Let's go, Lloyd said, with a spark of ambition in his eyes. We have an empire to collect.
The descent toward the foothills of the mountain range took them several hours of technical walking. The terrain was marked by colossal cracks exhaling hot vapors, vestiges of geothermal activity that the primordial ice had kept suppressed. Lloyd consulted the records he had borrowed from the fortress. The giants were not just warriors; they were accumulators of resources, and their mines were the true treasure of the kingdom.
When they reached the first exploitation, even Lloyd stopped to admire the magnitude of the wealth. The mountain had not been excavated with picks and shovels; it seemed as if a controlled cataclysm had torn entire sections of the rock away, exposing veins of minerals that glowed with a faerie intensity.
