The emptiness swallowed her words and gave nothing back. She shivered involuntarily and shifted position slightly. The pain this brought extracted a cry of agony from her lips and she lay flat again, closing her eyes against it.
The moment her eyes closed, images assailed her consciousness. She saw herself, broken and bloodied on a table of green rock. Even as she threw back the monsters that assailed her, she knew that she was dying, saw the terrible wounds that laced her body, but she refused to fall. She saw the claw pierce her and her muscles clenched in sympathetic agony. She saw herself fall. Valkia’s brow furrowed. She suddenly became aware of the fact that she was not alone, but that she shared her featureless afterlife with a presence that cradled her like an infant. It was a thing of pure malevolence, but somehow she knew that it was not directed at her, that this thing, whatever it was, held her in this insubstantial prison. It was not close by. Neither was it distant. It was everywhere around her and it was nowhere but inside her mind.
She saw herself die again, the event unfolding in her mind’s eye, but this time she did not jerk at the killing blow, instead bearing witness to her demise and the events that followed. A legion of crimson-skinned daemons sported night-black blades and followed a terrible, bestial herald. She watched them take up her spear and shield and bear her body into...
In an instant, she knew who had gifted her this vision and tears sprang to her eyes. ‘My master,’ she said through sobs that threatened to rip her body apart. ‘My master.’ They were not tears of sorrow or misery, but tears of joy and devotion at the realisation. They ran down her face from beneath her closed lids, salty and very real. This was no dream. This was where she was. The pain in her belly, the dull throb of her torn face paled into insignificance and she no longer cared if she spilled her innards on the ground. She tried to drag herself up, but lacked the ability to move more than a few inches.
A shock of strength ran through her, filling her limbs with heat and power and searing away her uncertainties. There was no kindness in the action, but there was a sliver of understanding that cut through her emotions and brought equilibrium to her tangled thoughts. She opened her eyes for the second time and this time she saw. A dry wind rushed across a plain of crushed bones that stretched as far as the eye could see. Ash and cinders fell from a bloody sky stained with bands of sooty cloud. Screams, wordless cries of fury and the clash of weapons filled the air and a charnel house reek assailed her senses laced with the acrid stink of hot metal. And on the horizon, a mountain of skulls so vast it swelled until it filled her vision, an impossible monument to the glory of endless slaughter.
‘I failed at the last, my master.’ Valkia remained where she was, lying on her back with her hands clasped over her stomach. But her voice bore the strength of the woman she had been. She called the words out into the boundless, barren plains that surrounded her. She did not purport to understand anything the god was showing her, but she realised that she existed in a limbo of sorts. A place where if she moved too far forwards, she would fall into eternal sleep. Or a place, perhaps, where the potential for other things existed. ‘I failed you.’ She whispered the confession into the void, hot tears prickling at her eyes again. ‘I did not climb the steps. I did not reach you.’
A torrent of images assailed her, one after another like pages of her life being turned by an invisible hand. A girl pushing a spear into the heart of a defeated barbarian. A young woman shearing the head from a man who lay squirming in a pool of his own spilled guts. A bitter mother burying her knife in the throat of a hulking brute. A raging warrior queen screaming across a hundred battlefields, her spear falling again and again, piling stained skulls at her feet in an endless war of devotion. A blazing, bloody berserker dancing an achingly perfect duel with an obscene monster. And finally, an unholy warrior casting down beastmen and daemons on a bleak, dusty plain.
She lifted a hand from her abdomen to wipe across her face, ashamed of the womanly tears that she was still weeping. She felt a ghostly brush across her face in the darkness and courage returned to her.
‘So what happens now?’
The towering presence that she had felt flowing about her suddenly withdrew and its raw, unchained force fell upon her like a suffocating shroud. It laid the very fabric of her being bare, stripping away doubts and fears. It erased any last vestiges of pity, mercy or remorse and discarded those parts of her that did not serve its insatiable thirst for slaughter. The experience lasted no longer than the blink of an eye, but scoured her nerves like liquid fire and filled her mind with torment. When it was done, its absence felt like a soothing wellspring on seared skin.
