Archaon: Lord of Chaos

by Rob Sanders

  As they rolled and separated, Be’lakor could see that the Slayer of Kings lay abandoned in the scuffle nearby. The daemon scrabbled to his feet and surged at Archaon but Archaon was ready for him. Picking up a small boulder, Archaon launched it at his father-in-shadow, the impact turning the rock to dust against Be’lakor’s face. The daemon prince grunted, dazed, but by the time he had recovered himself Archaon had already recovered the Slayer of Kings. This time it was the Dark Master’s turn to fly – a wing-tangled mess – into the wall of the rockface. Archaon roared up at the night sky as the monstrous daemon tried to pull himself free. Lightning cut down through the darkness, striking the mountain above and dislodging boulders, scree and a section of rockface with an excruciating crack that rumbled its way down to the valley floor and buried Be’lakor.

  Archaon would not be fooled again. He ran through the dark clouds of dust billowing away from the collapse. Sinking the searing blade of the Slayer of Kings into mounds of shattered rock and scree, Archaon furiously searched for the daemon prince.

  ‘Where are you, abominate?’ Archaon roared. ‘Face me!’

  The small mountain of scree beside the Everchosen exploded, sending shards of splintered rock everywhere. Archaon was knocked half off his feet. Be’lakor stood there, his wings demolished, his tail trailing ichor and half of one of his horns shattered. The Dark Master came at Archaon like a wild beast, swinging the searing shadow of his blade madly at the Everchosen. It was Archaon’s chance and the dark warlord knew it. The daemon prince was unbalanced by his exhaustion, his frustration and rage. Calling on his skill, the murderous passion of his daemonblade and the spectral glimpse of future decimation provided by the Eye, Archaon threw himself into the monstrous clash of swords. Feet scrabbled around. Arms swung relentlessly about and the two blades showered dark sparks of abyssal energy about the Everchosen and his father-in-shadow.

  Archaon knew he had the daemon prince, moments before Be’lakor did. Holding his ground through several shadow-streaming swipes of the shadow sword, Archaon felt the monstrous blade shimmer back to the world once more. Smashing Be’lakor’s blade away, Archaon watched it leave the claw of the monster. Turning into a devastating spin, Archaon clutched the Slayer of Kings like a knife and in completing the manoeuvre, slammed the daemonsword straight through the black flesh of the daemon’s stomach. Be’lakor was lifted off his cloven claws by the thudding impact before falling to his knees before the Everchosen. The Dark Master roared his agonies to the crowded heavens.

  ‘Just die, you monstrous thing,’ Archaon spat as Be’lakor endured his agonies. Archaon took a step back as the abomination looked up at him with murderous loathing and reared to torturous full height. With the raging blade still stuck through his belly, Be’lakor stomped towards the unarmed Archaon.

  You are nothing, the daemon howled.

  He smashed Archaon into the ground with his claw. The Everchosen bounced off the rock floor of the valley and clattered away. Be’lakor stamped agonisingly after him. As Archaon brought up his helm he saw the colossal shard of rock moments before it was to hit him. Rolling beneath its unstoppable progress, the boulder would have pulverised him to blood and scrap against the rock wall of the mountain. Another came and another, smashing into the valley floor about him like crashing meteorites. One bounced to the ground below his feet, knocking him over with the impact. Be’lakor was on him immediately and although Archaon saw it coming he could not evade the cloven-clawed kick coming for his helm. The impact knocked him off his feet. He landed some distance away in a cacophony of tumbling plate.

  Archaon had barely found his way back to his senses when he realised that the skewered daemon prince was standing over him. Pinning the Everchosen to the ground with his clawed foot, Be’lakor smashed Archaon’s helm into the rock again and again with his fist.

  I am Be’lakor – first of the Daemon Princes. Dark Master of the world with the legions of hell mine to command.

  The Dark Master took his foot from Archaon and the Chaos warlord saw in the Eye of Sheerian the horror of what was to come. Hefting a huge boulder above his head, the sword-skewered Be’lakor trembled above Archaon.

  ‘No…’ the Everchosen managed.

  When it hit, smashing to rock dust on Archaon and his buckled plate, the dark warlord felt himself break up inside. It was like being pulverised between Mannslieb and Morrslieb, clashing about him.

