by Rob Sanders
There were hundreds and hundreds of the infernal creatures. As Moraq and his beasts cleaved their way through the mob, the darkness gave birth to endless multitudes of red bodies. The murk rumbled with the bestial braying of hundreds more, awaiting their turn to honour the Blood God. To stab and gouge. To skewer and twist their primitive pikes in the flesh of their tribal enemy. Leaping and dropping from rising outcrop to rising outcrop, Archaon could see why Ograx the Great had held the Haemorrhagia for so long. Long enough to become infamous among innumerable other savage chieftains.
The Haemorrhagia rumbled beneath ice and rock. Beneath the thunder of hoof the world split. The ground shook. Flaming pitch vomited for the sky. The hellish earth opened up to reveal its infernal secrets.
Archaon perched with the agility of a cat on a shuddering outcrop. He cast his gaze across the waves of red muscle and twisted horn, rolling in from the twilight of the Wastes. He leapt off the rocky shaft, with Terminus and shield held high. Crashing down through the horde of brays, Archaon cleaved a half-breed in two. He brained beastfiends with his star-emblazoned shield and broke monsters with an armoured boot. He turned. He slashed and smashed through beastmeat. Bone spears split against the metal of the shield and the Sigmarite blade seared through daemon-pledged flesh. About him great rents opened up in the Wastes, and snow steamed away as clefts and chasms swallowed beastfiends whole. The gaping rifts unleashed an infernal glow on the battlefield.
Both the creatures branded with Archaon’s mark and that of the Blood God fell to a fiery doom, braying and bellowing away their misfortune. Archaon hopped across the parting fissures, cutting and cleaving through the blood-soaked brays as he went. He jumped the flaming crevasses that opened at his feet and butchered his way through beastfiends as he stormed across the trembling ice. Creatures thrust at him with unthinking savagery, stabbing and cutting, but the pikes sparked and splintered off the unhallowed armour of Morkar.
‘Enough!’ Archaon roared as he bludgeoned brays with his heavy blade. Blood leapt from the screeching beastfiends with every furious strike. ‘I want the Great One!’ Archaon shouted across the torment of the earth, the whoosh of flame and the suffering he had created in his wake. ‘I want the champion of Z’rughl Ka’kadron’ath. The Brassbound’s kindred. The bestial prince. Ograx of the Blood God – where are you?’
Archaon’s words were hot but his mind cut through the chaos and confusion like cold steel. He wanted to draw out the monster – and it worked. The Haemorrhagia shook with the thunder of the half-daemon’s roar. A great shaft of black rock erupted from the ground with an explosive shower of cinders, carrying the form of Ograx the Great high above the fray. Archaon felt his face contort into something halfway between a snarl and a smile. As another spur of ruptured earth rumbled skyward nearby, Archaon took the murderous steps and barbarian lives it took to reach it. As the rock took him above the steam, smoke and glare of the battlefield he saw his opposite. The bestial warlord Ograx.
He was big, even for one of the southern half-breeds. The light of the fires gleamed off the brazen surface of his shaggy legs and cloven hooves. They were living metal, like a sculpture that had achieved a life of its own. A belt of flayed flesh and fur scabbards sat on his hips, surrounding the nightmare creature in a nest of weaponry: flint-serrated swords of bone, pick axes of sabre teeth, scapula hatchets and short, broad blades of daemonic design. Ograx’s broad chest was a wall of red muscle, from which hung shrunken skulls, furs that danced in the wind and scraps of armour torn from his infernal victims. His face was a glowering mess of scars and bovine madness, amongst a princely crown of bifurcating hell-horn. As the two warriors of Chaos were thrust up at the sky, Ograx pulled a mighty axe from where it had hung across his mane-trailing back. It was a primitive weapon of bone and blood-stained sinew, holding the colossal length of the axe-head in place. The haft was a twisted spine while the axe-head was an actual head. A previous victim. The cranial-crest and snaggle-toothed upper beak of some Tzeentchian daemon. Rancid flesh still clung to the prize.
