They were easily seven feet tall, with dark pits in their skulls in place of eyes, in the depths of which a dim red fire seemed to flicker. Their mouths were fanged: their leathery yellow hides, the color of rancid butter, seemed armor enough. They each carried a double-bladed axe in one hand, a knife nearly the length of a sword in the other. There were nearly a hundred of them. A fearful murmuring arose from the ranks of Selenay’s forces—a few arrows flew in the direction of the things, but those that connected merely bounced off. As they opened their fanged mouths to roar and began advancing on the center of Selenay’s lines, her own troops fell back a step or two involuntarily.

Then, without warning, one of the demon-warriors stopped dead in its tracks, and let out a howl that caused men to clap their hands to their ears; then it burst into flame.

It howled again, and began staggering in circles, a walking pyre. Selenay’s troops cheered again; then the cheering died, for the rest of the demons were still coming, oblivious to the fate of the burning one, which had fallen to the ground, still afire.

A second and a third ignited—and still they kept coming. They moved fairly slowly, but it was evident that they would reach Selenay’s lines in a few moments.

And so they did—and the slaughter they caused was hideous. The demons waded into the line of fighters as a man might wade into a pack of yipping curs. They swung their heavy axes with deceptive slowness—and sheared through armor and the flesh beneath as if the armor were paper and the flesh as soft as melted cheese. There was no deflecting the blows of those vicious axes; a man in the way of one of them went down with his shield split, and his skull split as well. Incredibly, fighters pressed to replace those that had fallen, but their bravery was useless. The axes continued to swing, and the replacements joined their fellows, either in death or in mangled agony. The Guard swarmed to make a protective wall around Selenay and her commanders, but the demons were inexorably cutting through them. There was blood everywhere—some of it yellow, but precious little compared to the amount of red, human blood flowing. Men cried out in fear or in pain, the monsters roared, and under all was the screech of blade-edge meeting armor and the stink of demon-flesh burning.

Griffon, standing far behind the lines, brow furrowed with concentration, was focusing on yet another of the demons. As it, too, went up in flames, he looked for a new target in despair_ It seemed that he alone could kill these monsters—but there were so many of them!