"Open the shutter," Queen Lysenne repeated, her voice cutting through the damp chill like a razor.The militiamen threw their weight against the frozen hinges of the barricade window. With a screech of protesting metal that echoed down the shattered avenue, the oak slab swung outward, revealing the grey, mist-shrouded expanse of the neutral zone beyond.Drovic leaned out, resting the heavy barrel of his trench-shotgun against the frost-rimed stone. His eyes narrowed through the sleet, tracking the solitary figure approaching across the rubble-strewn street. The herald walked with a stiff, military precision, his polished brass pole and white banner cutting a sharp contrast against the greasy black smoke staining the morning sky."He's got the royal seal of the Duchy stamped on his tabard," Drovic muttered, shifting his weight as his bandaged hand throbbed in time with his heartbeat. "Clean boots, too. Means he didn't have to crawl through the drainage pipes to g

Queen Lysenne grabbed the parchment scroll right out of the air as the herald finished his declaration, her fingers ripping the thick royal vellum into fluttering ribbons before he could even blink."Take your master's parchment and eat it," Lysenne shouted, her voice ringing out across the frozen square with a crisp, royal fury that made the herald flinch. "And tell Duke Vane that if he wants my crown or my blacksmith, he can come down into the dirt and take them off our rotting corpses!"She released her grip, letting the wind catch the shredded remnants of the Duchy’s terms and scatter them uselessly across the mud and coal dust of the barricade.The herald's face flushed a deep, ugly crimson. He snatched his brass pole from the rubble, spun on his heel without a word, and broke into a brisk, angry march back toward the mist-shrouded ridge where the main army waited."Well," Drovic muttered, sliding the bolt of his trench-shotgun with a heavy, me

"Aerovan! The main support beam just sheared!" Drovic’s voice cracked, not from fear, but from the raw, lung-searing effort of bracing a massive slab of granite against his own shoulder."Leave the beam! Get the secondary pins in place before the ceiling caves entirely!" Aerovan roared back, ignoring the blinding stabs of agony radiating from his lower spine. He shoved a rusted crowbar into a jagged seam of concrete, his hands slick with a mixture of grease and fresh, dark blood.The forge didn't just shake; it groaned, a deep, tectonic protest of iron against stone. A heavy shell from the Duchy’s first barrage had hammered the courtyard above, and the resulting tremors had turned the forge’s heavy ceiling into a death trap. Tonnes of masonry hung like a guillotine over the workbench where the anti-golem batteries rested."We’re losing the feed lines!" Lysenne shouted from the darkness of the corner, her silhouette framed by the sporadic,

"Steady!" Aerovan rasped, his vision tunneling into a pinpoint of grey focus as the massive granite slab hovered, held aloft by nothing but the iron-willed leverage of his rusted crowbar and the desperate strength of the survivors. "Drovic, move!"Drovic didn’t wait for a second invitation. With a guttural grunt, he dragged his crushed, bleeding frame out from the fissure. As soon as his shoulders cleared the gap, Aerovan shoved his crowbar aside and collapsed into the silt, his lungs heaving. The granite slab slammed back into the dust with a bone-jarring thud, sending a shockwave through the floor that rattled the nearby quench-tanks.Silence, thick and suffocating, descended upon the basement. The only sound was the distant, rhythmic thump-thump of the Iron Duchy’s artillery walking toward their sector.Drovic rolled onto his back, gasping, his face a mask of pulverized brick dust and dried gore. He looked at his l

"If those pistons cross the threshold, the tunnel won't matter, because there won't be a living soul left to notice the rubble," Aerovan barked, his fingers locking onto the cold, grease-slicked brass of the primary firing lever. His hands trembled, a violent, uncontrollable tremor that threatened to betray him, but he didn't pull away. He couldn't.Lysenne scrambled across the uneven floor, dodging a fallen crossbeam. "Wait! If you trigger that discharge, the kickback will shred the entire support structure of this cellar. We need a secondary brace! Drovic, get the timber from the storage rack!"Drovic, still clutching his ruined hip, ignored the searing pain and lunged for the pile of splintered oak. "Brace it? We’re holding back a wall of iron, Princess! Bracing it is like trying to stop a waterfall with a toothpick!""It’s better than being flattened into paste!" she snapped back, shoving a stack of iron plates beneath the heavy frame of the sieg