by William King
This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.
These are bleak times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the heartlands of the human Empire and the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods.
An ancient and proud race, the high elves hail from Ulthuan, a mystical island of rolling plains, rugged mountains and glittering cities. Ruled over by the noble Phoenix King, Finubar, and the Everqueen, Alarielle, Ulthuan is a land steeped in magic, renowned for its mages and fraught with blighted history. Great seafarers, artisans and warriors, the high elves protect their ancestral homeland from enemies near and far. None more so than from their wicked kin, the dark elves, against whom they are locked in a bitter war that has lasted for centuries.
Prologue
Morathi, queen of the elves of Naggaroth, watched the tidal wave of flesh thunder towards her. Hundreds of thousands of feral warriors emerged out of the grim, grey wasteland, mounted on horses, drawn on chariots, carried by monsters, borne by their own booted feet. Enormous plumes of contaminated dust rose in their wake. Savage, sinister chants boomed out, audible even over the thunder of hooves and the turning of iron-bound wheels.
The onrushing horde bore the marks of Chaos on their skin: the stigmata of mutation, the tattooed runes of evil magic. The banners of the Dark Gods fluttered in the chill wind that blew out from the uttermost north.
Morathi moistened her lips with her tongue. Her spell of far-seeing allowed her to make out the smallest details if she focussed on them: the rings that pierced warped flesh, the blood that caked the spikes of black armour, the unholy fanaticism that glittered in every eye.
How many times had she seen their like before, she wondered? How often had she encountered the followers of the Dark Gods since that first time more than six thousand years before? Her own legion trembled. They feared for their lives and rightly so. Compared to these deadly newcomers they were a flock of lambs in the path of a pack of wolves.
She strode to the front of her force and stood beneath her unfurled banner. She raised one delicate and lovely fist in the air. Her musicians struck up. Trumpets sounded. Braziers were lit. Narcotic incense drifted on the wind.
Her followers slowly deployed in the cold desert, a carnival procession in the midst of a slag-strewn wasteland. There were thousands of them, selected for their beauty and their erotic skills and their ability to endure the caresses of even the most repellent with a smile. Hers was not an army that could conquer anyone in battle nor was it expected to. Her son had legions of warriors who could kill and slaughter. This army would triumph in another way.
It was just as well she was not expecting these pampered pets to fight, she thought. Most of these beautiful girls and boys could not hold a blade properly. Their talents ran in other directions, just as hers did. The difference between her and them was that she could do battle if she needed to and would if the necessity arose.
She had fought beside Aenarion in the days of her youth, killing daemons, slaughtering the enemies of her people with wild abandon. She had cast spells and brewed poisons and worked out battle strategies for his armies. She had used her gift of visions to grant the elves victories innumerable.
The so-called high elves had forgotten that now, preferring to cast her as the villain in the simple-minded morality plays they so enjoyed since her son had sundered the realm. They had no idea what it had cost to win those battles back when all thought the world was ending, or the price she had paid for victory.
Still, she felt no need to crow about those millennia-gone triumphs. She preferred to live in the moment. All across the world, she was known, feared and desired. Her reach was long, longer even than her son’s and quite as strong in its way.
Malekith would learn to appreciate her again. He always did. At the moment, he was going through one of his independent phases, but he would learn soon enough that his followers were unreliable. At the end of the day, they were elven nobles and one of the things that made them so was the secret belief that they owed allegiance to none but themselves, and that no one was better or cleverer or stronger than they.
It was ironic. Out of the whole self-satisfied race, only one really had been so unique, and Aenarion had not needed to prove it or boast about it. He had been respected, loved and feared as their son tried so hard to be and never would.
Poor Aenarion. He would have been more than seven thousand years old today if he had lived, but he had turned down the immortality she had offered him to walk his own fatal path. It was one of those things that had made her hate him as well as love him.
She glanced at the dreary land around her once again and the huge army of deformed barbarians moving towards her. She would need to act soon but she felt a strange lassitude. She let her thoughts drift back to her first husband. She could still picture him all too easily, tall and mighty, with his strange, sad eyes and that terrible blade glowing on his hip.
Better to be ashes than dust he always said, and yet in the end there had been no hero’s pyre for him. He had walked into the fire and it had rejected him. Now his bones were dust that mingled with that of the millions his sword had killed. No one even knew where he had fallen in the end. She had looked many times and she had never found him.
They said that Tethlis the Slayer had found his broken armour but there had been nothing in it. She could not believe that he had rotted away. She did not like to think about it either. She preferred to remember him as he had been, brutal and beautiful and burning like the sun. There had never been another elf like him and she did not know whether that made her sad or grateful.
