by Rob Sanders
So many died. Some even of note. Fastred the Bold, veteran of the Field of Green; Baba Kosch – witch of the Grovod Wood; Herrick von Raukov, the sickly seventh son of Ostland; the Knight of Brass – who Archaon had always assumed was just the subject of ballads and tales; Hjalmar Deathstrider – the famed axe man of Vidarheim and some hulking, corpulent thing calling itself the Gutwrencher, which had dragged itself north from the Mountains of Mourn. Few had been worthy of Archaon’s blade – despite their infamy. Even fewer were chosen to join his warband’s number.
As Archaon worked his bloody way west, he cut a swathe through the tribal lands of the dark continent. Northerners who truly called the Wastes their home and whose clans and castes observed the will of their gods with breeding, bleeding their last and the vile existence in between. They knew nothing of the fine lands of the south, but the unworthies that travelled from there in pilgrimage and spilt their sweet civilised blood in tribal territory. What the marauding nomads, savage hordes and horsemen called existence was life in its lowliest form. The choice between starving and eating your enemy. Between the solitude of victimhood or the brotherhood of darkness in your heart. Between being butchered as a weakling or fighting strong. Between living a life of murderous survival or not living at all. The tribes had no true lands to call their own. The Wastes were ever changing, ever moving beneath their feet and the hooves of their hardy steeds. There was only the way of their wanderings and wars on the move. Tribes would routinely clash over the ugly Shadowlands, daubing the clan symbols of their kind in blood on smouldering ruins, erecting totems to their favoured gods and leaving skinned victims on stakes as a warning to others. Sometimes hours later, two different hosts would gut and bludgeon each other to extinction for the same miserable valley, derelict temple or storm-racked plain. The insanity was unending but such existence bred harsh peoples, worthy of the dark lands about them.
Archaon came to know them across the blade, with their ragged corpses under his boot. The Norse: fur-clad raiders of hairy brawn, they were pale of flesh but dark of soul, dragging the dragon-prows of their clinker longships up the frozen shore to unleash the fury of their number on the Southern Wastes. The Hung – squat orientals born in the saddle, as swift and savage as the spear thrown and the shattered-glass winds at their backs. The Kurgan – swarthy-skinned warriors of the Eastern Steppes; most at home under the shadow of Chaos. Indomitable. Innumerable. A melting pot of competing cruelty, the tribe had the greatest presence amongst the armies of the Ruinous Powers and produced some of their hardiest heroes and enduring leaders.
Archaon fought his way through them all. The Kurgan Kul – the sons and grandsons of Asavar the Everchosen. Archaon taunted them with the failure of their Father in Darkness, savagely cutting them down in favour of his own worthy claim to the title. The Dolgans, whose gypsy queen used her sorceries to curse her tribe’s enemies with foul fortune and the misstep of luck. Any who fought the Dolgans had to battle with the terrain and weather against them, as well as the witch’s inbred army of lover-marauders roaring for their blood. Archaon did not require luck to win his battles. For the dark templar, belief, skill and cold steel won the day, and he broke the Dolgans like a spine across his own indomitable will.
The Hastlings and the Tahmaks, who Archaon and his Swords met as they battled each other at the leaning citadel of Karda Fell. The Hastlings, with their flowing raven hair and beards almost forming manes about the savagery of their dark faces, and the Tahmaks who armoured themselves with the inset bone and skulls of their fallen enemies, had both spawned mighty warrior chieftains – Drach-Mal the Black and Radzseekl of the Burning Plain. After Archaon had killed enough of their tribesmen and the Fell was flooded with blood, the dark templar fought them together, forcing the warring pair to join forces against him. Both died badly and it fell to Drach-Mal’s brothers and Radzseekl of the Burning Plain to hastily agree a slash-palmed truce and pull their tribesmen out from under Archaon’s gore-splashed sword while there were still warriors to withdraw.
