Agrin Fireheart, Runelord of Barak Varr, stood in his armour of meteoric iron. His incantation reached a crescendo as he threw off his disguise and, as he bellowed the last arcane syllable, he brought his iron staff down hard upon the ground. Runes igniting upon the stave which filled with inner fire, a massive tremor erupted from the point where Agrin had struck.
The elves were flattened, their murderous charge violently arrested by the runelord’s magic.
A shout split the dark like a peal of thunder. It took a moment for Krondi, lying on his back like the elves, to realise it had come from Agrin’s mouth.
Like a dagger blade bent by the smith’s hammer, a jag of lightning pierced the sky and fed into the runelord’s staff, so bright that the arcing bolt lit up the gorge in azure monochrome. With sheer strength of will, he held it there, coruscating up and down the haft in agitated ripples of power like he was wrestling a serpent.
One of the elves was trying to rise, take up a fallen arrow and nock it to his bowstring.
Agrin immolated him like a cerulean candle. The elf burned, grew white hot… There was a flare of intense magnesium white and then he was gone, with only ash remaining.
Thrusting his staff skywards again, thunderheads growling above him, Agrin was about to unleash a greater storm when a spear of darkling power impaled him.
Slowly he lowered his staff and the clouds began to part, losing their belligerence. A smoking hole, burned around the edges, cut through the runelord’s meteoric armour.
It was just above his heart.
Agrin staggered as another dark bolt speared from the shadows at him. Krondi cried out, railing at the imminent death of the beloved runelord of his hold, but Agrin was equal to it and dispelled the bolt with a muttered counter.
His enemies revealed themselves soon after, three robed figures walking nonchalantly through the gorge. A female led the sorcerous coven, sculpting a nimbus of baleful energy in her hands. Krondi was no mageling, but he had fought them before and even he could tell that the female was the mistress. The other two were merely there to augment her powers.
She unleashed the magicks she had crafted and a vast serpent fashioned from bloody light painted the gorge in a visceral glow before it snapped hungrily at the runelord.
Once more Agrin foiled her sorcery, a rune of warding extinguishing on his staff as he brandished it towards the elemental. She shrieked as the enchantment failed, recoiling as if burned, and pressed a trembling hand to her forehead before snarling at the male sorcerer in the coven as he went to help her.
Despite the fresh tipping of the scales against then, Krondi felt renewed hope. He didn’t have long to appreciate it as the leader of the elves came at him with a pair of sickle blades. The other was still grounded and watched eagerly from his prone position.
From the corner of his eye, Krondi saw Agrin assailed by dark magic as the three sorcerers vented their power as one. Runes flared and died on his staff as the iron was slowly denuded of its magical defences. Outnumbered, the runelord was finding it hard to retaliate, just as Krondi could only fend off the silvered blades of the elf leader intent on his death.
‘Submit,’ the elf snarled in crude Khazalid through clenched teeth, ‘and I’ll kill you quickly.’
Krondi was shocked at the use of his native tongue but knew that some elves had learned it, or tried to.
‘Unbaraki!’ he bit back, invoking the dwarf word for ‘oathbreaker’, for these bandits or whatever they were had broken the treaty between their races and sealed the deed with blood.
‘Your oaths mean nothing to me, runt. I’ll cut your coarse little tongue from your mouth–’
Krondi finally struck his enemy. In the elf’s fervour he had left an opening, one an old soldier like Krondi could exploit. Ribs snapped in the elf’s chest, broken by a hammer blow that the dwarf punched into his midriff.
Mastering the pain, the elf rallied but was on the back foot as the dwarf pressed his advantage. Laughter issued from somewhere close, though it sounded oddly resonant and was obscured by the near-deafening magical duel between Agrin and the coven.
Like he was swatting turnips with a mattock, Krondi swung his hammer with eager abandon. Kill the elf now, bludgeon him with sheer fury and power, or he would be dead like the others. He couldn’t match the elf for skill. Krondi knew this but felt no shame in it, as his father had taught him humility and pragmatism, so that left only brute strength.
His resurgence was only momentary. Dodging an overhead swing intended to break his shoulder the elf weaved aside and trapped the hammer between the razor edges of his sickle blades. With a grunt the elf cut in opposite directions, shearing the haft apart and disarming the dwarf.
Looking on despairing at his sundered hammer, the weapon that in all his years of loyal gatekeeping had never broken, Krondi scarcely noticed the twin blades rammed into his chest.
‘–and then gut you like a fish,’ the elf concluded, a grimace etched permanently on his face from the crushed ribs in his chest.
Krondi spat into it, a greasy gob of blood-flecked phlegm that ran down the elf’s cheek and drew a sneer to already upcurled lips. The dwarf slid off the blades, life leaving him as he hit the ground. He was on his side and tried to claw at the earth, to catch some of it in his numbing grasp and know he would be returning to the world below and his ancestors. Through his muddying vision that crawled with black clouds at the edges, though the storm had long since cleared, Krondi saw Agrin on his knees.
Teeth clenched, the runelord was defiant to the last but the wound he’d been dealt when his guard was down was telling upon him. It was to
