The Great Betrayal

II

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.

Grimnir was the most warlike of the dwarf ancestor gods. Legend told that he had closed the Chaos Gate himself and been doomed by the very deed. Left behind by Grimnir’s sacrifice, his fellow deities Grungni and Valaya passed from the mortal realm and went back into the earth, never to be seen again. But even the might of the ancestors could not prevent the canker of Ruin escaping. Disaster was averted, destruction of all life forestalled for a time, but Chaos lived. It bred and permeated the very cloth stitching reality together. It became pervasive, an invisible stain that would only spread with the passing of millennia.

Statues and memories were all that remained of the ancestor gods now. Even their lesser children were dust, with only scant temples to remember them. Such numinous beings could not exist forever and so it fell to their scions to try and rid the world of Chaos…

Snorri Whitebeard unleashed a bolt of lightning through the haft of his hammer. It sparked and cracked with all the fury of the ancestors, luminous and burning. A tide of hell-spawn that had come crawling over the lip of the flat rock where he made his stand was sent reeling. Blackened and smouldering, the creatures pitched over the edge and did not return. Sulphur-stink tainted the air as they were banished, the unreality of this place the only thing keeping them from dissipating immediately.

It had been a verdant valley once, the rich volcanic soil of the mountain giving life to acres of forest. All that had changed with the coming of Chaos. A blasted landscape, scorched black and seized in the grip of a half-frozen waste, was all that remained.

A mire of corpses piled up around the foot of the rock, putrefying with the taint of Ruin. From the steaming carcasses that were dried to husks and broken open by the baleful sun further abominations arose. Dewy eyelids blinked and nictitated in the light. Tentacles, claws and fleshy protuberances burst from skin-taut bodies eager for transformation. Carapace, chitin and malformed bone swaddled beasts already overrun with corruption that advanced against the elves and dwarfs.

These were the spawns of Chaos, hell-ravaged abominations birthed by fell sorcery of the darkest kind.

Uttering a cry to Khaine, the elven war god, Malekith speared a basilisk through its gullet. Viscous ichor spewed arterially from the wound. Mercury-swift, the elf prince leapt forwards and decapitated the beast without pause with his blade, Avanuir. Its dead, collapsing mass crushed several lesser beasts and swept many others to their doom as it fell.

Hundreds more of the wretched creatures now littered the rock where the lords of the dwarfs and elves made their stand. Daemons of every malformed persuasion and aspect had fallen beneath their weapons.

With a grunt, Snorri kicked a corpse over the edge. If they allowed the bodies to accumulate both elf and dwarf would soon be slipping on tainted entrails. Malekith’s dragon had not borne them here just to die ignominiously for no purpose.

‘’Tis thirsty work,’ remarked the dwarf in a moment of rare respite. Snorri licked his lips, smiling at the elf prince who hurled his spear into the belly of a bloated troll. Fire ignited along the haft, immolating the beast.

‘We’ll toast our victory later,’ Malekith replied, pointing to the southern edge of the rock where a horde of glaive-wielding beasts had just appeared. It was like an ever-lapping tide, with Snorri and Malekith acting as breakwaters. Horned and cloven-hooved, heat bled off the daemons’ muscled bodies in a gory steam. Malign intelligence flickered in their pit-black pupils. It warred with a terrible, consumptive rage.

Attracted by the scent of power emanating from the dwarf and elf, the daemons came on in droves. Eight became sixteen then over twenty as more and more of the daemons wanted to taste the flesh of true heroes. Like sharks drawn to blood, an insatiable hunger motivated them.

‘We are the devourers…’ they said as one in a horrible collision of voices patched together from a thousand different shouts of anger and wrath.

Grinning wickedly they began to circle the lords, beckoning them towards death and damnation with the tips of their hell-blades. Loping between the bloody daemons were brass-collared hounds, bigger and more brutish than any normal canine and with a vaguely reptilian aspect.

In seconds, the edges of the flat rock were festooned with daemons and the lords were surrounded.

Snorri backed up, snarling with wrath palpable enough to make the abominations pause.

‘We shall feast upon your mortal soul…’ promised the daemons. A hound leapt at the dwarf with an echoing roar.

But it would take more than a daemonic dog to fell the High King. ‘Then chew on this,’ he said. Silver fire flared, too fast to truly see, and the hell-beast was cut in half.

