by Rob Sanders
Suddenly it spoke. The creature had an infernal voice that burned through the furnace-roar glowing through its sharp teeth. Archaon had no idea what the beast had said. It was in an unspeakable tongue that Archaon did not know and proceeded from deep within the beast. Staring at one another, actions seemed to speak louder than hellish words, and Archaon edged his sword away and the weight of his armour off the beast. Rolling to its hoofed feet, Dorghar shook its head, passing a brawny shiver down its flanks. It snorted steam at the meltwater. Archaon still held his greatsword out, his broad blade ready to chop down through the beast’s neck. The daemon steed did not move, however. It stood waiting to receive its rider. Archaon nodded slowly to the beast and himself. The fourth treasure of Chaos – the Steed of the Apocalypse – was finally his. He would have rejoiced but for the searing ache in his bones from their thunderbolting descent and impact.
Slipping Terminus back into its scabbard, Archaon mounted the steed, settling back into the armoured saddle that seemed as much the beast as the sharp bone and midnight flesh. Taking the reins, Archaon motioned Dorghar gently on. Stabbing spiked hooves through the slush and into the icy sides of the pit, the steed climbed out of the crater. Casting the sorcerous sight of Sheerian’s Eye through the still darkness of the icy plateau, Archaon found what he was looking for. Dorghar turned its head to one side. Its eye burned with an internal blaze and the roar of the furnace poured from its daemonic maw. There were no words this time. Archaon didn’t need any to understand.
‘West, Dorghar,’ the Chaos warrior said. ‘West, beast. Just a little further. We call on my father-in-shadow tonight. Somehow I feel we shall not be well received.’
Chapter V
‘When we are not ourselves but we are no one else – who are we?’
– Khardunn the Gloried, Kurgan Bead-Belt
The Pustular Plain
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of the Raw
The unrelenting blackness of ice gave way to the oily sheen of meltwater lakes and deltas of steaming slush. Here, in the western reaches of the dark continent, a miserable kind of life eked out rancid existence. Earth, rocky and ice-threaded, sat stinking and water-logged like a tundrous bog. The wetlands were ancient in their corruption and ravenous for flesh. The mire was an undulating sea of bestial bones, choked with hardy brown grasses and islands of fungal growth. Things sloshed about in the foetid lakes of glassy blackness as a rash of volcanic peaks oozed steaming pus, curdling the churning tundra with its diseased filth. This was the Pustular Plain, where swarms of black flies bled beastfiends alive and the dark chuckle of the Great Lord of Decay could be heard in bubbles that rose from the dark water depths and broke the surface in a continuous, stinking chug.
As Dorghar came in low, the beat of his gargoyle’s wings created a wake in the dark waters, disturbing a miasma of feeding flies. The Steed of the Apocalypse glided in over trains of beastfiends working their way across the mire in single file columns. The creatures were horribly afflicted with growths, plagues and deformities that made movement a challenge and the thigh deep trudge through the bog-tundra an agonising trial. The bone staffs they used to traverse the freezing muck were crowned with a trio of thuribles in which burned peat. As well as lighting the creatures’ way, the headpieces offered warmth and praise to their Plague Lord in the skyward mockery of the unholy symbol created in the darkness.
As Dorghar back beat its wings to bring the beast and Archaon to a halt, the Chaos warrior peered down at the mire. The monster’s hooves creaked and splayed, ensuring both the steed and its master didn’t sink. Slipping down out of the saddle, Archaon couldn’t boast the same transformative powers and his boots oozed into the slurping freeze. The Forsaken Fortress had experienced the same problem. The architectural abomination loomed over Archaon – a palace constructed in the dread form of its monstrous master – but its wing-towers and horn-spires leant crookedly to one side where the palace was sinking. Wading through the muck, Archaon led the steed up to the smooth black stone of the fortress. Draping the reins over the razored protrusions at the base of the stonework, Archaon shouldered his shield and once again began the treacherous climb. There would be no door or gate. The palace boasted no barbican because the Forsaken Fortress did not admit visitors. The only unfortunates allowed inside the damned structure were those brought there by the daemon Be’lakor itself. Strangely, Archaon thought he qualified. Regardless, the Changeling had shown him the weakness in the palace fortifications. In the dread thing’s faithful reproduction of both the Dark Master and his palace, the rival entity had revealed a breach. As he began to climb, Archaon began to wonder if a similar vulnerability existed on his father-in-shadow’s own star-scorched chest.
