by Ben Counter
Caradryath bowed and led his Sword Masters away from the crater. Teclis looked back at Baudros. All the dragon’s eyes were fixed on him now. There was no intelligence in its more bestial head, only a rage that could not be stifled, a raw hatred of everything it beheld. One head knew what Teclis was, the other did not care. Both wanted him dead. No doubt it was a rare thing for them to agree so completely.
From the sky overhead descended a flittering shadow in the shape of a man, coalescing as it landed into the form of a white-bearded mage in grey robes, the head of his wooden staff carved into the shape of a raven. ‘I can hide you,’ said the mage. ‘The shadows will conceal you.’
‘Not from this,’ replied Teclis. ‘I will need the shadow magic that flows through you, Ogmarah. You must take your place. The ritual must be observed. Any break and the winds of magic will turn from us.’
‘The Amber wind courses around this beast, not through it,’ said a seventh figure, dressed in rough-spun cloth and bear furs. ‘It is no beast at all.’
‘The circle has but seven places,’ said Ogmarah. ‘Which one of us will stand apart from it? Which one will stand alongside you? Who, if not a master of the shadow, who can surely confound the senses of this monstrosity?’
‘One who is as one with the beast!’ replied the seventh mage. ‘A monster we face, and a monster I will become!’
‘No, Ferok,’ said Teclis. ‘Nor you, Ogmarah. The Amber and the Shadow winds must flow through the circle. You will not stand apart.’ Teclis coughed, bending over as he shuddered with the awful rasping of his wounded lungs. ‘The Light,’ he sputtered. ‘It must be the Light.’
From a pavilion of white silk, on the edge of the crater, emerged a figure in robes the colour of pearl. His head was shaven and his eyes ringed with dark pigment. In one hand was a wooden half-mask and in the other hand was a metal staff wrought into the shape of a hooded desert snake. Where he stood there seemed to exist a pool of tranquility, as if a circle surrounded him into which the troubled world could not reach. In the aethyr, the mask was of gold and the snake-staff had diamonds for eyes, both materials representing the purity that fell around him in a cascade of gemstones.
The Light mage looked down at Baudros. The bestial head reacted to him, turning its beady eyes on him and staring at the newcomer with the same hate it had reserved for the loremaster.
‘Malhavar!’ called Teclis. His voice was not strong enough to carry over the grumbling of Baudros’s lungs, but the Light mage heard him. ‘It is time. It must be done now.’
‘Of course, my loremaster.’ Malhavar walked across the crater. The hem of his robe picked up no soot or dirt. He passed in front of Baudros’s bestial head and it reared back, chest swelling as it sucked in a lungful of air.
Malhavar raised a hand. A circle of white light was emblazoned on the ground around him. A blast of frozen shadow ripped from Baudros’s throat, a killing gale billowing up from the Chaos Wastes themselves, dark grey and seething with hatred.
The gale burst against the invisible barrier around Malhavar, parting and swirling around him. The gale passed, drifting up into the sky like a pall of smoke from a pyre. Baudros’s brute head saw that Malhavar still stood and roared in anger, shuddering the earth with a peal of terrible thunder.
The other head, the cunning and mad head, cackled as it saw its brother thwarted. The bestial head snapped at it, spitting bile in frustration.
‘Are you ready?’ asked Teclis as Malhavar came near.
‘I am,’ said Malhavar. ‘The paths end here. I can see that plainly, even if Ceruleos cannot. The Light shines strongest when there are none there to cast a shadow. It shines brightest when we, its servants, are gone.’ Up close, he looked less like a man of Sigmar’s Empire and more like something ancient, or perhaps ageless, from a land that was now sand and ruins. His skin was coppery and smooth, his profile as proud and angular as if it had been carved.
‘That is why it must be you,’ said Teclis.
‘The way of the Light wind is sacrifice,’ said Malhavar.
‘It will try to kill me,’ said Teclis. ‘It must not.’
‘I understand.’
Teclis looked up to the sky and planted the Moon Staff in the ground, like a general planting his standard. ‘My students! My brothers! Call forth the cage!’
