by Rob Sanders
They desired the decimating attentions of their Dark Gods. They knew they were watching. Drawing their weapons they became part of the perpetual havoc of the place – as all others had before. Sacrifices were demanded. The warriors of Chaos offered themselves and as many souls as they could steal from enemy Powers, carving the path to a glorious death on the battlefield of all battlefields. They did this in a kind of hope. Hope that their Ruinous Patron would see such a sacrifice. Hope that they may be rewarded for the darkness they had brought to the world. Hope that they might serve on – in daemonhood – and become more than they had ever been. Archaon grunted. These men, these beasts, these twisted souls were fools. Damned and deluded fools.
The daemon steed Dorghar stepped out into the slush. The battlefield stretched as far as the eye could see. The slaughter was like an amorphous blob of clattering plate, singing blades and fountaining gore. It was pure, cacophonous havoc. Helms bobbing and weaving. Banners held high. The blades of swords cutting through the gelid air of the north. The shafts of spears reared. Shields shattering before the devastating onslaught of hate-heaved weaponry. The light-smear of torches clutched in the gloom. The clouds of exertion, misting away on the wind. Warcries screamed to the sky. Roaring determinations. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of the soon to be dead.
The ice was a filth-percolating slush, stained red with the incessant slaughter, body parts and constant corpses splashing down into the steaming sludge. In places hollows had formed that pooled with blood, in which the warriors of Chaos fought, thigh deep. Where the heat of gathering gore, blood and fresh death wasn’t melting the ice, the white of the freeze was besmirched with rust from the veritable carpet of plate and armour. Armour belonging to Chaos warriors whose journey to daemonic ascension had ended in the rabid, scrambling slaughter of the Battle Eternal. There were bodies also. The butchered. The unworthy. The warrior victims, whose ice-white cadavers stared up through the ice or whose creaking limbs were frozen in place, reaching out of the corpse-stomped slush, mummified by the deep cold.
It was across this macabre, blood-logged plain, clambering over the frosted mounds and ridges of the freshly fallen that the bloodshed and desperation unfolded. Warriors of Chaos stabbed, smashed and decapitated, only to turn and find another armoured foe, lurching out of a similar victory. Both would in time lay slain in the wake of some greater champion – a man bearing greater favour and determination until he too would fall to the lucky strike or back-stabbing cowardice of some nothing of a man. The insanity went on, as it always had.
‘Banner,’ Archaon called. A manfiend came forward. A comely youth that had once been a long-snout in the employ of the daemon lord Agrammon – muscular and bearing the buds of small horns. He held the banner proudly to the sky, pronouncing his warlord’s intention to join the battle. The flayed flesh flapped in the wind. Archaon had no actual intention of joining the Battle Eternal. Its leagues of madness, surrounding the polar gate as it did, were simply in his way. Unlike every other Ruinous warrior on the battlefield, Archaon’s destiny was taking him south.
‘Protect the wagons,’ he called back savagely, his orders relayed through the ranks of the horde. ‘Defend the siege engines. Make sure you don’t get bogged down or isolated. Scavenge what you can: armour, shields, weaponry. Exchange fur for plate, bone for steel – for this is the armoury of all the world. Pass the word. Have Jharkill unleash his beasts to clear us a path. His monsters to create calamity at our flanks. To the horde the rest!’
Archaon heard the thunderous cheer of bloodthirsty manfiends. Trapped in the wraithscape of the beyond for what could have been a wretched eternity, Archaon’s horde could not wait to be part of the horror of battle once more. The top of the world would certainly afford them such an opportunity, Archaon mused. As the jubilant roar of slaughter-happy fiends shattered the still air of the battlefield, helms were turned. Chaos warriors who had spent many exhausted hours fighting their way through the morass of bodies and clashing plate were now confronted with a new challenge. Having slaughtered their way through a sea of Ruinous warriors, warbands, tribal hordes and small armies, the exalted warriors of darkness now faced the prospect of fighting an entirely new host. A monstrous horde that was marching through the fires of doom and straight out of the gates of hell at them.
