by Nick Kyme
The girl snickered, and as she turned and rose to her feet she grew. Her bones lengthened, her skin turned a pale, mottled blue, tinged with pink. Her eyes split, multiplying as horns pushed out from her forehead. A third arm sprouted out of her back and her legs bled together, gaudy and iridescent, until they flowed and became robes.
‘Summoner…’ breathed Issakian, recognising the creature now it had transformed utterly. He threw himself at it, prepared to impale the wretch on the point of his sword and…
…pierced nothing except purple dust. It veiled his armour, giving it an ugly amethyst sheen. The reek of dank, mildew and old dusty places fell heavy on the air.
Cackling laughter echoed from the shadows around the dais, and an old, withered man in a black robe shuffled into the light.
Issakian went to confront him but dark energies curling from the Shyish runes etched in the dais kept him firmly rooted.
‘You are persistent,’ said the old man in a reedy voice that cracked like dry parchment. He shuffled closer, leaning on a gnarled staff with three finger bones tied to it. ‘Curious, isn’t it,’ he went on, walking round the edge of the dais and inspecting Issakian from every angle, as if appraising a laboratory specimen, ‘how you can die so many deaths and still come back? I find that interesting.’
‘Release me and I will give you a swift death,’ Issakian promised, his grip tightening around the hilt of his sword. The lightning prickled his skin. He felt its power, and knew he could unleash it if he wanted to.
The old man laughed. He laughed so hard he doubled over and began to cough.
‘Death,’ he rasped when he had recovered. ‘This is death. Shyish is death. You offer me nothing by way of trade. But I don’t seek to bargain. I wish to study.’ He leaned closer and outstretched a bony finger to claw at the dark energy caging Issakian. It shrieked to his touch, like nails running across slate.
‘I can smell the magic in you…’ he hissed. ‘The power reforged, remade. Did you think you could escape his gaze? Such arrogance. The hourglass has already tipped, bearer of the storm. Its sands run inexorably towards your end.’ He reached into his filthy robes and brought forth an emaciated bird, its feathers the same hue as the chalk dust. It cawed once in a thin, almost human voice. ‘The purple crow…’ The old man nodded to Issakian, ‘…and the lightning golem.’
Issakian roared. Anger, hot and indignant, rushed through his veins. His left hand burned, trembling with celestial fire. He slammed his sword into the dais and a great storm erupted from the pommel. Lightning lashed out, bright and violent, but as it touched the edge of the darkness, it reflected inwards. The storm struck Issakian repeatedly. A hail of thunderbolts tore at him, stripping back his armour, burning away his flesh, and turning bone to ash, until… nothing.
He died again, but as the storm within tried to leap up and arc for Azyr, it could not. The darkness turned into smoke and then glass, bottling lightning behind a host of potent enchantments. And within the glass was the crackling shape of a man, a lightning golem.
‘And the night-clad king is no more,’ said the old man, shuffling off into the shadows. As the darkness swallowed him, he rasped, ‘How much we will learn… and the God-King’s arrogance shall be his undoing.’
The laughter faded and then the footsteps, until Issakian was alone with his mindless self-pity. He had become the storm, lightning without the lightning rod, rampant and angry.
But a word resounded amidst the impotent rage, the only word the lightning golem could remember.
Agrevaine…
About the Author
Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Red-marked and Censure. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Warhammer Chronicles novel The Great Betrayal and the Age of Sigmar story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.
An extract from Soul Wars.
The dead thing stumbled slowly across the eternal desert of Shyish. Its bones were baked the colour of a dull bruise by the amethyst sun overhead, and what few pathetic tatters of flesh it retained had become leathery and fragile. Yet the lack of muscle and sinew had proved to be of little impediment in all the slow, countless centuries of its task.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Across burning sands, to the very edge of the Realm of Death, and then back, ten thousand leagues or more. Slowly, but surely.
As sure as death. As certain as the stars.
There was a soul of sorts, in those brown bones. It was a small thing, akin to the last ember of a diminished fire. It had no hopes, no fears, no dreams, no desires. Only purpose. Not a purpose it recognised or understood, for such concepts were beyond such a diminished thing. The directive that provided motive force to its cracked bones had been applied externally, by a will and a mind such as the dead thing could not conceive – and yet recognised all the same.