The Gharhars of the Upper Shroudlands received Archaon with submission and reverence at first. Having lost their warlord to a flesh-melding pestilence that had claimed a full quarter of the tribe, however, the skin-sloughers resorted to treachery, attempting to sacrifice Archaon as a daemon offering to reverse the Gharhars’ fortunes. Many Shroudlanders died for their underestimation of the knight and his Swords of Chaos. The far Kurganites, known as the Dark Arghols, conversely were openly hostile from the outset. The Arghol women fought alongside their men in battle, all famine-thin, body-painted and criss-crossed in strips of cured flesh-leather. They seemed not to notice the scalding cold of the climate or the losses Archaon and his knights inflicted on their tribe. Again and again they attacked the warband. They attacked at that nest of debauchery, the Maidenhead, on the killing fields of the Red Decimation and during a blizzard of ash and ice that reached inside the vast ruins of Caer Targul. On one occasion warrior women, she-devils of the Dark Arghol, attempted to drag a screaming Giselle off into the gloom and would have done so if it weren’t for the chain connecting her to the wagon.
While the degenerate Kurgans plagued the Shadowlands through which Archaon’s warband fought, the dark templar sought worthiness both poleward and out on the continent’s blasted shore. Horn-helmed Vargs from the Kraken Coast, in the Norscan north, had been yoked under the brutal leadership of King Ingvar the Ravager. The Ravager’s marauder fleet rode the berg-storms of the shattered coast, burning and slaughtering their way inland like a river of lava. After halting Ingvar’s invasions the Ravager King personally led an incursion north into the Ruinous gloom with the oath-answering Baldrgrim of the Bloody Beard and the Norse dwarfs of the Hel Peaks. Ingvar had but one intention – to end the mysterious Chaos warrior known as Archaon. Ingvar and his marauder army found the dark templar and his Swords of Chaos between the unscalable heights of the Vagassa Pass. There Archaon and his Chaos knights held them with sword, shield and armoured wing – butchering the bearded Norscans, their dwarf allies and their battleaxe-wielding king, in mounds of their fallen.
The Graelings tribe, meanwhile, saw fit to unleash the Werekin of Fjirgard upon Archaon’s warband. For weeks the lycanthropes dogged their progress, tracking the rank scent of Gorst as the flagellant followed the dark templar and his warband this way and that across the insanity of the Shadowlands.
In the stunted pines of a withering wood, the Werekin of Fjirgard came for them through the mist, their howls echoing ominously about the contorted landscape beyond. Archaon and his Swords fought their combined savagery amongst the wasted trees. They would have dined on priestflesh, however, if it hadn’t have been for Dagobert prising the rusty chain of a spiked flail from the skeletal hand of a long-dead warrior of Chaos and beating back the pack of shapeshifters – very much as he had done to their wolf-kin above Archaon’s infant form years before.
Further into the frozen continent’s interior, Archaon’s warband found the misshapen Tong – easterners with hunched backs, sharp teeth and a talent for the dark arts. Their warlocks were all whiskers and squinting hatred, withstanding the deep cold of the Wastes with the warmth of their mammoth-hair coats, their charmed fires and hulking Kurgan slaves – unfortunates snatched from the lands of the Tokmar and Yusak and worked to death. When Archaon had sliced and stabbed through enough of their slave-stock, the warlocks came at the warband with enchanted incendiaries – urns that unleashed firestorms of green flame. As Archaon butchered Yusak bodyguards, whose bodies had been warped and mutilated enough by their Tong slave masters, working his way to the warlocks, the templar was surprised to find larger urns raining from the sky.
With the frosted wilderness and the obscene shapes of standing stones erupting with unnatural infernos, Archaon realised that he had been led into a trap. The warlocks thrashed in the green flame, apparently having been sacrificed by their own witchbreed brethren. With little choice, Archaon crunched throu
gh the ice and grit at a run. His Swords were pinned down and at any moment the wagon – with Giselle and Father Dagobert within it – could turn into a fiery, green wreck. His heavy footsteps took him through the sky-striving blossoms of green fire, as the larger urns dropped and hit the ground. As he saw the lobbed urns fall before him, the templar was forced to skid and scramble in the opposite direction to evade a fiery death. Charging through the dying blaze of a short fallen urn, Archaon arrived before a pair of ramshackle mangonels, manned and manoeuvred by Tokmar slaves. Tong warlocks were overseeing the trajectory and loading of the weapon from a rhinox-hauled cart of prepared urns, protecting the fur tents of an encampment beyond. Archaon made short work of the brutalised mangonel crews and their vicious warlock overseers, thundering on through the cold and into the camp. Slashing his way through the hide shelters, the dark templar conducted the massacre alone, hacking his way through the privacy of each tent in turn and slaying without ceremony the wicked old men, their hags and chained slaves within.