  You are nothing, Be’lakor roared at the Everchosen of Chaos. A twin-bladed sword, who wounds he who wields it. A filth instrument of torture, used by the Ruinous Powers to torment me.

  Be’lakor bellowed through his pain and the frustration of his infernal plans, hefting another huge boulder above his head. Archaon didn’t think he could survive another impact. As Be’lakor wavered under the weight of the thing, Archaon tried to clear his pain-addled mind. Coughing up blood that leaked from the side of his thin lips, Archaon spoke the dark words of binding – the incantations the daemon Z’guhl had taught him in the Realm of Chaos. Be’lakor staggered with the monstrous piece of rock while the midnight flesh of his belly burned bright.

  ‘U’zuhl, Skulltaker and Slayer of Kings,’ Archaon called. ‘I release you!’

  Be’lakor went to scream something but couldn’t. The boulder broke across his back, falling either side of the daemon and almost burying him. He clutched at the Slayer of Kings and the daemon U’zuhl, the Skulltaker and Right Claw of Khorne, trapped in the prison blade for as long as anyone could remember, flooded Be’lakor with its boundless fury.

  Archaon staggered to his feet and stumbled away, moving from boulder to boulder for support. His leg was broken and his arm – the same arm – shattered, despite the petrified rock that threaded its way through his bones. Blood leaked continually from his mouth and nose, filling his helm with a coppery smell. All Archaon could hear was his own ragged breathing and the horrific wailing of the Dark Master. U’zuhl was tearing the ancient darkness of Be’lakor’s soul apart – desperate to feast on the daemon’s malevolent essence and assume his dread flesh.

  As Archaon staggered away, half watching, half escaping, he saw Be’lakor fall silent. His shoulders rose and fell with the titanic battle that had raged within his being. The battle was over, however, and Be’lakor had won. As Archaon had resisted Be’lakor so the Dark Master had resisted U’zhul. Slipping the Slayer of Kings torturously from his belly, Be’lakor held it up. The dull blade started to glow in his claw, burning to a rage-filled intensity that Archaon had never known. The Skulltaker had been free but within moments had been returned to his steel prison once more.

  Tossing the furious pollution of the daemonblade aside – not knowing if he could repel another attempt by the Skulltaker to possess him – Be’lakor lifted a trembling claw. He levelled it at Archaon.

  Now… you…

  The Everchosen of Chaos limped away, staggering from one boulder to another. All the Eye of Sheerian could show Archaon was what Be’lakor might do. The Dark Master was so insane with infernal fury and mindless vengeance that even he didn’t know what he was going to do. The ground trembled beneath Be’lakor’s step. He seized Archaon around his armoured neck and slammed the dark warlord into the rockface. He smashed him again and leaned in. Archaon could feel the claws of the daemon prince buckle the cursed plate about his bruised neck. Be’lakor was going to crush his throat. Archaon smelled the rank sulphur of the abomination’s breath.

  I shall wear the crown. I shall be Everchosen of the Chaos gods and stand once more in the warmth of their destructive radiance and favour. None shall stop me. No god. No daemon. Not you.

  Archaon felt the vice of the daemon prince’s claws close about his throat and the hell-forged plate give. He knew he had but seconds left. Scratching at the punctured plate at his side, Archaon got a trembling gauntlet around the hilt of the claw-crafted dagger. His eye rolled over, white with the agonising pain of its withdrawal. He felt the bla
de’s darkness cut through not only his butchered flesh but also his pantheon-pledged soul. His eye rolled back as the crooks and curves of the wicked blade were freed.

  For you are nothing. Nothing begotten of nothing and to nothing you return. You are a footnote in the history of a world destined to burn. Yours was my story to tell and I choose to end it now.

  ‘I’m your son…’ Archaon hissed through his father-in-shadow’s murderous embrace.

  You think that will stop me?

  Archaon looked for the Ruinous Star burned across the Dark Master’s broad chest. He looked for the chink in the daemon’s armoured hide. The cleft Archaon had found in the Forsaken Fortress. The mark of a piercing blade – thrust by one of the Dark Master’s many foes – that had yet to complete its journey.

