Vragni muttered a few choice blasphemies to himself as he trudged through the ash. Whose bright idea had it been to make Snorri Klausson runelord, again? Surely the outcome would have been patently obvious even back then: the promotion had gone to his head, he'd spent the next eight hundred years beating the very concept of subtlety to a weeping mess and here they all were, having to live with the results. The storm itself parted before the little bubble of still air Vragni's amulet generated but that still left the vast undifferentiated dunes of carbonised beastmen the Giftgiver had littered all over the place, that he just had to wade into with an undignified waddle. Really, you'd think someone supposedly so concerned with efficiency would have figured out by now how to fight without leaving such an infernal mess.
"Giftgiver!" he bellowed, possibly louder than strictly necessary, the moment the other man came within range of his air bubble and could hear him.
"Silverbrand? For pity's sake, what are you doing here?"
"Fimir are up to something and our lieges want us to regroup. Were it up to me I'd let you prance around out here as long as you like while more sensible people handle things, but for some ancestor-forsaken reason they want you back with the throng and thanks to my Storm-Breaker talisman I'm the only one who can pass through this ridiculous dust cloud you insist on throwing about and come fetch you."
The Giftgiver's face was not exactly clearly visible, between the helmet obscuring it and the fact that it was literally, magically turned to stone for the moment, but then Vragni hardly needed to look to know there was a smirk plastered on there. "A Storm-Breaker talisman, you say? How oddly specific. It's almost as if someone felt they had something to prove."
"...Don't flatter yourself. I only need this thing because someone keeps farting out lightning bolts without any regard for precision or restraint. Now come along, they're- uh."
Well, on the bright side, they now had very good intelligence on what exactly the fimir were doing. In front of them there had sprung a riot of too many colours, painted impossibly on thin air and somehow perfectly visible even through the storm, like an oil slick on the waters of reality; and even as Vragni tried to wrap his head round what he was seeing the colours expanded, not in the sense of filling a greater volume but rather in the sense of volume itself proliferating to contain something that could not easily exist in merely three dimensions: if the oil slick was at first a pane, then it swept out to become a cube, then a tesseract, then a succession of other shapes Vragni could only describe collectively as a migraine.
The creature that stepped through the migraine seemed almost disappointingly mundane by comparison, at first glance, having as it did only a height and a width and a depth. It was huge, and possessed of far too many limbs, and had an appearance that was... vaguely insectile... maybe? The more Vragni looked at the thing the less sense he could make of it, because he was quite sure it wasn't shifting or transforming and yet for the life of him he could not pin down what it looked like. It seemed leonine from one angle and serpentine from another, avian in one moment and molluscan in the next, and he could not tell where or when one aspect ended and the next began. Maybe he'd been mistaken when he'd at first assumed it only extended into three dimensions; maybe it was all those things simultaneously, ant and lion and adder and kite and octopus and more besides, only it was sitting some ways away in the direction of some fourth axis, perpendicular to the three he was used to working with, and his difficulties stemmed from the fact that only a small part of it extruded into the perceivable material.
Its head appeared in some ways to serve as a core, or maybe an anchor, because it was physically well-defined in a way the rest of the creature wasn't. It had great pointed ears and an elongated muzzle, upper and lower jaws stretching out some distance in uncovered bone and muscle before ending in clusters of misshapen teeth, rather like a skinless donkey. It brayed - it chittered - it roared and for an instant, the stormwinds abated around it.
"Well, Giftgiver, never did I think I'd see the day, but I must admit it's finally happened: for the first time, I've laid eyes on a bigger ass than you."
"Spare me your witticisms, beardling. There's work to be done."
