By late October, nights in the Northern Territory were already cold enough for breath to freeze.
The bleak crescent moon had been swallowed by thick dark clouds. Only the howling north wind swept fine grains of snow along, like countless icy blades scraping across the barren wilds.
Wintersburg loomed in the darkness like a huge, silent black silhouette. Only a few torches stuck into the battlements atop the wall thrashed violently in the gale, casting dim yellow halos that shifted and wavered as if they might go out at any moment, adding still more gloom and deathly quiet.
From the darkness beyond the fortress came a distant, mournful wolf howl. A moment later, a few answering cries sounded from the nearby thickets, then everything sank back into silence.
On the wall, several old and weak soldiers assigned to the night watch huddled behind the leeward battlements, wrapped in tattered military blankets. They turned a deaf ear to those few "wolf howls," too lazy even to lift their eyelids.
To them, the cries of night owls on this wasteland and the wails of wild wolves were far more common than any Sauron who might appear.
Wintersburg had been easily breached by the Sauron on a similar night last year. Although it had later been retaken, Earl Eisenberg seemed not to have learned any lesson. He had merely added a token dozen or so men and made no proper reinforcements at all to the low earthen walls and crude fortifications.
In the eyes of these defenders, coming out in this damned weather to launch a sneak attack was pure madness. Drowsiness and cold had long since worn away what little vigilance they had to begin with.
What they did not know was that lethal danger was lurking in the ink-black darkness barely