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.’
IV
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.
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.
V
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
