Winter had reached its cruelest season. The lead-gray sky hung low, like a vast shroud soaked through with icy water, pressing heavily upon Eagle's Nest Fortress's towering, battle-blackened towers and the endless battlements that dominated the treacherous ridge.
The cold wind howled like countless icy razors, sweeping across bare rock, the frozen surface of the moat, and the stiff, numb faces of every soldier behind the walls.
Earl Eisenberg stood alone behind a north-facing crenelation atop the keep, wrapped in a heavy black cloak trimmed with old silver fox fur.
He was nearing sixty, still tall of frame, yet the back that had once been so straight now seemed somewhat bent, as though bowed beneath an invisible burden.
Around his sunken eyes lay shadows woven from exhaustion and anxiety too deep to dissolve. His grizzled beard and hair stirred in the freezing wind, lending him an added air of weathered desolation.
His gaze passed over the crenelations thick with ice and fixed relentlessly on the wilderness below.
That had once been the relatively gentle valley leading from Eagle's Nest Fortress into the heart of the Northern Territory. Now, however, it had become something else entirely—a steel jungle of death traps, painstakingly fashioned by the machinery of war.
The Sauron siege camp sprawled across every stretch of land within sight like rust-colored moss growing wild.
Thousands upon thousands of identical leather tents and earthen barracks followed the contours of the valley, layer upon layer, spreading so far that the eye could not see their end.
Above the camp hung, day after day, a dim haze formed by the cooking smoke of thousands, along with the suffocating "vitality" unique to a massive army—a reek mingling human and animal filth, leather, rust, and something barbaric.
More terrifying still was the killing ground between