"Beardling? There's not even two centuries between us, you colossal fool-"
---
Was it a mercy that the monster was concealed by the storm, most of the time, or was it cause for dismay? Tarni honestly couldn't say, just as she couldn't say if she should feel relief or despair over the fact it had manifested some distance away from the throng, just when Master Vragni had left to collect... Lord Snorri. Were the fimir acting opportunistically to attack two priority targets at a time when the bulk of their forces was out of position to assist? It seemed likely, but then if the beast had appeared closer to the throng she wasn't sure what any ordinary warrior could have been expected to do about it, except die horribly. Maybe it really was for the best that the ambush had been sprung upon two of the people most capable of defeating it, with hapless victims safely out of the way... although it didn't feel that way, for her, knowing her master was dancing with death and her standing uselessly by the sidelines. She supposed she could only join her fellow-students in praying for their Master's success, and bearing witness to his battle as much as they could; the monster's enormous flailing limbs would tear great rends in the stormwall, from time to time, letting them catch glimpses of warring figures inside before the storm once again swallowed them up. Like just now, when Master Vragni was charging the monster and it in turn was sweeping towards him a great tentacle, like a squid's but thicker than a dwarf was tall, along the ground in a blow that seemed unavoidable - she felt her heart seize in her chest -
-And Master Vragni flew over it? It all happened so fast, she could only parse what had occurred after the fact: Master had leapt into the air, at first nowhere near high enough to clear the tentacle, but just then Lord Snorri had struck the earth with his hammer and a series of slender stone pillars had burst up in exactly the right places underfoot for Master to continue leaping, like an impromptu staircase. The pillars were scythed through an instant later but by that point Master had already continued upward, far higher than he could have reached unassisted, and landed safely some way up the monster's body. Only... Master had made his first leap before any of the pillars appeared. How could Lord Snorri possibly have had the time to summon them, when Master was already in the air? How could Master have known he would have anywhere to set his feet down, for that matter? Tarni had done enough shieldwall drills in her life to know just how much practice it took, even for close comrades, to do something as simple as interlocking a row of raised shields without someone falling out of step. Master Vragni and Lord Snorri were not even on speaking terms and yet, with no communication and no practice, they had somehow improvised a maneuver she herself could not have pulled off once in a hundred attempts. How was it even possible?
-Master Vragni was scaling the monster now and so was Lord Snorri, further down and on its other side, as the strange pseudo-gronti was running interference on the ground. The monster, for its part, was striking at the gronti but also lashing at itself to dislodge the climbers, heedless of the damage it was causing to its own body in the process. Lord Snorri bore the worst of it, enduring countless blows from legs and tails and other, stranger things, and yet the strikes that missed him seemed in a way more dangerous, because they tore great furrows in the creature's own flesh and beneath there was only a black-sky void, through which Tarni could dimly see the gleam of strange constellations; what would happen if Lord Snorri fell in? Master Vragni was having an easier climb and somehow he must have sensed without seeing what was happening, on the other side of the creature's body, because he threw his axe, the master rune of flight steering it in a semicircular arc around the monster's bulk before it cut through a veritable forest of appendages and pseudopods and flew through just the right space for Lord Snorri to snatch it out of the air (and he had a hand free to catch it because he'd attached his hammer to his belt moments beforehand, how had he known) and wield it to hack off the remaining limbs striking at him. Lord Snorri was holding two axes now, one his own and one Master Vragni's, and he was using them as iceclimbing picks to assist in ascending the monster, making better time than before-
-Both of them were standing on top of its head, Lord Snorri fighting off rampaging extremities while Master Vragni was pulling from his person some runic contraption she'd not seen before, a metal stake of some kind, and aligning it with some particular point on the crown of its head-
-They were both hammering it in, taking turns to strike it-
-She could see only light.
---
When the monster perished, the fimir had at once begun withdrawing from the field, leaving beastman chaff in place as a distraction while their less disposable troops retreated. Some work remained to mop up the stragglers, but the final outcome of the battle was clear all the same; the throng was exultant and eager to lay eyes on the two heroes of the day, who were obscured quite completely by the storm now that the monster was no longer stirring it up. It was no longer actively maintained by the Giftgiver and so was gradually stilling, but it took some time for the storm to die out completely and thus the two of them would remain out of sight for a little while longer.
Had any member of the throng eyes to pierce the storm, they would have seen most of the monster had dissolved into a foul pink slime that was itself rapidly evaporating, leaving only a giant skull cloven in two. On each half of the skull stood a dwarf, and the two of them were speaking animatedly:
"Ha! Once again I have proven the superiority of my methods, achievable only through proper adherence to the rule of pride. Admit it, Giftgiver! Admit it was my runespike that carried the day!"
"Ha! I'll admit no such thing, because it is patently untrue! The monster was distracted by my construct, worn down by my runic storm and the final blow was delivered by my hammer. Without the power of my runes behind it, your risible little wedge might as well have been a toothpick for all the good it would've done you!"
"HA! Power, he says! A thousand years old and still you haven't figured out that it isn't size or strength that matters, but the skill of he who wields! If ever there could be a man to disprove the adage that age brings wisdom, truly you would be that man!"
"As if you'd know anything about power, Silverbrand! Maybe I'll let you experience my strength first-hand, one of these days!"
"Oh, I'll welcome the attempt! Just don't come crying to me afterwards, if you end up bruised!"
"Nincompoop!"
"Half-threaded wingnut!"
But as none other could see or hear them, in that moment, no record of their conversation was made and later retellings of the battle would only speak of two bitter adversaries setting their differences aside in service to the realms and to see a great grudge avenged. And perhaps that was for the best.
