by Rob Sanders
As Archaon turned, his weapon ready, his good eye and the darksight of his ruined socket everywhere, he set his afflicted gaze once more on the mighty throne. In it, crafted in his own image, sat the insanity that was the daemon Be’lakor within a rocky palace that was the same.
‘Daemon,’ Archaon told it. ‘You have an undue fascination with yourself.’
The beast laughed. It was horrible to hear. Like the deep torment of rock and earth, as the land quakes and continents heave.
And with you…
As the creature spoke, the blue inferno burning within him escaped his ugly maw.
‘I’m here to put an end to that, creature,’ the dark templar told it, moving slowly and steadily in on the thing in the throne. A great infernal blade of jagged black steel stood upright before the throne, held in place by the loosely clasped talon of the stone arm. The daemon prince’s own claw rested on the pommel spike of the weapon.
Oh, you are, are you?
‘But first you will give me the satisfaction of all that is unknown to me, but known to you,’ the Chaos warrior threatened.
You want secrets…
‘I want truths,’ he told it. ‘And I’ll have them, even if I have to cut them out of you, dread thing.’
The living truth that is Archaon, chosen of the Chaos gods.
‘Aye.’
Archaon moved in. The daemon prince reared from his throne of stone, dragging his colossal blade with him. The beast’s wings spread and he thrust his ferocious daemon head forward, shaking the crown of horns as he spoke.
Well you can’t have it, mortal, Be’lakor roared at him, his words searing with hellfire. You impudent worm – bold of word but feeble of flesh.
‘I thought you might say that,’ Archaon returned. As Be’lakor dragged the tip of his infernal blade across the floor of the throne room and turned it upright in his claws, the Chaos warrior did the opposite. Turning Terminus about in his gauntlets, he aimed the point of the crusader blade at the floor. ‘See, you can’t give what you don’t have, daemon.’
Archaon stabbed his Sigmarite sword straight down into the floor of the throne room. Instead of turning the blade tip aside like the smooth rock it appeared to be, the material admitted its length with a shower of sparks. The blade steamed with the honour of its past deeds in the name of the God-King. The stone about it began to bubble and churn. Be’lakor let out a roar that descended into a hideous shriek. The palace trembled about Archaon and the daemon. It shuddered. It quaked. The daemon prince clutched his chest and crashed to his knees. The Ruinous Star scarred into his flesh steamed also. The infernal blade tumbled from his grip, falling straight through the floor with a splatter of stone, as though it had been dropped into a lake.
Archaon turned his greatsword in the broiling stone of the wound. Be’lakor screeched. His wings flapped and his spine arched. His knees sank into the floor and his claws trailed stringy stone where he had splashed the morphing material in his infernal agonies.
‘Now we’re talking,’ Archaon told the daemon. ‘This is a language that both of us can understand.’
Be’lakor’s claws tore at his daemon form. He was becoming one with his surroundings. In the throes of white-hot pain and the purity that still afflicted the crusader sword’s steel, he was changing. The palace was also losing its consistency. Liquid rock glooped and streamed from the ceiling while the ribs and bones contorted within the structure. Be’lakor and palace were as one. Except neither were Be’lakor.
‘Your name, daemon,’ Archaon demanded as his sword burned in the monster’s flesh. Its wings and features dribbled away. The creature sank into the floor. Into itself. It splashed like a flailing swimmer before thrashing beneath the surface of the stone. Its face rippled through the horrific visage of a thousand other diabolical things. Archaon pulled Terminus from the daemonflesh. For a moment everything was silent. The shrieking agony that shook the palace was gone. The Forsaken Fortress had melted to a ruptured, contorted mess.
Archaon lost his footing as the floor seemed to sink through the palace. The Chaos warrior turned the greatsword about in his grip, aiming its tip back at the floor at his feet. Like a corpse in a river, the daemon floated to the surface of the stone. It was a lesser thing now. A thing of arms and hidden form, lost within the twisting folds of a hooded shroud. As the colour of the stone bleached from it, the daemon began to move.