From Auroc’s fingers flowed a bubbling torrent of molten gold, forming the spindly shape of a golden cage in the air over Baudros. Baudros’s bestial head howled and its mad head shrieked, spitting ropes of hissing drool. The cunning head spewed a jet of acidic bile that sheared through the bars, but the Gold mage twisted his fingers into a defiant gesture and the cage reformed, ornate curling reinforcements spiralling between its bars.
Malhavar stepped forwards and knelt on the scorched ground. ‘Shine on us,’ he murmured, his words somehow carrying over the bellowing of Baudros. ‘Shine through us. Darkness be banished.’
A circle of power shone into existence around Teclis and Malhavar. The bestial head breathed a mass of darkness again, and it swirled around the hemisphere of protective magic cast by Malhavar. The sound was terrible, like an endless roll of thunder.
Teclis raised his hands, and the winds of magic blew through him now. He took the Gold magic coursing through the gilded cage, and brought it down towards Baudros. ‘Sons of Ulthuan!’ he yelled. ‘Hear me! Princes eternal! Stir from your slumber and hear!’
A layer of crackling gold shimmered over Teclis’s right hand. His other hand had a greenish tinge now and flowering roots spiralled around it as the Jade wind blew. Krieglan’s head was bowed, his staff of living wood sprouting leaves and flowers. The ground shuddered and began to heave up, as if a great claw of stone was breaking the surface.
‘Stones of the Lost Isles, rise!’ cried Teclis. The scale of the magic forced him off-balance. The Moon Staff glowed and the War Crown of Saphery burned, flames licking around its jewel.
Standing stones from the Lost Isles of Ulthuan, held immobile there for centuries to channel wild magic away from the Chaos Wastes, rose from the ground. They were smooth with age, cut deeply with words in an archaic form of the elven tongue. Magic burst like lightning between them, forming a fence of stuttering light around the dragon.
The cage descended over Baudros. The dragon’s two heads snapped at the bars, fangs bending them out of shape. A shower of burning stone, meteors from a darkening sky, hammered against the dragon’s faces, driving it back. Ceruleos, the Celestial mage, called down another volley of them, demanding that the stars themselves send their messengers down. Those stars burned overhead, shining through the black clouds gathering in the sky.
Ogmarah cast beams of darkness across the cage, reinforcing its structure as Marius increased the heat of its joints, forging a strength into them that Gold magic alone could not provide. Ferok wrestled with the bestial magic of the Amber wind, forcing down into the ground so it rose up and fought back against the thrashing of the dragon.
The stones continued to rise, forming buttresses around the cage. They rose until their tips touched over its centre. Slabs of purplish crystal shimmered between them as Malgos forced the winds of Amethyst magic through himself. As lightning flashed overhead it seemed to illuminate a grinning skull where Malgos’s face should have been, the chiselled angles of a statue over Auroc’s features, talons of gnarled wood in place of Krieglan’s hands. The aethyr’s connections with them were opening dangerously wide, exposing them to the unpredictable fury of magic’s raw source.
Deafening peals of breaking stone boomed around the crater. Baudros was slamming its bulk against the inside of its cage. Even as the cage solidified around it, the stones shuddered and threatened to fall. Bright sigils burst against the ground, symbols of power cast by Teclis to hold the winds of magic in check as they roared through the crater.
‘The seal, Malhavar!’ yelled Teclis. ‘The seal! By Light alone will it hold!’
Malhavar stood, and the circle of protection around him di
ed down. If Baudros broke free now, Teclis and his pupils would die.
Light dripped from Malhavar’s hands. His flesh was melting, sloughing off his bones and turning to liquid light.
It pooled on the ground and Malhavar’s skeletal fingers beckoned it up into a burning white spike, like a potter forming an object out of clay. It grew higher than Malhavar’s head even as his skin turned dull and cracked, flakes of it floating off to reveal the pure light flowing through the veins and muscle underneath.
‘You are nothing more than an insect, Baudros!’ said Malhavar through clenched teeth. ‘And like an insect, I will pin you down! What burns in you is not flesh, and it cannot be killed, but it can be banished! And so the Light banishes you!’