The flesh of her torso had begun to knit together, wounds sealing themselves closed. Beneath her hands, the ends of the ragged tear that had claimed her life stretched together, sealing closed the fatal injury that had ultimately slain her. It felt peculiar to her touch; the skin itself writhed as though it were alive. Cautiously she let go of the wound and her intestines remained where they should be. She put her hands to her face in wonderment, discovering that those injuries too were sealing closed as though they had never been.
She ran her hands over her naked body, feeling the ridges of invisible scars that could not be seen on the surface. Her god had wrought a wonder. His power was phenomenal to behold.
It took everything she had to battle past the remaining pain and get to her feet. Even then, she swayed and wavered for a while, unable to keep herself steady. She felt as though the unseen presence was studying her, watching everything that she did and judging her.
Her eyes glowed like coals and she turned her burning gaze on the towering monument of skulls, its ivory flanks reaching up into the blighted clouds. Rivers of molten brass carved dark channels down the mountain of bone and howled with every dying scream that had echoed from every battlefield since the birth of time. Valkia looked up and up, feeling the pull of the colossal entity that rested at its summit.
‘What my master desires...’
She never completed the sentence. It transpired that Khorne had only just begun the task of moulding his chosen. What Valkia had thought of as pain a few moments before was suddenly replaced by the realisation of true agony. It began as a pulsating throb across her shoulders as the skin twitched and distorted under the guiding hand of the god as he reshaped her body into something that pleased him even more than her natural form. The repair to her mortal frame had been a prelude to his true intentions.
The throb dulled down to an almost manageable level and then her skin tore open. In a detached way it reminded her of the day she had given birth to her daughters, the sense of being torn apart so that Eris and Bellona could rend their way into the world. She screamed, unable to bear the anguish any longer and dropped back down onto her knees. She fell forward onto all fours and squirmed in agony as the wings tore through the skin of her shoulders. Blood flowed and her nose was filled with the coppery scent of it. Her mouth remained open in a long, silent scream as the leathery pinions grew, unfolding themselves wetly from where they sprouted, bones crackling as they grew and distended.
They opened out in full, a wingspan of several feet and slowly, she got back to her feet. She reached a hand out to them in wonder, her fingers running their length. They twitched under her touch and instinctively, she flapped them experimentally. She felt their sheer power. These were no ornamental limbs. These were instruments that she could use.
A cruel laugh burst forth from her throat. Once, she had marvelled at the swiftness of the avian raptors who hunted the stark tundra. The irony of this transformation was not lost on her.
While she writhed in the throes of transformation, creatures emerged from the ash haze, their clawed feet crunching splintered bones beneath them. A host of sinuous, crimson-skinned daemons with vile, midnight blades surrounded her, their blazing, hateful eyes fixed on the changing woman.
More pain thrummed through her body, but this time she threw out her arms and cried out in sheer ecstasy, we
lcoming the agony that the change brought with it. Her beloved god was rewarding her beyond anything that she could ever have dreamed. The bat-like wings that arced gracefully from her back moved imperceptibly as her thighs lengthened, changing shape and form. Her feet were contracting and reshaping into the cloven hooves of an animal. There was a bow to her legs that matched those of the monsters that surrounded her and a pair of curling horns, tiny and vestigial, crowned her pale brow.
The snarling daemons fell silent and as one they bent their knees to their new queen, pressing their bloody snouts to the ground in a gesture of servitude. They were bent to her will and would serve her in slaughter like no other. Valkia opened her clawed hands and revelled in her raw power.
‘What of my weapons? My spear, my shield?’
The twisted visage of Locephax flashed briefly in her mind, its screaming face still nailed firmly to her battered shield.
