Chapter 7: The Cataclysm at Malachar's Gate

Elwin heard the gate fall before he saw it.

He was three hundred yards back on the eastern ridge, where Caedric had positioned him with a scout and two of the older riders — positioned him, not asked him — and the sound traveled ahead of the light, a low concussive exhalation that he felt in his back teeth before it registered as noise. He looked up from the map he had been pretending to study. The gate was already gone. Where the eastern approach to Malachar's fortress had been a shut thing, a sealed and ancient thing, black stone fitted with an exactness that had defeated three Ardenmoor sieges over fifty years, there was now a mouth of broken geometry, edges still moving, dust still becoming.

He stood. The map slid from his knee into the frost.