Upon returning to his own warband, drenched in the blood of the easterners, Archaon found that one of the Tong’s projectile urns had indeed come close to destroying the wagon, torching the horse that dragged it instead. Ordering Vier and Funf to retrieve the two-headed rhinox from the cart of urns and yoke it to the wagon, Archaon moved around to find Hieronymous Dagobert clutching The Celestine Book of Divination to his chest, ready to save the tome from the fires.
Meanwhile, Giselle hid stoic and silent in the wagon itself, giving Archaon the enmity of her eyes – knowing that if the enchanted fireball had hit the wagon there would have been no escape for her. Archaon thought on the Kurgan slaves that had attacked him in the encampment and the way he had found them chain-staked to the tent floor. Bringing up Terminus, the blade of the Sigmarite weapon still aflame with ghostly torment, the dark templar chopped down through the freezing chain, freeing the girl. The Sister of the Imperial Cross was shocked – as was Dagobert – but both said nothing.
That night Archaon had expected the girl Giselle to leave, but in reality, there was nowhere she could go. She was hundreds – possibly thousands of miles away from the nearest civilised land, where the sweet flesh of a Sister of the Imperial Cross would not be cooked and cannibalised as an offering to a dark god. Even if she could make it out of the Wastes alive – which was unthinkable – where could she go? Naggaroth? Norsca? The Troll Country? The Darklands? How would she navigate? How could she even get there? The perversity of the situation started to amuse the Chaos warrior as he scoured the Tong encampment with Zwei and Drei for useful supplies. Even without her chains, the sister was still a prisoner and it was with some dark satisfaction that he saw her still sitting at the reins of the wagon upon his return.
As Archaon rode on, leading the Swords and the wagon up the snaking valley, he began to think on the reasons he had brought the girl with them. The Swords were soulless, expert and unquestioning warriors – a valuable luxury in the Wastes. Father Dagobert – although priest of the God-King no more and almost feverish in the madness that was his devotion to The Liber Caelestior and his translations of its futures – was eminently useful. Like mighty Oberon and the stalwart blade Terminus, he was the only part of Archaon’s past that the Chaos warrior was willing to keep around. Such reminders helped keep the dark templar in the present rather than becoming a slave to the Wastes’ myriad distractions, like losing himself in wrath, obsession, temptation or hopelessness. Giselle Dantziger was something else. She was not really part of his past and although he searched for a reason to include her in his future he could not find one. As he rolled in the saddle, with ungainly scavengers screeching and flapping overhead, it started to bother the Chaos warrior.
At first, Archaon thought it was some dark manifestation of his new existence. The sadistic streak that was working its way through his very being. As a devout Sister of the Imperial Cross, who unlike the rest of the warband, had not lost her faith in the face of the Wastes’ insanity, he considered that he might enjoy her suffering. Something pure and resilient burned inside her no less than the Sigmarite blade Terminus did in the dark templar’s hands. Perhaps, Archaon considered, it was not a sadistic streak but a masochism that had wormed its way into his soul. It physically hurt to be near the sister. Her simple faith, the light she kept alive for the God-King within her, was like an inferno for the Chaos warrior. A soul-roasting agony to endure. Yet endure it he had. He had kept her alive. Despite her obvious hatred for everything he had become, Archaon had retained her as an unlikely member of the warband.
The dark templar’s thoughts took refuge in the idea that his actions might have a more straightforward explanation. The effect she had on him was the same effect she had on every other wretched thing of the Wastes. Like Terminus, the girl was a useful weapon against the evil of the world – the evil that even as a warrior of the Ruinous Powers, Archaon spent much of his time battling. Then he thought that it might be lust, pure and simple. Archaon had never thought of the girl as particularly attractive. Now that her hair had grown out of the harsh style required by the temple, however, it framed a comely face – like that of a farmer’s wife or innkeeper’s daughter. The kind of young women Sieur Kastner had spent a lifetime visiting unintentional heirs upon. Plain. Pretty even, when not screwed up in perpetual disgust and detestation.
