Contents

Cover

Abraxia: Spear of the Everchosen – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

CHAPTER 1

THE DESCENT

On the eve of the Hour of Ruin and all its upheavals, those massed cataclysms that would be called, in their aftermath, Vermindoom–

On the cusp of that moment, as calamity befell Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, and the Horned Rat rose to take its place among the Dark Gods–

War swept Ghyran, the Realm of Life.

War like scalding summer rain, which tests both body and spirit even as it feeds something hot and vital to the deep-drinking roots of the realm.

At the height of this reaving season, a host of dark riders laid siege to the walls of Verdigris, fledgling city of mortalkind. The city’s exhausted company of cavaliers sallied forth to meet them. They knew from the sight of this ill-omened foe that they went to their doom, but they went willingly, for they knew themselves doomed already. They carried in their breasts the Kingsblood Curse – the bite of the Mad King, Ushoran, cannibal Mortarch of Delusion. In bleeding for Verdigris, they relayed this gift to the enemy’s champion, the most vicious warrior among the invading host. That which had doomed them proved to be their foremost weapon. In bleeding for Verdigris, they gave their people a chance.

The cavaliers were decimated, but their deaths bought enough time for salvation to arrive. An avenging throng of Sylvaneth, fae of the deep forests, scattered the invaders, and then pursued them into the wilderness.

Yet of the dark riders, no trail was uncovered that a hunter might follow. Instead, scorched into the plains beyond the city, the Sylvaneth found only slow-burning sigils, miles wide. This fell inscription marked the aftermath of a ritual, and its nature confirmed the identity of the host’s master. For there was only one who possessed the power to scribe it.

One whose world-breaking war against the gods knows no end. One for whom each apocalypse was naught but prologue to the next.

Archaon.

The Three-Eyed King.

The Everchosen.

Those sigils, carved into the landscape beyond shaken Verdigris, defied rational understanding. But the souls of those who beheld them recognised their fell nature. They sensed that what had been done here had wounded the realm itself, drawn it just a little closer to that howling domain that lurks beyond mortal sight.

They were runes in the Dark Tongue, abhorrent to souls untouched by ruin. They invoked the Rhan’Karr’Oth.

The Sky-Death.

The Blade-of-Gods-Descending.

The Sylvaneth returned to the wild after that. They saw that the Everchosen’s riders had passed beyond their reach. The citizenry of Verdigris soon found themselves facing other foes, other afflictions. Wrath, ruin and warpstone. Hungers both natural and curse-borne.

And above another city, far from Verdigris, the sky split open and began to bleed.

What fell from it was not scalding summer rain.

But hellfire.

And horseflesh.

And her.

She descended upon the pale city, wingless, wreathed in a hissing corona of crimson embers that haloed the bulk of the beast beneath her. A screaming wound in reality split the sky at her back, disgorging warriors. These were clad in cold black iron, as she was, and each clung to the reins of their own monstrous mount, as she did. The sky disgorged hatred also. The animus of the daemon realm chased her in the form of grasping tongues of fire. Each sought to catch her, claim her, draw her back. Yet they could find no purchase. Her armour rebuked them violently, and each lashing attempt only served to temper her hurtling downward momentum.

Thus did she fall, caught at the point where daemonic hunger met the terrestrial gravity of mortal Ghyran. This was the moment of greatest danger, she sensed. The pressure of it closed in on her from above and below, and impressed violent patterns onto her movements. Yet there was power in this turmoil, she knew. Power that awaited its master. Power she needed.

It was a power with many names, across the wide span of the Mortal Realms, and across the great breadth of the cosmos beyond.

It was a power with one name, when the final tally is taken, when the final kill is consecrated. When the final gasp is savoured, and when the final secret is known.

Chaos.

For a moment, hellfire and gravity each regarded her with impassive disdain, and she twisted in the air, feeling the treacherous onset of terminal velocity. A momentary lapse in concentration would see her reduced to something far less than what she was. She refused to be reduced to the status of puppet, or projectile. She would not allow herself to end as a grisly stain upon the stonework of the city beneath her.

At last she found what she was looking for: not balance, nor in every sense control, but dominion over all that might doom her. Her focus wed itself to her unbreakable determination. Upon the axis of her third eye she adjusted her perspective, then craned forward in the saddle, adjusting her posture to mirror the intentional, dangerous vector of her descent. She imposed her own purpose on the circumstances in which she found herself, and she bent the horizon to her will. Her motion steadied, and by her command, falling became charging. Down-towards-death became forward-unto-victory.

White spires struck up towards her, adopting from this impossible angle the aspect of a colossal spear-wall. Defenders amassed upon the roofs and upper galleries of these spires, and raised their bows to her, and swivelled fine-crafted ballistae into position, and greeted her with a biting updraught of aelven steel.

Her black armour rebuked this, too. Shards of splintered silver hung suspended in the air all around her for a moment, then fell, returning to the ground as lacerating rain.

