The silence that followed the summoning lasted exactly three seconds.
Marcus stood over the headless goblin and stared at the knight kneeling before him, taking in the armor etched with marks that seemed to shift when you weren't looking directly at them, the sword still dripping green, the visor that revealed nothing and somehow still managed to feel like eyes were behind it.
Something about this felt familiar in a way he couldn't name.
"You're the same as me," Marcus muttered. Not a question. Just something that came out before he decided to say it.
The knight's stared vigorously .
"What's your name."
A pause. Then the voice like grinding stone came again, slower this time, like something being remembered rather than spoken.
"Malachar. The Crimson Titan." Another beat. "He who conquered seven realms and was cast aside by the eighth." The visor turned upward and found Marcus's face. "Your command is my duty, Master."
Marcus looked at him for a moment longer. Then the corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. Just enough.
"Good." He turned toward the field where three of the four remaining creatures were still tearing through what was left of the defenders. The fourth had spotted Marcus and was already moving toward him, unhurried, grinning with too many teeth. "Help me take care of our friends here."
Malachar rose.
And every person still standing in that village stopped what they were doing.
The mage who had been preparing a fireball let it die in his palms. Two fighters who had been back to back against a creature both turned at the same time without coordinating it. Even the creatures paused, some animal instinct overriding whatever passed for thought in them, heads swinging toward the thing that had just stood up and was now rolling its neck with the patience of something that had fought larger wars than this on days it considered quiet.
Someone in the crowd breathed the word summoner like it was either a prayer or a curse and wasn't sure which.
Liz pulled herself upright from the splintered wall she'd crashed into, one hand pressed to her ribs, blinking through the dust. She looked at Marcus standing in the center of the field with an armored giant beside him and something crossed her face that she quickly rearranged into something more neutral.
She squinted. Tilted her head slightly.
"Maybe," she whispered to nobody, "it might be him."
She didn't say who him was. But she kept watching.
Malachar turned to face the remaining creatures and when he spoke his voice carried across the entire field without him raising it even slightly.
"I have ended kings. You are not even worthy of being remembered."
Then he moved.
For something that size the speed was unreasonable. He crossed the distance to the nearest creature before it could swing the tree trunk it was carrying and took the arm holding it off at the shoulder in one clean motion. The creature dropped. He was already past it. The second one swung a massive axe at his midsection and he caught the handle, stopped it dead, and looked at the creature holding it the way a person looks at something mildly inconvenient. He headbutted it.
The creature went down and didn't get back up.
The third tried to run.
It made it four steps.
The field went quiet except for the sound of Malachar's boots on the torn earth as he turned toward the leader.
The goblin commander had not moved from where he'd been standing at the tree line. He'd watched his four strongest fall in under two minutes and his expression had gone through several things and settled on something that looked almost like amusement, which made him more dangerous than he'd seemed before.
He rose to his full height and drew that massive sword off his shoulder and pointed it at Malachar.
"I have burned cities and salted the ground after." His voice carried the easy confidence of something that had never lost anything it cared about keeping. "You are the first interesting thing I've seen in months, dead thing. Come and show me if you're worth the time."
Malachar walked toward him without answering.
What followed was not clean. The leader was fast and experienced and his sword had clearly tasted enough blood to know what it was doing. He opened a cut across Malachar's chestplate in the first exchange and laughed when he saw it land. Malachar absorbed it and kept coming. The leader hit him twice more, big heavy strikes that would have ended anything else, and Malachar took both and kept walking forward with the relentless patience of something that had already decided how this ended.
The leader's laugh faded somewhere around the fourth exchange.
He started moving backward.
Malachar gave him no room. He pushed forward with a combination that the leader barely blocked and then barely blocked again and then didn't block at all, and the leader's sword left his hand and spun into the dirt and Malachar's blade was at his throat before he finished tracking where it had gone.
Silence.
The leader breathed hard through his nose and looked down the length of the sword at Malachar and then past him to Marcus, who had not moved from where he'd been standing the entire time.
"Summoner," the leader said. Something in his voice had changed. "You have no idea what you've stepped into."
Marcus said nothing. He was already filing the words away for later.
The leader dropped.
Malachar straightened and turned. He walked back across the field toward Marcus and the people parted around him the way water moves around something inevitable. He stopped in front of Marcus and for a moment they simply looked at each other, the summoner and the thing he'd called from wherever such things were kept.
Then Malachar began to come apart.
Not violently, just quietly, the armor losing its edges first, the shape of him becoming suggestion rather than substance, shadow and dust pulling apart in the still air. His sword dissolved last.
Marcus watched until there was nothing left to watch.
Then the ground came up to meet him.
He didn't feel himself fall. One moment he was standing and the next the dirt was against his cheek and the sounds of the field were very far away, and the last thing that passed through his head before everything went dark was a name.
"Malachar".