by Rob Sanders
‘The spawn of the north, ancient, from the clouds impending,
A thunderbolt in flesh from angry skies, like death descending,
Detested of claw, of jaw, of scale, of flame – it is nature’s bane,
Hunting the lesser races, across ocean and waste, ever at change,
It is the very form of our darkest fears –
And like a nightmarish vision in the heavens – it appears…’
– Khezula Sheerian, Visions of the Fifth Tier, Scaling the Impossible Fortress
and Netherhell Bound
The Black Meridian
The Great Eastern Ocean
The Festival of Ghosts – Year of the Jackal
Archaon could hear cannon fire. It had started. News of his apparent death had spread like a disease, infecting the minds of champions and madmen with fantasies of brief bloodshed and taking Archaon’s place at the head of the Ruinous horde. Cut off from the influence of other champions, the warrior-captains of vessels making up Archaon’s raiding flotilla were first to declare their explosive intentions for their patrons and for themselves. Months of uneasy peace and fearful unity went up like a barrel of gunpowder. War junks, marauders, pirate xebecs and slaveships were all firing upon one another in pre-emptive strikes, boarding and slaughtering crews that fought for enemy gods.
For Archaon, standing in Dravik Vayne’s cabin, aboard the corsair-captain’s elegant raider, nothing said coup d’état better than looking down on his own corpse. The maggot-man that Nurgle’s witch had replaced him with was a ghoulish match. It filled the dark templar with disgust to know that there were others aboard the Spite that enjoyed muscle and reflexes tempered by decades of battle and their warlord’s fearful features. The doppelganger wore a death mask now: a face from which the worries of command had been removed, from which the horror of an unexpected end had fallen. Vayne had opened his throat from ear to ear with his wicked blade and allowed gore to cascade down his victim’s breastplate. The warrior’s face was calm and untroubled. In death, Archaon seemed to know a peace he had never known in life. Even before renouncing his weakling God-King and accepting as his masters the capricious Chaos Powers.
He looted his own corpse. His infested plate and mail. His helmet. His boots and gauntlets. His shield. The polluted blade, Terminus. Tearing the Fleshstorm’s shredded cast-offs from his hips, he slipped into his gore-stained arming doublet and armour sticky with blood. He shouldered the shield with a grunt. With darkness writhing and weaving about him and the weight of plate once more on his body, the Chaos warrior felt complete. Sliding his greatsword into a scabbard across his back, Archaon snatched druchii lanterns from the cabin and smashed them down on his deathly semblance. Within moments the maggot-man was a raging inferno of oil-fed flame that rapidly began spreading through the cabin.
He stared at his own funeral pyre. It was an end but also a beginning. He would start again. He would learn from his mistakes and be the herald the apocalypse truly deserved. The lieutenants, the beastmen and marauders that had betrayed him would pay with their lives. The wretches that had failed him did not deserve to live. There were only two of the hundreds and hundreds on board the floating fortress that he needed. That he wanted. That he cared to take on with him. The girl Giselle, who had once tried to save him from himself, and Father Dagobert – whose knowledge of both his past and unfolding prospect of his future made the priest indispensable. Besides, The Liber Caelestior was with them. Archaon would need the secret of his tomorrows, contained within the damned tome.
Taking a pair of crossed corsair cutlasses from where Vayne had them displayed on his wall, Archaon kicked open the door. He dispensed with the stealth he had used when entering the raider’s cabin from the gothic maw of the rear window.
The sun had set on the Great Eastern Ocean. Morrslieb was yet to rise but great Mannslieb was low and heavy on the horizon, casting its bloody double on the dark waters that rolled beneath it. Archaon’s breath clouded before him. It was cold. His search for the treasures of Chaos had taken the Spite to the farthest reaches of the southern seas. Beyond the Lost Isles. Beyond the continental capes of Lustria and Khuresh. Beyond the shipping lanes of the elder races and the reach of map and chart. The skies were crystal clear and the waters stabbing cold.
