Fire Rain Rocket

The Fire Rain Rocket is a battery of Cathayan war-rockets, bundled tubes of lacquered bamboo and iron that loose a screaming swarm of fire-tailed missiles high into the sky to fall like burning rain upon the foe. Each volley fills the air with shrieking projectiles that plunge down across a wide swathe of the battlefield, bursting in blossoms of flame that scatter and immolate whole regiments at once. The rockets are wild and imprecise, as apt to fall wide as true, but against the massed hordes that assail the Empire's borders such accuracy hardly matters: there is always something beneath them to burn. Crews of imperial artillerists light the fuses and stand well clear, for the weapon is nearly as perilous to its handlers as to the enemy. When a Fire Rain battery speaks, the heavens themselves seem to rain destruction, and the ground below is left a smouldering, blackened waste strewn with the dead.