Thanerzak flees through the hot dry darkness. Every inch of his skin burns with incredible pain as sweat and fabric conspire to torture it. Wet sticky patches are where pus is leaking out, wet and hot patches where blood is. A dent in his breastplate is like a dagger slicing him with each step he takes, digging deeper and deeper. His mind is clouded with the pain: all he can think is that he must go on, must go forward, must finish his revenge before Broderick’s ambition finishes him.
“Give up, commander!” Broderick shouts. He’s closer than he was five minutes ago. “Turn and face me! Die like a dwarf, not like a coward!”
Broderick, for his part, has never felt so exhilarated. The clanking of his old commander’s old armor is getting louder by the minute. That little trick of jumping down the mineshaft has failed utterly, just like all his other foolish gambits.
“What happened to you, old one?” he calls. “You used to be so clever!”
No reply comes; Broderick laughs and shakes his head, continues the chase. The dark tunnel twists and loops, but one thing is constant: it is sinking downward. They must be miles beneath the city now, nearly level with the bottom of the chasm. Still it goes down, getting hotter and hotter.
Far, far below the deepest of the dwarven realms lie seas of magma. At the behest of his Runeking, Broderick once visited one so he might look upon the true majesty of the underworld. It was just as hot as now, but was a different kind of heat. It was a heat with a slow and grand majesty. The heat growing in the tunnel has a sentience to it, as if it’s a malevolent entity working itself into his gold-coated skin to blister and destroy.
The tunnel slopes downward steeply and shockingly. A bright light appears at its end, concealed partially by the wide silhouette of Thanerzak that then vanishes as he jumps out into whatever chamber lies beyond.
Broderick tilts his weight forward and increases his speed. He begins to worry a little. What final scheme has Thanerzak got planned from him? Might it contain a little of his old brilliance? The light grows wider and brighter in his eyes, then he’s leaping down into the massive chamber Thanerzak has led him to.
Massive is indeed the word. How many lesser caverns had to be filled with rubble so that this place could be carved out? It is in the shape of a long hall, if long is the right word for a room nearly a mile long and a third of a mile wide. Its size is necessary though, for bound to its walls are the old rulers of the cavern.
Each is fixed in a standing position: their feet have great tungsten nails driven through them, their hands are nailed to the walls also, and their wings are spread out and fixed to the wall by tungsten hoops. Their heads are covered by tungsten helmets so that only their lower jaws, forced open by thick bars, are visible. A pipe is jammed into each one's mouth, and clasped to the throat of each like huge parasitic beetles are cog-work mechanisms. These have a single spike at their centers and chains from them run up through holes in the ceiling.
More tungsten bars of great thickness are bent across the dragons’ chests, arms, and legs. And as is if all this wasn’t enough security, a semi-cylindrical cage of tungsten surrounds each, locked.
“Impressive!” Broderick calls. “But you’re at a dead end, now.”
Thanerzak slows and halts. He turns around and looks at the grotesque golden upstart. He hisses in pain and raises Starcleaver, readies his shield too.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Broderick taunts as he strides closer.
“I have nothing to say.”
Starcleaver glows with terrible light. The dragons writhe and groan in their bonds as the power absorbed from a million of their tortured breaths intensifies. Thanerzak swings down. Broderick feels the slash cleaving air and reality toward him and leaps out the way. Even glancing him, the power is enough to slam him backwards, shatter some of his golden rings and even sever one of the chains wrapped around his waist, which jangles as it’s thrown up high.
Spots of blood rain as, catlike, Broderick flips in the air and lands softly on the balls of his feet. A long line has been cut in the floor and ceiling, and the back wall too. The bound dragons shiver in terror, try to thrash but cannot break their bonds.
Broderick examines the damage to his gold and curses. He wastes no time and rushes Thanerzak before he can raise Starcleaver again, swings with his own axe. It is grafted with a saga of speed and ferocity, but Thanerzak’s armor is a match for it, and his strike only dents the tungsten.
Even so, to the scarred skin beneath the hit feels like a raw cut. Thanerzak screams in agony and swings wildly, but Starcleaver has not yet recovered from its exertions. No wave of power crashes from it and Broderick avoids the blow entirely.
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He gives a countercut. Starcleaver meets it, and impossible light flashes. It flashes again, a third time, then a hundred times in succession as the two expert fighters engage. After many hundreds of years of combat their movements have no conscious thought to them—their arms flex and turn and exert force in automatic patterns.
Nevertheless, each has his strategy.
