by Rob Sanders
Hieronymous Dagobert did as he was bade by his master. As the warband passed over the very spine of the world, the damned tome told Dagobert of death from the skies in the form of a flock of harpies, nesting in the north-eastern slopes, and the manflesh they intended to regurgitate for their screeching, cliff-bound young. It did not tell of the Skewered Skull hobgoblin clan that bounded out of the foothills of the Dark Lands at them on long-legged war mongrels. The foothills formed part of their slave grounds. Attempting to catch and imprison Archaon was more foolish than trying to kill him, however, as the hobgoblin half-khan and his clan discovered too late. The warband decimated the clan to the very last rider and gangling, lupine steed, wiping the Skewered Skull clan and its ruling khanate from the face of the Dark Lands forever.
Leaving the slave grounds for some other foetid breed of greenskin to assume, Dagobert steered Archaon from the different types of doom to be found at the fortress of Uzkulak with Hashut, Father of Darkness, and the contested dwarf stronghold of Karak Dum. The Liber Caelestior also suggested that the infamous Road of Skulls held nothing but foes unworthy of Archaon’s blade and led out onto the Eastern Steppes, where men went mad for want of landmarks on the endless expanse of the horizon. So at Dagobert’s word the warband braved the treacheries of the Shattered Shore, where land and ice were indistinguishable and the world looked as though it had been smashed by the fist of an angry god.
It was here, in the howling desolation of a desert of ice that Archaon began to truly feel as though he were drawing nearer to his goal. Here on the edge of doom, where the gloomy heavens were like no other and where the seas sat frozen and unnatural, he found a kind of peace. He discovered that the buzz of insanity on the air soothed the ever-present pain in his ruined eye. That the petty concerns of the Empire and its bordering nations were long behind him and that the world was opening up before him. The scale of the place was heart-stopping. On one side, a range of frost-shattered peaks reached into the heavens as though they owned them, with the frost-shattered cragginess of splintered obsidian. On the other, searing depths plummeted below a covering of broken bergs in a darkness that threatened to swallow the world. Between them, Archaon had only a sky in mourning and the ice-riven shore. He could feel the black heart of the lands beating beneath his boots, calling him on with every distant quake. Despite standing in a land barren and lifeless, the Chaos warrior had never felt such life. Such will. Such possibility. It lifted the darkness of his spirit and put him in a murder-happy mood.
‘Tell me again, priest,’ Archaon called through the freeze. The air almost shattered about his words. Dagobert was seated up front in the wagon, buried in a nest of thick, lice-infested furs. Giselle drove the wagon. She would rather have spat on Archaon or Dagobert than accept a kindness from either of them, but with the air around able to freeze the blood in her veins, the Sister of the Imperial Cross had no option but to take the offer of furs for her own trembling body. ‘Tell me how I might achieve an end to eternity,’ Archaon said with a laugh that echoed about the face-scalding wasteland of white. ‘How might a mortal man end a world?’
Dagobert cleared his throat. Calling through the frost-threaded air was an effort.
‘With a nature indomitable,’ the priest said, ‘like the land, at one with its savage calling. With a heart’s desire deeper than the ocean depths. With steel, cold and true, my lord.’ With every passing day, Hieronymous Dagobert read more of Necrodomo the Insane’s twisted prophecies and with every day the priest sounded more like him. ‘To earn the honour of ender of worlds, Lord Archaon, you must offer yourself as a weapon to be wielded by the very powers that would test you. You must become the Everchosen of the great gods of darkness. You must become an acolyte of the Waste’s insanities, a disciple of the Ruinous Star like there has never been and doom to all who cross your path.’
Archaon thought on the warriors he was to meet. The warbands who had made the trek north like his own. The madmen who deceived themselves into the belief that they were worthy of ancient evil and its infernal sponsorship. The Chaos warrior smiled to himself. It almost cracked his frozen face. He felt a kind of savage pity for such victims of fate. Their journeys, their trials, their lives had all been in vain – for they were yet to meet their end. Their end had a name – and it was Archaon.
‘They will join me or die,’ Archaon spat, his words misting on the razored air. ‘Tell me more, priest. For I long to hear of my saga again.’
