Archaon: Everchosen

by Rob Sanders

  Kastner roared like a wild animal. Fire lanced through his left thigh, cutting through the malaise of other agonies squirming through him. Something had speared down through his leg, pinning him and his plate to the forest floor. Arching his back and tearing the wound in his side, Kastner saw that the sword Terminus had fallen after him, the broad blade stabbing down through the knight’s plate, searing through his flesh and grazing the bone. The templar smacked his head into the ground and fisted the soil with his remaining gauntlet. Bellowing once more, Kastner reached back and took the blade in hand. Hauling it upwards, the metal made an excruciating sound against the plate through which it had punctured. The pain was unbearable, but Kastner found himself willing it on – the agony cauterising its way through his dismal torments. At last the blade came free and fell heavily to one side, sticky with the templar’s blood.

  Dragging the greatsword like a penitent burden and limping like an animal that had ripped itself from a trap, Kastner pushed miserably on through the changing forest. Hours passed. It could have been days or weeks, for all the knight knew. His body felt as if it were aflame. The fever brought the knight’s heartbeat thundering to his ears. He was everywhere, yet felt nowhere. Each twist and turn about the trees was a dark discovery. Every decision, left or right, cost the knight a little shred of his soul, yet moment by moment he felt he was becoming something more.

  He was shaking. The templar willed himself to stillness but felt even his resolution tremble. The hairs on his body stood up on end with the chill of fear and excitement. In the impossible forest about him, roots snaked through the earth beneath his feet as if bifurcating networks of midnight blue threaded his pallid flesh. Like a God-King distant and lost to him, the land was Kastner and Kastner was the land. A nation of competing afflictions. A living, breathing empire to master and control.

  Thunder ripped the heavens apart above the dark canopy. A storm was descending – unseen and irresistible. What feeble light from the dying sun and shine-stealing moons found its way down to the clearing floor withered to twilight. The weald became an impenetrable labyrinth of gloom and dread. Kastner drew his miserable hobble to a stop, dragging his skewered leg in line with the other. All ways looked equally foreboding. Ahead was a fat log – a toppled trunk, bulbous with growths, nests and holes. Kastner could see the glint of eyes within. The bug-riddled timber was infested with vermin and the crawling, creeping, slithering things of the world. Beyond the woodland was a chorus of sickly creaking. From within the gaping darkness of the log, Kastner heard a dreadful, booming laughter. Its jovial invitation was infectious and ripe with a doom-laden mockery.

  Turning from the log, which seemingly blocked the path ahead, the knight saw to his left a colossal oak – gnarled and broad. The kind of timber from which the great cannon-carrying vessels and siege machines of the Empire were crafted. Its branches were straight like a gallows. Its bark was rough and full of furious character, giving the knots and gnarled bumps the appearance of a rising column of leering skulls that barred his path, flashed white by the lightning that opened the sky up above them. As the thunder tore the very air apart around the knight, lightning struck the branches above. With an ear-splitting crack, the bolt split the great oak in two. Flame spread rapidly through its crooks and boughs, devouring the wood with hateful abandon. Kastner drank in the power of the scene. The spectacle of wanton destruction.

  The templar hobbled back from the intense heat, turning his plated back to the furious inferno. Opposite, the pathway was no more certain. Trees seemed to meld one into another, as though they were one. The bark was uniformly scarred and stripped by the wicked claws of some animal, the rents dribbling sap down the wood. The more Kastner looked at the gliding curves, the rounded beauty, the arches, the twists and bends of the trunks and branches about one another, the more he was drawn to it. It reminded him not of inanimate trees but of people, men and women, embracing one another. In the opposing flames, Kastner found his face on every one of the male figures, while the girls were every woman he had ever yearned for.

  ‘No…’ he half-gasped, and forced his gaze from the perversity. To his right he found the log – which was impossible, since that was behind him. Except it wasn’t. The flaming oak now occupied that space. Kastner stared about, searching for the way he had entered the clearing, but it wasn’t there. The bodies. The flames. The laughter. The flames. The laughter. The bodies. The knight was lost in every way a man could be.

