Baghdad's dry, biting wind swept over the shattered ramparts, brutally mingling the scents of blood and dust and forcing them into the lungs of every life still drawing breath.
The city walls, perhaps once magnificent, had been reduced to jagged stretches of wreckage, like bones gnawed by a monstrous beast, silently bearing witness to the devastation of the crushing assault that had just ended.
The blazing sun hung high, mercilessly scorching this death-soaked land and casting a glaring light over the dark red, viscous liquid spread across it.
Emir Timur stood at the highest point of the ruins. The Company Captain of the White Scars' 64th Company now resembled a god descended from an altar of blood and fire, or a wilderness wolf pack's leader, utterly enraged and fresh from a slaughter.
He wore his distinctive ivory Power Armour, adorned with lightning and wolf-fang motifs. Brown bloodstains and fine ash spattered its plates, while a deep slash across his pauldron stood out with savage clarity—the mark his "goodwill" had earned him months before.
He removed his helmet and tucked it under his arm, letting Baghdad's searing wind brush over his black braids, matted with sweat and blood, and his sharply defined face, which now seemed cast from cold iron.
His eyes, the eyes of a steppe hunter and a son of the storm, held no victorious fervor. Only a fathomless, frozen fury remained, reflecting the mountains of corpses and seas of blood before him.
Blood—rivers of blood in the truest sense—wound between the remnants of the walls and through the gutters of the streets, gathering into nauseating crimson mire.
Fallen bodies lay piled upon one another, most wearing the crude uniforms bearing a distinctive eagle emblem used by the soldiers of this self-proclaimed "Cassandra Remnant Kingdom."
Among them lay a