The Striding Cairns of Flintrow

Dag Flintrow had exactly one seasonal ambition: skin fewer mammoths and take longer naps beneath the sheltered overhangs of the northern tundra. That sensible life plan collapses when an errant mallet-toss down the intake shaft of an ancient, snow-buried monolith awakens a five-hundred-foot three-legged terraforming pylon. Shaking off millennia of permafrost, the colossal striding cairn lurches southward on an automated geological reclamation run, flattening hunting reserves, mountain ridges, and territorial boundary stones in its path.

To the northern hunter clans, the machine is an unguided natural disaster grinding their winter provisions into paste. To High Herald Tallowcombe of the Southern River-Mound confederacy, the walking tower is the physical avatar of the Prime Architect, delivered by providence to crush her barbarian rivals and secure her faction's divine dominion. As the machine tramples through the disputed frontier, Dag is swept along in its lower mechanical rigging while Tallowcombe marches her ceremonial legions to board and claim the godhead. With neither side willing to yield the steering perch, the cynical slacker and the self-righteous herald are forced into a desperate race to the pylon's humming summit—before its quartz-driven plasma vents and unbending navigational protocols pave the entire continent flat.