Skulvath was an Infernal General who launched an incursion on a Kolonoth border-town in a year the chronicle does not date. Grandex, sent to halt him, found him on the salt-flat outside the town and met him in single combat. The duel ran nine hours. Skulvath was good. He was prepared to take the time. He had, by the seventh hour, made the salt outside the circle crack inward under the weight of the duel.
In the eighth hour he laughed once. The mason Orren, watching from the town wall, never managed to describe the laugh; he said only, in private and only to his wife, that it was the laugh of a man who had just understood, after eight hours of effort, exactly the shape of his own ending — and who had decided, in the breath after understanding, that the shape was acceptable.
In the ninth hour, Grandex struck once. Orren did not see the strike clearly; the air in the circle was, by that hour, more heat than air. He saw only that Skulvath was on the salt afterwards, in two pieces, in the disposition of a soldier who had fallen the way a soldier wishes to fall.
Grandex stood over the body until dusk, through dusk, and through the first watch of the night. Phaeren came down from the ridge — not as an angel but as a courier, in a cloak, with no visible weapon — and persuaded the Archangel that the town's survivors needed Skulvath's body for grief. The town buried him. The chronicle, by Phaeren's discipline, records his fall not as an extermination but as a kindness paid forward at cost.
