The roar of forty thousand mortal throats did not dissipate into the high atmosphere; it struck the descending cosmic frost like an anvil of raw iron.
Up in the churning purple clouds, the Grand Inquisitor Malakor-Zul did not lower his gravity poleaxe.
At his silent command, the three colossal moon-citadels shuddered in mid-air. From the jagged, meteoric keels of the floating fortresses, thousands of luminescent pods detached, falling through the black aurora like a shower of inverted shooting stars.
They hit the slopes of the High Barrows with concussive, explosive thuds that cratered the ancient emerald turf.
The pods did not open; they shattered into flying shards of vitreous black glass, releasing the vanguard of the Upper Void:
The Void-Reapers.
They stood nine feet tall, their bodies forged from interlocking plates of cold void-iron that absorbed all torchlight, their limbs elongated and ending in three-pronged talons of pure gravity-glass. Where their heads should have been were hollow neck-rings of spinning silver wire enclosing swirling vortexes of negative space—miniature singularities that wept continuous, freezing arcs of ultraviolet lightning.
In their four primary arms, they wielded long, double-curved scythes of star-iron that whistled through the mountain wind with a high, acoustic scream.
Two thousand of them.
They did not form ranks; they surged across the grassy swells in three converging waves of lightless speed, their scythes carving deep trenches into the earth as they aimed directly for the circle of standing stones atop the Great Barrow.
"SHIELD-WALL!" Alpha Conlan’s voice was an ancient, earth-shaking bellow that broke through the screaming wind.
The veteran warriors of the Timber did not break.
Along the lower terraces of the barrow, eight thousand northern heavy infantry slammed their five-foot star-iron tower shields into the turf, locking their rims together in an unbroken, silver palisade three ranks deep. Behind them, six thousand southern cataphracts dismounted in disciplined silence, their heavy eight-foot poleaxes bracing over the shoulders of the northern shield men, creating a bristling hedgehog of meteoric steel and star-iron.
The Void-Reapers hit the shield-wall like a collapsing black glacier.
CRASH.
The collision was deafening. The sheer kinetic mass of the nine-foot constructs buckled the front line of shields back three paces, the turf churning to black mud beneath the strain of thousands of braced boots.
Gravity-glass scythes whistled downward, shearing through three heavy ash-wood shields and severing armor like parchment.
"HOLD THE RIDGE!" Young Alpha Vane roared, his black-iron broadsword parrying a descending scythe in a shower of brilliant white sparks as he drove his armored shoulder into the chest of a Reaper, throwing the construct back into its brothers.
Across the ridge, the two ancient drakes launched into the sky.
Cinder did not hold back his fire. The sixty-foot volcanic drake dove through the black aurora, his jaws unleashing a continuous, three-hundred-pace river of blinding, white-hot cobalt dragon fire that painted the eastern slope of the barrow in roaring hellfire.
The heat was so absolute that thirty Void-Reapers were vaporized where they stood, their void-iron armor melting to liquid slag before their gravity scythes could touch the grass.
Beside him, the ancient Abyssal Drake unleashed its primeval sonic roar—a subterranean shockwave that resonated through the bedrock, shattering the gravity-glass talons of fifty advancing constructs and burying an entire squad beneath a massive landslide of displaced barrow-earth.
At the summit of the Great Barrow, Gideon didn't wait behind the shields.
"Hold the altar, Lyra!" Gideon growled, his voice dropping into that dark, apocalyptic timber. "I'm clearing the steps!"
The northern warlord leaped from the granite altar, charging down the northern slope of the barrow like an unstoppable siege ram.
He met the center wave of fifty Void-Reapers head-on.
His five-foot star-iron claymores became two spinning discs of singing death.
He parried two descending scythes with his right blade, the impact ringing like a cathedral bell, while his left claymore swung through a brutal, horizontal cleave that severed the torso of an eight-foot Reaper clean in two.
Without breaking his forward momentum, Gideon stepped inside the reach of a third construct, drove his armored forehead into its spinning silver neck-ring, shattering the containment runes, then ripped the creature’s gravity scythe from its hands barehanded.
He spun on his heel, using the stolen six-foot scythe as a colossal two-handed club to smash four Reapers off the terrace into the rocks below.
"IS THAT ALL YOU'VE BROUGHT, VOID-SCUM?" Gideon roared, his bare chest glistening with sweat and black ichor, his amber-gold eyes burning with pure, unadulterated slaughter.
Above the fray, standing atop the granite altar, Lyra was not watching the infantry battle.
Her dual-colored gaze was fixed on the lead moon-citadel hovering five hundred paces above the summit.
The forty-foot Grand Inquisitor Malakor-Zul was raising his gravity poleaxe toward the primary standing stone of the First Hearth.
The nine silver-wire rings around his head were spinning at catastrophic speed, weaving an immense, vertical column of pressurized void-gravity aimed directly at the heart of the barrows.
If that column of negative gravity struck the ancient burial mound, the kinetic shockwave would detonate the tectonic fault line beneath the plateau, collapsing the entire mountain tableland into a lightless chasm three leagues deep.
"He's aiming for the ancestral core," Lyra whispered, her teeth grinding together.
She didn't reach for her daggers.
She stepped to the center of the thirty standing stones, dropping to both knees upon the cold, moss-covered granite of the altar.
She plunged both of her bare hands deep into the turf of the Great Barrow, opening the True Loom within her soul to its absolute, unbridled limit.
Ancestors of the Ash Cleft! Lyra cried out through her soul, reaching into the deep, subterranean earth beneath the graves of forty generations of kings.
The Hearth calls its dead! AWAKEN!
The High Barrows answered their Queen.
A golden, tectonic resonance erupted from deep within the earth.
The thirty colossal standing stones around the altar ignited into blinding, incandescent pillars of pure, celestial starlight.
From the hundreds of ancient burial mounds across the plateau, the spirits of the first kings and sovereign alphas did not rise as weeping phantoms; they rose as towering, translucent titans of golden fire, their ghostly hands gripping celestial great swords, their hollow eyes burning with the unquenchable pride of the First Age.
Lyra stood upright, her star-iron circlet blazing like a new sun in the night.
She raised both hands toward the lead moon-citadel in the clouds.
"RETURN TO THE VOID!" Lyra commanded.
She channeled the conjoined spiritual fire of forty generations of northern kings into a single, vertical spear of blinding celestial starlight three hundred paces wide.
The spear shot into the heavens, striking the keel of the lead moon-citadel dead center.
The floating fortress groaned.
The petrified moon-rock of its foundation fractured with the sound of a shattering continent, and the immense, half-league citadel began to tilt violently in the sky, venting clouds of black lightning and shattered debris as its anti-gravity core began to fail.
Up in the clouds, the Grand Inquisitor’s visor flashed with sudden, genuine fury.
He lowered his poleaxe, looking down through the storm at the small, defiant Queen standing in the center of the roaring pillars of light.
SO BE IT, ASH QUEEN, Malakor-Zul’s voice thundered through the sky.
He stepped off the crumbling keel of his citadel, descending through five hundred paces of freezing air like an iron meteor straight toward the altar of the First Hearth.
Down on the slopes, Gideon saw the descending titan.
"LYRA!" Gideon bellowed, abandoning the slaughter on the terraces, turning to sprint up the bloody grassy slope with every ounce of speed in his colossal limbs.
The final clash atop the High Barrows had begun.