by Rob Sanders
Forcing himself on, step after desperate step, the armour of Morkar suffering the wrath of the daemon’s powers, Archaon sizzled with the sparks raining from his plate and down into the waters below. Punching through, Archaon ran up out of the shallows, stomping his way up the dais upon which Agrammon and its throne was supported. Swinging down with furious force, Archaon opened up one of the daemon’s fat coils with the sickle sword, tearing through daemonflesh and spraying himself with ichor.
‘Agrammon!’ Archaon roared at the monstrous being. ‘Your tower will fall. Your twisted palace will howl empty with the southern winds. The cages of your legendary menagerie will rust – legend no more. While so many have served you, you will now serve me: the chosen of the Chaos gods.’
Archaon had hoped to draw the daemon lord’s attention with his bold taunts. Agrammon – ever the slave to temptation – fell this time for the Chaos warrior’s trap.
‘I serve only at the pleasure of my god, mortal,’ the daemon seethed, its words like barbed ecstasies exploding in Archaon’s mind. ‘The Prince of such Pleasures.’
Agrammon, overcome with an infernal desire to see the architect of its woes ended, swept forwards with its gigantic, spindly claws.
‘Then you can serve him in oblivion,’ Archaon promised the daemon lord.
Ducking and weaving, Archaon evaded the daemonic talons, turning them away with savage flourishes of his sickle sword. At every opportunity, between the grasping and stabbing of the giant finger-blades, Archaon sank the serrated blade into the meaty daemonflesh of the creature’s coils. All the while, Archaon felt the quake of a monstrosity approach. The abominate creature of chitinous plate, fang-fiend face and colossal horns that Archaon had seen both raging in its enclosure and furiously beating dents into the thick metal of the palace doors was storming its way through the throne room. The slaughterbrute was an unthinking monster already blessed by the Blood God with an appetite for decimation. It lived to crush with its colossal claws, stamp with its mighty hooves and gore with its freakish arrangement of blood-stained horns. Its torso and arms rippled with the muscular fortitude of a thing that never stopped killing, while its maw was a deathtrap designed for tearing heads from prey.
The abomination thundered through the vaulted throne room, mindlessly crushing, smashing and killing anything in its path. Daemonettes became twisted mounds of spiked scrap through which the ichor leaked into the stinking waters of the palace. Monsters who, like the slaughterbrute, had suffered in Agrammon’s royal menagerie, became showers of gore and ragged limbs that rained in the abomination’s bloody wake.
Distracted by Archaon, the daemon lord was no longer protected by its flesh-shearing maelstrom. As soon as the abomination saw the daemon, it thundered towards it, stamping a fleeing long-snout into the shallows and beating a winged nightmare out of its path and into the spiked wall with bone-shattering force. Perhaps it was Agrammon’s size or a daemonic threat the serpentine thing so obviously posed. Perhaps the abomination remembered and knew its captor when it saw it. As the abominate monster charged, Agrammon’s coils tightened about the slaughterbrute, bleeding a powerful mixture of potions and poisons from it into the monster’s flesh. Agrammon brought up a colossal claw to back slice the creature to ribbons, but Archaon knew that such defences would not be enough. Clambering over the clamminess of sickly-sweet flesh, Archaon almost became trapped in the moving coils of the creature.
‘Giselle!’ Archaon called out, but the girl didn’t seem to hear him. Giselle was no damsel in a tale of old to be saved. She would not call out for help. She stared coldly into space, oblivious to the havoc about her. ‘Giselle!’
As he got to her the Chaos warrior tore at the steaming tail of the daemon. The thing resisted his efforts and coiled tighter about the Sister of the Imperial Cross. Flashing a glance at the oncoming slaughterbrute, Archaon brought his sickle sword down on the tail. Again. Again. The sword’s serrated edge sheared flesh from the thrashing horror but wasn’t heavy enough to cleave through bone. He roared, cutting at the daemon. Finally, the bone shattered under the frenzied onslaught, caught between one of the sword’s many barbs and the stone of the throne dais. Seconds later the thick coils slithering tighter about them suddenly unravelled. The bloody stump that Archaon had left was whipped away, trailing black gore. As the slaughterbrute and the daemon Agrammon collided, Archaon grabbed Giselle and ran for the wall.
