Archaon: Lord of Chaos

by Rob Sanders

  – Dammaz Kron, The Great Book of Grudges

  The Dreadpeak

  The Worlds Edge Mountains

  Grimnir’s Day / Passing of Oaths IC 2519

  The Dreadpeak shook. The Dark Master was here. At last.

  Archaon stood atop the mountain, with the peaks of the Worlds Edge Mountains extending south through the darkness, like the jagged, monstrous spine of all the world. It was here that the dwarfs looked north and turned back, with dread in their hearts, naming the Dreadpeak for such cowardly fears. Below the levelled peak of the mountain, they built what some claim to be the long-lost hold of Karak Zhul – of which no son of the mountains speaks, for the horrors committed there at the beginning of time.

  Archaon walked, pulling his cloak about his plate. It was cold up in the heights. Not the cold of the Wastes or the southern continent. It was a rawness, stiffening the lungs and chilling to the bone. It had taken months to get here, but as Archaon walked around the great black circle of standing stones – arranged on the flat, levelled summit of the Dreadpeak – he knew the time had come. After nearly a century searching for the Crown of Domination, he would know where to find the last of the treasures, the treasures with which the Dark Gods had tortured him for so long.

  The dark armada had fled the civilised lands of the south. A great fleet had been despatched to destroy them. Perhaps beacons had been lit along the Bretonnian coast. Perhaps Baron Lucus had sent word before the Curseling had taken Brilloinne or perhaps it had been the Curseling himself who had sent word of Archaon’s coming. For all the Chaos warlord knew, the Grand Theogonist might have his own ways of knowing such things and had despatched his magnificent cultship at the head of a hastily arranged armada of warships – both Imperial and Bretonnian – to destroy, in Archaon, a common threat. Archaon would not be drawn into such an engagement, however. He was a warlord of Chaos – he did not assume formations and fight battles on land or sea according to long-held traditions or the rules of titled men. He had not assembled an apocalyptic army to see them sent to the bottom of the ocean in cowardly cannonfire.

  Hauling off with Archaon’s monstrous horde barely aboard and the great black tors loaded, the Cloven Captain took the Perdición with the storms that seemed to accompany Archaon wherever he went. Breaking out of the gulf and out into the Sea of Claws – where the longships of northmen and raiders gave them a wide berth – Archaon ordered the dark armada north, up and around the treacherous coast of Norsca. The fleet had followed them. Whoever had been charged with his destruction would not return to the Empire with news that the doom of man had slipped out of their grasp once more. Some flesh-purifying high priest or buffoon admiral, with more titles than sense, would not be able to accept the simplicity of their quarry refusing their offer of an engagement and so had foolishly followed him into open waters, where his numbers counted for something. Despite entreaties from Captain Darghouth, Archaon still refused to engage the armada that was chasing him into the north.

  For weeks he watched their bobbing lanterns, enjoying the misery endured by the fearful crew and officers of high-walled galleons, fat greatships of the Imperial fleet and the storm-smashed wolfships and cultships that accompanied them. As frost crept through the creaking timbers and dusted rigging, and the Sea of Claws became the Sea of Chaos, Archaon felt the uncertainty of their pursuers. Unlike his own armada, the ships striking out from Marienburg were not outfitted for such a voyage. Food and water would be running low and the clothing miserably unsuitable for such sharp climes. Still the armada crashed on through the high seas and perverse gales that followed in the wake of Archaon’s storm-blessed fleet.

  Then it happened. A maelstrom not of Archaon’s making tore out of the north – no doubt some horror begotten by the Wastes. The Cloven Captain had an instinct for such dark storms and had requested that the Perdición lead the armada into the more sheltered waters of the Serrated Shore, a curved peninsula that saved the dark armada from the worst the storm had to offer. The following fleet were not so fortunate. While Archaon watched in silent satisfaction and the monstrous hordes roared their jubilation from the decks of their ships, the vessels of their pursuers were battered by the unrelenting storm, smashed and wrecked upon the broken lands of the Vestligkyst and the daggered fjords of the Serrated Coast. Despite requests from his own champions to hunt down the wrecked survivors, Archaon ordered the armada onwards, leaving the Sigmarite priests, sailors and officer-noblemen to the bloodthirsty tribes of the Graelings that haunted the coast.

