by Rob Sanders
Looking from the dread magnificence of the screaming blade to the cragged eyelid of Krakanrok the Black, the Chaos warlord realised what the daemonblade was doing. If Archaon would not set U’zuhl free then he would be destroyed – and since U’zuhl could not turn the service of the blade upon he that it served, the daemon would need to stoke the thunderous wrath of an awoken titan. Archaon watched as the rock-encrusted lid rose once more, flickering before the golden sun of a single eye behind. He felt the mountain beneath him stir. Tremble. Quake.
At first, Archaon did not know what to do. The dire magnitude of their circumstance was overwhelming. The daemon in the blade would shriek its fury and hunger until the gargantuan father of dragon ogres, awoken from an aeons-long slumber, effortlessly destroyed them all in his thunder-fuelled anger. The bloody solution was accomplished before Archaon had barely thought it through. With the daemonsword bleeding its wrath into Archaon through the warm metal of his gauntlet, his mind burned with necessity while his arm seethed with bloodthirsty action. Ograx the Great, visibly shaking under the weight of Krakanrok the Black’s colossal claw, knew the problem’s solution a mere second before it was brutally carried out. Leaning forward under his monstrous burden, Prince Ograx roared his defiance, that of his daemonic father and that of his bloody god. Archaon whipped the Slayer of Kings around to present it like the tail of a scorpion. Fury smoked from the blade, burning on the air and making the weight of the broad blade a nothing in Archaon’s hand.
Thrusting the daemonblade forward with merciless force, Archaon rammed the Slayer of Kings into Ograx’s open mouth, down his throat and into the monstrously muscular torso of the half-breed. With the blade up to the fanged crossguard in its scabbard of butchered flesh, the shrieking of the imprisoned daemon died on the wind. The hate-hot blade bubbled in the bloody ruin of Ograx the Great’s body, while the entity U’zuhl feasted on the soulfire of the Blood God’s champion – the rich brutality of his death and the countless deaths for which the half-breed was responsible. Ograx might not have been a king, but he was a prince, and the slaughter-filled barbarity of his existence seemed to satisfy the steel of the Slayer.
As Ograx faltered, Archaon was there to take the burden of Krakanrok’s mighty claw. Eins joined him, while Drei grabbed the toppling half-breed before he crashed to the ground. The half-breed was dead. Far from displeasing Khorne, his sudden and violent death honoured the Blood God. His crashing corpse or the dislodging of the daemonblade might have cost them still in waking the father of dragon ogres, however, had the wraith-warrior not reached Ograx in time. Combined, Archaon and Eins did not have the strength of the Blood God’s champion and juddered down to their knees under the weight, before laying the claw back across Krakanrok’s abominate face with as much arm-trembling care as they could manage.
From the rocky floor, Archaon watched the lid of the monstrous eye droop back down, eclipsing the golden sun behind it. After a few heart-thumping twitches, the abhorrent creature returned to its eternal slumber. Archaon’s pauldrons slumped. The Chaos warlord shook his head slowly from side to side. The shimmering shadows of Eins and Drei simply waited on their master’s instruction. As Archaon got to his feet, he looked down at the corpse of Ograx – his face fixed in an expression of pure horror, mouth agape and brimming with the blood in which the Slayer of Kings snugly sat. Archaon wouldn’t risk unsheathing the sword from its cadaver-scabbard until he was very far from the lonely mountain. Walking past the Swords of Chaos he nodded at Prince Ograx. Eins and Drei clasped the corpse, one under each arm, intending to drag the daemon prince between them, the crossguard, hilt and pommel-orb protruding from the half-breed’s open mouth and skewered head.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ Archaon announced, walking on ahead. As Eins and Drei dragged Prince Ograx and the daemonsword behind their master, Archaon said, ‘All of us.’
Chapter XIV
‘Now shall ye assay, he said unto Alderiq. And anon young Alderiq fought for all he was worth, therewithal the knight emerged victorious, presenting the head of the invader beast, for he loved this land, its kingdom and its people highborn and low and would not see it polluted by things unfit for existence.’