The abominate beast knocked Agrammon from its throne. As the daemon’s snake-like body wrapped itself around the monstrous force of the slaughterbrute, the pair of them smashed through the chamber. The creature alternated between the unrelenting force of its fist and the gouging slash of its thick claws. It savaged Agrammon with its dagger-toothed maw and gored it with its monstrous horns. Purple lightning enveloped them both, streaming from the spindly claws of the daemon, setting the slaughterbrute alight.
Archaon dragged the dumbfounded Giselle after him. The daemon’s dead tail fell away in scorched cinders as the pair of them ran. The titanic battle crashed through the throne room with the daemon screeching its life away as the abominable monster mauled and smashed it into the floor of its own palace.
‘Help me,’ Archaon said to the stunned Giselle, as he tried to help Sheerian and the Swords of Chaos from where they had been hooked into the wall. Like Giselle, they all moaned the pure pleasure of their agonies as Archaon and the girl tried to prise them from the spikes on the wall. As the thunder from the other side of the chamber subsided, Archaon turned to present his sickle sword. If the slaughterbrute had finished with the daemon lord, the Chaos warrior knew that it wouldn’t stop. The thing existed to bludgeon lesser creatures into oblivion, mindlessly honouring the Blood God that fuelled its fury and monstrous power. It knew only killing and Archaon and his people would look as good a murderous prospect as any.
‘Get them up,’ Archaon told Giselle as Vier’s knees buckled underneath him, sending the winged marauder into the shallows. As the girl helped the warped warrior back to its unsteady feet, Archaon readied himself for the abominate monster that had turned from the lifeless tremblings and slitherings of Agrammon. The monster roared, shaking the very foundations of the tower, and levelled its nest of colossal horns at Archaon. The beast flared its armoured nostrils. It was as if the thing could smell a threat: Archaon.
‘What’s happening?’ Archaon heard a disorientated Sheerian say.
An unsteady Eins appeared next to its master, its wings a punctured mess and one of its freshly drawn bone swords held in a hand dribbling with blood.
‘Get them out of here,’ Archaon commanded. The Sword of Chaos hesitated its protestation. ‘Do it…’ Archaon said, his voice sharp and grim.
As the Swords gathered their wits and shook off the Slaaneshi potion smeared on the spikes, they led Giselle and Sheerian towards the door. As the colossal slaughterbrute sniffed in the direction of the sorcerer and the girl, Archaon waved his sickle sword above him. ‘Here, monster,’ he called across the throne room. ‘Here.’
With the Swords of Chaos cutting their way through chimeric beasts, spawn creatures and wild-eyed beastfiends, Archaon felt the floor shake and the foetid waters about his boots slosh and recede. The abominate monster was charging down on him. Turning the sickle sword about with his wrist, Archaon readied himself, although he knew not what for. An undercut to some softer part on the creature’s belly? Did the monster have any softer parts? Perhaps he could get his blade past an armoured eyelid and into the beast’s brain. The thing was monstrous brawn beneath thick chitinous plates that served the beast as a kind of natural armour. Beyond that there was the skewering forest of horn, fang and claw to worry about. The abomination roared. Archaon stood his ground but beneath his plate the sound shook his very bones. With the monster all but on top of him, Archaon still didn’t know what he was going to do.
Something shot past Archaon, through the murk and drizzle. It thudded into the
brawn of the creature’s neck. It was the size of a spear but Archaon recognised it as an arrow. One of Jharkill’s arrows. The slaughterbrute took several more thunderous steps before crashing to one side. Archaon winced but stood his ground as the beast collapsed about him, scraping its way to a stop along the spiked wall of the palace. Opening his eye, Archaon turned to see that the malformed ogre was standing nearby. He was a mess, blood leaking from gaping slashes in his deformed flesh. His twin was dead, the thing’s mouth gaping open and leaking the horrible substance Jharkill used to poison his arrows. He had recovered his ivory tusk bow and quiver from before the throne and, selecting another arrow, smeared it in the blood and poison dripping down his belly before putting it in the abomination – ensuring that the uncontrollable thing had been put to sleep. Archaon nodded with obvious approval. The ogre’s marksmanship and knowledge of his quarry’s vulnerabilities were impressive – and these were the least impressive of the monster’s capabilities. He had indeed made Agrammon a fine servant and in time might do the same for Archaon.