‘Now, creature!’ Archaon called at the beast-champion. ‘Your master has waited long enough for the skull of one of his own.’ As the Chaos warrior was finding, Ograx was easy to provoke and manipulate. He was a living fortress of flesh and fury. Fury, however, could only take the monster so far. It had little trouble taking Ograx across the flaming gulf between them, however. With a daemonic roar the bestial prince was in the air, his skull-axe held high above him. There wasn’t enough room for both of them on the rocky outcrop and the beast’s hooves alone would crush him into the stone. At the last moment, Archaon leapt for a rocky shaft rising beside them. As his previous purchase crunched below the landing daemon prince, the Chaos warrior pushed himself immediately back.
Slamming Ograx with the star of his shield, Archaon knocked the bestial champion from his footing. With a bellow of raw frustration, the creature scraped down the side of the shaft with his hooves and the claw of a hand. Brazen hoof-tips and talons sparked down the rock as the monster heaved himself to a halt. The skull-axe swooped about, forcing Archaon onto one foot as the daemonic beak bit into the rock at his toe. Kicking the weapon away, Archaon swung Terminus below him, batting the skull-axe clear and cutting away crag and cranny from the rockface. As the furious Ograx was forced further down the shaft, the stone ledge upon which he was perched gave way and plunged the hulking half-breed down into the flaming pit that had opened about them.
Leaning out, Archaon peered down into the steaming glare, looking for some sign of Ruinous life. It came in the form of a scapula hatchet flung furiously from the inferno and nearly taking the Chaos warrior’s head off. Pulling himself back to the trembling shaft of rock, Archaon swore. Another razored shoulder blade came spinning at him like a throwing-axe, and the dark templar shattered it with a cleaving blow from his heavy blade. Seeing the red eyes of the half-breed prince searing up at him from the murky glare of the pit, Archaon released his grip on the shuddering spur and dropped down at the beast.
It was a long drop. Archaon’s boots found their way to an incline of trembling rock, but it was all he could do to not plunge face first into the flaming lake of pitch that sloshed, spat and fountained with explosive insistence about the roasted isle upon which he had landed. Skidding through the scree, the Chaos warrior skipped back into a regular step. Ograx was suddenly there. Out of the smoke. Out of the steam. More importantly it was the half-breed’s skull-axe that came for him. Allowing himself to skid beneath the terrible arc of its daemonic beak, Archaon was forced to release Terminus and put both hands behind his shield. As the blade rattled along the surface of the hot stone, Ograx turned with merciless force and intention. His axe struck Archaon’s shield and smashed the dark templar back. Rolling across his pauldron and furs Archaon brought the shield back up at a crouch but again the skull-axe was there, with the monster’s bone-shuddering brawn behind it.
Archaon risked a glance behind him. Terminus had come to a stop at the burning shore. The greatsword had skidded and bounced its way across the pitch pools of bubble and flame and was slowly sinking, blade first, into the black slurp. Still at a crouch, Archaon began to work his way over to the weapon but Ograx had him. Again and again the skull-axe came for him. Archaon could feel the beast-prince’s god-fuelled might behind each strike. Ograx wanted nothing more than to slam the beak straight through Archaon, armour and all. And between his infernal weapon and the brute strength in the mountain range of muscle that ran down his arms, Archaon had no doubt that he could do it.
Skidding. Kneeling. Shuffling. The dark templar watched his blade sink while his shield and his bones took the mindless and unrelenting onslaught of the creature. As the cross guard descended, Archaon threw himself into a messy roll, arm over arm, holding the shield close. Ograx was all over him. Stomping through the grit and pools of pitch with his hooves, the half-breed brought his axe down on Archaon with furious insistence. With each roll the Chao
s warrior just managed to get the shield between him and the impaling beak. On the roasting shoreline Archaon reached out for the sinking Terminus, the fingertips of his gauntlet trapping the pommel as Ograx battered his shield – and the shield, in turn, battered Archaon into the ground.
Clawing Terminus up out of the boiling pitch, the Chaos warrior heaved back at the skull-axe with his shield and an exhausted arm. Archaon swung the weapon at the half-breed’s legs. The edge of the greatsword sparked off the creature’s brazen leg, failing to cut into the metal. The raw frustration of the strike took Ograx from his cloven hooves and put him on the burning rock. Archaon swung Terminus down at the half-breed’s chest but the prone creature got the bone shaft of his axe between the blade’s edge and its intended target. The insistence of the parry carried up the Chaos warrior’s sword arm, jarring his shoulder. Boiling pitch flicked from the steel and scorched a line across Ograx’s broad chest.
