by Rob Sanders
Through swarms of beasts and frenzied fiends,
fights a man who has travelled far –
in him the end comes to these lands,
in search of signs and treasures dark.
A wretched place that knows no peace,
before his blade dread daemons fall –
to his banner flock bands of beasts:
a monstrous horde behind him forms.
He leads them through an ancient gate –
a raging portal overwhelmed –
through which his destiny awaits:
passage to an abyssal realm.’
– Necrodomo the Insane, The Liber Caelestior
(The Celestine Book of Divination)
Chapter I
‘The Great Beast is the land’s fury to vent,
Decimation for others to know.
He is the topless mountains’ torment
And unending desolation’s woe.’
– The Cloven Tribal Chant
The Haemorrhagia
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of the Raw
Archaon went south. Ever south. The ice froze to breaking beneath his boots and the air seethed with burning lethality. The wind howled its mournful goading and the heavens churned their black intention. The chosen of the Dark Gods pushed on through the midnight drifts, the skins and furs trailing about his plate crisp with the biting freeze. Behind him the Swords of Chaos trudged, their black wings held before them to deflect the worst of the snow carried on the burning gales. Decked out in a hotchpotch collection of plate and mail scavenged from daemonic foes felled in Archaon’s path and furs skinned from shaggy half-breeds, they had the appearance of frosted gargoyles. Eins. Zwei. Drei. With the misshapen Vier, twisted to grotesquery, stomping up behind them. His malformed wings, now useless for flight, were extended about Giselle.
Giselle Dantziger. Former Sister of the Imperial Cross. Giselle, who had carried from the Hammerfall the Liber Caelestior – heavy with the secrets of Archaon’s future and inescapable damnation – and changed the fate of all the world. The friend whom Archaon had made prisoner. The prisoner whom Archaon had taken as a lover. The girl who was in equal parts his death and salvation. Whose heart, even in this damned place, still beat with simple devotion to the God-King who had abandoned her touch. Whose touch was torment, burning with an indomitable purity. Whose touch Archaon could not seem to live without. She tripped and stumbled under the weight of the furs in which Archaon had buried her. Woolly hides that he had skinned from the shaggy beastfiends of the continental interior and that had formerly protected the half-breeds from the murderous cold.
With his other twisted wing, Vier did his best to protect Khezula Sheerian from the maelstrom. Sheerian, daemonic sorcerer of Tzeentch. To whom the third treasure of Chaos, the enchanted jewel, the Eye of Sheerian had belonged. The ancient carried himself with perpetual pain and the burden of a wizened body. Hunched and using his bone staff to drag the deformity of a bird’s leg through the snow, his filthy robes were a patchwork of sinew-sewn skins and a cloak of heavy black fur. His age-mottled skull was bare to the broiling heavens and the lustrous strands of his moustache trailed behind him in the harsh wind.
Whereas Archaon found that he loved Giselle but in turn was hated by her, the Chaos warrior simply hated Sheerian. Despite his animosity towards the sorcerer, Archaon had found the daemon to be a useful guide. In the depths of the Southern Wastes, where the beast hordes, long-forgotten monstrosities and the dangerous daemons of Chaos held sway, Sheerian’s survival depended as much on Archaon’s sword arm and savage leadership as Archaon’s depended upon the sorcerer’s dark counsel. The sorcerer had his uses. As he hungered for his precious Eye, its intoxicating gift of farsight and the secrets of the world it revealed, Archaon ached for the further treasures of the Ruinous Gods. The artefacts of darkness through which Archaon would earn the dread title Everchosen of Chaos. Sheerian’s cursed knowledge, sorceries and his interpretation of the Eye’s enchanted sights had helped to keep them from harm.
He had guided his worldly master (for beyond Archaon, Sheerian served no other than the dreaded Tzeentch) on towards his destiny. He had revealed the Gore Glacier, the treachery of Algis-Kar and the dark secrets of the Winter King. It had been Sheerian who had revealed the treachery of the daemonic thing Archaon had come to know as the Changeling, and in doing so had not only learned the location of the oblivion prince Be’lakor, but had also betrayed a brother Tzeentchian. If the Great Changer hadn’t been such a twisted entity of unfathomable evil, Sheerian might have feared an infernal retribution. As it was, Archaon half suspected the sorcerer would receive some warped gift or malformed blessing instead.
