Then, they were gone, lost amidst the swirling darkness.
EPILOGUE
Autumn 2528
Neferata stalked through the ruins of Middenheim, as the world died around her, and wondered why she had come. She had left the uncertain safety of Sylvania, left her new kingdom in the hands of her greatest rival and only friend, Khalida, and made for the certain doom of Middenheim. She had flown through the tortured skies, urging her abyssal steed on to greater and greater speed for reasons she could not articulate. Her armour was scorched and scarred, and wounds marked her flesh, but she felt no pain. There was no more time for pain, or fear, or anything save sadness. She looked up, and watched the sky burn. Her steed screeched in agitation where it crouched on the northern gatehouse.
You were right, Khalida, she thought. It is the end, and nothing we have done means anything any more. All our petty grievances and spiteful schemes are as dust before the doom that is coming to claim us all.
A whimper caught her attention and she turned, seeking out its source. She saw a woman, clad in ruined armour, crouched nearby, amongst rubble and the bodies of elves, dwarfs and northmen. Neferata sniffed, smelling Vlad’s blood on the woman. She moved towards her, sword in hand. The woman had been beautiful once, and might have been again, if there had been time.
‘But there is no time,’ Neferata said, softly. ‘There is no time.’ The end had come and gone, and all that was left now was for the carrion birds. She could feel it on the air and beneath her feet. She looked down at the woman, pondering. Then, hesitantly, she stretched out a hand.
‘Her name is Isabella.’
Neferata whirled, her heart thudding in her chest. Arkhan the Black staggered towards her, through the smoke and fire, leaning on his staff, his ragged robes swirling about him. When he reached them, the liche looked down at Isabella. ‘Vlad must have saved her somehow. He was always a determined fool.’
‘Not a fool,’ Neferata said softly. She sank down and cradled Isabella, as if the other woman were a child. ‘Just a man.’ She looked up at him. ‘You survived.’
‘I did. Thanks to Settra.’
‘Settra,’ Neferata said, unable to believe her ears. She shook her head, dismissing the thought, and asked, ‘Nagash?’
Arkhan extended his hand. Neferata’s eyes widened, as she took in the slow dissolution of Arkhan’s skeletal fingers. ‘The Undying King is gone, and his magics with him. Soon, I will join him. The Incarnates have failed, and the world is coming undone beneath our feet.’
Neferata looked up. ‘We will all join him. The world is done,’ she said. Isabella whimpered, and Neferata murmured comforting nothings to her. ‘All our striving, all our pain… for what?’
Arkhan was silent for a moment. He looked down at her and then placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘For the chance at something better,’ he said. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. ‘Do you feel it, Neferata?’
She jerked her hand away. ‘Feel what?’
‘One last roll of the dice,’ Arkhan said.
‘Spoken like a gambler,’ Neferata said. She hugged Isabella close and stroked the whimpering vampire’s matted hair. Crimson tears rolled down her cheeks and plopped into the dust. Arkhan reached out and wiped them away, before he turned away, to face the growling dark that crept through the streets towards them. ‘The End is here, my queen. The all-consuming black fire of the empty spaces between worlds. I see it, even as Nagash must have seen it. It will devour the world, bit by bit, until nothing is left. Until our world, our history, is but dust on the cosmic wind. When they have finished toying with the remains, the Ruinous Powers shall turn away. They will turn their attentions to other worlds, other times, and it will be as if we never existed.’ Arkhan extended his hand without looking at her. She took it, and he hauled her to her feet. She still held Isabella. The city trembled around them, and a strange light rose from the cracks in the street.
‘But I see something else, in the void… I see a figure, shining with the power of light and the heavens, swimming through the dark, determined to stir the embers of our passing and free the seeds of a new world, and new life,’ Arkhan went on, his rasping, creaking voice filled with something she thought might be wonder. He touched his chest, and she saw a light shimmering through the rents in his robes. He glanced at her. ‘There may yet be hope, though that word feels strange to say.’ He looked down at his chest, and touched a black mark on his robes, in the shape of a hand. ‘I thought she had cursed me, but I think she knew, in the end, that it would come to this. I see a figure, small in the darkness, but it will grow stronger, and I will help, even as oblivion claims me.’
