Shattered crucible
David Annandale


I

 	The storm began at the height of the Ritual of Grimnir’s Binding. From where they stood on the platform of rock high on the flank of the Forgecrag, both Thrumnor and Rhulmok saw it start. It stabbed deep into their awareness, drawing them from the necessary trance of the ritual. 
 	The Krelstrag lodge stood strong in the largest volcanic isle at the heart of the Earthwound archipelago in Aqshy. Here, the Fyreslayers said, one of Grimnir’s blades had cut into the ground as he had landed a great blow on Vulcatrix, the Mother of Salamanders. The molten blood of the great wyrm had poured into the vast cleft. The wound in the continents was a hundred leagues wide and many times as long, and it gaped and bled, never to be healed. An ocean of magma raged at the surface. It was said that the ocean had no true bottom, that the wound was so profound it tore through the barriers between the realms, but no living soul could survive the plunge through the depths of that terrible heat to find out. 
 	In all directions, titanic molten waves rose and fell. The rage of the earth pushed its incandescent rock to the surface, as if ten thousand volcanoes in perpetual eruption had drowned themselves and the land, from horizon to horizon. This was the ocean of tribulation and annihilation, and nothing could live in its eternal fury.
 	But the Krelstrag stood strong.
 	Volcanic peaks did rise above the surface of the burning ocean. Islands would come into being. Then the terrible waves would erode their shores, the internal forces would shake them apart, and they would crumble and melt back into the lava. Not all succumbed. Ten mountains had been there since the wound was first torn open. Perhaps it was their birth that had injured the land in the beginning. Jagged and twisted, like the anguished talons of an immeasurably vast beast, they towered over the waves, arrogant, defiant, unchanging. They were mountains at war, mountains under siege. They would stand forever.
 	And so would the Krelstrag.
 	The heart of the Krelstrag magmahold was within the largest of the great claws, the Forgecrag. The island mountain was broad, though so tall it resembled an onyx spike. It rose high enough to pierce the crimson-washed clouds. At a point just beneath the clouds, it was possible to look out at the entire domain of the Krelstrag lodge, the chain of basalt claws jutting from the lava. It was even possible, when the wind was strong enough to clear the worst of the haze, to see the sole hint on the horizon that something might exist beyond the Earthwound, that there was such a thing as a mainland. On those days, the bulky silhouette of the Great Weld would appear. Unlike the spikes of the archipelago, it had a wide, flat peak. It was a distant anvil. On this night, a hammer was striking it.
 	Runemaster Thrumnor and Runesmiter Rhulmok stood on the edge of the high platform. Behind them were a hundred warriors of the auric hearthguard, those chosen to make up the Sentinels of the Reach. Before each Fyreslayer was a drum. The drums were made of hide stretched over a stone framework built into the platform itself, and could never be moved. They had two purposes. The first was to provide the rhythmic thunder of the ritual. The sentinels beat their instruments, and the sound reverberated throughout the tunnels and vaults of the Forgecrag. The drumbeat was the pulse of the land as magma coursed through its veins. It shaped the humours of the Earthwound and called it to attention. When Thrumnor and Rhulmok listened to the beat, when it entered their flesh and their blood and their bones, when it vibrated through the ur-gold runes that were even more central to their being, then they were one with their environment. Then Thrumnor summoned the rage of molten rock, Rhulmok gave it form, and together they built the bridges.
 	There were homes and mines in the other claws of the archipelago, but the Forgecrag was the heart of the lodge, and its fortress in times of war. The Fyreslayers of the Krelstrag needed to move from one peak to another, and there was only one way that was possible. The Earthwound’s fury was so total that there were no tunnels that could link one island to another. Instead there were bridges.
 	Seen from the platform, a suturing of rock connected the islands. Narrow walkways spanned the ocean. Just as the fragments of Grimnir’s being were gathered together in the ur-gold, so the bridges brought unity to the fragments of the Krelstrag lodge. Grimnir had wrought the Earthwound, yet through his strength was a whole forged by his faithful Fyreslayers. 
 	Though they were stone, the bridges were ephemeral. Once they were built, they sometimes lasted as long as a week, sometimes a single day. When the ocean’s rage was great, a bridge could vanish mere hours after its creation, swallowed by waves of lava a hundred feet high. 
 	The bridges had high, curving sides, three times taller than any Fyreslayer, protecting those who crossed them from the worst of the ocean’s heat. Passage across them was controlled by more Sentinels of the Reach. Positioned at either end of each span, carefully trained by Thrumnor and Rhulmok, they observed the conditions of the crossings, determining whether or not they were still safe to use. There lay the second purpose of the drums – to beat the alarm when a collapse was imminent, and so help direct the work of the ritual.
 	In battle, Thrumnor summoned magma from below, destroying the foe as lava erupted from the ground, burning all who dared challenge the Krelstrag. Rhulmok commanded the direction of the magma’s flow. Tunnels opened before his will, and the Fyreslayers moved beneath the battlefield. Over the centuries, as he had learned to call on the magma’s wrath, Thrumnor had also learned how to calm it. He could cool it to solid rock. Rhulmok, in his turn, came to know how to shape what Thrumnor soothed. What was a bridge, after all, but a tunnel through the air?
 	And so the Krelstrag lodge thrived, extending its reach across the islands of the Earthwound archipelago, and any enemy foolhardy enough to try its strength against that of the Krelstrag first had to cross leagues upon leagues of the Earthwound ocean.
 	The Krelstrag had a term: lavasmite. It meant a period of time so short as to be not worth mentioning. It came from the contempt they felt for the sieges they had withstood and smashed to pieces, and for the uncounted thousands of foes who had been swallowed, screaming, by the lava. The sieges lasted only long enough for the Krelstrag to hurl the enemy into the embrace of the Earthwound ocean.
 	The Forgecrag could not be taken. It would stand forever.
 	Then the storm came.
 	Thrumnor was deep in the pounding trance of the ritual. He had caught a great fountain of lava in the clenched gauntlet of his will and chanted a prayer of low, guttural syllables. The blood of Vulcatrix must be called to answer. Righteous rage forced a wave of lava to climb above the ocean. It forced it to change its strength from fire to rigid stone. Rhulmok’s voice was there with him, no less determined but calmer, grinding and growling like the parting of stony waves. The cooling lava lengthened and the bridge came into being, arcing out from the side of the Forgecrag towards a new peak, one that had risen from the ocean a month before, and was now deemed stable enough to explore. Then, at the horizon, where the Great Weld stood guard, there was an explosion of lightning. It disrupted the song. Its thunder was too distant to be heard, but it was so huge it was felt in the air, and Thrumnor stuttered in his song. Rhulmok choked. The half-made bridge collapsed into the lava. Grimnir’s Binding unravelled, its energy lashing out uncontrollably across the bridges. They shook, cracking and groaning. The filament nearest to the incomplete crossing began to glow. Hundreds of Fyreslayers caught on the strut started to run, racing against the rising heat and shifting rock. They barely made it to the safe ground of the Forgecrag before that bridge, too, collapsed. 
 	Out of the trance, Thrumnor saw the last flashes of Binding dispersing over the farther bridges.
 	‘Grimnir grant we killed no one,’ said Rhulmok, his voice strained with shock.
 	Thrumnor grunted. His own breath was rasping. His gaze was fixed on the sky’s rage. This was no natural storm. The lightning struck again and again as if beating a rune into flesh. Pulsing in sympathy with the flashes was a searing glow on the summit of the Weld. The light was a vivid green, and Thrumnor experienced each burst with a mixture of holy dread and the excitement of war. 
 	‘What does this portend?’ Rhulmok asked. There was awe in his tone, but great suspicion too.
 	‘It portends much,’ Thrumnor said. ‘The hammer of Grimnir strikes his anvil once more,’ he recited.
 	Rhulmok did not appear to recognise the line of prophecy. The foretelling was an ancient one, and almost forgotten. There was much of it that Thrumnor could no longer recall himself.