Archaon heaved Terminus down at the monster but the half-breed was incredibly strong and pressed the haft of his skull-axe back at the dark templar. For a long time the two warriors held each other there. Archaon adjusted his balance and the angle of the blade. The daemonic bone of the axe’s spine would not break under the templar blade’s cleaving edge, however, and the pair assumed the trembling stillness of a quake-tormented sculpture, Archaon matching his skill and indomitable will against the bestial savagery of the muscle-bound monster.
Archaon became aware of movement about them. From the bubble and slurp of the steaming pitch, the creatures of hell were emerging. Wretched daemons and winged horrors crawled forth from the depths. Slick and black with pitch, many of the gargoyles were aflame and climbed up the walls of the pit, their talons taking them up towards their prey. They dripped with the black blood of the earth and extended jaws and wings lazily, as though they had just been awoken from infernal slumber in the dark womb of the below. This changed things for both Archaon and Ograx. From the shrieks and screams above, the monstrous beings of the Haemorrhagia were indiscriminate in their slaying, with bodies of the warlords’ beastfiends flying down into the hellish pit. As half-breeds of the Blood God and the eight-pointed star thrashed and boiled in pitch and flame, the creatures began to claw their way up the searing shore towards the two warriors.
Archaon risked a withdrawal. Leaning back he brought his blade off the axe haft, allowing Ograx to move. As the bestial prince brought his skull-axe around for a leg-smashing sweep, Archaon resisted the urge to bury Terminus in the prone half-breed and settled instead on smashing his heavy blade down on the skeletal weapon. The skull-axe was smashed from Ograx’s clawed grip and bounced across the hot stone out of reach. Archaon brought Terminus up to finish the job. To bury the monstrous creature in bludgeoning blows with the blade. He had grown accustomed to such wretches – the bested in battle – begging for their miserable lives or at least hiding fearfully behind outstretched arms and faces fixed with dread. This was not the end Ograx the Great had promised himself. He arched his back, leaning into his death. A growl trailed off into a hiss of hate as the champion gave Archaon the full horror of his half-daemon visage and the infernal glow of his eyes. Ograx dared Archaon to end him. For his innumerable sins, Archaon hesitated.
The Chaos warrior was hit from the side. The world became a tumbling mess of rocky floor and leathery wing. Archaon had been tackled by several creatures that had hauled themselves up the shore. Bounding for him and taking the dark templar down, like some great cat of the plains might a horse or rhinox, the daemonic furies had him on the ground. Archaon became aware of tearing claws, snapping jaws and the slip and slide of pitch-slick flesh. There were four of them, he thought. They savaged him with primordial strength and speed, searching for the soul hiding within the inconvenience of flesh. Between the slap of wing and the snap of jaw, Archaon caught sight of Ograx. He had left the half-breed prince prone and without his daemonic weapon. The brute was swarming with furies. Archaon didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted – either the creatures had sensed in Ograx an easier kill or a more formidable threat. The Chaos warrior settled on the sting of the latter. The monsters would not have been the first to be fooled by the muscle and rage. They would pay for their primitive assumptions.
Archaon rolled, dashing the brains from a snapping fury. His gauntlet, clutched in a fist about the hilt of his templar blade, landed a snout-crunching blow on another before the Chaos warrior rose from the hot stone and shook a third from his armoured back. The fiend received an elbow to its mangled maw, knocking it stumbling back into the pitch rolling up the shoreline.
‘Meet Terminus,’ Archaon snarled, turning the Sigmarite blade with a bend of his wrist. The things circled on all fours, wings held close to their backs, spitting and hissing like the creatures of hell they were. One lunged at him but he punched it aside with the star-blazoned surface of his shield. Another came for his throat but Archaon swiped it down with a flourish of his blade. The blessed steel burned through daemonflesh in a way the pitch had failed to, and the beast released an unearthly shriek of agony. Archaon suddenly felt pain of his own as the third monster latched onto his wrist with its crushing maw. Whirling into a savage turn Archaon dragged the beast around and sent it slamming into the creature he had just opened from the chops to the naval. Still dragging the monster, he thrust Terminus forward, taking the first daemon through the chest. It released its infernal claw-hold on reality and died right there on Sigmarite steel, leaving the dead meat of its horrid, worldly form skewered on the blade.
