by Rob Sanders
Ograx looked up about the edge of the pit. His brays were falling into the pitch and flame, forced back by the savage hordes of Archaon, where they were being torn apart and discarded by the furies of the Haermorrhagia, climbing up out of the fiery depths. Ograx pulled a horn from his furs and put it to his ugly lips. As he belted a lungful of air through the crude instrument, the very air about them trembled. The sound threatened to stop the heart and burst the ear. The brays of the Blood God knew the sound.
‘Hold!’ Archaon called, the boom of his voice amplified by the pit. At the signal of the two warlords, the bestial hordes slowed to the stillness of a standoff. Creatures stood obedient and uncertain. Even the ferocity of flame and tearing earth seemed to die away. Ograx called out orders in a bullish voice. Archaon had his own: ‘Destroy the daemons that crawl from the depths,’ he ordered his savages. Warcries and thunderous threats built in the chests of half-breeds as bestial kin found a brute camaraderie in the faces of their former foes. With the thoughtless compliance of a yoked animal, the creatures fell on the plague of winged monstrosities crawling from the pit, stabbing, bludgeoning and mauling the furies with a shared and monstrous rejoicing. The gods would have their grotesque games and Khorne would have skulls for his eternal throne.
Climbing up the side of the pit, slashing and skewering furies from his path as he did, Archaon hauled himself up over the edge. He turned to find Ograx the Great behind him. Archaon offered the bestial prince his gauntlet. After a moment’s feral consideration, Ograx put his claw in Archaon’s hand and allowed the Chaos warrior to help him up. The battle continued about them. The Haemorrhagia vomited forth all it had – firestorms, the rebellious earth and the scourge that was spawned from the bowels of the Wasteland interior.
Archaon directed his horde to take the battle to the very land itself. It was as if the Southern Wastes themselves were contesting his supremacy. Such winged monsters were the stuff of nightmares. Daemonic creatures of whim and monstrous fancy. They were no match for Archaon, the savage hordes of the dark templar and Ograx the Great combined. As the ire of the land died down, the flames faded and the boiling pitch drained away, the great rents in the landscape came together like healing wounds, and winged horrors that failed to crawl back into the dark womb of the earth were torn apart by bestial hordes beneath the flayed flesh of Archaon’s banner.
The Chaos warrior walked through the carnage. The land was a carpet of daemonflesh, rotting away with supernatural speed. The Swords of Chaos stalked close by, ever watchful for treachery. Through the muscular silhouettes of beastfiends, Archaon caught sight of Giselle. The girl was shadowed by the misshapen Vier, whose twisted body towered over her. It had been Archaon’s instruction that the winged marauder not leave her side. The girl for her part had not been the same since their encounter with the Chaos dragon Flamefang, and their unfortunate arrival on the damned shores of the dark, southern continent.
Giselle wandered as if in a horror-drunk daze. Her face was at once disgust and disbelief at the ghastliness she had endured, and the bleak acceptance of her fate to come. Archaon, who cared little for his own hardships and almost nothing for anyone else’s, could barely look her in the eye. They had been intimate once but that had been a long time ago. The girl’s remonstrations and Sigmarite curses had become a lost hope to save him. Such cares had become futility, infatuation and perhaps even love.
Archaon himself found little space in his heart for such sentiments, crowded out by the darkness and doom that he had become. He desired an end to all and yet, when it came to the girl, Giselle Dantziger, there was a part of him that desired existence. Not just the endless violence and burning desire for wars to be won and foes to be conquered. Another kind of existence. Fleeting moments of flesh against flesh and hearts that seemed to beat as one in the hollow emptiness of the world. Perhaps he had indeed fallen for the girl, but he would never admit that to himself, let alone to Giselle herself. Besides, their time at the top of the world had passed. Archaon had fallen so much further since then. He had been lost, but now he was truly damned.