The druchii raider’s sails were furled on their lateen gaffs. Above, dwarfing the tiny ship, was the mountainous silhouette of the Citadel of Spite, its crooked towers like a midnight claw reaching greedily for the heavens. The confusion of the corsairs on the raider’s deck was mercilessly exploited by the Chaos warrior, who put the spiked knuckle guards of his cutlasses through the gaunt faces of the first two dark elves he met. The face-smashing cries of anguish drew corsairs and slave-crew to Archaon, who opened them up with brutal sweeps of his curved blades. One of Dravik Vayne’s corsair-commanders got a cutlass straight through him and then became a shield of scale and black leather as Archaon ran at an assembling line of druchii dreadshards that punched a hail of willowy bolts from their repeater crossbows into the officer’s cadaver. Throwing the bolt-mangled body at them, the dark templar slipped through their number, clipping off limbs, skewering helmed heads and carving through druchii flesh.
Leaving his cutlasses through a pair of staggering dreadshards, Archaon took their repeating crossbows from their agony-open fingers, one in each arm. As hastily armed slaves poured from their forecastle enclosures, screamed on by druchii officers, Archaon unleashed the crossbows at them. As bolts buried themselves in faces, throats and bare chests, the stream of slaves started to form a shrieking mound over which following thralls had to climb – straight into the path of Archaon’s final quarrels. With both crossbows spent, the Chaos warrior allowed them to crash to the deck and snatched his cutlasses from the impaled dark elves staggering behind him. As their guts rained down on their boots, the druchii collapsed and Archaon continued his wolfish advance up the length of the vessel.
As he sliced through slaves and gutted their dark elf overlords, the Chaos warrior fired off loaded bolt throwers as he passed. Criss-crossing the raider’s black deck as well as oncoming corsairs with his wicked blades, Archaon released the ballistas as he went. The corsairs called them reapers and their name was well-earned. As their ratchet-claws released the taut sinew of the bowstrings, the heavy trident-headed bolts shot away, smashing through the hull, rigging and druchii crew of a vessel sailing alongside Vayne’s docked raider. Slamming individual reapers facing the Spite to maximum elevation before releasing their stone-spearing bolts, Archaon fooled the Chaos warriors crewing the floating fortress’s mighty bolt throwers into thinking that they were under attack. As the dark templar took heads from Vayne’s Slaaneshi elves and butchered the raider’s slave-stock, he heard the buck of the colossal war machines in furious reply. Bolt shafts the size of tree trunks smashed down through the deck and screaming slaves. Archaon felt a quake pass through the ship as a third colossal bolt followed the second down through the ruin of the top decks and slammed through the bottom of the raider’s hull. Skewered and in the throes of a savage fire sweeping up the ship, the druchii vessel began to take on water. Without the support of the surrounding deck, the foremast began to topple, taking the rigging, wreckage and topsails over the side with it.
Deciding that his work aboard the raider was done, Archaon ran at a throng of screeching corsairs. Skidding down onto the deck and between their boots, Archaon cleaved through the backs of their knees. A druchii officer was suddenly upon the prone templar with a pair of curved knives, but placing the soles of his boots against the leather of the corsair’s chest, Archaon launched the officer back across the deck. Throwing one of his cutlasses at an oncoming druchii, the blade slamming into the middle of the dark elf’s chest, Archaon plunged his other weapon into the gut of another corsair before the officer – with cat-like reflexes – was back on him. Archaon slapped the corsair back before smashing one knife from his enemy’s hand with an a
rmoured gauntlet. Again the officer came at him with the single knife. Allowing its tip to pass under his arm, Archaon grasped the druchii’s slender hand in both of his own. Holding the knife in an iron grip, Archaon tore back the fingers of the corsair officer, breaking bones and ripping digits from their sockets. The Chaos warrior heard the dark elf squeal but silenced him with an armoured elbow to the face. Both knife and officer hit the deck.
Archaon heard agonised lines give and felt rigging whip over his head as the foremast started to drag the mainmast down. Scooping up the dark elf’s knives from the ruined deck on their finger rings, Archaon ran at the officer, who buried both his helm and head beneath cowering arms. Springing off the corsair’s back, Archaon’s other boot found the ship’s rail, from which he launched himself at the rope dragged upwards by the excruciating descent of the mainmast. Riding the momentum of the rope, Archaon allowed himself to be propelled upwards at the Citadel’s side. When the rope had nothing left to give him, the Chaos warrior stabbed out with the talon-tips of his knives, the wicked tips of the blades scoring down through the salt-dusted stone of the floating fortress’s side. Scrabbling with his boots and hooking into the crooks and ridges of the black druchii stonework, Archaon’s slide down the side of the floating fortress slowed to a gruelling stop. With the raider flooding and aflame in equal measure below, the dark templar had little intention of clinging to the wall like a bat above the devastation. Sticking the stone of the wall with alternate blade tips, Archaon made the muscle-roasting climb required to reach the lowest of the Citadel of Spite’s contorted battlements. Hauling himself over the serrated crenellations, Archaon took a moment to catch his breath before climbing on board his twisted flagship.
