by Rob Sanders
It seemed as though he must have been standing before the rupture gateway for some time, since he found the horned multitudes of his half-breed horde stretching back towards the palaces of hellish royalty. They too were unnaturally calm. There was no roaring, butting or the shaking of primitive weaponry at the skies. The beastfiends stared as their warlord had, with thunderstruck horror and heart-pounding possibility at the unnatural wonder before them. Ograx the Great was no different. Jharkill the monstrous huntsman – who had lived several lifetimes in the light of the world’s doom – had never been this close and he too was glazed of eye. The abominations that he had hunted and enslaved to Archaon’s will had grown to a stillness, towering above the horde and watching from their cages.
The Swords of Chaos stood before their master, the punctured mess of their wings held in close, while the sorcerer, Khezula Sheerian – the only one of them to have experienced the soul-shattering realm beyond – looked fearfully on at the prospect of what his master was about to say. Only Giselle was missing, but Archaon saw the twisted Vier sitting at the reins of her bone wagon, pulled as it was by a pair of monstrous elkbeasts, midnight of hairless flesh and warped of antler. Reaching out with the beating storm in his chest, he felt her terror – felt the girl hiding from the silent expectation of some terrible thing beneath her furs, the stabbing flutter of her own heart like rolling thunder in his ears. It would not stop him. Not the coward beasts of his horde. Not the uneasiness of the sorcerer. Not the dread of a pure soul he was about to plunge into the raging depths of abominate corruption. Nothing would. Nothing could.
‘We stand at the precipice of possibility,’ Archaon called across the horde. As he did so, Sheerian turned and obediently squawked the beastspeak of his words at the half-breeds. Archaon could see the fear and uncertainty cutting into their bestial faces. The Chaos warlord prompted Dorghar into a spirited trot up and down the front line of half-breeds, allowing the unspeakable fires of damnation to cast him in a shimmering silhouette. Such words did not come easily to the Chaos warlord. He led by example. He held the horde together with fear. He was not given to speeches – especially delivered to wretched half-breeds, the monstrous issue of beast and daemon. For the first time in their dread union, the creatures of the horde were confronted by something that filled them with more fear than their dread warlord and master. Before them blazed the beyond. A colossal wall of warping flame raging up through the broiling heavens, scalding away the clouds, the sky and stars. A rift that blasted its way out through the bottom of the world and threatened to drag them screaming their miserable lives away to any number of hellish eternities. Their mongrel hearts might have pumped the blood of daemons about their bodies but their half-souls were a cowardly afterthought, filled with animal panic and sensory suspicion. Archaon understood that they needed a little more than idle threats, and they were idle, since once he was through the collapsed gateway and had become one with the howling infinitude, beyond there was no guarantee that he would ever return. This was not a possibility he shared with the horde.
‘Our destiny awaits,’ he roared at them. ‘Many of you dread things have followed me across the frozen Wastes of your homeland. A homeland vast – carried on the backs of mountains, racked by storm and honed to a razor’s edge by the frozen winds that carve through its wildness. You are part of that wildness – but like all savage things you cannot be kept prisoner…’
Archaon turned Dorghar about and cantered in the other direction. He thought of the creatures he had freed from Lord Agrammon’s menagerie and the irony of his own position as slave-master of such monstrosities.
‘You cannot be held hostage – not even by this great, daemon-haunted land. Not by the frozen expanse of its mighty glaciers nor its raging ranges of frost-shattered peaks and volcanoes. Certainly not by the deep darkness of the ocean that surrounds it, washing up on its icy shores. An ocean I crossed to be here with you, to face the trials of the Dark Gods together and earn their Ruinous rewards. For I come from a land made up of many lands. A place far, far away. Forests, villages, cities that you could barely imagine, all begging for the flame. Kingdoms ripe for destruction. Empires unworthy of their existence, awaiting our savage dominion. Weakling races – of succulent, soft flesh – who think themselves safe in their civilisation.
