by Rob Sanders
In Lord Agrammon’s citadel guard, pouring out from the tower, Dorghar and Archaon found a common enemy. The daemon steed reared at the thrust of sickle-spears, kicking weapons out of clawed hands and heads from obscene bodies. Clutching the saddle with his thighs, Archaon held onto the reins with one hand while chopping down through rancid shieldmaidens and emaciated beastfiends with the other. Beneath him, the Chaos warlord suddenly felt the ripple of some shadow-spawned transformation. Archaon rose as the Steed of the Apocalypse grew in size. As saddlestraps and bridle cut into the beast’s growing bulk, its horsehair sprouted to a shaggy black carpet of curls. An onyx horn and a colossal pair of curved tusks erupted from its changing face and Archaon found himself mounted on a daemonic thundertusk. Dorghar roared as it reared and stamped down on the infernal horde gathered about it. Mulching daemonettes and beastfiends into the floor, the steed shook the ground with its fury, knocking Slaaneshi deviants from their footing.
As slender beastfiends clawed their way up through the midnight tangle of the steed’s shaggy hide, Archaon cut through their miserable bodies with stabs and backslashes of his blade. Dorghar, meanwhile, swept its mighty tusks from side to side, smashing through daemonettes and breaking beastfiends against the caged sides of enclosures. Roaring, Dorghar thundered up the thoroughfare, making a mess of the citadel guard rushing out from the tower. Beneath him Archaon felt the steed transform once more. Its shaggy fur began to shed and its mighty form shrank. Sinking down onto the back of some kind of hellish black panther with burning eyes and obsidian claws, Archaon held on to the reins and armoured saddle as the cat bounded from one miserable beastfiend to another. Filleting each victim as it landed, Dorghar leapt from victim to victim – bounding off the sides of rattled cages and across the thoroughfare with fearful feline grace.
Archaon sheathed Terminus and took the reins with both hands as the steed accelerated up towards a throng of daemonettes who were approaching with their sickle-spears raised. Scrabbling left and right as the monstrosities hurled the razor-crescent crowned weapons, Archaon held on for all he was worth. Ducking and leaning out to one side to avoid the spears, the Chaos warrior had the distinct feeling that Dorghar was attempting to put him in harm’s way. Hauling the beast out of the path of further weapons hurled into the ground before them, Archaon prepared himself for a spine-jarring turn. The thing had daemonic reflexes and a lithe, muscular body to match. Dorghar pulled suddenly left. With Archaon holding on for his life, the steed leapt on and then suddenly off the bars of a nearby enclosure. Sailing over the daemonettes and the spiked shields, Dorghar landed on the obscene carcass of a spearless infernal. Savaging the daemonette with its claws, Dorghar finished it with the crystalline deathtrap of its obsidian jaws. Snapping the monstrosity’s head clean off, Dorghar spat it at the gathering numbers of Lord Agrammon’s citadel guard before leaping clean up into the air from a standing start.
Clutching the reins and surging for the sky, Archaon rode out the sudden manoeuvre. Dorghar landed on the enclosure cagetops before bounding impossibly again, up at the citadel wall. Landing with savage grace amongst the poison-sickly spikes, the cat leapt from one to another – working its way up the side of the citadel, avoiding slipping off. Holding his chestplate almost to the steed’s back, Archaon clung on while the beast ascended. Sickle-spears sparked off the metal of the tower as the citadel guard below attempted to acquire them. As the spears and appendage-claws of the daemonettes guarding the tower thrust through narrow arrow slits in the citadel wall, Dorghar was forced to abandon its savage climb. Feeling his stomach lurch, Archaon held on as the panther leapt away from the tower. With the concentric insanity of the menagerie below them like a spiralling maze, Archaon gathered the reins in his gauntlets. A snarl tore at his top lip as Dorghar took them both to their doom.
Plunging back towards the menagerie, Archaon felt the rupture of muscle and the crunch-transformation of bone below him. Once more Dorghar was changing. The dagger-clawed panther became a horrific bat creature of unfolding leathery wings, flea-infested fur and devilish flat-nosed face. Beating its great wings, Dorghar soared up – high over the menagerie that had been its prison. Archaon held on tight to the flying beast. The powerful motion of the creature’s wings took the steed and its unwelcome rider over the forsaken Gatelands.