‘We are not here in search of favour. We are not here in search of reward. We have been blessed by the darkness and we fight as one. Death to the weak. New purpose and a place in our ranks to the strong.’ Archaon pulled a broad-bladed axe of hell-forged craftsmanship from his belt and raised the heavy weapon. ‘I am Archaon,’ the Chaos warlord announced to the carnage and confusion of the Battle Eternal. ‘Chosen of the Chaos gods. Walker of worlds. Herald of the End. And I bring you your doom.’
The ice either side of Archaon suddenly became a blur. Jharkill had opened the cages and unleashed the horde’s pack of chimeric beasts. Like a torrent of fur, wing and snapping jaws, the emaciated fusions of monstrous beasts surged past. The stream of savagery smashed straight into the shocked warriors on the battlefield, who – exhausted and barely able to raise their weapons to defend themselves against similarly spent foes – were now barrelled to the ground by misshapen predators. The creatures clawed plate from savaged scarred bodies, before thrashing the rag doll corpses of the unfortunate warriors from side to side. Dropping the dead, the chimeric nightmares leapt at their next victim. With the surging advance of the emaciated predators slowed by such shredding butchery, the winged nightmares of Archaon’s horde swooped over the Ruinous warlord’s head.
Cutting down through the streaming ice and gloom, beasts of scale, feather and skin stretched between twisted bone beat their wings. Coming in low over the chimeric killers and their carnage, the airborne monstrosities plucked armoured warlords from stumbling steeds. They skewered Chaos warriors from the ice on single tusks and twisted horns before shooting for the skies to devour their prey. They streamed flame at the clashing mobs, turning columns of doom-pledged pilgrims into thrashing infernos, who shrieked through the battlefield confusion, setting alight the furs and cloaks of nearby champions.
As the horde’s complement of warp-spawned creatures carved a path through the havoc, Archaon urged Dorghar on, the daemon steed ambling through the carnage. As well as the savaged slaves to darkness that the chimera pack left in its wake, tight throngs of blood-splattered warriors stumbled through the slush and away from the beasts, clearing the way for Archaon’s horde. Rolling in the armoured saddle, however, the monstrous magnificence of his mount, the infernal craftsmanship of his ancient plate and the banner that bobbed above his head drew the Ruinous champions down on Archaon. Veteran warriors of Chaos, who had spent the lost and bloody years of their lives seeking out foes who fought for enemy gods so that they might draw some favour from their own miserable deity. The more deadly and infamous the opponent, the greater the glory in the eyes of the Dark Gods. It was a simple and merciless constant in the Wastes, which purged the unworthy and forged from the dross of damnation the most devastating of warriors. Marauder savages, beastlords, altereds, twisted sorcerers and exalted champions dressed from head to toe in foetid, baroque finery. All surged for Archaon from the flanks of the chimeric slaughter. Stumbling over the freshly savaged, doomed warriors were drawn to Archaon like moths to the furious flame of a torch in the darkness.
Riding tall on his daemonic beast – cruel, supremely confident and reeking of infernal favour – Archaon was a Ruinous altar of flesh and hell-forged steel upon which lesser men sacrificed themselves. With the frost of oblivion still sparkling on the battered brilliance of his dun plate, the veteran doomed of the Battle Eternal saw both blessed release and infernal salvations in the dark wonder that was Archaon. Riding out of the gates of hell with an abominate horde at his back, decked in the filth-treasures of Chaos, he immediately struck them as worthy. Worthy of their death. Worthy of a life, given in service of the doom Archaon promised to br
ing to the world.
As Archaon leaned left and right, hauling the daemon Dorghar around, he felled the great warriors of Chaos about him with single, mangling strikes of his axe. Smashing straight through battle-brittle shields and blades, Archaon cleaved down through his armoured opponents, his axe crashing down through fell-hearted rivals and spinning gore-spiralling heads from damned shoulders. He was a dread sight to behold. With savage beasts consecrating the frozen ground before him with slaughter, a battle-hungry horde of scavenging manfiends butchering in his wake and monstrosities creating blood-misting carnage at his flanks, Archaon’s progress through the warriors, warbands and unhallowed armies of the Battle Eternal became irresistible. Like a great ship ploughing through a sea of ice and bobbing bodies, Archaon drove the warrior multitudes before him, the swell of admiration and fear parting a path through the massacre.