‘They will learn they are not safe. They will learn of suffering. They will learn of death. You will teach them and I will lead us all into the embrace of doom. A time of ending, a place of ash and darkness. There your Dark Gods will be waiting – to receive and reward you. To reach such a place – such a time – you must follow me across another dark ocean. Through a realm undreamed of far beyond the limits of blood and bone. Where only the thunder of the heart and the monstrous thoughts of the mind hold sway.
‘In truth, I cannot tell you what to expect on this journey. Some experiences defy description. I can only tell you that it must be done, that I will venture first and lead us through this darkness and uncertainty, but I expect every single one of you to be at my back – as you have been thus far. It is a trial that must be endured – like the endless expanse of the land beneath your hooves or the frost that bites the flesh and numbs the spirit.
‘Before the dawn there is the long darkness of night. Before the sweetness of victory there is the bitterness of battle, long fought.’ Archaon hauled at the reins and leaned back in the saddle, drawing Dorghar’s spiked hooves up as the creature reared before the horde. ‘I will be watching you,’ Archaon told his half-breeds. ‘Your Dark Gods will be watching you, as they have never before. Disappoint us not and follow your master into eternity. For he is the Lord of the End Times and Everchosen of the Chaos gods. He cannot fail…’
Archaon turned Dorghar about and dug his heels into the daemon steed’s flanks. The mount thunderbolted away from the horde, accelerating into a gallop at the Ruinous inferno roaring up from the collapsed polar warp gate. Behind him Archaon could hear the roar of the horde. He could hear the stampede of hooves, the bone-creak of wagon wheels and the ground-shaking trudge of enslaved monsters.
As he closed on the screaming oblivion of phantasmic flame, Archaon felt the world flux and warp about him. He too, from his bones, from the flutter of doubt in his chest to the indomitable will that saturated his entire being, all bent about the ferocious, unnatural force of raging unreality. The path Dorghar was hammering out with its hooves stretched before them, reaching out for eternity. The world of before smeared into a new form of existence. What Archaon knew bled away. His arm knew no pain. His flesh no cold. His lungs no air. His heart no fear. All he knew was that he was screaming. The shrieking soulfire of the Gate had him.
Oblivion had swallowed him whole. The flames of white-hot nothing writhed about him, purging him of doubt. The tempest howled up through him, the Ruinous force of the beyond stripping plate from his body. It dragged his bones free of his flesh before shattering what was left of his corporal presence into dust and cinders. Only the raw darkness that was Archaon remained – streaming, warping and fluxing like a shadow caught in an otherworldly hurricane. Colossal fragments of stone, the black of soul-eating darkness, rocketed skyward with him. Grit, shards and rubble seared up through the absent flame in an eternal experience of the Great Gate’s explosive demise: the warp-saturated dereliction of the abominate architecture caught in the calamitous moment of its destruction.
Up became down and nothing became everything as Archaon’s monstrous essence – the curdled umbra of the soul, shot through with the liquid obsidian of apocalyptic ambition – was suddenly engulfed by the unknowing agony of the rift. Like the plummeting fragments of the Gate, reliving the horror of its reality-rending collapse. Swallowed by one of a million maelstrom-swirling maws through which the beyond screamed into the certainties of other realms, Archaon knew that the world was no more. The Gate was no more. He was no more.
Then… thought that… ended… When… experienced… as… he could ex
perience… reduced… nothing more… dark smear… underbelly of existence… realms… horror… eternal… Why… hurts, the gods it…! No… no…
Chapter X
‘Roads. Lives. Tales. To all things an end and a beginning.’
– Anonymous
‘Riding hard through eternity,
the doom of all the world came forth.
Bloodthirsty and armed to the teeth,
his monstrous host, ready for war.
At the frozen top of the world
he found men of fate like himself –
for whom life was a bloody blur:
an unthinking, murderous hell.
Foe. Barbarian. Invader.
He came at the kingdoms of men –
from north, south, east and west: danger.
Testing resolve, gathering strength.
With the treasures of Chaos found –
their infernal promise assumed,
he was to be chosen and crowned –
and all hell to be broken loose.
’Twas the dark daemon Be’lakor’s
damnable calling to perform –
a dread obligation abhorred –
a despised duty nevermore.’