Thunder crashed across the skies. Lightning slashed the firmament in two, throwing Archaon’s army into impossible shadow against the obsidian ice of the Southern Wastes. A wretched cavalcade of shaggy hide, horn and muscle. Archaon’s horde was an army of beasts.
The Southern Wastes were all but unknown by the men of the east and west and avoided by the elder races. Only the daemon, the monster and the beastman swarmed its black ice floes and mountainous wilderness. Tribes of savage half-breeds fought for warmth in their bones, flesh in their bellies and territorial supremacy. Many were ice barbarians, who wore the frost-threaded furs of conquered enemies and wielded primitive weapons of bone and stone. With no ‘men’ in the Southern Wastes there were no true ‘beastmen’, such as Archaon had encountered everywhere else on his doomed travels. The creatures of the Southern Wastes were an eye-stinging fusion of beast and lesser daemon, the infernal entities that plagued the benighted wilderness with their malevolence. They were beastfiends, led by the foetid best of their kind. Brutes blessed with either dark cunning or murderous might. Shamans who read tribal destinies in blood-splatters on the snow, the distant serration of mountain peaks and the crooks of exotic lightning that afflicted the skies. Beastlords, tyrant-gors and infernal bulls of brazen horn and mountainous muscle. Some suffered the specific sponsorship of Ruinous Gods, with monstrous mongrels and daemon princes leading warherds of the warped, the diseased, the obscene or the blood-mad.
Archaon had united many of the beasts, as was his gift. He was an exalted champion of darkness and the children of Chaos could see that. When confronted with one chosen of the Ruinous Pantheon, they expressed themselves in varying ways. Many simply attacked, like the wild things they were. Deep in their tainted flesh they needed to test him or at least sacrifice their herdkin on the altar of his dark sovereignty. Others had been warned of his coming by shamans and dread prophets, and lent Archaon their horde-strength out of the perversion of spiritual sympathies. Others still saw the growing army coming out of the north, with Archaon at its head, and felt fear or admiration. They saw opportunities for savage communion with their dread deities in the wars to come. The slaughter that seemed to find the champion of Chaos. The unending brutality that stalked his benighted plate and the god-bane of his steel. The butchery that seemed forever in his path.
Some said in their beast tongue that he was uniting the tribes and warherds of the Southern Wastes under a single banner of eternal bloodshed. Some that he was leading them to greater glory about the infernal palaces of the pole – to the Great Gate and the oblivion beyond. To promised lands of fresh suffering and slaughter that they had never known. A few even whispered, with their thick tongues and fang-crowded jaws, that Archaon intended to end the world – and not just the world, but all the worlds that were and would ever be. And man, beast and god would come to know their end at his hand and the power of catastrophe he wielded with it. Whatever the truth, the half-breeds of the Southern Wastes fought, they failed and they fell in behind the droves of beastfiends, pack monsters, centigors and the caravans of herd-sleds that churned up the black snow in Archaon’s wandering wake.
Behind the train of beastfiends, which hoof-trudged, snaggled, butted and roared at one anothe
r, shaking their primitive skull-cleavers and bellowing crude threats, another trampled through the snow. He wore only the skins that others had lain across his sharp shoulders and the penitent chains that had always cut into his emaciated form. About his gaunt features and the wild-eyed stare of madness and devotion, he wore a cranial cage. The kind favoured by zealots and flagellants. The kind favoured by Gorst, who had followed his master across both the known and unknown world, from long before he was the abominate Archaon.
Gorst still bore the sacred Hammer of Sigmar, inked into his flesh and hanging as pendants of faith from his rusted restraints. These drew spitting, savagery and monstrous threats from the slaves to darkness about him, as they always had. Beyond their disgust that had long soaked into his skins and the barging snorting and bare-blade threats issued to the mad man, the beastfiends seemed suspicious and uncertain of Gorst. There was something about the symbols of goodly faith, or perhaps the way the lunatic Gorst wore them, that prompted mongrels and infernal creatures to bellow and snort their derision before stomping away. Perhaps Gorst, the all but skeletal man-thing, soft and vulnerable, was simply not worth the trouble. Or perhaps it was because dashing out his brains with a butt or the bulbous head of a femur-club would be far too much trouble as Archaon, who favoured the wretch, would savagely end them for such an affront.