Archaon lifted Terminus higher, indicating his intention to bury the Sigmarite sword in the creature’s extended form once more, but the walls liquefied about him. The palace cascaded around him towards the ice floe. The fingers of one puny arm begged him to desist. The razor gales of the Southern Wastes and blizzards of splintered ice once again intruded on the scene. Archaon was standing in a sea of stone. The sea retracted to a lake. Then the lake to a puddle about the daemon until finally the thing held only its own form. Archaon stepped forward, holding his shield before the maelstrom and Terminus high above his head.
‘Enough of your tricks, dissembler,’ the dark templar told it. ‘Your name.’
‘Long forgotten,’ the creature managed. ‘Along with the face that it belonged to.’
‘Well, Changeling,’ Archaon roared through the howling wind. ‘It matters not that you are known. Only what you know.’
‘You sought me out?’
‘Yes, daemon,’ Archaon said. ‘It is said by the bestial shamans and diabolical creatures of this land that you are a deceiver and that you meddle in the great affairs of this dark world. That you hold a looking glass to both the damned and the damning and that you become what is seen.’
‘I have my questionable gifts, Archaon,’ the Changeling hissed, ‘as the chosen of the Ruinous Powers must have his own.’
‘Then you have held your glass to the infernal prince I seek,’ Archaon said, circling the prostrate monstrosity with his sword as snowfall gathered about the daemon.
‘I have studied him.’
‘Why, darknid thing? Speak and live to hold your mirror again.’
‘It pleases my master…’ the Changeling told him. ‘…the great Lord Tzeentch, to have the Dark Master’s ambitions frustrated.’
‘And so you impersonate Be’lakor, his form, his fortress.’
‘To god-pleasing perfection.’
‘You are a twisted thing, Changeling,’ Archaon told the daemon, ‘on a crooked path to nowhere.’
‘It is my fate,’ it told him. ‘It is the fate of all the Great Changer’s servants.’
‘So I was told by the monstrosities that led me to you,’ Archaon said. ‘Your damned journey, your twisted path, might not be any use to you, lost one. But it might be to me. Archaon, chosen of all the Dark Gods. Choose, Changeling. Assist me or accept that your journey ends here, with my sword as your grave marker, at some Byzantine crossroads on your lost path.’
Archaon grabbed the daemon by the lengths of its twisted shroud and dragged it over to a black snowbank that offered a little shelter from the storm. In the depths of the snowbank’s shadow, the blizzard died to a whisper. Archaon stared at the daemon. About them the southern continent was a blasted winter wasteland of warped confusion. The shredding splinters of ice drifted to the ground and stopped. The snow began to creak and freeze about them as the temperature plummeted. Archaon’s plate scorched his skin with the abyssal cold. He tensed as the daemon creature before him got to its feet in the snow. Subtle but horrific changes were taking place inside the depths of the thing’s hooded shroud. Something more resilient to the benumbing surroundings. ‘Don’t test me, warped servant of Tzeentch.’
‘As I said,’ it told him, ever at change beneath the frosted folds, ‘it pleases my master to frustrate the daemon prince you seek. How may I assist you, great Archaon?’ The Chaos warrior nodded. Satisfied.
‘You have studied Be’lakor?’
‘As I have studied all wh
ose flesh I assume,’ the Changeling said. ‘As I have studied you, Archaon, whose boundless ambition surpasses even your ageless father-in-shadow.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I say too much, perhaps,’ the Changeling tittered. Archaon shook his helm slowly. The Chaos warrior had crossed the surface of the known world and had travelled to hell and back. His experiences – the dark truths, the betrayals and the slaughter – had long washed anything approaching sentimentality from his cursed bones. There were truths he must know, however, even about himself, if he were to proceed in his apocalyptic quest.