  Kastner roared at the spuming heavens above. He had never seen such a storm. Rolling banks of clouds swallowing one another – spreading, surging and raging with lightning of pinks and blues. His chin fell and his gaze reached the clearing floor. He found tracks – the trench the greatsword had been carving behind him cross-crossed itself many times in a pattern of madness. Lines and circles. The black earth of the clearing was churned up in the impression of a star. An eight-pointed star.

  Kastner reached for the name of his God-King but found that it wasn’t there. The hallowed name that had sat on his lips for decades. His patron. His god and his king. The deity to whom the templar had pledged his life and service. His name… was gone. Kastner crumbled to his armoured knees.

  ‘My lord,’ he called up into the storm. ‘Why have you forsaken me!’

  ‘You are not forsaken…’

  The voice was everywhere. It was the roar of the flame. The laughter in the darkness. The doom-laden rapture. The impossible storm. Kastner turned, dragging his injured leg after him. He spun around, the forest blurring to smeared darkness. Then he saw it. For an instant. In the clearing. Right next to him. Horror incarnate, leering at mortal insignificance. Stumbling to a stop, Kastner got the impression of some hideous thing of the beyond. Fiend. Gargoyle. Daemon. Black as night, with the horns and wings of infernal favour.

  ‘Do not see meeeee…’ the being said in voice that seemed to burst the heart.

  Pain. Incredible.

  Kastner clutched his head and let slip a scream of honest agony. He covered his eye, but the searing torment proceeded in the socket of the one that was no longer there. He could see lightning inside his mind. Shards of colour that defied name or description. Ghostly impressions of a world beyond that of sense and sight. He could feel with his heart. Listen with his mind. He could taste a world ripe for destruction. It was too much. It was all too much. Make it stop.

  CHAPTER VI

  ‘With a world of pleas to hark and heed,

  Miracles begged and forgiveness received,

  Recoveries to foster and babes to feed

  How can fair Shallya offer aught but tears?

  – Fliessbach, The Daughter of Death

  Way Temple – the Sudenpass

  Hochland

  Niedrigstag, IC 2420

  ‘Get him up, get him up.’

  Being the hulking fellow that he was, Dagobert’s attendant, Berndt, picked Kastner’s body up from the hay cart, plate and all. ‘Bring him inside,’ the priest said, his voice like the gravel on the road running beside the way temple. He ran stubby fingers through his greyish hair. Berndt didn’t reply. The attendant was a mute.

  ‘Also had this,’ the gruff farmer said, lifting with difficulty the deadweight of the gore-smeared Terminus. Dagobert ducked inside and snatched a pudgy fistful of coin from the donations box and put it in the hand of the bemused farmer who had found the Knight of the Twin-Tailed Orb unconscious on the side of the Sudenpass. He took the greatsword Terminus. ‘Put him in the robing room,’ Dagobert instructed, ‘with his squire.’

  As Berndt stomped through the temple with the knight in his arms, guttering candles as he went, the clatter of Kastner’s ruined plate attracted the attention of the congregation. It was mostly travellers – skinners, pedlars, merchants and the like – taking the Sudenpass from Wolfenburg to Middenheim, with a few regulars from the goat farms up in the foothills. Disturbed from their devo
tions, the attendees’ eyes were drawn from the God-King’s sculpted form to the dreadful state of the templar.

  ‘Apologies,’ Dagobert said, waddling after Berndt and the templar. ‘Pray return to your thoughts, brothers and sisters.’

  Moving through the way temple, Berndt pushed through the curtains of the robing room. Emil was already there – like a preserved body in an ancient tomb, the hideousness of his injuries hidden in bandages and moist salves. A portly priestess of Shallya sat beside the squire in her white robes, giving motherly instruction to Giselle who was moving back and forth with fresh dressings.

  ‘By the Dove,’ the priestess said, ‘what have we here now?’

  ‘Another servant of Sigmar, Sister Arabella,’ Dagobert said. ‘Deserving, I fear, of your attentions.’

