by Rob Sanders
Warhammer: The End Times
SIGMAR’S BLOOD
The prequel to the End Times
THE RETURN OF NAGASH
Book One of the End Times
THE FALL OF ALTDORF
Book Two of the End Times
THE CURSE OF KHAINE
Book Three of the End Times
THE RISE OF THE HORNED RAT
Book Four of the End Times
DEATHBLADE
A Tale of Malus Darkblade
This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.
At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.
But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.
‘Thank the gods for their ignorance. For if the prayers of mortals were universally answered, there would be naught left living, since all pray for an end one to the other.’
– Ignatz van Offen, Offered Truths
‘And doom came decked in the flesh of man,
Death to all he didst devise,
No infernal could against him stand,
Twas thunder under brimstone skies.’
– Daemonsong
Prologue
‘At the dawn of the world, wisdom – savage and untamed – was with the beasts. The Dark Gods did not speak to the weakling races. The ferals, the half-breeds and the children of Chaos were sent to show the monster man how to express himself through the beast. And we were forever repaid in blood and hate.’
– Great Bray Gorganhok of the Dark Tongue,
The Lore of the Wilds
Hyborphregor Ice Shelf
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of Scars
The storm had come.
He was there. Among them. At one with the howling gales that swept up sinister shores, through the black spuming peaks and across the Wastes of everlasting ice. Like the rolling thunder of such unnatural tempests, Archaon had travelled far. From one side of the miserable world to the other, he had slain his way south. He had sought out the dark challenge of the Ruinous Powers. He had rescued the artefacts of Chaos from obscurity and the hands of enemies unworthy. All to become the Everchosen of the Dark Gods. The Lord of the End Times. Herald of inescapable Armageddon.
He had butchered those foolish enough to believe themselves chosen. Bestial warlords. Exalted warriors of daemon patronage, with lies bleeding from their poisoned ears. Sorcerers and witches, whose wretched powers could not save them from the cold judgement of Archaon’s blade. He had been the end to monsters and slain what could not be slain. He had slaughtered entire armies, including his own, for their unworthiness. Only those worthy of the apocalypse would join Archaon, as he ushered in the End Times to come. And so here he was. As far to the daemon south as any of manflesh had ever been. Flayed raw by the infernal freeze. Courting madness with the boundless horizon. A willing slave to ceaseless slaughter.
Archaon trudged through the black snow. His armoured boots were wrapped in the furs of some barb-skinned beast, the bony spines of which gave the warrior purchase across the frost and ice. The skies raged away above him, spitting and swirling like a ghostly, maddened creature, chasing its own tail. The armour of Morkar, First Everchosen of Chaos scalded his skin with its raw embrace. Archaon could not feel such pain. He wouldn’t allow it. The common miseries of existence were nothing to him now. With every step he took towards a doom of his own making, he became less of a man and more of an idea. An abstraction. A living misery for others to endure. He was not some character in a great tale told. He was the silence after the words. The covers of the tome slammed shut. The crackle of page and ink on the fire. He was the nevermore.
Holding his shield out before him, Archaon turned the worst of the storm’s fury aside. Splinters of ice shattered against the eight-pointed star of Chaos. The Chaos warlord cut an indomitable figure, smeared in the relentless blizzard, his cloak, loinmail and the furs of shaggy beastfiends he had butchered streaming after him like the tail of a comet. He jangled with skulls on chains that produced a mournful moaning in the wind. A sad and bitter tune for the bodies Archaon left in his wake.
The Chaos warrior’s trudging footsteps slowed. He felt something through the soles of his armoured boots. Through the furs and skins wrapped about them. Through the snow that crunched like charcoal and the obsidian ice that gleamed with darkness. A tremor. A quake. Archaon took several cautionary steps back. The ice was moving. It was rising. The frozen mask that was Archaon’s face creaked its way to a stiff smile beneath his skull-helm. He had found it.
Skidding back down the slope of the buckling ice and cascading snow, he listened to the crack of the ice floe as it shattered beneath him. Like a pair of spearpoints thrusting up through the ice, two mighty pinnacles burst free of the frozen land. They were jagged and sharp, crafted roughly from some kind of volcanic rock. As Archaon stumbled away through an avalanche of snow and ice that threatened to engulfed him, a great palace erupted from the frozen Wastes. Half swimming away from the dark wonder, Archaon peered up at the infernal architecture of the daemon fortress. It allowed both for the perverse flourishes of a Ruinous palace and the jagged crenellations of a fortification. As the ice parted and crumbled, the mighty building shuddered skyward. The gloom of the heavens broiled above it. Strange lights rippled through the maelstrom and lightning cracked between the twin pinnacles and the firmament. It rent the sky asunder.
As the mountainous palace trembled to a stop and the billowing clouds of black snow began to clear, Archaon could make out the strange architecture of the monstrosity. Although it was hewn from sharp, black stone – jagged and irregular – the palace had been crafted in the likeness of a daemon form. The twin pinnacles were both towers and the thumb-claws of great folded wings that formed the building’s mighty walls. A craggy head of infernal horror nestled between them, forming the palace dome, while the broad, muscular body, with its rugged arms, cloven-clawed legs and spiked tail had been crafted crouched as the formidable fortress foundations.
