Aren’s strikes were measured, practiced footwork of the Fairehaven academies, refined with elven precision.
Vris fought like something primal made cunning movement built from instinct, refined by cruelty.
Each time Aren advanced, Vris answered. Each time Vris pressed, Aren turned the Heartfang aside by inches.
Until Skara entered the fray.
The warg lunged from the smoke, a grey shadow streaked with blood, jaws open. Aren pivoted, thrusting his sword through her shoulder to save his throat. The beast yelped a deep, wounded sound that echoed through the hall like thunder in a tomb.
“No!”
Vris’s roar was not human. It shook the chamber.
He was on Aren before the prince could wrench his sword free. Ruin carved a burning arc across Aren’s chestplate, cutting through steel and skin. Heartfang drove in next Aren blocked it with his sword again, the edges grinding and screaming, white sparks flaring like fireflies trying to survive a storm.
Aren forced it back with both hands, teeth gritted, eyes blazing with silver light.
“You’re not the only monster born from gods’ mistakes!”
Their blades locked, the sound pure agony light trying to devour shadow, shadow gnawing light.
Behind them, Skara staggered, bleeding heavily. The dwarves’ alchemical fire loosed in desperation crawled across her fur like molten chains. She turned her head toward Vris, whimpering once.
She let out a whine a final farewell to her beloved Goblin lord cub. “Little green thing..”
And fell.
The Fanglord froze.
Heartfang went still. Ruin dimmed.
In that heartbeat, Aren saw something raw in his enemy’s eyes sorrow that didn’t belong to a goblin at all. For a moment, he glimpsed Toru, a boy crushed and burned by the world before this one.
Vris’s grief hardened into fury.
He struck. The blades met one final time Heartfang against the elven steel and this time the shriek split the air like a banshee. The light inside Aren’s sword flickered, devoured by the Heartfang’s hunger. The weapon shattered, its fragments burning away into dust.
Aren fell to one knee, breath ragged, chest bleeding through the rents in his armor.
Vris stood over him, both blades dripping. The forge behind him pulsed with the heart of the mountain.
“Take your wounded,” the Fanglord rasped, voice broken and hollow.
“Take your children, Your women. Leave the dwarf king to me. The mountain is mine.”
Aren met his gaze soft silver eyes stern, but his hands trembling from both the fight, and the adrenaline.
“And what will you do when the light comes for you?”
Vris looked to the body of his warg, smoke curling from her flank.
“Let it.”
Dunzok spoke up. “To show them mercy now? The Maw is ravenous Fanglord let our men feast…”
Vris contemplated the Orc’s words. “Mercy is the gift of the victorious.. I want them to remember it in the days to come..”
The Orc looked contemplative as he sheathed his cruel looking blade. “As the Fanglord commands.” He struck his own chest with his fist and left the Fanglord to grieve a faint look of sympathy expressed in his otherwise apathetic gaze.
When the survivors fled the burning halls, Aren looked back once. The Fanglord knelt beside his fallen beast, the two weapons resting on the stone before him. Heartfang’s glow dimmed, and Ruin whispered faintly in tongues older than men.
Vris did not move until dawn.
He gently rested his ash gray forehead stained with dry blood and soot against her now still hide weeping her loss weighing heavily like a cloak around his shoulders and deeply into his chest. He didn’t care that perhaps the Red Maw might view it as weakness but in truth many goblins and even orcs and ogres looked about solemn as the Fanglord grieved Skara. His faithful warg companion the two had been nigh inseparable since the day he had bonded to her.
If not for Maz the Vris might not have left Skara’s side at all.
“You loved her..” She said softly her own expression etched with sympathy, and empathy for the Fanglord. Maz was covered in blood it was just hard to see because of her complexion, but it showed in her armor and dripped eagerly from her whip. She had witnessed the Fanglord’s duel with the Half-elf Prince.
Vris gently rubbed Skara’s muzzle and removed one of her large canines wrapping it in leather he pierced her own hide with the tooth covering it in her warg’s blood then put it on a chain about his neck. “Bring her body in a wagon to Ravha..” He silently patted her dormant neck.
