‘Htarken…’ it pleaded, but the feathered sorcerer did not appear.
‘So that is your name,’ the elf prince muttered.
The daemon pulled away, its tattered wings beating furiously and spewing gouts of filth in its desperate attempt to escape. Slowly, Alkhor began to rise. Its body was still smouldering, shrinking as the dragon fire consumed it.
Snorri swung and missed. He cursed the daemon’s cowardice, hurling vengeful insults as it fled.
Malekith flew his dragon low and into the dwarf’s eye line.
‘Are you hurt, old friend?’
Snorri looked rueful, but otherwise uninjured.
‘Only my pride. Killing that thing will salve it.’
A feral smile turned the corners of Malekith’s mouth as he set his gaze on the fleeing daemon. Spurring his mount, he was about to pursue when he had to pull up sharply to avoid a burst of incandescent light exploding in front of him. Blinking back the after-flare, the elf saw a figure emerge from the sudden luminance. Clad in varicoloured robes, held aloft on feathered wings, Htarken barred Malekith’s path.
The elf reacted as quick as thought but his thrown spear evaporated into mercury before it could impale the daemon. Its outstretched claw and swiftly spoken incantation was enough to destroy the weapon. Htarken returned its talon to the folds of its robes, yet made no motion to attack.
All the while, Alkhor was escaping. Thinking quickly, Malekith turned to the lord of the eagle riders who had just arrived from on high.
‘Prince Aestar,’ he said, thrusting his sword in the plague daemon’s direction, ‘slay that thing!’
Nodding grimly, Prince Aestar soared through the clouds after the daemon, his brothers close behind. Malekith was left to face Htarken.
He would not be alone. A conclave of three Sapherian mage lords rose up beside the prince on pillared coruscations of gold.
‘You are finished, daemon.’ He gestured to the valley below where the hell-hosts were slowly dissipating, their mortal followers fleeing with the dissolution of their immortal allies. ‘Chaos has been defeated.’
‘Has it?’ Htarken spoke with a hundred different voices at once. Some were not even voices at all. They were the crackle of fire, the howling of the wind or the breaking of wood. They were cries of slaughter, pleas for mercy and the gibbering laughter of the insane. Birds, beasts, dwarfs and elves all collided in an unsettling union that put the prince’s teeth on edge.
Malekith grimaced as the sound of Htarken’s ‘voice’ echoed in his mind. Like a cancer, it sought to take root and destroy him from within.
‘Change,’ said the daemon, with the prince reeling, ‘is inevitable. Even with all your many gifts, the heritage of your bloodline, you cannot fight entropy.’
Malekith wondered why the mages had not yet banished this thing, and then he realised they were transfixed. Seized by a sudden palsy, they trembled as all the horrors of change were visited upon them. As the minds of the mages died, so too did the pillars of fire holding them up.
Htarken had them now, bound to puppet strings. And they danced, they jerked and spasmed until they exploded into transmuted globs of flesh and flailing limbs. They were loremasters of the White Tower of Hoeth and the feathered sorcerer had vanquished them as if they were nothing more than apprentices.
‘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.