The daemon’s gaze focused. In a blink it was drawn back to a story unfinished and a tale untold. Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, was near. A fellow disciple of fate’s dread architect, the god Tzeentch, and a sorcerous champion of darkness, it was he who would find a place in the ranks of the Varanguard – those ushers of the apocalypse, those knights of almighty Chaos selected by the Everchosen to serve the Ruinous Pantheon by his side.
The prince had come far since the Many-Eyed Servant had first seen him. He who had been far was now nearing. He had already faced great trials but he had to be tested anew, for the Everchosen was exacting. Only those of the blackest soul and darkest talents would fight in the company of living doom.
It was for that reason that the Many-Eyed Servant kept his eternal watch. He was Archaon’s terrible gaze cast far across the realms, but here he found an aspirant before their gates.
The Great Spoilage. A rotten wasteland.
Death, as far as the eye could see. Bodies carpeted the land, lying as deep as a lake or shallow sea. Mouldering. Putrefying. Liquefying. Whatever cataclysmic event had been responsible for such devastation was lost to time. Thousands, perhaps millions, had died or been dumped there. Had it been a battle to end all battles? There were plenty of butchered warriors rotting there, but it could just as likely have been a genocidal slaughter, a grand suicide pact or some unnatural disaster that had visited its elemental wrath upon the masses, with corpses raining from the sky.
Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, negotiated the cadavers with difficulty. From the Beaten Path, Zuvius had followed the crows. He had followed them as they moved from battlefield to common butchery. He had followed them as they feasted upon lone travellers and slaughtered armies alike. He had followed them to the Great Spoilage, where it seemed every other crow in the realms was enjoying a scavenger’s bounty.
Like harsh, hilly terrain or the crests of powerful waves, the Great Spoilage was an undulating landscape of cankered flesh and bone. Ribs gave, soiled cloth tore and rotting meat turned to maggot-choked, watery mush about Zuvius’ boots. However, while the land reeked of death, the place was very much alive. Blankets of fat flies smothered the sea of carcasses, filling both the ear and mind with their incessant drone. Rats swarmed through the dead, gnawing, tunnelling and expanding their rancid nests. Crows feasted on both flesh and flies, hopping, swooping and wheeling about Zuvius and his warband as the Tzeentchians made their way across the corpselands. So great was the plague of carrion birds that they blacked out the horizon ahead. Larger pot-bellied scavengers scrambled up and down the fleshmounds, tearing yellowing flesh from bodies and crunching the marrow from bones.
Zuvius held the ragged edge of his cloak over his mouth. The web of melted skin that stretched across the rawness of his scorched face squirmed with revulsion. This place was undoubtedly sacred to the Great Lord of Decay. Its stench saturated the blue straggles of the prince’s hair. Its rank taste was on his smeared lips and silver tongue. Zuvius detested it but in truth could think of no more suitable test or obstacle to place between a servant of the Great Changer and his goal than an expanse of stagnant rot.
The bird Mallofax circled their progress, riding on the rising stench, watching for potential threats. The warband had come across few. Small nests of ghouls picked over the bounty in places, while nomadic looters crossed the corpselands, neither interested in Orphaeo Zuvius or where he was headed. Even Zuvius had doubts about that. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos and Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse, had called for him. Zuvius had followed the signs, followed the crows, but they had led him to a carrion paradise, a mouldering land of dead flesh that undoubtedly attracted every bird in the realm.
Behind the Prince of Embers, Sir Abriel followed. The groaning knight had once been the captain of the royal guard. What remained of that band was now the Hexenguard. They trudged through the spoilage in silence, dark knights of Tzeentch whose plate glowed with enchantments. In their footsteps followed the Unseeing – Zuvius’ coven of blind sorcerers. The wretches staggered and tripped through the dead, one gnarled hand laid upon the shoulder of the sorcerer in front. They looked ancient and helpless, but their appearance belied their true power. With a gesture, the sorcerers could re-craft the flesh of nearby foes into representations of their twisted visions.