– Necrodomo the Insane, The Liber Caelestior
(The Celestine Book of Divination)
Chapter XI
‘Taste of oblivion, Everchosen of the Ruinous Gods. Experience your doom through daemon eyes and come to know the limitless light of the darkness you would extinguish.’
– Be’lakor – the Dark Master, First Daemon of Chaos,
The Liber Caelestior, margin inscription
The Long, Dark Night of the All Souls
The Realms of Chaos
Eternitude
A dream. Just like a dream. Archaon found himself walking. He could hear the soft clatter of his plate. The jangle of Dorghar’s halter chains as he led the daemon steed on. He reached for a weapon and found the hilts of several hell-forged blades in his belt, as well as the shaft of a hand axe and a sheathed dagger. He brought his right arm up before him. The tatters of a sling still hung about his neck. His arm seemed as new. He extended the fingers of his gauntlet and then clenched them in a fist. How long had he been in this place?
The dull agony of broken bones was gone. In fact, he felt nothing. His legs, striding through the darkness – perhaps for an eternity – were insensible to strain or fatigue. He pulled at a finger. Twisted it. Bent it back. Nothing. No pain. No discomfort. This truly was a dream, Archaon decided. A nightmare in which he knew he was trapped but could not, through will alone, wake from.
He remembered the Southern Wastes. The Gatelands. The horde. Then nothing. The warping, fluxing, roaring perversities of this realm had passed through him. Stripped him of bodily afflictions, his weakness of the flesh. Reducing him down to his essence: a streaming darkness, passing like an undercurrent through an ocean of others. A boundless sea within a sea within a sea within a sea. A bottomless abyss as wide as it was deep, dark with the energies that swirled, spumed and crashed through it. A spiritual storm through which schools of savage entities swam, predatory consciousnesses lay in wait and the colossal intensities of intelligences ancient trawled, drawn down on desperate souls. Archaon came to understand himself as part of such a maelstrom, a primordial darkness that was to the mortal world as the glassy facet of a pool. It reflected the world in dark imperfection but remained suggestive of something unknown but ever present beneath. The surface separated two different elements. Two different experiences of the same world – one the distorted mirror image of the other. It rippled at the insistence of both, those above and below. It invited those souls and entities so inclined to pass through the reflective illusion of a barrier between such realms, drawing the monstrous from the depths and the doomed to sink into the darkness.
Archaon knew he was nothing more than streaming shadow, coursing through darkness. At the mercy of prevailing tides. Surging before stormy fronts. Dragged along with rapidities. Whirled into the gyres and miniature maelstroms of raging tempests. Twisting and soaring through the streaming presence of other beings – aethyric evils, exalted essences and the searing passage of pure daemonic will – Archaon found the dark fire of his soul mauled. It had been torn this way and that by currents of raw knowing, streams of suffering, the downwellings of doom and the countercurrents of crackling ambition and false hope. Rings, eddies, traps, vortices and roiling embodiments – all threatening to put him from his endless course. His passage through the formlessness of the chaotic abyss.
Archaon felt familiar horrors in the swirling shadow. Things drawn down on him, following the rising star of the Chaos warlord’s soul. Infernal creatures he had crossed. Daemons he had slain. Depraved intelligences like the beast Agrammon that slithered and streamed about the crowded constellation of souls that was Archaon and his horde. Monstrous forces of warping, elemental destruction, like the dread presence of the Yien-Ya-Long, that stalked the soulfire trail of Archaon and his army through oblivion like a great predator might hunt a migrating herd. These seething entities, who wanted nothing more than to avenge themselves from the beyond, ultimately kept their distance. They seemed cautious, as though other great forces in the hellish stormscape of the aethyr had already laid claim to Archaon’s soul and were keeping watch over their property. Archaon felt the warp-scorching presence of such primordial and Ruinous entities. Of things impossible. Of dread power. Of myriad malevolence. Of promises eternal. Of fears indescribable. Like oblivions all of their very own, the Ruinous Powers burned like great dark stars, exerting an influence on every damned presence and victim-soul about them. Drawing them in. Sometimes they would stabilise the paths of the mighty. They would hold the exalted on their course to greatness and damnation, extending their monstrous reach and infinite influence to establish a temporary equilibrium between the irresistible forces of their realm-warping presence. Sometimes they would tear lives apart between them and, like behemoths of the deep, filter the soul-carnage left in the wake of slaughter, suffering and the meteoric rise of servant champions.
