by Rob Sanders
As Oberon’s hooves kicked up the ice and dust and the rickety wagon meandered its way north, Archaon passed the false-witnessing hours in brooding silence. When he wasn’t lost in some dark thought, some deep fury at his fate or a scorching recrimination of the soul, then he was killing the miserable wretches that crossed their path. Beastmen. Lunatics. Half-starved warriors looking for answers at the top of the world. They found their answers in the reflection of Archaon’s blade, moments before its cleaving edge passed through their unworthy bodies. Occasional wretches would impress Archaon with their pluck – usually their insistence on not dying immediately – or the usefulness of their servitude. They fell into line behind the wagon, trudging after Archaon like the wounded soldiers of some massacre or battlefield defeat, following in the footsteps of an indefatigable general who would not let them die.
They were watched by Archaon’s warrior-henchmen. His Swords of Chaos. They rode silently in their blank bone helms. Occasionally stretching their wings, they rolled uneasily in the saddle, flanking both Archaon and the wandering mongrels he chose to add to the number of their growing warband. Ever mindful of their master. Ever watchful of the traitorous dogs that fell into line behind the warrior of Chaos. Marauders, beastmen and armoured warriors, eager to share in the spoils of Archaon’s growing celebrity, like a pack of scavengers on the murderous scent of a lone predator, stripping the butchered remains left in its wake for scraps.
Casting his gaze behind, at the tainted path taking him north into destiny, Archaon found the others he had enslaved on the road to damnation. The Swords and the rag-tag cavalcade of recruited savagery that were already very much part of the damnation about them. Gorst, always a stumbling silhouette in the dust, dragging his chains and back-lashed carcass after Archaon as he had done after the distant memory that was Diederick Kastner. Giselle, who just stared back at Archaon from the wagon. Her face wore the weariness of horror and disgust. At first such horror had been laced with pity at what Archaon had become. She, better than most, knew that the darkness of the templar’s future had not been of his choosing. Such sentiment was soon lost in the hatred of the hostage, but even that had faded. Gone was the childish futility of a foul mouth and violent outbursts. She was as unbreakable as she had ever been. Her strength lay now in the tautness of her lips, the censure of her eyes and the burning silence that met any words Archaon had for her. When Archaon looked to the girl, he found only fear and abhorrence. He was a thing to her now. A force of unnatural nature that could be denied no more than the howling wind or raging sea.
When not punishing himself or other warriors of the Wastes, Archaon would demand of Father Dagobert answers to dangerous questions.
‘For years we were the caretakers of damned tomes and the tales of men who searched for evil of their own making. Did you ever think that it would be like this?’
Dagobert sent ripples of encouragement through the reins, prompting the beasts whose burden it was to drag the wagon on through the bleakness of the Shadowlands. The priest was still the kind-hearted scholar that Archaon had known and loved. Such a heart and the affection the priest bore for the boy who had been Little Diederick, the man who had been Sieur Kastner the Sigmarite Knight, now weighed him down like a millstone. Dagobert had decided to follow the boy that had been his charge and the man who had been his friend into damnation’s embrace. Perhaps he could have saved him once. With every step that took them north, such a hope became a fading possibility. A good intention that had become a bitter hope – that had become a lunatic’s fantasy. He answered his master’s questions as best he could, calling upon a lifetime’s study of combated darkness and the recorded untruths of Ruination.
‘I suspect,’ Dagobert said, ‘that it’s an intense, personal and inconstant state. As a punishment might match the crime for which it was devised. Reading of such things, by so many in so many different kinds of spiritual torment, I imagine that we share common miseries as we share common joys. The searing reality of any one man’s damnation seems specific to him, my master. You and I are both here as far as the chill in my bones and our words clouding on the air can tell me, but we live very different definitions of dread and darkness.’
Archaon nodded in the saddle. For years he had hunted men whose desire it had been to find this bleak and unforgiving place. Others who had returned from it, their souls and desires twisted by the horror of what they had found in both the Wastes and within themselves as they traversed such lands of torment and blood.
Ruins dotted the landscape – mostly the smashed and burnt-out remnants of fortifications, built from the dark stone of the region. Towers. Keeps. Forts. Bastions. Even the isolated derelicts of half-built castles and buried citadels. The only other buildings the warband happened upon were the tents of hastily abandoned camps and rough temples honouring one dire god or another. The structures also appeared not to obey the passage of time. Despite their state of ruination, the stone of some seemed freshly carved, while the walls of others were weathered and cracked – infested with stunted mosses, lichens and withered roots.
Beyond that, there were the bodies. The dead and the dying. Corpses. Everywhere. The Wastes were a warzone. Some of the unfortunate warriors and champions had clearly died in battle. The butchered torsos. The headless. The limbless. The unrecognisable. The ground soaked with blood and decorated with trailing gut. Others had been the victims of ritual sacrifice, impaled on stakes, cut to pieces or burned as part of daemon-appeasing ceremonies. Like the derelict structures, the cadavers appeared to defy the days, months and years. Some were waxy and cold to the touch, slow to rot in the climate, while others became infested with fat maggots and spoiled to puddle and bone within days, for little obvious reason. The strangest sensation for Archaon was accidentally happening upon the same smouldering ruin days later, only to find the bodies carpeting the grit and ice to be in a better state than when he had initially left them. Bodies he may have put on the ground himself. Freshly butchered corpses, rather than the clouds of flies, stripped skulls and mounds of spoilage the dark templar had left days before.
