by Rob Sanders
Plunging his crusader blade into the second creature’s exposed belly, Archaon sawed through the softer shell, opening the creature up from below. It was slow to react but when the beast realised that half of its innards were trailing across the craggy floor, it withdrew behind its snapping claws. As the tips of crushing pincers glanced off the dark templar’s sword, Archaon worked his way within the beast’s feverish grasp. With a sweep of the blade Archaon took the monster’s eyes from their twitchy stalks, blinding the thing. Terminus crashed down through the chitin, breaching the shell. Another cleaving swing over the Chaos warrior’s head broke through the thing’s armour and mulched what passed for its primitive brain. Taking a moment to catch his breath, Archaon dragged the tip of his messy blade along the rocky floor of the cave. Oberon had stopped shrieking. The horse was dead. Its thick, muscular neck was now just a bloody stump. The stallion’s magnificent head lay a little distance away. The crab-beast had sheared through its neck with one chunk-claw and discarded the animal’s head.
Archaon felt the searing heat of fury run through his veins like lava. He charged the monster who had already started picking flesh from the carcass. Smashing two claws aside with his great sword he chopped an insistent third from an armoured appendage. Leaping up off the stallion’s body and from one of the monstrosity’s scuttling legs, Archaon heaved down on Terminus, his gauntlets hanging from the crossbars and his weight driving the broad blade down through the crab-beast’s shell like a spear. The blade slid straight through the creature and Archaon hung there for a moment as the clicking stopped and the creature’s limbs dropped and fell still.
Tearing Terminus from the butchered crustacean, Archaon settled down on one armoured knee beside the dead steed. His steed. Oberon had been there through it all. His training as a knight. His life as a templar. He had followed the Chaos warrior north to his doom and had survived the insanity of the Wastes. He laid a gauntlet on the horse’s scarred flesh. Archaon felt a strange warmth wash through his chest. It was an alien sensation, feeling like some kind of illness or infirmity. A remembered weakness. He had killed so much and cared so little for so long that he had forgotten his affection for the stallion. It was hard to believe that the pair of them would never ride again.
Archaon moved his hand across the beast’s still warm hide and through part of its midnight mane.
‘Thanks for always being there,’ Archaon managed. He looked up. He sensed hunger in the darkness. Creatures were closing in. They smelled carrion. Hot blood, freshly spilled and horseflesh. They would pay for their curiosity. The dark templar pushed himself to his feet. Oberon was dead but he was still alive. The killing had to continue.
Archaon cut, hacked, stabbed, sliced and smashed his way through the relentless onslaught of nightmares. Dripping with ichor and crunching through shattered shell and bone, Archaon fought them. He saw them slither and crawl at him, thinking he was blind to their advance; that he was easy prey. The emaciated creatures of the deep paid for their cruel instincts. Archaon cast their ugliness in the darklight of his being. He turned with speed and bloody assurance, cleaving claws, tentacles and wicked appendages from beasts who in turn were defenceless without them. The dark templar buried Terminus in the grim, fishy flesh of the sea monstrosities about him, opening the beasts up and filling the dank air with the foul odour of the depths. Soon Archaon was taking the fight to the beasts, slaying the warped, the scaly and the spined as they fed on the banquet of dead monstrosities about the Chaos warrior. Ravenous creatures feasting on each other’s foetid flesh, allowing Archaon to move through them, indiscriminately ending beasts lost in their own gluttony.
Standing in the thick murk, his chestplate rising and falling with the efforts of dealing death, Archaon stopped. Salty gore dripped from his plate and chunks of gloopy flesh dribbled from Terminus. The shallows gathered about him as freezing glacial waters climbed the bedrock foundations of the floating fortress and flooded the cave systems that riddled its buoyant architecture. With the slaughter sinking into the freezing waters, the monstrosities retreated. Their element called to them – as did freedom – and they could smell the scent of easier prey flailing and bleeding in the waters outside the caverns. Washing the ichor from his armour and shield, Archaon sheathed and shouldered his weaponry and started to climb. He was certain his prize lay in the dark citadel above. Every crag, handhold and cutting purchase took him closer to it.
