by Rob Sanders
Turning back, Archaon caught sight of the monstrous Z’guhl. The thing was all horn, red daemonflesh and hate-dripping maw. Its eyes burned with lust for the blood that had started to flow through the creatures passing it. It was indeed an abominate thing and Archaon’s reclaimed flesh crawled at the thought of how such a murderous, malevolent force had been ensnared in his soul. As the fiery pits of its eyes met Archaon, the Chaos warlord felt the ghostly intrusion of the daemon’s thoughts once more.
Keep your dark word, manprey – as I have kept mine – or the legions of hell will not be able to save you from the Blood God’s fury.
The promise burned on the surface of Archaon’s tongue like the touch of a daemonic brand. Archaon gave Z’guhl a slow nod of his horned helm, before seeing the blood-letting daemon spit and stamp its claws at the passing sorcerer Sheerian. The ancient hurried on, unwilling to be the walking slab of meat that the daemon chose to sate its blood-hunger on. In reality, Z’guhl the Skullreaper had no dread desire to leave the Ruinous realm he haunted and ventured no further out of the gateway than he had already reached. Sending Archaon to achieve the almost impossible had been enough for Z’guhl to honour his own blood oaths and covenants to U’zuhl the Skulltaker, gore-favoured Herald of Khorne.
Like the hellish grandeur of its southern counterpart, the Great Northern Gate wasn’t in fact a gate at all. Demolished in the same cataclysmic event, the black stone and structure of both colossal edifices had been blasted to oblivion. Instead, there was only the open, gaping wound of a rift between the two realms. The flames of oblivion roared at the northern skies, which about the Shadowlands of the Wastes were no less seething, roiling and storm-shot than those at the bottom of the world. The impossible colours that danced about Archaon and his emerging horde combined to form a violacious inferno that lit up the Shadowland and cast the silhouette of the frozen landscapes beyond in an amaranthine gloom.
Archaon felt the land flux, warp and tremble about the insane power pouring out of the demolished gate. The Chaos warlord had dreamed his way from flesh to the streaming shadow of soulfire and back to flesh again. The Northern and Southern Wastes had been long bathed in the intense radiance of ruin and were heavily polluted with warpdust and tainted debris from the devastated gates. Travel through them carried the constant danger of contamination and mutation. With strange similarity, the lands and even the abyssal realm beyond the gates maintained an equilibrium all of their own. Archaon found that it was the tumultuous instability inbetween that carried the most danger of reward; the shimmering mutability of one existence intruding upon another unleashed warping potential and the dark blessings of the Chaos gods on Archaon and his horde. Passing from the Gatelands and into the gate, there had been no time to comprehend the changes wrought on both body and mind. Marching out of the warping flux of the Great Northern Gate and into the Shadowlands, the Chaos warlord and his army of bestial creatures came to acknowledge the price of their passage through the Realm of Chaos.
There were many minor mutations and betrayals of the flesh across the horde that went largely unnoticed. Growths that blossomed across the skin, some becoming the buds of isolated spikes and spines of bone. Rampancies that spread through the body, blooms of gristle about bones and harmless corruptions that reached through the innards. Some limbs withered while others received grotesque enhancements, like arms that ruptured with the chitinous blades of new claws or crippled fists that sprouted bludgeoning nodules of bone. Other arms fell off entirely or spawned new appendages like shoulder-snapping jaws and nests of slithering tentacles. Muscular third and sometimes fourth arms now reached from globed shoulders to hold extra weaponry. Backs grew hunched and patches of skin erupted with all manner of affliction: scales, spines, chitinous shell, false eyes, bark-like encrustations and seeping sores.
Other changes inflicted by the horde’s time in the Realm of Chaos were more dramatic. The perverse, warping effects of their immersion had stripped the half-breeds of their bestial natures. Snouts had receded, horns had willowed and thick fur had fallen out. While they were still daemon-sired fiends, their animal appetites, thick tongues and the dullness of their brute minds were gone. These were beasts who had transformed into men. Manfiends, who while still small mountains of barbaric muscle, were now things of human cunning and infernal spite – quick of mind and fleet of hoof. Ograx the Great was still an imposing wall of brawn, wielding his fearful skull-axe, but like the horde he led, the creature had forgotten the foetid savagery of a former life in the Southern Wastes. While the lower half of his body was living brass, his powerful legs were engraved with Ruinous symbols, fretwork and decoration. His infernal features and crown of horns might now have been described as darkly handsome and were truly those of a prince.
