by Rob Sanders
When exhaustion or injury finally sent him to his bed his sleep was fitful and feverish. His flesh would roast or it would cool to ice. He would sometimes be out for days or on other occasions wake with a terrified roar, disturbing Giselle as she nestled next to him or others form their own nightmares about the camp. It was not unusual. In the Wastes – so close to the infernal darkness of the world – all dreamt of the dread things trying to find their way into their consciousness and feast on their souls.
For Archaon the nightmare was even more intense and had become increasingly so as they worked their way west. It wasn’t a dream or some fanciful notion of vulnerability. It wasn’t the work of a sorcerer or infernal servant of the Chaos Powers. It wasn’t even the darkness that he had always carried, bubbling below the surface of his understanding. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t the exploratory thoughts of a dark intelligence. It was powerful. Overwhelming. It was something else. Something predatory was stalking his soul. Something unimaginably ancient. A thing of bottomless evil. Dead of colossal heart. Thunderous in the world-trembling rumble of an infernal throat. A thing of savage nature, at war with itself. Churning with change, yet always the same. Both sensing and insensible. Its presence seemed to press up against his own. Horribly, Archaon found himself within the monstrosity’s consciousness as much as it had crashed through his own. It was always the same. He was trapped in something dangerous and alien. A womb-like darkness, like an abyss. The infernal fug that made him gag. The sensation of inhabiting a mind savage and primordial, warped to bestial distraction. The hiss of lethal things unseen, hunting him like murderous thoughts through the darkness. Sometimes they would find him and Archaon would roar himself conscious. At other times they would stalk him for days, through a clammy feverishness from which the Chaos warrior could not wake. The horrors of the Wastes, of malformed men, of monsters and daemons held little dread for Archaon compared with the thing waiting for him behind the patch and closing lid of his eyes.
Archaon woke. He breathed in sharply. He blinked the darkness from his eyes. The thud of a monstrous heartbeat faded to nothing and the rasp and rattle of his dark prison bled away. He was cool and clammy, despite the warmth of the fire in the tent. Dogs were barking.
‘You were dreaming,’ Giselle said. The girl was sitting at a makeshift table beyond the fire, wrapped in a fur. As usual, she couldn’t look at him. The Sister of the Imperial Cross wore a mask of disgust and self-reproach. ‘Making strange noises.’
‘How long was I asleep?’ Archaon asked.
‘About a day,’ Giselle said. ‘Who can say out here?’
Archaon felt his neck. It was wet. There was blood from a tiny nick across his throat. He stood and walked about the fire.
‘You tried again,’ Archaon said. Giselle still had her kris in her hand. She was picking a symbol into the rough wood of the table. A twin-tailed comet. The comet heralding Sigmar’s birth. Archaon bridled. The engraving sent a ghastly shiver through him.
‘Tried,’ the Sister of the Imperial Cross said. ‘Failed.’
He reached for Giselle’s chin, moving it up with his finger. She looked at him for a moment and then away. Lust – love even – drained from her face. Archaon was the doom of the entire world. His gaze seared with dark destinies to come. He would raze ancient lands. His hands would drip with the blood of entire races. He would drive gods to extinction. He was entrancing… and abhorrent. Giselle couldn’t look at him. Archaon pushed her chin up. What remained of her hammer of Sigmar dangled about her neck. Archaon found himself forming a snarl at the sacred object. Above the chain, however – just like those across his own throat – the Chaos warrior found the nicks and slices of a blade danced lightly across the flesh.
‘You tried again,’ Archaon said, almost to himself. It was a little routine the pair had grown accustomed to. Now and then the girl would try to end the man whose fate it was to end everything else. Predictably, she failed and failure drove her to consider taking her own life. The fire and obstinacy of her youth had not quite abandoned her, however, and at the last moment – the moment before the kris did its worst – Giselle found the crestfallen strength to draw the blade from where it had sliced at her soft skin. Archaon knelt before her.
