Captain Kreese closed the throne room's doors and turned to face the eleven men who would die with him.
Eleven Royal Guards. The survivors of the compound's defense. Three at the Sixth Realm, eight at the Fifth. Their armor bore the campaign's accumulated damage: dented breastplates, cracked pauldrons, scored greaves, the specific weathering that sustained combat against an army with thundermakers and plenty of ammunition produced in the equipment of warriors whose equipment's replacement was no longer possible because the smiths who could replace it were either dead or fled through the southern gate.
The throne room was the room that the palace's architecture had placed at the building's center, the room whose walls were the thickest and whose doors were the heaviest and whose defensive value was the defensive value that the room's centrality and construction provided.