‘Words,’ Dagobert said. ‘Just words. Any fool can tell a story.’
‘Then there is no better choice for my own,’ Archaon replied harshly, ‘than you.’
‘Words are nothing without action,’ Dagobert said. ‘Words are but fantasy to the reality of the blade plunged through the heart or passed across the throat. You will have to kill more men alone than entire armies leave behind them on the battlefield, than the lives taken by sea and storm and the victims claimed by pox and plague. And that, just to get the attention of the dread pantheon.’
‘I have their attention already,’ the dark templar proclaimed. ‘I am Archaon. Past and future ring with my name. I have been selected by fate and will soon be Everchosen of the Ruinous Powers. They want sacrifices. They shall have them. I’m no blood-blind barbarian. This is no madness or malaise. I’m no pawn to be played and I enjoy not what I do. Men will die because they have to. Because they stand between me and my destiny. These monstrous powers shall have the souls they demand…’ The wind rose to howl about the warband and the wagon, dusting them with ice. ‘Yes, you hear me you calamitous monsters. I will be your weapon – but no more than the sword or spear issued to the soldier of state in prosecution of his duties. I am no more your instrument in the great unknown workings of the world than you are mine. You desire the doom of men, which with your assistance, I can deliver. The gods need a champion no less than the champion needs their blessing. I will be the Everchosen of Chaos not because I beg for it. I will not utter a word in entreaty – I will be chosen as the champion of the Ruinous Star, bearing the favour of all darkness, because darkness will not have a choice in my choosing. Only I will succeed where others have failed. Only I will bring an end to all and plunge the world of men into a futureless abyss.’
‘Master, please,’ Dagobert pleaded, as a screeching ice storm whipped up about them. ‘You offend your patrons. The entities of the Wastes.’
‘Soil your robes alone, priest,’ Archaon said. ‘Your fear proceeds from a cowardly soul – as it does in all men. Well, I am more than man. I am mine enemy’s failure incarnate. I am the morrow. I am the world’s end to come. Hear me, Dark Gods: warn your warriors, your doomed champions, corpses-in-waiting. You tell them Archaon is coming and the inevitability of their death is coming with me.’
The ice storm died. Crystals rained slowly to the shore as Dagobert peered fearfully up into the heavens. Beyond the storm-stored miasma of white, the warband could hear the grumble of thunder, distant and fading.
‘Dagobert,’ Archaon called. ‘What must I do beyond the ease of killing, to get the attention of these daemon deities? These dogs of damnation.’ Again, Dagobert peered through the ice-blind for some thunderbolt of displeasure or daemonic punishment.
‘Speak, curse it!’ Archaon roared in jubilant fury. ‘I would know what that monstrous tome has to say.’
‘The translations are difficult, master,’ Dagobert told him. ‘Some sections require primers, references and keystone texts we don’t have.’
‘Then we shall find them,’ Archaon said.
‘Even the sections we can translate are vague and open to interpretation.’
‘Then interpret…’
‘The Everchosen of Chaos will be known by the six treasures of dread antiquity he carries,’ the priest called. ‘Six trials to be passed – six gifts of the Ruinous gods, my lord, to be earned and recovered from the Wastes and the servants of darkness.’
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br /> ‘They shall be mine,’ Archaon said.
‘They are spread to the perversity of the northern winds, my lord,’ Dagobert said as Giselle crunched the wagon along the ice of the shore. ‘Hidden. Lost. Claimed by others.’
‘Others that aspire to be Everchosen?’
‘Others who believe they are,’ the priest said.
‘Such pretenders would have my pity,’ Archaon said, ‘that they come so far for failure. Instead they shall get my blade, through their deluded skulls.’
‘These treasures, lord, are separated by great distance and watched over by guardians of the gods – powerful and unknown.’
‘Then what do we know?’
‘Two must be earned and two must be stolen,’ Dagobert told him. ‘One must be found…’
‘And the other?’
‘Will find you.’
Archaon laughed, hard and harsh.
