‘What do you think you are doing?’ the grand inquisitori barked at them. As he stared about in righteous incredulity, the witchfinders and interrogators crafted swift nooses from their belts. The grand inquisitori was out of his seat, his beard shaking and his eyes screwed up with rage. ‘Stop this madness at once. The Avenger compels you.’ He turned back to the priest standing at the ladder. Within the darkness of the interloper’s hood, the inquisitori could make out the pin-prick glow of eyes ancient and burning like the embers of eternity. The priest hadn’t realised that he had soiled himself. A pool of urine was gathering on the filthy dungeon floor about him. ‘Guards! Guards!’ he roared. Above he could hear the clink of the plate, helms and halberds of the Reman Republican Guard.
The interloper looked up through the open trapdoor entrance. Something like a momentary storm passed through the chamber above, the influence of the sudden tempest felt on Necrodomo’s apocalyptic pamphlets, which were blown from the table. The screams were brief. With the interloper still staring through the dungeon opening, it began to rain blood. The Republican Guard gaolers were now nothing but a cruel drizzle drifting, dripping and dribbling from the trapdoor entrance. The interloper allowed the downpour to blotch his robes to a gory crimson. As his ghastly gaze returned to the grand inquisitori, the trapdoor slammed shut and thundered with heavy chains securing the dungeon entrance.
The robed thing moved across the chamber with the dread purpose of something unreal. As it passed them the servants of Solkan dropped from stools and improvised furniture to dance a spasmodic jig from their belt-nooses and the rings set in the dungeon ceiling. The interloper drifted through the forest of hanging priests.
‘Sit,’ it commanded.
The grand inquisitori wailed as his knees gave way, causing him to fall back into his interrogator’s throne.
The interloper moved towards the throne like an ancient evil. It pulled back its hood, revealing the full, unspeakable horror of its daemonic visage to the chamber. The robes fell like a fearful whisper from its barbed unflesh. It grew with each flagstone-pulverising step of its taloned feet, twisted bones blooming with muscle that ruptured into existence about them, lending the beast a glorious brawn and sinew. It dragged a serpentine tail, shot through with spikes, behind its infernal form, while both the daemon-crown of horns warping their way out of its head and the thumb-claws erupting from the dreadful magnificence of its wings, scraped the dungeon ceiling.
Like a nightmare, it lowered its sight-curdling skull and moved up behind the interrogator’s throne. Necrodomo, still clamped between the bar and crown-cap of the torture device, had no eyes with which to behold the beast. The grand inquisitori found, with his heart in the grasp of terror, cold, dark and despair, that he could not move. As the daemon brought its unseen face forward, both the venerable priest and the prognosticator found their cheeks bathed in the radiance of infernal royalty. A princely power of hellish birthright; a creature of unimaginable darkness; horror incarnate.
The grand inquisitori felt the thing touch him. At once all that had remained pure and noble in the man shrivelled within his soul. Darkness blossomed within the priest. Every ill-deed committed in the service of selfish weakness and temptation grew through his being like a rampant cancer. His eyes turned to inky twilight as his face became a cadaverous mask of ghoulish anticipation. The daemon clasped the grand inquisitori’s head in its claws.
‘You search for darkness in wretched madmen,’ the daemon prince whispered to the venerable priest – every word falling on the afflicted ancient with the force of a furnace, ‘when you should have been searching for it within your own ranks. No matter… You are mine now and have no need for this vessel of flesh. Before I take your soul, there is something you should know, priest. A gift for the journey you are about to take.’ The daemon leant in closer. ‘Your. God. Is. A. Lie.’ With that, the daemon prince crushed the grand inquisitori’s skull between its claws with effortless ease.
Slashing both the headless body and the back of the throne from the seat with a swoosh of its serpent tail, the daemon prince took a seat before Necrodomo. Necrodomo the foreteller. Necrodomo the reader of futures dark. Necrodomo the Insane. The thing drummed its talons across the desk, prompting the torturous contraption known as the Cracker to rust to disintegration about the blind prisoner’s head. Necrodomo pulled away immediately. The prognosticator was out of his mind with pain, but something spiritual and instinctive told him that he was in the presence of a dangerous evil. He felt fear without sight. Dread without sanity. Being contorted within the vice for so long, Necrodomo found that his legs no longer supported him. Crashing to the filthy floor he scrabbled away from the daemon prince like an animal until he felt his back against the cold stone of the dungeon wall.
‘Do not fear me,’ the beast told him. ‘I am your saviour – as you are mine. My name, for all it matters to you madman, is Be’lakor.’ The monster allowed the ‘r’ of its name to hang like a forlorn echo. ‘I am known by many titles: the Harbinger, the Herald and the Bearer. To the northmen, I am the Shadowlord. In the Empire and the civilised lands of the south, I am the Dark Master. To you, mortal, I am simply Master.’
Necrodomo curled up in agony. He was rocking, shaking and whimpering.
‘You are Necrodomo. Though your heretic name shall be whispered in the shadows, your work shall echo through eternity.’
Be’lakor looked down on the pamphlets decorating the desk. ‘I am an appreciator of your work – charlatan or not. Now I wish to become facilitator. Your masterpiece is yet to be written.’
The beast laid its claw on the empty tome intended for the prognosticator’s confession. Under the touch of its talons, the leather of the cover moaned and warped to a gruesome ghastliness. Its spine became as barbed bone and the bronze lock-clasps holding its pages closed melted into sets of jaws that snapped open. The cover smoked as hellfire scorched fresh lettering into the leather. As the tome writhed to stillness and Be’lakor removed his talon, the words LIBER CAELESTIOR afflicted the cover in the dark tongue of his Ruinous masters, accompanied by the name BATTISTA GASPAR NECRODOMO.
‘We shall wield your prophecies like a weapon,’ the Dark Master told him. ‘We shall make history together, you and I. We shall unite the gods and harness war, famine and plague in honour of a champion of ultimate darkness. We shall craft through destiny, a warrior worthy of the challenges to come. Worthy to bear the blessing of each of my Ruinous masters in equal measure and be called Everchosen of Chaos. He will be the key, as I am the keeper of the coming apocalypse. Between us, we shall herald the coming of the End Times – the doom you spoke of, my friend. Rejoice soothsayer. They are coming. When we do… when I have no more need of your words or his deeds, I shall assume the Everchosen’s flesh in true coronation. The flesh your prophecies shall exalt to the status of legend – and I shall take my rightful place as Lord of the End Times. Once more the world will be mine to plunge into darkness and ruin.’
Necrodomo groaned and shrieked. If the pain of torture hadn’t driven him into the embrace of insanity, then the daemon prince’s words had. He was gone – a willing host to oblivion that, like a leech, sapped him of the last of his mental strength. The prognosticator moaned insensibilities. He laughed at his agonies and shrieked at nothing. Necrodomo let go and Be’lakor let him.
‘No matter,’ the daemon prince said to the madman. He opened the tome to its first blank page and selecting a quill, dipped it into the ink on the table. ‘I will assist you. I will transcribe. I have a name already. The name I shall bequeath my champion. The name I shall eventually take, with the body of the Everchosen I shall possess and assume. A name of your southern tongue, prognosticator, honouring both the ancient I have been and the eternity I have yet to become. We shall be known as… Archaon.’
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