Poor Malekith, she thought. Her son had tried so hard to be like his lost father but he had never managed it. Malekith had his own cold genius, and he could make himself feared but never loved. He was stronger in some ways than Aenarion and certainly cleverer, but he lacked the fire that had made Aenarion what he was. He built empires as monuments to his desire to impress his absent father, a goal that defeated him even when he succeeded.
Aenarion was not there to be impressed and his achievements could not be matched. Malekith did not even understand why. Aenarion was safely dead. The elves could project onto him their own idealised image of themselves and there was no awkward living being to contradict them with his inconvenient goals and desires.
She sometimes wondered whether that was his appeal to her too. Their love, if love it had been, had not had time to grow stale, for her to learn to hate and despise him. She pushed that thought aside, not wanting to consider it.
No, Aenarion was the one the elves would always remember, their first Phoenix King, the warrior demigod who had saved them from certain doom.
Except, of course, that he had not.
He won every battle and yet he would still have lost that ancient war, had it not been for his so-called friend, the Archmage Caledor Dragontamer. Caledor had been the architect of the spell that had finally driven the daemons away and stabilised Ulthuan, keeping its quake-ravaged lands from sinking below the sea.
The elves choose to remember only the great battle and the heroism of Aenarion as he fought to pro
tect you during those final hours, but it was you that saved the world, wasn’t it Caledor? You built the spell that drained magic from the world and sent the daemons back to hell.
The Chaos army had noticed her now, as she had intended that they do. Even at this range, she could hear the bellowed threats and promises. They were so lacking in originality that she could not even muster any contempt. The worshippers of the Dark Gods were ultimately so banal that she struggled to keep her attention focused.
It seemed to be a day to remember ancient times so she gave in to the desire. She thought about Caledor. With his gaunt features, his high balding forehead so unusual in an elf, his eyes cold and blue as a glacier in the Mountains of Frost, the master wizard had been as memorable as Aenarion. Perhaps he would have been a better tool than Aenarion. But no – he was too cold to be manipulated and far too clever, and she could not have loved him as she had loved Aenarion. Caledor was no hero.
And yet in his calm, calculating way he had been as terrifyingly brave as her husband. In the end, he and his fellow archmages had laid down their lives to make their great spell work, knowing that it would bring them only death and worse. Their ghosts were trapped to this day, frozen in the eternal amber of the moment they had died by the power of the spell they had woven.
Are you out there now, old ghost? Can you see me? Do you understand what I do and do you shiver at the thought? For millennia you have woven and re-woven your ancient fraying spell, and for millennia I have tried to unravel it. The day is fast approaching when I will succeed and this world will change forever.
She felt her age sometimes. She had lived long enough to see the shape of continents change, to watch the great rivers of ice advance and retreat, grinding mountains down as they went. She had watched nations rise and fall. There had been times when she had given them a push. It kept her amused.
She was perhaps the oldest living being in the world. Only the gods were older and they did not dwell in this place as she did and were not bound to it as she was.
All of those around her were moving shadows, alive for a few flickering moments and then gone. How many were there now who remembered the days of ancient glory? Herself, her son, a few daemons and the mad ghosts who guarded creation from destruction and rebirth.
It was a shadow-play but it afforded her some entertainment as she waited for the end of the world. She still pursued her pleasures as relentlessly as her son pursued his dreams of empire.
It had all seemed so different when she was young. Then the world had been bright. The shadow of Chaos had not yet fallen on the land. The elves had been at peace. It had been disgustingly boring but she was too stupid and naive to know it.
Or at least she had been until the visions came.
They had been her gift from her eleventh year, tormenting her with glimpses of the apocalypse to come. She had seen the dark, daemon-haunted future and no one had believed her. She was a prophetess whose gift it was to see and yet not be heard. Or so it had seemed back then.
The elves had not believed her visions of destruction because they could not believe her. Their lives had been so sheltered during the long golden reign of the first Everqueen that they had no idea of just how dreadful the world could be.
She had told them and they had not listened, simply because they were incapable of understanding. They were cattle grazing in summer fields, unwilling to believe in slaughterhouses because they had not yet been inside of one. The sun was shining, the grass was tender, and their alien masters looked after them and fed them well.
Long before the other elves had learned what the world was really like, she had known. She had seen the coming bloodbath and she had tried to warn them.
And no one had believed her.
Sometimes that thought could still outrage her. Mostly now it just amused her.
She had tried everything to get their attention. She had prophesied, she had seduced, she had used her great beauty to get the attention of princes, of the Everqueen herself. No one had taken her warnings seriously, because they had not wanted to. Their world was golden and it was ending and they had wilfully blinded themselves to its coming destruction. They had been taken by surprise when the daemons of Chaos came and the Old Ones had fled or been destroyed.