The lance of light was taller now than the prison. It rose off the ground, dripping undiluted power, and hovered over the prison. Malhavar screamed, light bleeding from his eyes, and drove the spike down through the prison, through Baudros, into the earth.
Baudros was a dragon in the same way that a knight was a suit of armour. The dragon was just the flesh it wore, the shell into which it had crawled to survive outside the aethyr and the Realms of Chaos. A dragon was terrible enough. A Chaos dragon, mutated by the raw magic of the Chaos Wastes, even more so. But Baudros was far worse.
The spike of power driven through it tore open the caul of power that kept its soul intact. Raw emotion, raw magic, the stuff of the aethyr, poured out in a storm that bathed the two mages standing before it. Much of it was formless insanity. But glimpses of the past played out there in that storm, visions trapped in the decaying brains of the dragon Baudros inhabited and the memories of the entity that had come to possess and meld with it.
A battlefield rolled out amid the chaos. The countryside was dotted with keeps and villages, separated by swathes of forest – a land of men, not the Empire but Bretonnia to the west. Mounted knights, banners streaming from their lances, had brought a dragon to battle. That battle was against Baudros, or at least the creature it had once been. It had but one head and was smaller and more lithe, but it was unmistakeably the same beast, with the same colour scales and spiny crests of bone.
It snatched up a knight in its jaws and threw the body aside. A claw crushed down on a riderless warhorse, talons slicing it into three. The dragon waded into the throng around it, and now the scene became clearer – the heaps of torn bodies, those of peasant bowmen and militia, pulped and shredded in gore-filled ruts in the ground.
Lances hit home. Men died swinging hammers and swords into the dragon’s flanks as they surrounded it. The dragon reared up, gulped down a mighty lungful of air and breathed out a torrent of icy vapour over its attackers.
Bodies shattered as they hit the ground. Bolting horses were caught in the roiling fog and cut down as their lungs froze. The visions showed a chill mountain pass now, blood slicked across the jagged rocks. The dragon was hauling its bulk along. Wounds covered one side. Two legs were all but useless and its head drooped on its serpentine neck. Its torn wings would never let it take flight again. With every moment more blood pumped from the tears in its side, and it was surely dying.
Morrslieb, the witch moon, the harbinger of ill, hung framed by the mountain peaks. It shone with greenish light like a beacon, calling the dragon towards it, and the dragon obeyed as if the moon was a great hypnotising eye.
A dismal hollow among the mountains now, a pit of stone where the sun never shone, bounded by soaring cliffs. The dragon lay there among the heaps of primitive cairns, adorned with skulls and the well-gnawed bones of hundreds of skeletons. Symbols of forgotten gods were carved into the rocks by generations of fingernails, cries for salvation from those hurled down there to honour the interred. The only movement from the dragon was the tortured heaving of its lungs. It was going to die there, in this foul and miserable place, the burial ground of some forsaken and wicked people who had long ceased to befoul the world.
From the cairns issued a dark mist, and that mist coalesced into a form something like man, but far bigger, indistinct and ill-proportioned. The dragon’s blood gave it form. Three green eyes burned deep inside it, and a voice issued that was barely distinguishable from the cold hiss of the mountain winds.
Its words were obscure, but its meaning was clear. It was without a body, sustained here only by the ancient hate of those people who had worshipped it. The dragon was going to die there if some supernatural force did not intercede. And between them, they were making a pact.
Teclis drove back the storm with a torrent of arcane words. He unhooked a book from his belt and the winds ruffled through its pages, revealing spells he had inscribed there to conjure light and safety amid the darkness.
The pillar of light transfixed the prison. Baudros was screaming as it burned and the light bored through it. Teclis forced open the clearing in the storm and revealed a painful glare of light concealing Malhavar.
Teclis dropped to his knees and reached into the light. He felt Malhavar sink down to the ground and wrapped an arm around the Light mage’s waist, dragging him back from the storm. Teclis was barely strong enough to support his own weight and he half-crawled, dragging Malhavar behind him.
The light shining off Malhavar was burning and Teclis could barely see. Baudros was bellowing now, the sound like an earthquake, battering its great body against the inside of his cell. The storm raged.
Then, the light died.
