Phanar tipped his head back at just the last moment, the axe-blade screaming through the air just in front of his face – the storm-cloud carried by the weapon blinding him momentarily –

The elf, noting this, spun on his heel, bringing the axe about again. This time Abathorn crouched as he whirled rather than leaping, fearful of a counter-strike while his back was turned, and reticent to reuse the same techniques more than once.

As he completed the motion, coming around to see his opponent again, he was disappointed to find his axe was cutting through empty space – Phanar was mid-leap, springing over the attack –

The very end of the warhammer – the blunted tip – gave him a poke right in the brow, and Abathorn fell back, sent sprawling in the sand with frostburn searing across his forehead.

Phanar landed like a cat, instantly resuming a stance of perfect equilibrium.

“I thought we were to give them a show,” the newcomer said levelly, no hint of breathlessness in his charcoal voice. He patted his injured side.

He mocks me! Abathorn hissed internally, looking up at the Dragonslayer. First he steals Ovax’s Apex; now he feigns weaknesses he does not possess!

We shall see what weaknesses you do possess, Phanar of N’Lem. We shall see them, expose them for all the world to witness!

When Abathorn got to his feet, it was a liquid flicker, a twist of rust-red hair and crackling steel. The axe fell, again, and again.

The stranger, the Mystery Man, the dropping Slayer of Ord Ylon – Phanar parried, evaded, and responded, warhammer flying.

In the end the contest was one the crowd could scarcely see, but that didn’t stop it being the highlight of the day’s games. Only the most battle-hardened amongst the spectators would be able to discern the delicate placement of the contestants’ feet, the patternless figures described by their weapons’ dance – and such combat veterans were themselves a rarity in Mund, especially amongst the well-to-do audience drawn to the arena. All this, Abathorn knew. But little could he care. He would prefer that they couldn’t follow the action. That they couldn’t see the way the human outdid him, dancing faster through the forms, weaving the warhammer such that every instant was to Abathorn a work of art.

More than once, as he twisted to avoid receiving a tremendous blow that would’ve stopped the fight, the elf almost caught himself stopping and staring, so beautiful was the Dragonslayer’s command of his brush, the mastery with which he painted lines of death.

In any other circumstances Abathorn might’ve respected the man, but it was insult upon insult, to have this brought about on his head, him, the Thorn himself –

This is what indignity feels like.

The crowd were screaming. He felt the weight of their expectations, and his own. That weight crushed down upon him, upon his mind, worse than the blow of any warhammer, any sledgehammer. It broke him more completely than his spine being snapped.

Not one strike had landed, yet he’d already lost.

The very instant respect gave way to enmity, hope gave way to fear – and he started getting sloppy. As Abathorn writhed away from the spike the Dragonslayer reversed the swing, and the elf felt the crunch, the vile, nauseating sensation of Phanar’s weapon striking home –

The coldness. The blunt face of the hammer’s head smacked him directly in the left shoulder-blade. Ice was instantly spreading through the bruised bone, stealing his breath, limiting his movements; before he could catch his balance he was stumbling, and Phanar swept his feet out from under him with a single lazy arc of the warhammer.

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He growled, gasping for air, and his enemy slowly paced away, giving Abathorn chance to get himself together.

In the elf’s experience the crowd usually howled for blood, usually looked on any effort to show mercy as a crime. But this was no mercy. This was degradation. And so for Phanar they whooped and shrieked, men and women roaring in glee, all of them seemingly in support of the newcomer’s casual retreat.

They approved of him. They wanted him to humiliate Abathorn. To take one of their heroes of the arena and make him crawl.

If that is what they want of me… I shall… disappoint them!

Anger overrode fear, and Abathorn pushed himself back up to his feet.

“You are a skilled fighter, Dragonslayer!” he cried, rolling his injured shoulder, freeing up some of the frost caked onto his tender skin. “But don’t think I’m done yet.”

“I had thought you would stay afoot for longer,” Phanar said dubiously.

That did it.

There was only so far that professional rivalry could take a man. Only a fraction of a warrior’s true potential came to the surface when fighting a foe in the arena, and it was the gladiator’s art to fan that candle-flame into a roaring bonfire, feel the need to destroy the opponent.

Now Abathorn was aflame. Now he fought not for the spoils or the crowd’s approval. Not for honour or prestige.

He fought because he wanted to cut Phanar’s head off.

The axe sang, a lightning-borne song of lamentation, and it drank deep of the adventurer’s blood.

Again and again, Phanar took injury, suffering for the crowd’s sport. His gambeson was torn across the front, back, under the left arm…

“You see, Dragonslayer!” Abathorn grinned, pursuing his retreating prey across the field of sand. “The gods croon, and not for you! For your soul! I seal your fate.”

Phanar suddenly parried his next swing, raising the warhammer with such immovable solidity that Abathorn almost lost his grip when the two weapons met, the shaft of the axe almost jarred from his hands. The elf skipped back two paces.

I need to find an opening for his head, his neck… Naught else will suffice.

“Come, then, Manslayer,” Phanar replied. “Do what you might to avert my fate. I fear it was sealed long ago, before your birth, before the birth of your grand-sires. I was not made to test an axe’s edge.”

Abathorn spat on the ground between him and his foe.

What did this insolent human know of elvenkind? Elves could only procreate for a brief period, once they entered the synonadine trance, around their centenary. It was true that his grandparents were probably dead by now – they’d been old when Abathorn was born, and elderly before he left the lights of the Dome behind to explore the world. But they’d been over three hundred years old.

The Dragonslayer really is full of himself, isn’t he?

The elf pressed the attack – three heavy, overhand blows, the last disguised by a shifting of his weight that made it look as though he were about to follow the second with a horizontal chop. Phanar only just caught the third with the rim of his shield, and for a moment Abathorn thought he really was about to cleave the Dragonslayer’s head in two.

The human’s black coat was drenched in his blood, and yet when Abathorn danced away for a momentary reprieve Phanar merely started unstrapping the shield on his own arm.

“This thing, it is cumbersome.”

Abathorn, panting for air, heard Phanar’s murmured explanation, the dispassionate distance of the adventurer’s voice, and stared on in dismay as he ripped the thing from his wrist.

The crowd sucked in their breath, an anti-sigh, suspense itself made manifest –

“And useful.”

Phanar brought his hand down in a whipping motion.

The elf ducked, his reflexes fast-enough to let him slip below the spinning, unseen shield that was zooming at his teeth –

The instant he recovered from the evasive manoeuvre, Phanar was there. Right there, in his face. Or rather, his warhammer was.

It was the mercy of it that smarted worst, he decided later, once his teeth had been replaced, his jaw realigned. He’d been left lying there in the healing rooms while the crowd hailed the victor, his frustrations left to bubble on the stove of his mind. Phanar might’ve used the sharp end. He might’ve granted him a good death, a proud end – a gladiator’s glory. But no. For all his surprising showmanship, for all his martial expertise, the human from ‘N’Lem’ was no gladiator. Phanar used the blunt end. Phanar spared him for this – this life, this pointlessness. A tarnished existence. A broken tally.

I had to lose, in the end.

There was no other conclusion, was there? No winning streak went unbroken. No gladiators died of old age.

But the hatred! He’d never felt it like this before. Had it truly come to this?

The end?