Neferata looked at him. Questions danced through her mind, but she could not speak. She wanted to tell him to abandon whatever mad fancy had seized him. She wanted to tell him that her powers might sustain him, that together, they could hold off the end of everything. But the words turned to ash on her tongue. Arkhan turned fully towards her, and caught her chin in his crumbling fingers.
‘Run, Neferata. Run and perhaps you may yet outrun the end. Perhaps you may survive, to flourish with those seeds of life I will help plant in the world to come. Run to Sylvania, fly back to our people, and lead them, in these final hours. Lead them into death, and into the new life the old gods of the sands once promised us.’
‘Arkhan…’ Neferata murmured. She caught his hand, and kissed his mouldering bones, and then stepped back. ‘I will lead them.’
‘I will buy you what time I can. It will not be much, but it will be all that I can give. Go, quickly,’ Arkhan said, turning back to face the destruction. Neferata turned without another word and ran, Isabella cradled to her chest. Behind her, Arkhan extended his arms, as if he might bar the doom of all the world through sheer determination. Amethyst energy crackled along his bones and leaked out through the cracks in the same. His robes flapped about him as he lifted his staff high, and spat the words to every spell and incantation he knew that might hold back the tidal wave of destruction.
She could almost imagine him smiling, in those last few moments as she fled Middenheim on the back of her abyssal steed. A flash of purple from behind her and the crack of splitting air told her of his fate, and she closed her eyes to weep for the only man she had ever loved.
The world died around her, as she fled. Middenheim fell first, consumed by the nightmare forces awakened in its depths. The hungry darkness crept outwards from the void where the Fauschlag had once stood, and crawled across Middenland, consuming the Middle Mountains and the Drakwald. It was at once empty and full of squirming, abominable shapes, like vast serpents or the writhing tendrils of some immense, unseen kraken. Riots of colour and sound filled it, only to vanish and reappear. The keening of a thousand daemons washed across the stricken land ahead of it.
Beastmen stampeded out of the Drakwald in their thousands, fleeing before a doom that called out to them, even as it drove them mad with fear. Neferata saw them below her as she flew, vast hordes of panicked animals, and the Children of Chaos were soon joined by others – humans, orcs and even ogres, all fleeing before a doom they could not understand, and had no hope of escaping.
The darkness grew, devouring one province and then the next, over the course of the days and weeks that followed. Talabecland vanished, and then the Reikland, swallowed up by the cacophonous void birthed in the heart of Middenheim. Averland fell next, and then the others, one by one. In their mountain holds, the remaining dwarf clans saw nothing of the end, and would not have fled, even if they had.
The Grey Mountains crumbled, and even its staunchest defenders could not prevent the wave of desolation from washing over what remained of the kingdom of Bretonnia. The great forest of Athel Loren vanished, as if it had never been. The new-born over-empire of the skaven followed, and no burrow was deep enough to hide the scurrying hordes of terrified ratmen from obliteration.
The world shu
ddered down to its roots as it was consumed. In Sylvania, what was left of the peasantry, as well as refugees from Averland and the Moot, sought safety in the ruins of Castle Sternieste, where the dead made ready to protect them as best they could. By the time Neferata reached her lands, the sky had gone black from horizon to horizon.
Her abyssal steed smashed into the battlements of Sternieste, its form wreathed in smoke. It groaned and shuddered as Neferata hauled Isabella off its twisted form, and lifted the nearly comatose vampire up. Her retainers met her on the battlements, their eyes wide with fear. ‘Mistress, what–?’ one began.
‘The end,’ Neferata snarled. ‘Where is Khalida? Where are the liche-priests? Where are the necromancers? Summon them all! Gather them here, so that we might–’
‘We might what, cousin? Escape our fate, one last time?’