Padding through the shallows and across the throne room while Jharkill picked off the menagerie’s escaped monstrosities one by one, Archaon found the mess that the Blood God’s abomination had made of the daemon lord Agrammon. The serpentine daemon had been smashed. It had been broken. It had been torn into colossal, twitching pieces. Archaon found the daemon lord’s torso separated from the nightmare lengths of its body. The slaughterbrute had splattered Agrammon into the palace floor. Dragging its daemon entrails through the shallows, one of its spindly claws a broken mess, Archaon discovered that half of its chest had been crushed. Its array of horns were a shattered remnant and its tentacular appendages reached out for a body that was no longer there.
Archaon stepped across the creature, its back to him, and grabbed the shattered stump of a horn. Hauling the daemon lord’s head up out of the shallows, where it had been gagging and spuming, Archaon brought the blade of the sickle sword to Agrammon’s throat. Decimated though it was, he couldn’t risk the daemon using its regenerative powers or spoken sorceries. Holding it there, Archaon only found the dreamy smile of a Slaaneshi deviant enjoying the agonies of its last moments. Archaon grunted.
‘Your monsters,’ Archaon hissed in the daemon’s ear, ‘are now my monsters. Do you hear that daemon? This is for Terminus. An end for an end.’ Archaon drew the serrated sword edge across the daemon lord’s throat, the barbed teeth of the weapon tearing it out. Dropping the infernal creature’s heavy head into the ichor-clouding shallows, Archaon spat at the daemon. ‘Welcome to oblivion…’ he told it, before walking away.
Chapter VII
‘Daemons rise and daemons fall – and in their falling, come ever to rise again. It is both our gift and our curse.’
– Necromagne the Dark Muse
The Gatelands
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of the Ravening
Archaon left the palace of the daemon lord Agrammon behind. The barbed tower and twisted metal walls of the nightmare writhed with unnatural flame, fanned by the winds of the continental interior. As the palace raged behind them, lighting up the broiling black skies, the Chaos warlord ordered his horde assembled for a march on the palaces closer to the howling radiance of warping realities that spewed into the world from the demolished Chaos gate. Ograx the Great had led Archaon’s savage warherd to victory out on the bone-tangled Wastes and had arrived outside the palace as Archaon was leaving. The beastfiends had stripped the daemonic stronghold of anything useful – weapons, armour and wagons. Archaon allowed a few hours for the creatures of his horde to quench their thirst with Slaaneshi blood and quell the rumble of their bellies with the flesh of the fallen. The Swords of Chaos took their place once more at the warlord’s side. At Archaon’s insistence the savage shamans of his bestial army looked to Sheerian and Giselle’s wounds.
Archaon sat on the back of a bone-cage wagon that he had ordered covered in the skins of their foes. The Chaos warlord had the wagon furnished with a mound of furs for a bed. He had the lowly creatures of his horde attend with the freshest water they could find and cooked meat stripped from beasts of magnificent burden who had been found still in their menagerie cages. This he reserved for Giselle, with two more of the incredible beasts hauling the wagon and the twisted Vier at the reins. Giselle just crawled into the furs, holding herself like a child, staring deep into nothingness.
‘Giselle, I…’ Archaon began, but the words wouldn’t come. Once again, he had failed to protect her. Once again, some monstrosity of the Southern Wastes had visited torments upon her precious flesh. Once more, Archaon had made such things pay with their existence – but that was little consolation to those who had already paid for Archaon’s mistakes.
He wanted to tell her that he was sorry. That he had failed in his confrontation with his father-in-shadow and that he should have been at the head of the horde instead. The daemon Agrammon wouldn’t have got its spindly claws on Giselle, on his Swords of Chaos and even ancient Sheerian if Archaon had been there. The Chaos warrior was sure of that. At one time he had found it easier to talk to Giselle. They fought, they spat their threats and even found their way to laughing the woes of the world away. Their lips craved the taste of each other’s damnation. Their fingers burned across the purity and pollution of each other’s flesh. Now Giselle pulled away from Archaon like every other dread thing in this benighted world. He had once again become a thing feared, untrusted and unloved.