‘Yes,’ she acknowledged. ‘But the shield... fell upon the steps beyond the abyss.’
Images assailed her once again. She watched as the herald bore the severed head of Locephax into the Blood God’s realm and ascended the mountain of skulls. The creature of Slaanesh had screamed and gibbered throughout the ascent, its usually malignant gaze wild with the horror of its situation. She saw darkness close about it and heard its final wail of despair as Valkia’s long promised doom came to pass.
The shield had not been within her line of sight before and yet now it appeared, shimmering into being before her. It had been remade, trimmed in etched brass and fused with the severed neck of the creature. The head of the daemon was scowling up at her, motionless and seemingly without the animate life that it had possessed.
She took up the gift and strapped it to her arm and she could feel the cowed will of Locephax shrink at her touch. Where once the daemon had taunted her with its promises and false words, in this place it held no power.
‘By your will, my lord, it is so.’
Her spear appeared before her, its haft cast in hell-forged obsidian and its silver head etched with brass and black iron. The angular skull design throbbed with a crimson, infernal light and her mind came alive with images of slaughter that dwarfed anything that had come before. She would return to the world of men and she would reap the souls of the living.
‘In your name, my lord, it will be so.’ Her eyes were bright with zealous fury.
The vast, black will atop the mountain withdrew and the daemons parted before her, opening a path to the foot of the monument. She could feel the unquenchable fury that burned atop that bleak summit and sensed its expectation. It called to her in a visceral way that promised an eternity of death, rage and relentless carnage.
She gave a little sigh of sheer adoration. ‘I have never forgotten my promise, my lord. It matters not how the blood flows. It matters only that it does flow.’
The throne of brass and skulls beckoned and clothed in her new daemonic flesh she approached the impossible edifice. Opening wings of fathomless night, Valkia spread her pinions and was borne upward into the windblown ash. Torrential rains of blood lashed at her and screeching, fanged monstrosities tumbled about her gleefully. Past the skulls of a million dead that buried a million more she ascended until at last she passed beyond sight of the plain of bones and the eternal battlefields, until at last she hung before the throne of brass and iron. Until at last she saw.
Valkia the Bloody stepped beyond the woman she had been and became something greater. Something eternal.
Something terrible.
And the world continued to turn.
In the realm of the gods, the passage of the aeons moved differently to the time in the land of mortal man. To all intents and purposes, it stopped altogether. After all, time itself was a concept invented by the living to count down the moments until their inevitable demise.
They broke their fleeting lives down into years, months, days, hours. They came and went, rarely registering as little more in the eyes of the gods than a pattern of lights against the dark canvas of the universe. But once in a generation, one would burn with more fury than those around them.
Valkia had caught the attention of the Blood God early in her life. Had she not met Deron, the man who had brought the god’s name with him, then Khorne would have found another way to bring the remarkable young woman to his side. He had watched her over the years as she had honed and sharpened her considerable talent for slaughter. He had watched. He had waited. And in his way, he had guided.
Here in the realm of the gods, time ceased to have any sort of meaning. In the world beyond, it continued to flow. Uninterrupted, ceaseless and relenting. In the wink of an eye a year had passed. Before Valkia had even begun to understand the sheer magnitude of the power she had been gifted, three more had gone by.
Not that she cared. Not that she retained any interest at all in the world of men. Not whilst she was enjoying the pleasures of all that her immortality had to offer her.
Far beyond the mountains over which she and her army had laboured throughout the cold winter, the Schwarzvolf were learning the ways of a new master themselves. But for them, things were not quite so pleasurable.
Of the thousand or so warriors who had left at Valkia’s call, less than a few hundred returned. They struggled to the far outposts of the Schwarzvolf, bloodied and broken. Some were on the very cusp of madness itself with all they had witnessed and raved endlessly. Others retained a stoic, taciturn silence, refusing to discuss the journey at all.