‘Your God-King does this to you,’ the dark templar said. ‘You feel the hopelessness of his failure. Abandon him as he has abandoned you.’
‘And pray to your dread gods?’ Giselle said, glassy-eyed.
‘No,’ Archaon said. ‘For I have none. Let the powers of darkness favour me if they will. Let them lend me their strength and draw strength from my victories, if that is their want. You will not see me kneel to them even as I kneel before you now. All gods are fickle. Don’t trust in them. I don’t. Believe as much as you need to or not at all. Ultimately, the only thing you can really believe in is yourself.’
‘You serve the Chaos gods…’
‘They serve themselves,’ Archaon said. ‘As do I. This world is not fit for man or god. The Empire and nations of old, the exotic lands beyond and even here – the cruel Wastes. All will fall and all will burn for me. I will be the Lord of the End Times. The harbinger of doom for all – man and god – for in a world of the slain, with no men, no savages, no ancients of the elder races to pray to them and erect their temples, what will become of these gods, their heroes and their daemons?’
Archaon saw Giselle nod, even if it was just a little. Archaon stood, grabbing the furs about the girl and drawing her to him. They kissed. It was gentle. Tender even. Then he pushed her, spinning her naked form out of the furs and back onto the bed. The playful movement drew from Giselle a laugh. It was stifled and forlorn but it was the first time he had heard honest joy from the girl’s lips. In a world of vile threats, screams and thunder, it was pleasing to the ear. For a moment the pair of them could have been young lovers, a servant girl and a farm hand kissing in a barn or a woodcutter and his wife, enjoying a simple life of contentment. As Archaon gathered the furs about him, Giselle’s laughter died and her smile faded. They were not young lovers or enjoyers of a simple life. They were the unimaginable horror such people feared. They were the end to such life. They were death to warmth, affection and love – the very things other people lived for.
Giselle’s blood ran cold. Her heart felt like stone. She started to say something to Archaon, but the dark templar was gone.
Outside, it was brighter than usual. Archaon’s army had been making their way south for weeks and the Chaos warrior had started to feel the intensity of the continent’s dark interior ebb away. It took a moment for Archaon’s eyes to adjust to the dazzle off the ice. The army was camped out on the Eisarnagga Glacier – an ice floe meandering out of the twisted landscape of the Wastes, reaching down into the northernmost watchlands of Naggaroth. Here the druchii – or dark elves, as those who lived through the misfortune of meeting their kind had described them – defended their malicious lands with a continent-spanning line of sky-piercing watchtowers. A day did not pass without a madman, warband or marauder tribe testing the unbreakable resolve of the elves. The druchii lived for murder, however. They were organised, fortified and unimpressed by the horrors that came out of the north. Not even the most determined of Chaos incursions – with the mountains of iron and spite awash with Ruinous degenerates – had succeeded in any lasting invasion of the Land of Chill. The curdled spirit of the dark elves and their twisted witch-masters would not allow it. Fortunately for Archaon, he did not need to conquer Naggaroth – at least not yet, nor with the army under his present command. The dark elves’ time would come. With half the world aflame and with Archaon commanding the legions of evil, the druchii lands would fall as all were destined to do. But not today. Today an excursion into their frosted realm was required rather than an incursion to conquer it.
Archaon’s tents – shelters of shaggy mammoth tusk and hide – were mobile and set on a wooden platform. The platform
sat on a set of carved wooden blades, like a sled or sleigh that cut through the ice and was dragged by a team of black woolly rhinox. The tents incorporated a number of chambers, including the general’s own quarters, those belonging to Giselle and Father Dagobert respectively, a tusk-arched stable for Archaon’s steed Oberon and a tabernacle for the gathering of his warlords. The tabernacle also included a small shrine to the Ruinous Star, though the dark templar didn’t care for it, preferring to appease the daemon deities of the Wastes only when he had to and through the spilling of enemy blood.
