The Furnace Knight raised his blade, in prayer, in salute. "The fire burns still," he says simply, quietly.

Not much of a monologue but enough to get him shot in the mouth by Deather. The Furnace Knight smiles as the coldbeam clears, lips blue and microcuts visible around his mouth. For a moment it seems like he could not be happier.

*

The star Salib rumbles. At this moment it lets loose a colossal gout of violet plasma, a solar flare that changes light itself all across the system.

*

It's incomprehensible, the way the Furnace Knight moves. 

There will be time enough to examine it later, to contemplate the gravitic singularities that his divine spellcasting generates. His technique creates concentrations of gravity so powerful they bend light and time both. Around them he wraps, stretching to a hundred times his length, seeming to fill the entire room as an endless oroboros, a snake whose jaws unhinge to eat the world. 

The effect collapses and he is amidst the liches, in the centre of their formation. 

The sword is everywhere. The blows are crashing down again and again as he pivots from stance to stance, offense to offense, crash and sweep and spell all coming together so fast and unstoppable it feels like being on the wrong end of a turn based RPG. His sword flawlessly passes between all four hands and any hand not swinging it is either casting or countering a spell. Micro-gravitic singularities erupt around him like flowers, dragging opponents into his blows or shoving their aim aside. The [i]Law of Kings[/i] - the blade's name is carved upon it - blazes with divine fire, a rainbow of blue.

(Above there is the crack of thunder - Unlucky glances up to see Boldness in the railings high above, having aimed a strange wooden rifle down at something in the chaos below and fired a shot that wafts like ozone. She's turning her aim towards the Furnace Knight when, offhandedly, he hurls a metal sphere at her that hits her shoulder at such speed it shatters her arm and sends her falling to the ground below)

And then come his allies. These are not champions with the expertise of the Aotrs High Command, these are not a host of legendary paladins - these are berserkers. A host of the wolf-warriors, each wearing blindfolds glowing with runes of blue, stripped to the waist, charging furiously with fang and talon and monstrous strength. The shock of their charge is impossible to stop: they wear divine wards that defer all consequences they are to suffer until after the battle is done, at which point they will drop dead. They surge into the opening created by the Furnace Knight and, heedless for their own safety, seek to overwhelm the High Command.

And as the battle breaks out behind him, the Furnace Knight has a few precious moments alone with Lord Death Despoil. He smiles still through bloody lips. Painted eyes sparkle with a boyish kind of joy. It's infectious, maddeningly infectious, an enormously powerful psychic compulsion to leave aside spell and strategy and fight this impossible monster hand to hand with a sword. 

Scales coil beneath him, tensing like a spring. He is ready if you do not.