  The Sea of Chaos became the Kraken Sea. The Kraken Sea became the Frozen Sea, where Archaon had his sorcerers cut a path through the cracking, creaking pack ice. Finally, when the ice would allow no further passage south-east and the vessels of Archaon’s mighty armada became a fleet of frozen remnants, stuck in the warped, white desolation of waters bordering the Chaos Wastes, he called for anchors to be dropped. Disembarking his monstrous army and their mounts, he had the horde craft beast-hauled sleds for his siege engines and dark stone tors. Chopping up the vessels of the fleet to provide firewood, Archaon struck out across the ice on Dorghar, leading the monstrous expanse of his horde on across the pack ice and back onto dry land, heading for the Dreadpeak – the level-topped mountain that marked the dire point where the Worlds Edge Mountains met the Ruinous Wastes.

  It had taken days to get the black, sigil-etched stones up the mountainside. Despite being levelled for the minerals blessing its peak, the Dreadpeak still cast its colossal shadow across the lesser peaks that extended south with the range. It had taken even longer to erect the stones and make dark preparations for their use. A great fire was built on the flattened summit, at the centre of the standing stones. Between what Archaon had learned from the daemon Z’guhl about the drawing and binding of his daemonic kindred to the Slayer of Kings and Khezula Sheerian’s ancient knowledge of otherworldly summonings – the sorcerer having been summoned himself in such a fashion – Archaon felt ready. Despite his monstrous flesh being a living lie, the Curseling’s tongues had spoken true. There was an undeniable darkness to the Dreadpeak. Though no one could know and the dwarfs of the Worlds Edge Mountains spoke not of it, it did feel as if something terrible had unfolded deep beneath the mountain. Perhaps the legendary long-lost hold of Karak Zhul had been here and perhaps it had been here that the daemon legions and their dark prince stalked the dawn of the world and massacred the mountain kin. There was definitely a weakening here. A flaw in the darkness. A chink in the mountainous armour of the world.

  ‘It’s time, master,’ Sheerian rasped in the thin air. The sorcerer was but a silhouette against the raging fire that lit up the abyssal blackness of the night sky. About the perimeter of the stones, Archaon saw his host of dark sorcerers, all acting under the guidance of Sheerian in the preparations to be made.

  Looking out over the edge of the mountain peak, Archaon could see his colossal army camped out in the valleys below. Their camp fires were a rash that spread far between the crooked mountains like a disease or affliction of all the world. Archaon had even sent the strongbacks, spawn and champions that had seen the dark tors to the Dreadpeak back down the mountain. He had left the misshapen Vier to watch over the deathly Giselle, in the monstrous ribcage of her fur-lined wagon-sled. A dark delegation of trusted warlords, chieftains and armoured champions had requested to be present on the mountain – for Archaon’s protection, if nothing else – but he denied them, selecting only Eins and Zwei, Sheerian and his sorcerers for company. The daemon steed Dorghar stamped at the rock of the mountain nearby, snorting plumes of its furnace-hot breath into the reedy freeze of the heights.

  ‘Do you think it will be enough?’ Archaon asked the sorcerer.

  ‘We are going fishing in the abyss, my lord,’ Sheerian answered. ‘We have the tools. We have the words. We have princely incantations and the fire of soul-thousands to lure the Dark Master in. Quite the contrary, do not be surprised if we land and bind somethin
g worse than Be’lakor.’

  ‘There is nothing worse than Be’lakor,’ Archaon told the sorcerer. ‘You have the blade?’

  The daemon sorcerer handed him the short blade of the sword the wraith-warriors had recovered from the caves below the mountain. The Swords of Chaos indicated that there was no evidence that the Dreadpeak lay upon the mines and holds of Karak Zhul but Archaon knew it in his bones. The dread darkness of the place did not lie. The recovered weapon had been smashed from the grip of a skeleton. It was a dwarf blade, black and serrated with age but made of meteoric iron. Still impossibly strong, Archaon hoped that it had belonged to some lowly sentry rather than a warrior king. Some dwarf who had lost his life in the infernal massacre. An ignominious prison, suitable for the prince that led such slaughter.

  Archaon walked out into the space between the towering black tors. The heat from the colossal fire raged and turned the metal of his cursed plate to a flesh-scorching affliction. About him the sigils of the standing stones glowed and smoked with a searing balelight – the soulfire of those slain by Archaon and his horde within their configuration. Standing between them, Archaon felt the world-splitting power crackling at the heart of the nexus. The instability of the rock beneath his boots, the heat from the fire and the air in his lungs. The Ruinous realm drawn up out of the beyond, like the black silt coating the bottom of a disturbed tarn, spuming up through the crystal waters and bleaching the surface with its darkness.

