Chapter 54: Breach
Midnight. No moon.
Sythek chose the darkest hour because drakes didn’t need light. Their vertical-slit pupils dilated to coin-size in darkness, turning starlight into navigation. The Lizardmen riding them had worse night vision but they didn’t need to see — the drakes did the climbing.
Sixty-two riders at the base of the cliff. The southern face of The Stamp — sixty feet of vertical stone that Thyrak’s minotaurs had never bothered to watch because nothing with hooves could climb it and nothing without hooves had ever challenged them.
Sythek pressed his palm against the cliff face. Cold stone. Dry — no rain in three days, which was good. Wet stone meant slipping claws. Dry stone meant grip.
He looked at his drake — Grip, the firstborn, now fully mature, armored plates darkened to near-black, clawed feet flexing against the dirt with the coiled patience of a creature built to climb. Sythek mounted. He didn’t use a saddle — nobody had invented one yet. He sat in the natural groove between the drake’s shoulder plates and locked his legs against its flanks.
"Climb," he said.
Grip moved. Not fast — careful. Each clawed foot found purchase on the stone with a grip that justified the drake’s name. Left front. Right rear. Right front. Left rear. A diagonal climbing pattern that distributed weight and prevented the drake from peeling off the face. Behind Sythek, sixty-one more drakes began their ascent, staggered across the cliff face at three-meter intervals.
No sound. Claws on stone, barely audible. The occasional scrape of a rider’s armor against the rock face. Sythek kept his breathing shallow and his heartbeat slower than the climb demanded. Cold-blooded discipline. The Lizardman way.
Twenty feet up, a problem. The drake below him — a juvenile named Scree, ridden by a young Lizardman called Tarn — hit a patch of crumbling mortar. The left front claw slipped. Scree’s body lurched sideways. Tarn grabbed the shoulder plates with both hands, his weapon clattering against the stone — too loud, too loud — and for three seconds the entire southern assault hung on whether a juvenile drake could recover its grip on deteriorating rock.
Scree found fresh stone. The claws locked. Tarn’s breathing was audible for ten seconds, then he controlled it. The column continued.
Forty feet up. Twenty remaining. The wall’s upper edge was visible — dark against dark, distinguishable only by the absence of stars where the stone blocked the sky. No torches on this face. No minotaur guards. The wall was undefended because it had never needed defending.
Grip’s claws hooked the top of the wall. Sythek pulled himself over the edge, drew the stonesteel blade strapped to his back, and looked down into the interior of The Stamp.
Torchlight below. The inner courtyard. Minotaurs — hundreds of them — assembled in the barracks buildings that lined the courtyard walls. Some sleeping, some tending wounds from the earlier charge. The blacksmith quarter was active, repairing damaged armor. The temple at the north end glowed with dark red light — Thyrak’s divine furnace, the Iron Hoof’s seat of power.
Nobody was looking up.
Sythek waited until thirty riders had crested the wall. Then he raised his blade and brought it down — the signal. Thirty drake-mounted Lizardmen dropped from the wall into the courtyard like cold-blooded rain.
The screaming started immediately.
***
Nix felt the wall die before he heard it.
Three days of digging. Forty-four sappers working in shifts, eight hours on, eight hours rest, in a tunnel that started fifty meters from the northern wall’s foundation and ran straight underneath it. The tunnel was a meter and a half high — sized for Kobolds, not minotaurs. Anyone who followed them in would have to crawl.
The work was the kind Nix understood in his bones. Rock. Leverage. Structural failure points. The northern wall’s foundation had been neglected for decades — Runt’s scouting report was accurate. Moss in the joints. Cracks in the mortar. A visible lean that told Nix everything he needed to know about the load distribution.
You didn’t blow a foundation out. That was theatrical and wasteful and imprecise. You removed it. Surgically. You identified the load-bearing stones — the keystones, the cornerstones, the compression points that held thirty feet of wall upright — and you pulled them out one at a time until the structure forgot how to stand.
Nix directed the extraction with his single hand and his voice. His sappers — Kobolds all, chosen for size and tunnel sense and the specific kind of patience that comes from spending your life underground — worked in silence. Each keystone was identified, loosened, and pulled free with wooden lever-tools that Nix had designed himself.
At midnight, the last keystone came out.
The wall didn’t explode. It didn’t crack. It settled*. Twenty meters of thirty-foot stone wall simply exhaled downward — a grinding, groaning, geological sound as the structure’s weight found no resistance and chose the path of least resistance, which was straight down. The wall sank four feet into its own undermined foundation. Gaps opened along the settling line — four-foot gaps between stone blocks that had been tight-joined for centuries.