‘I have you now, dissembler…’ Archaon growled, each word a stream of white from his helm.
The Chaos warrior had chased the fortress across the Southern Wastes. For months now – years for all Archaon knew, for time moved with a perverse uncertainty at the bottom of the world – Archaon and his men had drunk the black snow and feasted on nothing but beastflesh.
The continent was overrun with monstrous half-breeds and beastfiends: savage tribes of creatures that were dread fusions of animal and daemon. Hordes that, like their damned brethren hiding in the forests of the Empire, were drawn to the most twisted, gifted and monstrous of their kind.
Shamans and beastlords led their great tribes one against the other, for a miserable patch of black ice that they might call their own and the base glory of their fell gods. Archaon had roasted their flesh, worn their bones and daubed his armour with their steaming blood. He had used their hides for warmth and had yoked their barbarian strength as the warlord of united tribes, for the creatures prized victory and dominion above all things. In doing so, Archaon had brought battle to the daemons, monsters and fiend princes that ruled this frozen hell. This beast he had sought alone.
The Forsaken Fortress, it was held, could never be sought out. Never be found. Those who had seen it had simply happened upon its dread form towering out of the Wastes. By the time they had returned to show others their find, the monstrosity had gone. Sunk down once more, below the ice. Daemon palaces and the forts of black ice crafted by the tribal beastfiends could be found across the Wastes, especially in the continental interior. The Forsaken Fortress moved at whim, however. The stone of its construction had come from far below or beyond the ice and was cursed, like the daemon prince to whom it belonged, without permanent form. Be’lakor…
The Shadowlord. The Dark Master. First of the oblivion princes. Harbinger of the Ruinous Powers. Be’lakor, who had always been with him and stalked the Chaos warrior still across the Southern Wastes. Archaon would not be stalked, and resolved to hunt the dark power that hunted him. Perhaps then he might gain answers to his questions. He might learn the locations of treasures of Chaos he had yet to find. The attainment of such would prove his worth to the dread Powers of the world and grant him the title of Everchosen of the Chaos gods. He would be the Lord of End Times and the Herald of the coming apocalypse. Only then would he show man, beast and god the folly of their existence. He would plunge all, his patrons, his enemies and everyone else, into an everlasting darkness. A true oblivion. A place of neither good nor evil where nothing could be won or lost. An eternal nothingness. A kingdom devoid, where not even Archaon would rule.
The daemon prince Be’lakor and his Forsaken Fortress could not simply be found, since none knew where the damned palace would appear. Archaon had been forced to trust his wanderings to uncertainty. To the potion-fuelled ramblings of Bray Shaman, the interpretations of auroral ghostlights, the bargains of daemon princes, cursed with the telling of truths and the riddles of his wizened sorcerer Sheerian. Khezula Sheerian, who had served the Great Changer. Sheerian, whose advice had seen Archaon slaughter his own army and sent the Chaos warrior into the jaws of the Chaos dragon Flamefang. Whose reading of ghostlights, shamanic ramblings and infernal lies now sent Archaon into danger again. Into the lair of daemon royalty. Into the clutches of a creature that had watched them from afar with doom-hungry eyes.
Such miserable intelligence placed the Forsaken Fortress on the Hyborphregor Ice Shelf. The enchanted jewel, the Eye of Sheerian, confirmed its disappearance from where it had been last reported amongst the fiery peaks of the coast. With this, Archaon had set off for the daemon palace. Leaving his bestial army with Eins and his Swords of Chaos, with the storm-wracked skies making flight for the warriors impossible, Archaon had been forced to cross the midnight ice on tuskgor-dragged sleds and mounted on strange daemon steeds. He had killed them all, pushing the creatures with such unrelenting ferocity across the frozen wilderness. The final leg of the journey Archaon had trudged on his own, insisting on no less fortitude from himself than the beasts he had sent to an icy grave.
Now that he was standing before it, there didn’t appear to be a way into the daemon palace. This made a perverse kind of sense to the Chaos warrior. What need such a creature for a gate, door or portcullis at the front of his palace? Why risk such a weakness in fortification, when monsters, roaring armies of bestial half-breeds or daemonic foes might happen upon the Forsaken Fortress and attack? Why not offer them the indomitability of solid rock?
Scrutinising the towering fortress, with the glass storm raging uselessly about it, Archaon saw that half way up the structure, below the daemon dome of the palace, was a great carving in the stone. The eight-pointed Ruinous Star of Be’lakor’s calling, across the dread architecture of the daemon’s chest. It was the same star that adorned Archaon’s shield. Like the Chaos warrior, the daemon prince served doom in all its forms, not favouring one dark god over another. At the centre of the star, however, Archaon saw a sliver of light. A weakness. A crack in the stone, as though the mighty fortification had been breached. Within, the blue ghoulishness of unnatural light shone.
