by Rob Sanders
Archaon nodded to himself. There was no fury. No dark oaths or threats. This was the double cross of which Sheerian had warned him. This was the betrayal and deception he had expected from a sorcerer pledged to Tzeentch. This was the treacherous truth he needed to know, that the Curseling was pledged to Archaon’s father-in-shadow, the Dark Master. Vilitch had already consigned the knights and men-at-arms of Brilloinne Castle to spawndom and had taken the dark treasures of the chapel for himself. The castle was now a monstrous trap and tomb – for Archaon.
The Chaos warlord turned around. The Twisted Twin stood there. Both warrior and sorcerous worm watching him. The warrior-twin thrust his blade suddenly through Jharkill’s back. The monstrous ogre looked down at the tip of the blade protruding from his chest. He clutched at it with the tiny, claw-like hand of his atrophied arm. The huntsman looked up at Archaon across the bloody courtyard before disappearing in a maelstrom of purple light. As the flesh-shredding whirlwind dissipated – ogre, shaman staff and all – the Curseling stepped forth.
There were fresh horrors all around. The Bretonnian knights and the men-at-arms of the castle had stopped running. The glowing mist that accompanied the sorcerer Curseling and seemed to slip through everything, now disappeared into the ground. With the illusory haze no longer required, Archaon and his Chaos warriors saw the Bretonnians for what they really were: the growing number of the Curseling’s spawn army. Misshapen monstrosities of raw flesh, tentacular horror and scything appendages leapt on Archaon’s bestial champions, marauders and fiends. The corpses of castle defenders erupted like mounds of mutable horror. Stabbing limbs, snapping jaws and streams of caustic liquid blasted forth from things that, as men-at-arms, had been felled but had waited for their sorcerer-master’s signal to reveal the truth of their resilient forms.
Archaon broke into a run. He hacked apart spawn creatures that leapt at him in transformation, dashed extra heads with his shield and stomped, skipped and jumped through a courtyard of snaking tendrils. He decapitated heads that crawled their snapping jaws at his ankles and quivering corpses from which chitinous claws erupted. He did not get far. The worm-sorcerer Vilitch had its staff directed at the charging warlord. As Archaon brought his shield up, the Curseling unleashed a stream of dark lightning that blasted Archaon back across the courtyard and into the chapel.
Shaking the impact from his head, Archaon found himself in a dangerous place. The holiness of the chapel – devoted as it was to the Lady of the Lake through the many pure deeds of Baron Lucus – drained Archaon of his potency. It was like burning in the fires of absolution. His eye burned to open. His flesh burned within his plate. His mind burned with the hallowed nature of the place. Outside Archaon could hear the horror of the battle and the monstrous fury of the slaughterbrute. Archaon felt the ground tremble beneath him at its approach. Like the rest of the monstrosities that were part of Archaon’s horde, the abomination was no longer under Jharkill’s control. They were slaves to their own dark and savage natures, with some breaking for a cursed freedom while others turned immediately on those about them, savaging the warriors of Archaon’s army and the Curseling’s spawn with equal ferocity.
Archaon suddenly felt the seething shadow of long fingers around his arm. He felt himself dragged out through the hole shattered in the brickwork of the chapel and when he could open his eye again, he saw that Drei had pulled him free. The chapel suddenly disappeared before them. Grit and shards of stone pranged off Archaon’s plate as the chapel was demolished by the slaughterbrute’s monstrous fist. With the darkness of the wraith-warrior’s arm still alight from the purity of the place, Drei stepped through the dust and rubble of the flattened chapel to engage the abomination.
As Archaon got to his feet and shook off the draining fury of the chapel’s consecration, he was set upon by abominations of his own. The tentacles of a rapidly evolving spawn shot out and whipped about his arm. Cleaving through the slime-dribbling tendrils with the Slayer of Kings, Archaon felt the huge talons of a winged serpent attempt to snatch him from his feet. Slipping free and dropping back to the courtyard, Archaon rolled. The scaled serpent beat its wings and landed before him, opening the narrow jaws of its mouth to bury its former master in flame. Running at the winged monstrosity with his shield before him, Archaon turned aside the roaring stream, forcing the inferno back at the twisted serpent. Smashing the length of its snaggle-toothed jaws aside with the shield, Archaon turned and brutally hacked down through its long, snaking neck with his daemonsword.
