Primordials.
Ragnar didn't know the word applied to the man on all fours. He didn't know what Quinlan Elysiar was. But his cells knew. His blood knew. Every strand of dwarven ancestry coiled inside his body knew, because the terror of primordials was not something the mortal races had learned. It was something they were born with, written into the species the way a rabbit was born knowing the shadow of a hawk, and the dwarves had buried it deeper than anyone because the dwarves had been the ones hiding the longest.
The ancient legends spoke of beings that shattered armies and reshaped continents. Most scholars dismissed them as mythology because no living creature could do what the old texts described.
He had just rejected the concept of enslavement from a fractured skull on empty reserves and cooked a king alive in his own plate, and the legends suddenly felt like understatements.
But then, just as quickly as it came, Ragnar buried the feeling.
"Kill him. Now!"