– Roland Rancourt – Le Morte D’Alderiq, Chapter IV:
Of the First War and how King Alderiq won the field
The Marches of Brilloinne
The Bretonnian Coast
Jour de Roi IC 2518
Archaon felt the galleon roll with the storm. He had given up the cavernous darkness of the great cabin to Giselle but found himself returning there often. To be alone with his thoughts. With the accusatory silence. To be alone with her.
The world had indeed turned. The years had passed and taken their inevitable toll. Even the warlords of Chaos suffered the ravaging attentions of time. The girl was little more than an emaciated bag of bones now. A wasted, skeletal wight of a girl, whose soft skin was stretched to transparency across the sharpness of her bones. A horror to behold, rippling with ribs and spine. She had not the miserable strength to lift herself from the bunk and furs. She was a cursed invalid that Archaon kept alive for his own selfish reasons. Without a mouth, the girl could not even scream away her sufferings. Most of the time she simply lay there, still, like a cadaver in an ancient tomb. The lanterns that swung and creaked with the pitch of the vessel were kept low and the windows of the great cabin boarded up. For Archaon it was a ghoulish retreat.
Like a flagellant – like Gorst – returning to the chain or whip for purification and self-remonstration, he would stand before Giselle to remind himself of what he had done. He had lived a long life of blood, fear and darkness. His victims. His dire acts. His dread and unsung achievements. His world-shaking atrocities. These all seemed lost to a life half remembered. It was in the girl that he found the true horror of his Ruinous existence. It was a daily test. A punishment he subjected himself to for his many failures. His failure of an innocent young girl. The failure of the abyssal love that even now he somehow felt for her. The failure of his dark quest to find the final treasure of Chaos – the Crown of Domination – and end the living nightmare all the faster.
The years of his life had ebbed away in search of a treasure it had taken longer to find than all of the others combined – and every day he returned to Giselle to look upon her terrible beauty. She was like a mirror in which Archaon saw the terrible things he had done. He had brought a terror to the world. He had massacred with indifference. In the wretched suffering of this girl eternal, this memory of his past that would not die – when he had been a better man – Archaon came to know the true measure of his darkness.
He lay with her nightly. Archaon didn’t sleep. Not any more. He just sat there on the bunk, amid perfumed silks and rich furs stripped from the palaces of the mighty and the dead. Holding her. Holding her to him. Holding the blade of a dagger to her throat. He felt her willing him on. Begging him without words to do what he had failed to do many years before. When they had shared a bed and each other it had been Giselle’s turn to fail him. Fail to slide the dagger across his throat. Fail to release him from the suffering of a dark existence as he nightly failed her.
He knew it wasn’t love that stayed his hand. The obsidian of his heart, that sat heavy and useless in his chest, was beyond such things. Giselle had been his prisoner. A slave to his physical needs and her own in the long, dark night at the top of the world. He had inflicted upon her the unspeakable perversions of his foes, enemies who wished to wound him through her. He had visited upon her the savagery of the Southern Wastes, the madness of the Northern Wastes and the living hell that was the Realm of Chaos inbetween – where daemons stalked your soul and Dark Gods all but destroyed you with their obliterate gaze. And now, an endless search through faraway lands for treasures that refused to give themselves up. She was a slave again. Slave to a need he had for her that was beyond words or physical expression. Prisoner within the agonies of skin, bone and
withered muscle that would not obey. When Archaon looked on Giselle, he knew he was a monster.
He heard the rattle of his plate. He watched the shimmering glint of the lantern’s low and ghoulish light off the dagger’s blade. His face was a wretched snarl behind the skull of his helm. Black tears of will defied had left the stain of their progress down one side of his face. He sat behind her on the bunk, amid the mound of furs. He had Giselle’s horror in his armoured embrace. His blade was at her throat. It would take nothing. Nothing. He heard the slightest of murmurs issue from the misery of the girl’s form. The slightest of movements as Giselle’s skeletal touch pulled at the cold metal of his arm. He wanted to release her from torment. To give her what she desired. What she needed. The dark will wasn’t there, however. A roar built within Archaon’s chest. A fury that wracked his being as he leant his head and horned helm back to bellow his withering rage to the cabin ceiling. To the storm-churned sky. To gods that would not listen and did not care.