As Archaon slowed, peering through the maelstrom at the light on the horizon, the Chaos warrior gestured for the sorcerer Sheerian, Eins and the beastlord Moraq Half-Horn to come forward. Sheerian struggled with his hunch and his leg through the snow to catch his master up.
‘My lord?’ the ancient managed through the storm. Eins was with him, but as usual the winged warrior did not speak. Like a dark angel he simply drew level with Archaon and matched him step for step like a sentinel or shadow. Moraq Half-Horn dug his sharpened hooves into the sides of the woolly rhinox he was riding. Sitting behind the scrawny beast’s shoulder-hump and with reins of sinew guiding the twin horns erupting from the creature’s snout, Moraq joined them. Archaon’s barbarian horde was made of beastfiends of all the fell tribes he had conquered and the warherds that had joined his number for the honour of the coming slaughter. Many beastlords and chieftains led this assortment of mongrel creatures, routinely fighting one another for the right to lead the horde in Archaon’s name and to report to the Chaos warlord directly. This changed on an almost daily basis. Today it was Moraq Half-Horn.
Moraq urged his rhinox on. The animal was a shaggy, scabrous thing with a will of its own and it fought the beastfiend chieftain for control. Moraq shook his daemonic skull, with its single horn that erupted from one bony temple to curve beneath the creature’s own snout like a crescent. He bellowed and savagely kicked at the beast until it settled.
‘What is that?’ Archaon put to them with brute impatience. Eins remained silent but Sheerian attempted to wrap his thin, cracked lips around the dark tongue spoken by the beastfiends. With no men to afflict their monstrous wilderness there had been no need or opportunity to learn the languages of men. Archaon had found it easier to have the sorcerer translate his demands through the beastfiend’s own tribal tongue. This became more difficult still, given that the beast language of barbarian tribes and warherds were given to regional variations of their own across the continent. Archaon had been a scholar as well as a warrior in his previous calling as a templar of Sigmar, and over time had picked up the basics of the brute tongue. This did not stop him tormenting Sheerian with the duty of translation. Archaon listened to the sorcerer and the beastlord Moraq exchange savage, angry words through the cacophony of the storm.
‘He says it’s called the Haemorrhagia, my lord,’ Sheerian told him. ‘’Tis a region of quakes and ruptures, where the land fights itself and the black blood of the earth bubbles up from the depths. ’Tis a birthing place of daemons, awash with pitch and flame.’
‘A place to warm our bones and camp perhaps,’ Archaon put to them. Again there was a furious jabbering between the two, replete with grunts, snarls and apparent cursing.
‘He says that it is the territory of the Skullfest,’ Sheerian explained. ‘The bloodied gorfiends of Khorne. They celebrate their allegiance to the Blood God by taking the skulls of half-breeds from neighbouring tribes and daemons that crawl out of the birthing grounds.’
‘And who leads this Skullfest?’ Archaon demanded. Moraq told them.
‘Ograx the Great,’ Sheerian translated. ‘Daemonkin of Z’rughl Ka’kadron’ath the Brassbound, Bloodthirster of Khorne.’ Archaon nodded his helm. The Chaos warrior seemed satisfied. ‘We could always go around, my lo–’
‘No,’ Archaon growled. ‘My destiny will not wait on mongrels and skulltakers. We will go through these tormented lands. We will see how great this Ograx really is. We shall see if he lives up to his father’s reputation. If he does not, it will be his skull honouring the Blood God and his lands.’
Archaon pulled away from the group once more, his boots crunching through the black snow. ‘Ready the horde, Moraq.’ As Archaon spoke, Sheerian translated his savage orders into beastspeak. ‘And pass the word. No snow and scraps for your dark kindred. They feast on red meat tonight.’
The beastfiend bellowed its acknowledgement and hauled its monstrous steed around. Archaon looked back at the infernal glow rising from the dark horizon. ‘Onwards,’ the warlord commanded before pushing on through the snow. Each trudging step took him into the quake-tormented lands of the Haemorrhagia. The black blood of the earth oozed up through the ice, where it took to flame and brought warmth to the glacial darkness. The frozen insistence of the continent interior tried its best to douse the fires of the ruptured ice and land. Flames roared, guttered and hissed in blizzard and storm. The fury of the earth’s hellish interior would not be denied, however. Soon great pits and raging fissures opened about them, forcing the horde cavalcade to slog, weave and sled through the fiery torment. Archaon began to sweat in his heavy furs and armour and, although it was a discomfort of a different kind, it was welcome. The chosen of Chaos and his army of half-breed wretches did not have long to enjoy it, however, for out of the fires’ blinding glare their infernal foes came.