‘Tasty?’ asked Snorri, brandishing the head of his gore-stained axe at the other monsters.

Three more hounds sprang after the first, but were swiftly struck by a flight of pearlescent arrows. Every shaft was a heart shot.

Snorri only half turned, giving Malekith a sidelong glance.

The elf nodded to the dwarf, lowering his bow and stowing it to draw Avanuir.

‘That’s a debt I’ll have to repay now,’ said the High King. Snorri grinned at the elf, showing two rows of crag-like teeth within the forest of his long beard. ‘We stand before the world’s ending, elfling.’

Malekith gave the dwarf a wry glance, but his attention was partly on the daemons advancing across the Fist of Gron. He lost count after fifty, and was acutely aware he had retreated several paces. Elf and dwarf were almost back to back.

‘You sound almost pleased.’

‘Aye, think of the saga it will make. Immortality awaits!’

Malekith didn’t sound convinced, ‘Not if there is no one left alive to write it, and all existence has come to an end.’

‘Good point,’ the dwarf conceded. ‘Let us hope not then.’

Snorri eyed the daemons as he would dung upon his hobnailed boot, swallowing back a bitter taste in his throat at their stench. A cage of iron-hard, blood-red monsters surrounded them and its bars were tightening.

‘We need room to fight,’ he muttered, then hefted both his rune weapons and beckoned to the daemons. ‘Come on then!’

In one gnarled fist the dwarf had a gromril axe, its face etched with three angular runes. In the other he had a hammer, a lightning bolt embossed upon the head in gold. Thick links of gilded mail swathed his broad, muscular body. His arms, dark from the forge and the earth, were bonded with torcs and vambraces. A red, fur-trimmed cloak fell from slab-like shoulders armoured with pauldrons fashioned into the faces of ancestor gods. He wore no helm, for he wanted his enemies to see his fury, but carried a crown upon his brow instead. Runes inscribing every inch of his armour shimmered. Flawless rubies, verdant emeralds and pellucid sapphires studded every ring and bracelet.

I am the High King, they said. I am Lord of the Dwarfs and my vengeance is terrible. Behold! For your doom has come.

Snorri beat his chest with a clenched fist.

‘Khazuk!’

It was not meant as a challenge, but a death sentence.

The daemons heard neither but attacked as one, hounds and masters both. They were a crimson tide, of rage, hate and a desire to end all things.

Snorri cried out to Malekith as the daemons rushed them, ‘Hold on, elfling!’ and brought his rune hammer crashing down on the rock with all the potency of a lightning bolt.

Tremors rippled from the point where the dwarf had struck, cracks jagging outwards in an ever-expanding crater of sundered earth. Stone split, sending teeth of razor-edged rock into the daemons, scything into hellish flesh and spilling their tainted ichor.

Malekith was fast as quicksilver, darting between the spears of rock thundering out of the ground, running ahead of the quake. He weaved around the lazy blow of one daemon, severed the head from another. A third he impaled, before swinging the twitching corpse around to bludgeon three more. Destruction from the dwarf’s hammer rained around him, but did not touch the elf. Not one scratch.

Avanuir took a heavy toll, almost acting as an extension of the elf’s will and fury. Not to be outdone, the dwarf king weighed in with his axe, smashing into anything that had survived his first titanic blow.

Howling, bleating, furious, the daemons were slaughtered.

A heavy pall of dust engulfed the survivors, their balefire eyes the only thing visible at first. The storm presaged a seismic crescendo, an aftershock of power that cast the rest of the bloody daemons back over the edge of the rock. They fell screaming, raging before being dashed to paste or impaled on the upraised blades of the monsters below.

Malekith was crouched down, his head bowed. He held on to his spear haft, using it to anchor him to the rock until the storm had passed. With the tremors fading, he rose to his full height again.

The elf prince was as impressive as the dwarf.

A long coat of ithilmar mail draped his lithe but honed body. Nearly twice as tall as the High King, his face was thin and pale but noble. There was wisdom in his eyes, born of the esteemed bloodline of the greatest asur, but coldness too that the dwarf did not fully understand. At times, it bordered on cruelty. Angular, almost almond-shaped, the elf prince’s eyes were concealed behind a tall, conical helm that left only his mouth visible. A mane of griffon hair cascaded from the peak and ran the length of Malekith’s back.