Yet still he kept the girl alive, rather than cast her aside as he had so many. Her hallowed touch was agony to him. Somehow, in this benighted place – or perhaps because of it – the girl’s simple faith in a false god, a God-King, had not abandoned her. It had been a long time since he had known such agonies. Now her mere existence seemed to burn his soul. She was a little of what remained; in the stale echo of her original affections continued to live the man he had once been. It was a weakness, Archaon knew this, but he could not bring himself to end the half-felt, half-remembered scintilla of his former existence. A life the many dark deeds of his doom had eclipsed and he could barely remember. For Archaon it seemed to live on only in his consuming hatred for the world, the gods that plagued it and the mortal multitude that were the slaughter-in-waiting. Only in Giselle did he exist as anything else and, for some perverse reason, Archaon couldn’t find it in himself to destroy that. So, Giselle Dantziger lived on. A ghost of a girl, buried in furs and surrounded by fiends who would die to protect her in the most lethal of lands, simply because Archaon, their dark lord and master, wished it so.
The sorcerer Sheerian approached, hobbling with his staff. Moraq Half-Horn was with him, dwarfing the ancient with his brute bulk. The half-breed, in turn, was buried in the shadow of Ograx the Great.
‘A truce, my lord?’ the Tzeentchian put to him. Like everything the sorcerer said, it was some kind of a subtle challenge.
‘An assimilation,’ Archaon settled upon.
‘But how can we trust such a mindless animal?’ Sheerian asked. Ograx snorted, the stinking mist engulfing the ancient. The sorcerer stumbled back a little but was undeterred. ‘A servant of the Blood God, for whom any of our skulls might serve as tribute.’
‘I’ll trust a mindless animal over a Tzeentchian sorcerer any day,’ Archaon told the ancient. ‘A mindless animal can be loyal. This is more than I can say of the Great Changer and his duplicitous minions, for it is in their nature to cog, lie and deceive.’
‘My lord,’ Sheerian protested.
‘It is done,’ Archaon said. ‘The bestial prince and I have reached an accord, at least for now. If my skull had been destined for the Blood God’s throne then I don’t doubt that Ograx here would have been the one to take it.’ Archaon gave the hulking monster a slight nod, which the half-breed returned.
‘Pray, sir…’
‘Pray yourself,’ Archaon said, ‘and keep your foetid gods happy, for I don’t get to choose, sorcerer. I am to be Everchosen of the Chaos gods, the Herald of Ruin in all its cursed forms, not just the Powers towards which I feel wretchedly inclined. Now, convey my words in the dark tongue of the beast. Inform Ograx here that his warherd will join my own and that together we shall travel south and bring the wrath of the half-breed to the Gatelands and the infernal kings who grow soft within their palace walls.’
Archaon watched the bestial prince carefully as Sheerian spoke his words in the guttural tongue of the beastfiends. He saw Ograx look down on Moraq Half-Horn and then back at Archaon. When he spoke, it was with savage pride.
‘Well?’ Archaon asked.
‘Ograx the Great wonders for whom he fights,’ Sheerian translated.
‘Tell him he fights for the glory of his god,’ Archaon said, ‘and through him the glory of all the Ruinous Gods – for it is through them that the darkness of all the world will be realised. Tell him I am the instrument of that realisation – chosen of all gods as he is chosen of his – and as such he fights for me, as the best of all the half-breeds of the Southern Wastes do.’
Something seemed to trouble the creature.
‘Or he can fight for his life…’ Archaon warned. Ograx moved quickly for such a hulking beast. He was suddenly behind Moraq, his great, bulging arm around the half-breed’s neck. He picked the creature up by the arm-lock and his infamous half-horn, th
e chieftain’s back against the scarring of his broad chest. Moraq’s flailing hooves and thrashing arms told of the incredible force behind Ograx’s mighty frame. Suddenly it was over. Moraq Half-Horn’s body fell like a rag doll at the bestial prince’s brazen hooves, while the beastfiend’s head – replete with the shock on the unfortunate creature’s face – remained in Ograx’s grasp. The monster threw the head down at Archaon’s boots.
The dark templar stared at the half-breed hulk. His Swords of Chaos had cleared their bone blades from their wing-sheathes and Sheerian had stumbled back into his master in shock at the sudden violence.