 	‘We must speak with the runefather,’ said Rhulmok.
 	‘Aye,’ Thrumnor agreed.
 	But there was something he must do first.
 
 
 	II

 	Thrumnor knelt before the altar. It was a great stone anvil with seams of gold running through it. The strands gathered at its base, and then appeared to flow upwards, becoming a statue twenty feet tall: Grimnir in battle against the wyrm Vulcatrix. The statue was resplendent with golden fire, shining in the light of a hundred torches. There was no ur-gold in its construction; that element, holy with the contained essence of Grimnir himself, was too precious to use in anything but the runes hammered into the Fyreslayers’ bodies. Such was the craftsmanship of the artisans who had created the altar, though, that the lines of the figures resonated in the runes of whoever came before it. Thrumnor felt the warmth of the designs in his flesh. Their power stirred, urging his blood to battle, to march along that road leading to the union with Grimnir, and the great reforging of his scattered being.
 	Thrumnor leaned forwards, arms spread wide. He rested his palms and his forehead against the side of the altar. With his eyes closed, he could feel the stone vibrate with the beat of the distant storm. The beat passed into his body. His runes flared. Fire coursed through his soul.
 	The beat grew stronger. It overwhelmed him. Thrumnor no longer touched the altar. He was falling through a darkness resonating with the blows of hammers, a boom boom boom boom shaking realm upon realm. Then, at the centre of the dark, there was a sharp point of bright orange light. It spread with every beat of the hammers. Then the dark peeled away, and Thrumnor beheld a vision. Something dark yet streaked with red and gold moved up the height of a vast anvil. It seemed to be a stream of living ore. A hammer as big as the sky was poised over the anvil. When the ore was gathered, the hammer fell. An explosion filled Thrumnor’s sight. The anvil shattered, then lava was flowing over a landscape. There was movement on the ground before its path, a suggestion of flight, a ripple of war. The lava consumed all. It was a tide hundreds of feet high, and it moved with purpose. Thrumnor could not see where it came from, nor where it was going, but a great will determined the destruction. There was a reason for this wave. And there was judgement.
 	The vision faded. Thrumnor rose to his feet. He bowed his head before the image of Grimnir and gave thanks. 
 	‘I know what we must do,’ he said.
 	Auric Runefather Dorvurn-Grimnir regarded his council. With him, along with Thrumnor and Rhulmok, were his seven runesons. All had climbed to the platform to witness the storm. Now, deep in the magmahold, they sat in a circle of stone chairs, carved to suggest the jagged peaks rising from the Earthwound ocean.
 	‘Our duty is clear,’ Thrumnor repeated. ‘Grimnir’s hammer calls us to the Great Weld. There, on blessed ground, there will be a great forging, and we will march in fire and conquest across the mainland.’
 	‘To where?’ Rhulmok shook his head. ‘The meaning of your vision is unclear to me. The scrolls of prophecy foretell a time of tribulation when Grimnir’s hammer strikes the Weld. I can well believe it. Something of enormous power is at work in the realm. Why should we respond by abandoning the magmahold?’ He brought a fist down on the arm of his chair. Stone chips flew. ‘Might the portent not herald a siege such as we have never encountered before? You saw the anvil shatter. This disturbs me. Should we not instead be preparing to defend?’
 	‘No,’ Thrumnor said. ‘My vision points the way.’
 	‘How? You saw lava. You saw terrible destruction. Is that not the foe heading our way?’
 	‘No. It is us.’
 	‘What do you mean?’ asked Forvuld, the eldest of the runesons.
 	‘In my vision, the destruction was a necessary thing. What burned was unclean. The lava was our lodge, overwhelming our foe as we march across the realm in answer to the call of Grimnir. The call every one of us has now witnessed.’
 	Rhulmok’s heavy brow was wrinkled with doubt. ‘That interpretation is not enough to justify the risk to the magmahold.’
 	Dorvurn tried to remember the last time he had seen his runemaster and runesmiter so divided on an issue. He failed. Though Thrumnor was Rhulmok’s senior by more than a century, the bond between the two was a strong one, forged by the unity of bridge creation. He had seen them taunt each other in jest about whose mastery over the lava was the stronger, but on matters of import to the lodge, they had always spoken with one voice. 
 	‘Runesmiter,’ Dorvurn said, ‘it is unlike you to express reluctance for battle.’
 	Rhulmok grunted, but did not take offence. Dorvurn had come close to calling him a coward, and the fact Rhulmok ignored the gibe was telling. The runesmiter’s concerns were deep ones.
 	‘I’m reluctant to engage in the wrong battle,’ Rhulmok said. ‘If we misinterpret what we see and march toward an illusion, leaving the magmahold open to the real menace, what then?’
 	‘There is no question of misinterpretation,’ Thrumnor said. He sounded more heated than the runesmiter. His bald scalp, marked with an intricate tracery of ur-gold, reddened with frustration. ‘I have seen our duty! To delay is to defy Grimnir! And there is also the matter of the oath.’
 	‘What oath?’ said Dorvurn.
 	‘The Oath to the Lost.’
 	There was a puzzled silence in the hall.
 	‘I’ve never heard of this oath,’ Homnir said. He was the youngest of the runesons, but it was clear none of the others knew any more than he did. Even Rhulmok looked confused.
 	Dorvurn felt a pang of guilt. Was it possible he had never spoken of the oath to his sons? Had he never passed on that portion of lore? He had been remiss. He could tell himself the Krelstrag tradition and history were so vast, it was impossible for anyone to remember every aspect, and some things would be forgotten. The tool that was never used would be abandoned over time, and the oath had never been invoked. Even its name had been altered, the form it now took revealing that something had been forgotten. Nevertheless, it existed. Thrumnor was right to invoke it. It seemed that the runemaster and Dorvurn, the oldest Fyreslayers of the Krelstrag lodge, were the only ones to remember. The runefather could not let that situation stand, especially since the oath’s relevance was clear to him now.
 	I had forgotten, he thought. Grimnir, forgive me. 
 	‘The Oath to the Lost,’ Dorvurn said, ‘was made at the time before the Krelstrag came to Earthwound. It was made to another lodge, one bound to us by kin, as we set forth on the journey that would at last bring us here. It was an oath of mutual aid. Should the Fyreslayers of one lodge be attacked, the other would help them in their defence. Our foe is their foe, and their foe is ours.’
 	‘Another lodge?’ Homnir asked. He was stunned.
 	The passing of so many centuries in the Earthwound had isolated the Krelstrag. They had not had contact with another lodge in the living memory of even Dorvurn.
 	‘What is it called?’ Homnir continued.
 	‘We do not know,’ Thrumnor told him. ‘The name has been lost to us. We know we were kin. We know of the oath. We know the lodge lies somewhere beyond the Great Weld. All else has been forgotten.’
 	‘So we don’t even know if it still exists,’ said Rhulmok. ‘To reach the Weld will be a long journey. When have the Krelstrag ever sought to reach the mainland?’
 	‘Our foes have come to the Earthwound from there,’ Thrumnor snapped. ‘Are we lesser than they are?’
 	Rhulmok’s brow darkened, but his grip on his temper was more secure than the runemaster’s. ‘I did not say that. Nor did I mean it.’
 	‘No one questions our valour and might,’ Dorvurn intervened. ‘It is true that we do not know if the other lodge still exists. It matters not.’ He rose from his seat. ‘What matters is the oath. We made it, and we shall not break it. A great storm has come, an omen of tribulations for the Fyreslayers. The anvil of the Great Weld is struck. And Runemaster Thrumnor has a vision of our unstoppable sweep over our enemies.’ He raised his voice, and he raised his grandaxe. ‘Grimnir summons us to war, brothers! And we shall answer! We march!’
 
 
 	III

 	‘The youngflame is unhappy,’ Rhulmok said.
