by Rob Sanders
When Archaon’s gaze passed across Giselle, he found to his surprise that she was looking back. It was still the blank stare of horror relived – the kind of fixed mask of distant pain that Archaon had seen in soldiers returning from slaughter. The pair looked at one another across the umbra of the canyon. The flash of perpetual storms glowered through the ice above them and cast the pair in a ghoulish light. Archaon slowed. Giselle stumbled about in the water, her gaze unbroken. Fat droplets of meltwater plunked about them like rain. He thought she gave him a look. A softening of the lines about the mouth. A hardening of the eyes. It was an accusation glared across the twilight. He was leaving again. Leaving her in the care of madmen and monsters. Leaving her in this godforsaken place. Simply leaving her. Off to slip steel into beastflesh. To bring daemons to their knees. To carve the name Archaon in misery across the surface of the unknown world.
Archaon felt the pang of something he’d thought forgotten. Something dull and heavy in his chest. Responsibility? Guilt? Love? These were feelings fraught and fragile: sentiments unbecoming of the Everchosen of Chaos. With a will that burned with resistance the dark templar turned away, striding into his future with determination and fury at the miserable world, at the gods – both those that were Ruinous and those that were simply untrue – and at himself.
With Giselle’s gaze burning into his armoured back, Archaon marched south, following the black stream and the curving progress of the crescent canyon. The wagon tracks and the hoofprints of the Slaaneshi hunting party were clear to follow and before long the twists and turns of the Scabyrinth became one colossal cleft. He no longer walked with the waters of the stream but against them, and before long Archaon felt the canyon floor ascend, rising to meet the plateau of the continental interior, the Gatelands and the sovereign territories of infernal royalty. He stomped his boot prints into the grit, passed water against the canyon wall and broke the stems of petrified foliage as he passed, all to make it easy for Ograx and the horde to follow his progress and scent. He even left the messy corpses of marauding creatures he happened upon to leave no doubt.
With the progress of the wagons slowing and the cavalcade winding its way up the canyon side, Archaon decided to make his move. Shouldering his shield, the dark templar advanced on the servants of Slaanesh. Hugging the crags and clefts and moving rapidly between the cover offered by boulders and sparse, black foliage, Archaon crept up on Jharkill’s wagon train. Darting out from between huge rocks that lined the zigzag ascent, Archaon made a heavy run uphill towards stragglers of the cavalcade rearguard. Grabbing beastfiends from behind by their horns and their snouts and savagely snapping them around, the dark templar despatched the creatures. With the rearmost cage wagon bumping its way up the incline, dragged by two bipedal steeds and a beastfiend skinner at the reins whipping the beasts of burden with delirious abandon, Archaon made his move.
Unbolting the cage, which seemed to have been fashioned from the bones of some great Wasteland beast, Archaon found himself face to face with some kind of sabre-toothed hellcat. The thing looked half starved but unleashed a heart-stopping roar. Archaon pushed his way into the cage, infuriating the beast further and prompting the hellcat to leap at him with its trap-jaw open. The Chaos warrior didn’t have time to tangle with the creature and had to take care of it before the beastfiend skinner noticed the commotion in the back of the wagon.
Grabbing the hellcat by its sabre fangs, Archaon turned aside the creature’s savage attack. Bringing the blood-matted fur of its mane under one arm, Archaon tightened his lock around the beast’s neck. Scrabbling back with its cruel claws, the hellcat attempted to extricate itself from the Chaos warrior’s stranglehold. Gritting his teeth and trying to keep the creature’s struggles to a minimum, Archaon squeezed for all he was worth. The brute’s snapping and snarling suddenly changed to a throttled whimper. Finally something felt like it was breaking within the creature’s muscular neck. As the struggle subsided and Archaon lowered the hellcat’s emaciated body to the cage floor, the dark templar released the beast.
