Dawn. Three hours after departure.
The road to Eclipse was a graveyard of old hopes.
Burnt-out vehicles lined the cracked asphalt, their skeletons rusted and hollow. Telephone poles leaned at impossible angles, their wires long since stripped for scrap. And everywhere, the smell: ash, iron, and something sweet, like rotting fruit.
Julian stopped at the crest of a low hill. Before him, the Eclipse stronghold rose from the Plains like a black thorn jammed into the earth's flesh. Walls of reinforced concrete, thirty feet high, topped with razor wire and sensor arrays. Guard towers at hundred-meter intervals. And behind it all, the central spire, pulsing with that ominous crimson glow.