The winged body of the headless monster had barely flapped back into a courtyard stable before another damned creature was on his back. Archaon felt the grapnel-like claws of a chimera on his back and the teeth of one of its several heads crushing the plate of one arm. With a snarl, Archaon barged the nightmare straight into the stone of the smouldering west wall. He smashed it into the unforgiving surface of the wall again and again until the thing’s monstrous neck broke and Archaon could shrug the beast off his back.
Archaon found that although Drei had bought him a few moments to recover, his own delay had cost the wraith-warrior dearly. Jumping, evading, weaving and slicing, the Sword of Chaos had slashed at the abominate slaughterbrute with its pair of bone blades. As Archaon charged towards the rampaging monster himself, the wraith-warrior leapt into the furious wing beats of an evasion. Drei was too late, however, and the monster’s claw cut through the air, back-smashing the wraith-warrior into a shower of shattered bone and the smeared haze of shadow.
Archaon’s own progress towards the unstoppable fury of the beast was suddenly checked by the appearance of the Curseling. Vilitch was hunting the Chaos warlord through the destruction of the flaming castle. As the warrior-twin marched indomitably towards Archaon, the grotesque sorcerer blasted the stables apart with a reality-scorching stream of dark lightning.
Knocked from his feet by the explosion, Archaon scrabbled to his feet with a roar. Trap or not. Expected or not. He would bring this havoc to an end. Archaon broke into a heavy run. With his plate rhythmically clattering about him, he ran along the west wall of the castle. While the warrior-twin impassively marched on towards what he had been told was his foe, the sorcerer was beside itself with feverish, worm-like excitement. The flames. The transformation of spawn. The death and destruction. The smoke-belching castle was a nexus of ruin and change. Directing its sorcerous staff, Vilitch blasted a stream of energy after the Chaos warlord once more.
Archaon ran, barely a hair’s breadth before the dark stream. Skidding down to a stop before the bulging foundations of a tower, Archaon allowed the stone to absorb the remainder of the staff’s wrath. Looking up, Archaon saw that the slaughterbrute had followed him, its monstrous collection of eyes following the warlord’s swift movements.
As Archaon got up out of the dust, the abomination cornered him, its three tongues lolling in monstrous expectation, the throaty thunder of a growl building in the slaughterbrute’s chest. The sound was suddenly eclipsed by the ear-splitting cacophony of splintering brick and shearing stone. Archaon had led the destructive power of the Curseling’s staff along the west wall, cutting through the thickness of its base. As Archaon stepped back, the wall toppled inwards, smashing the slaughterbrute into the courtyard floor. As the dust rose and the abomination was buried in buckling masonry, Archaon heard the thing’s rumbling growl trail off into a bloody rasp.
Scrambling up the mound of red flesh and masonry, Archaon rose and fell with the exertion of the monster’s breathing. Pausing amongst the shattered stone, back spikes and chitinous armour of the beast, Archaon turned the Slayer of Kings about in his hand. Settling the tip of the blade between the pulverised rock and the armour of the abomination, Archaon took the weapon by the crossguard and leant down on the blade. The daemonsword slid down through the monster’s flesh. With Archaon on his knees and the raging blade of the Slayer of Kings skewered through it, the slaughterbrute knew pain. It roared its agonies, blood flo
oding out of its trap-jaw maw, its three tongues slapping around like fish in a dried up lake.
Grabbing the hilt, Archaon twisted the daemonblade in the back of the beast, enjoying the torment that howled out of the monster’s brute form. Twisting it around again, Archaon felt the monstrosity’s heart burst within its cavernous chest. As the abomination breathed its last, Archon could feel the daemon U’zuhl feeding voraciously on the slaughterbrute’s gore-stained soul. He pulled the blood-slick blade of the Slayer of Kings from the creature’s carcass and allowed it to steam in his hand.
