The Great Betrayal

V

Ropes of mucus drooled from the bloated lord’s mouth. Its teeth were blackened nubs, rotting in the gum. Its breath was beyond foul, and rose from its maw in a noisome gas the dwarfs fought hard to ignore. Worst of all was the daemon’s laughter. A hideous chuckle burbled from its lips, echoed mockingly by the crows perched upon its shoulders and fluttering around its corpse-like body. Alkhor was laughing when its jaw distended to impossibly wide proportions and it unleashed a stream of filth.

Snorri brandished his hammer and a shield of lightning sprang up to protect the king and his charges. The deluge seemed unending, a veritable torrent of puke and acidic bile from the very pit of the daemon’s stomach. It spat and crackled like cooking fat against the runic shield, burning to smoke and sulphurous vapour that clung to armour, skin and hair. Merciful Valaya was by Snorri’s side, as the foul slop ceased at last and the High King was left alive and miraculously unharmed.

The hearthguard fighting either side of the throne were not so fortunate. Dwarfs died in their droves, their armour melted, skin and bone rendered down to nothing, sloughed away by the disgusting miasma. Above the fading screams the stentorian tones of Haglarr Grudgekeeper, he who had served the High King for centuries, could be heard recording each and every name and the reckoning that would follow.

‘Heed that, beast,’ snarled the High King, ‘your infamy shall be remembered. I shall reckon it here and now. You’ll burn for this.’

Lashing out savagely, Snorri carved a notch into Alkhor’s plague sword. The daemon’s bulk belied its swiftness as it parried the High King’s axe and the runes upon it flared in anger at this denial of their power. A blow like that should have snapped the daemon sword in two, but the wretched weapon was ensorcelled. Rusted and pitted with serrated teeth, the glaive looked ancient and broken but was far from it. Encrusted with aeons of filth, Snorri knew just by looking at it that the slightest cut from the weapon’s blade would fill its victim with a cornucopia of disease. Flesh would blacken, bones would crumble and organs liquefy until all that remained was a soup of corruption.

Seven brave dwarfs had already succumbed to that fate. Many more had been devoured by the daemon, swallowed into its belly. With every morsel, the bloated lord swelled until it had become a behemoth of utter foulness.

Shouting his defiance, Snorri was determined it would grow no further.

A chip of tainted blade came loose like a rotten tooth as the dwarf yanked out his axe. He swung the rune weapon around, circling the plague sword. Snorri went to attack again when an unholy swarm spilled from Alkhor’s widening mouth and engulfed him.

Bloated flies, the daemon’s host of tiny familiars, crawled over his eyes and armour, scurried into his beard. They bit his skin, buzzed in his ears. Suffocated, blind, Snorri spat out a wad of insects trying to burrow into his mouth and uttered an invocation.

‘Zharrum!’

Lightning arced from the haft of his hammer, drawn into a thunderhead that wreathed the king in a furious storm.

A shriek of agony, louder than the storm, split the air. It took a moment for the High King to realise it had come from the fly swarm, speaking with one voice as they burned and died. The enchanted fire had lifted the malaise, and Snorri shook the insects from his beard, brushed them hurriedly from his armour and breathed again.

Alkhor loomed, mocking the dwarf with its gurgling laughter. Its plague sword was raised for a cleaving blow. Blinking away the filth crusting his eyes, Snorri thrust upwards with his rune hammer and crafted a lightning bolt from the storm that speared the daemon’s bloated chest.

Mirth became pain, the face of the daemon contorting as rune fire devoured and purified its flesh. It staggered then slumped, legs giving way to agony and bringing it within striking distance of the High King.

‘I said you would burn!’ Snorri roared, and slashed Alkhor open like a boil.

A slew of foulness erupted from the wound in the daemon’s stomach. Half-digested corpses, chunks of armour and cloth, scraps of corroded leather and the remnants of skeletons eroded by the daemon’s intestinal acids spilled out.