Teclis slumped into the mud, what little strength he had suddenly draining out of him. He lay there, willing his limbs to carry him back to his feet, but they would not.
Marius reached him first. The Bright wizard turned Teclis over and though he was talking, Teclis could not make out his words over the ringing in his ears.
Teclis turned his head. The prison was intact, a great structure of gold, stone and crystal, now wrapped around with intricate scrolling bands of silver.
Krieglan, the Jade wizard, was kneeling over Malhavar. Teclis could see a foot protruding from the Light mage’s robes – it was skinless and scorched, like a charred skeleton. Krieglan was turning Malhavar’s head and talking to him.
Words were reaching him now. Marius was asking if he was hurt. Teclis ignored him and crawled to Malhavar’s side.
Half of Malhavar’s face was gone, flaked away revealing scorched bone. His remaining eye turned to Teclis.
‘Do you remember,’ he whispered, ‘what you taught me, loremaster? When I asked you what the Light truly was?’
‘I remember,’ replied Teclis. ‘And so did you, this day.’
‘The Light,’ said Malhavar, ‘is sacrifice.’
Malhavar’s head dropped back and his eye rolled upwards. The spark in it went out. Teclis could feel it go.
‘I can bring him back,’ said Krieglan.
‘No,’ said Teclis. ‘You cannot.’
Krieglan tried anyway. He called forth the few drops of life magic remaining in the tortured earth. Green shoots and flowers burst around Malhavar’s corpse. But the damage was too great. The force of the Light magic burning through him had seared away organs and muscles. There was simply not enough man left for the Jade wind to heal.
‘Light magic is sacrifice,’ said Teclis, putting a hand on Krieglan’s shoulder. ‘Malhavar gave himself willingly. Not even the Jade wind can counter that.’
The Sword Masters ran down from the pavilion and tended to Teclis, carrying him back to the lip of the crater, dripping medicines brewed by Isha’s priestesses onto his tongue. By the time Krieglan walked back out of the crater, Teclis was propped up against the side of his pavilion, Caradryath kneeling beside him and praying to the gods of Ulthuan.
The seven remaining pupils of Teclis stood around him. They were all exhausted. The marks of their magic were on them. Ogmarah’s shadow lagged a few seconds behind him, as if he had conjured so many shadows he did not have enough power left to fuel his own. Auroc’s hands had solidified into golden gauntlets and flecks of gold were embedded in the skin around his eyes.
‘In time,’ said Teclis, ‘you will take pupils of your own. I must return to Ulthuan with my brother, and see to the defence of my lands. Your colleges will stand in the city you see ahead of you, Altdorf, the crossroads of the Empire’s fates. I shall take new pupils and teach them each a fragment of Malhavar’s knowledge, and they will found the Light College as you will all found your own. It will be on this site, and it will be the keystone that holds fast the prison of Baudros. Thousands will walk across this place ignorant of what lies beneath them and how their presence helps keep it imprisoned. In the name of Malhavar, first wizard of the Light Order, this will be done.’
‘It will,’ said Auroc. ‘I shall see to it.’
‘And I,’ said Malgos.
The other mages nodded their assent.
‘Without you, there can be no victory,’ said Teclis. ‘Without men, and magic as they alone understand it. The risks were great. My fellow mages told me it was madness to teach you what we know. But I have seen the threads of fate, and read from them what will happen if men live on in ignorance. You safeguard the knowledge that will keep your race, and all races, alive against the darkness. You are the future. Trust me in this, my pupils, my brothers. Your orders must grow and thrive. Your lives will come to an end, but what you know can never be allowed to die.’
They buried Malhavar near the edge of the crater, a single obelisk raised over his resting place. Already men from Altdorf were filling in the crater, believing it to have been caused by a meteor falling during the strange portents of the previous day. None of them paid much attention to the ceremony happening beside the crater, for without the aethyr-sight the wizards seemed little more than a ragtag band of travellers.
Only Teclis spoke.
‘Our brother Malhavar alone understood the nature of sacrifice,’ he said, as the sun set. ‘That for an evil one to be banished, so must a good one be put beyond our world. That was why it had to be Malhavar. That was why it had to be the Light.’