 	He and Thrumnor stood a few paces away from where Dorvurn and Homnir spoke, surrounded by the other runesons. They were assembled on an enormous ledge, as big as a plateau, two-thirds of the way down the Forgecrag. Behind them were the main gates of the Krelstrag magmahold. The heavy iron doors were open, and in the great hall behind them, the massed ranks of the Krelstrag fyrds waited for the order to march. The thousands of vulkite berzerkers were a sea of red hair and beards. Thrumnor looked at them and saw the lava flood of his vision on the verge of being unleashed.
 	‘And what about his fellow youngflame?’ Thrumnor asked. ‘Is he reconciled to our quest?’ His question was serious. He wanted to know Rhulmok’s mind. It was important they were working well together again as they began the journey. How long would it be until they reached the other lodge? Weeks? Months? The lodge needed them, and it needed them acting as brothers. So he phrased his serious question using the frequent joke between them. Rhulmok was no youngflame. There were mountains younger than he. But Thrumnor was more ancient yet, and he still pretended to look upon the runesmiter as a youth.
 	He was glad when Rhulmok smiled. ‘This beardling has his concerns, but he will follow where the runefather leads, and be glad to do it.’ He turned serious. ‘And an oath is an oath.’ He looked out over the ocean, in the direction they were to take. The smaller volcanic islands blocked sight of the Great Weld, but the silver flashes of the greater storm were still visible.
 	‘The oath applies to us all,’ Homnir was arguing. ‘I too must fulfil it. How can I if I stay?’
 	‘You will fulfil your duty to the oath by staying,’ Dorvurn said. ‘I believe the runemaster is correct in his reading of the portents, but Rhulmok too is right: we cannot leave the magmahold undefended. You will defend our home, Homnir, and you will hold it against all enemies.’
 	‘If someone must stay, why not Forvuld?’ 
 	As the eldest, Forvuld’s hope to succeed Dorvurn as runefather was arguably the strongest.
 	‘Because you have much to prove,’ Dorvurn said. ‘You will perform the miraculous to protect the hearth.’
 	To his right, Forvuld nodded, showing his confidence in his younger brother.
 	Homnir bowed his head in acquiescence.
 	‘Your father is grateful,’ Dorvurn said. ‘And your runefather is grateful. Gather the people in the Forgecrag in our wake. The bridges will be dangerous until our return.’
 	‘I will, runefather.’
 	Homnir walked toward the edge of the plateau, so he would not be in the way of the departing army. Dorvurn went forward to where Karmanax, his magmadroth, clawed at the ground, impatient to be away. Dorvurn climbed into the saddle and stood tall. 
 	‘Fyreslayers of the Krelstrag!’ His voice boomed over the eternal rumble and liquid roar of the Earthwound ocean. ‘To the Great Weld and beyond! On this day, we begin the fulfilment of an oath made an age ago. On this day, we march toward the manifestation of prophecy! For Grimnir!’
 	‘For Grimnir!’ the great host of the Krelstrag answered.
 	Dorvurn looked at Thrumnor and Rhulmok. ‘Runemaster,’ he said. ‘Runesmiter. Pave our way.’
 	Thrumnor made a fist and struck his left shoulder in salute. Rhulmok did the same, and mounted his own magmadroth, Grognax. Thrumnor moved to the magmadroth’s side. With the crunch of thousands of feet against stone, the march began.
 	The journey through the Earthwound archipelago was a long one. It took many days just to move beyond the Krelstrag domains. Thrumnor and Rhulmok worked in unison, creating bridge after bridge. There came a moment, seven days into the march, when the distance between the volcanic cone on which the army mustered and the next peak to rise above the ocean of lava was so great that Thrumnor wondered if he and the runesmiter could span it. Span it they did, though, and the bridge appeared as thin as spun gold as it stretched across the seething, restless inferno. The bridge was strong, and it carried the host. In the end it was the island they had left that sank first, taking the bridge down after they had already begun construction of the next one.
 	Days and days of crossings, a journey over the infinity of the ocean, and always the waves of molten rock heaved to the horizon. Slowly, very slowly, the Great Weld grew larger, and Thrumnor began to believe they were making progress. The unnatural lightning storm had ended, though at different points in the sky it would return for a time, like the flaring of a new war. The green bursts on the top of the Weld continued, the rhythm unending, the hammer striking the anvil ceaselessly. It was a summoning so insistent Thrumnor had to remind himself that the ascent of the Weld was but the first stage of the journey, and not the destination itself.
 	Finally, after many, many more days, a dark line appeared on the horizon. It was the mainland.
 	The Earthwound ocean had a shore.
 	The shore was blighted.
 	A forest spread over the leagues of jagged foothills and deep, narrow canyons that led towards the base of the Great Weld. It was a forest that had been buried aeons ago, but that now had been resurrected into a monstrous new life.
 	The forest was petrified. The trees in their millions had been killed by the violence of the land, and then turned to stone. They still stood, skeletons of rock reaching up to the cruel sky. Something new had come among them; a terrible foliage hung from their limbs, a thick, black, glistening fungus. It dripped ichor down their trunks. Where the fluid ran, it ate into the rock, dissolving and devouring. Thrumnor examined the fungus more closely as the Fyreslayers moved through the dead-yet-diseased forest. The growths resembled giant slugs. They clung to the trunks and branches as if trying to suffocate them. The surface rippled like muscles. 
 	‘A plague to eat stone,’ Rhulmok muttered. Thrumnor nodded. He tightened his grip on his runic iron. Rhulmok sounded at least as curious as he was horrified. Thrumnor felt only holy outrage.
 	‘We will find our way below the surface,’ Dorvurn announced. ‘We will take the ancient ways, and if an enemy awaits, we will meet him on our terms.’
 	The forest writhed. Stone rotted. Insects with clattering wings swarmed from burst fungus pods. Thrumnor learned that stone could have a stench. But there was no attack, and at the end of the first day on the mainland, a scouting party of vulkite karls found a gateway underground. It was a ruin, its doors long rusted to nothing, the pillars of the entrance leaning against each other and blocked by a heap of fungus twenty feet high. The Krelstrag scoured the parasite away with fire, and then descended.
 	The world they found filled Thrumnor’s soul with melancholy. There was much that was familiar, which made its dereliction all the worse. The tunnels had once seen much work. There were traces of engravings on the walls. Caves were recognisable as dining halls and smithies, and more than once, as the days passed, Thrumnor’s breath caught when a vast, empty tomb of a chamber revealed itself to have been a forge-temple.
 	‘What lodge was this?’ Forvuld wondered.
 	‘I have seen signs of several,’ said Dorvurn. ‘But I do not know their names.’
 	‘Then this was once an empire,’ Forvuld said with bitter awe.
 	‘Yes.’ Dorvurn was equally solemn.
 	Forvuld insisted, ‘It is wrong that we have forgotten who was here.’
 	‘Yes,’ said Thrumnor. ‘It is wrong. But we can do nothing about what has been lost. What we are doing now preserves at least one strand of the long past. We will honour it, and in so doing, safeguard the future.’
 	The dereliction disturbed him, though. These ruins were not an insurmountable journey away from the Forgecrag. That the Krelstrag had no memory of who had been here was a sign of how much had been taken by Chaos, even if the Krelstrag held fast in the Earthwound archipelago.
 	They passed under a colossal archway whose runes could still be read. It announced itself as the gateway to the Great Road of the Wyrm. The tunnel was enormous, travelling in a straight line over a long distance, as if it truly had been bored through the stone by a leviathan of myth. It had once been the lodge’s trade route. For three days, the Krelstrag grand fyrd moved long it. Thrumnor’s melancholy turned to anger as he gazed upon its forgotten majesty. So much had been taken from the Fyreslayers. The roof of the tunnel was vaulted, so high that it was a distant shadow in the torchlight. The pillars supporting it were carved in the form of titanic limbs. Their orientation alternated. First was an arm thrusting up from the floor to splay its hand against the ceiling, then another reaching down as if to pull the ore from the earth. Every few leagues, chambers opened up on one side or the other. In them stood towering statues that had been defaced. Many were missing heads, but the heroism of their stances was still apparent. They straddled crevasses so deep that they reached down to the molten depths of the mountain, and an orange light bathed their corroded features.