The dogs were barking. Nearby Escoffier was feeding his hounds. The mad Bretonnian had a sack full of bones – the carcass of some beast he had murdered in the night. Escoffier kept the swarming pack of warhounds ravenous on purpose. He had no idea when Archaon would call on him and his emaciated monsters. He kept them ever hungry. Ever ready to tear Archaon’s enemies – and sometimes his wayward allies – apart, at the warlord’s command. Buried in a shaggy mound of flea-infested dog skins, which kept the cold from the Bretonnian’s own bones, Escoffier moved through the pack. The skinny beasts were all claw, drawn lips and dribbling jaws and the packmaster had to beat them back with the bones with which he was feeding them. The dogs were noisy but Archaon had instructed Escoffier to stake them out close to his tent. More than once the hackle and snap of the voracious hounds had warned the Chaos warlord of uninvited visitors approaching the tent.
Archaon already had protection, however. Turning he saw Zwei and Drei, perched up amongst the tusk-tips of the shaggy hide tents like a pair of black raptors, stretching their wings and keeping watch over their master while he had slept. Fitch, a hunchbacked thing, spindled of limb, served both as skinner for the rhinox-train and ostler for beasts of burden, including Oberon. Having just milked the shaggy beast-cows and returning with a bucket of suspect-smelling produce, Fitch splashed the liquid into a wooden cup for Archaon.
‘Master,’ Fitch said, his eyes averted and head low. He extended his long arm and offered the cup to the Chaos warrior. Archaon took the drink, allowing Fitch to withdraw from his presence and go about his business with the wretched, whip-mauled animals. Archaon went to drink the milk but his nose told him that there was something wrong with it and he tossed it out onto the ice and slush. His army was camped about the shelter. As a pair of warriors in fur and spike walked by, they noticed their warlord standing at the bone rail that ran around the tabernacle platform.
They lowered their horned helms before walking on. This was more out of animal subservience than military etiquette. Archaon was a warlord of the north: a leader amongst leaders – a general of a sizeable Chaos host. He did not waste his time with drills or formalised expectations. His army was not a state troop of the Empire or even a free company of irregular militia. They were savages, maniacs and madmen. The vast majority of them amounted to little more than rabid dogs. You did not harness such strength with uniforms and codes of conduct. You put them on chains and released them when you needed to. Since chains themselves were impractical, warbands and tribesmen were kept in line by their own chosen and chieftains – some of whom Archaon controlled by adopting them as his lieutenants. Others served the Chaos warrior purely out of fearful respect. They were drawn to his singularity of purpose and the ruthlessness with which he prosecuted his will. He claimed to be the chosen of the Dark Gods and acted like it. The damned were lost and always looking for powerful forces to guide and orient themselves to in the insanity of the Wastes – and Archaon was indeed a powerful force. He had confidence and direction and these were all lesser men who needed to make the leap of faith necessary to join Archaon in his doomed quest.
There were, of course, some of Archaon’s warriors that actually did require chains. The dark templar could see the Great Spleen like a small mountain of flesh, out on the floe, a little way distant of the camp. The gore-drenched ogre was a chosen of Khorne – an almost unstoppable bloody avalanche of bone-breaking destruction. He was staked out on four colossal chains that he barely noticed on account of the crushed flowers that were rubbed into the links and which acted as a soporific. Archaon’s army had fallen foul of the strange flowers in an otherwise bleak, bone-filled basin that nearly claimed them. Many of Archaon’s men had settled to sleep there amongst the skeletons of other unfortunates who had never woken. Before they had stumbled out of the depression, Archaon had ordered some of the flowers gathered, which then had been rubbed on the Great Spleen’s restraints, in an effort to keep the frenzied brute from smashing through the camp. As it slept on the ice, the barbarous marauders known as the Ravening that followed in its huge footsteps and honoured the Great Spleen as a manifestation of the Blood God, conducted some primitive cannibal ceremony before the statuesque corpulence of the thing.
