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‘The first day began with wrath...’

The Angfyrd Odyssey

The Fyreslayer screamed until his throat was raw and his chest heaved on empty lungs. He gulped down a breath, heaved forwards, but was restrained. Iron clamps around his arms and legs groaned. His seat rocked on triple-bolted floor brackets. The new rune ignited as it took, blazing brilliant gold that flooded his eyes with fire and the thick muscles of his chest with torment. His biceps spasmed, tensing and un-tensing with a fury.

He screamed as no duardin ever should – honestly, terribly, his cries cast back at him by metal and stone.

The walls didn’t care. They had heard and borne witness many times over ten thousand years. His ancestors had endured the same trials as he. Who was he to suffer so visibly under the gaze of their icons?

Who was he?

‘I am Dunnegar!’ His breath was cinders and ash, his voice the rasp of hot coals stirred through a fire. ‘I am duardin. I am a Fyreslayer. I am… am…’

He grunted with recovering sensation as the pain in his chest faded just slightly, diminishing to a level that allowed him to feel again the punishment meted to his belly, his left hand, his thigh, both biceps, his back, several times over. Power and glimmerlust whirled through his mind. Power and glimmerlust. Glimmerlust and power. It hurt, but by Grimnir he wanted more. With a shuddering swallow breath, he blinked away the fire sprites that cavorted behind his eyes.

Runemaster Rolk stood framed by the heat of the forge.

The ancient priest smouldered. Fire licked the gold and magmadroth scale of his ceremonial dress. The deep lines in his thickly muscled forearms were steaming channels of sweat. Master runes of smiting and unmaking burned red against his blackened skin, responding in kind to the power of the forge that had cast them.

A newly forged rune sat upon his fire-wreathed anvil, spitting out golden impurities under the heat. Impassive, the runemaster reached for it, his arm glowing cherry red as he withdrew it with the rune hissing violently against his bare palm. He raised his hammer of runic iron, eyes the white of the hottest fires glowering through the smoke.

‘What is wrath, boy?’

Dunnegar gritted his teeth and jerked against his bonds. ‘Again. More.’

Face set, the runemaster positioned the rune in the centre of Dunnegar’s forehead and stepped back. The rune roasted into place and didn’t slip. Dunnegar forced his eyes open and his mouth shut against the near overwhelming urge to clench them tight and howl.

Then the runemaster swung, and Dunnegar’s mind exploded into embers.

Chipped stone the colour of rust ran away from his hands and knees.

They were his hands, and his knees, even as their weight and strength took him aback. No ur-gold runes punctured them, branching tattoos spiralling in their place, but it didn’t matter. He was stronger than Dunnegar had ever been or conceived. Heat was the common element between that world and this. Fire had been folded into the wind, smoke and air layered and layered until what the fire had forged filled his lungs like tar. The sun was small and red, hazed behind an ash sky, and intermittently sparked with cinders that rained from the mountain’s peak. Motes shot through his savage crest of red hair and sizzled against his skin. For the injury they caused he might as well have been made of metal. The power within him was older and hotter than anything that boiled under Aqshy’s broken surface.

Even as that inner fire gave him no particular pause, the part of him that was a Fyreslayer gloried in the glow of the divine.

A sky-sundering bellow rocked the mountainside and sent scree avalanching past him.

He held firm and looked up into the ash sky, hunting, but immediately recoiled from the searing intensity of the cinder rain. Brighter and brighter it became, the pain in his forehead pounding on his skull until he could see nothing but light and his mind was awash with molten gold.

Tendons standing from his neck like cables, Dunnegar heaved against his restraints and sprayed his knees with spittle.

‘Vulcatrix! I see the ur-salamander. The Godslayer.’

An excited murmur echoed this declaration, but he saw no one in the smoke, heard no words.

‘Not bad,’ Rolk grunted, drawing yet another hot rune from his forge. ‘Perhaps you’ve half the chance your kin think you have.’

Dunnegar began to laugh, panting hoarsely, gasping the air so fast that his lungs could have strained nothing from it. And yet he felt power. His heart raced upon a tremendous wave of it. It was destruction. It was fire and wrath, but it was joy as well, pride in his strength. His biceps bulged against the iron restraints, metal cuffs beginning to bend and hiss as they were heated. From behind him came a gruff warning, and hands gauntleted in fyresteel clamped over his arms.

‘Tell me again, boy, if there’s anything left in that thick skull: what is wrath?’

‘Grimnir is wrath.’

‘Ur-gold is what Grimnir left us of his power and will,’ said Rolk, staring into the complex geometry of the rune in his palm, his hard face appearing to express something like veneration in the shifting light of the flame. ‘By harnessing its might we do him glory in the manner in which he approves.’

Then the runemaster closed his hand over the rune, and Dunnegar growled to see it taken away from him. Rolk gave a knowing smile, a narrow thing of craggy lines and gold-capped teeth.

‘Glimmerlust. He’s had enough.’

The voice was that of Horgan-Grimnir. Rarity made his words precious, and imbued them with a power far beyond their worth. Even Dunnegar seemed to understand, though his attention remained locked on the runemaster’s closed fist.

The Trial of Wrath had but three possible outcomes: survival, gold madness, or death.

To the minds of those in attendance, no outcome was favourable. Survival meant embarking on the path of the grimwrath – gold madness and death by another name.