Then, from the walls and boulevards of the ancient city, defenders took wing. Phoenix-riders upon steeds of misting frost and searing flame; wind sorcerers, borne aloft by zephyr-lore and the wrath of the elemental spirits that swelled within and around them. She beheld others, also. She beheld…

Soaring pegasi. The shining tips of lances, blazing at summer’s height. Bright pennants in courtly liveries that swim and shift in the heat haze.

She shook herself free of these phantasms. They were little more than motes of recent, unwanted madness – curse-spores, a manic contagion that was not sacred to her gods. Yet these illusions threatened to take root in her, even so, should she fail to deliver her master’s censure to this place. This pale, mortal city. This Seed of Hope. This Phoenicium.

The curse of the Mad King had been her reward for her failure at the gates of Verdigris. It dissembled in her now, terminal and insidious. Under its sway, she would dream of false things forever.

Bright, summer-touched things. The warmth and sustenance of a well-ordered court. Honour and courtesy.

These were lies, she knew. Fables. Her Dark Gods lay beneath and beyond such ideals, exposing their fragility. She would no more yield to these false promises than she had yielded to any other power or peril in her long life. Yet this latest doom was drawing close. Dangerously close. More imminent than gravity, keener than a blade.

The Everchosen had told her what she must do to avert this fate. The Everchosen had torn the sky asunder, and delivered her here.

To Summercourt.

No, she thought, banishing once again the voice of madness.

To the Temple of the Ur-Phoenix.

To eat the soul of a god.

She willed speed into her descent, focusing her mind on the simplest and most enduring truth available to her: by day’s end she would make a ruin of this place, or fate would make a ruin of her. These were the only outcomes that the Dark Gods would accept. Failure or victory. Doom, one way or the other, for her or for somebody else.

There was nothing new in this. It was all she had ever known.

Beneath her, the mad Thanatorg bucked and snarled. Her monstrous mount wanted to be free. It yearned to hunt and feed, to loose its hungers upon the folk of the city below. Yet the beast had no self-mastery, and it craned its long, reptilian neck and snapped back towards her. In response she lashed out with her boot, driving her black sabaton into the back of the beast’s skull and forcing its eyes downward. A tremble went through the Thanatorg as it yielded to her. Its wide shoulders spasmed, revealing deep abscesses between its scales.

Do you dream of the wings that fate has denied you, creature? she thought.

The beast does not sleep, replied a censorious voice, which emanated from the spear held low at her side. This was not a voice that she heard aloud, nor in her mind, but in her body. It was a weapon’s voice in every respect. It cut deep into her, entering via the palm of her right hand as if her flesh were bare, not gauntleted in iron.

The beast does not know what it is to dream, it continued.

She felt each syllable as a shock of heat and pain. The weapon’s wisdom agonised her forearm, shuddering upward, breaking and resetting each bone in turn. Her armour could do little to thwart its power. Through force of will alone did she halt its potency at her shoulder – before it could wrap itself around her neck.

Before it could crack her skull, again.

Be silent, weapon, she commanded. I have use of you yet.

The weapon had said its piece. It relented, its voice diminishing to a murmur that caused her fingers to shake, wrack and fracture. These were agonies that she withstood always. With this pain, she proved herself.

It was then that the daemon sky loosened its grip on her. She gained speed, falling faster. The spires of the ancient city drew closer, its skyborne defenders drawing closer still. Battle lines began to converge along an impossible, vertical axis. She grinned despite herself. Here was something new – a dimension of war that might test her.

She regarded the battlefield below with a killer’s guile and a general’s eye.

Her gaze fell upon champions of the Phoenix Temple, aglow with power, hope, and desperation as their last day dawned. She saw Realm-lord aelementiri and other cravens of Hysh, here to lay their hypocrisies bare before her despoiling blade.

Her eye fell next upon the heart of the Phoenicium, and the pale city that sprawled outward from it, and the colossal Arborean mountain-tree in whose shadow it had been built. She beheld its ancient, aelven dignity, and snarled.

Tomorrow you will know no shadow but mine, she promised.

Then she heard the rising roar of the horde at her back, whose apocalyptic descent followed in her wake. They were tyrants and warlords all, her riders of ruin, her Swords of Chaos.

They were the Varanguard of the First Circle.

And she was first among them.

She, Abraxia, ascendant pitspawn of taloned Carngrad. Princebreaker. Champion of the Varanspire. Grand Marshal of the First Circle. Spear of the Everchosen.

Beneath her thrashed the mad Thanatorg, godwyrm’s-whelp, deep-terror, hungering always.

And in her hands she held the weapon:

I, accurs’d Gorbolga.

Spear of the Everchosen.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Anastasia Ovchinnikova.

Abraxia: Spear of the Everchosen © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Abraxia: Spear of the Everchosen, 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.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-83609-316-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

For Abby. My darling!

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