Using the sorcerous glaive A’cuitas to cut a path, Zuvius waded through the morass of breaking bones and sloughing flesh. Hauling himself up onto the corpse of a festering gargant, the prince knelt and rested, putting the raw skin of his forehead against his weapon’s haft. As Sir Abriel, the Hexenguard and Zuvius’ wretch-sorcerers climbed up onto the monstrous cadaver beside him, Mallofax returned, perching on the bill-hook of the glaive’s crowning blade.
Zuvius tapped the pommel of the glaive on the gargant’s hide. It was hard, waxy and mummified. Fungi bloomed across the giant carcass. Looking out across the corpse mounds, the prince watched as crows spooked by other scavengers took to the skies, wheeling about in rancid formations before settling once more. He tried to catch his breath but it was difficult. Every lungful of air was concentrated corruption that closed the throat and heaved the stomach. Mallofax flapped. The Hexenguard stood like warped, knightly statues. The Unseeing broke up and spread out across the gargant’s chest, feeling their way across jutting bone.
‘The Varanspire,’ Zuvius said. ‘Where is the damned thing?’
‘Everywhere and nowhere, my prince,’ the reptilian bird told him in a series of hisses and squawks. ‘It exists in the Realm of Chaos. It is here but also there. Near but impossibly far.’
‘Enough with the riddles,’ Zuvius warned.
‘I speak only truth,’ Mallofax said.
‘Well, you’re bad at it,’ Zuvius told him. ‘You should stick to lies, they’re more convincing. I’m beginning to think that we are going to end up the same way as these miserable souls.’
‘My lord?’
‘Perhaps they all set out for this palace of Chaos,’ Zuvius mused, ‘and died on the journ–’
Zuvius felt a quake through the soles of his armoured boots.
‘What is it?’ Mallofax squawked.
Zuvius stood, looking down at the yellowing flesh of the gargant. The quake turned into a series of thrashing tremors that shook the colossal carcass. The Unseeing froze while Sir Abriel and his malformed knights drew the notched blades of their longswords. In front of them, a sorcerer of the Unseeing suddenly disappeared. One moment he stood there in his rag-robes, the next he had been swallowed by the cadaver.
Disappearing into a pit of chewed flesh, the sorcerer screamed his way to death. The gargant’s corpse bucked as a terrible creature erupted from it. Feeding quietly on the underside of the great carcass, a horrific maggoth had smelled their freshness. Chewing up through the rot with the shredding teeth of its maw, the thing erupted from the gargant like a monster of the deep. Its arms and legs were but stunted remnants used to propel it through the dead, and its skin was sticky with spoilage. It held there for a moment before blasting a stream of half-digested rot back at the sky.
As Mallofax took off, Sir Abriel and the Hexenguard came forward with swords presented to protect their master. The maggoth went under once more, wriggling itself loose of the carcass. The Unseeing grasped for one another while the Hexenguard pulled Zuvius back from where the giant corpse met the sea of bodies. Cadavers twitched and death-stiff limbs moved as the monstrous maggoth swam and ate its way through the corpses. Zuvius turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets and pursed his lips in disgust. Not only did the prince have to wade through the Great Lord of Decay’s detritus, he now had to suffer the attentions of some Nurglesque monstrosity stalking them through the killing fields.
Zuvius felt the cadaver buck beneath them again as the maggoth rose once more. Chewing up through the body, it exploded from the gargant king’s gut. Another sorcerer of the Unseeing fell back into the pit o
f shearing teeth and rotting mulch. As he instinctively reached out, a member of the Hexenguard grabbed for him.
‘No!’ Zuvius called.
As the sorcerer thrust out his hand blindly, the tattooed symbols on his bony palm burned with fear. The Hexenguard knight, already a twisted, god-pleasing thing, clutched his chest, his screams joining the sorcerer’s own. His plate screeched as he began to contort and change shape, becoming the frightful vision of terror that flashed through the sorcerer’s mind during his last moments.
Toppling forward, the monstrosity knocked into another member of the Hexenguard. The knight slipped, his armoured boots scrabbling down the pit of rotting flesh. His dark blue steel sword bounced behind him, down into the maggoth’s great trap of teeth. Zuvius lunged and grabbed the knight by the arms. Surging once more, the maggoth clamped its obscene jaws about the knight and thrashed its teeth. Cutting the warrior of Chaos almost in half, the creature tugged, dragging Zuvius over the ragged lip of the pit. Sir Abriel reached for his master. Zuvius scrambled away from the great maggoth but his boots and gauntlets slipped through the slime of the gargant’s entrails.