Beneath his boots Archaon felt the great vessel rock. Over the side he could hear furious agitation in the icy waters – an eruption of bubbles and turbulence that thrashed the surface of the sea to a white maelstrom. Peering over the fanged bulwark of the Spite and down its stone side, the dark templar could see light in the depths; pinks, blues and purples. Beneath the black waters Archaon fancied that he could see impossible flame and the crash of titanic bodies. Beasts were rising from the ocean. As they broke the surface, Archaon could see some of the floating fortress’s monstrosities – creatures that the warlord had ordered set upon enemy hulks and flotillas – wrapped around some greater beast. Something Archaon hadn’t seen before. Sea serpents and the tentacles of a giant-beaked kraken were coiled about the monster’s form. The great beast rolled like a crocodile, tangling itself further in lengths of tendril and serpentine body. Archaon saw huge claws rend huge chunks of blubber and scale from its attackers. Jaws flashed and crunched serpents in two, while wings struggled to unfurl and beat through the water like monstrous fins. The kraken wanted to drag the beast down into the depths and drown it, but as the creature turned its colossal maw on the squid and its flesh-shearing beak, the kraken released it. Streams of purpurescent flame followed it into the darkness before the beast wriggled free of the last of the strangling serpents and beat its wings for the surface. Breaking through the bubbling foam rising from its own fiery breath, the gargantuan creature latched onto the side of the floating fortress with its massive claws. Once again, Archaon felt the Spite list to one side as the floating fortress took the extra weight of the beast on its starboard side.
There was something spellbinding about the thing. It was huge. It was obscenely ugly. It was climbing up the Citadel of Spite towards Archaon. The dark templar looked down on the beast. Flamefang. The curse Archaon had ordered Sheerian to unleash upon the Spite, upon his mutinous Chaos host, upon the world once more. All to be caught in the degenerate god Tzeentch’s unfolding storm of change. The terror of Grand Cathay was flesh and doom once again – and what a horror it had become. It was a dragon – that was for sure. Its lithe body was long and serpentine, like some colossal serpent of the sky, simultaneously sinewy and powerful. Its spindly limbs supported scythe-like claws that could cut through the trunks of trees, while the beast’s wings were colossal, sun-blacking shelters of gnarled bone and stretched flesh. The thick, whipping coils of its tail, which seemed simply a continuation of its snaking body, balanced the length of a slithering neck, in turn supporting a gargantuan head: an armoured skull of twisted horn, gavial jaws and twisted teeth.
The Chaos warrior had encountered nothing like it before, even in his wanderings through the Wastes. He had only seen its kind in pictorial form. Oriental dragons stitched into the flags of Cathayan vessels or carved into the lacquered breastplates of the Dreaded Wo. Its predacious size and presence was heart-stopping enough but as Archaon stared down at the ascending monstrosity he had unleashed, it somehow managed to exude a dread that was more than the threat of its savage power. At his command, Khezula Sheerian had brought into existence an otherworldly thing. A slinking beast of world-eating spirit, encased in the devastating form of its ancient terror. The creature’s flesh was not its own, however. Like the daemon sorcerer who had summoned it, Flamefang had been forced to make do with the materials available. The dragon’s ancient scale and primordial flesh was long gone. The small mountain of bodies that had been the Fleshstorm had found new form and purpose, stretched horrifically about the dragon’s monstrous spirit. Archaon could see eyes, mouths and faces staring out from the melded beastflesh. Its skin was pale and flesh-pink, thick with muscle and tendon, threaded with rib and bone. It was a creature crafted of the living. A howling, screaming, begging nightmare of borrowed flesh and suffering – stomach-churning to behold.