  ‘You… don’t… have… the… heart…’

  Archaon brought up the dagger and with a single, merciless stab, hammered the claw blade into Be’lakor’s chest. A monstrous gasp escaped the daemon. The Everchosen fell down the rockface and crumpled as the Dark Master released him. Stumbling away through the boulders and debris, Be’lakor clawed at his punctured heart and the pumping ichor that gushed from his ruined chest. The abominate’s cloven claws suddenly seemed no longer to support him and the beast crashed to the ground in a growing pool of his own steaming darkness. Archaon watched as his father-in-darkness – the twisted daemon prince who had for so long been the source of dread, woe and affliction in his life – died before him. In his final moments of panic, the Dark Master reached out for Archaon, the claw of one hand a pleading emissary of doom. He shimmered with crackling shadow, unnatural energies arcing and sizzling about the daemon. In a last ditch attempt to survive the horror of the wound Archaon had inflicted upon him, Be’lakor was phasing between forms. Between the insubstance of shadow and the last moments of a fell, ichor-coughing existence. Archaon grunted with dark satisfaction. Being crafted from a part of the daemon prince itself, the dagger-claw was doing the same, making it impossible for Be’lakor to escape his doom, as he might a sword swung through the sizzling shadow of his form.

  As the pool of liquid darkness grew and Be’lakor sank into his own daemonic gore, the Dark Master steamed away. His clutching claw scraped along the rock with final defiance before slipping back into the obsidian pool. Archaon watched the darkness drain down through the valley floor. Looking up he saw the distant blaze of torches as his monstrous army poured into the valley. The immense moons of Mannslieb and Morrslieb were setting over the Worlds Edge Mountains. Above them the twin-tailed comet that was herald of the doom Archaon was yet to bring blazed across the sky.

  Archaon limped through the draining darkness of his father’s grave and with difficulty picked up the Slayer of Kings. Slipping the daemonsword into his scabbard, Archaon stared back at the spot where Be’lakor had died. The word seemed to ill fit the daemon prince’s fate, for the Everchosen knew that he had simply banished the enormous being – the bane of his existence – back to the Realm of Chaos from which he had sprung. Every smashed and aching bone in Archaon’s body told him that Be’lakor would be back. He would return as he had many times before to plague the world and the enemies that walked it.

  ‘I’ll ensure that there will be no world to return to…’ Archaon told the steaming grave. He looked up into the dark depths of the heavens. Thunder rolled in the distance. He knew that the Dark Gods were watching. They would not have missed Be’lakor’s failure – the daemon’s delicious demise – for the world. ‘You hear me?’ Archaon roared up at the sky, his threat intended for the fell gods whose soul-devouring existence depended upon the world and its mortal plague as much as the daemon prince they had made an eternity of tormenting. ‘Only ash and darkness. An oblivion in which to starve. Choke on it, you monsters…’

  Epilogue

  ‘And so the end it came to pass,

  Archaon the Everchosen –

  at the head of an army vast –

  his storm of Chaos yet to come.’

  – Necrodomo the Insane, The Liber Caelestior (The Celestine Book of Divination)

  The Borderlands

  The Worlds Edge Mountains

  Die Zeit der Stürme IC 2519

  The Everchosen brought his daemon steed to a stop on the mountain pass. Dorghar’s furnace breath clouded on the chill air. He had arrived. As the Worlds Edge Mountains dropped away before him in frost-shattered supplication – peaks becoming foothills and foothills disappearing into thick, dark forest – Archaon knew he was home. To the north he could see the hard lands of the Tsarina: Kislev, ever ready for the dark hordes of Chaos to descend on their desolate land. To the south, however, Archaon cast his far reaching gaze across an Empire ripe for ruin. The Empire – nestling safely in the bosom of civilised lands. Pathetic. Weak. Like a new-born baby: soft, unknowing, defenceless. The victim lands upon which Archaon himself had been forced. As infant. As dark warrior. As doom. The Empire was a festering wound on the surface of the world. Hot to the touch with its weakling gods, its emperors and principalities – lost in the self-importance of its past and delusions of its endurance. Below the spoiling surface, in the empty hearts of its cruel men, the forlorn hopes of its women and fears of its sickly children, it was a land already broken – begging for the blade and the flames of its future destruction. Archaon would be the answer to the Empire’s dark and secret prayers. He would be the dark dream of its undoing come true. If the world was to end – and it was – then the Empire, the unhallowed site of Archaon’s dread birth and many miserable deaths, was the perfect place to start.

