by Rob Sanders
Words of monstrous dread and abyssal determination. Both No… And Yessssss… The ancient iron of Karak Zhul failed. The sword shattered. Shards of wicked iron blasted out in all directions. Sudden. Shocking. Guided by some unholy force. The sorcerers crumbled, slivers of infernal iron protruding from hoods, faces and chests.
Archaon turned to Khezula Sheerian. The sorcerer who had seen so much – with his own misted eyes and the sorcerous Eye that now resided in Archaon’s helm – now had two barbed slivers of black metal embedded in his sockets. He tried to say something. Perhaps to Archaon. Perhaps to entreat his warped god. Falling forward on his bony knees, the sorcerer drizzled away to otherworldly flame that snaked across the stone floor and down the mountain. There was nothing left of the sorcerer who had served Archaon so long with his twisted counsel. The two slivers of iron plinked to the floor.
As the metal began to dance on the flat stone of the mountaintop and the freedom of Be’lakor’s wrath bled through the rock, Archaon looked down at his own body. A serrated shard of the blade had stabbed straight through his cursed plate, through his stomach, above the hip, and out the back of his armour. His insides burned where the wicked sliver sat, still glowing with the failed containment of the daemon prince. The mountain was shaking with Be’lakor’s wrath. The standing stones were rocking back and forth, then fell forward in unison, smashing through the cracked rock of the fire-scorched summit, creating a cavernous sink hole in the top of the trembling mountain. As the summit collapsed in on itself, Eins and Zwei surged for the sky, their wings beating with feverish urgency. Dorghar also leapt from the mountain, the black stallion sprouting black, leathery wings of its own to escape the thunderous calamity.
The rock tumbled away beneath Archaon’s feet. He twisted around but the movement was agony with the shard skewered through the side of his gut. His right leg felt wet with blood pouring down from the wound. Archaon clawed at the stone behind him but it simply crumbled away, dragged down with the Chaos warlord by a dark force greater than gravity. A lightless chasm opened up like a monstrous mouth to swallow him whole. As the world became a receding vision, like an eye clouding to unconsciousness, Archaon fell. Rubble tumbled with him. The mountain seemed to roar with Be’lakor’s voice. Archaon flailed. He plummeted through the darkness, losing his sense of direction. Seeming to accelerate through the abyssal pit that had opened up through the mountain and its foundations. His vision, his darksight and the sorcerous power of the Eye combined to form a kaleidoscope of shadow overlaying shadow. An obliviate blackness that deepened to an impossible intensity. Up and down, speed and space; these concepts became meaningless as Archaon plunged through the darkling abyss. All he knew was his father’s voice echoing through oblivion. His earlier words thundering about him.
THE CROWN WAITS…
…IN THE FIRST SHRINE OF CHAOS–
WHERE THE FIRST HUMAN SOUL WAS BARTERED TO THE DARK GODS…
Then Archaon knew.
…HERE.
Chapter XVII
‘What good are souls if they are not to be sold?’
– Anonymous
The Dreadpeak
The Worlds Edge Mountains
Grimnir’s Day / Passing of Oaths IC 2519
Archaon hit stone. The warlord screamed, although he had not meant to. The impact was bone-shattering enough and would have broken him up into tiny pieces inside were it not for the protection of his hell-forged plate and the wyrdstone that threaded its way through his skeleton. The shard of iron hit the ground at an agonising angle, however, tearing through his insides. Moaning, Archaon scrabbled slowly around, holding his plate-punctured side. Opening his eye he saw nothing but darkness. Absolute. Like pitch poured into his mind. The Eye of Sheerian showed only more of the same. His darksight sizzled with the dank evil of the abyssal shrine. Turning his head, Archaon could see the faint shadows created by blasphemous runes inscribed in the stone of some kind of ancient gate.
Archaon felt the cracks created by his impact spread beneath him. The ancient stone gate to the First Shrine of Chaos disintegrated beneath him. Archaon gritted his teeth against the pain and the torment to come. With the cacophonous crash of the gate giving way, Archaon was falling once more amongst fragments of cursed stone.