Corsair-Captain Vayne also favoured chains. Archaon had been searching for a champion from the south – a warrior that knew Naggaroth and could advise him on the enemy he would face. Vayne – as Archaon knew him – was a druchii slaver. A reaver, who while transporting a mysterious cargo for Morathi the Hag Queen across the Sea of Chaos, had lost both his floating fortress the Citadel of Spite and the cargo to an unnatural tempest. Washed up on the icy shore of the Wastes and guided by his witch-lover Sularii – Vayne had taken the remainder of his corsair crew inland. His lover’s visions of the mighty Citadel of Spite beached in the Shadowlands prompted Vayne to gather a small army of slaves. The Chaos god Slaanesh was merely toying with the sorceress, however, and the corsairs’ wandering led them into the Prince of Pleasure’s embrace.
Polluted, bereft of vessel, having lost the Hag Queen’s mysterious prize and unable to return to their homelands, the druchii lovers had wandered the Wastes for the better part of two hundred years before Archaon found them and put the corsair-captain’s Slaaneshi slave army and knowledge of Naggaroth to good use. Archaon could see Vayne’s reaver-officers in their scale cloaks, walking up and down the lines of their slaves – desperate wretches, caught in the Wastes and shackled to the corsairs’ colossal chain gang army. The Slaaneshi slaves were surprisingly little trouble under the expert thraldom of the druchii. What little food was allowed them was drugged to keep the dire creatures in a perverse state of shared delirium. With their irons loose and scavenged weapons handed out moments before battle, the slaves had little choice but to maintain formation and fight for their lives against the enemies of the corsair-captain and his witch-lover.
Archaon’s compact with the druchii pair was simple. Once the dark templar had done with the gathered depravity that made up his army, he had promised them as prisoners to Vayne and Sularii. Archaon didn’t tell them that he expected the challenges with which he would present his host to fully decimate their number. The agreement was rendered further pointless by the fact that those necessary losses might very well include the dark elves themselves. Still, it was easier for both Vayne and Archaon to agree to such arrangement rather than have the inconvenience of killing one another in advance – and following the death of Iskavar Gan and the doomed attempts to replace him with Balduin the Blooded, the Chevalier Malraux, Xandressa Headtaker and Tangrul-Targ as the army’s second-in-command – Vayne had made a capable and entertaining subordinate.
Archaon could not see Vayne and the sorceress Sularii amongst the druchii number. The dark templar finally spotted the dangerous pair approaching his tent, accompanied by an animated Father Dagobert, who was fingering through the pages of The Liber Caelestior. The three of them were matched in number by the Chaos knight Eins and his accompanying pair of winged Swords. Like a delegation they were making their way through the Tusker herd of the beastlord Gorghas Hornsqualor. Muscular and shaggy, Hornsqualor’s beastmen were covered with fur of dour white, almost matching the ice of the glacier about them. Like the beastlord, the beastmen had each been blessed with a single horn, like a narwhal, making the herd appear like grizzled, rearing unicorns.
From the slavers and beasts, Archaon’s army spread out
across the ice, enjoying the meagre comfort of small fires and the less-oppressive heavens. The largest contingent to have joined Archaon’s army of Chaos was the celestial Hundun. Under their eastern warlord, Fengshen Ku, the Hundun marauder clan belonged to the Dreaded Wo tribe and were made up of mounted members of the respected sword clans and their retainers that formed hordes of pike-wielding supporters. With their black, lacquered armour, pairs of curved long swords and iron masks – forged in expressions of horror and dismay – Fengshen Ku and the sword clan of the Dreaded Wo were a dark and determined force. Archaon had been told by Vayne that the Hundun very much resembled the celestial warriors of the Dragon Kingdom, manning the empire-spanning wall of the Great Bastian, which kept the marauders of Chaos at bay.