The Unseeing moaned in their blindness. Mallofax squawked overhead. Zuvius kicked and turned, freeing himself of Sir Abriel’s ghoulish grip. The maggoth’s jaws gaped open and a black pool of digestive rot rose up from within. A warty tongue shot out of the pool like a serpent, wrapping itself around the prince’s leg. As Zuvius kicked and slid towards his doom, the muscular tongue retracted, hauling him to the edge of the maggoth’s fang-lined jaws.
From above, Zuvius heard Mallofax’s half-stifled squawk. The bird was flapping his wings with effort, trying to stay above the cadaverous pit while clutching the metal shaft of A’cuitas in his scaly talons. As the weapon dropped, Zuvius watched the glaive tumble blade over pommel. Both the prince and his weapon were heading for the same place – the maggoth’s foetid mouth.
Zuvius snatched the daemon-forged glaive out of the rank air. Spinning the weapon around, he cut through the monster’s scabrous tongue with one sweep of the heavy blade. It did not stop the beast. Turning A’cuitas about, he aimed the pommel of the weapon down the creature’s cavernous throat. The eye at the end of the glaive’s shaft opened and a stream of lightning leapt from the weapon. Lighting up the darkness of the doom within, the lightning caused the maggoth to retract, tremble, boil, and finally explode.
Zuvius held his position through the black tempest of rot that erupted about him. As a putrescent mist drifted back down, Zuvius used the glaive to climb out of the gargant-corpse’s abdomen. Reaching down, Sir Abriel hauled his master up. With the exception of Mallofax, who circled above, the whole warband dripped with stinking corruption.
‘We are being tested,’ Zuvius said through gritted teeth. Spitting rot from his lips, he once more descended into the sea of the dead and set forth, leading the warband onwards.
‘Where is it?’ the Prince of Embers demanded. They had been walking for days, the rankness of rot and death coating them like a blanket. There had been no sign of the dark citadel that Zuvius had seen in his vision or the gateway leading to it. The Great Spoilage seemed to extend forever, in all directions. The flocks of crows blacked out the sky, the cacophony of their incessant cawing an invitation to insanity.
‘We shall find it, my lord,’ Mallofax assured him.
‘Will we indeed?’ Zuvius roared. ‘Will that be before or after we join the fallen at our feet?’
He turned A’cuitas on the bird, whose cryptic explanations were almost as infuriating as the endless horizon of crow-pecked corpses, and unleashed a blast of lightning that arced across the mouldering landscape and scalded the stench about it. Narrowly missing Mallofax, the stream of energy sent the bird flapping and squawking for the safety of the sky.
He wasn’t the only one. Disturbed by the sudden crack of lightning, the crows carpeting the wasteland ahead of the warband took to the air in a storm of black feathers. As the flock lifted and cleared the path before the Prince of Embers, a fortress was revealed. The colossal castle reached into the skies with clawed turrets, citadels and towers of brick and blade. It was an abominate construction, its concentric walls an unbreachable barrier of dark stone and iron, each more towering than the last. They surrounded a central spire that pierced the heavens and resembled a spiked gauntlet punching victoriously at the sky.
The infernal architecture of the place was as disturbing as it was impressive, a fortress-shrine to Chaos, blasphemous in sculpture and indomitable in design. Its very presence brought forth storms that tore the sky asunder. Daemonic furies perched amongst the spires and circled in furious unnatural squalls. Elevated walkways of blood-stained stone spanned the fields of perpetual flame that raged about the castle and its moat, while its gargantuan gates were lined with monstrous metal teeth.
‘The Varanspire,’ the Prince of Embers said.
‘What else could it be?’ Mallofax agreed, coming in to land on his master’s glaive.
‘Let’s find out,’ Zuvius said.
The corpselands, though they had sapped the vigour of the warband with their stench, their marshy putrefaction and their bone traps, were now nothing to the Tzeentchians. Every crunching, squelching, spore-cloud-disturbing step took them closer to the dark majesty of the Varanspire – the fortress of Archaon, the Destroyer of Worlds.