‘The Ruinous Powers wish to play. We shall indulge them, for now. Where does this perverse game of the gods begin?’ the dark templar demanded.
‘As yet I have discovered the location of only one of the treasures, master,’ Dagobert said.
‘What is this gift of Chaos?’ Archaon asked.
‘I know not,’ Dagobert said, ‘but whatever dark thing it is, it resides in the Altar of Ultimate Darkness.’
Archaon nodded. ‘Where does fate take us?’
‘To the New World, my lord,’ the priest told him. ‘The land of the murder. Where the Witch King rules in the name of gods with bloody hands.’
‘You speak of one of the elder races,’ Archaon said. The dark templar had had occasion to kill a number of the secretive forest folk in the Laurelorn – wood elves, as frightened villagers would call them. He had never seen their cousins from across the sea but knew, as many did, of the aid they had offered Magnus the Pious during the Great War against Chaos. Of those who lived further still across the icy oceans, Archaon had heard little. He certainly had not enjoyed an encounter with a member of their weakling race.
‘I do, my lord,’ Dagobert said.
‘Speak on.’
‘I know little more than you, my lord. Rumour and dread legend from across the seas.’
‘Speak on, priest,’ Archaon commanded.
‘An outcast species, master,’ Dagobert told him, reaching for details from the heretical texts it had been his duty to keep from the world. ‘Turned from the light and long separated from their kin – ousted after civil war.’
‘Turned from the light,’ Archaon echoed, ‘to darkness. Do these dark elves worship our gods?’
‘They do not, master. They venerate the deathless embodiment of murder itself.’
‘A race of assassins, perhaps,’ Archaon acknowledged, ‘but one blessed with losing wars and fleeing from them.’
‘From what I have read they are not to be underestimated, lord,’ Dagobert warned. ‘Their kind infests the New World. They have held their kingdom of Naggaroth safe from the clutches of Chaos for thousands of years. Their watchtowers line the border where the Wastes meet the lands of murder. They benefit from the God of Murder’s blessing and sorcerous servants, who will know of our approach before we make it.’
The icy haze about Archaon cleared, revealing once more the black and white immensity of the landscape about them. They were still on the Shattered Shore, with great bergs of ice creaking against one another in the frozen sea to the west and the colossal range of midnight mountains to the east. Archaon knew that there was no east and west where he was heading. No maps or guides that could show the way. Only the whim of the Wastes and the will of his Ruinous patrons.
‘It seems we shall need an army,’ Archaon announced. ‘Fortunately for us, our gods have seen fit to furnish us with one – for it has long been in the ramblings of heretics and madmen that the greatest concentration of fighting men in the world can be found in the dread lands that are our path. We shall cross the Wastes. We shall kill the weak, conquer the strong and build an army of our own from the very best our enemies have to offer. Our banner shall bear the Ruinous Star of Chaos in all its glory. We shall best, commandeer and welcome warriors of all Dark Gods and creeds beneath the folds of its foetid fabric. It will be an army without equal. The Wastes will never know its like again, unless the gods of Chaos themselves decree so. I shall lead this army into the land of murder, where these ancient watchtowers will fall. The secrets of this Altar of Ultimate Darkness shall be mine and my host shall be sacrificed to the Ruinous Powers in its taking. This I pledge to my daemon gods – as always – with the blackness of my lost soul.’