The agonising ascent took him up the rocky sides of midnight chambers, through the abandoned grottos of fled monsters and up an abyssal dropshaft that weaved its crooked way through other cave systems and the inky vastness of open caverns. The climb was murderous. The rock was like climbing obsidian. All edges were sharp and surfaces greasy. The drops were dizzying – even in darkness – and the Chaos warrior had to risk heavy leaps of faith across razor-sharp chasms he could barely see.
As his body burned with the unending exertion of the climb, Archaon’s hands felt the crumbling architecture of crafted stone. It was ancient and came apart in his fingers. It lacked the twisted angularity of the cave rock below and before long the dark templar found himself in the pulverised foundations of the druchii citadel. Staring about the lightless environs and heaving himself onto a precarious ledge, Archaon found he was in a dungeon, out of which the bottom had fallen. The stones about the dungeon walls – the ones the knight was perched exhausted upon – were the only ones to remain. Something attracted Archaon’s attention immediately. A door of black metal set in the opposite wall. It wasn’t the mouldering metal of the ancient door or the shattered stone about it that held the Chaos warrior’s gaze. Between the dungeon door and the floor, Archaon could see a darklight that was not his own. A powerful evil lay in the passageways and chambers beyond. One so potent and pervasive that its darkness reflected off the walls and about the corners of the labyrinth in which it sat like the light and heat of a blinding inferno.
Standing and edging carefully around the loose flagstones about the edge of the chamber, Archaon found himself before the entrance. He could feel the dark radiance through the metal of the door, even though the metal of the door itself was cool. Levelling his armoured shoulder against the ancient metal, Archaon heaved at the door. He would not be denied. Not this close to his prize. Not this close to the Altar of Ultimate Darkness. With some surprise, the dark templar went straight through the door. The dungeon door did not open. Its locks were firmer in their resolve than the door’s constitution and the black metal disintegrated about the warrior.
Shrugging off the splintered shards of withered metal, Archaon brought up his gauntlet to shield his eyes. Even in a corridor of simple, black stone – like many that made up the dungeon vaults of the Citadel of Spite – Archaon found the brilliance of the darkness blinding. The walls were saturated with the sheer malevolence of the treasure the labyrinth contained. Its darklight shone off the floor, the stone and the walls. It burned to stare upon. He closed his eye but it made no difference. There was no blinding glare to block with a squinting lid. The socket of his other eye, covered in its black leather patch and within his helmet, could not be closed to such wonder. It saw the darkness of all the world. A truth that could not be seen to be believed. The shard of stone within his skull bled its warping potential throughout the Chaos warrior’s mind. A growl erupted from the dark templar’s chest. Something savage and animalistic. Like food, drink, physical gratification or to breathe, Archaon needed the evil beyond. It sang to him, blazing into his being with its scarring potency. He hungered for it. He lusted for it. He began to realise that he would simply die without it.
Blinded though he was, Archaon sensed movement in the oblivion. He grunted the barbaric acknowledgement of an enemy. Many enemies. The labyrinth was swarming with the hunchbacked, the flesh-smeared, the shambling, the fang-faced and formed that were impaled on their own bones. Here were the druchii. The slaves. The unfortunates taken with the Spite by the unnatural storm
. The miserable army of wretches that Dravik Vayne had left behind. The soul-ravaged remnants of dark elf corsairs and the Citadel’s legion of slaves. They only knew allegiance to the altar now. The Altar of Ultimate Darkness that Vayne had recovered and transported across the ocean for his power-hungry Hag Queen. Its corrupting influence had spread throughout the dungeon decks, the caverns below and the crew towers above. It had drawn them all to it. It had made mindless acolytes of them, twisting their minds beyond depravity and into the unknowing savagery of oblivion. Naked in their barbarity, their skin bleached to transparency by the darkness, they knew only that an interloper had entered the labyrinth. That the interloper was a threat to their mind-scalding shrine. That the interloper had to be torn apart. Groaning where mouths would still allow, the troglodytes lurched and shambled into one another, choking the passageways with their malformed number.