Archaon tumbled through the darkest night of his soul. He had walked the polluted Wastes of the world. He had even navigated the empty depths of hell – an otherworldy Realm of Chaos, haunted by daemons and dread entities. Here, however, in a darkness to end all darkness, Archaon felt as if he were falling through the benighted pit-pupil in the eye of a dark god. All Dark Gods. As he saw them, they saw him. He was saturated in the bleak ruination of the collective gaze. He was tempered like a blade, moving between the furnace fires of their abominate love and ice waters of their need, stained black with the cruelty of iron. Phantasmic faces raged about Archaon in the blackness. The faces of men and beasts he had killed. Dark champions he had defeated. Monsters he had destroyed. Daemons he had obliterated from existence. All of them. Roaring for his soul.
Before long, his abyssal drop – accelerating faster and faster through the dark below the world – passed through the depths of an ocean of innocents. The men, women and children who would have to die in the End Times to come. A black, constellation-brimming sky of screaming faces, begging for Archaon’s mercy. As he fell, Archaon could read the weakness of the world in them all. Given the eternity they craved, such simple souls would fall prey to the wrath, the despair, the hopes and desires that governed their polluted lives. It burst Archaon’s heart and scarred his soul to know it, but Archaon came to understand – in the dreadful darkness – that these mortals had to die in order for the Dark Gods and the monstrous, predatory intelligences of the beyond to soul-starve to inexistence. That was what he was he–
Archaon struck the pit floor. The Chaos warlord roared as his plate warped about his smashed body. The shard of iron was hammered back through his gut, the metal twisting through him like a bent and serrated stake. A horn on his helm shattered and one entire side of his suit was battered flat out of shape. Moaning and rolling over onto his back, he felt for the sword splinter. Grasping for it in the darkness behind his eyelid, he gripped it with both gauntlets. Counting silently to himself, Archaon tore the daemon-shattered metal out of him. Again he bellowed. He coughed. He breathed his ragged breaths into oblivion. He opened his agony-clenched eye. His vision acclimatised to the foetid gloom. There was a miserable light but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He didn’t care. Other senses were being overwhelmed.
As he lay there he was struck by the smell. His laboured breaths took the indescribable feculence of the stench deep into his lungs. He tore off his helm by its remaining horn, gagging for something he could breathe. He retched and gushed blood over the body next to him. He was not alone. There were bodies. So many bodies. Gods, the smell. Rot and pestilence hung over the mound of suffering like a miasma. The gloom was thick with groans, pleading and madness. Insects ran rampant through the plaguescape of diseased forms. Flesh-eating beetles. Fat centipedes. A droning blanket of flies. Archaon tried to stand. Bones broke beneath his boots, leading to more wails of torment. Gangrenous limbs reached out for him. Leprous hands missing fingers scraped at his plate. He pulled his legs away from such pitiless suffering and clambered with difficulty across the diseased mound. Victims had little control over their illness-ravaged bodies – vomiting and making a mess of themselves and those about them. Pox-erupting fevers sent sufferers into a delirium of madness and the twilight was haunted by the laughter of the doomed. People picked rancid flesh from their own bones while the bodies of others bloomed with moulds and fungi that cared not if the nutrient-rich mound beneath was alive or dead.
As Archaon trudged across the never-ending mire of diseased bodies he felt forever pass in the darkness about him. These were the dead and dying he had left in his bloody wake. The millions he would maim and
slaughter in the apocalyptic days to come. The famine and disease that would follow in his footsteps. As he strode, climbed and tumbled through the suffering, the armour of Morkar began to creak about Archaon’s bones. Some kind of otherwordly corrosion reached through the browning metal. Plates sheared off him, falling into the bodies below. The pus-riddled. The infested. Those ripe with myriad corruptions. Those screaming for help that would never come, grabbing one another for rank comfort. The dead and quietly rotting.