Snorri was tired. Breathing hard, the dwarf leant his forehead against his hammer’s pommel and bent one knee to rest. It was almost genuflection. The oath on his lips had been spoken to Grungni, so it was as if he were praying at the altar of his own rune-crafted hammer.

The hand on his shoulder lifted him, and brought strength back to his weary limbs.

The dust was receding, spiralling away on the hot breeze. But through the slow dispersion of the cloud, claws could be seen and heard reaching for the summit of the rock.

‘Relentless bastards, aren’t they?’ the dwarf remarked, raising his chin.

Malekith pulled his gore-streaked spear from the ground. In his other hand was Avanuir. Although it had reaped many monstrous heads during the battle, the silver sword’s blade remained untarnished. Just a part of its magic — along with its brutal killing edge.

‘Old friend,’ said the elf, ‘I think it is almost time for us to depart.’ With the spear’s tip, he pointed to the battlefield below where their armies warred against the Chaos hosts. Judging by the fury of the unfolding melee, the clash had reached a tipping point.

‘Aye, lad, you may be right,’ Snorri admitted, deciding to slake his lust for grudgement on the beasts below. Weary, he got to his feet.

Malekith laughed. It was a hollow sound, but had genuine mirth.

‘Lad, am I? You ever manage to amuse me.’

‘Old, am I?’ Snorri replied, his grin as broad and wide as an axe blade.

Though he was far the younger of the two, an age of living beneath the earth, of sweating in the forges and furnaces of the underdeep, had left the dwarf with skin like baked leather. Unlike the elf, he was not immortal, although relatively long-lived.

‘See there?’ The elf hastened to the edge of the flat rock, thrusting again with his spear. He kicked at a daemon that had come close to the lip, giving it little thought as it plummeted hundreds of feet to its doom.

Snorri joined him, hacking into the face of another beast that had reached the edge of the Fist. The dwarf followed the elf’s pointing spear tip. Crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened as he squinted into the fading sun.

‘A breach in their lines.’

Through the mad swell, the pitch and yaw of the battle, it was difficult to see at first, but the ranks of the Chaos host had thinned. Where before a seemingly impenetrable tide of monsters had barred the way for the elves and dwarfs to reach the feathered sorcerer and the bloated lord, now there was a gap. A slim gap. A slim hope, but hope it still was.

The dwarf’s plan was straightforward. Use them both as bait.

His thane-kings and the other lordlings of the elves too had argued against it but Snorri would not be swayed, nor Malekith who saw its virtues at once. The elf’s dragon had brought them high above the battlefield to the Fist of Gron where all the foul daemons of Ruin could see and taste them. Eager to kill the elf prince and the dwarf king, the horde would flock to them, but in their eagerness would leave their daemonic masters less well protected.

‘Your ruse has worked, old friend.’

‘Of course it worked, I am a dawi!’

Malekith laughed again, but this time it was deep and hearty.

‘Fighting at your side, I do not think I have ever been more at peace,’ he said, flashing the dwarf a warm smile.

Snorri frowned at him.

‘You find your solace in the oddest of places,’ he shrugged, ‘but then you are an elgi and as strange to me as the sky.’

Snorri grew stern. Despite this relative victory, the plan would only succeed if their armies held and could maintain the breach until he and Malekith arrived to lead them. The High King gazed out from the Fist of Gron, trying to gauge how the dwarfs were faring. They were fighting hard, thane-kings leading their warriors from the slopes of the distant mountain into the heart of the daemonic hosts and their beasts. On the vast left flank, lightning speared from runic anvils in their dozens and turned the monsters into ash. Immense pillars of flame rolled out from other runic war engines. Daemons and beasts caught up in the conflagration were swiftly rendered to charred hunks of tainted meat. Earth trembled as runesmiths in their hundreds called forth powerful quakes that opened up great chasms in the ground, swallowing scores of monsters before closing ominously.

Behind the stout phalanxes of dwarf warriors leading the attack, Snorri saw giants. Creations of stone and metal, these ancient golems were slow to rise and quick to slumber. Only the most powerful runelords could rouse them. Like the anvils, they were magical machineries fashioned by the supreme artifice of rune masters. The craft to forge them anew was lost, but the gronti-duraz lived still. It meant ‘enduring giant’ in the dwarf tongue.