Below him, Dorghar snorted and steamed, padding the marshy earth with its splayed hooves. Archaon reached. He jumped. He hauled himself up through the wretched wonder of the daemon prince’s form. Though fraught with perverse dangers and a sloping angle of ascent, it was an easier climb second time around. Here where the volcanic peaks warmed the gelid bog and even the raging gales slowed to a stagnant stillness, it was much warmer than the continental interior and the structure was not caked in ice.
Archaon aimed for the heart – as he did in all things. The fingertips of his gauntlets hooked into the colossal symbol of the eight-pointed star scored into the midnight stone. He dragged himself up through the Ruinous iconography – the symbol of those that damned themselves equally to all the dread powers of darkness in the world. It was his guiding star, as it had been for his father-in-shadow and the doomed creatures that followed them both, as well as many more into which Archaon had thrust his blade. The eight-pointed star knew no middle ground. When it was on the rise, the servants of Chaos – from the most infamous warlords to the lowliest spawn – followed it or died. And Archaon’s star was on the rise. It was time his father-in-shadow came to know this also.
Archaon found the fracture in the stone where he had before. A cleft in the wall over the palace’s daemonic heart. The Changeling’s wretched mimicry had indeed been a dark wonder to behold. Passing his shield through first, the Chaos warrior slipped through the breach in the defences and entered the Forsaken Fortress.
Inside, Archaon felt immediately vulnerable. It was an alien feeling for the warlord. He had travelled the world and killed just about everything that walked, talked and breathed. It would not have been an idle boast to call himself one of the deadliest warriors in the known world. He had the patronage of Dark Gods and seemed destined for a dread greatness. Still, in the darkness of the palace, with its smooth, flowing, almost organic architecture, Archaon felt trapped. Not like he had felt in manacle and chain. Not as a captured specimen, caged for display in Lord Agrammon’s sick menagerie. The Forsaken Fortress held more dread for Archaon than doors of oak, bars of steel and cells of stone. Its phantasmic walls could fade at any moment. It was there and it was not. The palace could vanish from the Pustular Plain like a ghost, to reappear somewhere else in the Southern Wastes or, for all Archaon knew, the world. The Forsaken Fortress haunted the realms of men and beasts – and the Dark Master himself haunted the halls of his own palace. If it were to disappear now, it would take him hostage.
Stalking the fortress passages and halls that wove through the palace like the cascading innards of so many of Archaon’s foes, the Chaos warrior’s armour jangled lightly. The palace interior was lightless, but Archaon’s darksight seared through the abyssal blackness. The Forsaken Fortress blazed with the fearful ruin of its construction. Its walls and floors – in their ornate wonder and madness – bled the raw essence of Chaos. Every speck of dust in the place burned with ancient evil and Archaon had eyes for such raging malevolence. In the darkness of the palace everything was reversed. The black oblivion burned bright with dreamy damnations and the wan brilliance of competing realities. It revealed to him a palace that was both there and not. Like a shadow, the Forsaken Fortres
s existed in so much as it was a semi-corporeal absence of something else. Purity. Mercy. Hope. Archaon’s boots scuffed the midnight marble of the floor and his furs rippled with the ghostly breeze. He held his shield aloft – in part to be ready for anything that the fortress had to throw at him, in part to present the eight-pointed glory of the Chaos Star to potential foes. A simple sign of Archaon’s allegiance to the Ruinous Powers in all their unified majesty.
Then he heard it. The single beat of a heart.
The Chaos warrior’s boots scraped to stillness. He looked this way and that through the blazing darkness. About the strange, flowing architecture that represented the prince of daemon princes both inside and out, the sound was like a tiny peal of thunder in the midnight madness. Then again. And again. Archaon pulled his shield closer and slipped Terminus from its fur back-scabbard with a steely hiss.
