Archaon: Everchosen

by Rob Sanders

  Suddenly, light. The blinding radiance of the day. A sun Archaon had not seen in what seemed like forever. Colours. Shapes. Trees. He was there. Back in the forests of the Empire. Smoke stung his nostrils. The smoke of destruction, utter and merciless. He could taste blood on his lips. His own and that of barbarian tribesmen whose slaughter hung on the air like a bloody mist. There was a barbarian before him. A Reiklander. A small mountain of muscle, decked in forest furs, trailing the long, unkempt mane of a savage. He was not alone. He introduced Archaon to his companion. A dwarf hammer. A warhammer of haft, rune and gold. A warhammer whose enchanted and unstoppable head trailed blood and destiny. Ghal Maraz. Skull-splitter. And then Sigmar hit him.

  Something broke deep within Archaon. His body smashed through the trees before bouncing off and around the thick trunks of Empire oaks and Reikland heartwoods. His armoured form spun like a discarded doll before coming to a stop in the leaves and the dirt. Archaon brought up his weapon, a sword that smoked with daemonic fury… but again Sigmar was there. The Unberogen had stormed through the forest at Archaon like a force of nature. Ghal Maraz smashed though the blade and it shattered like silver glass. The barbarian turned on his heel and brought the terrible weapon around and down.

  When it hit Archaon it felt like an earthquake. The Chaos warrior was smashed down through the black forest earth, the stone and roots and into a hollow of his own making. Sigmar leapt into the pit, landing like a great cat. Like a wild lion, his face was contorted with noble savagery. Eyes narrow and teeth bared. He had confronted a thing of evil and now he was to destroy it. It was the end for Archaon. His God-King would destroy him.

  His God-King. Archaon reached back. Back through the blood and treachery – back to a time of simple falsehoods. A God-King and the tales that were told about him. Tales that false priests and templars promoted as belief, venerated and worshipped. Archaon knew this tale. He knew how it ended.

  Morkar the Uniter. Favoured of darkness. Everchosen of the Chaos gods – smashed and defeated – pushed his helm up off his head and looked up at Sigmar Heldenhammer. The man who would be a god. Ghal Maraz came up, for it was his destiny to end the evil that had ridden out of the north on a deluge of Ruinous warrior-savages.

  ‘Brinnan utva lioht,’ Sigmar spat – a curse of his barbarian ancestors. An Unberogen curse Archaon had come to know in his former calling. Not only as his God-King’s holy words but also a Sigmarite templar’s way of life. Brinnan utva lioht. Burn by the light.

  ‘Brinnan utva lioht,’ Archaon spat and brought the great hammer down on Morkar’s head with such righteous force that rather than split the Everchosen’s skull, he obliterated it – hammering blood and bone into the forest bedrock.

  Archaon rose from the molten rock of the lake. Lava spilled down his glowing plate. Magma dribbled from his backplate and pauldrons. Through the socket-slits of his skull-helm and the haze of heat, Archaon could see. Liquid rock bubbled and spat about him like an infernal sea. He had been knocked into the lake of lava but the daemon runes and dark enchantments of Morkar’s armour had saved him. Striding out of the magma and up the shale shore, Archaon shook the igneous globs of cooling stone from his shield. Within the plate it was as dark, cool and empty of vengeance as Archaon could wish it. Outside, the outlandish metal of the armour steamed and cooled.

  Snatching up furs for his shoulders and the ragged cloak that had failed miserably to keep him warm out in the frozen wilderness of the Southern Wastes, Archaon moved with power and purpose across the stepping stones of the raging lake. Like the twin-tailed comet that heralded the Heldenhammer’s coming – he would not be stopped. Like the world’s wretched end – he would not be stopped. When he reached the wall of rugged, black stone that was the hollow interior of the volcano, Archaon started to climb. He hauled himself up the stone sarcophagi of Morkar’s marauders and the razor-sharp jags and ledges. He climbed. Like a rising star of the Ruinous Powers he ascended. The mountain’s height was nothing. The weight of his armour was nothing. The dark templar hauled himself up over the lip of the caldera, the lake of lava raging beneath him.

  Hubris had put him from his path. It had made him blind to treachery. It had sent the army with which he was going to conquer the world to the bottom of the ocean. But he had come back from calamity. Another treasure of Chaos was his. And another would be also, if he could only find a way into the belly of the daemon-dragon that had swallowed it.

