Eighteen sunrises had come and gone, each greeted not with prayer but with the scree-scree-scree of whetstones on notched steel.
Eighteen nights spent curled in armor like crabs in their shells, if they slept at all. The men moved through the smoke like specters now, their eyes sunken into bruised sockets, their armor crusted with layers of gore that would never wash clean.
Asag knew sieges.
Knew how they sanded men down to their raw, quivering cores. This was no war of glorious charges or heroic last stands—just the slow, meat-grinder arithmetic of flesh against iron. A butcher's ledger where the only numbers that mattered were how many bodies it took to fill a gap in the wall.
And yet.
And yet his men had held.
Not for his snarled orders.
Not for some abstract notion of honor.
