"Hold the main avenues with your phalanxes," Dratha told his legates, "The dead will trouble us no more. Do not attack the southrons unless they strike first."

"Yes my lord," replied Octes, turning to bark orders at the assembled centurions. 

Dratha signaled to his guard, then spurred his mount in the direction of the citadel.

The city around him was a charred ruin. Buildings of granite and marble were empty husks, stained by fire and blood, littered with the bodies of wights and southrons. The pride of the Empire, reduced to silence and ashes. He closed his remaining eye as he rode down those empty streets, envisioning the city in proud, ancient days, times this Arsenikos upstart no doubt thought himself restoring. Bustling avenues, thick with pedestrians shuffling between merchants stalls, noblemen and philosophers born aloft on palanquins, snaking a path through the crowds. The shining, gilded dome of the Palace of Wisdom, rising before him where...

Dratha opened his eye....where the black iron walls of the Citadel now were, a thick, ugly spike towering over a ruined skyline like a dark fang set among broken teeth.

A band of wights rounded a corner and, snarling, hurled themselves at Dratha and his guard, but at a glance from the Witch King the undead collapsed into ash and bone.

"I am Othman Dratha, Lord of Sepulchrave," he shouted hoarsely as he and his party neared the fortress. The hordes of ghouls clambering up the rust-pitted walls and hammering at its gates fell lifeless at the Witch King's approach. The southerners along the ramparts aimed their bows at the newcomers, sparing astonished glances at the sudden collapse of many hundreds of wights.

"Let further bloodshed be avoided, lest it feed the fell Power here. Summon your lord- he will wish to hear what I have to offer."