It was sometimes difficult to tell how the chimeric fusions and monstrosities of the horde had changed, since they were already warped carcasses of abominate affliction. Jharkill the huntsman, however, no longer carried his shaman’s staff, with its cross bar and dangling charms. A huge rack of black antlers had sprouted from the ogre’s head, proud and twisted like those that might belong to a monstrous stag. The charms and tokens that held the titans, predatory creatures and chaotic abominations of Archaon’s horde in check now swung from the forest of snags on the ogre’s antlers.
The Swords of Chaos had changed also. Their ragged wings had long healed but the darkness of the realm through which they had travelled had blessed them with a horrifying mutuality. While still flesh and blood, Eins, Zwei, Drei and even the misshapen Vier, were now terrifying wraiths of flickering shadow, both gangling and ghastly. Khezula Sheerian’s transformation had been simultaneously striking and yet the most subtle. While still dragging his bird’s foot and bearing the burden of a hunch, the ancient had bled away the years. His features were sharp, his eyes crackled with sorcerous power and lustrous lengths of straight, black hair cascaded from his formerly threadbare scalp.
Archaon’s own blessings were not as physically obvious as those belonging to his horde or his henchmen. Even rolling in the armoured saddle of the daemon steed Dorghar – whose own afflictions were masked by the natural horror of its existing transformative powers – Archaon felt heavier. While blood roared through his veins and his heart thundered within the cursed plate of Morkar, Archaon felt a resilience and solidity beneath the flesh that was new. The shard of wyrdstone that was lodged in the socket of his ruined eye had spread while bathed in the warping influence of oblivion. The warpstone had threaded its darkness and endurance through Archaon’s skull and bones.
Archaon found that the affliction also had a secondary effect. Like some kind of ancient menhir or a standing stone at the centre of some dread stone circle, Archaon’s mere presence seemed to affect the environment about him. Wherever he went, the skies darkened. Thunder rolled and cloud broiled. Lighting storms flashed within the apocalyptic oppression of a storm ever breaking and bathed the land with an infernal glow. Indeed, Archaon had brought a little of hell back with him from the brink of oblivion. The wind streamed dust and ice about him. As the gloom darkened, the heavens rumbled and forks of hellish lightning stabbed down from the sky, Archaon nodded to himself. He was a living announcement of his own doom – a fitting misfortune for the Everchosen of Chaos and the Lord of the End Times to come.
There was suddenly commotion behind him. Turning Dorghar, Archaon found that Giselle’s wagon had stopped. The girl had jumped down from the vehicle and was running this way and that. Vier had heaved the monstrous beasts of burden that hauled the wagon to a stop and had climbed down to assist the girl. At first Archaon thought that the Sigmarite sister was trying to escape. Now that they had returned to the north, perhaps she had delusions of fleeing and making her way home. Her movements seemed panicked, however, as she silently ran from half-breed to half-breed in the horde’s front rank and even clawed at the chest of Ograx the Great.
The manfiends laughed with the cruelty of their new
-found sensibilities, while Ograx tried to push the girl away. She tore at the fur straps of his small breastplate – a horned daemonic skull that sat strapped in the centre of the prince’s chest. Archaon watched with interest as the girl collapsed before the hooves of Ograx the Great, clawing away his breastplate. Pulling the straps and skull back, Ograx lifted his hand to backslap the girl, who seemed to be lost in a mad fever. Lowering his meaty hand as a mounted Archaon approached, he simply shrugged Giselle off, who got up and half collapsed again while careening straight into the flickering, black arms of the wraith-like Vier.
As Archaon slid down out of the saddle he found Ograx laughing with his manfiend kindred and strapping the skull back across his broad chest. As Giselle pushed away from the misshapen Vier, she stumbled, her fingers scratching at her face. She fell into Archaon’s arms and the Chaos warlord turned her around.