Several times, Archaon felt the blaze of their direct attentions. To be beheld by such beings through the looking glass stillness of storm centres all but scorched Archaon out of existence. He felt his fate flux and warp at their gaze. It was simultaneously the most wonderful and the most dreadful thing Archaon had ever experienced. He burned in the incomprehension of their interest. In the existential chill of their ignorance, Archaon felt predatory entities close back in. Even there he was not alone. Ever present in the havoc, in the dread and the darkness, Archaon felt the calamitous force of his father. The First Daemon of Chaos. Watching. Waiting. Wanting. The bitter vortex of his otherworldly presence was a warp-curdled and crushing darkness of his own making and Archaon could feel the distant pull of his aeonian desires.
Although Archaon knew from the scorching fleshlessness of his soul that he was not walking through the empty blackness in his plate, with weapons heavy on his belt and Dorghar snorting alongside him, it felt hauntingly real. He understood that it was simply the way his being could experience the impossibilities of the beyond – the mind-stabbing, flesh-shearing unrealities of this monstrous realm.
As he looked about, all Archaon could see was the darkness of his soul reflected back at him. It was a gaze-devouring nothingness. The lethality of the place saturated him. Looking up was the horror of a never-ending tumble into an abyss. Looking down was the deepest of dreads – like treading water in an ocean of predatory creatures that could bite you in half at any moment or drag you to oblivion to tear you flesh from chunk of flesh. Looking behind him carried with it the same spine-twisting, sickening expectation of some horrid thing waiting for him to turn before it struck. Everywhere else was moment by moment, heart-hammering horror and the dread of seeing something that could not be unseen – visions of mindless terror that could not be blinked from the eye. Fearfu
l aspects that were ever present, even when they were not.
Archaon’s tongue sizzled with the cold bitterness of the void while his nostrils stung with the coppery rawness of his flesh – wherever it was – being freshly flayed, over and over again. His ears bled with Ruinous whispers of dark things bargaining for his soul. Their temptations burned to resist. Their eternal entreaties tore at him like hooks and lines disappearing into the benightment. The shrieking. The screaming. The befriending and the begging. He listened to every word, his nerves the strings of some fearfully abused instrument. He fought their lies and the fragilities of his own soul, unruly parts of himself that desired acquiescence and an end to all torments.
There were those daemonic entities prowling the blackness that did not cog, whisper and deceive but attacked like ambush predators – frenziedly seizing upon the soulfire of the unclaimed, that burned like a beacon in the void. Things that punched through Archaon like an unstoppable evil, and wrestled him for his soul. Entities that struck with fang and force, to paralyse the spirit and poison the present. Abyssal creatures that feasted on the indomitability of his will, spreading rancid corruptions of the spirit through his resolve, infecting him with the plague of doubt. Infernal enigmas that forced Archaon back through the labyrinthine madness of choices yet to be made as they roasted his resolutions in the warpflame of their unbearable presence. Other horrors simply launched themselves from the darkness, goring without horn, tearing without claw and snapping without jaw. Such battles for the soul lasted a castle-crumbling age – and like a castle under siege, Archaon’s defences began to crack and tremble under constant onslaught. He could not know that he had been fighting such ravenous beings for a lifetime. In the slave-pit of the soul, Archaon had fought for the survival of everything that he was and ever would be. Such infernal battles shook the very fabric of his being. Approaching it like any other form of combat or martial discipline, he had grown adept at such inner conflicts. He drove daemonic essences, who fought to inhabit his own, before him. Sending one after another back to the darkness and the dread, enjoying the solitude of several more lonely steps before some other monstrous aberration surged forth with infernal optimism and bottomless greed.
