The Baron of Frost struck at the third hour before dawn.
Valden's griffon descended from fourteen hundred feet in the power dive that the aerial mount's anatomy was designed to produce, the beast's frost-rimed wings folded against its flanks, the dive's acceleration converting altitude into velocity at the rate that a twelve-hundred-pound predator's mass and gravity's constant combined to dictate. The wind screamed across the Baron's visor. The ground rushed upward. The barbarian thundermaker battery at the column's rear became a cluster of shapes that resolved into individual weapons and crews and ammunition stacks as the dive's altitude consumed itself.
