Read The Great Betrayal for Free Online

organs liquefy until all that remained was a soup of corruption.
    Seven brave dwarfs had already succumbed to that fate. Many more had been devoured by the daemon, swallowed into its belly. With every morsel, the bloated lord swelled until it had become a behemoth of utter foulness.
    Shouting his defiance, Snorri was determined it would grow no further.
    A chip of tainted blade came loose like a rotten tooth as the dwarf yanked out his axe. He swung the rune weapon around, circling the plague sword. Snorri went to attack again when an unholy swarm spilled from Alkhor’s widening mouth and engulfed him.
    Bloated flies, the daemon’s host of tiny familiars, crawled over his eyes and armour, scurried into his beard. They bit his skin, buzzed in his ears. Suffocated, blind, Snorri spat out a wad of insects trying to burrow into his mouth and uttered an invocation.
    ‘ Zharrum! ’
    Lightning arced from the haft of his hammer, drawn into a thunderhead that wreathed the king in a furious storm.
    A shriek of agony, louder than the storm, split the air. It took a moment for the High King to realise it had come from the fly swarm, speaking with one voice as they burned and died. The enchanted fire had lifted the malaise, and Snorri shook the insects from his beard, brushed them hurriedly from his armour and breathed again.
    Alkhor loomed, mocking the dwarf with its gurgling laughter. Its plague sword was raised for a cleaving blow. Blinking away the filth crusting his eyes, Snorri thrust upwards with his rune hammer and crafted a lightning bolt from the storm that speared the daemon’s bloated chest.
    Mirth became pain, the face of the daemon contorting as rune fire devoured and purified its flesh. It staggered then slumped, legs giving way to agony and bringing it within striking distance of the High King.
    ‘I said you would burn!’ Snorri roared, and slashed Alkhor open like a boil.
    A slew of foulness erupted from the wound in the daemon’s stomach. Half-digested corpses, chunks of armour and cloth, scraps of corroded leather and the remnants of skeletons eroded by the daemon’s intestinal acids spilled out.
    ‘Don’t touch it,’ warned the High King, and his retainers stayed back.
    Alkhor staggered again. Unable to regenerate, the daemon clutched its wound, spitting bile and curses at the dwarf who had hurt it. Pathetically, it began to sob.
    Unfurled from its back, a pair of tattered fly-like wings started to beat.
    But Snorri wasn’t finished with it yet.
    ‘Closer, filth,’ he growled, stepping down from his throne, ‘so I can take your ugly head.’
    As Snorri’s booted feet hit the ground, Alkhor’s sobbing turned into derisive laughter.
    ‘ Foolish little creature ,’ it burbled and tugged at the edges of the wound the dwarf had made. From within the rotten ropes of intestine, the sacs of pus and putrefying organs, a welter of tentacles burst forth. One wrapped around the High King’s arm, the other pinned his leg. A third quested for his neck but he swatted it with his rune hammer before it could strangle him.
    Each of the tentacles was swathed in sharp teeth that champed and gnawed at Snorri’s armour. Slowly, they began to drag the dwarf into Alkhor’s gaping maw.
    Rising in the saddle, Malekith put the bloated lord firmly in his sights – along with Snorri entangled in the daemon’s intestines, losing his fight for survival. Malekith was about to even the odds.
    Digging his feet into the stirrups arrested the elf’s descent and the dragon pulled up sharply, its long neck angling downwards and nostrils flaring. Trails of smoke extruded from the corners of its mouth, carried away on the breeze.
    ‘I hope that armour of yours is impervious as you claim…’
    Inhaling a deep, sulphurous breath, the dragon unleashed fire.
    Flames roared hungrily across the daemon’s wretched body, burning away pestilence and purging rot. Clods of fat, festering slabs of skin sizzled and spat. Alkhor squealed as the