Nick Kyme: The Great Betrayal

They were foul and wretched creatures that the dwarfs would drive from the Old World forever.

At last the enemy reached them, a collision of barbed lances and mewling steeds against dwarf shields and tenacity.

As he raised his axe to strike, Thurgin knew no quarter would be given.

He would ask for none.

Glarondril and his knights swept into the armoured horde, piercing flesh and shattering bone. Severed heads fell from the necks of his foes as he swept around his blazing blue sword in a killing arc. A jab disembowelled another, as hundreds of lances struck flesh, impaling dozens with every vengeful thrust.

‘I am the Master of Dragons,’ he roared. ‘Behold your doom!’

Incandescent fire spewed from the jaws of the elven mounts. It rose in a tide that burned their enemies to ash. No defence was proof against the Dragon Princes of Caledor. No foe, however determined, could resist their charge. The few who did survive found their attacks repelled harmlessly by dragonscale harder than plate. The beasts snarled in contempt, crimsons, ambers, emeralds and azures, a myriad of colour and fury, tearing at limbs with fang and claw.

Hundreds of the enemy died in the first seconds, spitted by lances, devoured by the dragons or burned alive, their corpses left to ruin in the sun. What began as a contest swiftly became a slaughter.

A leader, his armour thicker than the rest, bellowed a challenge at Glarondril who accepted without hesitation.

‘For the king!’ he shouted above the eager roar of his mount, as he took the enemy leader’s head.

‘For the king!’ urged Thurgin, chopping into the riders blunted on the dwarfs’ wall of shields. A spurt of ichor splashed across the dark lacquer of his vambraces but he ignored it, thumping with his shield and hacking with his axe. The runes on the blade flared like star-fires as it hewed through iron-hard skin like it was parchment.

Though the foe pushed and pressed, using every ounce of their depraved strength, the dwarfs held back the tide. Utterly implacable, the shield wall didn’t budge and the enemy cavalry buckled as they rolled against it. Riders in the rear ranks, unable to arrest their momentum, barrelled into those in front. The enemy’s formation rippled, mounts and riders sent sprawling only to be crushed by those that followed in their wake, or butchered by dwarf axes.

Thurgin knew they had weathered the worst of it, and now what they had to do next.

‘Forward!’

Fifty thousand booted feet stomped in unerring unison. The enemy resisted at first, but once the dwarfs had overcome the inertia caused by the broken bodies underfoot they were unstoppable. The throng of Karak Izril moved slowly but inexorably. Like a landslide, and with the same momentum, they cascaded over the cavalry and destroyed it. Already smashed against the dwarfs’ resilience, the riders scattered. Harried without mercy by the triumphant dwarfs, the enemy cavalry had lost two-thirds of its warriors before the charge was ended. Thurgin himself had accounted for no fewer than fifteen of the creatures.

Seeing no gain in pursuit, he called the throng to a halt. His chest was heaving and there was a burning sensation in his shoulder from the violent axe-work, but it was a good pain.

Taking a moment to look around, he realised the battle was perched on a dagger’s edge. A heavy toll had been taken of the enemy, but they were numerous and their will bordered on fanatical.

Lifting up the faceplate of his dragon helm, Thurgin’s eye was drawn upwards to a vast shadow approaching him and his warriors from out of the sun. Not one of the throng of Karak Izril so much as flinched.

‘We have the east flank,’ he called out. An elven dragon rider, leading his scaled host, answered with a clenched fist and a broad, warlike smile.

Glarondril landed gracefully and bowed in the saddle to the thane-lord of Karak Izril. So too did his beast.

‘Well met, Thurgin son of Brak.’ He wiped the ichor from his sword before sheathing it. Behind him, almost twenty thousand dragons lowered their heads in respect to their allies. Each of their riders, every one of them a prince, nodded.

The dwarfs slammed their fists against their breastplates, raising a mighty clamour.

‘High prince,’ answered Thurgin, thumping his own chestplate and the angular rune engraved upon it. ‘I am always glad to see the Master of Drakk and his host.’ He gestured to the mound of sundered daemon corpses strewn around them. They were ugly creatures with hell-red skin, hooves and coiling horns that jutted from canine skulls. Foul steam rose off their broken bodies as the slow dissolution of their natures rendered them down to nothing but essence.

‘I am especially glad,’ Thurgin went on, ‘when his intervention crushes my enemies so gloriously and hands us a piece of the field to hold on to.’ He gestured to the slain host littering the ground for a hundred feet or more in front of them.

Glarondril regarded the daemon corpses with disdain.

‘We had best make the most of our good fortune then,’ remarked the elf, already spurring his mount.

‘Indeed…’ Thurgin turned his eye northwards where the bulk of the daemons festered and gibbered. ‘Those two fiends won’t kill themselves, now, will they?’

Even in the distance the leaders of the horde were easy to discern as they towered above their vassals: the feathered sorcerer and the bloated lord. Each was a prince of daemons with the innumerable hosts of Chaos at their command.

As the daemons retreated on one corner of the battlefield, they swelled in another. Thurgin saw them, the bulk of the cavalry he had butchered, the remnants left by Glarondril and his dragons, gathering around the Fist of Gron. And on that flat spur of rock was High King Snorri Whitebeard and the Elf Prince Malekith, alone and besieged by hell.

A sea of red-skinned death surrounded the king of the dwarfs and the prince of the elves. Though the Fist of Gron was over a hundred feet across, they could see the creatures capering and undulating below them because the horde stretched so far back onto the plain. Had they both stood in the middle of the flat, featureless rock that capped the Fist, Snorri and Malekith would still have seen them.

As it was they stood at either end, close to the edge, as determined warriors would defend a wall during a siege. But it was the braying, the animalistic moans and lascivious promises emanating from beneath them, that told the nobles their enemies were climbing up to fight them.

‘They are eager,’ shouted the High King, clashing his hammer and axe together in a challenge.

‘Try not to be as keen, old friend,’ the elf prince replied. ‘They are coming.’

Snorri and Malekith faced away from each other, but each knew that their counterpart was smiling.

This was the war to end all wars, the final battle against the daemons and the power of Ruin. Here, history was being made. Malekith and Snorri were its architects. But although legendary, this was not the first time that Chaos had challenged for mastery of the Old World.

Long ago the hosts of Chaos had come from the north. An icebound, unforgiving land, the north was thronged with feral tribes and great primordial beasts. These creatures were the first amongst the servants of Ruin, the denizens of the glacier caves and frost-bitten valleys quick to bend their knees in worship. Succour was granted without mercy, their bodies reshaped into horrific forms, just as their souls were cast to damnation. Through a great gate, from a hellish netherworld where all the laws and fabric of nature were mutable and perverted, Chaos spilled into the mortal realm.

Its essence had bled into the lands beyond, turning trees into claws, rivers into arteries of blood and natural beasts into abominations. Like shadows, wisps of half-seen smoke or nightmares witnessed in periphery, the daemons marched alongside these beasts. On leathery pinion, on hoof or claw, slithering on their bellies the monstrous horde had swept across the Old World devouring all before it. Bloated on corruption, swollen with mutation, it could not be allowed to endure.