On this great day when elf and dwarf stood together united in purpose, they had woken in their hundreds. The sight brought a tear to the old dwarf king’s eye. It was to be their final battle, for the magic to animate them was getting harder and harder to craft, seeping away like a draught through a slowly widening crack.

From the craggy flanks of Karag Vlak a horn blast resounded, seizing the High King’s attention. Ballistae gathered in serried ranks turned the air dark with flights of bolts the size of lances. Farther up the mountainside, mangonels and onagers hurled stones. Chunks of rock etched with runes of banishment and daemon-killing crashed and rolled amongst the horde. Beasts and daemons alike were crushed and skewered by the deadly rain pouring from the ranks of war machines.

Though monsters of every stripe had been unleashed against the armies of Snorri and Malekith, it was a plague-ridden tide that faced the dwarfs. Even high above the battlefield, Snorri could see hundreds of horned and hunchbacked daemons. Tallymen, he had heard them named. One-eyed, bloated bellied, the stench of their decaying flesh assailed his nostrils all the way up on the Fist of Gron.

Lesser, maggot-ridden beasts loped alongside them in their thousands. Some had once been men. Slug-like beasts with gaping maws like cages of acidic slime slithered behind them. Daemonic tallymen rode on the backs of the beasts, rusted bells ringing at their shrivelled necks. Diminutive, wide-mouthed daemons, covered in boils and pustules, swarmed like a rancid sea. They gathered at the edges of the horde, giggling like manic children.

‘Such horror…’ breathed the High King of the dwarfs, knowing even this was not the worst of it. Snorri followed the diseased ranks of the enemy until he saw the bloated lord.

Behind its pestilent legions there loomed a malevolent creature, cankerous and rotten as its vassals. Clad in rags and strips of flesh, a cloud of flies buzzed around it like a miasma. Tattered wings hung from its emaciated arms and a flock of rotting crows perched on its hulking shoulders, cawing malevolently.

Alkhor, it had named itself. Defiler, it boasted. Tide of Pestilence and Harbinger of Nurgle, it claimed. None of which were its true names, for daemons would never relinquish those.

Disgusted, Snorri saw a throng of warriors attack the beast and his heart swelled with pride. The banner of Thurgin Ironheart fluttered on the breeze. Snorri clenched a fist as a flash of fire tore down the daemon prince’s flank. For a moment it burned, and the dwarf dared to hope… But then the rent flesh began to re-knit, hideous slime filling the wound and resealing it.

Alkhor’s foul laughter gurgled on the breeze. Its crow host cawed and chattered as a stream of utter foulness retched from the daemon’s ugly mouth.

Thurgin and his clansmen were overwhelmed, drowned in a stinking mire of vomit. Dwarf skeletons, half clad in rotting plate and scraps of burned leather, bobbed to the surface of the miasma. Hundreds died in seconds, their gromril armour no defence against Alkhor’s disgusting gifts.

‘That creature needs sending back to the abyss, as do all its debased kind,’ said Malekith.

Deep as an abyssal trench, a roar split the heavens. It brought an answering cry from the elf prince before he declared to the dwarf, ‘The war hinges on the next few moments.’

Snorri’s jaw clenched. The elf was right.

On the other side of the vast plain, the elves fought a very different foe. Lurid, gibbering creatures cavorted in unruly mobs. Bizarre, floating daemons dressed in skirts of transmuting flesh spat streamers of incandescent fire from their limbs. Feathered beasts, bull-headed monstrosities and hell-spawn wracked with continuous physical change roved next to the daemons.

‘They were all once men,’ said Snorri, ‘the barbarian tribes of the north.’

Malekith looked grim. ‘Now they are monsters.’

Overhead, the sun was eclipsed as a massive shadow smothered the light.

Lifting his gaze, the prince of the elves saw a massive host of dragons coursing through the red skies. He longed to join them, his fist clenched as he watched the princes of Caledor and their mounts clash with flights of lesser daemonic creatures.

Amidst the swathe of dragonscale, he saw the smaller forms of eagles circling with the dragons. They picked apart the hellish flocks so the larger beasts could bring their fury to bear on the Chaos infantry. No less proud, the belligerent cries of the eagle riders carried through the battle din to the glittering elven warriors below.

He recognised one of them, noble Prince Aestar. He was keen-eyed and raised a quick salute to his lord, which Malekith returned before turning his gaze on the elven warriors below.