As the cadavers began to thin and Zuvius’ boots found the blasted black grit of the solid ground that lay beyond the corpse marshes, the prince noticed other groups moving towards the fortress. Some were armoured and rode on horseback, while others moved in great barbarian hordes. Champions of Chaos and their doomed followers. The Blood God’s butchers. Slaaneshi deviants. Other sorcerers of Tzeentch, and the diseased of the Great Lord of Decay. He shouldn’t have been surprised at the sight, and yet he was. These were other warriors who had fought their way to this dark place from across the Mortal Realms, intent on impressing unholy Archaon with their dark talents and commitment.
Grit became shattered stone and shattered stone the blood-polished marble of an elevated walkway. It trembled with the killing taking place there. Zuvius became part of the madness. Perhaps it was the infectious doom of the place, or perhaps it was the collective insanity of ruinous champions who had fought through so much to be there. In reality, Zuvius knew that the servants of the Chaos pantheon did not really need a reason to fight. Like territorial predators, it was in their nature to kill their competition. Through such unnatural selection did the forces of ruin grow ever more powerful. The weak were sacrificed for the Chaos Gods on the dark altar of the strong.
Warriors of Chaos threw themselves at the prince and his warband. Battle cries and all manner of damned weaponry cut through the air. It was a bloody free-for-all, an unspoken quest to be the last champion standing on the bridge. Zuvius became one with the slaughter. He needed no invitation. With his Hexenguard fighting behind him and the sorcerers of the Unseeing casting nearby champions into horrific new forms, Zuvius fought his way across the bridge. In the shadow of the Varanspire and with, he hoped, the gaze of the Three-Eyed King upon him, Zuvius killed for his new master, for his place in the ranks of the Varanguard. For the Everchosen’s entertainment and for his own murderous whim.
Zuvius moved through the dread butchery. Khornate savages jangled with teeth and skulls while swinging serrated axe blades at sorcerers who smouldered with unnatural powers. Slaaneshi hedonists gutted Nurgle’s children, who were already one with their own agonies. The diseased, in turn, seemed desperate to spread their suffering to all. The greatest hostility seemed to erupt between champions of the same patron. Blood knights on horseback hacked their way through barbarian hordes pledged to Khorne, while the witchbreeds and warriors of the Great Changer couldn’t take their eyes off one another for fear of the treachery they all too well knew existed in the hearts of their compatriots. Mouthing dark enchantments and blasting Tzeentchian flame at on
e another, they created a spectacular firestorm of mutually assured death and damnation. No champion of Chaos wished to show their weakness before Archaon and his monstrous shrine-fortress, especially not the Prince of Embers.
Zuvius stabbed and skewered servants of the Dark Prince, who moaned their ecstasies while impaled on the daemon-forged weapon. The infected spilled pus and entrails before his boots. Monstrous knights in bone-lined armour stained their plate with their own gore as Zuvius passed his heavy blade through their throats. He stove in the skulls of warrior-enchanters like himself before the cursed incantations that resided there could reach blue Tzeentchian lips.
As Zuvius fought up the walkway, with unnatural flame roaring about him from the broad, infernal moat, he noticed the daemonic furies thunderbolting from the sky. Bringing their leathery wings in close, the fiends snatched warriors from the many walkways leading up to the great iron gates and portcullises of the castle. Tearing horses apart and tossing the remains of Chaos warriors between them like rag dolls, the flocks of furies seem to delight in their sport. Champions screamed as they were dropped from the storm-wracked skies and knocked into the roaring inferno that surrounded the Varanspire.
As the warriors of Chaos killed each other, the daemons thinned out their number, further, protecting the Varanspire from those who would threaten it. Zuvius tried to remain calm as the champions he was fighting were torn from the walkway about him and savaged by the flying monsters. A ragged fury landed on one of the Hexenguard and proceeded to snap his head from his shoulders and feast on his warped flesh. Zuvius heard Sir Abriel issue the low groan of an order. The Hexenguard brought up their battered shields.
Age of Sigmar: Call of Archaon Page 17