The words felt hollow as they did empty.
The forge had fallen silent.
Ash drifted through the air like snow, coating every banner, every broken anvil, every corpse. The heat had ebbed, leaving only the soft red glow of magma veins running like dying arteries through the stone.
Vris descended the steps alone, the two blades at his sides whispering in opposite tongues.
Ruin murmured hunger take, devour, claim.
Heartfang pulsed beneath his fingers a steady, mournful thrum, as though echoing his own heartbeat.
He found King Durak Stoneforge kneeling at the base of the Great Forge, his massive frame bowed but unbroken. His armor was cracked, his beard singed and blackened, his warhammer Kingshield split clean down the middle.
Before him, the colossal heart of the Skybreaker lay inert: a sphere of dark crystal, veined with molten light that flickered fitfully like a dying star.
Durak looked up as Vris approached, one eye replaced by a molten gem that still glowed faintly.
“So. You’ve come to take what’s left of my home.”
Vris paused, his shadow long in the forge light. “Yes..”
He felt grief was still too near for a witty reply to the old Dwarf King.
The dwarf laughed a sound of gravel grinding underfoot.
“Aye. And now it sleeps. The Skybreaker won’t answer you, Fanglord. Not anymore. I broke the key, shattered it with my own hand.”
He gestured weakly to the ruined hammer beside him.
“Better it be this way than end up in the hands of my enemies.”
Vris stepped closer, studying the shattered relic. Kingshield’s haft was fused to the stone, runes dimming like closing eyes. He could feel the Skybreaker beneath the floor an thing ancient, vast, still dreaming.
He could also feel respect. Not for the hammer. For the dwarf who had dared to break it.
“You fought well, Stoneforge,” Vris said at last. “Better than any human or dwarf I’ve met. Better than I expected from something made of stone.”
Durak chuckled, the sound turning into a cough. “If I were younger, I’d still split your skull. But I think I’ve done the last of my killing today.”
He met Vris’s gaze.
“Go on, then. Eat your fill. Make your victory worth the lives you took.”
For a long moment, the Fanglord said nothing. The hall crackled, settling under its own ruin.
Then, slowly, he sheathed Ruin.
“No. You’ll have a King’s death.”
Durak frowned. “And what does that mean, from a goblin?”
Vris drew Heartfang instead the obsidian glass blade gleamed crimson in the forge’s dim light. “It means you’ll feed the earth, not the beast.”
He knelt beside the dying king and, with one clean motion, drove the blade into Durak’s chest.
The dwarf gasped once not in pain, but in surprise and then smiled, a weary, soot-stained smile.
“May the stone remember you,” Vris murmured, as the light in the king’s molten eye faded.
He rose, holding the still-beating heart aloft. For an instant, the entire forge shuddered as Heartfang drank deeply of its power. The veins of magma along the walls flared bright red then dimmed to embers.
[You have consumed a Sovereign heart.]
[Essence Assimilated: +Dominance, +Instinct, +Command Aura.]
[Evolution Path Threshold Reached: Goblin Lord(Variant)] Finished
[New Evolution Path Unlocked: Goblin Warlord Threshold 33 Percent]
When the fires cooled, Hadrik Veinborn and the Stone-Eaters gathered what remained of their kin.
Vris watched in silence as they carried Durak’s body to the King’s Crypt, deep beneath the mountain.
The Stone-Eaters sang a dirge in the dwarven tongue slow, heavy, each word like the toll of a hammer on an anvil.
Vris stood apart, leaning on Heartfang, Skara’s collar still clenched in his other hand. He said nothing, but as the tomb was sealed with molten runes, a strange ache twisted behind his ribs.
Durak Stoneforge was gone. The mountain was his now.
And yet, somehow, it felt emptier than before.
When the Stone-Eaters finished, Hadrik turned to him, kneeling low.
“He died as kings do. You gave him that. The mountain will remember.”
Vris nodded once. “See that it does.”