  He did not have to wait long.

  CHAPTER XVII

  ‘So two titans of darkness met,

  In sight of daemonlands undreamt.

  One shook the world with titan’s deeds,

  The other to death was condemn…’

  – Necrodomo the Insane, ‘The Liber Caelestior’

  The Hinterdark – The Obliviate Plain

  The Southern Wastes

  Horns Harrowing: Season of Fire

  Out of the storm-swirling skies it came. The Yien-Ya-Long. Flamefang. Chaos dragon and terror of Grand Cathay. A thing crafted of stolen flesh. A great serpent slithering through the heavens, the beast beat its stretched skin and clawed its way into a banking turn. Mouths screamed in its sides, eyeballs writhed in the sockets set in its warped form – ever on the lookout for soul-prey. Within moments of emerging from the cavernous crater, Archaon knew it had him. It wheeled. It turned. It surged. It cut down through the howling gales and swooped in on the lone figure standing atop the glowering summit of the volcano. In the maelstrom, in the darkness, against the black rock of the mountain, Archaon would have been all but invisible – but to Tzeentch’s monster, he was a beacon of soulfire calling the beast down on him.

  ‘Come on,’ Archaon grizzled, his boots crunching through the grit. ‘Come on you ugly brute.’

  And then it was there, a plume of purple flame raging before its mangled jaws. Archaon’s instinct was to run, to take cover behind the boulders and crags of the mountaintop. The disgusting sensation of the warpflame’s effects still remained with him. Through the searing agony that was his left hand, he fancied he could still feel his missing digits and their rebellion in flesh. The inferno washed across the peak, feeling its way about the rocks and ridges before it found its victim. Archaon stood like a statue, with the purple blaze raging about him. It filled his socket-slits with its blaze of change that danced across the surface of his plate. As the firestream abated, Archaon felt no scorching warmth through the armour. He felt no rebellion of the flesh as spawndom claimed him. Morkar’s armour was impervious to the dragon’s wrath. Slipping an axe from his belt the Chaos warrior threw the weapon at the passing beast, burying the blade in its morphing flesh.

  Again the dragon came at him. And again. Each time its warped jaws were preceded by the fury of its transformative flame but again and again the dark templar emerged from the inferno unscathed and ready with a sword or axe to toss at the beast. Then suddenly the colossal creature was gone. It had vanished into the broiling, black heavens.

  ‘No!’ Archaon roared. ‘I’m here you aberration. I’m here!’

  He glared up at the firmament as it boiled like molten pitch above him. He peered through the swirling maelstrom that howled across the Southern Wastes. He stared at the darkness beyond the infernal glow of the volcano, at the savage hordes of beastfiends and daemons that were tearing each other to pieces in the madness of the storm.

  He heard Flamefang before he saw it. He never actually saw it at all. As he turned, the great jaws of the Chaos dragon were already there, beckoning like the entrance of a cave. Archaon was knocked from his feet by the snapping force of the maw as it snatched him from the mountaintop. Then the dragon’s mangled mouth clamped shut, trapping the Chaos warrior in a prison of fang and twisted tooth.

  Archaon had seen Flamefang claim its victims before. Like a hungry hound it gorged itself, wolfing down its prey, sometimes using the length of its jaws like a trough t
o scoop screaming crowds of unfortunates into its gullet in eagerness to assimilate their flesh and forms. And with each victim the beast had grown. Not Archaon. The Chaos dragon reserved extra suffering for him. Crunching down on the dark templar, the monster intended to masticate him first. Crush him within its titanic jaw. Skewer him with fang. Shear him to miserable pieces within its mangled maw. The armour of Morkar would not allow such desecration. Ordinarily the victim would be blind to the gnashing horror within the beast’s mouth but Lord Tzeentch’s beast flooded its mouth with warping flame that lit up its maw and bathed Archaon in a purple blaze. To the dragon, Archaon mused, his armoured form must have felt like chewing on a musket ball.