The grotesque beating continued. Blinking through the radiant oblivion, Archaon thought he saw movement. The Chaos warrior suddenly realised that he had wandered into the throne chamber. At its far end he could make out the monstrous form of a daemon cast in cold stone. The infernal form of a muscular body. Clawed hands and feet. Horns and wings. It looked just like a miniature version of the palace itself. Before it Archaon saw the wisp and twirl of shadow – congealing, intensifying, solidifying into the blackness of flesh. A monstrous heart beat before the throne. It was a twisted thing of large daemonflesh – strangled by bitterness and belligerence – thundering through the contorted muscularity of its obscene form with an otherworldly will to exist that would not be denied.
Archaon licked at his lips. It was painful to even be in the presence of such a realisation. The warlord knew that he could not let this moment pass. The heart beat like a dare in the silent darkness of the throne room. Willing himself on, Archaon’s gauntlet tightened about his Sigmarite sword. The blessed steel scorched the very air of the dark palace. One boot scuffed the marble floor ahead of the other. A hesitant stumble became the urgent steps of a walk. Moments later such steps became a plate-jangling run up the darkened length of the throne room. Terminus came up. Archaon’s hand tightened. He would cleave the monstrous heart in two.
There was suddenly more movement in the shadows. Shapes emerged from behind the throne, sweeping up on either side to surround the great pulsing heart. Some slipped silkily from behind pillars while others erupted from the blackness of archways. Archaon skidded to a stop, his plate rattling to stillness and his blade up, its point aimed over the top of his shield. The Chaos warrior turned, ready for an attack or ten such attacks but the shadowy forms also grew still. Their weapons were not presented. They were simply placing themselves between Archaon and the daemonic heart.
Each was a living silhouette. A shadowy outline of a Chaos warrior. Shadow churned within each one, holding its form and giving the impression of plate, of horned helms, of furs, of aberration and weapons in scabbards or slung across backs. Archaon thought he could make out the shape of northmen, Kurgan warlords, damned kings, Kislevites in spike and fur, shadow-pledged marauders, bestial chieftains and warrior half-daemons. Men, women and monsters, long in their leaving of the world and now cast in shadow like statues of living darkness. Each seemed doomed to haunt the palace, cursed by their undying devotion to their Dark Master. Each still bore the mark of the daemon prince across their chest – centred on their black hearts. Be’lakor’s Ruinous Star of darkness united and powers undivided. The sign of the Bearer. The Herald. The Harbinger. The star was scorched in a cruel light that cut through the shadowy form of each otherworldly warrior of Chaos.
Archaon turned with sword raised and shield held out before him. He was ready for the sentinels in shadow but the things merely assumed their positions about the throne and throne room. They waited as black veins sprouted from the monstrous heart in a horrific, labyrinthine network that finally began to assume a daemonic shape. Thick arteries carried the pumped ichor of the thing through a torso and long limbs. A spider web of black capillaries spread from these throughout wings and the rest of the body. The vessels’ steam and smoked shadow assumed the form of spouting muscle and black bones. About the dark bloom of a brain, housing Ruinous thoughts and unimaginable power, grew a midnight skull. Horns sprouted from the nightmare, before the haze of shadowy steam around the daemon suddenly congealed about its monstrous form like an instantaneous frost. The infernal beast was now clothed in its blacker-than-black skin. Hooks, chains, skulls and scraps of hell-forged mail dribbled from its muscular flesh. The realisation was complete. Within the design of the Forsaken Fortress, sat the daemon-sculpted shape of the prince’s throne – on that sat the daemon itself: the Dark Master, Be’lakor.
The abomination wore its infernal royalty like a cankered soul. Its horrific visage was an obsidian mask of the unreadable and unknowable. All at once Archaon thought he saw disdain in the thing’s abyssal eyes, and pride and horror and glee. Mostly it just seemed bitter and irritated to be in his presence. Archaon stared at the loathsome creature. With his one good eye he beheld it. With his darksight gift he beheld it. With the sorcerous Eye of Sheerian he beheld it. It was there – in the infernal flesh. The Chaos warrior lowered his Sigmarite sword and his shield.