Far beneath them Archaon could see the ruins of fortresses and palaces built within the ruins of others. The land was black but not with ice. It moved like a carpet of insects. Peering down as the monstrous Dorghar banked, Archaon could see that the ruins, the contested borders, the warped Wastes of the Gatelands were swarming with beastfiends, daemons and other monstrosities. Dark things of savage ignorance, perpetually driven to spill blood in the name of their patron prince or daemonic power.
About the pole, Archaon spied the fortified residences of infernal royalty and the lords of damnation. Proud towers, festering battlements, brazen bastions and fortress monuments bleeding ruin into the air crowded the frozen lands about the blazing glare of the southern pole. They were built one on top of another, as though the palaces themselves – ever in a state of crooked enhancement – were vying for the most prestigious placement. A location commanding an unrivalled view of the blistering pole. A position closest to their Ruinous patrons. This created the silhouette of a dark, gargantuan crown about the shattered vortex of the long-demolished gate, through which the raw power of the beyond passed into the mortal world. Lord Agrammon’s citadel and great menagerie was but one decorative piece of such dark reverence.
Again Archaon’s stomach took a vertiginous tumble. Dorghar’s banking roll became a plunge. As the monster turned, Archaon clamped his thighs around the armoured saddle and clutched onto the beast. Dorghar rolled wing over wretched wing, attempting to throw the Chaos warlord off, but Archaon had his prize. He had travelled across the Southern Wastes to acquire it and he would not let it go now. Beating its wings through the broiling skies, torn this way and that by the perversity of gales, updrafts and violent eddies, the Steed of the Apocalypse soared across the tower tops of the highest of the daemonic palaces. Archaon hauled at the creature’s reins but Dorghar plunged straight at the howling maelstrom of light and horror erupting from the ruined gateway and bleeding into the world.
Moving between realities was a sickening shock. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. As the creature glided through the state immaterial – the very rawness of Chaos – Archaon felt a wave of indescribable intensity come over him. It was as though he had hit a wall of pain, of pleasure, of possibility – but had passed through it. He fought for control of his body and soul. His mind cried out both for relief and for more. He felt lost and as if he did not know himself, yet had never known himself or his place in the world better. Tears began to roll down his cheeks. He struggled to control his bowels and choked back the necessity of vomiting in his helmet. Experiencing the crude power of ruin – uncrafted and without purpose – was a dreadful feeling that both excited and appalled his every sense and shattered the very core of his being. It felt like he had died.
If Dorghar had intended such an overwhelming experience to unsettle and ultimately unsaddle its rider, the dread beast was disappointed. Bathing the Chaos warlord in the searing certainty of the unknown had not broken him. Archaon did not clutch his helm in immaterial agony. He did not slip from the monster’s back in a warped daze. He did not scream his sanity away. With his good eye, Archaon saw things that were not meant to be seen in the howling blaze of the polar gateway. Far below – if such a thing still existed for Archaon and the steed – predacious daemons, entities of the beyond and monstrous personifications, hungered for the fragility of his soul. They were a horror removed. Ever warping. Ever waiting. Ever wanting. Archaon understood how such sights could drive a man to madness and shatter his reason.
Archaon, however, was more than a man. He saw the impossibility of worlds connected like no one else. He could not only see what fear-feasting daemons and
the Ruinous Powers of the otherworldly realm wanted him to see; with the darksight of his ruined eye he saw light where there was shadow. Perversities twisted themselves into a contorted sense. The burning certainty of his gaze lit the way to truths that commonplace dread refused to acknowledge. With the Eye of Sheerian he saw even more. The sorcerous gem burned bright in his helm, granting the Chaos warlord sights of dread wonder. The Eye revealed the daemons and their abyssal masters to be living corruptions. Realisations of the mortal condition. Self-determining entities, spawned and living out their unnatural existence in a stormy maelstrom of dark vision and emotion. They were the architecture of purest intention, draped in an otherworldy flesh formed of hope, of fear and of the unbearable, myriad states inbetween.
The wondrous prize not only revealed to Archaon the true nature of such infernal princes but also the principalities in which the horrors dwelled. Like a lens, the hellish haze of the pole magnified the powers of the sorcerous gem. Staring far to the north, directing his gaze towards the region the repulsive Changeling had indicated, Archaon could see the Forsaken Fortress. Like a great stone sculpture of a monstrous daemon crouching on the horizon, the palace taunted the Chaos warrior with its distant presence.
