The gorge of the Hollow Pass had once been a road, a narrow vein carved through the spine of mountains. Merchants had walked it with their mules, monks with their chants, soldiers with their banners. But tonight it was none of those things. Tonight it was a furnace.
The sky overhead sagged under smoke, a bruised canopy bleeding orange and black. Flames licked the ruins of siege wagons. Corpses sprawled in heaps where the first charge had broken against the second. Spears jutted from the ground like weeds, swords lay forgotten in the sucking mud. The air smelled of rust and rot, every breath a rasp of iron and ash.
And at the heart of it all, there was stillness.
Two men stood where the battle had burned itself into silence. Around them, thousands watched but did not dare intervene. It was as though the whole gorge had grown narrow, narrowing further still until there was room for only two blades, two bodies, two vessels that would not both endure.