‘Don’t touch it,’ warned the High King, and his retainers stayed back.

Alkhor staggered again. Unable to regenerate, the daemon clutched its wound, spitting bile and curses at the dwarf who had hurt it. Pathetically, it began to sob.

Unfurled from its back, a pair of tattered fly-like wings started to beat.

But Snorri wasn’t finished with it yet.

‘Closer, filth,’ he growled, stepping down from his throne, ‘so I can take your ugly head.’

As Snorri’s booted feet hit the ground, Alkhor’s sobbing turned into derisive laughter.

‘Foolish little creature,’ it burbled and tugged at the edges of the wound the dwarf had made. From within the rotten ropes of intestine, the sacs of pus and putrefying organs, a welter of tentacles burst forth. One wrapped around the High King’s arm, the other pinned his leg. A third quested for his neck but he swatted it with his rune hammer before it could strangle him.

Each of the tentacles was swathed in sharp teeth that champed and gnawed at Snorri’s armour. Slowly, they began to drag the dwarf into Alkhor’s gaping maw.

Rising in the saddle, Malekith put the bloated lord firmly in his sights — along with Snorri entangled in the daemon’s intestines, losing his fight for survival. Malekith was about to even the odds.

Digging his feet into the stirrups arrested the elf’s descent and the dragon pulled up sharply, its long neck angling downwards and nostrils flaring. Trails of smoke extruded from the corners of its mouth, carried away on the breeze.

‘I hope that armour of yours is impervious as you claim…’

Inhaling a deep, sulphurous breath, the dragon unleashed fire.

Flames roared hungrily across the daemon’s wretched body, burning away pestilence and purging rot. Clods of fat, festering slabs of skin sizzled and spat. Alkhor squealed as the tentacles rippling from its stomach were reduced to charred meat, writhing like headless vipers.

‘Htarken…’ it pleaded, but the feathered sorcerer did not appear.

‘So that is your name,’ the elf prince muttered.

The daemon pulled away, its tattered wings beating furiously and spewing gouts of filth in its desperate attempt to escape. Slowly, Alkhor began to rise. Its body was still smouldering, shrinking as the dragon fire consumed it.

Snorri swung and missed. He cursed the daemon’s cowardice, hurling vengeful insults as it fled.

Malekith flew his dragon low and into the dwarf’s eye line.

‘Are you hurt, old friend?’

Snorri looked rueful, but otherwise uninjured.

‘Only my pride. Killing that thing will salve it.’

A feral smile turned the corners of Malekith’s mouth as he set his gaze on the fleeing daemon. Spurring his mount, he was about to pursue when he had to pull up sharply to avoid a burst of incandescent light exploding in front of him. Blinking back the after-flare, the elf saw a figure emerge from the sudden luminance. Clad in varicoloured robes, held aloft on feathered wings, Htarken barred Malekith’s path.

The elf reacted as quick as thought but his thrown spear evaporated into mercury before it could impale the daemon. Its outstretched claw and swiftly spoken incantation was enough to destroy the weapon. Htarken returned its talon to the folds of its robes, yet made no motion to attack.

All the while, Alkhor was escaping. Thinking quickly, Malekith turned to the lord of the eagle riders who had just arrived from on high.

‘Prince Aestar,’ he said, thrusting his sword in the plague daemon’s direction, ‘slay that thing!’

Nodding grimly, Prince Aestar soared through the clouds after the daemon, his brothers close behind. Malekith was left to face Htarken.

He would not be alone. A conclave of three Sapherian mage lords rose up beside the prince on pillared coruscations of gold.

‘You are finished, daemon.’ He gestured to the valley below where the hell-hosts were slowly dissipating, their mortal followers fleeing with the dissolution of their immortal allies. ‘Chaos has been defeated.’

