As he passed over, Aenarion saw mighty banners fluttering over enormous moving towers. Each bore the sign of the greater daemons who were the generals and champions of the besieging force. Even in the shadow of the gigantic spell Caledor was weaving, Aenarion sensed the power of these deadly creatures. They were the mightiest of their kind, hardened by millennia of constant warfare in the hells they came from. Normally they would have been the deadliest of enemies, but on this day, in this place, they seemed to have managed a truce in order to crush the one threat remaining to their domination of this world.
The dragons swooped and slew like great birds of prey. Hills of smouldering corpses rose on the way to the temple but it did not matter. No matter how many they killed more came on, rushing forwards to inevitable death as to the embrace of a lover. Now the dragonfire began to weaken as the dragons reached the end of their resources. Flocks of winged daemons surrounded individual dragons and smashed them from the skies.
They could not prevent the great horde reaching the outer defences of the temple and engaging the thin lines of desperate elf soldiers waiting there.
A terrible wave of agony and terror rippled out from the temple. For a moment, the huge spell at the centre of it trembled and threatened to collapse. Aenarion swooped lower and saw that one of the archmages had fallen along with all the apprentices who had been linked to him. The power of the spell had burned the life out of him. The whole mighty edifice Caledor was creating threatened to collapse like a palace hit by an earthquake.
Somehow the mage at the centre of it all managed to stave off the disaster and continue. The structure of the spell stabilised and the ritual went on. Aenarion was not sure how much longer it could endure.
How many of the archmages could die before Caledor was unable to constrain the forces he had unleashed and destruction rained down on them all? For better or worse, Aenarion thought, it would all be over soon.
Four gigantic forms made their way to the temple, each surrounded by a bodyguard of potent worshippers. The greater daemons who led the Chaos horde were vying to see which would be the first to reach Caledor and end the threat he posed. The greatest enemies of all wanted to be in at the kill.
Ahead of them the first wave to reach the walls of the temple looked as if they were about to break through and interrupt the ritual. If they were not stopped, they would succeed.
He dropped Indraugnir into the middle of the melee. They landed on top of a massive self-moving siege engine within which the living essence of a dozen daemons was bound. The dragon took the great battering ram in his claws and beat skyward, lifting it and sending it toppling backwards to crush a hundred foes beneath its weight. It lay there broken, like a beetle turned on its back. Indraugnir smashed into the press of bodies, tearing foes asunder with his claws, searing them with his fiery breath, snapping twisted Chaos monsters in half with his jaws.
A group of elf soldiers tried to fight their way towards the embattled Phoenix King but died before they could reach him, overwhelmed by the sheer number of their foes. Aenarion leapt from Indraugnir’s back, like a swimmer diving into a sea of monstrous flesh. His blade flickered faster than mortal eyes could follow, smashing through the bodies of his enemies as if they were made from matchwood. A beastman leapt at him, jaws snapping; he caught it in the air one handed, and sent it flying a hundred yards with a flick of his arm. It cartwheeled through the air to splatter against the walls of the shrine.
Aenarion cleaved through his opponents, killing everything within reach, his blade sending pulses of black light over the battlefield, the red runes glowing ever stronger as it drank life. His enemies died in their hundreds and then their thousands. Nothing could stand against him, and seeing his unleashed wrath his foes turned to flee.
For a moment, Aenarion thought he had turned the battle but then the air in front of him shimmered and a hole appeared in the fabric of reality. A figure of horror emerged, towering twice as high as any beastman, monstrous wings snapping on