Death, right there before the fury’s burning eyes, had persuaded the third brute to unclamp its twisted maw from Archaon’s arm. The Chaos warrior turned on it and with a savage thrust of the head, smashed its face back into its skull with a butt of his skull-helm. A back slice with his greatsword cut the distracted monster all but in two, leaving Archaon facing one lone and uncertain beast.
‘Come on, thing of darkness and flame, don’t disappoint me now…’
With a predator’s patience it paced back and forth before surging for him. Archaon moved, allowing the beast to pass by before bringing the flat of his heavy blade down on the creature’s skull. There was a wet crunch that sent the daemon to the floor. Stalking up behind it, Archaon stamped down on the monster’s head, crunching his heel against the burning rock beneath. He paused to soak up the havoc in which he found himself.
Above, a three-way battle had unfolded about the opening pit. The savages of his own warherd were taking the fight to the Blood God’s beastfiends, while both were forced to defend themselves against the infernal horrors that were crawling up from cracks, flame-howling pits and fissures that were opening up across the lands of the Haemorrhagia. He saw Moraq Half-Horn, still fighting from the saddle of his slain mount. His Swords of Chaos, like lieutenants amongst the half-breed savages of Archaon’s horde, slashing with boneswords and parrying with unfurled wings. The sorcerer Sheerian, mumbling incantations and tapping his staff on the flesh of passing brays, prompting limbs to erupt from bestial torsos that clawed and strangled the afflicted creatures. The misshapen Vier, keeping Sister Giselle beneath his own mangled wing – the girl holding her furs about her like a comforting embrace, her face inflicted with the blankness of a battlefield stare. Before him Ograx the Great was a nest of writhing daemons. Archaon could hear the bellow and roar of the mauled half-breed.
The Chaos warrior allowed a snarl to fall from his lips. Slipping Terminus into his back-scabbard and shouldering his shield, Archaon scooped up Ograx’s weapon from the roasting stone. He hefted the axe, feeling the weight of the daemonic skull. Turning the spine in his gauntlets, he spun the beak and the skull-crest around. The grit crunched beneath his boots, flames roared from the pit and furies snapped and snarled with savagery. Within the mound of infernal flesh, Archaon could hear Ograx the Great bellow his pain and frustration. Archaon nodded to himself. It was decided.
Lifting the skull-axe above him like a wood
cutter, Archaon brought it straight down on the nearest hellfiend. Like a pick into stone, the beak of the weapon thudded through the back of the fury, prompting the creature to screech its agony and surprise to the heavens. Archaon tore the creature off the Blood God’s chosen, dragging it back across the hot stone. Resting a boot on its thrashing form – a frenzy of wing and claw – Archaon finished the monster with another heft of the daemonbone axe. He peeled the infernal beasts from Ograx. The skull-axe crunched through torsos and hooked heads from shoulders. Archaon battered monsters aside, allowing them to claw and skitter their way through the trembling grit, before slamming the axe-head into them and then the brutes into the stone.
Finally, Archaon saw the bestial prince, his face and broad chest further mangled by the claws of the furies. Ograx was drowning in winged daemons, both alive and dead. Many still had the beastfiend’s assortment of flint blades and scapula axes buried in their infernal flesh. Archaon dragged the carcasses from him as the bestial prince held a fury’s head before him, smashing its face with a clenched fist while its twisted jaws snapped for him. This had gone on long enough, Archaon decided, and heaved the skull-axe over one shoulder. He brought the bone weapon down with such force that its beak cleaved straight through the back of the fury’s head and out through its face, drizzling Ograx with honouring gore from the Blood God.
The beastfiend heaved the daemon to one side, leaving it atop the mound of other corpses, and got unsteadily to his feet. The two warriors of Chaos regarded one another as the havoc of battle, firestorm and slaughter unfolded about them. There were few words suitable for such an encounter, even in the beastfiend’s dark tongue, and Archaon did not deign to use them. Actions spoke louder in the cacophony of Haemorrhagia. Turning the gore-dribbling skull-head of Ograx’s axe in his gauntlets, Archaon placed it in the hot grit at his feet and kicked it across to the bestial prince. Ograx watched the weapon bump and hiss through the grit to his hooves. As the monster slowly picked it up, Archaon found his own hand twitch. The muscles in his arm were tensed and ready to reach for Terminus from his back-scabbard. Ograx was a savage. A daemonic half-breed. A barbarian disciple of the Blood God. Anything might happen.