Catching his breath, Archaon sagged. Around the hellcat’s broken neck, Archaon found the sinew string that carried Jharkill’s shamanistic skulls, glyph-pendants and carved effigies. Slipping it off the creature’s great head and around it sabre teeth, Archaon hung the cursed thing about his own neck. Resting his pauldron against the dead beast, Archaon heaved its carcass across the floor of the cage and out of the rear door. As the hellcat’s lifeless body rolled back down the incline and off the edge of the narrow, rocky trail, Archaon slid his shield off his shoulder and slipped Terminus from its scabbard. He found a suitable hiding place for both sword and shield between the wheels, in the mangle of bones and sinew that made up the underside of the wagon bed. He then proceeded to bolt the cage door closed and lock himself within it like the myriad other specimens Jharkill and his hunting party were returning to the palace menagerie.
Checking that the beastfiend skinner was still fully involved with driving the infernal beasts that were dragging the wagon up the meandering incline, Archaon sat back against the barbed bones of the cage. Resting his own aching bones, Archaon tried to relax. He jangled the charms and effigies hanging about his neck. He would play the role of the compliant prisoner. He watched through the bars as the Southern Wastes juddered by. After a torturous ascent up the canyon wall, the hunters’ train of wagons set out across the nightmare lands that afflicted the continental interior. The sky was a churning tempest of eddies and whirling blackness, lanced by spidery bolts of unnatural lightning that seared across it like a web. Here the elemental ferocity of wind, ice and hail lost its potency.
Archaon couldn’t count the number of times he had almost frozen to death out on the Southern Wastes or been burned alive in some fiery pit or river of lava. The Ruinous wilderness had thrown everything it could at the dark templar. The Gatelands existed at the pleasure of whim and dark fancy. The realities of the cold and harsh weather were not constants there and so as the wagon train creaked and squeaked across the blasted, hellish landscape Archaon was treated to all manner of atmospheric madness from above. Storms whose thunder only existed in the mind, as a skull-splitting ache of the head. Infernal lightning that struck the ground, creating birthing pits for savage entities. Pellets of lead that fell like musket balls from the tumultuous heavens. Clouds of soot and flame that seemed to consume one another like monsters battling for supremacy across the sky. Dew that settled on everything like spots of black ink. Glowing banks of mist that swept in to change the very landscape across which it drifted.
The land below the bone-jarring progress of the cage wagon was little better. The wheels crunched through shattered obsidian while the black clouds of dust, kicked up by the wagons and the beasts hauling them, willed change on everything it coated. Hellquakes thundered up from the depths of the Wastes – unforgotten echoes of the catastrophic collapse that destroyed the polar gate and spilled ruin and death into the world. With every moaning tremor and furious rumble, the architecture of derelict palaces – warped, grand and ancient – rained about them. The battlefields inbetween were landscapes of carnage. Infernal bodies upon bodies, mummified into the land and covered with slaughter anew. The wagon train weaved through the harsh terrain of corpse mounds, ridges created by the fossilised remains of toppled monstrosities and fields of rib and bone that made for a bumpy passage.
The wagon train halted several times. A mire of carcasses and ichor forced the cavalcade into a detour, while Jharkill and his beastfiends suffered the rabid assaults of infernal skirmishers, issuing forth from the palaces of the damned and fortresses of the mighty. Jharkill added their corpses to the surrounding slaughter before moving ever on. South. Towards the gate. Towards the palace of his royal master. Archaon sat against the barbed bone of the cage like a good prisoner. He wasn’t exactly enjoying the ride but he had walked across so much of the dark southern continent that he enjoyed at least not trudging through some bli
zzard or snow drift.
Trumpeting calls of alarm from the Slaaneshi beastfiends alerted Archaon to an approaching problem. Grasping the bars with his gauntlets and peering about, the dark templar could see little. When the black outline of a distant ruin moved, Archaon couldn’t quite believe what he was looking at. The black towers of the derelict palace suddenly reassumed their former baroque glory, almost as though the furious warpflame that had gutted it had never been. The towers bucked skyward slightly, leading Archaon to believe that the land beneath it had moved. And it had. As the gleaming towers of black stone and brass majesty collapsed in on themselves and the walls of the fortress-palace toppled, a giant cloud of dust and corruption reached up from the calamity and into the heavens. Resting his skull-helm against the bone bars of the cage, Archaon saw that there was a ripple of the past – or possibly the future – passing through the Wasteland itself. Like a rogue wave at sea, the landswell had moved beneath the palace, restoring it to its former glory, before rippling through its foundations and destroying it again.