  ‘Set him down on the other bunk,’ the priestess directed. Berndt obeyed. ‘I am going to need assistance with his armour.’ Dagobert nodded, laying Terminus aside and moving across to help Berndt with the smashed plate.

  ‘His wounds are grievous,’ the priestess concluded as she unwound Giselle’s handiwork about the templar’s eye. ‘An object. It still seems to be in there,’ the priestess said. ‘Hand me my satchel, child.’ Giselle passed the priestess her bag of instruments and potions with no little petulance. ‘It’s going to have to come out. It’ll get infected.’

  ‘Whatever you think is best,’ Dagobert said.

  ‘Shallya knows,’ the priestess said, ‘this is dangerous. He could lose more than his sight – and he has lost that already. You’ll take responsibility.’

  ‘Aye,’ Dagobert said slowly. ‘Aye, I will at that.’

  Selecting a pair of tongs that wouldn’t have been out of place on a blacksmith’s rack, the priestess dipped them into the ruin of the socket and tried to grasp the shard protruding from it. As the metal of the tong scraped the stone, Kastner’s hand shot up, snatching Arabella’s wrist and the tongs away from his eye.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the templar snarled, his other eye writhing about its socket, his gaze roaming the room like a frightened animal.

  ‘Diederick,’ Dagobert soothed. ‘Diederick, it’s me. You were brought to the temple.’

  As the templar lifted his head and looked about him, he fixed Arabella and Giselle in a withering stare. He let go of Arabella’s wrist.

  ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘This is Lady Arabella, new to Shallya’s shelter from Hovelhof,’ Dagobert said. ‘And this is Giselle – from the Hammerfall. She brought Emil to us, thank the Founder. She said you sent her.’

  Kastner burned into Giselle with his gaze, making the novice-sister bridle under the intensity of his attentions.

  ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘You were there.’

  ‘We’ve been expecting you,’ Dagobert said. ‘It’s been a few days.’

  Kastner laid back down, then turned his head towards the bandage-smothered Emil.

  ‘Will he make it?’

  ‘Lady Arabella doesn’t like his chances, out here in the provinces,’ Dagobert said.

  ‘He needs the care of the hospice in Altdorf,’ the priestess said. ‘As might you.’

  ‘I’m not going to Altdorf,’ Kastner told her.

  ‘The injury to your eye requires extraction of the offending object,’ Arabella told him. ‘I cannot lie to you. There will be pain.’

  ‘I have known pain.’

  ‘A great deal of pain,’ the priestess said.

  ‘Then leave it alone.’

  ‘It will become infected and it will kill you. You will be slain from within, good templar. Would you have that? Taken in your bed during fever and delirium. Not the end a knight of Sigmar would pray for.’

  ‘Do what you must,’ Kastner said grimly.

  ‘Before you were insensible,’ Arabella told him. ‘You must be rendered so again. Father Dagobert, please bring us a bottle of your strongest spirits.’

  ‘Well, I…’

  ‘Come, Father. The God-King praises alcohol as a gift – if enjoyed in health, peace and moderation. This purpose is medicinal, after all.’

  ‘Save it,’ Kastner spat. He looked hard at the priestess. ‘Just get it out. If it’s going to be as painful as you say I’ll be out soon enough.’

  ‘As you wish, my son,’ Arabella said to him. ‘Hold him down.’

  With Berndt’s great form holding the knight’s broken body down and Dagobert holding his skull against the bunk, Giselle hovered over them.

  ‘What can I do?’ the girl said.

  ‘Take these,’ Lady Arabella said, thrusting a handful of clean rags at her. ‘There will be blood.’

  Moving in once more with the tongs, Arabella felt the knight suddenly strain against them. His body spasmed and a grim moan erupted from his pursed lips. ‘Hold him,’ the priestess commanded. She took the tip of the shard – which still protruded a little way out from the ruined eye – and attempted to extract it. Moans became roars and roars shrieks as the priestess used all of her strength and skill to take the stone from his skull. Dagobert held Kastner down, his face a grave mask of care and determination. Blood streamed down the side of the templar’s face, where Giselle tried her best to stem the flow. Soon the gathering were covered in the knight’s blood, their hands slimy with his gore.

