The southwest tower fell on the second night, and its falling was nothing like what the militia levies on the adjacent wall sections had imagined.
They had imagined drama. Towers fell in stories with the sudden, spectacular collapse that cleared the way for heroes to charge through the dust.
What actually happened was a process so measured and so incremental that the first sign of it was a vibration in the wall-walk stone beneath their boots, subtle enough that a soldier who was not paying close attention might have attributed it to the catapult strikes continuing outside, but unmistakable to anyone who had been paying attention to the tower's condition since the crack appeared in the foundation.
The vibration was the tower settling. Not catastrophically, not all at once, but with the terrible patience of stone that had reached the limit of what its compromised foundation could support.
