The day of the assault dawned gray and heavy, the air thick with the kind of tension that pressed down on the shoulders of every soldier before the start of the meatgrinder. The skies above were eerily empty, the usual flocks of ravens that circled battlefields conspicuously absent. Far beyond the city walls, they feasted still on the banquet left for them by the Yarzats few days prior, when fleeing stragglers and discarded corpses littered the fields a few kilometers away.
The silence in the skies only deepened the foreboding stillness. It was as if even nature itself held its breath, sensing the storm that was about to break. The small walls sorrounded the keep, was their last bastion, their last hope built on sands and ready to unravel at the slightest touch of reality.