‘Has it?’ Htarken spoke with a hundred different voices at once. Some were not even voices at all. They were the crackle of fire, the howling of the wind or the breaking of wood. They were cries of slaughter, pleas for mercy and the gibbering laughter of the insane. Birds, beasts, dwarfs and elves all collided in an unsettling union that put the prince’s teeth on edge.

Malekith grimaced as the sound of Htarken’s ‘voice’ echoed in his mind. Like a cancer, it sought to take root and destroy him from within.

‘Change,’ said the daemon, with the prince reeling, ‘is inevitable. Even with all your many gifts, the heritage of your bloodline, you cannot fight entropy.’

Malekith wondered why the mages had not yet banished this thing, and then he realised they were transfixed. Seized by a sudden palsy, they trembled as all the horrors of change were visited upon them. As the minds of the mages died, so too did the pillars of fire holding them up.

Htarken had them now, bound to puppet strings. And they danced, they jerked and spasmed until they exploded into transmuted globs of flesh and flailing limbs. They were loremasters of the White Tower of Hoeth and the feathered sorcerer had vanquished them as if they were nothing more than apprentices.

‘Fate is mine to manipulate,’ said the daemon. ‘I have seen yours, elf. Would you like to know it?’

Malekith was about to answer when a terrible pain seized his body. He convulsed, clutched at his skin.

His dragon mewled in fear and confusion.

‘I am…’ Malekith tore off his helm, ripped at his gorget and cuirass, ‘on fire! Isha preserve me!’

‘All endings are known to me. Every skein of destiny is mine to behold. I see past, present and future. Nothing is occluded. Your doom has c-’

Agony lessened, the fires in the elf’s mind faded to embers.

As he opened his eyes, Malekith saw a rune hammer lodged in Htarken’s chest. The daemon clutched at it feebly, arrested in its sermonising.

A gruff voice called from below.

‘You’ll find it hard to speak with dwarf iron in your gut.’

Relief washing over him like a balm with the dissipation of Htarken’s sorcery, Malekith nodded to his friend.

Snorri was not done. He outstretched his hand and the hammer’s haft began to quiver. As if snared by an invisible anchor the daemon came with it, drawn down by the runecraft of the weapon, unable to remove it from where it had impaled its ribs and chest.

‘I am master of fate…’ Htarken was weakening, his many voices becoming less multitudinous with every foot he descended. ‘I see all ends… I see…’

‘Bet you didn’t see this, hell-spawn,’ Snorri snarled through gritted teeth. The daemon was almost in front of him. He readied his axe in one hand, drew in the hammer with the other.

Htarken was weeping… no, laughing. Its spluttering mirth paused for agonised breaths and to spit ichor from its mouth. The hood fell back in its pain-wrecked convulsions, a savage parody of what it had done to the mages, revealing a grotesque bird-headed fiend. Narrow eyes filled with pit-black sclera glared over a hooked beak.

‘I am oracle, architect and thread keeper…’ it gasped, every second bringing it closer to the bite of the dwarf’s axe. Htarken coughed, its laughter grew deeper and its struggles ceased. ‘Your doom is certain, you and your pathetic races. Chaos has come and already a change is upon you. Feel it warp your bones, the very course of your bloodlines. It will shape the future and I will be there to witness it. Htarken the Everchanging shall stand upon the ashen corpses of you all and exult. Doomed…’ it cawed, eyes widening in a sudden fervour. ‘Doomed, doomed, doomed, doom-’

‘Elfling!’ Snorri cleaved the raving daemon with his axe as Malekith plunged Avanuir into its heart.

Htarken screamed a thousand times all at once as it was cast back into the abyss. An inner fire consumed it, possessed of chilling heat that made the elf and dwarf recoil.

In a flare of light, the last gasp of a candle flame before its air has run out, Htarken was gone and left only colourful ash motes in its wake.

Malekith felt his heart beating hard in his chest like a drum. His arm was shaking where he held Avanuir and he had to lower it to keep from dropping his sword.

‘Isha…’ he breathed and turned to the dwarf.