Giselle’s face was a stricken mask of panic. Her eyes were rolling back white. She was as young and beautiful as Archaon had ever found her but she had awoken in her wagon to discover that the Realm of Chaos had left her with a gift also. Her faith could not protect her from the Ruinous Power of hell. Where once there had been thin but inviting lips – that at one time or another had been employed in the whisper of prayer, curled in sadness and disappointment, tenderly kissing Archaon’s own or even wrapped around the rarity of an occasional smile – now there was only flesh. While narrow nostrils flared and closed with panic and horror of discovery, the girl’s jaw went to work opening a mouth that simply wasn’t there any more. There would be no more prayer uttered in praise of the God-King. There would be no more smiles, sadness or the forlorn burn of meeting lips for Archaon. The curse seemed cruel, even for the Dark Gods, and Archaon heard their otherworldly mirth in the laughter of Ograx and his brute manfiends.
Archaon slid down onto his knees and held Giselle to him. The girl had awoken, terrified at the change. She had clawed at her face, running from the wagon and begging for help that she could not articulate and would not come. She had panicked and, thinking that she could not breathe, had all but blacked out. Archaon slipped his horned helm from his head and looked down upon her.
He tried to calm Giselle, soothing her and holding her. With the whisper of dark steel, Archaon drew the curved blade of a kris from his belt. He allowed the point of the blade to drift across Giselle’s body and up to her face. Archaon didn’t know what he was going to do. Use the knife like a butcher on her face, to give her back what was taken from her? Archaon’s own lips fixed in a snarl. What kind of mutilated existence would that be? If he didn’t, then Giselle would almost certainly starve to death. Archaon cursed the Dark Gods – the monstrous Powers who had not only taken from the Sister of the Imperial Cross the comfort of her uttered prayers but also, from Archaon, the delicate distraction of her lips and the words that might proceed from them.
Archaon felt the weight of the stone in his bones, dragging the blade down. He moved it across her. Over the pale flesh of her neck. Across the soot and grime of her chest and down over her heart. It was time to end it, Archaon decided. Quick. Easy. To remove from them both a further affliction. Giselle had endured enough horror, pain and madness to fill a hundred lifetimes. It was time to release her and bring the only one she’d had to an end. The kris knife trembled in the Chaos warlord’s grasp. Anger built in his chest. At himself. At damnation. At the perverse Powers who would see them suffer so. He had killed countless things that walked and crawled but he could not bring himself to deliver mercy to one that he loved. A dark, twisted love that seemed to be coiled about his heart like a serpent, but love all the same. Something precious and all but forgotten in the living nightmare of Archaon’s existence.
‘Do it…’ Ograx the Great told him. Archaon looked about. While the Swords of Chaos haunted the ground about them with their blistering darkness and the sorcerer Sheerian gave him an unreadable glare on sharp, uncaring features, Ograx was almost foaming at the mouth with his Blood God’s lust for slaughter. Although the fiendish prince was staring at Archaon holding the knife over Giselle’s heart, what he was living – over and over – was the plunge of the kris into the gory exposure of a blade-mulched chest.
Archaon’s trembling blade began to rattle in his gauntlet. Injustice filled him with the dark promise of fury. He turned the blade suddenly about and pointed it at Ograx the Great – manfiend, butcherer and southern prince.
‘I think to save my steel for you,’ he told Ograx, before tossing the blade into the frozen earth, where it thudded up to its hilt. Archaon pulled Giselle to him and instead of laying a kiss where none could be received, tried to save her. Enclosing her tiny nose with his mouth, he breathed for her – filling her panic-stricken lungs with air the mindless horror of the experience had denied her. Pulling away, the Chaos warlord felt her breathe for herself. Her nostrils flared and contracted to slits as she breathed. Rising chest by rising chest she calmed, the nightmarish disappearance of her mouth accepted, along with the reality that she could breathe. The girl could only speak with her eyes. They had returned and were wet with dread, accusation and relief. ‘I know,’ Archaon mumbled. He leant forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘We’ll work it out. All is possible. We have already proved that.’