With the rusted armour falling away in a red dust, all else about him disintegrated with the inflicted years. Cloak. Furs. Scabbard. Weapons. The treasures of Chaos. Like a madman – naked and splattered with the filth of the dead and the dying – Archaon clambered and crawled through the grasping limbs and the softening bodies. It was like a gloomy moor. Wet. Stinking. Undulating. Cloaked in a fog of flies and contagion. Before long the laughter became Archaon’s own. A dark chuckle. The rasp of laughter. The boom of jubilant doom. The horror of death became a disgusting celebration of life – rich, ripe and overpowering. It started with the ragged wound in his side. It was no longer bleeding. Now it burned with infections and stank of the rot worming its way through his insides. Archaon’s skin began to blister. Rashes spread, competing for flesh to ravage. Sores popped and wept down his body. Black blood and pus dribbled from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth in a constant and sickening stream. Maggots and worse squirmed through his flesh. Bits of Archaon fell away. Abandoned. Forgotten. Growths blossomed about his failing innards. He bloated and burst before his skin became a leathery cape thrown over the sharpness of his bones. Even as this withered away to mouldy dust from his stone-threaded skeleton, Archaon stalked on across the benighted landscape of suffering, rot and doom.
There was sick laughter still, but it was not Archaon’s own. He was but bone and the indomitable force of will that held him together. The boom of dark mirth quaked through him. With every laugh from cavernous, froth-corrupted lungs, the moaning, fearful grasping and begging became frenzied and intense. The glee of a dark god passed like wet thunder through the realm of suffering – at once the call of a million crows, the chitter of feasting insects, the wailing of widows, the frustration and fury of approaching death and the drone of bells over gravestones. As the laughter shook the very darkness about Archaon, bones began to fall from his frame. His skeleton – that had trudged so far through the endless suffering – began to crumble. His browning bones slipped down through the sea of bodies. He went under, reaching, clawing with skeletal hands as he was dragged down through the writhings of the diseased, the ripeness of the dying and the ancient dust of the long dead.
Archaon felt the clean darkness whoosh about him as he tumbled through the hell of the abyssal shrine. He barely remembered what it was to have flesh. To feel anything but doom. He was falling for so long through the soothing gloom that Archaon fell asleep. When he awoke, he was surrounded by bodies once more. Bodies falling with him. They reached out for him but not in fear, dread or pain. The blackness ached with need and temptation. As he rolled, thrashed and tumbled through the swarm of bodies he saw that they were all the same. A desire from the darkness of his memory. The bodies all belonged to Giselle. A thousand Giselles, sharing the terror and excitement of the fall. Soon there were so many bodies about him – a swarm of flesh – that he could not tell in which direction he was falling or if he still was at all. Giselle, the fledgling Sigmarite sister, bright eyed and unknowing. Giselle the prisoner, thin-lipped and hate-filled of eye. Giselle the lover, her mind and body lost in the madness of the Wastes and the insanity that was Archaon. Giselle, the living corpse, the mouthless horror of emaciation and silence, staring reproach.
Archaon roasted in the fires of the pure flame. An inferno of writhing flesh that burned Archaon with his own damnation. Like a fireball of flesh and dark desires, Archaon fell through a hell of his own making. Archaon could not tell his flesh from Giselle’s. One body from another. They were fused in a spidery arrangement of entwining limbs and twisting torsos. Their hearts thudded as one – in horrible unity through the blackness – like that beating beneath the single breast of a godly Prince of Impossible Pleasures.
Suddenly there was an impact. Hard. Shocking. The clarity was soul-scouring. Bodies broke. Giselle’s died. The aching fusion of flesh was torn from Archaon with a glass-slicing precision. Archaon was himself once more. He had endured… once more. Flailing down through the chasmic pit of the First Shrine, accelerating, falling deeper into darkness, Archaon had stuck something. Fragments of it fell about him. Like a crystal wall that his descent had shattered into myriad pieces, Archaon saw himself reflected in the innumerable facets of innumerable shards. Splinters showered about him like rain, creating a flux of impossible colours. In the reflection of each razored surface Archaon beheld Archaon. Archaon who was. Who had been. Who never would be. A mewling infant. An eager young boy. A young man in the making. A warrior, proud and true. A million darknid interpretations of Archaon. The savage. The Ruinous warrior lost on his path. The exalted champion fighting for each and every dark god. Archaon the defeated. Archaon the dead. Archaon the forgotten. Archaons instead. The warlord. The Everchosen. Lord of the Apocalypse. Archaon – end… of… All. Lives all lived in his endless, tumbling descent. A labyrinth of lifetimes. A mind fit to break, tortured by raw possibility and knowing, the endlessness of existence. Archaon screamed for his one life. His single determination. An end to everything known and unknown. A silent, empty darkness for the world and the realms beyond it. He closed his eye for the length of a boundless moment and it was gone.
