‘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