 	Glory and loss, everywhere Thrumnor looked. Glory and loss.
 	Towards the end of the third day, the route sloped upward, rising in increments toward the surface. As it did so, it became more and more unclean. The roots of the petrified forest reached down through the tunnel roof. They too were stone, and they too were diseased, covered in a grey, flaking mould. And they moved. Rock twisted in pain. The roots scraped at the walls. They tortured the ceiling, dropping jagged blocks to the floor of the tunnel. The more the path went upwards, the more the roots clustered and the more they tangled the space. Stone creaked in rotten agony. Leading from the front, Dorvurn smashed at the roots with his grandaxe, while the magmadroths battered them to fragments with their claws. At one juncture where the tunnel narrowed, Karmanax reared and unleashed a torrent of flaming bile into the knot of twisting corruption ahead. The stream melted the roots to nothing, clearing the way. The magmadroth snorted in unhappy contempt at the remains as he passed through.
 	Ahead, the tunnel widened. The roof was higher. Twisting, grinding roots draped the walls on all sides. Thrumnor watched the shadowy movement of the roots carefully. Rhulmok’s Grognax, just as suspicious, issued a low growl with every breath. 
 	‘The shadows are a thicket,’ Rhulmok commented.
 	Thrumnor grunted his agreement. Much could hide in the dense tangle. 
 	‘There might be more than plague-ridden stone within,’ he said. The convulsion of a blighted land concealed the artistry of the Great Road of the Wyrm.
 	There was so much movement. All around them, the shadows bulged and turned and rustled. An attack could come from anywhere.
 	The attack, when it came, was from everywhere. There was a sudden increase in the volume of the rustling. Things giggled in the dark. The shadows boiled. Down the walls and dropping from the ceiling came a swarm of distended, mewling, chattering, laughing daemons. They were squat, bulbous things, thick with tumours. Their needle-toothed jaws were parted in leering smiles. Horns in ones and twos and threes sprouted from their foreheads.
 	They were nurglings, and Thrumnor had fought their kind before during some of the many failed sieges of the Krelstrag lodge. Now the daemons attacked as if the Great Road was their land, and the Fyreslayers were the invaders. They came in a tide of uncounted thousands. In moments, the floor of the tunnel was hip-deep in the mire of the beasts. With tooth and claw and crude, rusted blade, the daemons swept against the Krelstrag duardin, seeking to overwhelm them with the sheer weight of their numbers. 
 	The Fyreslayers responded to the attack with fury. These things had made the very veins of the earth unclean, and extermination was almost too good for them. Atop Grognax, Rhulmok let loose a roar of outrage. The magmadroth echoed him. Rhulmok began to hammer a rhythm. He chanted the Krelstrag war song. The ur-gold in Thrumnor’s flesh responded, filling him with the heat of rage and strength to shatter mountains. Down the ranks of the Fyreslayers, the essence of Grimnir came to wrathful life. The sigils and runes beaten into hardy duardin flesh glowed with fury. The uncountable nurglings were the plague-tide, rising up to drown its victims. The Fyreslayers were lava, scouring all before them.
 	Thrumnor swept his runic iron in wide blows. He smashed swaths of nurglings with every strike. They burst apart with wet cries of distress. 
 	The magmadroths lashed out with tails and claws, destroying scores of the abominations. They crushed the daemons beneath their paws, smearing green bodies to bubbling liquid. They spewed their bile, burning the nurglings to ash.
 	The warriors of the Krelstrag fyrds hurled themselves into the destruction of the unclean enemy. With axes, they cut the grey tide down. Their voices joined Rhulmok’s, and they sang their fierce joy of battle – a pure, honourable joy that drowned out the burbling, gurgling, nonsensical clamouring of the daemons.
 	The nurglings rushed forward again with greater force. From behind their first ranks came their leaders. Blightkings waded into the battle, each one commanding hundreds of nurglings. They were bloated, deformed. Suppurating tentacles reached out from gaping maws where stomachs should have been. Some had one eye, others three. Arms were transformed into huge pincers. As they attacked, tocsins rang. The solemn tolling reverberated against the walls of the Great Road, claiming the tunnels in the name of the Plaguefather.
 	‘Unholy trespassers!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘This is Fyreslayer land. You come here only to perish!’ He ran forward at the nearest blightking. He struck with his runic iron, plunging it into a torso maw. The jaws bit down, seizing the rod, and the blightking swung a pitted axe at Thrumnor’s head. The runemaster ducked and pressed harder. The sacred metal of the iron burned through the pestilential flesh. It shattered its spine and burst through its back. Thrumnor pulled it free as the heavy corpse fell.
 	A double-flail struck him from the side, and he staggered. Nurglings swarmed against him, trying to smother him with their biting mass. The blightking who had hit him, a corpulent, one-eyed giant, raised its flails again. Nurglings clamped their jaws onto Thrumnor’s arms to hold them back. He was slow to raise his staff to block the coming blow.
 	A stream of bile fell on the blightking. Its flesh melted and the flail dropped without striking. Grognax’s huge jaws snapped the plague warrior in half. Rhulmok had led the magmadroth away from the main formation of the Fyreslayers, cutting through the nurglings to ease the pressure on Thrumnor. The runemaster smashed the daemons from his person and took his stance at Grognax’s flank.
 	‘That was foolish,’ Rhulmok shouted in between his drum beats.
 	‘You cannot accept this sacrilege!’
 	‘I do not accept useless rage,’ the runesmiter said. ‘This ground is lost, corrupted beyond hope. We must pass through it, not sacrifice ourselves pointlessly. Is this battle the one of your vision?’
 	It was not. Thrumnor wished he could refute Rhulmok’s logic.
 	Still the nurglings and blightkings charged. Still they were thrown back. But their numbers told. Thrumnor saw the karl Gabir, one of the elite of the vulkite berzerkers, swarmed by the creatures. He fought them hard and well, killing many, but they clambered over him and bore him down before any of his brothers could reach him. When the other Fyreslayers cleared the mound of nurglings away, Gabir was a half-eaten carcass swelling with boils. 
 	The stench of the daemons was foul. Gaseous, thick, suffocating, it conjured images in Thrumnor’s mind of stone turned as soft as flesh, falling apart like stringy, fly-blown meat.
 	The nurglings ate into the Krelstrag lines, but they could not stop the march. They brought down individual Fyreslayers, but the fallen warriors’ brothers responded with renewed fury, destroying the daemons in ever greater numbers. Step by step, the Fyreslayers burned and smashed their way forward, grinding the enemy down. This much was true to Thrumnor’s vision. The Krelstrag were the lava flood, and would not be stopped. Certainly not by this enemy.
 	 I saw what must happen, Thrumnor thought, grasping that triumph. We are on our destined path. The sweep of his staff destroyed another cluster of nurglings. 
 	At last, the flood of foes ended. Their numbers were not infinite. The Fyreslayers trampled the last underfoot and watched as the bodies burst into clouds of dusty spores. The air was filled with disease, but the fire of Grimnir burned brightly in the ur-gold of the Fyreslayers, and they would not be brought down by so lowly a foe.
 	Less than an hour later, the tunnel split. The left-hand branch continued to climb toward the surface. On the right, it plunged deeper into the earth. Dorvurn raised an arm to call a halt. Thrumnor and Rhulmok rode up beside him. They were joined by the runesons. Together, they stared in horror at the full extent of the blighted underworld.
 	The route up was relatively clear, but the roots of the petrified forest created a thick, malodorous tangle on the path that descended into the lodge. The mould there had reached a critical stage, achieving an unholy union, and the roots now spread the pestilence to the rock around them. What Thrumnor had only imagined earlier was a reality here. The tunnel walls and ceiling pressed in on each other, as soft as a sponge, a fleshy collapse. There was no passage to be had here. There was barely room for a single Fyreslayer at a time to try the tunnel, and it narrowed further at the edge of torchlight.