Not unlike the army of unfortunates swarming about him, Archaon grunted with brute intention. He needed to kill. They needed to die. It was agony to hold the simple sense it made in his head. Archaon drew Terminus. Any remaining essence of the God-King’s intentions for the blade were gone. It had been forever polluted. Like Archaon, it was being re-forged in the fiery darklight. Like a furnace, the labyrinthine sanctum that housed the Altar of Ultimate Darkness – blazing with the abyssal radiance of immaculate evil – was remaking them both. The crusader blade burned no longer with torment of its godly service. The sword was swathed in a bloody flame. It seethed in silence. It gave itself – its cleaving edge, the profanity of its pommel and the upturned smile of its cross-guard over to the darkness it had once fought. The blade had turned. Archaon smiled with his weapon. It spread to the insanity of a death-drunk grin.
The troglodytes chattered with their needle teeth. They drooled in the darkness. Bones broke as withered, claw-like limbs were brought to readiness. Archaon ran at them, his steps shattering the black stone beneath his boots. His roar sent great cracks and splits through the sanctum walls. He slammed into the freakish horde with his shield. No one troglodyte was his equal. Their twisted frames were lank and light. The passage was wall to wall with groaning bodies and the first few ranks of wretches were just smashed into oblivion by the sheer force. Skeletons shattered. Heads and malformed organs burst like ripe fruit. Archaon pushed at the mess. The floor became slick with blood and the dark templar skidded. There were simply too many troglodytes. Their obscene carcasses were crammed into the corridor and flesh and bone would give no more. Like a wave of misshapen flesh they rolled up behind the Chaos warrior. Within moments they were everywhere. Clawing, tearing finger-talons. Biting needle-jaws. Bludgeoning limbs that ended in bone growths. Emaciated arms and legs that stamped and strangled with a madman’s strength. They were before him. They were behind him. Those Archaon put on the floor still ripped at his legs, eager to find flesh through the plate and mail. Others hooked their way up his back and tore at his face and helm. The dark templar became lost in the blinding evil, adrift in a sea of corrupted flesh.
He punched his blade through the horrid creatures and smashed them into the walls and floor with the unrelenting force of his shield. He smashed through skulls with the pommel of the greatsword and butted druchii malforms into a brain-splattered mess with his helmet. The dark templar pushed on through the labyrinth, feeling his way not only through the carnage but along the walls. Every junction was an agony. A wrong turn would mean minutes more of meaningless slaughter. The knight’s darksight didn’t abandon him, though. Although it was soul-razing to look upon, Archaon forced himself to stare into the blinding glare of doom reflected off the walls. Where the mind-scalding radiance was brightest, Archaon made his bloody path.
The sea of bodies kept rolling in like a tide. Archaon was unyielding but step by step, death by merciless death, the gibbering droves wore him down. The thrust of his arm wouldn’t falter. His legs would stomp on through the meat at his feet. He would never surrender to the horde – even in their combined strength, tearing at him like a single creature of innumerable arms, claws and jaws. The troglodytes tore at the dark templar, their sharp nails like hooks in his armour and flesh. They wrenched pieces of plate from his body. They ripped his mail to shreds. The padding of his doublet became rags in their clutching, filthy claws. Archaon’s shield – bearing the Ruinous Star of the Chaos pantheon united – was torn from his arm and Terminus was taken from his blood-slick grip by the unrelenting throng.