Four feet of gap was a door.
Nix stood in the tunnel mouth and watched his wall fall. His single hand ached — phantom pain in the fingers that weren’t there, the ones the forge had taken years ago. He’d built walls. He’d built bridges. He’d built a forge that produced the finest steel on this continent. Taking a wall apart was the inverse of everything he’d ever done, and he found that it satisfied something different. Not creation. *Correction*. Thyrak had built this wall to keep people in as much as to keep enemies out. Taking it down felt less like destruction and more like opening a cage.
"Through," Nix said.
Forty-four Kobold sappers poured through the breaches — small, fast, armed with picks and short blades designed for close-quarters tunnel fighting. Behind them, the infantry reserves from Vark’s column were already moving forward. The northern wall was open.
***
The fortress fell in four hours.
Not because the minotaurs were weak. They weren’t. Each one fought with the desperate strength of a cornered bull — hammers swinging, iron shields battering, horns lowered for charges even in the tight confines of the courtyard. They were formidable. They were brave. None of them surrendered.
But they were fighting in three directions at once.
Drake cavalry from the south — fast, mobile, riding mounts that could climb walls and leap from rooftops, striking from angles that heavy infantry couldn’t cover. Sappers and infantry from the north, flowing through the breached wall like water through broken masonry. And Vark’s shield wall pushing through the western gate — the gate the minotaurs had closed, now open from the inside because Sythek’s riders had reached the gate mechanism twenty minutes after cresting the wall.
Three doors into a fortress built for one. The Constrictor, delivered.
The minotaur officers tried to organize a defense. Crown-banded sergeants bellowed orders, trying to form their warriors into knots of resistance at chokepoints — the barracks, the temple steps, the armory. Some of these knots held for minutes. A formation of sixty minotaurs at the armory gate took an hour to break, and broke three of Vark’s squads in the process. A solitary minotaur champion — nine feet tall, scarred across every visible surface, carrying a hammer that most soldiers couldn’t lift — killed seven of Sythek’s riders before Thaelen put three arrows through his throat from the ridge.
But individual heroism couldn’t overcome combined arms. That was the lesson of The Constrictor, delivered in blood: it didn’t matter how strong your soldiers were if they couldn’t coordinate, couldn’t communicate, couldn’t adapt to an attack that came from everywhere simultaneously.
The Kobold sappers were the key that nobody talked about later. While the cavalry drew attention from the south and the infantry pushed through the west, Nix’s forty-four tunnelers moved through the fortress like rats through a granary. They didn’t fight the minotaurs — they couldn’t, not directly, not at that size disadvantage. They went under. Through walls. Under barracks floors. They sabotaged armory doors so they couldn’t open. They cut the chains on the well covers so the minotaurs couldn’t access water. They put out the forge fires. Small things. Invisible things. The kind of damage that didn’t show up as casualties but showed up as an army that suddenly couldn’t resupply, couldn’t rearm, couldn’t drink.
By the third hour, exhaustion did what combat couldn’t. Minotaurs who’d been fighting since midnight, wounded from the morning’s charge, bleeding from stonesteel arrows that punched through their iron plate, running low on hammers and shields — they started to slow. The charges became shorter. The formations became looser. The bellowing orders from the crown-banded officers became quieter, then stopped.
By the fourth hour, the fighting was concentrated around the temple. Two hundred surviving minotaurs — wounded, exhausted, their officers dead or dying — backed against the temple walls with Thyrak’s Iron Hoof behind them and Ashenveil’s army in front of them.
Vark called a halt. He planted the Cog-and-Flame standard in the courtyard dirt, fifty meters from the temple steps. The banner snapped in the pre-dawn wind.
Then he waited.
Through the bond, from two hundred kilometers away, Zephyr spoke to Krug. Krug spoke to a signalman. The signalman raised a flag. The flag said: Hold.
Not attack. Hold. Let them see the banner. Let them see the army that broke their fortress open from three directions. Let them understand what they were looking at.
The minotaurs looked. Some of them dropped their hammers. They didn’t know it, but this was the moment the war ended — not with a charge, but with a choice offered in silence.
In the temple behind them, the Iron Hoof cracked down its center. A god’s symbol, breaking in real time, as his power bled away with every believer who looked at the gold eye on the black banner and thought this one might be different.