Ash fell like snow over the battlefield—soft, silent, and wholly out of place.
Shia stood at the edge of the Rift-blasted wasteland, where the fortress gates had once stood. Now there was only ruin, and beyond it, war. The sky above bled light in the wrong direction, and reality twitched like a sick animal trying to wake from a nightmare. The goblin phalanx waited behind her, shields braced, eyes fixed not on the horizon, but on her.
They were warriors reborn from a war that should have ended. Veterans of a dozen deaths. Goblins, humans, fragments of old spirits sealed into shells of flesh and metal. Whatever they had been, now they were one legion.
And this was their last stand.
