The southeastern highland corridor was not a road. It was a suggestion, a series of ridgelines and valleys that connected the orcish territories to the Threian frontier through terrain that discouraged large-scale military movement by making every mile of it a negotiation between the army and the earth.
The Verakh scouts had marked the route over months of careful surveying, identifying water sources, defensible camping positions, and the narrow passages where the column would need to compress from its marching width to single-file movement through gaps that stone and gravity had carved between the highland's rocky shoulders. Each passage was a potential ambush point, and each one had been scouted, assessed, and assigned a security protocol that the Warg Cavalry executed with the disciplined thoroughness that Haguk's riders had perfected through years of operating in contested territory.
