When he returned to the upper halls, the feast had reached its fever pitch. The Red Maw drank deep from dwarven barrels and devoured roast boar, goat, and worse. Songs of war echoed through Harrowhall’s corridors, crude and triumphant. Maggra and her ogres feasted, and drank with reckless abandon. Dunzok’s laughter echoed as he partook in the festivities with his orcs.
Maz found him standing apart, staring into the Stoneforge that had forged the countless dwarven siege weapons and artifacts that lined the halls..
She approached silently, placing a hand on his arm.
“You’ve won,” she said softly. “The mountain bends to your will. The gods tremble. What more can you take?”
He turned toward her and for once, there was no mask of command in his eyes. Only exhaustion.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I just keep taking until I can’t tell where I end and the world begins.”
She stepped closer, the smell of ash and iron clinging to her skin. “Then take me, Vris. Just this once not as a trophy. As what you are: the fire that burns with mine. For the possibility of what comes next.”
Maz moved like a blade made flesh every motion deliberate, balanced between grace and violence. She stood taller than most goblins, her posture proud, shoulders squared and back unbent a living declaration that the Shardtooth line remembered the shape of divinity. Her skin gleamed a dark volcanic red, smooth as oiled iron and warm to the touch. In firelight, the tones deepened, shifting to molten copper along her collarbones and throat, as though embers lived beneath her flesh.
Her hair was long, thick, and black with a metallic sheen, bound into segmented braids threaded with bronze rings that glimmered like captured sunfire. A few short strands always fell loose to frame her strong, angular jaw a face both beautiful and fearsome, marked by faint streaks of soot-black pigment drawn like ritual scars across her cheekbones. Her eyes burned a molten amber-orange that flickered subtly when she grew angry or impassioned.
Maz’s armor was a latticework masterpiece a second skin woven from cured hide and reinforced with flexible bands of bronze plates hammered thin and etched with sigils of the Red Goddess. The design was both protective and deliberately revealing: a war-priestess’s garb that showed confidence rather than vanity.
Across her chest, dark leather straps crisscrossed and locked together under her arms, leaving glimpses of burnished red skin between them like cracks in cooling lava. Her shoulders and forearms were wrapped in heavier hide, plated with overlapping bronze scales for deflecting blades, while her legs bore tight, articulated guards that allowed for both movement and the occasional flourish of intimidation.
A bronze torque rested at her throat a spiral of metal shaped like two entwined serpents, their eyes set with dull red stones. It was said to be a priestly mark, signifying her blood-oath to the Red Goddess.
He hesitated but only for a moment. His mouth found hers, and he kissed her shielding his thoughts from grief from Skara’s death. Her mouth eagerly returned the passionate fire between them.
That night, beneath the echoes of the forges and the whisper of the Skybreaker’s dormant heart, Vris and Maz became more than allies, more than conqueror and forgemistress. The forge fire light danced upon their skin, the tattoos along his back glowing faintly as if the mountain itself blessed the act.
When dawn came, the Fanglord rose from her arms changed again not in body this time, but in something deeper.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The last pieces of Toru the boy who once flinched from fists and hid behind kindness were gone.
In his place stood a god of shadow and flame, his kingdom of monsters stretching from the sea to the mountains.
The Fanglord had risen.
The boy was ash.
A day later he reached the cavern where he’d chosen for Skara to rest permanently the old hunting burrow deep below the war dens. The air smelled faintly of her: musk, earth, rain. Her scent lingered even now, woven into the stone.
Ravha’s silk draped the chamber like mourning veils. She was there too, vast and silent, her eyes obsidian pools in the dark. When she spoke, it wasn’t in words only vibrations, a soft trembling through the web that reached his heart.
“The hunt ends, little Fang.”
Vris knelt by the mound of stone and silk that covered Skara’s body.
The warg lay as if sleeping, massive and still, her fur gone dull, her breath long faded. Someone Ravha’s brood, perhaps had wrapped her in webbing fine as silver thread.
He placed the fang beside her head and rested his palm on her muzzle, tracing the familiar scars. His claws trembled.
“You should’ve eaten me when you had the chance,” he whispered. “Would’ve saved you the pain.”
The web around him trembled again, Ravha’s grief echoing through it like distant thunder.
“Pain is proof we cared,” her voice vibrated. “Even gods cannot weave without breaking threads.”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
Instead, he drew a dagger from his belt and cut his own palm open, letting his blood fall onto the silk. It hissed softly, absorbed into the weave.
“You were never my beast,” he said quietly. “You were my friend.”
The blood pooled around her muzzle, forming a crude sigil a fang circled by flame the mark of the Fanglord’s kin.
From somewhere deep in the tunnels, the Webmother’s children began a low vibration not joyous, not triumphal, but reverent. A funerary rhythm taught by Ravha herself, made of hums and throat-deep clicks that mimicked the sound of her weaving.
Vris pressed his forehead to Skara’s. The silk was cold.
He closed his eyes and breathed in her scent one last time the musk of the plains, the faint iron of blood, the warmth that had once matched his own.
When he rose, Ravha’s massive form shifted, lowering her head until one obsidian fang touched the ground beside Skara’s tomb.
“Shall I keep her, little Fang?”
Vris shook his head. “No. She ran under open sky. She’ll rest there too.”
Ravha’s web shimmered, and the ceiling began to open threads pulling stone apart with patient grace. A single shaft of moonlight fell through the gap, spilling over the warg’s body. Her fur gleamed faintly, silver for a heartbeat, as if catching the moon’s last mercy.
Vris turned away only once the light faded.
He felt the emptiness beside him like a wound that would never close a silence too vast for any prayer.
“The world before took my kindness,” he murmured, looking toward the tunnels that led back to his army. “And now this world takes my heart.”
Ravha’s hum answered low, maternal, endless.
Now that Vris had tasted what the price of victory could bring.. The truth of it settled into his stomach souring it. “If this is what it feels like to win.. I don’t want it!” He shouted angrily upwards toward the sky his roar echoing into the tunnels.
He knelt feeling the vibrations from the webbing underneath, and he saw Webmother’s enormous body shifting into the dark until she was close enough to lift his chin with one of her claws. “Your grief is my grief child..” He felt a shudder of pain echo through her vibrations. “You must channel it for the good of all, or that which we fought for will come to ruin..”
Vris nodded looking up at her with vulnerable eyes that soon hardened as he found his resolve. “Yes Matron..”
When he left the room he gently patted some of her spider children understanding them far more greatly now. He didn’t fear them at all he feared them coming to harm because of allowing weakness.
“Then weave her memory into rage, my son. That is how we keep what we love.”
He nodded once.
When he left, the silk sealed the chamber behind him, shimmering faintly with red light from Heartfang’s reflection, as though the web itself remembered.