‘The flameling’s soft, as flamelings are wont to be,’ Rolk scoffed. ‘He’ll have had enough when he makes it to the top. If he makes it.’

‘Enough,’ the runefather spoke again. ‘There is a long journey ahead, and he already bears more runes than I.’

‘Are you jealous, lord?’ Opening his hand brought a golden flush to the runemaster’s face, and he chuckled at Dunnegar’s immediate reaction to the rune’s brilliance.

‘Again,’ said Dunnegar, straining to be nearer. ‘I will see the mountaintop.’

‘That’s the gold talking, lad,’ came the level wheeze of one whom Dunnegar felt he should remember, but just then, just there, could not.

‘And through it, Grimnir.’ Eyes glowing, the runemaster pressed the scalding rune to Dunnegar’s shoulder, hammer swinging even as Dunnegar drew breath to scream.

The blow knocked him sideways, body and mind.

It came at him from nowhere. He struck it aside on the back of his axe, sending a sword-length chip of talon spinning off into fiery oblivion. A howl of primal suffering shook the mountaintop as if the force of a thunderclap had been pressed into the rock face and unleashed against it. Everything was scales and claws, his twinned axes a blur as despite the exertion burning his every muscle. He somehow countered the great wyrm’s every blow. He laughed uproariously, the sound extinguished by the rush of flame as fiery twisters leapt up from the ground. An infernal glow lit up a reptilian head some thirty feet above him – wide mouth filled with spine teeth, horned ridge, serpentine neck – then billowed out into a fireball that rocketed down and smashed apart his guard.

Dunnegar/Grimnir was slammed down, each of his axes thrown a separate way. With an exhausted rumble, Vulcatrix’s sinuous upper body crashed onto scaly forelimbs. It drew back, neck coiling like a spring. Flame flickered around its hanging jaw as its colossal torso heaved up and down with every breath.

The wyrm was as badly hurt as he was. The next blow would belong to the victor.

Grinning, Grimnir found his feet, Dunnegar urging him on, or perhaps back, for every duardin child knew how this battle ended.

‘I am Grimnir!’ they roared in unison. ‘I am vengeance.’

Howling without words, Dunnegar threw his punch.

And it was his punch. The fist was bruised and glittered bloodily with ur-gold, driven only by a mortal’s strength, but was enough to shatter the front teeth of the half-armoured karl standing in front of him. The warrior’s ornate wyrm helm and twinned plumes of vibrant red hair revealed him to be a champion of the runefather’s hearthguard. A warrior second to none.

The duardin staggered back, stunned, before another punch bent his nose and spun him on his way to the ground. Dunnegar fell on top of him, furious beyond reason, when another duardin threw his arms around his chest and dragged him off. Fyresteel gauntlets pushed up under his ribs and locked as the duardin fired a stream of curses into his ear. Dunnegar heard none of it. The karl was strong, but Dunnegar had tasted real strength and had his opponent’s measure.

Every muscle in his body seemed to flex at once, drawing back his neck and forcing the air from his chest in a scream of golden fire. The ur-gold riven into his shoulder muscles ignited like the head of a match.

The hearthguard grunted in surprise, but held on. With the burning of the rune came a fraction of Grimnir’s strength, and little by little Dunnegar peeled open the karl’s lock. With a throw of his shoulders, he knocked the straining duardin’s arms wide. He tossed back an elbow and felt the hearthguard’s forehead crack under it. Then he turned, followed up with a quick step, and smashed the dazed warrior down into the now-broken iron chair with a headbutt that painted both of their faces with blood.

‘I will not be tamed!’

He turned back to see a fist like a cannonball studded with jewelled rings flying towards his face just before it hit his temple. He corkscrewed twice, then slammed face-first into the flagstones. He groaned. The rune was sapped, and he no longer felt the berzerker rage he needed to awaken the others.

Horgan-Grimnir cracked his knuckles and walked away. The runemaster smiled at the both of them, his ancient face telling a clearer tale than the finest of Battlesmith Killim’s chronicle banners.

The Angfyrd lodge had its first grimwrath berzerker in a generation.

Dunnegar felt no pride in that: just the cool of the inert rune in his shoulder where the might of a god had once raged.

He hadn’t yet tried to push himself off the ground when someone proffered him a grubby oilcloth.

Killim crouched over him, sadness and pity like dust in his eyes.

The look on the smith’s face hurt more than any number of blows from the runefather’s fists ever could. All Fyreslayers of a lodge were bound closely together, but his bond with Killim was stronger than most. Like all his age, Karl Huffnar of the Cannite Fyrd had taught him how to handle an axe, but it had been Killim who had forged his blade. His earliest memory was of the smith – old even then – sitting him on his knee to teach him to read the common runes.

Now, his old mentor searched his eyes as if looking for someone he knew was lost.

‘Will he be strong enough to travel?’ said Horgan-Grimnir, broad back turned. ‘We have a journey of four thousand days, and Grimwrath or no, the magmahold empties at dawn.’

‘He’ll be stronger than you,’ Rolk grinned. ‘Has the messenger in the fire told you anything more about our quest?’

‘That Fyrepeak calls its daughter-lodges home, to war against Taurak Skullcleaver and his two lieutenants.’

‘And of the Fyrepeak itself? Yesterday it was a myth.’

Horgan-Grimnir snorted and shook his head. ‘Tend to what is yours, runemaster. My son and I will keep what is ours.’

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First published in Great Britain in 2016.
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