One thing was abundantly clear: the army was no longer headed by Valkia. Instead, Hepsus the Warspeaker and the Godspeaker Edan walked at the army’s fore. The former looked like an old man, his hair greyer than it had been when he had left and his eyes reduced to sunken hollows that had seen too much. The younger man, the brother of the former queen of the Schwarzvolf, had grown in stature and confidence. Finally allowed to step beyond his sister’s considerable shadow, Edan’s sheer arrogance was palpable.
There was a considerable outpouring of grief in the wake of Valkia’s loss. Her lengthy rule had been sometimes difficult to bear, always controversial... but at least she had ruled them. She had never left them to fend for themselves and she had always ensured that the smaller tribes she conquered into submission were provided for.
Her daughters bore the news of her death with a calm acceptance that they knew would have made their mother proud. Edan delivered the news to them in an uncanny echo of the day, years ago, when Valkia had told her two little half-sisters that their father had died.
Bellona nodded, tight-lipped. She had never truly expected her mother to return from the journey. She also suspected Edan without reserve. Her uncle had always projected an air of self-satisfied smugness that had made her uncomfortable.
Eris on the other hand demanded full details. The entire time she questioned Edan about her mother’s death, her hand rested easily on the pommel of her sword. From time to time, Edan’s eyes flicked down at the weapon and an air of unspoken tension crackled between them. Eris trusted her uncle about as far as she could comfortably throw him. She didn’t care about his rank and status within the tribe. She had seen the way he would always sit and watch Valkia, cold, calculating shrewdness in his eyes.
‘She fell under the daemonic might on the steps leading to the great beyond,’ relayed Edan. He only had Hepsus’s word for that fact of course, having ducked out of the journey when Valkia had been too obsessed with her destination to even notice. But Edan knew his sister well enough to know what she was likely to have attempted. That she had even made it as far as she had still surprised him.
If she had taken but a few more steps, his entire plan would have come crashing down around his ears. And it had taken him so long to carefully piece the whole thing together. He had spent so long cultivating the right attitude, that air of seriousness and just a little aloofness. A tendency to speak softly so that people had to strain to hear him. It was a simple trick that gave the impression he thought carefully abou
t everything he said. He had learned it from his predecessor and he had learned it well.
He let his eyes move from one girl to the other. They were virtually identical in appearance, although Eris was more prone to sporting bruises and cuts from her more eager forays into battle. Bellona had ever been more cautious. He let his gaze linger on the former. There was almost visible rage smouldering in her eyes.
‘She fought bravely if that is what is worrying you,’ he said. His tone was soothing, perhaps even a little condescending. Eris bit immediately.
‘And you witnessed this fall with your own eyes?’ Eris’s hand closed around the weapon at her side. Her uncle met her accusing stare without flinching and he told the lie.
‘Yes, Eris. I did. Your mother attempted to lead our people to their death, but although she fought with the strength of a mountain lion, ultimately she failed.’ Seeing the flash of anger in Eris’s expression, he gently laid a hand upon her arm. ‘Listen to me. Upon my sworn oath, her dying words were that until a decision is reached by the great Circle to determine her successor... The future of the Schwarzvolf is in the hands of the Warspeaker.’
‘Our mother said...’ Eris began to protest, but Bellona put out a hand to forestall her argument. Edan’s normally benign expression flashed into a moment of anger that gave him more than a passing resemblance to his sister. It was such a rare thing to see Edan riled that Eris took a physical step backwards, startled by his temper.
‘Your mother said a lot of things, girl. I merely suggest that if you have even a trace of lingering respect for her at all, you would do well to honour those last wishes.’
‘Don’t you ever dare say such a thing again. Or so help me, uncle, I will slay you where you stand.’
‘Did you not respect her, Eris?’ The taunt was obvious and got exactly the response the Godspeaker sought. For a girl who was usually so reticent about demonstrating any sort of affection, Edan had pushed her just one step too far.
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