None of the people who had refused to believe her were alive now and she was. She would live forever and she would remake this world in her own image. The day would soon be here when she was a goddess and these barbarians would help her bring that dawn.
The huge metallic arm of a daemon-forged siege engine sent an enormous boulder arcing towards her. The rock hit the ground a hundred strides ahead of where she stood, bounced forward and came to rest not too far from her feet. It was close enough so that she could see the cursed runes scratched on it. Behind her, her legion moaned with anticipatory terror. She knew they only stood their ground because she did.
They were among those who worshipped her and adored her as something like divine. But that was not what she wanted. She did not wish merely for the empty gratification of her ego, although she enjoyed it. She desired the real, actual power of a god and she knew how to get it. All she had to do was destroy Caledor’s masterwork, the Vortex.
Her visions had shown her that too. In the beginning, the knowledge had horrified her. She had thought that daemons sent them. She thought what she saw was evil beyond imagining, but over the long lonely years she had come to see the power of the daemons as well as their horror. She had realised that they too could be manipulated and used and bound to her will.
Knowing the end was coming, she had prepared for it. She had sought out all manner of forbidden knowledge. She had made pacts with the enemies of her people while the sun still shone and the invasion was merely the tiniest cloud on the horizon. If her folk would not help themselves, the best she could do was ensure her own survival.
It was strange how in all of those tormenting visions she had never seen Aenarion. Perhaps if she had, things might have been different. She might have been different. But she had already walked a long way down a dark road when she met him and it was far too late to turn back, even if she had really wanted to.
He was famous then and mighty beyond all others, a grim, mortal god with haunted eyes. He had believed in her visions too. It was easy then, for they had all come true. And oddest of all, he had not wanted her. He did not abase himself before her beauty. He looked at her and saw just another elf woman.
His indifference had been a gauntlet thrown in her face, a challenge she could not back away from. She had set herself to win him, to woo him from his grief, to bring him over to her cause. And the oddest alchemy of all had been the trick fate had played on her. In pretending love, she had discovered the real thing. In trying to snare him, she had snared only herself.
She laughed at the irony of it. The sweet malice of her voice attracted the attention of her followers. She smiled at them, enjoying the fact that they did not understand, taking pleasure in their pleasure at the sight of her. They thought she was laughing at the oncoming horde, and it heartened them.
She had won Aenarion over in the end, but he had never loved her as she loved him. He was not capable of it. His dead Everqueen and his lost children filled his heart with gall. He was too lost in his own black grief and his dark desire for revenge. It had consumed him in the end. It had threatened to consume the world.
The barbarians laughed now too at the sight of the force they thought opposed them. Their laughter was bright, mad and cruel and it sounded so like the mirth that echoed through the towers of Naggarond that it was chilling. These humans had much in common with the elves of Naggaroth. Their Dark Gods had taught them well.
Briefly she considered the fact that she might die here, that her visions might be wrong, that the lords of Chaos might for their own reasons have decided to stamp on her face and end her immortal existence.
Part of her woul
d honestly have welcomed it. She was sometimes weary unto death of the ways of this world, and longed to see what might wait on the other side of death’s dark doorway. Unfortunately, she had a good idea of what waited for her and those like her. In the endless night of the Realm of Chaos, the daemon lords lusted to devour the souls of her people. She would make a particularly tasty morsel for them, a soul fattened on millennia of sin. No, she was not keen to undergo that ultimate experience just yet.
She called for her mount. It was led to her by nervous grooms, a coal-black, burning-eyed hell-steed with enormous folded wings. Mist emerged from its nostrils, suggestive of the poisonous gas vented by the chasms of this unwelcoming place. It greeted her, eyes blazing with lust and hatred and a curious, twisted love. She stroked its cheek and it whinnied with pleasure from the spells woven into her hands. She vaulted onto its back and rode towards the Chaos horde, her mount becoming airborne after a dozen strides.
She heard her own followers gasp in wonder and fear. Perhaps they thought she was abandoning them to their fate and, for a moment, her malicious elven mind considered it, but she was too wise to do so merely to gratify a whim of the moment. Instead she soared above the oncoming tide of warriors, allowing them to view her half-naked form and luxuriate in the aura of unbridled, wanton lust that she projected. Ancient spells amplified the effects of her matchless beauty. All who looked on her groaned with desire.
She landed her steed defiantly in front of the chieftains of the horde, touching her heels to its flanks so that it reared and whinnied. A dozen brutal faces inspected her, a dozen muscular, mutated bodies stiffened with lust.
She paused for a moment to let them examine her as she examined them. They were powerful but primitive and they were already responding, although they did not know it, to the ancient sorceries surrounding her. She smiled at them and they smiled back and licked their lips, and she knew that in that moment, she had them in the palm of her hand.