The dwarves of Harrowhall were waiting.
They met the horde in narrow tunnels, their armor gleaming like the walls themselves, their hammers blazing with radiant sigils. Every strike of steel against steel sent sparks flying, the tunnels alight with bursts of gold and red.
Dunzok roared, shoving through the front ranks, cleaving dwarves in half with a waraxe twice the size of a goblin. Behind him, the Fleshfeeders lunged through the smoke, tearing throats and dragging corpses back into the dark.
The dwarves did not break.
Even when their front lines fell, the next stepped forward, shields locked, songs of defiance echoing in perfect unison.
“They fight like the mountain,” Maz shouted over the clash. “You can’t break it you have to undermine it!”
Vris nodded once, then turned to Hadrik.
“Collapse their veins.”
The order carried like thunder. The Stone-Eaters vanished into side tunnels, chewing through support columns, burrowing beneath the dwarves’ feet.
Moments later, the ground erupted stone giving way as entire companies of Harrowhall’s defenders plunged into the abyss.
The song of defiance ended in silence.
By nightfall, the Red Maw had taken the outer forges.
The air was thick with smoke and molten ore, the heat unbearable even to the ogres. Maggra’s undead tended the wounded while the Moonless Choir whispered through the tunnels, singing discordant hymns that turned the dwarves’ holy chants into gibberish.
Vris stood on a broken dais where once a dwarven overseer had stood. The Heartfang burned faintly in his hand, its edge drinking the light.
Hadrik approached, bowing low. “The lower halls are ours, Fanglord. But the deeper gates are sealed. There’s something down there.”
Vris looked at him sharply. “Something?”
The dwarf nodded. “My kin guard it like a relic. They call it the Skybreaker their last god-forged weapon. They mean to wake it.”
The Fanglord’s grip on his sword tightened. “Then we wake it first.”
“Ash and Iron..” He said lifting Heartfang high causing the goblins, orcs and ogres who saw him to suddenly stand beating their chests in renewed Zeal.
The clarion of roars and yells echoed forward two words becoming discernable to King Durnak Stoneforge.. “Ash and Iron.. What kind of surface nonsense are those goblins going on about?” He asked steadying some of the dwarves who were preparing. A servant of his was polishing the steel of King Durnak’s helm.
“Pay no heed your majesty we will route these goblins and their ilk soon enough.”
The King furrowed his bushy brows as he looked through the portcullis down into the lower tier of the halls. He could see the lower veins burning their forges now belonged to the Fanglord.
“The Skybreaker cannot fall into the hands of a Goblin..” He began to prepare.
The mountain screamed.
Not from wind, nor storm, but from stone itself cracking, moaning as if the world’s bones had grown tired of holding up the weight of dwarven pride.
Prince Aren Valen stood at the inner gate of Harrowhall, his armor flecked with soot and runes that flickered like dying candles. Around him, what remained of his honorguard thirty men of Fairehaven steel and faith held a faltering line beside King Durak Stoneforge’s furnace knights. The dwarven king stood at the front, his warhammer Kingshield singing with molten light.
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They had fought three days in the dark against teeth, against claws, against laughter that slithered through the vents. The goblins had come like smoke, endless and clever.
And then came the Fanglord.
A tremor rippled through the hall, shaking banners loose. From the lower tunnels, a sound like a hunting horn but made of bone and rage echoed upward. Out of the firelight stepped Vris.
He was taller than any goblin Aren had seen, his frame draped in the flayed banners of conquered clans. His eyes burned a deep, feral red flecked with black, and from his back stretched dark hair matted with ash. Behind him padded Skara, a monstrous warg whose fangs were as long as dwarven blades.
“Stone and light,” murmured Durak beside Aren. “So this is the beast that wears a crown of bone.”
Aren raised his sword, voice steady despite the quake in his heart. “The Fanglord of the Red Maw. If he wishes alliance through slaughter, he’ll choke on it.”
Vris didn’t roar. He smiled a flash of something cruel and almost curious.
The clash began with a quake.
Aren charged, his militia pouring in behind, shields clashing against iron. The dwarves roared their oaths, hammering the flagstones as molten rivers spat from the forge pits.
Vris moved like shadow and fury. Wielding Ruin what he called his twisted knife, and Heartfang in his other hand. Both weapons hissed through the air, cutting through plate and prayer alike. Skara tore through men, her maw red to the ear.
The forge-hall was a sunless inferno. Runes cracked and bled molten light down the stone pillars, and the air screamed with the sound of metal dying. Ogres hammered down with their large weapons scattering dwarf, and man like tossballs. Goblins lined the catwalks shooting their bows, and their blowguns at dwarves that were firing crossbows, and launching molten slag from their slag barrels. Dunzok fought fiercely to open the way toward the dwarven king and his honorguard. The Fleshfeeders, and Blackgrin fighting in formation with a zeal as the banners drew closer to their intended targets.
Maggra’s undead continued to pester the side tunnels, and keep the dwarves from surrounding the Red Maw as it pushed deeper and deeper into the heart of Stoneforge’s depths.Her arcs of witch light continued to rain down from her vantage point as both heads in unison kept repeating the Red Maw’s mantra. “Ash…” Her right head grinned. “Iron..”
The Fanglord entered the circle of the forge’s glow, eyes alive with ghostlight. His armor was bone and ghostly spidersilk armor, his silhouette wreathed in smoke.
In his right hand, he carried a curved blade of blackened Ruin, pulsing faintly like something alive.
In his left, a new weapon: — Heartfang — and its edge hummed with hunger.
Aren felt its pull before they even met.
They collided like thunder.
Aren’s elven-forged longsword met Heartfang’s serrated bite, and the impact tore a shriek from the very air. Sparks of red and white light bursting between them like warring souls.
Every time Heartfang connected, Aren felt it a magnetic pull, as though his sword were being dragged into the maw of something starving. The edge of his weapon warped, light bleeding along the steel like veins of fire.
Ruin came from the side, fast and low. Aren twisted, barely catching the curved black knife on his vambrace, the blow carving through tempered steel as if it were bark.
He retaliated a diagonal cut, silver light arcing through the forge-glow. It grazed Vris’s cheek, leaving a burning line across his ash grey flesh.
The Fanglord laughed not in mockery, but exhilaration.
“Good,” Vris growled, his voice a rasp of smoke and ember.
“At least one human knows how to bleed the dark. Though you’re not exactly human are you?”
Vris laughed as he swept both weapons in an arc narrowly missing Aren’s face catching a spaulder of iron on his right shoulder.”You fight like a man who doesn’t want to live, princeling…”
“Shut your mouth Goblin!” Aren retorted as they continued to fight both combatants like a whirlwind of steel, and fury.
Aren lunged. Vris ducked beneath and answered with both blades: Ruin slashing for the knees, Heartfang hammering for the guard. The elven blade caught both, but each impact shrieked sparks like fireflies raining around them.
Stone cracked beneath their feet. The forge fire dimmed and flared as if watching.