The master commanded, and it obeyed. The master’s voice, like a great, black bell tolling endlessly in the deep, was the limit of its existence. The reverberation of that awful sound shook its bones to their dusty marrow and dragged them on. The master had sheared away all that the dead thing had been and made it into an engine of singular purpose.
The only purpose.
Cracked finger bones clutched tight about a single grain of pale, purple sand. The mote rested within a cage of bone and was incalculably heavy despite its size, weighed down with potential. Moments unlived, songs unsung. The dead thing knew none of this, and perhaps would not have cared even if it had.
Instead, it simply trudged on, over dunes and swells of windswept sands. It was not alone in this, for it was merely a single link in a great chain, stretching over distance and through time. A thousand similar husks trudged in its wake, and a thousand more stumbled ahead of it. Twice that number lurched past, going in the opposite direction. Their fleshless feet had worn runnels in the stone beneath the sand, and carved strange new formations in what was once a featureless waste. The silent migration had changed the course of rivers and worn down mountains.
Jackals hunted the chain, having grown used to the sport provided by the unresisting dead. They streaked out of the dunes, yipping and howling, to pluck away some morsel of dangling ligament. The dead thing paid them no mind. It could but dimly perceive them, as brief, bright sparks of soul fire, dancing across the dunes. By the time its sluggish attentions had fixed upon them, they were gone, and new fires beckoned elsewhere.
A carrion bird, one of many, circled overhead. Once, twice, and then it alighted on a sand-scoured clavicle. The bird twitched its narrow head, digging its beak into the hollows and crevices of the dead thing’s skull, as generations of its kind had done before it. For wherever the dead went, so too came the birds. Finding nothing of interest, it fluttered away with a skirl in a flurry of loose feathers, leaving the dead thing to its purpose.
On the horizon, a second sun – a black sun – shone. Its corona squirmed like a thing alive, alert to the attentions of the master. As that great voice tolled out, the sun blazed bright with a hazy, bruise-coloured light. When the voice fell silent, the sun shrank, as if receding into some vast distance. But always, its dark light was visible to the dead thing. And always the dead thing followed the light.
It could do nothing else.
All of this its master saw, through its empty eyes and the eyes of the carrion birds and the jackals, as well. All of this, its master knew, for he had willed it so, in dim eternities come and gone. And because he had willed it, it would be done.
For all that lived belonged ultimately to the Undying King.
In every realm, wherever the living met their end, some aspect of Nagash was there. Once, such a menial task would have been undertaken by other, lesser gods. Now, there was only one. Where once there had been many, now there was only Nagash. All were Nagash, and Nagash was all. As it should be, as it must be.
The dead were his. But there were those who sought to deny him his due. Sigmar, God-King of Azyr, was the worst offender. Sigmar the betrayer. Sigmar the deceiver. He had snatched souls on the cusp of death to provide fodder for his celestial armies, imbuing them with a measure of his might and reforging them into new, more powerful beings – the Stormcast Eternals.
Worse still, he had not been content with the nearly dead, and had scoured the pits of antiquity, gathering the spirits of the long forgotten to forge anew into warriors for his cause. Every soul lost in such a fashion was one less soul that might march in defence of Shyish.
Nagash saw the ploy for what it was, and a part of him admired the efficiency of its execution. Sigmar sought to beggar him and leave him broken and defenceless, easy prey for the howlers in the wastes. But it would not work. Could not work.
His servants had been despatched to the edge of Shyish, where the raw energies of the magics that formed the realm coalesced into granules of amethyst and black grave-sand, heaped in grain by grain. Over the course of aeons, he had gathered the necessary components for his design.
Even when the forces of the Ruinous Powers had invaded the Mortal Realms, he had continued. Even when he had been betrayed by one he called ally, and the armies of Azyr had assaulted his demesnes, he had persevered. Unrelenting. Untiring. Inevitable.
Such was the will of Nagash. As hard as iron, and as eternal as the sands.
Click here to buy Soul Wars.
A Black Library Publication
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Pavel ‘Cynic’ Romonov.
The Lightning Golem © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. The Lightning Golem, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-978-2
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