  Then, through the fires of change he saw it. The Imperial cross of the pommel. The modest twinkle of gems set in the crossguard. Terminus. The greatsword still sat in its scabbard of morphing flesh, buried in an outbreak of faces that peered down from the roof of the Chaos dragon’s mouth like blisters. Archaon reached for the blade, but as he did the mouth was suddenly awash with a burning liquid that exuded from his monstrous surroundings. The stinking deluge preceded a swallowing action, and the telescopic jaws of its inner mouth and the one within that shot forward to snap shut about the Chaos warrior like a toothed cage of smeared flesh and bone. Pressing himself against the inside of the inner maw and reaching between the bars of its stabbing fangs, Archaon stretched. He reached. He snatched at the sword with his armoured fingertips. As he reached it, clamping the pommel between two fingers, the Chaos dragon ingurgitated. Dragging the sword free of its fleshy prison, Archaon held on to the blade as his armoured form was hauled to the back of the dragon’s throat where he was swallowed again and began a horrible journey down through the beast’s undulating gullet.

  Archaon was filled with pure disgust. His plate was awash with the creature’s assimilating slime. The stench inside the monster was an overwhelming, oblivion-inviting fug the dark templar was forced to breathe. The creature was living horror. Archaon could feel the morphing, muscular movements in the flesh about him, taking him down the beast’s snaking throat and down into the cavernous lairs of its monstrous body. Spat and slinked through a series of gullet sphincters, Archaon found himself sliding down through a slurping passage in which the mouths of victims set in the walls bit at his armour and hands tore at the difficult to digest plate. The assimilated unfortunates did not succeed and within several horrid moments Archaon slid down into a larger chamber – some kind of pre-stomach or gizzard – and came to a stop in the digestive shallows of a small lake.

  Clawing his way back up through the slime and the fleshly shoreline, Archaon turned to take in his surroundings. The walls had a flesh-smeared architecture – a horror all of their own. Within their trembling, ooze-exuding structure were bones, ribs and scraps of armour. It was here, in the prison of its own flesh that it kept its captured treasure. In amongst the gristle and sinew Archaon could see coin, precious stones and Ruinous artefacts. Assimilated victims reached out for him with arms that extended from the walls. Others screamed in perpetual agony, all merged mouths and torment. The pool from which he had hauled himself was alight with isolated tongues of transformative flame. The waters shifted from side to side, splashing up one side of the chamber and then the other as the great dragon banked and flew. The pool itself was drowning in part-assimilated bodies. From there, it seemed, the poor wretches would find themselves part of Flamefang. One with its flesh. Trapped in gibbets of twisted bone. Draped behind the stretching transparency of its skin. Doomed – until finally their horror would be complete as limbs and organs parted ways to serve the Chaos dragon’s warped form. Archaon had never known such rancid disgust. He knew only that the colossal beast had to die.

  Stomping through moaning shallows, with Terminus clamped in the vice-like grip of his gauntlet, Archaon advanced through the beast. Pushing through fleshy slits and serrated valves, Archaon traversed bloody, rippling chambers lined with shredding teeth. He pushed through forests of embedded limbs that clawed for his mercy. He marched through masticating orifices that threatened to smother and absorb him. Everywhere he searched for the sapphire glow of the daemon sorcerer’s gem. The prophetic Eye of Sheerian. A Tzeentchian treasure that had blessed the endeavours of Morkar the Uniter and belonged in the setting of his mighty helm. As it had fostered the decimations of the first Everchosen of Chaos, it would do the same for the last. It did not deserve to furnish the fantasies of a senile sorcerer or slosh around the digestive pool of a damned abomination like Flamefang. It was destined for greater service. Without The Celestine Book of Divination, Archaon would need the enchanted jewel to show him the path ahead. To show him the Ruinous treasures that once reclaimed would mark him as the herald of Armageddon and Lord of the End Times.

  As the Eye beheld Archaon, Archaon beheld the eye. Through the womb-like darkness of the dragon’s warped innards, the Chaos warrior saw the slightest suggestion of the gemstone’s ethereal glow. Hefting Terminus, the dark templar stabbed his way through the writhing flesh of the stomach wall and sawed his way through to systems new. As he cut his way through to an adjacent set of chambers, Archaon felt the dragon twist and contort about him. He was up to his knees in blood as the beast bled internally. It could feel the agonies its last meal was inflicting on it from within and was forced to land on the black ice of a midnight plain. Even from within, Archaon could hear the war cries of beastfiends attacking in number. He heard daemons leaping from the storm to sink their brazen talons into dragon flesh. They would tear it apart, Archaon knew, but as the stomach walls stiffened and bucked, Archaon knew that Flamefang was visiting the wrath of its transformative flame on the dark monstrosities of the Southern Wastes. Small lakes of assimilate slime erupted in purple flame as the Chaos dragon scorched the hordes about it to spawn.