Archaon never truly got used to the perversities of the Wastes. The strangeness of the land and the weather. Its unpredictable effects on things both living and dead. The Chaos warrior understood that this was very much the point of the Wastes’ existence – if the land had such a thing as a point. Its very nature resisted definition and defied expectation. Its inhabitants could be anywhere, at any time. They could be alive. They could be dead. The Wastes could be a promised land – a paradise – or it could be some kind of eternal punishment. It was everything and it was nothing. To Archaon it was a means to an end. The dark templar’s intentions extended beyond its borders – he ruled his ambitions, they did not rule him. He brought death to his enemies but was not there to feed his blood lust. His black heart sought satisfaction from the goal upon which it was set, but he didn’t lose himself to indulgence – a prisoner in gratification’s loose embrace. Neither did he become lost in the infectious malaise of the place. He would not forget himself and remain. He was there with purpose. His movement was ever forward. Even if the path he was on led to nowhere.
‘And what of the gods of Ruination that call the top of the world their home, trading in dark deeds and the souls of lost men? I have fought their servants for what already seems like a lifetime. I have stood sentry over those they would claim with their myriad and wicked ways. I have frustrated their desires with word, deed and blade. Though they curse me with gifts unasked for and invite me to their realm with prophecies and deceit, I hate them with all my heart. As I hate the God-King and the feeble powers of this broken and decrepit world. I hate them, yet I feel that I know them not. How can a man hate nothingness?’
‘The Ruinous Powers are all things to all men,’ Dagobert said cryptically, drawing upon his careful studies of dark arts and the pledges men have made – their very souls for desires they thought denied to them. ‘Th
is land is not their home. They are the land and the land is an expression of them. They dwell in the dark corners of men’s hearts. A place warm and ripe for corruption. They prey on the fickleness of fancy and the inescapability of need. We hide behind the stone walls of temples and the false hope of daily rituals, half-remembered history and symbols that jangle about our necks, but the truth is that we are defenceless against their predations.’
Men were feeble things, Archaon knew. Mostly spoiling meat and the selfish desires that drove inconsequential existence. It took nothing to twist the hearts of such beings. Desires of the flesh. The blood of one’s enemy. The promise of alleviated suffering. The granting of paltry ambitions. It cost nothing for the dark powers of the world to build temples in the blackest reaches of such hearts. Nothing for such beings to draw the twilight from men’s souls. Like the leech within, they infected their host with a little of their own filth, to keep the darkness flowing. Most men harboured such a covenant – many unknown to themselves, masked by ignorance and denial. For few could tolerate the knowledge that they are truly evil without the comfort of a path or purpose. For those men, the path always led north. Through the Wastes and the Shadowlands. To the insanity beyond. To darkness, pure and true.
Like the lodestone, the desires of those who would kill in the name of ancient evil took them to the top of the world. Archaon was set on a course not of murderous malice or self-glorification. He travelled not for unknown pleasures or the alleviation of torments past. He was at the top of the world simply because the route to Armaggedon led through the Ruinous Wastes. If that was where he would find the means to end a world, then so be it. Nothing could quell his appetite for annihilation. Oblivion beckoned.
And so, the Chaos Wastes. There mindless marauders, who had ravaged, robbed and butchered their way north, gathered. They knew not why. The road to damnation was a lonely one and perhaps, Archaon considered, it gave the doomed comfort. To know that there were those who shared their madness. In truth, they were there to fight the foes of their dread patrons, each other and themselves – since there was only so much pain and bloodshed a single man, even a man devoted to Chaos, could achieve. Marauders found each other on the path and gathered about the suggestions of greatness in their ranks. Warbands formed. Warbands joined together to create hordes and hosts about emerging warriors and sorcerers, whose worthiness was tested before the growing number of the damned.
Like hungry wolves they fought each other for the wretched right to lead others of their ill-breed. Some became dark beacons in the cold havoc of the north, attracting hordes of their battle-kin to their banner – bringing the souls of hundreds under the yoke of their dark celebrity. Such men might even earn the loyalty of beastmen and greenskins or even the fallen of the elder races. Such dark light in the world might then snare the service of monsters and daemons. From such a melting pot of savagery, the champions of Chaos are crafted. Some received the kind of infernal gifts and sponsorship required to exalt them to infamy. Dark heroes to those in their service. They became names known by others; known by the names of other great warriors whose heads they had claimed and followers they had taken for their own. Some became Chaos lords and generals, commanding armies that would threaten to conquer the very Wastes themselves. Such was the dark path to damnation and greatness. The path that the man who had never been Diederick Kastner found himself upon. The path of the Ruinous Powers.
‘What are these gods of havoc and darkness?’ Archaon had put to Father Dagobert. ‘What do they want with me?’