Archaon tore up on the reins and hauled Dorghar to the left, putting the Forsaken Fortress in their sights. The beast could not know that the palace was the Chaos warrior’s objective and found itself swooping out of the blinding blaze. Beneath the saddle the creature was changing yet again. Dorghar had assumed the form of the black stallion. It favoured Archaon’s memory of Oberon, only with the ragged wings of its previous incarnation. Beating through the stormy, dark skies of the polar maelstrom, the steed seared northward. Galloping through the churning heavens, swooping between the crash of the lightning and the plunge of thunder, Dorghar surged up through the broiling cloud and down at the Wasteland. The warped wilderness passed like a blur below. The Steed of the Apocalypse weaved between the sky piercing towers of daemonic palaces and crooked citadels. Colossal fragments of the polar gate littered the wilderness whipping by, and within moments the beast was passing over the crescent canyon.
Archaon felt the scream of a storm erupt about him as Dorghar blasted up out of the curving canyon depths and back up into the maelstrom. Beneath him the creature was transforming once more. Not into some other monstrous beast but into a furious, living blaze. Like a comet streaking across the night sky, Dorghar accelerated. With the dread armour of Morkar protecting him from the worst of the flames, Archaon held on tight as the supernatural flame roared and whipped about him. Tensing his thighs and locking his gauntlets grimly about the reins, the Chaos warlord drew his armoured chest to the steed’s blazing back. As an unnatural fireball blasting through strange skies, Dorghar galloped. He beat his fiery wings. He soared up through the heavens on a path of flame.
The frozen insanity of the Southern Wastes fell away from both warlord and steed. The flesh-shattering temperatures. The scalding gales of stabbing ice and agony. The warherds of beastfiends that swarmed the midnight land like a sea of muscle, shaggy fur and hate. The black of the ice receded. With it narrowed the deep clefts and canyons that zigzagged their way through the guts of the pole, meeting at the rift that bored its way through the bottom of the world.
Through the roaring flames that raged about him, Archaon saw the Southern Wastes recede. Warrior and steed travelled far, protected from the sky-scorching inferno that Dorghar had become. The dark creature beat its fiery wings and banked left and right, up through the storm-racked clouds and down through the broiling maelstrom that blanketed the continent with its unnatural miasma. Archaon held on as he felt the beast buck and writhe beneath him.
The blasted lands of ruin and flesh-searing freeze passed beneath him in a sickening blur. Dunes of black ice migrated across the Wastes. A ghostly haze swirled across the monstrous expanse making it appear like the surface of a phantom ocean. Glaciers of living obsidian grew. Mountain ranges of serrated darkness reached up out of the icy plateau. Volcanoes blazed their unnatural, molten fury at the skies, bathing the howling bleakness about Archaon in a strange glow. Dorghar tried to pull away but Archaon kept the beast on course.
The rocketing monstrosity raged north before the Chaos warrior angled its searing progress west. Guided by the Eye of Sheerian set in his helm, Archaon’s farsight extended across the continent faster than even Dorghar could carry him. It took him across dread lands that were but a blink of cruel peaks, shrieking winds and deep freeze – lands that were a streaming blur beneath the Steed of the Apocalypse. The sorcerous gem granted him a vision of the benighted kingdoms of the west, where innumerable warherds of innumerable beastfiends fought, butchered and ate one another, filling bellies and lending strength for the next day of rank slaughter. Not that days, months or years had much meaning in the midnight hell of the Southern Wastes.
Dorghar came in low across these killing fields of frozen blood, ice-mulched corpses and bestial swarms. Like a living carpet of murder and hate, the shaggy monsters fought one another with mindless abandon. Some were scarred, frost-blackened creatures of bare muscular chest, curved blades of bone, draped in skulls. Others were striped deviants dragging fiends separated off from their herds into hollows for last hours of perversion and horror. Hulking beasts of humped back, matted mountains of fur and filthy horns overcame fiend victims with a noxious stench so intense it could be seen, while shamans of fur and feather wielded staffs of crooked spine that they whipped about them, turning daemonflesh to a bloody gruel that was carried away on the icy gales. The beastfiends barely looked up from their savagery and slaughter as Dorghar blazed its path above them.