Peering through the thinning dust, Archaon could see his horde still fighting for their lives within the courtyard, Chaos warriors, manfiends and marauders being entwined in the slithering appendages and dragged towards monstrous mouths that were opening in the undulating flesh of the Curseling’s spawn. The Curseling itself was being kept busy by Zwei. The wraith-warrior had returned from Archaon’s errand, to find the castle in chaos. Slashing both the warrior-twin’s ensorcelled blade and the sorcerer’s staff aside with expert bladework, Zwei was backing the Twisted Twin up the steps leading to the castle battlements. Skidding down the scree in which the slaughterbrute was buried, Archaon ran for a similar set of stone steps nearby. The Chaos warlord knew that Zwei wouldn’t last long against the Curseling.
Running along the blackened battlements and through towers that were still aflame, Archaon gutted and shield-smashed the fire-swathed forms of burning spawn aside, grabbing one by what passed for its legs and tipping it through the crenellations and down the outside of the castle wall.
Running up behind the Curseling, with the slashing fury of Zwei’s bone blades forcing the sorcerer back, Archaon suddenly found the staff’s headpiece turned about to face him. Knowing that the cursed thing would blast him to spawndom, Archaon turned both the staff and the furious stream aside with his daemonsword, while bringing the edge of his shield down through the shaft of the Ruinous staff. Trapped between the stone of the battlements and the cleaving force of the shield, the sorcerer’s staff snapped in two, bleeding a glowing mist about them. Smashing the warrior-twin across the helm with the back of the shield and then back into his face, Archaon saw the stone behind the warrior’s skull shatter with the force. The ensorcelled blade came at Archaon but Zwei turned it aside, pinning it against the battlements. Archaon chopped down with the Slayer of Kings, the blade chopping the hand holding the ensorcelled blade clean off at the wrist.
Archaon heard the warrior-twin grunt in pain, spitting blood through the grille of his battered helm. Both blade and hand tumbled away down the castle wall, while Archaon held the Twisted Twin against the wall. The worm-like sorcerer writhed and twisted with an agonising frustration, its needle-toothed mouth contorting around a collection of exotic oaths and curses.
‘Shut the hell up,’ Archaon warned, laying the furnace glow of his daemonblade across the throats of both warrior-twin and his sorcerous brother. Vilitch grew silent, instead revoltingly caressing and calming his injured twin. Archaon watched as, horribly, the skeletal fingers of a new hand eased their way out of the ruined wrist Archaon’s sword had left behind. Threading with veins and then blossoming with tendons and muscle, the hand bled new skin through the rawness of fresh flesh. ‘I’d like to see you do that without your heads,’ Archaon told the Curseling, edging the blood-hungry blade of the Slayer of Kings towards their throats. The sorcerer smiled hideously.
‘I’ll trade you truth for truth,’ Archaon told the Curseling. ‘I fulfilled my part of our agreement, including the part where I walk into your feeble trap.’ Archaon grunted and turned his helm, allowing the destruction of the castle in through his eye slits. Even he had to admit that the trap had been anything but feeble but he wasn’t going to tell Vilitch that. ‘Now – the Crown of Domination. You promised me the one who knows where it is. You promised me the whereabouts of such a Ruinous individual.’ Archaon leant in close, pressing his burning blade ever closer. ‘If I hear anything else pass your lips – either set – that isn’t what I just asked for, I swear to the dread Powers, I will slash your throats open.’
‘…the Dreadpeak,’ the Curseling managed, ‘where the Worlds Edge Mountains meet the Northern Wastes.’
‘Very good,’ Archaon said, his blade seething against the sorcerer’s flesh. ‘See what a good team we make. Now, I don’t like surprises. Who waits for me at the Dreadpeak with the knowledge I seek?’
The worm-thing began to laugh.
‘Don’t test me, sorcerer…’
‘Be’lakor…’
‘Be’lakor?’
‘Be’lakor is the Harbinger, He Who Heralds Conquerors… The Bearer of the Crown,’ the Curseling told him, enjoying the warlord’s confusion. ‘The Crown of Domination is Be’lakor’s burden. Only he knows where it can be found.’