 	‘How can such rot be?’ Forvuld asked.
 	‘It has had all the time it needs to settle deep into the marrow of the earth,’ said Dorvurn. He turned to the left-hand path. ‘We will travel overland.’
 	It took another day’s journey, beset by smaller nurgling assaults, before the Krelstrag reached the outer gates. They emerged on a steep slope, less than a league from the base of the Great Weld. The petrified forest with its agonised forms was now at their back, but the route to the Weld was strewn with boulders, fuzzy with mould, and the ground was a carpet of rock-devouring lichen. If there were daemons nearby, they did not attack. The Fyreslayers moved on.
 	As dusk fell, the army reached its destination.
 	Thrumnor gazed up its height. The size of the Weld was overwhelming. A force beyond reckoning had brought multiple volcanoes together, fusing them into a single giant, standing alone. 
 	‘And Grimnir desired an anvil for his work,’ Thrumnor intoned. ‘And he essayed first one mountain, and then another, and they were all too weak, shattering to dust at the first blow of his hammer.’ His voice echoed against the cliff face. He faced the Krelstrag, his back to the Weld, and recited the tale they all knew, but had never felt so visceral until this moment. ‘And because the mountains on their own were too weak, Grimnir gathered a great number together, and he welded them into one with the fury of his making. From that great forging, he had his anvil.’
 	Thrumnor stopped. He turned around again to regard Grimnir’s anvil with a mingling of awe and horror. Seen from the Forgecrag, the Great Weld was a distant silhouette, and its proportions did indeed resemble an anvil. Now he could see the evidence of Grimnir’s work. The outlines of the individual volcanoes were still visible. Clefts running from peak to base, their gaps filled with basalt, marked the shapes of the mountains that had been. 
 	There was something else, though, about the configuration of the lines. Their slopes, their angles and their parallels were suggestive of something else. But the pattern extended beyond Thrumnor’s sight, and he dismissed it.
 	What he saw was a wonder, and Thrumnor gloried at the power of Grimnir.
 	But there was horror too. Even in the dim light, he could clearly see the extent of the blight on the towering walls of the Great Weld. It was a stain, one that appeared to move and spread if Thrumnor stared at it long enough. The shape of the stain was even worse.
 	‘No,’ he said. ‘This cannot be.’
 	‘You see it too,’ said Rhulmok.
 	The form of the stain was a flow, as if it were lava pouring from the peak of the Great Weld. It widened as it approached the base. Thrumnor traced the descent with his eyes, and saw new meaning in the plague on the land. 
 	Rhulmok spoke the words Thrumnor could not bring himself to articulate. ‘The Weld is the core of the blight,’ he said. 
 	‘No,’ Thrumnor said, as if denial could banish the obscenity. Ground so sacred could not truly be the origin of the corruption. The Great Weld had been attacked. It too was a victim of the Chaos Gods.
 	Dorvurn said, ‘We must pass beyond the Weld.’
 	‘No!’ Thrumnor cried. ‘Grimnir’s hammer awaits us on the peak. A great forging is to be ours.’
 	The doubt in Rhulmok’s face was now present in Dorvurn’s. The distance Thrumnor had felt growing between himself and the runesmiter now became a schism. He would not permit Rhulmok’s lack of belief in his vision to divert the Krelstrag from their destined path.
 	‘The Weld is under attack,’ Thrumnor said. ‘But its heart is still pure.’ He spoke from faith rather than knowledge. He approached the wall now. ‘Bear witness with me,’ he commanded Rhulmok. 
 	The runesmiter hesitated. The concern Thrumnor saw in his eyes was beyond bearing. With a great effort, Thrumnor prevented himself from laying his hands on Rhulmok and dragging him to the wall. After a moment, Rhulmok joined him. 
 	‘And if you are wrong, what then?’ he asked.
 	‘I am not wrong,’ Thrumnor growled.
 	Rhulmok used his latch-axe to scrape away the devouring mould, exposing the rock of the Weld. He and Thrumnor placed their hands and foreheads against the stone. Rhulmok, Thrumnor knew, would be reaching out to the tunnels in the Weld, reading the veins and passages, seeking to know whether the stone would consent to part before his will. Thrumnor listened for the beat and rush of the magma. He needed to gauge the extent of its rage.
 	Thrumnor had barely begun to chant a prayer of kinship to the Weld when he recoiled. So did Rhulmok, and at the same instant. 
 	Thrumnor’s head and palms burned as if the rock face had turned molten. ‘The Great Weld rages,’ he said to Dorvurn. ‘It feels the plague attacking it, and all inside is wrath. Holy wrath.’
 	Rhulmok nodded, gazing at his own hands in alarm. ‘There is so much pain,’ he added. 
 	‘But the heart of the Great Weld is not corrupt,’ Thrumnor insisted.
 	Rhulmok hesitated, then nodded.
 	‘Then we climb,’ Dorvurn declared. He looked up.
 	The clouds flashed green, reflected from what thundered on the peak of the Weld. 
 
 
 	IV

 	At first glance, the walls of the Great Weld appeared vertical. Though they were very steep, a path could be made out. The Fyreslayers marched up a long, inclining ledge that had once been a mountain’s slope. Sometimes it was wide enough for the duardin to march three abreast. Elsewhere, it narrowed to the point that the magmadroths were barely able to navigate it, even with their claws digging deep through the tainting mould and into the stone. 
 	The rock blight became thicker as they climbed, and more active. It pulsed and scraped. The endless whispering of dissolving stone sounded in Thrumnor’s ears like a daemon’s mockery. That this great wonder, this holy monument, should be so desecrated made his fists tighten in fury. He longed to strike out at the bearers of this plague. 
 	Nurglings cavorted along the cliffs, scrabbling over each other, sometimes falling like overfed ticks to burst on the ground below. In small groups they attempted to harry the Krelstrag, and they were dealt with savagely. They could not summon the numbers to attack in the concentrated manner they had in the tunnels, so they taunted and laughed. 
 	Thrumnor vented his rage on those who dared come within reach of his staff, but it brought no satisfaction to smash the lowliest of daemonkind. They were not the ones who had created the blight. He might as well be striking at the mould. 
 	He did once, snarling, then caught himself, even more angry that he had succumbed to his frustration. As he turned back to the path, he heard a low, deep buzzing. He looked up to see a swarm of huge insects descend from the heights of the Weld. Ragged wings supported drooping sacks of bodies. Serpentine trunks hung from their heads. The sound of the rotflies’ wings crawled into Thrumnor’s ears and into his mind. His spine ached. The swarm flew down the path as if to knock the Fyreslayers off the side of the slope. The host of the Krelstrag responded before the first rotfly struck. Vulkite berzerkers hurled throwing axes at the daemon insects. A single blow from a fyresteel blade would have done little against the flies, but the axes arced upwards in the hundreds. 
 	The daemons flew into a scything wall. Axes cut wings to shreds and burst swollen bodies. A score of the creatures tumbled into the dark below. Screeching hatred, the rest of the swarm spread over the Krelstrag line. The abominations fell on the duardin warriors, tearing their bodies apart with the jagged points of their chitinous limbs. Fyreslayers avenged their kin before the insects could fly away with their victims, attacking each monster with wrath and steel. The magmadroths smashed them from the air.
 	Thrumnor struck at the daemons that flew near him, but his blows with the runic iron were not enough. He longed to punish the rotflies with a burst of lava from within the Weld. Their presence was still another grievous insult to the sacred anvil. His anger grew, but before he lost himself, Rhulmok called his name and drew him back.
 	He raged, swinging his staff with all the more force because Rhulmok was right. The rage in the Weld was far beyond his own, far beyond his control. He would unleash disaster if he called it to the surface.
 	Four score of the Krelstrag lay dead before the last of the rotflies was exterminated. 
 	‘Mourn our brothers,’ said Dorvurn, ‘and celebrate their victory. The foe has not stopped our advance.’
