The Aldwick Gate Fragment

The Aldwick Gate Fragment is a broken remnant of the fortress defense Lord-Marshal Cassian Thorne believed would prove the old stories wrong. Aldwick Keep had been built around confidence: forty-foot walls, a refined kill-zone, and an outer gate reinforced with iron bands that took two years to forge. To its defenders, the gate was not just wood and metal. It was proof that enough preparation could make fear obsolete.

That belief ended when Thur’Zakk reached the gate.

He did not bring a ram. He did not call for engines. He placed his hands against the gate and forced the iron to answer a kind of pressure its makers had never imagined. The bands gave way with a long, tortured sound, not because the engineers had been careless, but because they had prepared for the wrong category of threat. The gate had been built to withstand armies, siege engines, and time. It had not been built to withstand Thur’Zakk himself.

The fragment’s torn iron and splintered wood became more than wreckage after Aldwick surrendered. It became evidence. Sergeant Hask Orven had spent eleven years trying to explain what Thur’Zakk was, only to be dismissed as a frightened survivor whose story had grown too large in memory. The broken gate proved the opposite. The stories had not been exaggerated. They had been incomplete.