  Archaon stepped back. Swinging Terminus about him, Archaon hacked at the tendon and sinew that blocked his progress. It was butcher’s work but as mouths in the flesh about him screamed and the Chaos dragon coughed and spluttered its torment, a mad grin spread across Archaon’s face.

  ‘Hurt, you abominable thing,’ Archaon roared. ‘I want you to feel this,’ he spat, doused in blood and hacking through the thick flesh. ‘I want you to feel it all.’

  Tearing his way through its last sinewy resistance, Archaon stepped through into a different chamber. It was tighter. Darker. It even smelled differently. There were riches here. As well as the horror of flesh-smeared unfortunates embedded in the walls of the chamber there was coin, jewels and objects of precious metal. Archaon had entered some kind of inner lair, within the Chaos dragon itself, encrusted with swallowed wealth. The dark templar felt suddenly on edge. Something wasn’t right. Moving around the twisting corners of a fleshy canal, Archaon saw it. A bright blue radiance that seemed to call out to him. His armoured boots slapped through the chamber’s blood-threaded slime and he quickened his step.

  There was a sudden cracking sound. Something the Chaos warrior hadn’t heard before. He froze. The glowing gemstone shone. It twinkled. It blinked at the dark templar. Archaon almost had it in his grasp. But he was not alone in the canal chamber. He was being stalked by something from within the Chaos dragon’s warped body. Archaon turned his head. He could hear more cracking. Peering through the gloom he saw movement. There were other riches here. The most precious of the lair’s treasures. There were eggs set within the fleshy walls of the chamber. The lair was some kind of birthing canal. Archaon had no idea whether the Chaos dragon was male or female – some combination of the two or neither, but deep within its grotesque carcass it was harbouring the next generation of monstrous calamity, ready to inflict on the world.

  Archaon’s lip formed a snarl. He watched the shell of the egg before him fracture and crack. The internal agonies he had visited upon Flamefang had awoken the infant dragons. The stink of Archaon’s fresh flesh and the prospect of a first meal now drew them from their shells. Archaon revolved his arm
oured wrist, turning Terminus around in the grip of his gauntlet.

  ‘All right,’ the dark templar announced to the chamber. ‘Let’s go.’

  The dragon exploded from its shell. A sinewy gargoyle of half-formed flesh and fang. Flapping its slime-coated wings and tearing its way from one wall of the birthing canal to the other, the infant monstrosity came at him. Before the beast even leapt for the Chaos warrior, a second was on his back and a third hammered into his shield from the side. Archaon fell through the fleshy curtains of chamber, his ears full of the metal-scraping cacophony of dragonclaw. The monsters were supernaturally strong. They were ravenous and prised at his infernal armour for the succulent flesh within. They snaggled his armoured limbs and one had the back of his skull-helm in the flesh-stripping fangs of its maw. Archaon rolled and the infant dragons rolled with him – grotesque sculptures crafted of misbegotten flesh. They tumbled and ploughed through the shell of a fourth egg, liberating another beast – the commotion drawing a fifth – some kind of malformed runt – from the sphincter of some side chamber.

  Archaon was buried in dragonflesh, the beasts slithering about him like a nest of strangling serpents. With the chamber moving about him with Flamefang’s own movements, it was difficult for the Chaos warrior to find his bearings. He felt their plate-wrenching claws, the lengths of their gnashing jaws and the muscular constriction of their bodies test his armour. He had no idea how long it would take the supernatural spawn of the Chaos dragon to find a weakness and exploit it, burrowing into his torso with their twisted, narrow jaws. As their tumble came to a stop at the canal wall, the Chaos warrior found himself on top of one of the monsters. Bucking and landing on his shield with the full weight of his armour and all the force he could muster, Archaon slammed the shield’s spike straight through the trapped beast, bursting what passed for its malformed heart. Pressing his advantage, Archaon worked his arm free and smashed the infant dragon that had it clamped in its maw across the snout with his greatsword’s crossguard. Drawing Terminus back immediately, Archaon sliced the head of the dazed dragon from its warped shoulders.