‘You say what your Ruinous master wants you to say,’ Archaon told the Tzeentchian monstrosity. ‘You are a miserable messenger. No more. So, let us play your dark lord’s game. You mentioned my father. To which I am supposed to reply, “I never knew my father”. Or my mother, for that matter. I’m an orphan. Abandoned on the steps of an Imperial temple. A temple of the thrice-cursed God-King.’
‘Your mother was a nothing,’ the Changeling told Archaon. ‘Baseborn. Simple. Unremarkable. Unclouded of heart in a way our foetid kind abhor. The kind of heart our masters revel in corrupting.’
Archaon burned into the Changeling with an unswerving gaze.
‘But they never got the chance.’
‘No,’ the Changeling said. ‘Her blood is on you, Archaon. She died in birth. In the labours of delivering the apocalypse to the world.’
Archaon’s gauntlet creaked about the hilt of Terminus. The Tzeentchian servant was enjoying this.
‘And my father?’
‘You have had several, Archaon,’ the creature told him. ‘The wretch whose wife you took and then left to raise your youngling brothers.’
‘I have brothers?’
‘Half-brothers,’ the Changeling cackled. ‘But they are long dead, Archaon. You have outlived them, chosen one.’
‘My father?’
‘Is Be’lakor, of course,’ the Changeling’s cackle became a howling laugh. Archaon surged forwards and landed a heavy kick in the creature’s midriff with an armoured boot. The impact smashed the daemon back, sending it tumbling through the black snow. Archaon stomped after it, standing over its broken form. The Changeling did not get up. It coughed. It wheezed. It choked and spat daemon blood from the recesses of its shroud. The blood sizzled on the ice.
‘The passion of the present will not undo the painful truths of the past,’ the Changeling told him.
‘Be’lakor.’
‘You are his, chosen one,’ the thing coughed. ‘Did you not question, not for once, what you have achieved and how you could have achieved it? Out of the thousands, nay millions of lowly creatures of this world that ache for the power to challenge their stars and change their fate, why should it have been you? Why should you have risen from obscurity? Why should you be the chosen, the Everchosen of Chaos? The Herald of the Apocalypse… the Lord of the End Times?’
‘Then I am…’
‘Nothing… something… everything,’ the Changeling hissed from within its hood. ‘Like me, like all who serve the powers of light and the powers of darkness, you will be what you are needed to be. Have no doubt, though, Archaon of the distant Empire. You are blessed with daemon lineage. You are the son of a prince, chosen one – which in some corners of this foetid world would make you a prince in your own right. You are special not just because of what you made of yourself and your circumstances. Look at you. You stand where no mortal man has stood before. You are undoubtedly an indomitable soul. You are also special because of what others made of you and the circumstances of their own. Principally, your father-in-shadow.’
Archaon leaned in. The tip of Terminus reached into the Changeling’s hood. The daemon leaned back into the black slush.
‘And what does my father want of me?’ Archaon asked through clenched teeth. ‘You have been him. You must know. Why does he stalk me? What does this thing of darkness want?’
‘What he has always wanted,’ the Changeling answered. ‘From the dawn of time. What my master, the Great Changer denied him. To command the legions of hell. To be the master of the entire world again. To subvert my master’s curse of eternal servitude and be the Everchosen of the Chaos gods.’
‘What does that have to do with me?’ Archaon growled.
‘Everything, I suspect,’ the Changeling said before the seething steel of Archaon’s sword. ‘But in truth, I do not know. Some daemon secrets are buried deep, beyond even my arch-powers of study and reproduction. You are wrong, Archaon. I deceive. I do not become. The infernal and almighty have a way of showing you everything, yet truly telling you nothing. Unlike my Ruinous master, I cannot be all and know all.’
‘I don’t believe you, deceiver,’ Archaon told the daemon.
‘That is irrelevant,’ the wretched creature said. ‘I have told you all I know. The rest you must ask of your father-in-shadow, himself. For only he knows.’
Archaon held the Changeling there. The deep freeze of the Southern Wastes crept up through their bones. ‘I have done what you have asked, chosen of Chaos. Destroy me,’ the daemon said finally. ‘Or release me.’
Archaon considered.