 	‘But they could not have,’ Rhulmok said, thoughtful.
 	‘What do you mean?’ Thrumnor asked.
 	‘How could they have hoped to, with those numbers?’
 	True. The swarm had been no more than another harrying raid.
 	‘What does it mean?’ Rhulmok asked. The question felt like a challenge.
 	‘It changes nothing,’ Thrumnor said. He knew he wasn’t answering, but whatever the attacks meant, his faith in the truth of his vision held. He could imagine no other interpretation. He swallowed his anger at Rhulmok and said, ‘We are being tested. We will be tested again at the peak. And from these tests we will emerge stronger yet.’
 	‘What test?’ said Rhulmok. ‘What waits above? Nothing but foulness has come down to us.’
 	‘We will cleanse it.’ Thrumnor thought again of his vision, of the great hammer and its transformative blow. Such light, such fire. The memory renewed his faith. They would cleanse the Great Weld of its plague.
 	On they climbed. The Great Weld shook and rumbled. Its convulsions were not those of an anvil resonating from hammer blows, but agonised wrath struggling to find expression. The heat of the Weld’s interior pushed outward. Cracks webbed along the ledge and stone fragments fell from the cliff face. The walls of the mountains were solid, and they contained their anger, trembling with the effort while their flesh was gnawed by the blight.
 	The Krelstrag marched day and night without rest. The nurglings gave them no respite. Further swarms of rotflies eroded their ranks. But the summit called to them with its thunder and its beating glow. They would answer. At the end of the fourth day, with the fall of night, they arrived at the peak. What Thrumnor saw there almost paralysed him with rage and horror.
 	The summits of the many volcanoes had been fused into a giant plateau. There was no sign of the calderas that had once been. Instead, the surface of the plateau was slightly rounded, as if bulging upward. At the centre, half a league away, was the origin of the green light. 
 	It was a celebration.
 	Daemons of Nurgle in the thousands cavorted and sang. Drums, bells and horns sounded, creating music as dissonant as it was joyful. The noise was enough to make Thrumnor’s chest contract as if he were breathing foul air. The daemons danced. The lumbering, uneven movement of so many abominations was that of maggots heaving under flesh. 
 	At the heart of the ritual stood a titan of plague.
 	What waits above? Rhulmok had asked.
 	Here was the answer.
 	And Thrumnor felt the first true wounds of doubt.
 	During the most terrible of the sieges that the lodge had withstood, when it had been necessary to withdraw all the Krelstrag to within the redoubt of the Forgecrag, they had fought a Great Unclean One, one of the most powerful daemons of Nurgle. The story of that battle was one that the lodge never tired of hearing Battlesmith Yuhvir recite. It was one Thrumnor recalled in perfect, vivid detail. He recognised the daemon here as kin to the other. It too was a Great Unclean One, though many times larger. It was a mountain in its own right. It was over a hundred feet high. Its mass was swollen, the diseased skin taut and shining with the weight of tumours and the pressure of gas. Its head was sunken in its shoulders, if it could be said to have a head. But there was a maw, a huge one, gaping between the shoulder blades, where a tongue longer than a magmadroth hung pendulously past the fangs, dripping ichor and slime. There were other mouths too. They were on its arms, and on its knees, and they jabbered and slobbered and sang and laughed. It laughed most delightedly when the multitudes of lesser daemons at its feet raised their arms in praise and shouted a word.
 	‘Distensiath!’
 	They were calling its name.
 	The foul colossus led the dance. It created the beat of the song with the ground-shaking impact of its trunk-like legs. It could barely shift its great bulk, and its gut dragged against the surface of the plateau as it lifted and stamped its feet. It waved its arms, conducting the celebrants, and brandished a pitted, twisted sword twenty feet long. The voices of its mouths formed a choir, which summoned a rain of phlegm from the air that hissed when it fell on stone. 
 	The panorama of corruption was intolerable. But the worst of it for Thrumnor was that the beats of the song were the blows of the hammer. Every time Distensiath stamped, the repellent green light flashed, smearing the falling night with its disease. This was what he had seen from the Forgecrag. He had said that Grimnir’s hammer was again striking the anvil. Instead, the truth was the unspeakable amusement of a daemon. It was from this dance that the rockblight flowed. Thrumnor could see it now, see the mould spring into existence around Distensiath’s feet. It piled up, then spread outwards in ripples. It covered the plateau. It poured itself down all sides of the Weld, and from there it reached out to blight all the land. 
 	‘Runemaster,’ said Dorvurn, ‘is this what your vision foretold?’
 	Thrumnor fought past the horror at what had become of the sacred ground. 
 	‘It must be. Our cleansing fire begins here, runefather.’ The terrible explosion he had seen – that was the coming clash. Fiery glory would follow.
 	This is the truth, he thought. There is no other possibility.
 	He kept his doubts secret. He stamped them down.
 	‘This is our path,’ he said. 
 	Dorvurn turned to address the Krelstrag host. 
 	‘Fyreslayers,’ he said, ‘you see Grimnir’s great work desecrated by daemonkind. I will not stand for it! Will you?’
 	A collective roar of denial. Hammers slammed against shields. Every warrior present burned with the need to punish the daemons and cleanse the sacred ground. 
 	‘Our oath calls us beyond the Great Weld,’ Dorvurn continued. ‘It calls us through that unclean horde. To fulfil our duty, we must pass through the daemons.’ He grinned. ‘We must destroy the daemons!’
 	Another roar, louder still, and the greater thunder of clashing weapons. 
 	‘Krelstrag lodge!’ Dorvurn shouted, his voice filling the night with righteous anger and eager fury. ‘March with me to war!’
 	Dorvurn, Thrumnor and Rhulmok led the advance. Behind them came the runesons, and with them Komgan, the grimwrath berzerker. Then came the fyrds of vulkite berzerkers, Battlesmith Yuhvir striding at their centre. He held high the standard of the Krelstrag, and he began to recite the battles of the lodge, the centuries of sieges withstood and broken, the glories accrued to the warriors of Grimnir. His huge voice reached the ears of every Fyreslayer present. They grinned to think of honours past, and of the saga that would be told of the battle now upon them.
 	Rhulmok was hard at work, igniting the fire of the ur-gold. The sound of his labours punctuated the chanting of Yuhvir and the berzerkers’ shouts of praise to Grimnir, and so the Fyreslayers countered the foul music of the daemons with a song of their own. Pure and hard and unforgiving, it rumbled over the plateau. It was a challenge, and it was a reclamation. The sons of Grimnir had come to his holy place, and they would take it back, beginning by returning the true sounds of the anvil.
 	As the Fyreslayers advanced, they built up speed. The magmadroths began to lope. The berzerkers broke into a run. Every second they were not lopping off the heads of daemons was a second wasted. The ground shook beneath the pounding of their feet. 
 	When the Fyreslayers were halfway to the enemy, the sound and the vibrations of their challenge broke through the daemons’ celebration. The daemons hesitated in their dance. They stopped. They turned to see who had interrupted them, and who it was who did not fear them.
 	Distensiath’s grotesque smiles grew even wider.
 	Hills of struggling nurglings giggled in delight.
 	The more solemn plaguebearers clustered together and took up their weapons. 
 	Distensiath spoke. The words came first from one mouth, then another. They overlapped in their speech, so that some words were spoken by two maws at once. The voice of the Great Unclean One was the sound of a mountain coughing up its lungs. The syllables were moist. The mockery was acid. 
 	‘You are welcome, children of Grimnir. We have been waiting for you to join us. What has taken you so long? We have been calling you and calling you and calling you. Were you deaf and blind to our invitation?’
 	Do not answer, Thrumnor thought. Do not exchange words with the abomination. There is nothing to be gained in doing so.
 	But he could not remain silent. 
 	‘Your taunts mean nothing!’ he shouted. ‘Your revels are over!’
 	‘Over?’ Distensiath repeated. All the mouths of the daemon laughed. Its corpulence trembled with mirth. ‘But they have only just begun! Your coming was foretold! Let the prophecy be fulfilled!’