Such thoughts were not without peril for the Chaos warrior. They bordered dangerously close to mercy – a notion that ordinarily would have prompted the dark templar to turn Oberon around and execute the girl in the wilderness. A man like Archaon – a living embodiment of the end of the world – could afford no such sentimentality. He could spare lives because it served his needs or even for perversity’s sake but not simply because his heart told him to. As a Sigmarite templar Archaon had long understood that good and evil were not absolutes. A man’s actions in service to the devotion of his cause – whatever that might be – determined the degree to which he could be called good or bad, virtuous or evil, devout or corrupt. He had known thoroughly despicable men who claimed to be ardent Sigmarites. He had also known the fallen find their way to damnation through the virtues of their faith. Archaon knew that himself, only too well. He knew also that there was a small part of him, a scintilla of light in the darkness of his soul, which still yearned to end every evil thing in the world – including himself. A sliver of regret, like the beaten child that runs away from home but still wishes to return and feel the embrace of the parent that beat him.
Archaon knew this truth about himself. He knew that it was the lost love he had for his God-King that poisoned him as much as the shard of wyrdstone embedded in his skull, leaking its corruption into his mind. Rather than return home to the arms of a loving parent, Archaon wanted to burn down the house. The God-King and his servants would pay for his neglect and abuses. The tiny glimmer of stale hope that afflicted Archaon scared him. It scared him that it might be the reason he was keeping Giselle Dantziger alive. She represented a way back from the darkness. Escape from the shadow. Though it was a spiritual agony to be in her presence, perhaps she was keeping some part of Diederick Kastner alive.
Such dread concerns accompanied Archaon and his warband west. West through miserable moorlands and out into open country. A mountain-framed tundra that was home to the horse tribes of the mighty Mung. The Mung were known among the Wastes to possess the finest steeds of any tribe on account of the way their witch-doctors unlocked the simple animal souls of their horses to devils and evil spirits. The eyes of Mung mounts burned with the spectral fury of beasts possessed. They could run faster and for longer than any equivalent mount in the Wastes and with herds of the black beasts, the Mung’s territories were wide and ever expanding. Unbeknownst to Archaon at the time, his warband had ridden into the territory of a brutal chieftain calling himself the Hu-Mung-us, a chariot-riding giant of a marauder – nearly twice as tall as his stunted Mung tribesman. Considering Archaon and his warband to be merce
naries brought in by the centigor herd of a nearby territory, which had defiled Mung steeds and fathered filth filthy offspring upon them, the Hu-Mung-us sent his fastest spirit-steeds and horseback-mounted archers to run them off. He sent them in their hundreds.
Caught out in the open, Archaon and the warband were at the mercy of the colossal war party. Mung horsemen swept down on them like a flock of birds, wheeling and swerving, attempting to cut them down with their wyrdstone edged blades. The rhinox-hauled wagon was never going to outrun the Mung horses and Archaon feared that Oberon and the steeds of the Swords would fare little better against the marauders’ possessed mounts. With the tundra swarming with the Mung, Archaon ordered his warband to head for the mountains where speed counted for less and they could thin the horsemen’s numbers. The escape turned into a running battle, however, with the Mung war party moving almost as one, slicing through Archaon’s band at blazing speed before routinely withdrawing and turning the sky black with launched arrows. Shooting in unison from the saddle, the Mung appeared to be expert archers as well as riders and it became apparent to Archaon that they might all be skewered alive on the wyrdstone flint-tips of the arrows.
Pushing Oberon to his flesh-steaming limits and with his Swords riding alongside, their wings outstretched like shields to the sky, the warband just got out of range of the tundra-stabbing shafts. The Chaos warrior turned to find that the wagon had fared less well. The material of the bonnet had been punctured to ribbons. Dagobert and Giselle were hiding between the wheels, the wagon bed soaking up the swarm of arrows like a wooden target. The two-headed rhinox had gone down beneath the barrage, appearing more like some kind of giant porcupine with so many shafts buried in its shaggy flesh. The creature was not dead, however. It was too stupid and its hide too thick to succumb. At the site of each arrow-inflicted injury, the beast suffered the horror of a rapid transformation. It swiftly became a moaning mound of hairy mutation, spawning new appendages, tentacles and growths. With these new gifts it dragged its spiny form across the tundra towards the wagon and the pair taking refuge beneath it.