The march north was a march through the bones of the earth.
Vris and the Webmother led the vanguard, winding through tunnels older than memory. The walls glowed faintly with veins of molten rock, and the heat pressed heavy against the lungs. Behind them trailed Dunzok’s orcs, Maggra’s ghouls, and packs of goblins bearing spider-silk banners marked with the red fang.
They followed the scent of ash and the promise of blood.
The first sign of the Shardtooth clan came as glitter in the stone: flakes of obsidian wedged in the cavern floor, sharp enough to shear through boots. Then came the forges shallow pits ringed with crimson light, where red-skinned goblins hammered molten shards into jagged blades.
The air hissed with heat and song not the crude grunts of the Burrow tribes, but rhythmic chanting, a prayer pounded into steel.
“Red Mother… drink the heat, forge the flesh…”
Vris watched from the shadows, eyes narrowing. These goblins were different. Taller. Straighter. Skin the color of fresh blood. Their weapons gleamed black as midnight glass. They moved with purpose, with pride.
Even their females stood with the bearing of warriors.
At their center towered the mountain itself a smoking cone that breathed slow streams of fire from its crown. The Shardtooth called it The Heartforge. To them, it was not a volcano but a god’s wound, and they worshiped the one who had cut it open: The Red Goddess.
Maz the Lasher sat upon a throne of volcanic glass, bare arms glistening with heat-born sweat. Her skin was deep crimson, her hair black and wild, and a crown of cooling metal coiled around her brow. Vris had to be honest for a large goblin female she was pleasant on his eyes. A whip of woven obsidian scales hung at her side, its edges whispering as she moved.
Her voice, when she spoke, was the sound of crackling embers.
“Another warlord crawls from the dirt. Speak, little shadow, before the mountain drinks you.”
Vris met her gaze without flinching. “I am Vris. Fanglord of the South. And you sit upon my goddess’s bones.”
That made her laugh low, dangerous.
“Your goddess? Ours bleeds fire. Yours hides in holes.”
Maz rose, whip coiling through her fingers. “Then prove which god still breathes.”
She struck. The lash snapped through the air, slicing a line across his chest that smoked but didn’t bleed. Vris didn’t move. Didn’t even blink.
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She struck again, harder. The whip cracked stone this time.
Vris smiled. Slowly, deliberately, he reached up and dragged one claw across the wound she’d given him collecting the blood and smearing it into the obsidian floor.
The ground pulsed.
Fire rippled through the cracks like veins. The torches flared green for a heartbeat Maggra’s mark, reaching faintly even here through the bond of essence they shared. The Webmother’s threads twitched in the dark above.
Maz froze. Her warriors murmured.
Vris’s voice cut through the confusion.
“I will slay her if she hides,” he said softly. “If she still lives, then she knows this truth every flame burns brighter under my shadow.”
When the heat died down, the Shardtooth had seen enough.
Maz lowered her whip, the corner of her mouth curving in what might have been admiration or hunger. Perhaps a mixture of the two?
“Perhaps the Red Goddess sent you,” she murmured. “Perhaps she means for our forges to feed your war.”
She extended one clawed hand. “Then take my steel, Fanglord. But if you waste it… the mountain will take your flesh.”
Vris clasped her wrist, claws biting into hot skin. “Then let the mountain watch.”
The Shardtooth joined the Red Maw banner that night. Vris knew the truth Maz had been his toughest opponent yet he was hiding the extent of his wounds, and when he finally got free of her audience he collapsed thankfully with Skara and Maggra’s help his wounds were tended to.
Skara snarled at the Fanglord incredulous that he had risked so much. “You hang but by a thread Fang-cub..” Maggra’s witch light stitched flesh together, and cauterized wounds allowing the stench of burnt goblin flesh to assault all of their nostrils.
Vris looked at Skara perhaps pathetically as Maggra didn’t exactly have good bedside manner. “The irony isn’t lost on me..”
Skara snorted almost calmingly so, and she pressed her large nose and muzzle against Vris’s face a nudge of comfort was all he was going to get as she curled up protectively around him her heavy paw now crushing down on him daring him to move as she licked his ash grey skin and his hair as though cleaning him.
Maggra’s heads both had cruel twisted smiles on their faces watching Vris get put in his place by the Warg Matriarch. “Fanglord find mate now..” Maggra’s left head said snickering clearly meaning Maz, and the right just sneezed. “Too soon to tell.. Might not live through next encounter with Forgemistress.”
Vris didn’t argue with either Maggra, or Skara he was far too tired to debate either of them.
Shardtooth forges bled new weapons black glass swords, jagged shields rimmed with crimson ore, and spears tipped in obsidian so sharp they hissed through the air. Goblin artisans etched each weapon with glowing runes shaped like fangs, each piece a whisper of the Red Goddess’s favor.
When the Fanglord’s host returned south, the army had doubled.
Orcs and red goblins marched together, wargs prowled their flanks, and Maggra’s undead kept pace in silent ranks.
In the great cavern, new banners unfurled the red fang now edged with shards of black glass.
Vris stood before them all, cloak of spider-silk sweeping the stone.
“The humans think themselves safe behind their walls,” he said. “But walls break. Fire melts stone. And the mountain burns for us now.”
The chamber erupted in howls, screeches, and the thunder of drums.
The Red Maw had grown again, and for the first time, even the gods might have looked down and wondered what they had unleashed.