The banners of House Winters fluttered weakly in the late afternoon wind, their azure silk stained with soot and blood. All around the temporary camp, soldiers worked in grim silence ... hammering stakes, tending wounds, or burning the carcasses of the fallen. The mountain pass had taken its toll on them. Three thousand gone… and the narrow cliffs still echoed with the dying screams of men crushed beneath falling boulders or hacked apart by orcish blades.
Countess Aliyah Winters rode through the lines in silence, her clear-blue eyes scanning the weary faces of her troops. Her armor ... a gleaming suit of frostforged plate etched with runes ... still bore a splatter of orcish ichor that no servant had yet dared to clean. Behind her trailed Rhaegar Vance, the knight who had stood by her side since her first battle. His greatsword hung across his back, chipped and darkened from the previous day's fighting.