Archaon squinted through the pit-flares and eddies of flame. A snarling smile drew back his lips and his gauntlet snatched for Terminus. The consecrated steel was once again to burn through the bestial and the daemon.
Bovine brutes of blood-stained mane and twisted horn stomped out of the brightness at him. Scores of them, and each branded with the hate-scorched sigil of Khorne. Archaon turned aside axes of razored bone and blades of wicked flint. The Swords of Chaos were about him, shielding their warlord with their gargoyle wings and parrying sweeps of their bone swords. Archaon frustrated their attempts to play sentinel at every turn, hurling himself headlong into the barbarian numbers. He leant out of the reach of throat-slashing flint, rolled out from under the cleaving descent of axe-fashioned shoulder blades and feigned left before darting right, out of the stampeding path of Ograx’s bullfiends. Terminus opened up their backflesh, took horns from heads and stabbed through all but impenetrable muscle and fused ribcage to find the rupturing vulnerabilities within. Half-breeds died and the pits spat forth flaming coals and sprays of cinder in celebration.
They were but the vanguard of Ograx the Great’s beastforce. Directed on by Eins and the staff-shaking Sheerian, Archaon’s bestial horde rushed forward into the fray. Archaon was soon lost in a sea of muscle, shaggy hide and snorting steam. The land trembled beneath the hooves of Archaon’s army and lakes of black ooze bubbled up about them. Pits gaped open and the earth tore apart. Flame reached for the skies. The ground upon which Archaon stood bucked and shuddered upwards, and he roared as the thunderous outcrop reared. He clashed Terminus against the eight-pointed star of his shield. Beastfiends bellowed their infernal celebration. Wretched horns were sounded and rude weapons of bone, twine and stone rattled as they were shaken jubilantly at the skies. Suddenly
a hiss rose above the spitting of flame and tearing of the earth – a sound Archaon knew well.
‘Shields!’ he called savagely across the crashing sea of muscle and fur. He brought up his own. The Swords of Chaos extended their wings and enveloped themselves in a bubble of battle-hardened leather. Vier’s warped remnants sprang out horribly, like a storm-shattered tent, to offer protection to the ancient Sheerian and Sister Giselle. The half-breeds of Archaon’s hordes brought up their own defences – hide shields of cured flesh and shaggy fur, mounted on frameworks of entwined ribs. Nothing was wasted in the Southern Wastes. With little in the way of ore and metal to work with, materials were torn from the carcasses of the innumerable beasts that swarmed the continent. Weapons and armour were fashioned from friend and slaughtered foe. Archaon smiled to himself as he held his shield above him. It was raining bone. Rib and fibula – straightened, sharpened, hardened and fashioned into arrows. Archaon waited. He listened to the splinter of bone off his steel and the thud of arrows into hide shields. As the storm passed, the Chaos warlord came out from behind his Ruinous Star.
‘Do your worst!’ Archaon roared. Below him it was as if a dam had broken. The sea of muscle and horn he had been holding back had been released. The base instincts of his legion’s brute nature took over. With Moraq Half-Horn leading the way and smashing his own beastfiends aside with the hammer-head of his saddled rhinox, the monstrous half-breeds of Archaon’s army surged forth through the havoc. Huge shafts of ice and stone erupted from the ground and spouts of pitch fountained about them. Fires spread and turned such fountains into furious beacons of flame.
Archaon leapt from one rising outcrop to another as his savage horde clashed with the beastfiends of the Haemorrhagia. Within furious moments they were among their attackers. Brays of stunted horn and shaved chest twanged their arrows off bows of blood-stained bone and strings of sinew. Horns were blown and a cacophony of weakling warcries rose from chests of red flesh. As Archaon’s brutes waded into the mobs of miserable half-breeds, the brays dropped their cowardly weapons in favour of crooked pikes bearing heads of crafted horn, splintered bone or razored flint. They hurled their wicked shafts at Archaon’s oncoming host but his beastfiends would not be denied. Hoof-hobbling on, sometimes with jagged pikes embedded in furry legs, shoulders and chests, the warherd charged the brays.