Archaon shouldered his shield and clawed his way up through the snowbank. He had come this far. The Forsaken Fortress would not forsake him. If the thing attempted to descend into the ice it would have to take him with it. Where the ice and palace foundations met the snow steamed. When he reached out to it, the stone felt strange against his gauntlets. It wasn’t the searing cold he had come to expect. Through the metal of his fingertips, the fortification felt warm, as though heated by some infernal fire within. Hauling himself up the precipitous wall and using the crooks and crannies of the volcanic stone for finger and toeholds, Archaon climbed the daemon palace. With the architecture crafted to resemble the infernal prince himself, Archaon felt as if he were ascending the mountainous form of a titan or god.
Sidling along jagged ledges, dragging himself up by his fingertips and leaping for razor-edged purchase, Archaon climbed the stone perversion. When he reached the bottom point of the Ruinous Star, he hauled himself into the great arrowhead cut into the stone. From there he settled his armoured back against one side of the carved shaft forming the arrow and both his boots and gauntlets against the other. Braced between the rock, the Chaos warrior shimmied and scraped his way up the centre of the star, where he found the sliver of an opening. It did not appear to be part of the infernal design. If anything, it looked like damage. The fortress seemed to have been stabbed in the heart. Passing his shield through first and angling his horned helm, Archaon slid his backplate, breastplate and muscular torso through the cleft in the rock.
Within the daemon palace, the sound of the blizzard died to nothing and Archaon was bathed in a dull blue light. It was impossible to tell where the ghoulish illumination came from, since there were no brands or torches. The floor possibly, or the walls. These, unlike the rock-like architecture of the exterior, were smooth. The lines of the chamber flowed. Everything was rounded and organic, as though the ribs, bones and spikes of the daemon’s skeleton had been reproduced within.
Taking the weight of his shield, Archaon drew Terminus. The templar blade smouldered in the gloom of the palace. The Sigmarite sword had travelled with its wielder to hell and back. It had sparked blade to blade with daemon swords and been buried in the corruption of the doubly-damned. Its metal and the carved iconography of the God-King had been stained by the slaying of thousands in the name of the Ruinous Powers… and still a little of its nobility remained. In the deep strength of the blade, the trueness of its cleaving edge and the ring of its metal off enemy steel, it still carried some of the calibre of its former calling. Despite this, and in some ways because of it, there was no blade Archaon would rather have between him and a foe. Indeed, to the daemon and the damned, the sword still stank of faith and burned the flesh with its cold virtue.
Leading the way with the faintly glowing blade, Archaon moved through the rib-lined chambers and rachidian passageways of the palace. He was focused. He was ready. Should any daemon servant proceed from the darkness or rush him from the strange architecture, the dark templar would cleave them in two. There was nothing, however. No horrors haunted the palace. No things waited for him in the shadow. The Forsaken Fortress seemed empty. Yet Archaon felt like he was being watched. The darkness that afflicted the lengths of bone-lined corridors was a mirror through which he could not see but could be seen.
You are far from home…
The voice was everywhere. The boom was bottomless, like the abyss, and the words seethed like hellish flame. It was a
voice he had known his whole life yet had never heard… until now.
The Chaos warrior moved across a large chamber, looking about him. He slowly turned and swished Terminus all around. He peered into the dark recesses of alcoves. He crooked his neck to look back the way he had come, the path now lost to shadow. As he moved through the nightmarish interior of the palace, the murk receded to reveal a large figure in the centre of the chamber. Like the Forsaken Fortress, it was horned, cloven-clawed and broad of wing. To Archaon, it appeared to be a replica of the fortress in miniature.
At first, he took it for the daemon overlord of the palace itself, but as his shuffled steps and defensive turns took him closer, he saw the infernal figure for what it was. A throne. Crafted from the same rough stone as the palace in which it sat. The daemon prince’s crouching legs formed the seat, its star-scarred chest the back and its clasped talons the arms. The horned horror that was the daemon’s grotesque head formed a kind of crafted crown, while the leathery, outstretched wings, hewn from volcanic rock, gave the throne a hellish grandness. For all its imposing abomination, the throne was empty, like the palace.
‘I am where I need to be, daemon,’ Archaon answered back finally. His words returned to him with a strange quality, echoing through the torturous skeletal structure of the daemon palace.
That is more true than you can ever know. Though not many who have sought out the Forsaken Fortress have found it.
‘I am Archaon,’ the Chaos warrior spat, angling his helm about the dark entrances to the chamber. ‘I am the chosen of the Dark Gods and the end to the entire world. Nothing is beyond me.’
I am beyond you, chosen one.
‘And yet here I stand, Be’lakor,’ Archaon spat. ‘I have your name, daemon. I have all your names. Shadowlord. Dark Master. Cursed of the Ruinous Gods. You, who have watched me from oblivion, like the craven being you are. I stare back, abyssal thing. I see you now, daemon prince, though there be little or nothing to see. And here I stand, before your cursed throne within your cursed castle.’ Archaon waved Terminus at the darkness in invitation. The blade smouldered with expectation. ‘Time for us both to take a closer look, don’t you think? If I’m lucky, as with your palace, I might get to see inside.’