It had been twelve hours since Nova began preparing to withstand a siege.
As night finally approached, a heavy silence settled over the city, the sun's last light fading beneath a horizon thick with storm clouds that had been building since morning.
Even the night itself felt unusually oppressive tonight, the sky raging overhead as though the world itself were bracing to wash away the blood it already knew would soon soak the ground below.
The tension gripping the city sat over it like a physical weight, pressing down on the minds of every defender standing post along the walls, all of them waiting for the combined armies of the Empire and the Devourer horde to finally descend.
They expected the attack to come with the dark. Over a dozen sieges in the past several months had taught the city that lesson clearly enough — more assaults had come under cover of night than had ever come in daylight.
