Nick Kyme: The Great Betrayal

The slain monster staggered back, not quite realising it was already dead, and fell off the rock to the earth below.

Spreading its wings, the dragon unleashed a deep-throated bellow that prickled the High King’s beard.

‘No need to shout.’

‘Hope there are no hard feelings, old friend,’ said the prince with a wicked smile.

Snorri glowered at the beast, but his wolfish grin returned quickly. ‘Consider that one I owe,’ he said. ‘Our friendship is worth more than the stolen scalp of some shaggoth.’

The dragon growled in empathy and Snorri laughed despite the beast’s formidable size and presence.

Malekith muttered a heartfelt greeting to his mount that Snorri didn’t catch. As he approached where it was perched on the edge of the rock, the dragon lowered its serpentine neck so the prince could stroke it.

Snorri frowned, then sighed. ‘Another of your customs I cannot fathom, elfling.’

Ignoring him, Malekith swung up onto the saddle and looked down. ‘We’ve lingered long enough,’ he said, nodding towards the smoke-choked battlefield. ‘Our warriors have need of us, old friend.’

Through the murk and the carnage, the elves and dwarfs were fighting hard but their strength was finally waning. A last effort, a determined push that looked chaotic from above, widened the fissure in the daemons’ ranks a little farther. Beyond it there lurked the lords of the host.

‘The sorcerer is mine,’ snapped Malekith, before proffering a gauntleted hand to the dwarf.

Snorri declined.

‘I can make my own way,’ he replied. Sheathing his axe, he began to swing his hammer above his head. The lightning rune engraved upon it started to glow, and the heady aroma of the forge filled the air. ‘Step back,’ he warned.

Malekith and his beast obliged, watching the hammer’s arc grow wider and wider.

The dwarf frowned in consternation.

‘Why so grim-faced?’ asked the elf prince, as his dragon sent a belt of flame over the north edge of the rock. A cacophony of screeching told them the beasts climbing up it had been destroyed.

‘Because I hate being storm-borne…’

Snorri smashed the hammer into the earth. A flash of lightning, a dense clap of thunder and the High King was gone, carried off by the power of the hammer’s ancient rune magic. Just a patch of scorched earth was left behind, a tiny circle where the dwarf was kneeling.

‘Always with another trick beneath your beard, eh, old friend?’ Malekith chuckled to himself. ‘Ride the lightning,’ he whispered, kicking his heels into the dragon’s flanks. With a single beat of its huge wings, the elf prince soared skywards. His mount screeched a final curse at the encroaching hordes as they reached the flat summit of the Fist of Gron too late.

Elf and dragon breached cloud and smoke, ascending to the higher heavens. Below, glimpsed through a greying fog, the rock was overrun. Like an anthill swarmed by its denizens, the Fist of Gron was engulfed as a red sea rose up to claim it. The anguished hell-cries of the teeming masses followed him all the way back to the elven battle line.

High King Snorri Whitebeard emerged at the edge of the battle through a jagged tear of light. Tendrils of lightning still played across his pauldrons and rivulets of power spilled over his breastplate as the magic he had employed was slow to dissipate.

The cohort of five hundred hearthguard who greeted him tried not to appear shocked at his sudden arrival, for the elder rune on the High King’s hammer was slaved to his throne, the earthing point for its magic. Only half hiding his smile, enjoying the little piece of theatre, Snorri ascended the stone steps of the immense throne awaiting him.

An artefact from an ancient age, forged when the ancestor gods still roamed the deeps of the world, the Throne of Power was unique. It bore the Rune of Eternity, believed to have been inscribed upon its high back by Grungni. The dwarf name for it was Azamar , a rune so potent that nothing in existence could destroy it.

Fifty paces ahead of the High King were the backs of the gronti-duraz lumbering alongside the warrior clans and brotherhoods. Another hundred paces beyond them were the daemons and one of their masters. Snorri eyed the bloated lord with vengeful relish just as the stone-clad giants began to part, letting him through.

‘Thronebearers.’ The High King’s voice was a deep rumble as he spoke to his retainers. ‘Bring me to war.’

‘Khazuk!’ Grunting with effort, four burly dwarfs lifted king and throne aloft. Singing their deathsongs, they began to march.

The hearthguard fell in beside them. Thanes borne on their own war shields ordered their clansdwarfs to gather around the king’s throng as he passed them, flanked on either side by the gronti-duraz. Snorri nodded to them, though the creations of metal and stone could not respond.

Vagrumm, his standard bearer, bellowed above the din of tramping boots and clashing shields to announce him.

‘For Karaz-a-Karak! In the name of the ancestors and the High King!’

‘Khazuk!’ the throng replied.

A last bulwark of mail parted before the High King, the vanguard of the dwarf army hearing their liege-lord’s return and rejoicing. Their ranks bowed aside only to reform again behind the hearthguard as slowly they reached the front where the fighting raged.

No sooner had he joined the front, than Snorri was immediately embattled.

A daemonic tallyman flung itself at the High King but was cut in half before it could land a blow. Rotten viscera sizzled on the ground but turned into mist where it touched the Throne of Power, the rune of Azamar flaring brightly. Another daemon was smashed asunder by the thronebearers as they pushed against the horde, trying to throw them back.

Hearthguard were hacking great inroads into the daemonic ranks, whilst the other thane-kings wrought similar carnage on either side of the king’s throng.

It was wide, a two-hundred-foot hammer-head driven deep into the heart of the enemy. With Snorri leading them, the dwarf advance was inexorable and devastating. His sheer presence, and the innate resistance of the dwarfs, seemed to drain the creatures of Chaos, and as the fell magic drenching the plain waned, so too did the corporeal bonds binding the lesser daemons to it. Plague-infested corpses began to dissipate, cast back into the Realm of Chaos. Sloughing away, burning down to bone and ash, dissipating into smoke, hundreds of daemons surrendered to instability and were banished.

The tide turned.

Like an armoured plough scything a field of pestilential wheat, the dwarfs slew every Chaos beast that came before them until the High King was face-to-face with the bloated lord himself.

Alkhor chuckled at this reckoning. The bloated lord was many times larger than Snorri and towered over the dwarf until its shadow eclipsed the entire Throne of Power. It seemed to relish the fight to come.

Snorri was only too happy to oblige. Feet braced either side of his ancestral seat, he stood up to level his axe at the daemonic prince.

‘Now you are mine.’

Malekith flew low across the daemon ranks, his dragon spitting fire. Since leaving the Fist of Gron, he had made straight for his war host and the feathered sorcerer they fought against.

A hideous clutch of hell-spawned creatures spat tongues of iridescent fire at the elf prince but their aim was poor and he evaded the barrage. Issuing a mewling challenge, half plea, half roar, the beasts snapped their malformed jaws in frustration.

The dragon snarled back, despising the foul stench of the hell-spawn.

‘Burn them,’ Malekith whispered.

Liquid sulphur drooling from the dragon’s snout burst into flame and streaked across the battlefield to engulf the Chaos beasts. They recoiled, reduced to little more than a dark silhouette amidst all the haze and smoke. Against such fury, the spawns’ charred remains capitulated into ash. What remained of their mutated bodies sank into a heap.