‘Treachery, my lord,’ the sorcerer screamed. ‘Skulls for the Skull Throne of Khorne!’
‘No…’ Archaon decided. He didn’t move. His muscles were tensed but he didn’t want Ograx to know his display had startled him. ‘A skull for me,’ the dark templar informed him. ‘The Blood God’s diplomacy, if such a thing exists. An offering. A bargain to be made – but with conditions.’ Archaon looked straight at Ograx. ‘The half-breeds fight for you, correct?’ Archaon put to the bestial prince. ‘And with them, you for me.’
Ograx the Great nodded his ugly head slowly. Archaon nodded his agreement also.
‘Ready the horde, mongrel prince,’ Archaon said turning to leave. ‘We march on the continental interior, the Gatelands, where daemons rule and worlds beyond our own wait to be discovered.’
Chapter II
‘Those that worship the Prince of Excess are free to serve as slaves to darkness.’
– Lothal the Lost (Flesh inscribed)
The Scabyrinth
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of the Raw
The ragelands of the Haemorrhagia gave way once more to the howling freeze of the Southern Wastes. Archaon pushed his horde of half-breeds to their limit. Such creatures were used to the idle violence and wanton debauchery of holding territories. Even encroachments and invasions were laggardly, aimless affairs following whatever gorfiend or beastlord had indulged its aggressions that day. The beastfiends of the Southern Wastes were not used to hoof-marching and cavalcadery, where the inhospitable conditions and unnatural geography prohibited such madness.
This did not stop Archaon leading his ragged horde of barbarians and bestial savages from the front, setting the pace for the miserable creatures as they trudged through snowstorms and black drifts, across lakes of ice in which entire armies of daemons were encased, and glaciers that oozed ichor and doom. He led them between ranges of serrated mountains and along rivers of lava that snaked and steamed through the frozen wilderness from the flare of distant peaks. All the while, the lunatic Gorst followed in the horde’s hoofsteps, trailing his master – as he always had. Nothing could stop the wizened madman, jangling in his chains and head-cage. No drift of black snow was too deep, no frost-shattered maze of dagger peaks too towering for the flagellant. From time to time Archaon would inquire after the madman. Every time Gorst was taken for gone, however – lost in some unnatural storm, picked off by a monstrous predator of the Wastes or simply swallowed by the darkness – the lunatic would appear. How he achieved this, the Dark Gods only knew.
Archaon took each step with dogged assurance. Time and distance had little meaning in the insanity of the Southern Wastes. This he had long known and tended to measure the passing of both in the number of half-breeds crashed to the ice, dead from exhaustion and exposure. Ograx’s blood-brays were particularly susceptible to the deep cold of the continental interior, having formerly made their herdlands in the warmth of the Haemorrhagia. Every so many deaths, Archaon would open the Eye – the blazing jewel he had taken from the sorcerer Sheerian and the Chaos dragon Flamefang.
Ensconced above the eye sockets of his helm’s skull-face, Archaon engaged the Eye’s supernatural abilities. The gem glowed with damned energies, allowing Archaon to see far beyond even his own enhanced senses. Great distance and the obstacles of rock and storm were nothing to the Eye. It brought Archaon, in gaze at least, from horizon to horizon and beyond. With the great artefact, one of the six treasures of Chaos that marked a man as Everchosen of the Ruinous Gods, the dark templar had plotted the course of his incursion into the Wastes at the bottom of the world. He hoped that one day he would unlock the sorcerous jewel’s secrets further and learn to extend its view ahead in time, as well as space. He looked forward to the time he might see the prospects of the very next moment, hour, day or year in the same way that the Eye already allowed him to see beyond the limits of his earthly gaze – to see his future, his destiny, rather than simply aching for it in the unknown of the present.