Archaon hit water. It was like plummeting into rock. If it hadn’t been for the wyrdstone that riddled his bones and skull, the impact alone would have smashed him into oblivion. He thundered down into the depths. He could see nothing, but the waters about him were thick, rich and warm. Eventually the force of his descent slowed and Archaon kicked for the surface. As the viscous darkness of the deep met the infernal gloom, Archaon tasted copper. Spitting his last breath, which exploded from his lungs at the surface, Archaon found that he was treading blood in a sea of gore. Like flowing magma the blood burned in patches, lighting the abyssal blackness with a hellish glow. Looking about, Archaon saw that predators of sweeping horned head, serrated dorsal sails and whipping tails cut through the bloody waters. Swimming, Archaon made his way to an archipelago of bone. Colossal ribcages of monstrous beasts and daemons. Small islands of shattered bone and piled skulls, up which the tides of gore washed. Storms of flame danced, seethed and churned across the surface of the red sea, sizzling in the never-ending drizzle of blood spilled from the darkness above.
Archaon hauled himself up through the bones of a monstrous ribcage, perching on a breastbone as the horrors on the blood below sloshed and thrashed to a frenzy. He sat there like a savage, his body dipped in drying blood. Then. Bubbles in the blood. A few at first. Building to a spuming maelstrom of gore. Archaon stood up on the ribcage, attempting to get a better look at the abomination rising from the bloody depths.
It was huge. Monstrous horns. Wings that showered gore from torn membranes of their leathery, outstretched surface. A mountain of red muscle, fused with black-bronze chains and great spiked plate. The bottomless bloodthirsting fury of some great daemon, hunched in its bestial rage. It bellowed its abyssal ire, the grotesqueness of its face stretched back over its colossal, fang-crowded jaws. The force of its territorial roar knocked Archaon from his perch and into the bloody waters. Predatory fiends surged for him with their daggered jaws. Grabbing one around the neck, Archaon dragged it up the shoreline of skulls, pummelling the creature to death. Another surged up the bank, snapping ferociously at Archaon, but the Chaos warlord stamped down on its head with a heel, killing the creature outright.
As he stood there, Archaon found that the monstrous Bloodthirster bellowed still. The slickness of blood dribbled away from Archaon’s muscular frame. Firestorms died and skulls rolled back up the sh
ore of the island. The abyssal beast was power incarnate. Violence. Murderous rage as an elemental force. Something about being in the monster’s presence brought Archaon back to who he was. A butcher of innumerable deserving foes. A survivor of countless monstrous encounters. A nightmare born of blood. Tested across eternity. He had the dark intelligence of a great warrior, the Ruinous blessings of abominate gods and the death-dealing experience of lifetimes lived and lost.
The great daemon brought its gargantuan arms out of the sea of blood. In one he clutched a bronze battle axe that glowed with the darkness of its infernal craft. In the other was the length of a titanic whip that dribbled flame into the gore.
‘Come on!’ Archaon roared at the daemonic embodiment of his doom. The monster didn’t need any further encouragement. Its arm came up, the searing whip snapped up and around, sizzling arcs of blood from its surface. Archaon turned and ran.
The whip slashed the island to a storm of shattered skull. The daemon stomped its cloven path through the shallow sea of blood. As Archaon leapt for the spine of a long-butchered beast and ran along its length, the Bloodthirster smashed through the titanic, skeletal remains with its great axe. Archaon was once more on the skull-crunching shores of a beach. The archipelago seemed to stretch forever through the darkness and the crashing blood of the sanguine sea. Archaon could only hope it did. He ran. He ran as fast as he could. When he couldn’t run he swam through the rich gore. From island to bone island. Skull mound to mound. Through the ribcages of abyssal behemoths and along the bones of great slain daemons. The Bloodthirster followed like a storm of brass and blood. It smashed through skeletons, decimated isles of bone and colossal skulls that sat in the shallows like standing stones.