The blade drifted from Giselle’s throat. Archaon let it tumble into the furs. Pushing her gently away, he got up off the bunk and walked away, becoming one with the darkness of the cabin. Giselle slipped back into the furs, tears of her own glistening across eyes that caught the lantern light. She had not even the strength to turn over and bury her head in the covers. From the shadows he watched the girl. Her suffering and torment as she tried to tremble the emaciated horror of a hand down the furs towards the knife. To pick it up and to use the blade… on herself. Archaon’s heart thumped its encouragement. He wished she could do it. Save herself. As the skeletal fingers plucked gently at the dagger, he saw the hand shake and then fall. Giselle could barely life the hand, let alone the blade she intended to clasp within it. Archaon turned away. He could bear to look on her no more.
Closing the archway door to the great cabin behind him he found Zwei and Drei standing silent, like sentries, either side of the entrance. In the chart room, Archaon spread the fingers of his gauntlets and leant against the dark altar. It was covered with Ruinous symbols and the implacable illustrations of daemons. Over these were laid maps, charts and twisted instruments. Ancient books and dusty grimoires were stacked about the room, while a lantern swung above the altar, throwing the chart room in a fiendish light.
There was a lifetime of study in the chart room and the Chaos warlord had spent many lost hours searching history, the quill-scratched ramblings of mad men, ancient stone tablets and mythical maps for clues to the location of the final treasure of Chaos.
On the shattered coast of the Northern Wastes, Archaon’s colossal army had searched for vessels to transport their number. For months the horde camped out on the storm-lashed coast, taking raiders and Norscan longships where they could. These Archaon despatched with false word of a thousand slaves stranded on the coast following a shipwreck of a slaver fleet.
The Chaos seas spat out a number of greedy opportunists, which Archaon’s hidden horde enslaved since the number of their vessels were unsuitable to their needs. A month later, the ocean offered up a legend. Captain Kurdogoli Darghouth. The Devil of Araby. The Dread of the Infidels. The Cloven Captain of Kalabad. Darghouth had come a long way since his days as a merciless slaver and then brutal corsair on the Pirate Coast. Some said his appetite for human flesh extended beyond trading and stealing such cargoes and that he would select the finest specimens to be roasted for his table. Estalians. Tileans. Even the occasional dwarf. As wealth lost its appeal and the dread of victim-nations became Darghouth’s guiding star, the pirate gave up the harsh strictures of his one god for the freedom of a pantheon of Ruinous admirers. Plying the coasts of Estalia, Tilea, the Pirate Principality and the Border Princes, the Cloven Captain amassed a fleet of gun-toting galleons, as well as carracks and caravels loaded with cannibal crew.
Some he took with ease on trade routes he knew all too well. Others were warships sent to deal with the piratical threat he presented. All failed. Darghouth’s attack fleet was heralded by a swarm of smaller craft, including lanteen-masted cogs and armed pinnaces. Behind these trailed hulks that carried victims by the hundreds – to be traded, eaten or sacrificed to the Dark Gods at Kurdogoli Darghouth’s bestial whim.
His hunger for suffering and destruction took him into cooler climes where he found new prey in Bretonnian shipping and the great ships of the Empire. Farther north he found the Chaos seas replete with raiders, madmen and warriors of the Dark Gods. In Archaon, the Cloven Captain met his match. Playing the part of the stranded slaves, Archaon allowed himself and his horde to be transported over to the pirate captain’s fleet before staging a bloodbath of a mutiny. Sparing Kurdogoli Darghouth and some of his most gifted cannibal captains, Archaon had offered them continued service to the Dark Gods in his name or the fate of being fed to his monstrosities. Darghouth and his captains had chosen life over death. To confirm that they had made the correct choice, Archaon gave them as their first responsibility the transport of Archaon’s monsters and abominations over to the fleet’s hulks with the horde’s mounts, wagons and siege engines.