His relentless trek through the lands of shadow, ice and insanity, trailing a mighty cavalcade of brute half-breeds, had taken him south. Further south than any man had ever been. The Eye had reached over the black horizon for him to reveal a great canyon, a crescent canyon that cut deep into the Wastes. It was colossal, and curved its crooked way into the darkness of the polar interior, the infernal whimlands of Chaos, where sanity and reality had no business. The sorcerer Sheerian told Archaon that the chasm was one of eight mighty tears in the fabric of the interior that had been created by the calamitous collapse of the great polar gate – the gargantuan portal that led from the mortal realm to that of the Chaos gods. The Eye showed Archaon the shattered remains of the gate and the amaranthine balelight that bled into the world, reaching up from the rift and into the broiling skies like a Ruinous dawn.
Huge fragments of midnight stone – warpstone that ate the very balelight about it – sat strewn across the infernal region, too massive for even the strange forces of the Gatelands to erode. About them the Eye revealed the sovereignties of the great entities of ruin and the earthly palaces of daemon lords and princes. Topless citadels. Nightmarish palaces. Colossal fortresses of paranoid madness. Such abominations, crafted in stone, metal, flesh and bone, reared from fossilised battlefields, the carcasslands of rotting daemonhood and vast ruins of ancient grandeur and dream-bastions yet to be built. A place where the manifest melted before the mind and the desires of darkness achieved a warped reality.
As Archaon’s determined steps led the horde down into the opening of the crescent canyon, beastfiends gave rancid thanks to their gods for the respite. With craggy stone walls rising up either side of them and a winding path descending into the frozen hell-hole of the Wastes, the crescent canyon offered shelter from the cut-glass gales and heart-stopping temperatures. With every hoof-fall down into the canyon depths, the temperature rose. Heated by the volcanic activity in the bowels of the earth and hot springs, the rockface of the crevasse became warm to the touch. The lifelessness of the icescape above gave way to unnatural mosses and lichens. The petrified roots and branches of hardy shrubs and woody foliage reached out for the horde as they made their way along the canyon.
The half-breeds were all but dead on their hooves, stumbling along in a listless train of savages. Archaon did not slow as he reached the shelter of the crescent canyon. He did not camp as any other warlord or general might have. He increased the pace further, snowdrifts and the slippery surface of glaciers no longer slowing their progress down. Although he did not share his desires with the brutes and lieutenants of his exhausted army, he was intent on reaching the Forsaken Fortress of Be’lakor before it disappeared once more, forcing him to criss-cross the frozen continent in aimless futility. He would not have the Dark Master escape him and, to ensure that, he needed a daemonic steed fleet enough to catch him and his capricious castle. The Changeling had shown him where he might find such a mount, so on he trudged. Through the canyon’s torturous twists and turns, through the brush of midnight foliage sprouting from the grit path and drooping from the overhanging rock.
As the canyon cut through the twilight wilderness of the Wastes, it bifurcated into a series of smaller, deep ravines. The single path became many as the canyon turned into a maze of tight gulches, gorges and gulleys. Above, the ice she
et had managed to bridge the narrow chasm tops, providing a vaulted roof to the canyon, through which the bleak glow of lightning storms passed as if through black crystal. Sheerian called it the Scabyrinth, though Archaon knew not where the sorcerer had heard the term. Where the canyon had split into a delta of smaller paths, the ice had managed to reassert its supremacy and cover the canyon, like a crusty scab across a festering wound. It rained within the ravine’s depths as the warm rock melted the under-ice to produce an ink-blot drizzle that guttered half-breed torches of bone and fat-smeared hide.
The drizzle sustained all manner of strange plants and animals. The Scabyrinth was an oasis of warped life – lowly creatures in the main. Things of long leg, claw and boot-crunching body. Wet serpents and spiders as big as Archaon’s shield made their home in the crags of the rockface. Warpwater crayfish scuttled about the black streams created by the perpetual drizzle in the squelching gravel of the ravine floor, while leeches dropping from the canyon walls and fat, chitinous flies attempted to feed on the warm blood in their veins. It was a while before the horde encountered actual warm-blooded creatures, but when they did it was in the form of twisted vermin and packs of vicious wolf-rats.