This did not stop the Chaos warrior. Fumble-fighting his way through the darkness, he was shrine-blind. He was without weapons, without armour, naked as a newborn and sliced to ribbons. But Archaon fought on. Dripping with blood – his own and everyone else’s – he used his fists, his feet, his knees, his elbows and his head to beat the monstrosities about him to death. He wrestled the troglodytes for their lives, breaking necks and spines, tearing withered limbs from their sockets and wrenching deformed skulls from torsos. He screamed his sacrifice to the sanctum ceiling and punched through ribcages to rip feeble hearts from malformed chests. He didn’t know where he was. Darkness had become his world and the blinding darklight of the altar was everywhere. Bodies carpeted the floor beneath his bare feet. The walls and surrounding architecture were wet with blood. Archaon became an infernal instrument of decimation. Some of the creatures he just broke to hear the chorus of their suffering. Others he killed quickly. Mindlessly. A number he played with – allowing them hope before cruelly finishing them. He savoured the rest – enjoying their victimhood and the last gasps of their worthless lives. His guiding star – his star of Ruination – was always the end of all. His limbs felt like lead. His mind was overcome with his dark purpose. His heart thundered beneath the sliced flesh of his chest.
Suddenly there were no more. There was nothing left to kill. It was a shock. Archaon grabbed out at the darkness – to make sure that there was nothing left hiding or cowering in the shadows. Archaon stumbled through the butchered bodies and fell against a stone column. The column was slick with spilled blood. On it Archaon’s bruised fingertips traced a symbol carved into the stone. He stared at the column as hard as he could but blinded by the absolute blackness in which he sat and the darklight all about him he could make out nothing. All he had was what he could feel. The bloody steam rising from his aching body. The air thick with the stench of fresh death. The stone beneath his gore-stained fingers. He knew the symbol instantly. It had been worn with dark pride by those he had fought and killed in the Wastes and those that had joined him in the killing.
He stumbled across from the column and fell, almost braining himself on another. It bore the horror of another symbol. Another expression of another dark god, commanding followers in the Wastes and beyond. Archaon crawled through the bodies, eager to confirm the terrible picture he held in his mind. He found more columns and more symbols. Four larger pillars, each bearing the dread symbols of the gods of Chaos. The four Ruinous Powers of Chaos. The four horrific forces in the world to which the lost and damned pledged their souls – each holding the others in delicate balance. The obelisks formed the four points of a star, the four tips of a cross, the four corners of a square. Between each one Archaon found other columns, further out from the original four, which bore a multitude of other symbols – some the dark templar recognised and some he did not. Renegade entities, daemon princes of Chaos, Dark Gods masquerading as the barbarian deities of other races. Archaon had found it. One of the dark treasures of Chaos. The Altar of Ultimate Darkness. Holding one of the obelisks in his filthy hands, Archaon lowered his head in exhaustion and subservience. The darkness denied him the horror and beauty of the shrine. The Altar of Ultimate Darkness was not meant to be seen. It was meant to be experienced. It was a means by which a mortal might achieve communion with the gods. Its medium was darkness. And blood. About him Archaon heard the ooze and thick drip of blood from the bodies he had butchered. He had reconsecrated the dark altar without even realising it.
Archaon got uns
teadily to his feet. He glowered into the blackness. He saw only darkness. He heard only blood. He waited but nothing happened. His glower dropped to a smile of madness that swiftly became a snarl.
‘This unholy quest is complete,’ Archaon announced to oblivion. ‘Now give me what you owe me, you abominable wretches…’
Archaon was suddenly struck from all sides by powerful bolts of dark energy that seared from the tips of the columns. The experience was beyond pain. Beyond feeling. Archaon roared and thrust his fists at the ceiling. The energies crackled across his flesh, burning the hair from his head and his body. The darkness sizzled over his skin, cauterising gashes and open wounds. The bolts of energy lanced through his mind and met in the dark templar. He felt the shard of wyrdstone rattle horribly in his skull. He felt his scalp burn where the energies seared into him, creating an eight-point crown of pain and black-scarring around his hairless head. Archaon felt the presence of darkness within him. His soul howled at the centre of damnation’s storm – being torn this way and that, but never straying from the serenity within the swirling havoc of dark voices, dreams and feelings that enveloped his being. He felt the darkness change him, as the height of the sun in the sky transformed the day into dusk and the dead of night into the dawn.