‘Archaon!’ he roared to the skies. ‘Archaon!’
It was an announcement. It was a warning. It was a challenge.
Then it happened. Dark-armoured warriors – some draped in filthy furs, some jangling with skulls and chains, some wearing great horned helms and others sporting plate of blood-stained spike – turned from the advancing horde. Whether it was a form of primordial submission, the dark inspiration of men still devoted to a doomed path or the mind-shearing whisper of Dark Gods, Archaon heard his name erupt from foes who were moments from the welcome of his axe.
‘Archaon!’
His name spread like a plague through the blood, thunder and fatigue of the Battle Eternal. Men and beasts who moments before had swung their notched weaponry in exhaustion and their own belief, turned to hack warrior unfortunates out of Archaon’s path.
‘Archaon!’
‘Archaon!’
‘Archaon!’
His name became a rallying call, uttered in a plethora of accents, for dread warriors whose plate and the banners bobbing above their warband advertised their allegiance to daemon princes and the different gods of the Chaos Pantheon. Some, like Archaon, fought for the pantheon in all its glory. Some fought for lies. Some fought solely for themselves and the corruption of calamities that had transformed the nobility of former lives. Others still bore the symbols of dark entities that even Archaon – having slaughtered his way across the globe – could not identify. They turned in advance of the crest of gore rolling before Archaon’s axe. Before the bone-shattering, body-breaking carnage of his monsters and the fury of his fiend followers, who step by scavenging step, looted the battlefield dead.
No more was the horde a rabble of southern bare-chested barbarians, clad in cannibal furs and skins, wielding the sharpened bones of the conquered. The fiends baptised their manflesh with cold steel, plucked from the dead and the slush: scraps of mail, battered breastplates, spiked pauldrons, Ruinous Star-bearing shields, the clinker-plate of armoured boots, helms of horn and fearsome faceplate. Their gore-splattered claws were drawn to the wonder of forged weaponry that lay chill, blood-stained and rusting in the slush. Some were drawn to the savage ostentation of brute equivalents to their own bludgeoning weaponry: great serrated axes, pikes, spiked flails and the heft of monstrous hammers. Others couldn’t resist the relative craftsmanship of blades that had found their way there from all corners of the world. In the hands of the horde, all killed with equal prejudice and indiscriminate butchery.
‘Archaon!’
‘Archaon!’
‘Archaon!’
‘Archaon!’
‘Archaon!’
The Chaos warlord heard the chorus of his name move through the carnage of battle. It rose above the screams of the slaughtered and the ringing clash of desperate blades. For every ten unworthy tribal champions, altered hulks, sorcery-streaming witch-warriors and dark knights of doom felled, Archaon added an armoured axeman, some black-hearted bestial chieftain or broadsword swinging lord of Chaos to his number. Like a line of reapers moving through a field of wheat, Archaon and his growing horde felled the unworthy. Only the strongest, the most committed and doom-hungry of the gods’ champions survived the onslaught of Archaon’s horde. Men and monsters who had stridden through flame streaming from the skies. Who had survived chimeric predators launching themselves from freshly savaged foes. Who had walked away from the apocalyptic devastation of flesh-smeared giants. Who had fought clear of Prince Ograx’s fiend mob and had slain their way through other warriors of Chaos who had achieved the same.
The Battle Eternal was a hellish vision of violence and brutality. The sound of clashing blades, death cries and bombast rang in the ear. The sting of the cold made way for the stench of old rot. On his lips Archaon could taste copper from the mist of blood in the air. His mind and muscles ached with the urgency of murder, carried out with bone-aching force and determination. All Archaon could see was the blur of furious attacks streaming by as he urged Dorghar back to the forefront of the battle-parting assault, where Chaos warriors pledged to Archaon’s flayed banner only minutes before were making progress.
