They had known he was coming. They had prepared.
Then the voice reached them from inside the dome, amplified by an artifact loud enough to shake pebbles loose from the ridge.
"THERE HE IS! The great Primordial Villain himself, gracing my humble walls with his magnificent presence!"
The words slurred. Badly.
A squat figure stood on the highest rampart behind the barrier's shimmer, one hand wrapped around a tankard that was actively sloshing over his gauntlet and the other pressing a rune-etched horn to his lips that turned his voice into a weapon of its own.
He was round in the way dwarves got when centuries of command replaced combat, his belly straining against a breastplate that had clearly been forged for a younger man, and the slouch in his posture suggested he'd been drinking since before the sun cleared the ridge.
"I hear you like the slender sluts, Villain!" The dwarven lord's voice boomed across the slope, crackling with amplified spite.
