The ash storm howled around the Ashfall Vanguard.
Lucifer and Celeste pressed forward through the thick, gray soot. The fifty Void-Breaker Dragoons formed a tight, heavily armored ring around them.
The massive, winged mechanical centaurs fired their purple aether-cannons into the gloom, vaporizing any Abyssal Crawlers that tried to slither close.
"There it is," Celeste called out. She pointed her heavy longbow through a brief break in the swirling ash.
Looming out of the toxic darkness was the Gore-Spire.
It was a monument to absolute horror. The tower was three hundred feet tall, constructed entirely from the fused, melted corpses of the fallen Royal Army.
Thousands of dead faces, locked in eternal screams, stretched across the biological architecture.
Thick, pulsing veins of glowing green magma spiraled up the sides of the structure, feeding power to a massive, fleshy sphincter at the apex.
