The march from Val-Roc began at dusk, slipping into the western valley beneath a mantle of choking mountain fog.
Five thousand iron-tipped spears moved in suffocating silence, their boots muffled by strips of boiled wool tied around the leather soles, their shield-bosses blackened with wood soot to drown the moonlight. Not a single horn sounded. The only rhythm to their passage was the low, grinding clatter of the siege engines rolling along the packed dirt of the sunken highway.
Three leagues ahead of the vanguard, Aurelia picked her path along the limestone flumes of the Razor Crags.
Behind her crept thirty handpicked veterans from Kaelen’s elite night-stalkers—men who had traded names for scars, clad in light boiled leather and carrying short recurve bows of horn and sinew. They moved like mountain cats through the jagged scree, their breath held tight behind linen mufflers.
The gorge fell away to their right in a sheer drop of three hundred feet, plunging into the churn of the Red River.
Even from the high ledges, the roar of the black water was deafening, amplified by the narrowing canyon walls. Across the chasm, the timber palisades of the Bridge-of-Ashes loomed like an iron jaw clamped over the gorge. Torches burned inside iron cressets along the parapets, casting long, wavering spears of orange across the foam below.
Aurelia raised her hand, clenching her fist.
The thirty scouts halted in an instant, dropping into the cold shadow of the limestone shelf.
Beside her, Sergeant Varek—a lean, one-eyed border veteran whose left cheek was branded with the mark of an imperial penal legion—crouched low, his fingers testing the wind.
"The wind is blowing off the water, my lady," Varek whispered, his voice barely audible beneath the roar of the rapids. "Their watchdogs won't catch our scent until we're inside the ditch."
"The winch-house sits on the north abutment," Aurelia murmured, her eyes narrowing as the silver thread in her core pulsed with predatory clarity. "See the iron housing beneath the bridge timber? That is where the chain-boom is anchored. If that chain stays up, Malakor’s vanguard will be butchered on the causeway."
"And if we cut the counterweight?" Varek asked, a grim grin creasing his scarred lips.
"The chain drops into the riverbed, and the gates swing open," she replied.
She turned her gaze back toward the western highway, where the black silhouette of the mountains met the fog. Through the bond forged into the marrow of her bones, she could feel him. Malakor was closing the distance. His sovereign presence was a rising tide of molten iron, a gathering storm of wrath and hunger that set the hairs on her arms standing on end.
He was two miles out. His warhorses were already forming into the wedge.
"Check your bowstrings," Aurelia ordered softly, unhooking her twin curved blades from their leather sheaths. The dark steel caught the faint starlight in dull, matte-black gleams. "When the first catapult stone strikes the south bastion, we drop through the flume."
The scouts drew their black-shafted arrows, notching them in unison with a dry rustle of feathers.
Moments later, the night tore open.
Across the valley, a single, apocalyptic roar shook the foundations of the gorge. A flaming boulder, soaked in pitch and catapulted from Malakor’s heavy trebuchets, arced across the black sky like a falling star, crashing straight through the timber roof of the southern guardhouse in a fountain of sparks and splintered beams.
The alarm horns at the Bridge-of-Ashes shrieked into the wind.
"Assault! The vanguard is upon the road!" shouted the sentries from the parapet, followed by the clatter of hundred iron boots scrambling for the southern battlements.
Aurelia rose to her feet on the lip of the precipice, her dark hair whipping wildly in the updraft, her eyes blazing with pale, terrifying silver light.
"Move," she commanded, leaping down into the black maw of the flume.