CHAPTER XI
‘It is known by many different names. The Wastes. The northlands. The Top of the World. The Realm of Chaos. The last madman I met simply called it Inevitability. I like that. Anyway. It is known by many different names. The Wastes. The northlands. The Top of the World. The Realm of Chaos. The last madman I met simply called it Inevitability. I like that. Anyway. It is known by many names…’
– Lanfranc the Unchanging (the wall of his cell, in an unnamed prison of his own making)
Inevitability
The Northern Wastes
Date unknown
The Wastes were nothing like Archaon expected – and the Chaos warrior had few expectations – but it was everything that he had desired. To Dagobert and Giselle – miserable in their different ways – the months and possibly years were passed in the gale-battered confines of the wagon, trying not to die of the cold, contaminated food or from some misshapen maniac coming out of the storm with an axe. Archaon’s Swords were as stoic and uncommunicative as ever. For them, already very much part of the havoc of the north, they had simply come home. Unlike his winged warriors who were indifferent to the forlorn horror of the landscape or the woebegone priest and sister, who regarded their surroundings with dread, Archaon experienced the Wastes in all of their unseen glory. Where the warband saw the simple darkness of the skies, Archaon could stare back defiantly with a darkness of his own. His ruined eye and the shard of wyrdstone that still lay trapped within its socket was no longer a loss or disability. He saw with it what others could, in a way that others could not. He saw the winds of Chaos, impossible to detect on the rawness of the face or goosebumps of the skin, streaming about them in indescribable colour and shadow. He saw the way it had dusted and stained the pole-facing surfaces of hillsides, mountains and valleys. The way that it howled in silence through the sparse structures of the Wastes and damned souls that wandered its wilderness. The way its essence collected in the hearts of the daemons that stalked them unseen by all else in the shadows.
As they rode north, the temperature dropped. Mere existence became a numb ache. Madmen and mongrel beasts fell to their knees before Archaon and the wagon, pledging their souls to his service in exchange for a scrap of food from their stores or a moment by their fire. At first, the Chaos champion tolerated such squabbling vermin. They were a distraction from the cold. Only the strongest survived the Wastes and the miserable wretches Archaon met on his way north were untested. Their tongues knew not trust and their savage instinct for survival led them to butcher each other in their sleep and feast on the remains. They were not worthy of Archaon and so he ended them.
Even to the eye untrained in evil, the Wastes were a time and place at war with itself. A land of mournful madness. The bizarre weather; the sunless, starless skies; the rise and drop in temperature; the strange behaviour of water; the land itself – the rock, the earth and ice, almost a living thing, alien and aggressive. Features of apparent claw and tooth, landscapes of suggestive undulation and meagre thorn forests of twisted trunk and withered branch. Unforgiving ranges of mountains, freshly erupted from the ground. Volcanic peaks that glowered in the distance. Quakes and flash floods. Waterfalls that were anything but. Rivers that flowed uphill and backwards. Lakes and inland seas that just see
med to bleed up from the depths of the earth. Polar deserts of frosted grit and glacial wastes. The only things to eat slithered and crawled, while strange lights danced and poisonous gases brumed like glowing streams through the terrain. Storms were common. Wind. Rain. Sleet. Hail. Snow. Dust storms. Ice storms. Storms of energies strange and unnatural. The heavens would churn. The Dark Gods would grumble their nerve-shredding thunder and lightning would crash across the land, of every colour and intensity.
All these things Archaon took in his stride. The one quality of the Wastes that even the Chaos warrior found difficult to manage was the way in which time and distance seemed to have no meaning. With light of different oppressive hues finding its desperate way down through the tumultuous heavens, it was almost impossible to tell what time of day it was. On the occasions that the clouds did clear, the sky above was black and empty – like the dead, glassy inside of a shark’s eye. The warband could ride for days and get nowhere. At other times, they were barely out of sight of their last camp before entering a landscape new and markedly different from the one they had just left.
Archaon turned to what he had brought to the Wastes, rather than the insanity he found there, for some kind of measurement. It would be easy to lose himself in a labyrinth of distractions. In the absence of sun, map or fixed mark on the ever-changing horizon, he needed a way to judge his progress. Something more than guesswork or the timeless ramblings of The Liber Caelestior. To know how far he had come and judge how far he might have to go. The answers to these questions were invariably ‘too far’ and ‘as far as is needed’, but it helped to have a system. Something concrete and not at the whim of change.
Ultimately he had to use Giselle and Dagobert as some kind of marker. Archaon could not trust the enhancements of his own form. As a dark templar of the Chaos Powers, his impossible existence leeching from their potency, he was faster, stronger and more resilient in body, mind and soul than he had ever been as a knight of the weakling God-King. Regardless of where the sun had gone to die in the sky, a day’s worth of travel exhausted the pair. They were hungry. They were thirsty. They were tired. It was in these physical necessities that Archaon put his faith. Still, time was difficult to trust in the Wastes.