As he became entranced with the dragon, the dragon in turn became entranced with its prey. The marauders and beastmen on board the Spite and the surrounding flotilla were all damnation’s children. They all had the whiff of destined greatness about them. The Dark Gods were fickle in the choosing of their champions. To the Chaos dragon, Archaon was a blinding light amongst a constellation of lesser stars. His power and potential burned to behold and the beast knew it must have him. Like a wild thing of impulse and darkness it would swallow the swarms of souls about it like an ocean behemoth might clouds of shrimp. It knew that Archaon was special – even if it couldn’t possibly conceive how or why. It had his stink in its ghastly nostrils – the stench of destiny – and knew it must have him.
It saw him with the hundreds of eyes peering in horror from its form. Its twisted cage of dagger-teeth parted and from the bottomless blackness of its throat a glorious fountain of purple flame vomited forth. Throwing himself back behind the knife-edge of the bulwark, Archaon dived for the deck, allowing the unnatural inferno to roar past and reach for the skies. Scrabbling to his feet, Archaon lurched for the nearest cover. Flamefang was suddenly there, its serpentine neck carrying the Chaos dragon’s monstrous head up to the stone deck. Again the jaws parted. The dark templar clambered awkwardly over a balustrade and dropped down onto the stone steps of a stairwell leading down onto a mezzanine deck. The sky disappeared beneath a blanket of flame. Archaon expected to hit the black stone of the steps. His fall was broken, however, by Gorghas Hornsqualor and a throng of his shaggy white warriors. The beastmen roared their fury at the Chaos warrior as they tumbled together down the stairs. In a brute rage the beastmen grabbed the warrior with their brawny arms and proceeded to kick dents into his plate with their hooves.
Archaon wasn’t worried about Hornsqualor’s troops. He felt the deck shift as Flamefang pulled its monstrous length up onto the Citadel’s deck. The beastmen were so involved in defeating the Chaos warrior that had fallen on them that they hadn’t noticed the colossal beast that was now snaking its way through the Spite’s towers and architecture. In between the hairy, white fists and the bloody hooves, Archaon caught glimpses of Flamefang’s horrific body passing overhead. He could hear shrieks and screams as the monster cut marauders in half with the mindless snap of its jaws and buried entire warbands, crowded tents and warriors of the Ruinous Powers in flame. Archaon got his gauntlet to his brawny restrainer’s single
horn. With his arm around the beastman, he twisted and snapped the creature’s neck with a horrible, bleating screech. He didn’t have time to deal with Gorghas Hornsqualor and his bully gors and found himself crawling away. The beastmen chuckled their harsh derision, watching the Chaos warrior scramble behind the corner.
Their mirth was lost in the purple firestorm that enveloped the stone stairwell as the dragon slipped its long neck and open, elongated jaws down through the cruel druchii architecture and blasted them to fiery oblivion. Some monstrous, primordial urge to serve its Dark Master drove it on. It wanted forms to change and the souls that fled such abomination. It wanted Archaon. The blazing light of his significance drove the monster mad, flashing briefly and temptingly before becoming lost once more in the miasma of dark souls that lit up the floating fortress.
After the heat washed away and Archaon heard Flamefang slither monstrously away to create havoc towards the stern, Archaon turned to see what remained of the beastmen. Instead of a huddle of cremated beastmen, the Chaos warrior found that the dragon’s breath had actually turned the brutes into small, fleshy mounds that were erupting in change. Like anemones turning themselves inside out, the creatures had been transformed into blossoming spawn by the form-altering power of the Tzeentchian monster’s fire. Instead of a fiery death, Flamefang visited upon its victims the blessings of its infernal master – Lord Tzeentch.
‘What you think?’ came a voice. Archaon turned to find the sorcerer Sheerian hobbling around the corner, his bone staff tapping its way along the black stone. The ancient leant on the staff and Archaon was bathed in the azure glow of its gem headpiece. The jewel seemed to blink. ‘What you think of Lord Tzeentch’s gift?’ Archaon didn’t give an answer and Sheerian didn’t wait for one. ‘Change is coming, Archaon. For you, for me, for the poor mongrels hereabouts,’ the sorcerer said, gesturing to the chaos and confusion that swarmed the Citadel’s decks. ‘For the world.’ The ancient smacked the base of the staff down on the stone. ‘Go then, chosen one. Ring the changes with your blade, with your vengeance. Bring my lord the souls of your enemies, Archaon. Sacrifice them on the altar of your ambition.’