Picking her up, Archaon barged past a glowering Ograx before settling Giselle back to sleep in her wagon. Ordering Khezula Sheerian to stay with her, he climbed back up into the saddle, prompting Vier to do the same with his wagon. The daemon steed Dorghar snorted, no more impressed by the spectacle than Ograx had been. Savagely jabbing the heels of his boots into the creature’s infernal flesh, Archaon urged the beast on and led his monstrous horde out of the Northern Gate and into the slaughter of the Shadowlands beyond.
As the glare of the riftflame subsided, Archaon was granted his first clear sight of the Northern Wastes. It had been many years since he had first set foot there. Fleeing towards his fate, he had left the civilised lands of the Empire and his life as a templar of Sigmar behind. He had exchanged a life half lived, an unloving god and a world strangled by corruption and contradiction for the dire freedom of the north. He had embraced gods who cared even less so that he might destroy them, and lived his life as a savage – a warrior of the Wastes – so that he might one day return to the glowing ashes of the Empire the architect of the world’s end. In all of his time as a wandering madman, a marauder and warrior of Chaos – leading bands of other souls into damnation – he had never travelled this far north. He had never crossed the Shadowlands. He had never bathed in the balelight of the ruptured gate, the fires of doom that crowned the world.
The Shadowlands about the gate were everything he had imagined them to be. The Northern Wastes were not as savage as the southern lands from which he had departed. The southern continent was swarming with bestial barbarians. It was haunted by daemons and fiends. Its storms rent both land and ice apart while the limb-shearing cold, which would descend on a monstrous whim, could kill in seconds. The Northern Wastes were no less lethal, but Archaon admired their subtlety. Beasts and lowly daemons lacked the imagination to influence the primordial chaos of the landscape about them. The Northern Wastes were the hellish domain of lost men, however. Doomed individuals who were not lacking in the desires, perversions and needs required to feed the afflicted land with suggestion – to inspire the warping currents that swept south from the ruined gate with their bloodlust, ambition and deviance. Here the land was a law unto itself, dreaming itself up into a frenzy of forever changing forms. Storms were everything and nothing – with gales that might howl sweet visions through your being one moment and then coat you in rancid acid the next. The cold lacked the savage elemental punch of the southern continent but was just as likely to creep into your furs like a serpent and stop your heart, as claim frostbitten fingers and toes.
Here, in the wine-stained gloom of the Shadowlands, Archaon found himself before the Battle Eternal. A cycle of never-ending death and destru
ction. The doom at the top of the world. Archaon had known warriors of Chaos who had searched a lifetime to find the Battle Eternal. Pilgrims of dark faith who had become lost in the madness of the Wastes and had never breached the inner nightmare of the Shadowlands. Exalted warlords, with small armies of fell followers, who had been showered with the warping gifts of the Dark Gods but for whom spawndom waited. Whereas the Ruinous whisper of the Chaos Wastes drew man, beast and the lost of the elder races north with the promise of more, those that braved the murder and madness eventually came to seek some higher form of realisation. For Archaon that path had already been laid, as similar paths had extended before all of the Everchosen champions of Chaos who preceded him. For those unblessed with apocalyptic destiny or some other cursed fate, the Battle Eternal called. An irresistible force pulling at all who had been on the road to damnation long enough or who had impressed their dread patrons with rare deeds of darkness. Marauder chieftains. Bestial warlords. Truthseeking witchbreeds. Knights of ruin. The exalted warriors of Chaos, seeking solace in slaughter.
Those chosen to find the Battle Eternal – those that did not lose their way to blade or abstraction – all found the same. In the mutable madness of the Wastes, the Battle Eternal remained a constant. For the dark trials, the struggle, slaughter and fury were forever. Stumbling, half mad from the storm and perversity of the Shadowlands, the warriors of Chaos, clad in their blood-stained plate, feasted their eyes on a vision from their darkest dreams. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of monstrous men, like themselves – fighting for the glory of their patron Power, fighting for the Ruinous Pantheon, fighting for themselves. Hacking. Skewering. Skull-cracking. Piercing with arrow and bow. Burning with the cold energies drawn from an otherworldy realm. Bludgeoning with club, rock or hand. Savaging, with mouth and claw.