  ‘Hold him,’ Arabella carped, her frustration getting the best of her.

  ‘I’m trying,’ Dagobert shot back. ‘He’s so strong. Girl, help me here,’ the priest of Sigmar said to Giselle. The bunk was already awash with blood.

  ‘Why isn’t he out?’ Giselle asked, the templar’s screams passing straight through her. ‘My brother had my father pull a rusty nail from his foot once. The pain. He went out like a candle.’

  ‘He has a strong will,’ Arabella mumbled, no less rattled by the knight’s grating agonies. ‘I’ll give him that.’

  Even with both Dagobert and the novice-sister holding his head still, the priestess could not extract the shard’s infectious presence. The stone seemed wedged in the bone of the socket, as well as lancing deep into the skull. Even her bodily attempts to twist the splinter of stone free – producing from Kastner the most dismal howls she had ever heard from a patient – failed to move it.

  When the knight’s screams finally subsided – to the relief of everyone – the priestess thought she might be able to exert more pressure but regardless of her efforts, the stone shard was there to stay. She finally sat back, letting the tension in her shoulders go. She seemed in shock.

  ‘You’re giving up?’ Dagobert asked.

  ‘The goddess forbids harm done in her name,’ Arabella said, her face almost as white as her patient’s.

  ‘You said he would get an infection if it was left in,’ Dagobert protested. ‘You said he would die.’

  Arabella looked from Dagobert, to Giselle to Berndt.

  ‘He’s already dead,’ the priestess of Shallya said, withdrawing her hand from his chest. Dagobert moved around and put his ear to Kastner’s heart. There was no life to be found there. ‘I have offended my mistress,’ Arabella said. ‘I must make amends.’ She got up from the bunk. ‘I’m sorry, Hieronymous – I must leave you now.’

  Dagobert lifted his ear from Kastner’s blood-smeared chest.

  ‘What of Emil?’ the priest said miserably, his mind elsewhere.

  ‘I will take my ponies back to Hovelhof,’ she said, ‘and leave you the hospice wagon. I can do no more for him. Take the boy to the Shallya’s temple in Altdorf. If he survives the journey, the high priestess will care for him there.’

  As Arabella left them, Dagobert turned back to Kastner’s lifeless form. He leant up and kissed the knight on the forehead. Even now, in the blood-battered corpse of the warrior before him, the priest could see the boy he had raised.

  ‘Girl,’
Dagobert said, getting to his feet.

  ‘Yes, Father,’ Giselle said, the tautness of teenage ill-humour and irritability gone from her face.

  ‘Strip and bathe the body for last rites,’ the priest said with difficulty, as though he were forcing every word. Giselle nodded slowly. She drew Sigmar’s hammer up out of her robes on its chain – the simple token of her simple faith – and kissed the silver of its form. ‘I must send word to Grand Theogonist Lutzenschlager and Grand Master Schroeder of the Knights of the Twin-Tailed Orb.’ Dagobert continued. ‘Berndt, you will go ahead to the temple and the chapter house with my missives. They shall learn that one of their very best, a scholar and a warrior born – a true son of Sigmar – this day is lost to us.’

  There are many who would mean you harm, shadow-of-mine. Many wretched gods and their misguided servants. The weakling God-King of the Empire. Ulric of Wolves and Winter. Even the merciful maiden Shallya, who would harm as much as she heals with her potions and instruments. They will cut you with their steel. They will burn you with their faith.

  You are claimed, shadow-of-mine. You were begot of havoc. Orphaned in a world you will destroy. Baptised in the susceptibilities of your enemies. You have the attention of the Dark Gods. They look down on you as I do. With dread. With hope. With possibility. You cannot deny what you are. My gift to the world. Flesh, bone and the spirit that drives it on. A living doom.

  In order to realise your terrible purpose, however, you must live, my creation. Live, shadow-of-mine. The Dark Gods know you now. Show them what you can do. Give them a glimpse of the calamity to come.