 	Thrumnor felt the touch of an icy claw in his chest. Had he been wrong? He had seen the storm, and he had seen the light on the Great Weld, and he had believed a Fyreslayer prophecy was coming to pass. That had been the reason to urge action to keep the oath. But Grimnir’s hammer was not striking the anvil once more. 
 	Did the daemon speak the truth?
 	The possibility was ghastly. Worse than the Krelstrag prophecy not being fulfilled was a daemonic one reaching fruition instead.
 	Are we the tools of that realisation?
 	No. Thrumnor would not permit such a thing. No Krelstrag would. The daemons had infested ground sacred to Grimnir, and for this crime they would suffer.
 	The daemons waited until the Fyreslayers had almost reached their position before they moved. Then they advanced, howling joyfully. The nurglings spilled around the legs of the plaguebearers, rushing to be the first to greet the newcomers to the revel. Distensiath’s maws unleashed a cacophony of laughter, and the Great Unclean One began to walk. Each step was ponderous, dragging and thunderous, shaking the ground and spreading new webs of cracks over the surface. The daemon could barely move, yet as it rocked forwards it spread its arms as if to gather new worshippers to its flock.
 	Rhulmok pounded the war altar with mounting fury. Thrumnor’s ur-gold sigils blazed in response, and he was consumed with the ferocity of battle. No enemy could stand before the rage he embodied. He roared. The entire host of the Krelstrag lodge roared. The Fyreslayers fell upon the daemons.
 	A battering ram in red and gold slammed into the abominations. Nurglings burst apart upon impact. The Krelstrag wasted no blows on them. Their charge was enough to part the stream of lesser daemons and hurl them back the way they had come. The plaguebearers were the more worthy opponents. Things of swollen bellies and rotten limbs, they sprouted long horns on their heads and wielded foul blades. They waded into combat with the Fyreslayers with mutters and nods. They appeared to be counting, and they attacked with purpose. The purifying rage of the Krelstrag clashed with the essence of disease. 
 	Dorvurn and the runesons led from the front. They attacked in seven powerful kinbands. At their sides were the auric hearthguard and the berzerkers. Many of the hearthguard had been tasked to remain at the Forgecrag with Homnir, but even so, there were more than enough present to march with the lords of the lodge and burn the ranks of the daemons. The hearthguard’s magmapikes launched fiery death into the enemy, setting the plaguebearers ablaze. As the daemons’ chants turned to cries of pain and rage, they burned again as the berzerkers waded in with their flamestrike poleaxes. Braziers on the ends of chains crashed against the abominations. Into the spreading wall of burning daemonflesh, Dorvurn and his sons laid waste to the foe with sweeps of their axes and the monstrous predation of the magmadroths. Then came the vulkite berzerkers, a brutal wave of blades and anger. The Fyreslayers punched deep, breaking the coherence of the daemons’ advance, pushing the daemons back towards the centre of the plateau.
 	Thrumnor brought his staff down on the head of a plaguebearer, shattering it utterly. The daemon’s ichor spewed out, and the body sank to its knees. Thrumnor followed through with a sideways strike, crushing the bodies of the daemons who tried to close with him. There was rapid movement in the corner of his left eye. He turned, seizing a throwing axe from his belt and hurling it at another plaguebearer. The axe buried itself in the daemon’s face, splitting it in two.
 	The Fyreslayers drove deeper into the enemy, wedging the foul mass apart. The plaguebearers responded by closing around the Krelstrag army and trying to crush the lines. Axes smashed their bodies to festering slime. 
 	Dorvurn and the runesons ripped through the diseased ranks, tossing daemons left and right, burning their way toward Distensiath. Seven lines of destruction converged on the greater daemon. It was the defiler of the Weld, and it would feel the greatest wrath of the Fyreslayers. The magmadroths sprayed flaming bile, turning left and right to consume the ravening daemons. The abominations howled and melted, but more rushed forth as Distensiath advanced, footstep by slow footstep, crushing its own followers in its eagerness to meet the Krelstrag.
 	‘Worship with us!’ Distensiath bellowed. It swung its massive sword and cut deep into the Fyreslayer lines, killing five warriors at a stroke. It swung again, and Krelstrag blood rained from the blade. The duardin roared their defiance. They charged forward to avenge the deaths of their brothers, and surrounded the bulk of the huge daemon. It laughed, delighted, and struck again. The lords of the lodge attacked Distensiath’s flanks. The hearthguard held the plaguebearers and nurglings back while the berzerkers brought their weapons to bear against the rubbery flesh of the behemoth.
 	Thrumnor stopped before Distensiath. He raised his runic iron high. Here and now he would reclaim the Weld for Grimnir and deny the daemon whatever purpose it believed drove its presence. 
 	‘This is the anvil of Grimnir!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘This is the work of his hands, of his hammer, and of his forge. You have no place here! Burn in the fire of Grimnir’s anger!’
 	The rod glowed crimson. Thrumnor slammed its tip into the ground. Now let the wrath of the Great Weld be loosed, he thought. The force of the spell transmitted itself through the surface of the plateau to the molten rock below. The magma rose. The anger was so great it threatened to escape Thrumnor’s control. He managed to contain it, and to direct the burst of its release. Rock split where the staff had hit. The crack widened as it raced toward Distensiath. 
 	‘Grimnir’s fury!’ Thrumnor shouted, a warning to his brothers in the path of what was coming. They parted on either side of the widening gap. Then a geyser of lava shot from the ground before the Great Unclean One. It splashed against Distensiath’s belly and torso. In its first burst, it flew high enough to fall, burning, onto the daemon’s upper maw.
 	Distensiath screamed. The howl shook the entire Weld and knocked Thrumnor off his feet. A swarm of flies billowed out the daemon’s jaws and covered the sky. The great blade wavered, its blow arrested.
 	‘For Grimnir!’ Dorvurn shouted, and the latchkey grandaxe buried itself deep into Distensiaths’ bulging flesh. A hundred other weapons struck the raging daemon at the same moment. 
 	The howl climbed higher, becoming a gurgling screech so intense, blood filled Thrumnor’s ears. Distensiath’s body began to swell. It became even more immense. The flesh of its belly bulged like a frog’s throat. The sickly green became the pallid white of tension. The scream rose higher yet.
 	Thrumnor saw what was coming. There would be no shelter. Nor did he wish it. He pulled himself up into a crouch and held fast to the staff. At the last moment, at the height of the scream, he saw that the mouth on Distensiath’s knee was laughing.
 	Then came the searing light from Thrumnor’s vision.
 	The daemon exploded.
 	The gasses in its body ignited. The blast hurled Fyreslayers and daemons back across the Great Weld like leaves in a gale. Distensiath vanished, transformed into a rain of bile-green ichor that covered the entire plateau. Stone hissed and dissolved at its touch. Flesh erupted in boils. Thrown a hundred yards by the explosion, Thrumnor staggered to his feet. He was coated with the daemonic essence, and he felt it eat into his being. His skin wept pus. Something foul sought to take him apart. 
 	He spat in contempt. He shook his head, ridding his beard of the ichor. There were cries of agonised rage on all sides as the devouring plague gnawed the flesh of the Fyreslayers. 
 	‘Karls of the Krelstrag!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘The fire of Grimnir runs in your veins! Deny the pestilence. Cast its weakness down and trample it underfoot!’
 	Rhulmok had climbed back onto the throne atop Grognax, and had resumed the beat on the war altar with a vengeance. Ur-gold flared, and it burned the corruption of the flesh. The purging was torture, but it was a needful pain, true and clean, and Thrumnor exulted in it. 
 	Not all the berzerkers found salvation. The surface of the plateau was littered with bubbling, dissolving bodies. But the Krelstrag were still strong, and they rallied round Yuhvir’s standard and the runefather’s raised grandaxe. They formed a circle of iron at the centre of the plateau.