Archaon’s lip wrinkled into a snarl.
‘You know something, Curseling,’ he said to the sorcerer. ‘I think I’m going to kill you anyway, you monstrous son of a…’
In the radiance of the daemonsword, Archaon didn’t notice the sorcerer’s own glow. The mist pouring from the shattered staff and gathering at their feet had slithered up about the Curseling. As the Twisted Twin let out a horrid laugh that echoed away to nothing, Archaon lurched forward. The Slayer of Kings slipped through the glowing mist that the Curseling had become. With the sorcerer’s mocking laughter still bouncing around the inside of his skull and dark magic on the air, Archaon sheathed his mighty blade. Zwei began a search of the battlements.
‘Forget it,’ he told the wraith-warrior. ‘He’s gone.’
As the Chaos warlord walked along the battlements, the towers of Brilloinne swirling with flame and staining the heavens black, he looked down on the courtyard. As the Curseling disappeared, his spawn seemed to become disorientated wretches of cursed flesh and monstrous gifts – speared, hacked apart and bludgeoned to death by the dark warriors, bestial champions and savages of Archaon’s army. Those monsters that had not fallen in the fighting fled the castle to plague the Marches of Couronne. Gazing out across the battlefield beyond Baron Lucus’s castle, Archaon saw that the reinforcements and summoned knights were no more. They had been no match for Archaon’s monstrous horde.
Looking beyond the battlefield carnage, the Eye of Sheerian granted Archaon a vision of the standing stones beyond. Great glyph-inscribed tors that he had recovered on his travels and transported on board his hulks. Standing stones that the sorcerer Sheerian had assured him – if placed in dark configurations – could draw soulfire from lands cursed with the spilling of blood. Archaon had ordered Sheerian and a horde of strongback slaves to have the tors erected before the battle and was sure that he had charged the ensorcelled stones with enough dread power, violence and bloodshed to blow open a gateway to hell – which is exactly what Archaon intended to do with them.
Then, beyond the soot and smoke of the battle, the Ruinous stones that stood and the storm that battered the Bretonnian coast, the Eye of Sheerian showed him sails. Hundreds and hundreds of sails in the distance. Greatships and galleons flying flags of different nations. Bretonnia. The Empire. At the head of the armada surging north out of Marienburg, he could see a great, ornate galleon flying the holy banners of the Church of Sigmar – the cultship of the Grand Theogonist himself.
There was little time. So little time. Archaon turned to Zwei.
‘Tell Sheerian to get the stones back to the fleet,’ Archaon ordered. ‘Tell Captain Darghouth that as soon as the stones and the horde are back on board we haul off immediately and make way. Inform him that a battlefleet seeks to engage him from the south but that we sail north.’
Zwei nodded before spreading his gargoyle’s wings and leaping from the battlements. Archaon watched him swoop across the battlefield, carrying his orders. He thought on the Curseling, who had hoped to do his Dark Master proud and strip Archaon’s corpse of its treasures. He thought on the Bretonni
an king and the Emperor, who sat in distant Altdorf, briefed on the terrible danger Archaon presented. He thought on the Grand Theogonist – whoever he now was – still trying to finish what Archaon had started in the Cathedral of Sigmar so many years before. They would fail. All of them. For Archaon sailed north into destiny.
Chapter XVI
‘It was Great Grungni told us of his coming. A calamity come of calamities. Daemons born of the land-shaking storm. A prince among daemons risen of their dread number. A doom of horn, wing and terror, walking tall among the darklings, causing mountains to quake and hearts to thump at his passing. He claims the tainted land as his own but Grungni taught us that it was the land itself that would save us. That the depths would be our salvation. That to dig was to dig for one’s life. Some say we did not dig deep enough. Some that we dug too far. That the stone of Karak Zhul was cursed long before any dwarf set foot here or desecrated the darkness with pick and shovel. He has found us. The Dark One comes with his legions to reclaim what is his. I write this in my blood, before it is spilt. So that the sons of Grungni, the underkin of Karak Zhul, might be avenged. For our doom has come and visits his darkness upon our own…’