  He stabbed the ancient dwarf blade into the rocky earth before the fire. Lifting his helm he spat on the blade, watching the spittle sizzle on metal that had already become uncomfortably hot before the raging fire. Lowering his horned helm, Archaon walked back towards Sheerian.

  ‘Begin the incantations,’ he ordered.

  The sorcerer’s milky eyes fluttered shut. Dark words in a dark tongue proceeded from his cracked lips, echoed by the dread sorcerers standing at the perimeter, between each of the black tor stones.

  Archaon waited. And waited. The ritual proceeded long into the night, with sorcerous incantations called like a chorus into the terrifying emptiness of the night sky. The fire raged eternal and the stones glowed with an eerie darkness. Archaon stood with his arms folded and his cloak gathered about him, the fingers of his gauntlet tapping the hilt of the Slayer of Kings. Dorghar walked up and down, snorting its infernal impatience.

  The incantations grew suddenly louder. Archaon heard the black tors creak and groan. Grit began to bounce about the rocky mountain floor. The flames boomed, blasting out with raging balls of blinding fury, before reaching higher and higher into the black sky. The glowing sigils of the standing stones seemed to melt down the sides of the tors before searing into the rock of the mountaintop. Suddenly the flames went out. Thunder rolled across the sky. Silent flashes of lightning criss-crossed the heavens. When the flames returned, with explosive force, they were lustrous black, like an inferno of raging oil. The midnight flames writhed, twisted and contorted into a shape Archaon recognised. Wings. Horns. A muscular torso and arms. The slash of a tail and the abyssal ugliness of a daemonic face. Be’lakor. The Dark Master. Straining. Thrashing. Clawing up through his own flaming form. The sorcerer Sheerian had him.

  Archaon stepped forward. There were several Be’lakors now. All fighting to be free of the summoning’s all but irresistible force. Fearful of the iron prison that awaited the daemon in the form of the ancient dwarf sword. Fifty Be’lakors. A hundred.

  ‘Daemon!’ Archaon called through the boom of the oily black inferno. As the fiery phantasms raged, one nightmare shape flickered to stillness. It looked at Archaon, seeming to see him for the first time. ‘Dark Prince. My father-in-shadow. Hear me…’

  I can hear you, the daemon said, its slick composure at odds with the thousands of other frenzied Be’lakors that fought to be free of the daemon-trap. The Dark Master was both storm and infernal serenity, living the existential agonies of semi-realisation.

  I can see you. I feel your dark presence in this miserable world. I smell your fear and taste of your bitter despair. Archaon, who would be Everchosen. Archaon, who will herald nothing more than his own disastrous doom.

  ‘Enough of that, I think,’ Archaon told the daemon prince. ‘If this flesh is destined to fail, then you fail with it. You tell me what I need to hear, like all fathers to their sons. Spare me, wretched shadow. There is but one thing I want – and will ever want – from you. You are the Herald. You are the Bearer. You, and only you, know where the unholy Crown of Domination can be found: Ruinous right of the chosen, distinction of infernal sovereignty in this world and those never to follow. Tell me, daemon, where can the final treasure of Chaos be found?’

  Archaon…

  ‘Yes?’

  Archaon, Archaon, Archaon. How can a man who has travelled so far, who has lived the lives you have, who has tasted eternity, not understand the nature of his fate?

  ‘Explain it to me,’ Archaon ordered. ‘While you still can.’

  Your existence is a history of nevers. A madness repeated, falling from the lips of a lunatic. An echo ebbing away to cavernous silence. You are the ghost that has forgotten itself. The shadow passed. Your flesh only lives to know the true darkness that awaits it – once your soul plagues it no more.

  ‘Could the abomination be more cryptic?’ Archaon asked.

  Like the wayward son, you have pulled away, Be’lakor told him. You have defied your father’s wishes, his hopes for your future. You have forged what you have told yourself to be your own path – yet here you are begging for your father-in-shadow once more.

  ‘Begging?’ Archaon snarled. ‘You mistake asking for telling, daemon. Entreaty for interrogation. Invitation for imprisonment. Words don’t seem to work on the daemon. Show the wretched thing.’