  The Worlds Edge Mountains shook. Not with thunder, titanic battles or the wrath of a daemon prince vanquished. Archaon’s dark horde – his army of ruin and ending – had grown. The twin-tailed comet, which still scarred the skies with its fierce progress, hung over the Empire like a fearful portent of the horror to come. It led the way to ash, darkness and destruction as it had led so many to the dread coronation at the Dreadpeak. Colossal hordes of Hung maruaders and tribes of Kurgan horsemen, savages pledged to the ruin of the world, their countless number shaking the ground with their passage as shamans and chieftains followed the comet up into the mountains.

  At the glorious sight of the comet, warring northmen set aside their tribal enmities, their petty raids and berserker invasions of the hinterland Wastes. Behind bloodthirsty champions in spike and fur, they trudged south through the mountains, along the spine of the world, to find the Everchosen of Chaos: a warlord worthy of their butchery and talents. Half-breeds and beastmen arrived in droves, emerging like a shaggy plague from the depths of dark forests. Then there were the warriors of Chaos. Exalted champions of the Ruinous Gods. Dread sorcerers. Siege engines and wagons. Dark knights in cursed plate, astride monstrous black steeds. New Swords of Chaos to ride beside Archaon into battle and bloodshed. A torrent of pollution, flowing down through the Worlds Edge Mountains like a black river – a cacophony of Ruinous plate, hooves and flesh-flayed banners dedicated to the coming darkness.

  Monsters thundered through the peaks, attracted by the unmistakable stench of doom and horror approaching. Horror to which they instinctively wanted to belong. Giants. Abominations of the Wastes. Packs of rabid scavengers, predacious chimeric fusions and hordes of gibbering spawn.

  Like the effluence of the world, the degenerates of the Wastes flooded south to join Archaon under an apocalyptic banner of death and destruction. Some followed their dark instincts. Others followed the dread omen of the twin-tailed comet. Champions who saw significance in such a dark sign. All had been pushed before the storm. The endless army that had marched, shrieked and slaughtered its way south, vomited forth from the ruined gate at the top of the world and pantheon-pledged to join the Everchosen of Chaos. They were the world’s nightmare. A monstrous host of daemons and infernal princes the likes of which history, even in its darkest hour, had never witnessed. Horrors of the beyond. Things of blood. Of plague. Of dread
desire and sorcerous madness. Things of darkness that barely had form, with Ruinous behemoths of greater malevolence and monstrous infernal royalty to lead them. The legions of a thousand hells unleashed. A vast army of calamitous destruction and darkness, like an unnatural disaster that was Archaon’s to visit upon the world.

  Flooding every pass, crowding the slopes of every mountain, looking down on the victim lands of the distant Empire, Archaon’s monstrous host – his dark storm to lead – were amassed along the edge of the world. Their harnessed madness waiting for the Everchosen’s signal.

  A figure jangled up behind Archaon. The warlord turned to see Gorst, the flagellant trudging forth, pushing through Archaon’s abominate ranks. He was skin and bone dressed in scraps. The ancient dragged rusted chains and his head, still caged, stared up at Archaon through the age-eaten bars. As ever, Gorst said nothing. He had followed Archaon across the known world, through unknown realms and followed him still – into destiny. Gorst. The last of a ghostly collection of fading memories. Dagobert. Oberon. Giselle. Archaon was no longer that man. He was more than just a man now. He was doom. He was dread. He was darkness incarnate. He no longer had need of such memories. He was beyond the love of a loyal friend or the placed puppets of infernal betrayal. He was Archaon.

  In a slick and devastating move, the Everchosen of Chaos slipped his daemonsword out of its scabbard. Executing a merciless swing of the sword, he cut Gorst’s head from his miserable shoulders. The head, still in its cage, bounced before Archaon and his army before it rolled down the slope towards the Empire. Gorst had almost made it home.