Snorri was on one knee, holding himself up with his axe as his chest and back heaved up and down.

A shaft of sunlight blazed down from the sky, lancing through the bloody cloud that was slowly turning back to white. Snorri looked up into it and let the warmth bathe his face.

Malekith took off his helm to wipe the sweat from his brow. He smiled.

Snorri was nodding.

‘Good,’ he said, licking the dryness from his lips.

With their leaders banished or fled, the hell-hosts were dying. The lesser daemons were gone, the beasts and thralls were slowly being destroyed by the triumphant armies of the elves and dwarfs.

Snorri sighed as if a heavy burden had been removed from his shoulders and tramped wearily up the stone steps of his throne where he sat down heavily.

‘Thus ends the threat of Chaos to the Old World,’ he said. ‘We have followed in the footsteps of our ancestors, of Grimnir and Grungni and Valaya.’

‘Of my father Aenarion and Caledor Dragontamer,’ said Malekith as his dragon bowed low to let him leap from the saddle and be at the dwarf’s side.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, the lords who had challenged darkness and cast it back to hell.

‘You look tired,’ said the elf.

Snorri slumped against the throne.

‘I am.’

Still clutched in one hand, his rune hammer drooled black smoke from a cleft in its head. Malekith knew the weapon’s name was Angazuf, which Snorri had told him meant ‘sky iron’. In banishing the daemon it had been ruined.

Snorri looked sad to see its runic strength diminish; the hammer was older than some hold halls.

‘What else has been lost to this fight, I wonder?’ he uttered, suddenly melancholy.

Around them the battle was ending. With the defeat of the Chaos hordes, order was returning. Life would return in time, but this would forever be a tainted place. For the touch of Chaos is a permanent taint that cannot ever be entirely removed.

Above them, Karag Vlak was quiescent, its anger spent like that of the dwarf king.

Around the mountain and before it, elves and dwarfs lay dead in their thousands.

But it was for his friend that Malekith’s eyes betrayed the most concern.

There was rheum around Snorri’s eyes. Age lines threaded his face, gnarled skin and lesions showed on his hands. Like his rune hammer, he was broken. The elf wondered just how much this last fight had taken out of the dwarf, how badly Alkhor had really wounded him.

‘Don’t look so afraid, I am not dead yet,’ growled the king.

Silent as statues, his thronebearers and hearthguard were grim-faced.

Malekith smiled, though it was affected with melancholy. He looked around at the battlefield, at the dying and the dead.

‘We have paid a great price for this,’ said the elf, finally answering the dwarf’s question. ‘Here we witness the passing of a golden age, I fear.’

He watched the elves and dwarfs as they fought together to cleanse the battlefield of the last remnants of resistance. Some had already begun to celebrate victory together and exchanged tokens and talismans. For many, it would be the last time they would see one another.

So different and yet common purpose had formed a strong bond.

‘But perhaps we can usher in a new one. Either way, let us hope this is an end to hell and darkness.’ He added, without conviction, ‘To war and death.’

‘Aye,’ Snorri agreed, ‘it is the province of more youthful kings, I think.’

Malekith nodded, lost in introspection.

‘I had expected more joy, elfling,’ said the dwarf. He leaned forwards to clap Malekith’s armoured shoulder. ‘And you say that we are dour.’

The elf laughed, but his eyes were far away.

‘We should feast,’ he said at last, returning to the present and leaving his troubles for now, ‘and honour this triumph.’

‘Back at Karaz-a-Karak, we will do just that, young elfling.’ Some colour had returned to the dwarf’s cheeks at the prospect of beer and meat. ‘And yet you still seem moribund. What is it, Malekith? What ails you?’

‘Nothing…’ The elf’s eyes were fixed again on a dark horizon, his mind on the remembered fire that had ravaged his body. It felt familiar somehow. ‘Nothing, Snorri,’ he said again, more lucidly. ‘It can wait. It can certainly wait.’