The air on the second tier smelled of hot oil, crushed marble, and the metal tang of fresh blood.
Archon Xuan Ming stood behind his four shield-bearers. His hands shook slightly around the knurled grip of his sky axe-spear. The heavy starmetal weapon, forged to channel hurricanes of spiritual wind, was now dead iron and cold bronze, its polished head weighing eighteen pounds. To an immortal who had not lifted a physical kettle in three thousand years, eighteen pounds of unassisted metal was a painful lever against his strained shoulder joint cords.
Yet the Vanguard Archon refused to yield.
In his youth, before he had accepted the golden token of the Archons, Xuan Ming had walked the bloody battlefields of the Northern Plains as a mortal warlord. He remembered the taste of iron on the tongue, the cold grease of mail shirts, and the brutal arithmetic of men killing men with sharp steel. That ancient, buried instinct flared to life through the fog of his decrepitude, overriding the fear that held his council peers numbed.
“Hold the wall!” Xuan Ming bellowed, his voice rasping through his throat as flecks of foam flew from his lips. “Brace against the steps! Drive their mortal skulls into the stone the moment they touch the line!”
