Half a mile south of the pass road, in the fertile lowlands of Province Seven, the royal dragon frigate Iron Phoenix completed its final descent.
The ship didn’t crash. There was no dramatic explosion of sky flame, no dramatic shattering of carved cedar masts, and no glorious martial martyrdom.
Instead, sixty thousand tons of bronze-plated mountain timber settled into a flooded cabbage patch with a slow, wet, undignified squelch that threw a wave of black mud ten paces in every direction. The three-hundred-foot keel sank smoothly through the soft peat, cutting through two hundred years of rich river-bed silt until it came to a dead halt four feet deep in the underlying clay.
The ship listed fifteen degrees to the port side, its decorative bronze dragon prow resting awkwardly against a dry-stone pigsty wall.
From behind a nearby willow grove, thirty mortal tenant farmers emerged.
They were armed with wooden pitchforks, iron spades, and woven wicker potato baskets, their faces weathered and leathered by a lifetime of hard labor. At the front of the crowd walked the village headman, Old Man Zhang. He held a dented bronze hoe across his shoulder like a guard’s axe-spear. The peasants had spent seven hundred years running in terror whenever the shadow of a royal dragon-frigate crossed their fields. Now, they walked up to the grounded giant beast with the cautious curiosity of village boys inspecting a beached carp.