A large phalanx of knights, riding hard alongside scores of chariots, hit a thick wedge of pink, gnarled daemons that blurred and split apart as they were killed. Malekith gaped in disbelief as smaller blue imp-like abominations sprang from the ashes of their larger dead hosts and swarmed over the mounted elves. Victory looked far from certain for the knights, who were on the verge of slowing down and being overwhelmed when a conclave of Sapherian mages riding pillars of storm-cloud rained enchanted death down on the daemons. The creatures squealed in pain and delight, before the knights ended them and the mages flew off to confront a coven of sorcerers riding screaming discs of flame.

It was madness, a desperate struggle where the fates of not just lives but souls were at stake.

‘There…’ Malekith gestured to the second daemon lord, the feathered sorcerer. ‘The creature is drawn into the open at last.’

‘Like poison from a wound,’ snarled Snorri. ‘We must act swiftly,’ he said, with half an eye on the edges of the rock where more beasts had begun to appear.

The feathered sorcerer was a creature of mischief and convoluted machination. Though they had never seen its true form, for it wore many, it had chosen an imperious aspect and was swathed in varicoloured flesh-cloth. Beneath its cowl, there was the suggestion of a beak. In one claw the daemon prince clutched a staff of obsidian carved with the faces of the damned. Souls were enslaved within its haft, ever screaming, ever changing as the Architect of Fate moulded them to its will. Unlike Alkhor, it did not attack but merely watched. But as the elves pulled open the threads of its legions, the daemon would soon have to act.

A massive shadow loomed above Malekith, and he averted his gaze from his enemy to crane his neck and search the skies. Something was approaching through the choking cloud, the thump of its wingbeats like peals of thunder.

From below the rock shook, the earth underfoot trembling as if in fear as something massive neared the summit.

‘Time to leave,’ said the elf.

‘I crave a moment longer…’ Snorri stared straight ahead at the massive claw that had just reached up over the edge.

After a long climb, a cyclopean brute had gained the Fist of Gron’s flat summit.

A second claw joined the first and slowly a massive, tusked head came into view. It snorted, releasing a drool of snot from its blunt, scarred snout. Tiny eyes, hooded by a sloping brow, glinted like rubies shot through with dark veins of anger. Its hide-wrapped chest was brawny and swathed in a thick fur. Scales colonised its abdomen, swallowing muscular forelegs and then back legs as the shaggoth heaved itself up.

‘I saw it earlier,’ Snorri confessed, ‘when we were at the edge together, lingering behind the lesser beasts.’

Malekith had put some distance between them both, so the dwarf had room to fight. He shook his head.

‘You were waiting for it, weren’t you?’

As if bored with the exchange, the shaggoth bellowed and thumped its chest. It hefted a cleaver as large as a tree in one meaty fist. Plates of armour, shields and pieces of cuirass taken from dead heroes, wrapped its torso. A shoulder guard fashioned from battered war helms hung from strips of sinew lashed around its neck, back and chest.

‘Not exactly,’ the High King lied.

Snorri swung his rune axe in a practice arc, eyeing with dangerous belligerence the massive brute that had just crested the rock. He had fought one of these creatures before with Malekith at his side. It was many years ago. He had been a younger dwarf then, and his friendship with the elf was in its infancy.

‘No, you wanted to kill it,’ Malekith protested, circling around to try and reach the monster’s blindside.

‘Well… it has climbed such a long way to taste the bite of my axe.’

‘There’ll be plenty for you to kill below. More than enough to satisfy any battle-lust,’ the elf reminded him.

‘Aye, but I want this one,’ said the dwarf, catching the monster’s reflection in the blade of his axe.

Scenting blood, the shaggoth threw up its head and roared at the lightning wracking the sky. Its ululating challenge was eclipsed by another as an even larger beast armoured in carmine scales descended on the shaggoth like an owl upon a rat. Hide and metal plate tore open like parchment. Fire spewed from the dragon’s jaws in a red conflagration that set hair aflame and sizzled flesh. The shaggoth recoiled in agony, realising the larger monster’s dominance, but Malekith’s dragon raked it with sword-long claws and clung on. Strips of meat and sinew ripped away from the shaggoth’s body as it fought desperately to free itself. A cleaver blow went wild and the dragon chewed off the other monster’s arm, releasing a font of spewing gore from the point of dismemberment. Then it bit down on the shaggoth’s neck, tore out its throat and the brief one-sided brawl was over.

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.