With a Chaos fleet once more at his command, Archaon left the execution of his orders to trusted lieutenants spread throughout the armada, which sailed like a black plague south from the berg-clashing coast of the Wastes. Navigation, the running of the flagship and communication through the fleet he left to the Cloven Captain. Archaon, in turn, divided his time between study on the long ocean voyages and savagery upon reaching his destinations. Each one was either a possible resting place of the Ruinous Crown of Domination, or of other illuminating treasures, ancient texts or individuals that delivered to Archaon with their dying breath further clues to the crown’s location. Months. Years. Decades came and went in fruitless search for the treasure. What felt like a doomed quest to some of Darghouth’s cannibal captains and crew, captured from vessels and flotillas that ran foul of Archaon’s dark armada, was nothing to Archaon and his horde, who had endured eternities in the Realm of Chaos.
There were mutinies, of course, shore-sent forces that failed to return. Splinter flotillas that attempted to leave the fleet. Archaon had learned much since the last time he had commanded idle warriors on the high seas. He trusted almost no one and although he was infrequently seen, his authority was felt in the brutal recapture, horrific torture, execution and macabre decoration of his vessels with the bones and body parts of those that lacked the fear, dark faith and common sense to be loyal.
For almost a century, Archaon held the world quivering in the palm of his gauntlet as his vast fleet and the thousands upon thousands of Chaos warriors under his monstrous leadership circumslaughtered the globe. In the Kraken Sea the longships and raiders that tormented the north were decimated by Archaon’s fleet – so much so that the mist-shrouded kingdom of Albion and the Sea of Claws saw no Norscan raids or invasions for a year. For months Archaon’s ships haunted chill Naggaroth, razing the coastline of the Sea of Malice and destroying swarms of druchii reavers. For the inscriptions on the mighty monoliths that stood ancient and untouched in the east of Naggaroth, Archaon brought blood and fire to the dreadlords of the Witch-King’s coastal strongholds.
Sailing east, Archaon’s fleet met the miserable flotillas of other damned souls out in the desolation of the endless Great Ocean. Plaguefleets of the low races and the hellships of Chaos captains, who wished – like Archaon – to bring terror to the world. Some, like the Bloodships of Bjornvar the Berserker, went to the bottom of the ocean with their lack of reason. Others – upon sighting a horizon blotched with the black sails of the dark armada – fell into formation behind the flagship with signalled obedience. No shots were fired and no lives were lost. Souls were another matter entirely.
Rounding the squall-lashed cape of the Southlands, Archaon almost lost half of his fleet to the cyclonic fury of an unnatural storm that swept up out of the Southern Wastes. The Sea of Dread, conversely, killed with calmness as for months the fleet saw not a breath of wind. Arch
aon’s army suffered under the blaze of the unrelenting sun and were forced to resort to blood-letting slaves to survive the ravages and madness of thirst. When they did reach land, the horrors of disease waited for their number on the foetid Mangrove Coast. Seeing virtue in a violent distraction, Archaon visited the frustrations of his followers and the wrath of his fleet on the stilt cities of Clan Festerlingus. The skaven of the south with their sun-bleached fur and savagery poured from the swamps and swarmed the shallows, while verminships and coastal clanfleets of neighbouring infestations – to which word had been sent – hit Archaon’s anchored armada from both the north and the south. With a fleet becalmed and an army weakened by equatorial fevers and rat-bred pestilence, Archaon eventually ordered his armada north, leaving the skaven with their stinking mangrove kingdoms.
Plundering the city ruins in the Lands of the Dead, Archaon honoured the Dark Gods at several Chaos shrines half swallowed by the sands. Going in search of ancient scrolls and the Crown of Domination itself, Archaon was disappointed, as he had been a hundred times before, to find that the Straits of Nagash and skeletal civilisations that plagued the bordering lands with their unlife did not hold the secrets to his lost treasure.
Negotiating the clashing cliffs of the Gates of Calith, where the ancient Hinterlands of Khuresh threatened to reach out and touch the polluted lands of the southern continent, Archaon took his fleet to the legendary Lost Isles, hoping to learn more of the Crown of Domination. There his army laid siege to the ancient High Elf fortress colony of Tor Elithis, only to find that it had long succumbed to daemons of the Southern Wastes who held it as their own.