Archaon gritted his teeth as the steed coursed upwards through the moaning maelstrom of cloud, punching up through the obscurity and into the searing silence of a world above the world. A darkness of crystal cold where the sickly stars shone once more. The Chaos warrior fancied that he could see the great curve of the world and the shattered lands of ice and berg that formed the western limits of the dark continent like an unfinished mosaic. Holding on and turning back, Archaon could see the distant Gatelands behind, with the wailing insanity of the collapsed polar gate roaring a hole through the cloud, revealing only the raging abyss of an existence beyond his own. A pit into which reality fell, was devoured by eternity, marinated in the impossible, before being churned up and vomited spectacularly back into the world.
Suddenly something changed and Archaon was forced to turn back around. Dorghar’s fiery progress seared to whiteness. The flames intensified, becoming nothing more than an agony felt but not seen. The Wastes – that had rushed by like a bleak blur – now became a mind-scalding instant. The moment was a screaming flash, a raw elemental power coursing through Archaon’s being. An unstoppable surge of blinding pain that sizzled through his plate, flowed through his paralysed limbs, stabbed his heart to a stop and blanked his mind.
When his eye fluttered open, Archaon saw only smoke. Through the slit of his helm he saw black steam swirling through oily smoke. His nostrils stung with the burned air. His ears rang with a mighty crack that still seared through his mind. Morkar’s plate felt buckled about him. Archaon patted his cursed armour down to find that whatever had hit them had not breached the damned plate of the first Everchosen. Archaon’s bones hurt within flesh that was still flush with a ghostly burn.
He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and stamped out a small fire that had taken on the bottom edge of his furs and cloak. As the steam and smoke cleared the Chaos warrior found himself in a pit. A crater. About him was black ice that had been scorched to dribble. Black water began to pool about his boots. Beneath them he found rock – shattered but unyielding. Only then did Archaon realise what had happened. They had not been hit. They had been the ones that had done the hitting. Dorghar – the beast of a thousand transformations – had turned from steed to fireball and fireball to a stream of dark lightning that had thunderbolted for the
ground. The creature’s elemental power had burned through Archaon. Its sky-splitting speed had smashed both of them into the Wastes. Neither the searing blaze nor the murderous impact had killed the Chaos warrior. No bones had been broken and his heart continued to beat. The steed had succeeded in unseating its rider, however. It would have escaped Archaon – denied the chosen of Chaos his prize and made him chase the monstrous wonder across the world – but for the fact that he found it stumbling to its own feet. The thing had been equally dazed by the impact and drained by its efforts to rid itself of Archaon.
Now before him it was a black stallion once more, its midnight flesh ruptured with spikes of bone and its eyes alight with infernal fire. Archaon grasped for the hilt of Terminus, which he found to his relief was still sitting snug in its fur scabbard. He ran at the beast as it stumbled this way and that. Slamming his pauldron into the mount’s muscular side he toppled it. Dorghar went crashing back down into the inky meltwater, with the Chaos warrior on top of it. Archaon grabbed the monster by the scruff of the mane and drew his templar blade. Resting the tip of the great sword against the side of the creature’s throat, Archaon watched the blessed steel sizzle and burn against daemonflesh. The steed kicked out with its hind legs and tried to right itself but Archaon leaned in with the weight of his armour – the blade ready to skewer the beast.
‘Yield!’ Archaon roared at the Steed of the Apocalypse. ‘Yield!’
The beast roared like a furnace at him through its daggered maw. It kicked. It bucked. It made ready for transformation but Archaon wouldn’t let it. Turning the sword around he smashed its horse skull into the ground again and again, causing meltwater to splash about them. He turned the blade once more to the creature. With its gleaming point worming its way dangerously through smoking flesh, Archaon bawled, ‘You will yield to me, daemon. For I am to be the Everchosen of Chaos, the Harbinger of Ruin and the Lord of the End Times: by dark right, you are to be my steed, monster. A daemonic beast of burden fit to carry me into the annals of history before I see fit to send the past, present and future of this miserable world into oblivion. Yield, creature of Chaos, or I will send you on ahead.’ Terminus rattled with Archaon’s rage and rested on the creature’s neck. Gradually, the steed’s struggles died away. It turned, searing its black flesh against the Sigmarite blade, angling its long face towards the Chaos warrior. Oberon’s face.