Guildmaster Wharoth raises his shield and charges into the jagged mouth of the sinkhole. His guild follows him, not knowing whether this is suicide. There could be magma at the bottom—though he thinks there isn’t supposed to be any near here.

Magma or no, the tunnel is steep, only a dozen degrees or so off vertical. An unarmored dwarf would roll down head over foot and have his bones smashed to splinters, but around Wharoth’s titanium sabatons run runes of stability and grip. He tilts forward to align his body at a right angle to the extreme slope. The sensation is one of plummeting, but to his eyes he is running, chasing after the storm of lava drops, crushed stones, and energy-crackling quartz.

His target is the black dragon, a shadowy mass amidst the fire and blue arcs. Blood from its three wounds forms a trail behind it, a lighter golden fire amidst the lava, which bends toward Wharoth’s halat axe and flickers past his face. Some spatters on his faceplate and he can feel the heat even through the tungsten plating there.

The slope vanishes abruptly beneath him and he’s plummeting vertically. The debris before him coalesces into a crumbly mass which he slams into feet first. Even bending his legs to take the shock of impact, his breath his driven out of him. He feels a twinge in his ankle—the first hurt of many coming soon, he thinks. A succession of crashes around him marks the arrival of his guild—those crazy and driven enough to follow, which is nearly all of them. Forty dwarves stand up, or limp up. None is equipped to fight a dragon, yet maybe all of them together...

“What are you doing?” barks Gerthel. “The dragon!”

A shadow in the near distance is run-limping down the wide cave they’ve come to.

“No one injured?” Wharoth asks.

“Injured or not, doesn’t matter!” Whelt hisses. He’s barely standing, barely has the strength to hold up his axe. “Chase it!”

Wharoth nods solemnly, and restarts his chase. His rune-enhanced gait is far faster than anyone in his guild expected—third degree he may be, but perhaps that is just because he has not had time to sit the examination for second or even first.

The ripples and jags of the ground blur darkly below him. He stumbles on something—the body of a tungsten clad elite, her breastplate punctured a dozen times in a curved row of bleeding holes. The dragon’s teeth went through the tungsten like it was nothing more than thin sheets of iron.

A hundred yards later and he comes across her trident. It’s coated with smoking dragonblood, and from it the blood trails forward.

“It’s hurt!” Wharoth shouts. “Bleeding out! We can catch it!”

The twenty of his guild who have kept up with his pace thus far cheer as one. Wharoth pushes his legs harder than he has in a long, long time. The air whistles past his helmet. Yard by yard he is drawing closer to the run-limping dragon. It glances back at them, and its green eyes flash.

“I’ll carve those eyes from your skull!” Gerthel screams. “Then I’ll place them in my brother’s grave.”

“Juice them first!” shouts another dwarf. “Dragon eye jelly makes a great armor oil, I’ve heard!”

“We’re going to kill you!” screams another.

The black dragon hisses loudly and turns back away. Its limp is growing more pronounced by the minute, and Wharoth isn’t feeling tired in the slightest. Better yet for the dwarves, the thundering of more footsteps from behind signals the approach of Vanerak and his elites.

The black dragon turns into a side-tunnel. It lets out a puff of flame to illuminate, and sees a forbidding dead end. The wall isn’t totally solid, but the aperture in it leading to the next section of cavern is far to small for its bulk—would barely fit a dwarf. It turns around to escape the trap it’s got itself into, but there at the tunnel exit stands the dwarf with the fire-eating shield and blood-pulling axe. Beside him more dwarves line up to form a wall of metal, weak-looking but even mice can bite. The black dragon roars flame over them, to no effect.

“No escape, dragon!” Wharoth shouts. His heart is pounding against his ribcage with equal amounts fear and glory. “No escape this time! No flying away, no running away! You’ll pay for what you did to my guild!”

“Hah!” laughs the black dragon. “You shall soon see that trapping a dragon is not so easy a task. It is dragons who trap dwarves, not the other way around. Just as my forebearers trapped your wreck of a Runethane to burn for their amusement, I shall trap you beneath my claws and melt you in your armor.”

“Runethane Thanerzak killed your forebearers, just as I will kill you!”

“Would that he had killed them,” laughs the black dragon. “He will soon rue the day he let his desire for revenge take dominance over his characteristic caution. You will not be there to see his final downfall, however. Only the downfall of your friends.”

“Charge!” Wharoth screams.

The Association of Steel charges the dragon. It flicks around its tail and throws one to the ground, but the dwarf next to it smashes down and his hammer crushes the tail's tip. Another dwarf reaches striking distance with his spear. The dragon’s hand is faster, and tears his arm away at the shoulder, then its shoulder is cleaved by axe right into one of the bolt wounds. Bright blood sprays out.

“Die!” Wharoth shouts, and cleaves at its head.

The black dragon rears up out of range and unleashes a beam of yellow-white flame. Wharoth takes it on his shield. The runes glow bright as the fire vanishes into the whorl they are arranged in. The cave becomes illuminated as if it is open to the sun far above.

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“It’s distracted!” Wharoth shouts. “Cut its limbs!”

The dwarves chop, stab, and hammer at it. Desperately the dragon blocks and counters with its razor talons and iron-hard forearms. Yet for every attack it defends, two more strike true. Its armored scales bend or are cut asunder. Hot golden blood sprays onto the dwarves, who scream wordlessly in rage and glory.

The black dragon clamps its jaws shut. The beam of fire vanishes; the cavern becomes dark. Its head starts to glow red like hot metal, and the red glow expands down its neck. Pressure is building.

“Shields up!” Wharoth shouts. “Now!”