‘There are as many creatures of dread haunting the Wastes and the corruption of men’s souls as there are evil desires in the world, master,’ the priest had told him. ‘Of the Ruinous pantheon, most find themselves afflicted by the dark will of four. Four ancient afflictions of existence. Like the four walls of a prison cell, holding the conflicting hopes and fears in men’s hearts hostage. He who would war with all else – the spiller of blood, the flame that heats the ire in men’s souls – causing it to bubble over into the world.’
‘I have felt this affliction…’
‘As all men have,’ Dagobert said, ‘since the first fist or the first stone was lifted in violence.
‘Go on, priest.’
‘He whose dark desires are the very nature of desire itself,’ Dagobert said. ‘He who lusts. He who thirsts. He who both tempts and is temptation.’
‘You said there were four,’ Archaon pushed.
‘He who is the end of all,’ the priest continued. ‘The constancy of suffering and desperation – whose sign is seen the world over in the diseased and the gasping hopes of the dying.’
‘And?’
‘He who is the very storm of change,’ Dagobert said. ‘The volatility and vitality of a world ever in motion. The embodiment of men’s appetite for… more.’
Archaon nodded.
‘I have known all of these afflictions,’ the dark templar said.
‘And they have known you, my lord,’ Dagobert told him. ‘As they know all men.’
‘How can one man serve such opposites?’ Archaon asked, the desires as described to him seeming at odds with one another. ‘How can a man be both desire and death that would end it? Constancy yet the drive of change.’
Dagobert considered. He thought back to fearful texts read by candle-light in the temple vaults and long forgotten.
‘He must not be the pots that keep the paint separate,’ Dagobert said. ‘He must be the ever-darkening canvas, burdened with colour upon colour until he becomes a shade of ruin pleasing to all the Chaos Powers to look upon.’
Once again Archaon nodded, for once again the priest’s words had cut through the confusion that burned in his mind. Digging his heels into Oberon’s flanks, the Chaos warrior urged the steed onwards.
The daemon-haunted north was ever calling. There damnation exerted its great influence and the gifts of Ruination were showered on the fearless, the accepting and the doomed. The endless darkness of the unstable region about the pole was more dream than reality. It was where gateways to unearthly realms stood tall and the raw promise of Chaos bubbled up through the appearance of reality. It was where lie became truth, a never-beginning eternity where men could lose and find themselves a thousand times over. Where fantasy and nightmare bred realities anew and mortals could stand like mirrors in the soul-shattering presence of gods. It was not Archaon’s destination, however. He was no pilgrim of darkness. He was not there to prostrate himself at the feet of his daemon overlords. He had not travelled across continents to jostle and squeal like a piglet before the bounty of a sow’s belly, begging for blessings, with a bottomless appetite for attention and favour. That was a path to greatness unworthy of one who might call himself the Everchosen of Chaos. A calling beneath the Lord of the End Times. Archaon would not seek damnation. It would find him. He would not curry favour with his infernal patrons. They would come to him when the time was right. When he was needed. When he had earned their power.
Instead, Archaon went west. In reality, there was no such thing in the Wastes. There was only the instinct of west. A direction that most of the time was signified by a general trend in the warband’s wanderings. Without open sky or elevation to believe in, there were only two seeming constants in the Wastes – and even they, on occasion, were playful in their perversity. Archaon trusted that, if he kept the berg-shattered coast on his left and the daemon darkness of the pole on his right, his progress should generally be west. Taking care that their exploration of the Wastes had not taken them too far into the twilight insanity of the polar interior, Archaon routinely meandered away from its agonising attraction and every few weeks would reach the frozen, storm-battered shore, before turning inland once more. In the gloomy hinterlands between, the ring of shadow that encompassed the continent’s dark heart, Archaon used the winds of Chaos to guide his path.
Thus, the saga of Archaon – warrior of Chaos and cham
pion of the Dark Gods – began. He was no northern marauder or tribal chieftain, leading his brothers in the perpetual darkness of murderous territoriality. He was no blood-baptised champion, looking for the way to become lost. He was no fool sorcerer, searching for secrets, only to become one. He was Archaon. He would achieve the horror of the entire world. He was a living legend. Great things were his to achieve – and to achieve them he would need great men.
The first of these great men, Archaon slayed. They were new arrivals, like the dark templar himself. Untried and untested, leading small bands that were equally so. Men of the Empire, haughty Bretons, grim Ungols and Gospodars, even the occasional southerner. Some bore Ruinous favour for the terrible evil already wrought in their homelands: claws, spines, venomous fangs, horns or some other type of deformative horror – acid-dribbling maws, an overpowering stench or scaly, armoured skin. A hundred different aberrations of the mind or body, received as blessings for terrors rendered. Their conception of their pantheon or patron powers was simple and savage. They had carved symbols into their faces and flesh, indulged affliction, wrath, vice or dread powers they did not understand. They honoured their gods with insanity and the weakness of wild abandon. They did not know what they had become or the part they had to play in the circus of delirium and death that was the Wastes. They thought of themselves as victors when in actual fact they were victims. Of folly. Of fate. Of Archaon’s irresistible path. Souls caught in the slipstream of the dark templar’s supremacy.