‘Before I make that decision,’ the Chaos warrior said. ‘One more thing. You must know Be’lakor’s palace, to have reproduced it so faithfully. Where is it, Changeling?’
The daemon hissed its hatred at Archaon.
‘The Forsaken Fortress appears and disappears at perverse whim,’ the creature told him.
‘This I know already.’
‘Sometimes it remains for weeks,’ the Changeling said, ‘sometimes for seconds. Right now it sits on the Pustular Plain.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Tis a realm far to the west,’ the Changeling said. ‘Where the ice melts to a boggy tundra about a rash of volcanic peaks that suppurate and ooze with disease.’
‘How might I reach such a damned place?’ Archaon asked.
‘By travelling south…’
‘You said it was far to the west,’ Archaon growled.
‘You could never reach the Pustular Plain on foot,’ the Changeling told him. ‘And certainly not trailing an army of beastfiends. The journey is far and the geography between here and there challenging and ever changing. By wing, by sled, by exhausted step you could not make it in time.’
‘Then what could?’
‘In the south, close to the continental interior towards which you have waged war, you will find other daemon palaces.’
‘About the Gate?’
‘The Gatelands,’ the Changeling said, ‘Yes… there you will find the palace of the daemon lord Agrammon. He keeps an infamous menagerie in the palace grounds, housing every dread creature imaginable. His prize possession is Dorghar, daemonic Steed of the Apocalypse. You will need to gain entry to the palace, steal the beast and break it. For it is the only creature I know can make the journey to the Pustular Plain in the time you may or may not have.’
Archaon turned his helm to one side and peered down at the Changeling, attempting to penetrate the depths of its hooded shroud. With sudden violence the Chaos warrior stepped forwards, putting a boot on the daemon’s chest and forcing it down into the black slush. He held Terminus above the creature.
‘The Steed of the Apocalypse,’ Archaon seethed.
‘The fourth treasure of Chaos,’ the Changeling cackled, the information forced from him.
Archaon marvelled for a dread moment. The fourth treasure of Chaos. He had been traversing obsidian and ice for longer than he could remember. Slaying daemons. Butchering beastfiends. Searching. Ever searching. It was one of the reasons he was seeking out Be’lakor, the oblivion prince. Answers. It seemed now he would have them. The eternally burning Mark of Chaos that he wore on his flesh. The fabled armour of Morkar that clad that flesh. The Eye of Sheerian, the sorcerous jewel retrieved from
the Chaos dragon Flamefang, now safely ensconced in the skull-face of his battlehelm. All great artefacts of darkness that had belonged to former champions of evil. Those who had borne the blessing of the Ruinous Powers in equal measure. Those who had achieved the title ‘Everchosen of Chaos’. The fourth was a steed worthy of such a warrior. A steed he would tame and who, in turn, would carry him across the Southern Wastes to the Forsaken Fortress.
‘And you were going to tell me this when?’ Archaon roared at the Changeling.
‘You never asked,’ the daemon said silkily. It was true. Archaon hadn’t. The Chaos warrior grunted. Taking his boot from the creature’s chest, he started to trudge back through the snow and rising storm. He had left his army of beastfiends many leagues distant. His winged Swords had been grounded in the storm and, although hardy and ferocious, the monstrous half-breeds that made up his horde were riotous and slow. It was the reason the Chaos warrior had set off alone in the first place. Archaon heard the daemon Changeling’s harsh laughter on the frozen air.
‘Beware, Archaon,’ the Tzeentchian wretch said. ‘The daemon lord Agrammon is a slaver. Take care you do not become part of his infernal collection.’
‘To hell with you, daemon,’ Archaon snarled, holding his shield once more before the shredding gales.
But they were already there.
‘Beyond the maps and charts of man,
where gold lies cold and unplundered,
there lies a bleak and hellish land,
of savage darkness and thunder.
No tree or forest ever grows
in this lightless realm of cold,
a land of ice and midnight snow –
scorched by storms of shrieking souls.