For Broderick, it is to wear down his old commander. His amulets of youth are expertly forged, even if reckoned among the highest masters of the art, and he knows that if he lasts Thanerzak will eventually fall in exhaustion. As long as no strikes powered by three hundred years of dragonfire cleave him in two, he will win this battle.
He believes that Thanerzak’s strategy is to finish the fight quickly. To make use of what strength remains in his worn-out muscles to destroy his hated rival with a blow too powerful to defend.
But Broderick is wrong.
He relaxes the pace of his strikes. The flashes of terrible light reduce in frequency from five a second to just one. There’s no need to tire himself out. Each blow he lands, even glancing, makes Thanerzak flinch.
Starcleaver begins to glow bright once more. Thanerzak kicks out and Broderick does not manage to dodge. Thanerzak’s tungsten boot hits him full in the chest and the gold rings crunch. Broderick flies backwards and skids along the smooth stone a full twenty feet leaving a trail of fizzing sparks in his wake.
He swears; Starcleaver is raised high. He throws himself out the path of the blow, but he doesn’t need to. Thanerzak is not aiming for him.
Thanerzak has only had one goal these past three hundred years. And if he can no longer give the dragons a painful life, he will give them painful deaths.
He slashes side-on at two dragons bound on his left. Starcleaver’s power obliterates the cages then impacts the tungsten bars over their chests and shatters them with a noise several tones lower than breaking glass, and the next moment the superheated lifeforces of the two dragons burst outward in fiery cataclysms. Scales flash across the hall like a hail of deadly dark arrowheads. Broderick catches one an inch before it slices his eye, and several more cut into his body and make him gasp in pain.
Where the two dragons were bound are now spreading pools of white and orange. The heat of their demise converted the wall behind into lava which fell down in a bright waterfall unnoticed by anyone, so much brighter were the death-flares. In the pools float scraps of twisted tungsten.
Broderick tears a scale from his right pectoral and flings it to the ground. The blood bubbling from the small wound is steaming.
“What the fuck are you doing to my dragons?” he shouts at his old commander.
“They are not yours to seek revenge on!” Thanerzak roars. “They are mine, mine for all eternity, be that in this world or the next!”
“Stubborn old fool!”
Broderick rushes him. His axe is like a rabid wild animal, biting ten times a second, a hundred. Thanerzak cannot block even half of them, but all the same he remains standing. Every square millimeter of his skin is now raging agony, and his physical agony matches his mental so that he is driven berserk.
“Fall down, damn you!”
Thanerzak’s reply is a wordless roar and Starcleaver begins to glow once more. It brightens far more quickly than ever before; Broderick understands that written into it is a saga of infinite rage in runes so small they are more numerous than even the stars of the sky of the surface.
Starcleaver swings down toward the dragon at the far end of the hall, a black monstrosity with wings like sheets of abyss.
Broderick raises his axe and blocks two-handed. Starcleaver’s power bursts forth nonetheless, and concentrated to only half a slash it is visible, a red line of anger that digs deep into the ceiling, bringing down a rain of dust. With a shout of anger Thanerzak tries to pull away, but Broderick locks his axe around Starcleaver’s haft. Thanerzak tries to tug it free; Broderick resists then relaxes, flies forward and punches with all the force of two Runethanes. His golden fist shatters Thanerzak’s helmet into a hundred shards.
Within is a red melted lump that once could have been called a head. From it stare yellow and black shriveled eyes. A gash in its lower half opens and a scream like from something being torn slowly asunder comes as the ambient dragon-heat contacts the bare skin.
Thanerzak falls to his knees. His hands scrabble for the shards of his helmet. Starcleaver clatters down and he ignores it. He gathers up a few pieces of tungsten and attempts to form them into a sheet of metal, which falls to pieces.
“No, no...”
Pus runs from his shriveled eyes in place of tears as he gathers more tungsten pieces.
“No, no, no...” he rasps.
Broderick, feeling slightly sick, puts a single cut through his brain and Thanerzak slumps down, finally freed from his unending torment.
“You should have done that to yourself a long time ago,” he says quietly. “I might have done it for you that day, if Vanerak hadn’t stopped me.”
Oh well. He lets out a long sigh. It’s all over now. He’s freed too, from this stupid conflict which he often thought would never end. It’s a bittersweet feeling, as he remembers that far back before their fighting begun that he used to admire Thanerzak, loved him as a great leader who was fearless enough to invade a cavern of the worst monsters known.
He looks up at the bound dragons. They’re shivering in their bonds, feeling no less fear than they deserve. Their fire is his now. What shall he forge with it? A new axe? A new covering of rings?
Or perhaps he shall begin to forge his crown.