Nick Kyme: The Great Betrayal

One of Malekith’s lieutenants, Klarond, saluted. They had been struggling against the monstrous spawn until the prince of Nagarythe’s timely intervention.

‘For Anlec and King Bel Shanaar!’ roared Klarond, stabbing his sword into the air. The cheer from his warriors drew a sneer to Malekith’s lips which he hid well before soaring back into the sky.

As he ascended he was met by Glarondril of Caledor. A host of dragons circled with the prince, the other nobles of the mountainous realm.

‘I see no daemon lord, Malekith,’ said Glarondril, an edge to his voice.

Malekith ignored the thinly veiled slight and instead surveyed the battlefield.

‘It is here somewhere.’

His eyes narrowed, alighting on the dwarf throng where the king fought his own daemon lord. Many of the hearthguard lay dead around his feet, and one of the king’s thronebearers could no longer fight.

Turning his gaze back to the dragon host, Malekith gestured to a trio of eagle riders that had just joined the flight.

‘My lords,’ he said, recognising again Prince Aestar as he addressed them, and glancing darkly at Glarondril, ‘come with me.’

Malekith arrowed out of sight a moment later, piercing the cloud layer in seconds. Avian shrieks behind him told the elf prince that Aestar’s eagle lords had followed.

The dwarf king looked beleaguered.

‘I am coming,’ he said, and urged his dragon to fly faster.

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.