Neferata turned, and saw Khalida, once High Queen of Lybaras, and once her cousin, standing nearby, staring out at the encroaching darkness. Even now, her thin limbs wrapped in crumbling wrappings and her ceremonial vestments tarnished with age and battle, she was the very image of a queen. Neferata snarled in frustration. ‘And you would meet it gladly, then?’ She shook her head. ‘I will not go like a sheep to slaughter. Not now, not ever.’
‘You speak as if we had a choice, cousin,’ Khalida said.
‘There is always a choice,’ Neferata began, but the words died in her throat as she saw the distant shape of the great bone wall raised by Mannfred in the year before Nagash’s resurrection crumble like sand. The darkness swept over it, and Sylvania shuddered like a dying beast. Below, in the courtyard, the surviving humans screamed and wept in fear. Neferata shook her head. ‘Too late,’ she muttered. She looked down at Isabella and kissed the other vampire on the brow. ‘I am sorry, little one. I was not fast enough.’
‘Yes,’ Khalida said. She turned towards Neferata. ‘Time has caught up with us at last, cousin. The Great Land is dead, and soon we will join it.’
Neferata laughed sadly. ‘Maybe it is past time. But I will not do so cowering in a hole.’ She looked at her cousin and smiled. ‘We are queens, cousin. We are daughters of the Great Land, which was old when the world was young. Let us die in a manner befitting our station.’ She extended a hand. ‘Will you join me, Khalida?’
Khalida stared at the proffered hand, and, after a moment of hesitation, took it. Down below, the warriors of Lybaras, Khemri, and Sylvania raised their shields, as if bronze and steel might be enough to resist the destruction sweeping towards them. Frightened humans cowered behind skeletal warriors and armoured vampires, seeking protection from those they had once feared.
And then, the final darkness swept the last of the old world away.
The world came apart and the hungry dark stretched out towards the stars, unsated. The raw stuff of Chaos consumed the heavens in an orgy of uncreation. Stars flickered out one by one, until only darkness remained. It might have taken moments, or millennia, but the Dark Gods were not bound by the flow of time, and did not mark its passage.
But even as the ashes of the shattered world settled in the void, the powers and principalities of Chaos moved away, already bored by their triumph. The four great powers turned upon one another, as they always did, and mustered their forces for war. The Great Game began again, on new worlds, and the Dark Gods broke off from the swirling void at last. Had they not done so, they might have noticed a mote of light, within the dark.
The tiny pinprick of light tumbled through the dark. It had once been a man, though it had forgotten its name. It fell for what might have been centuries, until it came to a shard of the world that had been. Desperate, it reached out and caught hold of the shard with a grip that could shatter mountains, saving itself from the storm of nothingness.
As it slumped, exhausted, thought and memory returned, and soon, its strength as well. And with strength came memory – a name. And with that name came purpose. Gathering what remained of his strength, he stretched out a hand.
And then a miracle took shape in the void…
About The Author
Josh Reynolds is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt, all three featuring the White Scars, and the Blood Angels novel Deathstorm. In the Warhammer world, he has written The End Times: The Return of Nagash, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen, and the novels Neferata, Master of Death and Knight of the Blazing Sun. He lives and works in Sheffield.
An extract from Archaon: Everchosen,
by Rob Sanders
‘You shall know me by my works,’ the prognosticator howled.
They knew him by his pain. The agonies erupting from his ruined face. The gasps of relief and hope – both sweet and dangerous – that escaped his broken body inbetween tortures. They called it the Cracker. An ugly name for an ugly contraption. With the victim’s head braced between the unforgiving metal of a chin bar and a closing crown-cap, the two were drawn together by the slow turn of a handle screw. It had earned such a name for its effectiveness in producing confessions.
‘Battista Gaspar Necrodomo,’ a priestly witch hunter read from a blood-spattered scroll, ‘his holy vengefulness, Solkan – God of Light and Law – has judged you witchfilth and false prophet, denying the poor and ignorant of this republic the comforts of his guidance.’