Now it was surging across the Wastes, bringing brief life to the mummified, mangled and long-dead that were quietly rotting on the ancient battlefields where they were butchered. Thrown up into the air by the rippling force, the warrior daemons, beastfiends and spawn screeched the horror of their last moments, thrashing and snapping before falling back behind the swell and reassuming the entangled stillness of the grave. There was little Archaon could do but grab the bars of the cage and hold on. As the black earth rose beneath the wagon, Archaon was suddenly confronted by the horror of intermingled bodies. Rather than wood, the wagon and its cage was largely constructed of bone, horn and sinew – the dead being a plentiful resource in the Southern Wastes and trees sparse. The dead whose bones had been meshed and tied together to create the cage were brought back momentarily to terrible life. As the wagon tumbled it was as if Archaon had been trapped inside a shrieking spawn.
With the moment of horror passed and the bars of his cage age-browned bone once more, Archaon found himself on his back. The wagon had been knocked over onto its side, and as the dark templar picked himself up he could see the landswell bringing the abomination of life to the battlefields of the east. With Jharkill barking gruff orders and long-snouts moving along the wagon train to secure beasts and right wagons, Archaon waited. The beastfiends got behind the bars of his cage and pushed the rickety vehicle back onto the braced ribs of its bone wheels.
One of Jharkill’s bestial underlings gave him the blankness of its white eyes, seeming not to remember placing him there. A tongue slithered out from its long snout and tasted the warp-curdled air. Jharkill had collected so many specimens for his infernal master – monsters, savage beasts, spawn and daemonkind – that it was impossible to keep track. Taking Archaon for some warrior-daemon in his hell-forged plate, the creature eventually moved on, trumpeting at skinners to get their beasts and wagons moving.
Archaon cast a glance down the corpse road behind the wagon. Somewhere down that road, Ograx the Great led Archaon’s horde after him. Looking forward, beyond the beastfiend skinner and his pack-daemons, Archaon could see the dread that lay ahead. The Gatelands. The storming balelight of the beyond, blazing for the heavens where the polar portal used to be. The serrated silhouette of infernal palaces encircled the raging gateway like a black crown, and before long the wagon train found itself in the shadow of one of the largest.
The road up to the palace of the daemon lord Agrammon was a well-worn path in the mummified remains of those foolish enough to have attacked it. The track weaved its way between colossal fragments of black stone, half buried in the cursed earth. Their size and grandeur led Archaon to believe that they were fragments of the polar gate that used to tower over the dread lands of daemonic sovereignty. Other hunting parties had joined them on the approach, and Archaon got the impression that Agrammon’s ever-expanding menagerie was an endless enterprise. No monstrous specimen would be so impressive, no daemon so infamous or spawn so exotically repulsive as to sate the daemon lord’s appetites and complete his collection.
Chapter III
‘…sits Agrammon, daemon lord of a palace proud, in the Gatelands of infernal sovereignty. A serpentine nightmare of slithering indulgence and grasping tentacle, it is the Cagelord, a turn-key for the Prince of Excess, a collector, an enslaver, a master of the hoard. Its madness is greed, but not for gems or metals precious, not for cravings sweet or more land than a daemon can use. He is a gatherer of the flesh, a presenter of prisoners, of creatures exotic, of beasts infernal and myriad, keeper of a menagerie monstrous, about his palace proud.’
