by Darius Hinks
It was a vision of such madness and ruin that Clara turned her gaze to the sky, unable to look upon such lunacy. The view overhead was just as shocking. Monsters were spiralling through the clouds, locked in furious battle – vast, screaming hawks swooped and dived through the fractured air, pursued by armoured insects clad in the same rotten flesh as the daemons in the river.
Clara felt her reason slipping and made a last, desperate attempt to understand what she was seeing. Beyond the nightmarish host she could still make out trees, sky and even mountains in the far distance. Perhaps this was not the end of the world, just a rupture in its surface? Clara realised that she was watching the end of a great, inhuman battle. The monsters with rotten bodies had defeated the feral, long-limbed warriors and now they were racing towards their prize.
She climbed to her feet and looked down the valley, beyond the battle, trying to see what they were heading for – to see what the spoils of such a war might be.
Further down the valley the vivid, yellow scar met another, more natural river. Where the two met there was a tower of swirling, gaudy fumes, framing a pair of shapes so monstrous that they dwarfed everything else. At the mouth of the valley a twisted goliath had risen up to assail the daemons. Clara giggled at the sight of it. It was a mountain of hate – a colossal hulk, carved from the carcasses of ancient trees, thrashing branches through the air and tearing up the ground with its roots. The air around it was crackling and shimmering, and Clara realised this was the source of the power she had been following. The soul of the forest had poured itself into a single, furious body and had pitted itself against the daemon host.
The second figure was almost as huge and far more disturbing. It was a sack of white, blubbery flesh that rippled as it lashed itself around the tree monster. Its face was a nest of tentacles and they were tearing at the tree spirit, filling the air with splinters and bark.
Clara could take no more. Beside these two goliaths even the lunacy of battle seemed tame. The white-fleshed creature was gradually tearing its opponent apart and, as it did so, gouts of magic poured from the splintered wounds, mutating the surrounding trees – twisting them into weird, otherworldly shapes. The whole landscape was losing its coherency and creating something new – something so absurd and revolting Clara knew that her mind must have finally given way.
She turned and fled.
She dropped her crook and scrambled back down the slope, turning her back on the pandemonium in the valley. As she ran, she picked up speed until the world became a seamless torrent of colours. Faster and faster she went, howling at the thought of all that she had seen.
As her speed grew, Clara realised that she could no longer feel the ground beneath her feet. It seemed impossible that she could travel so fast. She looked down, trying to understand, but her eyes were full of tears. The breeze had picked up and it was battering against her face and feathers.
Feathers? As the word formed in her consciousness her eyes cleared and she saw that she was hurtling through the clouds, way above the trees.
Her cries became a shrill, avian scream as she realised what had become of her.
Then she saw the forest more clearly and screamed again. The landscape was bubbling with disease. Huge tracts of land were boiling into new, grotesque shapes. Fingers of yellow acid had spread right across the forest, spewing fungus and blight as they burned through the trees. Clara’s screams grew wilder as she soared up through the clouds, seeing the full extent of the forest’s ruin. Tumours and cysts had torn through the earth, and vast armies of grubs were rising from the wounds, filling the world with noise and stink.
With the last shreds of her human consciousness, Clara realised she was witnessing a tragedy far greater than her own transformation. This was a disaster on a grand scale. The daemons had torn something ancient and beautiful from the world.
The Everwood was lost.
To be concluded in
Orion: The Council of Beasts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darius Hinks’s first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he has carved a bloody swathe through the Warhammer World in works such as Island of Blood, Sigvald and Razumov’s Tomb. Recently, he has ventured into the Warhammer 40,000 universe with the Space Marine Battles novella Sanctus. He plans to return to the grim darkness of the far future after he has finished telling the tale of the forest god Orion.
For Arthur. (La la la.)
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
© Games Workshop Limited 2013. All rights reserved.
Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-85787-872-4
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