  At Archaon’s order, Sheerian and the dark sorcerers gathered about the circle of stones tightened their hold on Be’lakor. The daemon roared, joining the thousands of Be’lakors already raging against their spiritual bonds. The daemon’s shadowform became stretched and contorted. The blade before it rattled in the ground, drawing the daemon in – like the black, iron doors of an eternal prison thrown open wide. Be’lakor’s torments sent quakes through both the mountain and sky. The agonies of instability. Infernal fears of imprisonment. Bolts of indescribable energy snapped between the meteoric iron of the ancient blade and the daemon prince Archaon wished to consign to it. The blade glowed to unruly darkness while the great black fire began to die with Be’lakor’s hold on the beyond, on the material world, on himself.

  ‘Had enough, daemon prince?’ Archaon put to his hated father-in-shadow. ‘I am Archaon. My fate is my own. My decisions my own. My existence my own – and I have chosen the doom of all for that existence. I shall trap you in ancient iron, to spend forever in an unworthy blade, wielded by those you consigned to everlasting darkness in this dreadful place. I shall then take this blade – this prison – out to the ocean and drop you into the deepest waters I can find: lost for eternity in the sands of a dark, watery desert with only carcass-picking crabs for company.

  YOU WILL NEVER…

  ‘…find the last treasure of Chaos?’ Archaon said as the Dark Master fluxed and raged, the pull of the ancient iron irresistible. ‘I’ll take my chances. At least I will spend my eternity free to pursue such a destiny. You will not, my father-in-shadow. Besides, the Dark Gods are fickle. Perhaps the next Everchosen of Chaos will be crowned without lowly Be’lakor. After thousands of years, perhaps the Ruinous Powers desire a change. At least one of them does. Oh how he would like to see your failure complete. A world’s end without Be’lakor to usher it in…’

  ARCHAON!

  ‘Tell me…’ Archaon hissed at the dissipating daemon. ‘Tell me now.’

  THE CROWN WAITS…

  ‘Yes…’

  IN THE FIRST SHRINE OF CHAOS–

  ‘Where, daemon?’ Archaon roared.
<
br />   WHERE THE FIRST HUMAN SOUL WAS BARTERED TO THE DARK GODS…

  ‘Your soul, daemon prince,’ Archaon said. ‘Where?’

  YOU ARE UNWORTHY.

  ‘Where?’ Archaon bellowed back at the raging daemon.

  YOU… WILL… NEVER…

  ‘Wear the crown?’ Archaon completed for the daemon. ‘Then neither will you! Do it,’ Archaon commanded.

  ‘But, master–’ Sheerian said.

  ‘Show this abomination the eternity of iron,’ Archaon roared. Be’lakor roared. The skies split asunder. Thunder rolled backwards through the heavens. The dwarf blade quivered to a sonorous shriek, glowing with Be’lakor’s darkness. The flames boomed and twisted. Dark energies sank a dread chorus, streaming between the Ruinous tors and through the monstrous fire. Thousands of screaming Be’lakors became hundreds. Hundreds became one – a mighty phantasm in flame, clawing, slashing his tail, flapping his wings and tossing the grotesque form of his horned head from side to side, his shrieks, oaths and daemon curses melting the sky.

  ‘Yes!’ Archaon roared. ‘Yes! Know, monster, what it is to be bound by destiny and a prisoner to your fate.’

  Suddenly – with Archaon’s monstrous jubilation still echoing about the Dreadpeak – the daemon prince was gone. The oily emptiness of the inferno died. The black, age-eaten blade quivered and glowed with Be’lakor’s darkness. Dread energies arced from stone to steaming sword. No one spoke. Thunder faded. The skies flashed with silent lightning and black rain fell on the mountain.

  ‘Master, I…’ Khezula Sheerian began but Archaon brought up a single, armoured finger.

  The sword’s quiverings had built to an imperceptible vibration. Beneath Archaon’s boots the Dreadpeak trembled. Cracks felt their way from the daemon-bound blade, through the flat stone of the flattened peak. They creaked and sheared their way through the rock, reaching out to a number of standing stones and creating an eight-point star of ruin. Sheerian and his sorcerers suddenly grabbed for their ears. Archaon felt the excruciating vibration of the ancient blade grow to a mind-splitting shriek. As he screwed his eye shut and grabbed his helm in pain, he heard his father-in-shadow’s voice.