As Giselle’s lips parted, Archaon’s heart – that sat heavy like a shard of obsidian in his chest – leapt. He leant in. His gauntlet moved for the mound of her body beneath the furs. Giselle’s bloodshot eyes were dry and distant with tears that would not come. Her bandage-bound hand reached out for the cold metal of the gauntlet. A mumble became a forlorn hiss. Archaon leant in closer.
‘Why… won’t… you… die?’ the Sigmarite sister said, her words stinging with the blank-face bitterness of betrayal. She pushed the gauntlet from her trembling body. Archaon felt cracks creep deep through the obsidian agony in his chest and bit back a snarl. The anger was not directed at the girl but at himself. The contortions behind the faceplate of his horned helm fell away to a slow nod.
‘Aye,’ he told Giselle. ‘That’s the question.’
Turning away, Archaon found Sheerian and the twisted shaman that had been tending to both the sorcerer and Giselle’s wounds. Across the bonfire of bones that warmed the warlord through his cursed plate, Archaon saw the small mountain range that was the silhouettes of Ograx the Great and the huntsman, Jharkill. The beastfiend champion and the malformed ogre waited on the edge of the fearful distance left clear about Archaon’s wagon. The stinking shaman approached but Archaon angled his helm at the thing, the warlord’s silent gaze enough to stop it in its hoof tracks. The shaman had been busy in the camp with its filthy dressings, its wound-cleansing flame and the curved bone-shard of its wound-closing needle. Several times the shaman had tried to tend to its warlord’s wounds and afflictions but every time Archaon had shaken the beastfiend’s clawed fingers from his plate.
‘My lord,’ Sheerian said, risking Archaon’s ire, ‘if I may be so bold. If you ever want to swing a sword with that arm again, you need to have it bound in place. So it will heal, my lord.’
Archaon had all but forgotten the dull agony of his broken arm. He had grown accustomed to visiting savage butchery with his left, while the arm that his father-in-shadow had shattered dangled armoured and helpless at his side.
‘My sword is gone…’ Archaon said, his words taken by the doom-laden breeze.
‘There will be other swords, master,’ the ancient told him. ‘Let there be the strength of an arm, the turn of a wrist and the belief of a clenched fist to guide their death-dealing path.’
Archaon hated the Tzeentchian sorcerer but he knew he was right. While Archaon was no ordinary man, with his fate-cursed bones and f
lesh blessed of ruin, he could not allow the unnatural healing of his body to fix the mangled limb in place. Such a limb would be next to useless and a liability in the monstrous battles the Chaos warlord was sure were yet to come. Archaon nodded and Sheerian pushed the shaman to approach with its splint and the black fur of a sling.
As the beastfiend went to work on the shattered limb, fresh agonies arcing through the warlord’s being, Archaon instructed Sheerian to have Ograx and Jharkill come before him. As the beastfiend champion and the monstrous ogre stepped forth, Archaon felt Eins, Zwei and Drei close in slightly. Like gargoyles protecting some cathedral from evil spirits, the Swords of Chaos stood sentinel and silent about the wagon, their wings in tatters, but their bone swords intact and but a swift hand grasp away.
Archaon regarded Ograx the Great. The beastfiend was a blood-drenched vision of horn and muscle. The creature had its brain-splattered skull-axe by its side and about its waist the champion wore so many skulls dangling from its fur belts that the clinking arrangement almost constituted a skirt or kilt.
‘Sorcerer,’ Archaon commanded, ‘ask this creature why he moved my horde into battle before my order to do so.’
Sheerian translated Archaon’s words into the dark tongue of the Southern Wastes and Ograx replied dangerously in kind, the infernal beastliness of its jaws going to work at a snarling explanation.
‘He says that he camped near the palace as you instructed, but that this monster,’ the ancient said, indicating the malformed ogre, ‘captured and caged those that the herdmaster would keep close.’
‘Perhaps Ograx the Great might have lived up to its name,’ Archaon replied, ‘and kept those the herdmaster would keep close, close to himself.’ When Sheerian hesitated, Archaon urged, ‘Tell him.’
‘Has there not been enough blood spilled, my dark lord?’ the Tzeentchian wheezed.