‘You will know me by my works,’ Necrodomo spat. His words escaped the clenched mantrap of his own jaw in a hissing rasp. Bloody lip-spittle sprayed the interrogator sitting opposite. One of the priests milling in the dungeon-darkness beyond tore a strip from his ragged grey robes.
‘Grand inquisitori,’ he mumbled, kissing the rag and handing it to his spiritual superior. The interrogator dabbed his speckled cheeks and the whiteness of his beard.
‘Again,’ the grand inquisitori said.
‘No,’ Necrodomo groaned, his pleadings pathetic and palsied. A priestly servant of Solkan turned the screw and fresh agonies filled the dungeon chamber. Necrodomo’s screams were muffled shrieks of gargling desperation. As the turns of the screw abated, the freshly blinded seer sobbed and moaned.
‘You are a charlatan,’ the grand inquisitori said slowly, his voice threaded with the certainty of his age and station. He was the Avenger’s high hand in these low dealings of the world. ‘You are the herald of lies. You are an artist of nothings. You read the eye, the lip, the face and write false prophecy on the stars. You tell gullible widows what they want to hear, no? A sayer of soothings. Saw you this coming, prognosticator?’
‘No…’ Necrodomo managed through his shattered jaw.
‘If you had stuck to prattlemongering,’ the venerable inquisitori told him, ‘you just might have escaped the attentions of the brotherhood. Though Avenger knows, your professed haruspexery would have been known to him – he who sees all and judges all. Your time would have come, Necrodomo. Necrodomo the foreteller. Necrodomo the skygazer. Necrodomo the reader of futures dark. Now to be known – if known at all – as Necrodomo the Insane. By my order.’
‘No…’ Necrodomo whimpered. ‘Know…’
‘This, however,’ the grand inquisitori continued, picking up a bony fistful of pamphlets that littered the table, ‘this goes beyond the pilfering of credulous coin. The Celestine Prophecies. Signs and Wonders. Transcendentia. The Days of Doom to Come. The End Times. This is heresy in our midst. This is demagoguery, spreading fear through the people. It is a challenge to the Republic. It is a corruption advertised and an invitation of vengeance. It is what brought us to you, Necrodomo. It is what brought you to this.’
The grand inquisitori gestured at the quill and pots of ink on the table and the thick, unmarked tome that sat before the groaning Necrodomo, its pages clean and waiting for his confession. ‘Help me by helping yourself, Necrodomo. Confess your crimes to the brotherhood. Allow Solkan into your heart and
I promise a death swift and clean enough to take you to his judgement. Why dally here in the meaningless filth of lies and conspiracy? Why suffer here as well as before the Lord of Light and Law? Commit your contrition to these pages and let me grant you the relief of death.’
‘Forgive…’ Necrodomo begged through shattered teeth.
‘It is not for me to do so. Only the Avenger can grant you that. All I can grant you is an unburdened conscience and free passage. Your crimes are grievous. These bold pronouncements of coming apocalypse, printed and passed between the people. We are the light in the ignorance you sought to spread with your writings of the trembling world and the End Times you profess are to come. The world already trembles, Necrodomo. It trembles with the vengeance of Solkan the Mighty. It trembles with his judgement on the unnatural and the wicked. This is the greatest of your sins, false prophet. Fear is not your weapon to wield. It is ours. Armageddon is not yours to portend. The world is the Avenger’s to destroy at a time of his choosing. If his servants fail, if the land can bear no more evil and the filth of corruption floods the–’
The oratory was shattered by a single clap. Followed by another. And another. Like the grand inquisitori, the witch hunters and priestly torturers of the chamber turned to the entrance. Stepping down from the rusted ladder that led from the trapdoor in the dungeon’s ceiling, a lone priest in the hooded, ragged robes of the Avenger stood in slow applause. Sallow clouds of brimstone drifted down from the chamber above and descended about the interloper.
‘How dare you interrupt the holy work of–’ a priest began.
The End Times | The Lord of the End Times Page 42
