The first blood was drawn at Ashwall Station Fourteen — a garrison outpost on the fortification's central segment, three kilometers east of the Verdant Pass, at exactly the fourteenth hour of a cloudless afternoon on the third day of Scorchend.
The engagement was not planned. Neither side had intended to start the war that day. What happened at Station Fourteen was what military historians would later classify as an "escalation incident" — a collision between forward elements that converted the tense non-combat of the mobilization period into active hostilities. The collision was produced not by strategy but by proximity: when two armies mass on opposite sides of a border, the distance between their forward elements shrinks, and shrunken distances produce contacts, and contacts produce decisions, and decisions under pressure produce violence.