The dwarves obey, apart for three overzealous ones who continue their attack. The black dragon opens its mouth and a blast-front of flame and pressure explodes out. At the exact same moment, it snaps its massive wings around its front to double the explosion’s speed and force. The dwarves with their shields up are smashed backwards off their feet and into the air—only Wharoth remains standing, yet even he is pushed ten feet back. The three dwarves who did not raise their shields are burned alive in an instant. Their red-hot suits of armor, billowing black smoke and trailing fine ash, fly far away.

In the moment of reprieve it’s bought itself, the black dragon turns and bites hard into the hole in the wall. With a terrible cracking sound from both the stone and its teeth, a chunk of the wall comes away. The black dragon shoulder charges the expanded gap and the wall smashes apart.

“I said you’re not escaping!” Wharoth screams, and he charges after it into the cave beyond. A second later and he realizes he’s plummeting down toward a cluster of stalagmites sharp as spears. He rotates his shield down and smashes the one below him. The dwarf behind him is not so fast, and is impaled.

The black dragon roars in pain. With a weak flap of its wings it has managed to clear most of the stalagmites, but its back right foot caught on one and is stuck through. Left, right, left, Wharoth cleaves through the tight-clustered stalagmites toward it. With a mighty flex of its thigh, the black dragon pulls its foot free—by tearing it in half down the middle. It struggles away, slipping in its own blood.

“I’ve got you now!” Wharoth shouts. “Die!”

The black dragon whips its jaws back around and unleashes another torrent of flame. It’s weaker though: its blast from before must have strained its throat. Wharoth shouts:

“Nachroktey! Drazakh nachroktey!”

“Die! Die, dragon!”

The fire slows his advance but does not stop it. The black dragon retreats, limps backwards, but its torn foot slows it to a crawl. Its eyes dart to Wharoth’s left. Another dwarf is coming for it, in polished tungsten that reflects the flames so that the dwarf looks as if he himself is composed of flames. The black dragon shifts its torrent onto him, yet the flame washes off the tungsten like water breaking on a stone.

Vanerak swings down his halberd. A wave of distilled sharpness slashes through the air and cleaves into the dragon’s face, cutting it vertically. It shouts in shock and pain. Wharoth, the flames off him, accelerates to unleash a charging strike. The black dragon raises its hand to grab the titanium blade and twist it away, but the not-halat rune pulls forth a torrent of blood from its arm-wounds. Weakened, the dragon’s hand drops.

Wharoth's axe cleaves diagonally into its wrist. There’s an instant of impact, then the axe gives—cuts right the way through. The hand falls to the stone.

The black dragon wails in agony and stumbles backward. Wharoth raises his axe for another strike, this time at its heart. Vanerak pulls his halberd backward and diagonally to unleash violence enough to slice through ten feet of multi-folded steel.

The black dragon vanishes downward, plummets off the chasm it had been backing toward. Wharoth rushes after it, sees it falling and twisting leaking bright blood: his foot comes to the very edge.

A hand grabs him by the shoulder plate and wrenches him back.

“Stop there, guildmaster,” Vanerak says. “Can you not see the glow?”

At the very bottom of the chasm the bleeding dragon is falling into, is a long thin line of orange.

“No!” Guildmaster Wharoth roars.

“There’s no need to panic,” Vanerak says calmly.

“No need? No need?” Wharoth looks back to his guild member impaled upon a stalagmite. That one and three more are dead, one more has his arm torn away—his most loyal dwarves, the most strongest, most driven—his best. Killed for nothing.

“No need to panic,” Vanerak repeats.

“All those dead! Our chance at revenge! Gone!”

What of those injured in the original attack, whom he does not expect to make it through the night? Surely they will die with broken hearts.

“You will have your chance at revenge, guildmaster. I know a great deal about dragons. They do not swim fast through magma, for their wings are hindrance rather than a help. And although this part of the cavern is ill-mapped, we do know of this river and into what cave it emerges.”

“Can we make it in time?” Wharoth says hoarsely.

“Yes.” Vanerak pats his shoulder as far below the dragon splashes into the magma with a flare of flame. “It will have to be a fast march, but we can make it in time. Even if we do not catch it on its exit, it is weak, and can only crawl.”

“We can make it? We can catch it?”

“Yes,” Vanerak reassures him. “Now, let us—”

A crash behind catches their attention. Another dwarf has fallen from the entrance to the chamber. He crawls out the path Wharoth smashed through the stalagmites, tries to stagger to his feet, but cannot.

Thinking it’s one of his, Wharoth hurries over. But this dwarf is clad in tungsten. His breath is a high-pitched rattle. He forces himself into a sitting position, and when he takes his helmet off to better be heard, Wharoth sees he is in far worse condition even than Whelt was.

His face is blotchy with red swellings. His beard has nearly entirely fallen out.

“Vanerak,” the dwarf rasps. “Vanerak...”

“What is it?” Vanerak asks. “Ultrich? You were not on the hunt.”

“I ran... Followed your trail, got stung... Red gecko, couldn’t move fast after that... Saw you chase dragon down here, sprinted...”

He vomits blood.

“Message for you...”

“What message?” Vanerak asks. Some of the calm always present in his voice is gone. “What’s happened?”

“Broderick won... Took city. Conquered, took castle.”

“He attacked?”

“After you left... Ganzesh killed, battle lost.”

“And the Runethane? What of the Runethane?”

“Missing... Dead or captured. You have to go back. Go back... Hurry!”

The dwarf vomits blood once more. Too much blood for anyone to lose. His eyes roll up and he slumps sideways, dead.

“Vanerak?” Guildmaster Wharoth says. “Vanerak?”

Vanerak is deep in thought and does not answer.