Within minutes the whole area was filled with curious people wanting to know what just descended from the sky.
They came from the tents first, then from the training areas, then from wherever else people had been when the ground shook and the purple light cracked the night open. Nobody organized it. Fourteen hundred people just moved toward the same point because something that size landing in your desert at that hour demanded an explanation.
Noah stood at the base of the forge stone and watched them come.
Up close the thing was something else entirely. Taller than two men stacked on each other, wide enough that a group could press against it without crowding. The red veins running through the dark surface were moving now, slow and deliberate, throwing enough light that faces were visible in the desert dark.