As he led his army through the havoc – killing the weak and recruiting the strong to his banner – Archaon was granted a view of what he had achieved. His darksight was merely a scramble of wretched souls clashing for miles around, while his good eye struggled to peer through the storm-streaming gloom ahead or the intense blaze of the Northern Gate, which threw everything before it into an amorphous silhouette. The Eye of Sheerian burned above the socket-slits of his helm, however, revealing to Archaon the devastation he had caused. Like a colossal wedge, Archaon’s horde had charged out of the Ruinous fires of the Great Gate and into the havoc of never-ending battle.
Behind, Archaon could see the steaming, bloody expanse of fast-freezing bodies Prince Ograx’s manfiends had left behind. Clad in real mail and plate, while wielding forged weaponry of steel and strength, the horde had proved more devastating than ever. Archaon watched broken corpses sail across the heads of the manfiends. Abominate giants and warped titans under Jharkill’s influence swept and smashed enemies into the air with colossal bone clubs and the flick of monstrous horn-crowned heads.
The airborne nightmares of the horde tore Chaos warriors from their mounting assault on the flanks, beating their wings for the sky before dropping the armoured champions to their deaths. Winged serpents and mutant monstrosities soared along the same flanks, laying down streams of flame that cooked blood-sworn knights in their plate as the ice beneath their boots turned to shallows that swallowed their splashing bodies. Those warriors of Chaos that did reach the manfiends beyond the meltwater and the flames had other things to worry about. As they carved into Archaon’s half-breeds, the chimeras, warhounds and emaciated predators that had been unleashed from the cages now prowled the crowded flanks – their lithe, skeletal bodies held close to the ground. The only evidence that they were even present on the field of battle were the unmanly shrieks and sudden disappearances of beastmen and marauders who, moments before, were there fighting next to their Ruinous lords and who, moments after, were gore-splatters in the snow.
Archaon had achieved more than just the slaying of enemy warlords and the Ruinous followers that fought for them. That was the purpose in every other servant of the Chaos Pantheon fighting before the Northern Gate. The Eye of Sheerian showed him that the wedge of Archaon’s horde – including the freshly recruited and growing army of Chaos warriors and doom-destined champions that fought with him at the driving point of the path-carving assault – had actually disrupted the Battle Eternal. It was breaking up.
Archaon allowed himself a crooked smile and a grunt of derision. Truly only the Everchosen of Chaos could cause such a wonder. Only the Lord of the End Times could bring the greatest Ruinous warriors in the world, partaking in the greatest battle in the world, under his banner as one.
Archaon suddenly cursed – his daemon steed and himself – as Dorghar lurched around, nearly knocking him from the saddle. Like a stupefied fool he had allowed himsel
f to be distracted in the middle of the battle he was threatening to end.
Dorghar reared and snorted. Dun-armoured knights who had been splashing through the red slush to rally behind Archaon now parted to reveal the wielder of a monstrous mace.
An abominate champion of Nurgle stomped forwards, making fountains of curdling meltwater splatter up about the dimensions of its grotesque form. Like a small mountain of rancid fat, its bare pox-riddled belly poked out from its filthy leper’s shawls. The rusted plate that barely fitted around the trunks of its legs squealed for oil like a tortured child. The corroded shells of pauldrons sat on its great globed shoulders, while a tiny head sat inside the beaked, metal mask of a plague doctor. The crude instruments of the champion’s former calling – saws, pincers and lancets – jangled on the belt of its brown mail skirts. The boils on its belly grew to horrid fruition. Bursting. Splattering. Dribbling their pus-streaked corruptions into the slushy shallows and mixing with the slick of rust that followed the Great Lord of Decay’s champion. New boils erupted almost immediately from the afflicted flesh in a continuous celebration of rot and renewal. Worse than that, Archaon could see a growing army of the afflicted, shuffling in the champion’s rank footsteps. The rust, pus and plague, the effluent corruption the champion had trailed behind it on its journey north, now clouded its way through the meltwaters of the Battle Eternal.