The sun crept over the ridge of the mountain and touched the battlefield like it was afraid of what it would find.
It found plenty.
The plains below Ryugan's gate were a graveyard. Bodies in red and obsidian armor lay scattered across hundreds of meters, some frozen stiff from Sael's frigid arrows, some were charred from Annette's flamest, others torn apart by brutal strength. The Empire's banners, once proud crimson cloth that soldiers carried with religious devotion, were trampled into the mud and blood and frost.
The gate itself stood. Damaged, scarred, sections of the wall to its left crumbling where the javelins had bitten deep, but standing. The runic patterns that ran through the metal and blue gem still pulsed with faint light, though dimmer than before, as if the structure itself was exhausted.
