"VILLAIN! YOU DARE?!"
The Primordial Villain's eyes flashed a brilliant crimson. Beneath his helmet, a terrible expression sat on his face.
"Yes."
A limbless torso in crumbling fused plate. One socket empty, one eye burning with a hatred the ice had not cooled by a single degree.
"It's the king." The whisper ran the shield-wall end to end, and the fighting died where it passed. "Stone have mercy, it's the king."
An axe hit the tiles somewhere in the second rank, and nobody bent to pick it up.
"He's alive," a guardsman said, hushed. "Stone above, what did he do to him?"
"Eyes front!" an officer barked down the line, and his own eyes never moved from the king.
Ragnar. The last king of the dwarves.
The king who had fed his own body to a forbidden ritual to become his people's unkillable shield, aimed the result at the wrong man, and lost his limbs, his war, and his mountain for it.
Quinlan had frozen what remained, and kept it.