– Horror-Scribes of the Endless Mountain,
Bestiarum Diabolika
The Gatelands
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of the Raw
As the rickety wagons closed on the main gate, Archaon saw that the massive exterior wall was made of metal. This came as a surprise to the Chaos warrior, since he had seen precious little of it in the frozen Southern Wastes. He assumed that Agrammon had the ore mined from beneath the Gatelands and processed for his needs, although Archaon couldn’t tell what kind of metal it was. The walls were a bold black and covered in sculpted barbs, wicked skewers, spikes, hooks and grapnels. All were sharpened to a flesh-snagging point and glistened with poisons that sent victims into spasms. Archaon knew this as he saw the beastfiends and daemons that had impaled themselves on the wall and were dancing a jig of delight to their death.
Increasingly the Chaos warlord thought that he had made the right decision. The twisted wall alone was designed to shred any attacker desperate enough to scale it. A direct assault by his horde would have resulted in horrific casualties. If he were to be captured by the daemon lord Agrammon or fail in his objective then it still might. Archaon licked at his dry lips.
A single tower extended high above the palace walls, made of the same twisted metal. It was covered in downwards slanting spikes like an urchin, making a climb almost impossible. Looking up at the cloud-grazing height of the citadel, its bulbous bell tower and the pincer-shaped crescent that crowned the tower spire, Archaon thought such a climb would be suicide regardless. As the train of wagons and cages rattled in through the twisted gatehouse, Archaon saw Jharkill talking to a daemonette – one of many Archaon saw stationed about the palace, standing in armoured corsets and executioner’s hoods. They clutched sickle-spears and walked up and down the menagerie thoroughfares.
The colossal courtyard between the palace wall and the citadel was the metal of cages and the black stone in which the barbed and twisted bars were set. Cage had been built upon tangled cage, three, four, and sometimes five stories above the black gravel of the thoroughfare. They had been built around one another in all sizes and configurations. They were uniform only in that they were woefully insufficient to house the captive creatures inside. As the wheels of Archaon’s wagon hissed through the gravel, he saw monstrosities undreamed of, daemonic abominations, god-cursed spawn and bestial slaves with exotic fur and extravagant horns, housed miserably together as a single collection. He saw things with wings, things all limb, beasts of claw and fang, creatures of scale, blubber and armoured skin, great monsters that slithered, malformed titans and packs of lesser infernals that hissed through the barbs and bars of their cages at the new arrivals. The menagerie was colossal and its number of deplorable specimens impossible to count.
What struck Archaon instantly was the stench. The ripe funk of thousands of creatures all eating, defecating, living and dying in close proximity. The cramped conditions were nothing less than wretched. Archaon gagged as the reek overwhelmed him. The noise too was unbearable, the bestial misery palpable. The Chaos warlord had never heard such a chorus of woe. The menagerie was a nest of caged suffering: a collection of creatures, sitting in their own filth, waiting to die. All wore Jharkill’s shamanistic tokens of obedience about their necks, or at least what passed for necks
on the more warped specimens. Long-snout menials moved between the cages ladling slop and throwing rancid meat between the bars, but Archaon suspected that the only thing keeping the creatures of the menagerie alive was the unnatural hardiness of their warped constitutions. What pleasure Lord Agrammon could derive from this, Archaon thought, the Ruinous Gods only knew.
The wagon train trundled around the exterior wall before the gravel thoroughfare started to work its way inwards in a concentric spiral, finally arriving, Archaon expected, at the centre citadel. It was an insane design. It was completely impractical, unless your objective was to slavishly admire every exhibit, in every cage, in the entire menagerie. It occurred to Archaon that Agrammon had designed the spiralling layout of the twisted collection with exactly that in mind.
Progress stopped and started along the wagon train as dead exhibits were dragged from the barbed nightmare of their cages and replaced with new captures. The monstrous cadavers were then loaded on the wagons for dumping on the Wastes. As the cavalcade worked its way inward, Archaon realised that his turn was coming. Clasping his gauntlets around one of the bars of his cage, he hauled on the bone – quietly but insistently – so that it snapped. Archaon left the broken bar in place. It was not the only thing he would be leaving with the wagon. His shield and the blade Terminus were hidden under the wagon bed, between the wheels. Upon re-earning his freedom, the Chaos warrior would need them and so had broken the bar as a means of identifying the wagon once more.