 	As Thrumnor ran forward to join the fyrds, he heard something that chilled his blood. It came as the last of the ichor fell from the sky and settled into the Great Weld. He heard a sigh, and he heard a whisper. The voice was Distensiath’s voice, a phantom echo, a single word.
 	‘Fulfilled.’
 	In the vision, the anvil had shattered. Now the Great Weld heaved. It rocked to and fro, but the movement was wrong. This was no earthquake. This was no eruption. This was transformation. Standing beside Grognax, Thrumnor looked toward the distant edges of the plateau, and saw them rise up and down. Like flesh. Like muscle.
 	And now Thrumnor understood the pattern he had partly seen at the base of the Great Weld. The shapes embedded in the rock were not just those of fused volcanoes. They were also limbs. Revelation flooded in. Thrumnor gasped.
 	‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn shouted. ‘What is happening?’
 	‘Grimnir’s feat was greater than we imagined,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It was not volcanoes he fused together. He battered a great beast into submission. He turned his opponent into the anvil of stone. It became volcanoes.’ He paused. ‘And now that defeat is being undone. The beast is awakening.’ 
 	We have done this thing, he thought bitterly. 
 	The heaving became more pronounced. The cracks in the surface of the plateau began to assume a different cast. They were the outline of scales.
 	The beast came closer and closer to waking. Then it would walk. A monster of plague the size of a mountain chain would be loose upon the realm.
 	The plaguebearers and the nurglings closed in once more, but gradually, as if waiting for a signal. It came now. Across the entire plateau, the scales of the beast rose, and from beneath each one came another plaguebearer. Thousands upon thousands of them dragged themselves up from the beneath the skin of the Great Weld.
 	Tens of thousands.
 	Hundreds of thousands, covering all the leagues of the Great Weld.
 	There was a sudden, terrible, immense lurch, as of a single step.
 	The daemons in their uncountable legions raised their voices in solemn praise to the Plaguefather, and they advanced.
 	The Fyreslayers were surrounded.
 	‘The defilers of the Great Weld come to meet their doom!’ Dorvurn thundered. ‘Be the fire of Grimnir, and burn them from the realm!’
 	The air shook with the defiant clash of blade on shield, but there was a different quality to the sound this time. Thrumnor knew it. This was the last stand of the Krelstrag. 
 	From atop Grognax, Rhulmok called to Thrumnor, making peace. ‘At least it will be a fight worthy of song.’
 	Thrumnor shook his head. ‘This is wrong,’ he said. ‘This is not my vision.’ He could not have been so tragically mistaken. He filled his lungs and howled his wrath at the fates. ‘This was not foretold!’
 	The Krelstrag lodge decimated. The Great Weld transformed into a leviathan of plague. This was not what he had seen. This was not what the great light in his vision had produced.
 	Ahead, the front lines of the Fyreslayers hurled themselves against the ocean of daemons. The sound of the battle was immense, as of a great hammer coming down on iron. At that sound, Thrumnor thought of his vision, and of the forging. Of the shattered anvil, and of the lava that came after.
 	And he felt a surge of hope. 
 	The transformation was not yet complete. Thrumnor called to the wrath inside the Weld, and found it was still there. Grimnir’s work was not undone. The fury of volcanoes had not turned into corrupted blood.
 	‘Rhulmok!’ Thrumnor cried. ‘We may yet honour Grimnir! With me, brother! Let this be not an anvil, but a crucible. Let us unleash its full wrath!’
 	Dorvurn looked down at him from Karmanax. ‘Can you do this?’
 	The image before Thrumnor’s mind’s eye was one of shattering and lava. ‘It is foretold that we will,’ he said.
 	Rhulmok laughed, and drummed the anvil of war with renewed energy. 
 	‘I see it now!’ he said to Thrumnor. ‘I see it at last! What a grand transformation we shall forge!’
 	‘We will be the prophesied fire,’ said Thrumnor.
 	The runefather nodded, and then he spoke to the entire lodge, his voice strong with pride and drowning out the chanting of the daemons and the rumble of war. ‘Fyrds of the Krelstrag, what comes is no sacrifice! This shall be the greatest victory, and the greatest tale, of our lodge!’ 
 	The Fyreslayers roared their approval, and with joyous fury they threw themselves at the sea of daemons, holding them back as Thrumnor and Rhulmok did what they must.
 	Rhulmok increased the beat on the altar. Thrumnor felt his ur-gold sigils ignite with a fire greater than ever before. 
 	‘One more Binding, then,’ Rhulmok said. 
 	‘One more,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It will be our greatest work, youngflame.’
 	‘A fine song it will make.’
 	‘So it will.’ For a few moments more, Thrumnor watched the fyrds fight a war they could not win, and there too was the making of a fine song. The Krelstrag cut the daemons down by the score, by the hundreds. The hundreds of thousands pressed closer, but now, right now, the fury of the Fyreslayers was unstoppable, as the voice of Yuhvir shouted the litany of victories.
 	Let this be how I last see my brothers, Thrumnor thought.
 	Then, with both hands wrapped around the staff, its power crackling a deep violet and plunging deep into the transforming ground, he reached for the magma.
 	The strain threatened to tear him apart. The rage of the Great Weld was enormous, but the change was coming to it too, and molten rock would soon become diseased blood.
 	But not yet. 
 	Thrumnor called to the magma. He called to the fury of the Weld. Eager, it rose towards him. He felt the deep vibrations as Rhulmok spoke to stone that had not yet become flesh. It raged against the transformation of the Great Weld. At the runesmiter’s command, it parted before the rising magma. 
 	One last Binding, Rhulmok had said. It was true. This was their grandest enactment of the ritual. Though they sought a perfect destruction, in the coming annihilation they would return the Great Weld to its volcanic being. All the bridges linking the islands of the Earthwound archipelago found their culmination here, as they fused wrath with its fullest, most holy expression.
 	The magma rose. The full strength of the Weld, all of its contained rage, rushed upward to the peak. The surface of the plateau had become flesh, but the interior of the Great Weld was still stone. Walls parted. Tunnels opened up. Molten magma climbed. Thrumnor’s temper joined with Rhulmok’s shaping. 
 	The wrath came. The entire plateau bulged upward, swelling as Distensiath’s bulk had, only this time with the fires of purification.
 	Thrumnor smiled as the ground rose, and he felt the heat through his feet. 
 	‘For Grimnir,’ he said.
 	And the world erupted in a terrible blaze.
 
 
 	V

 	Dorvurn strode down the far side of the Great Weld. 
 	His body shielded from the blast and fire by Karmanax and the will of Grimnir, he had lived through the initial moments of the destruction. He had flown through fire and smoke and incandescent gas, through lightning and ash and still more fire. Burned, his weapons gone, he had landed beyond the new, immense caldera, on a ledge partway down the mountainside. 
 	There was purpose in his survival. Chance had no part in it.
 	He descended the sloping ledge, so much like the one the Krelstrag had climbed on the other side. It was stone again, not a beast. The ground was still a long way off, and Dorvurn knew he would never reach it. His moments were numbered. Lava was everywhere, flowing down the Great Weld and spreading over the land. Dorvurn was walking between streams, and soon enough another would come to swallow him.
 	But he was content. 
 	Below, the blighted land was purged by the ocean of lava. 
 	‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn said, ‘I have lived to see the truth of your vision.’ The Krelstrag had truly become what Thrumnor had foreseen. The Fyreslayers had brought the purifying fire. Dorvurn’s lodge had, in every sense that mattered, become the lava flood. And the Krelstrag would be strong yet. Homnir would see to that.
 	Dorvurn looked off into the distance, toward the other lodge, its name still forgotten, its location unknown. It was unreachable. But perhaps their actions here today would aid those Fyreslayers. Perhaps the vast scouring of the land would be enough to weaken the hold of Chaos on the entire region.
 	Dorvurn was still marching in the direction of the lodge, still holding fast to the oath, and to the knowledge the Krelstrag had humbled a vast army of Chaos.
 	So as the heat came for the runefather, he did not mourn.