‘I see you, dread thing,’ Archaon told it.
Only because I wish it, mortal, Be’lakor told him. The daemon prince’s voice was in everything. Heard. Felt. Archaon could even taste the bitter hatred coming off the thing. You have wandered far off your course, chosen of the Chaos gods.
‘The Everchosen of Chaos,’ Archaon told it.
You have not earned that title yet, mortal, the Dark Master reminded him. The Everchosen of Chaos is known by his treasures and there are two yet to be found.
‘That is only a matter of time,’ Archaon assured the creature. ‘Is it not, daemon? Are not my moments, my months, my years – the very lives I might have lived – but playthings to a creature like you? Like skeins of wool about your claws – to cut, to let loose or to wrap about your finger?’ Be’lakor glowered at Archaon with a withering intensity but said nothing. ‘I look to the north, the south, the east and the west, and you are there, Shadow, hidden on the horizon. I try to remember my past and there you are, haunting my memories. I have dark hopes for the future – but you afflict even those with your potential presence.’
Is that why you are here, mortal? To whine, carp and plead.
‘You know why I’m here, daemon-filth,’ Archaon told it. ‘Let’s not play childish games. I have travelled far and found he who would not be found.’
You are here for answers…
‘We will leave guesswork to idle philosophers,’ Archaon said. ‘I would know what you would have with me, creature. From your own faithless lips. Or I shall cut the truth out of your infernal carcass.’
Answers?
‘Speak daemon, while you still can,’ Archaon warned.
You have the very world on its knees before you and you came to find me… for answers?
Archaon felt the bottomless depths of the creature’s scorn. Its mockery burned to hear.
‘Are you going deaf?’ Archaon shot back. ‘My demands have not changed since the last time I asked. Yes, monster – answers. To questions. I ask a question and you answer it. That’s how this works. Don’t make me ask you again.’
What I would have with you? Be’lakor seethed. I would have you realise your destiny… my son-in-shadow.
Archaon bit at his bottom lip. The sound of his daemonic father admitting as much was like icewater in his ears.
‘And who does my destiny serve?’ Archaon asked.
We all serve those greater than ourselves.
‘Be’lakor,’ Archaon hissed. ‘Daemon prince. Dark Master. Some say you are the crown-bearer of the Chaos gods. Nothing more than a slave. Others that you serve only yourself and your insatiable ambition.’
A mere pastime, Be’lakor said. Some embroider.
Some whittle. I craft the future in flesh and blood. Who does your destiny serve? It serves me, you miserable cur. You are a doll with which to be played and left abandoned on the floor. You are the piece of the game taken and placed to one side of the board. You are a living afterthought, Archaon of the North – like all my servants. Nothing more.
‘And yet here I am,’ Archaon rumbled back. ‘I’m not on the floor. I’m here, where no man nor daemon thought I would be. I stand before the lowly Be’lakor – dung stain of the gods – in the armour of the Everchosen, carried here on the Steed of the Apocalypse, bearing the treasures of Chaos and the ever burning Mark of the Ruinous Powers in my flesh.’
You think you are the first to bear such dark honours? Be’lakor asked, the question like a scorpion’s sting. You are a nothing. Born of nothing. The hollow fruit of an empty womb. All that you are I put in there. But think not that I afford you any affection for that. My half-breeds roam the world. Thousands more serve me not in flesh but in deed. They carry my mark. They live for my favour. They know their place. They do not carp and question. They serve the darkness of this world through the darkness they find in themselves. They serve their father-in-shadow – the darkness that is Be’lakor, you worthless wretch. As you should.
‘And yet I am not without worth, it seems,’ Archaon told the abomination. ‘I am the dark hope of the Ruinous Gods. The same gods that laugh at you, my father-in-shadow, and scorn your wretched efforts. Be’lakor the Bearer. Slave to circumstance. Doomed to carry crowns but not to wear them. Doomed to choose but not be chosen. Granted eternity but denied form. You call me a nothing. You call me worthless. You are a prince without a kingdom to inherit. Nothing could be more worthless than that.’
