Two miles away, on a jagged granite ridge overlooking the swamp, the wind howled.
Warlord Gorak lay flat on his stomach, chewing on a strip of dried goat meat. His massive frame hidden within the crevices of the rock. His two Honor Guards crouched behind him, silent as stone.
He wasn't waiting for a signal. He hadn't told Vex he was coming. He was here because he didn't trust reports written by spies. He trusted his eyes.
He raised the telescopic spyglass, a relic salvaged from the deep mines, and trained it on the lights below.
"By the Stone..." his guard muttered.
Gorak didn't speak. He twisted the lens, bringing the image into sharp focus.
He expected to see a mud-hole. He expected to see scrawny Kobolds huddled around a campfire, shivering in the damp.
Instead, he saw Industry.
He saw the Smeltery chiming. He saw the flash of molten iron. He saw the walls that living granite held in the crushing grip of Mangrove Treants. He saw the heavy, lumbering shapes of Iron-Back Tortoises moving crates that would take ten Troglodytes to lift.
"Cooperation," Gorak whispered, a cold knot forming in his stomach. "Different bloods. Working as one."
It was unnatural. In the mountains, the strong ate the weak. Here, the strong carried the weak.
He moved the spyglass inward, toward the center of the city. He wanted to see this "Temple" Vex was infiltrating. He wanted to see the altar of their false God.
He found the Plaza. He saw the structure.
And then, Warlord Gorak, the Butcher of the Northern Peaks, stopped breathing.
The entrance to the Temple wasn't a gate. It was a skull. A skull the size of a carriage. Even stripped of flesh, bleached white by the sun, the shape was unmistakable. The three distinct cranial ridges. The backward-curving fangs longer than a spear. The bone-spurs where the neck muscles once attached.
Gorak lowered the spyglass. His hand was shaking.
"Warlord?" the guard whispered, noticing the tremor in his commander's armor. "What is it?"
Gorak didn't answer. The sound of the swamp faded. The sight of the Bastion melted away.
Suddenly, he wasn't twenty seven years old. He was seven.
—
-
.
20 YEARS AGO…
The rain fell sideways, stinging like hail.
It was supposed to be a safe scout. The sky was choked with black storm clouds. The Elders had said the moon was hidden, that the Pale Doom would sleep.
They were wrong.
Young Gorak stood knee-deep in the mud, clutching his father's belt. His father, Warrior Grog, was laughing, pointing at an iron vein exposed by the eroding bank.
"Look, boy," Grog roared over the wind. "Wealth! We mine here tomorrow!"
Then, the water stopped moving.
There was no roar. Just the sound of water displacement, massive and heavy. A shape rose from the black lake, blocking out the lightning. One head. Two. Three.
The Pale Doom.
It was glowing. Not with bioluminescence, but with a sick, pale moonlight that seemed to emanate from under its scales.
"Run!" Grog screamed, shoving Gorak toward the tree line.
The other scouts drew their steel greatswords. They were veterans. They were strong.
The Hydra moved with a speed that defied physics. The Left Head snapped forward. Gorak watched as Uncle Vark was bitten in half. The sound of the steel breastplate crunching was louder than the thunder.
The Center Head exhaled. A stream of boiling green acid hit the line of warriors. Men dissolved. The smell of acrid, sweet, burning meat filled Gorak's nose, choking him.
Gorak tripped in the mud. He looked back.
His father stood between him and the monster. Grog raised his hammer, screaming a challenge to buy his son one second of life.
The Hydra didn't even slow down. The Right Head slammed into Grog like a battering ram. Grog didn't die heroically. He was simply erased. Smashed into red paste against the rocks.
The beast turned its three heads toward the small, trembling boy in the mud.
Gorak closed his eyes, waiting to die.
CRACK-BOOM!
A bolt of natural lightning struck a tree next to the lake, igniting it. The sudden flash of fire and the deafening boom startled the beast. It recoiled, hissing, hating the fire.
Gorak crawled. He crawled through the mud, through the thorns, sobbing, listening to the screams of the dying men behind him.
He survived because of the storm. He survived because he was small. But part of him died in that mud.
Watching the hydra again made Gorak recall the memory of the night of the tragedy.
Gorak gasped, sucking in a lungful of humid night air.
He was back on the ridge. His knuckles were white as he gripped the stone. Sweat was pouring down his face inside his helmet.
He looked through the spyglass again.
He looked at the skull. The same skull that had haunted his nightmares for two decades. The skull of the invincible monster that had turned his father into paste.
Now, it was dead, stripped, and turned into a doorway.
And the Kobolds... they were wearing armor made from its scales. They were walking around wearing the skin of a God-Tier Calamity as if it were common leather.
"They killed it," Gorak whispered. His voice sounded hollow, stripped of its usual bravado. "They didn't just kill it. They butchered it."
"Warlord?" the guard pressed, concerned. "Vex... Vex is nowhere to be seen. Should we go down?"
Gorak stood up abruptly. He didn't look at the city. He couldn't look at it.
"No," Gorak rasped.
"But Vex—"
"Vex is dead!" Gorak snapped, turning on his guards with eyes wide with terror. "Vex walked into the den of a God that hunts nightmares! He is gone!"
Gorak looked at his own greatsword. It felt like a toy. It felt like a toothpick. What was steel against a power that could bring down the Pale Doom?
"We leave," Gorak commanded, his voice shaking. "Now. We run."
"Run? Back to the Council?"
"Back to the mountain," Gorak said, already moving up the path, his pace frantic. "To tell them... to tell them the age of Steel is over."
He paused one last time, looking back at the violet glow rising from the Temple in the distance.
"We woke something up," Gorak whispered. "And it's hungry."
He turned and vanished into the darkness.