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Archaon: Lord of Chaos – Extract

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Prologue

‘At the dawn of the world, wisdom – savage and untamed – was with the beasts. The Dark Gods did not speak to the weakling races. The ferals, the half-breeds and the children of Chaos were sent to show the monster man how to express himself through the beast. And we were forever repaid in blood and hate.’

– Great Bray Gorganhok of the Dark Tongue,
The Lore of the Wilds

Hyborphregor Ice Shelf
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of Scars

The storm had come.

He was there. Among them. At one with the howling gales that swept up sinister shores, through the black spuming peaks and across the Wastes of everlasting ice. Like the rolling thunder of such unnatural tempests, Archaon had travelled far. From one side of the miserable world to the other, he had slain his way south. He had sought out the dark challenge of the Ruinous Powers. He had rescued the artefacts of Chaos from obscurity and the hands of enemies unworthy. All to become the Everchosen of the Dark Gods. The Lord of the End Times. Herald of inescapable Armageddon.

He had butchered those foolish enough to believe themselves chosen. Bestial warlords. Exalted warriors of daemon patronage, with lies bleeding from their poisoned ears. Sorcerers and witches, whose wretched powers could not save them from the cold judgement of Archaon’s blade. He had been the end to monsters and slain what could not be slain. He had slaughtered entire armies, including his own, for their unworthiness. Only those worthy of the apocalypse would join Archaon, as he ushered in the End Times to come. And so here he was. As far to the daemon south as any of manflesh had ever been. Flayed raw by the infernal freeze. Courting madness with the boundless horizon. A willing slave to ceaseless slaughter.

Archaon trudged through the black snow. His armoured boots were wrapped in the furs of some barb-skinned beast, the bony spines of which gave the warrior purchase across the frost and ice. The skies raged away above him, spitting and swirling like a ghostly, maddened creature, chasing its own tail. The armour of Morkar, First Everchosen of Chaos scalded his skin with its raw embrace. Archaon could not feel such pain. He wouldn’t allow it. The common miseries of existence were nothing to him now. With every step he took towards a doom of his own making, he became less of a man and more of an idea. An abstraction. A living misery for others to endure. He was not some character in a great tale told. He was the silence after the words. The covers of the tome slammed shut. The crackle of page and ink on the fire. He was the nevermore.

Holding his shield out before him, Archaon turned the worst of the storm’s fury aside. Splinters of ice shattered against the eight-pointed star of Chaos. The Chaos warlord cut an indomitable figure, smeared in the relentless blizzard, his cloak, loinmail and the furs of shaggy beastfiends he had butchered streaming after him like the tail of a comet. He jangled with skulls on chains that produced a mournful moaning in the wind. A sad and bitter tune for the bodies Archaon left in his wake.

The Chaos warrior’s trudging footsteps slowed. He felt something through the soles of his armoured boots. Through the furs and skins wrapped about them. Through the snow that crunched like charcoal and the obsidian ice that gleamed with darkness. A tremor. A quake. Archaon took several cautionary steps back. The ice was moving. It was rising. The frozen mask that was Archaon’s face creaked its way to a stiff smile beneath his skull-helm. He had found it.

Skidding back down the slope of the buckling ice and cascading snow, he listened to the crack of the ice floe as it shattered beneath him. Like a pair of spearpoints thrusting up through the ice, two mighty pinnacles burst free of the frozen land. They were jagged and sharp, crafted roughly from some kind of volcanic rock. As Archaon stumbled away through an avalanche of snow and ice that threatened to engulfed him, a great palace erupted from the frozen Wastes. Half swimming away from the dark wonder, Archaon peered up at the infernal architecture of the daemon fortress. It allowed both for the perverse flourishes of a Ruinous palace and the jagged crenellations of a fortification. As the ice parted and crumbled, the mighty building shuddered skyward. The gloom of the heavens broiled above it. Strange lights rippled through the maelstrom and lightning cracked between the twin pinnacles and the firmament. It rent the sky asunder.

As the mountainous palace trembled to a stop and the billowing clouds of black snow began to clear, Archaon could make out the strange architecture of the monstrosity. Although it was hewn from sharp, black stone – jagged and irregular – the palace had been crafted in the likeness of a daemon form. The twin pinnacles were both towers and the thumb-claws of great folded wings that formed the building’s mighty walls. A craggy head of infernal horror nestled between them, forming the palace dome, while the broad, muscular body, with its rugged arms, cloven-clawed legs and spiked tail had been crafted crouched as the formidable fortress foundations.

‘I have you now, dissembler…’ Archaon growled, each word a stream of white from his helm.

The Chaos warrior had chased the fortress across the Southern Wastes. For months now – years for all Archaon knew, for time moved with a perverse uncertainty at the bottom of the world – Archaon and his men had drunk the black snow and feasted on nothing but beastflesh.

The continent was overrun with monstrous half-breeds and beastfiends: savage tribes of creatures that were dread fusions of animal and daemon. Hordes that, like their damned brethren hiding in the forests of the Empire, were drawn to the most twisted, gifted and monstrous of their kind. Shamans and beastlords led their great tribes one against the other, for a miserable patch of black ice that they might call their own and the base glory of their fell gods. Archaon had roasted their flesh, worn their bones and daubed his armour with their steaming blood. He had used their hides for warmth and had yoked their barbarian strength as the warlord of united tribes, for the creatures prized victory and dominion above all things. In doing so, Archaon had brought battle to the daemons, monsters and fiend princes that ruled this frozen hell. This beast he had sought alone.

The Forsaken Fortress, it was held, could never be sought out. Never be found. Those who had seen it had simply happened upon its dread form towering out of the Wastes. By the time they had returned to show others their find, the monstrosity had gone. Sunk down once more, below the ice. Daemon palaces and the forts of black ice crafted by the tribal beastfiends could be found across the Wastes, especially in the continental interior. The Forsaken Fortress moved at whim, however. The stone of its construction had come from far below or beyond the ice and was cursed, like the daemon prince to whom it belonged, without permanent form. Be’lakor…

The Shadowlord. The Dark Master. First of the oblivion princes. Harbinger of the Ruinous Powers. Be’lakor, who had always been with him and stalked the Chaos warrior still across the Southern Wastes. Archaon would not be stalked, and resolved to hunt the dark power that hunted him. Perhaps then he might gain answers to his questions. He might learn the locations of treasures of Chaos he had yet to find. The attainment of such would prove his worth to the dread Powers of the world and grant him the title of Everchosen of the Chaos gods. He would be the Lord of End Times and the Herald of the coming apocalypse. Only then would he show man, beast and god the folly of their existence. He would plunge all, his patrons, his enemies and everyone else, into an everlasting darkness. A true oblivion. A place of neither good nor evil where nothing could be won or lost. An eternal nothingness. A kingdom devoid, where not even Archaon would rule.

The daemon prince Be’lakor and his Forsaken Fortress could not simply be found, since none knew where the damned palace would appear. Archaon had been forced to trust his wanderings to uncertainty. To the potion-fuelled ramblings of Bray Shaman, the interpretations of auroral ghostlights, the bargains of daemon princes, cursed with the telling of truths and the riddles of his wizened sorcerer Sheerian. Khezula Sheerian, who had served the Great Changer. Sheerian, whose advice had seen Archaon slaughter his own army and sent the Chaos warrior into the jaws of the Chaos dragon Flamefang. Whose reading of ghostlights, shamanic ramblings and infernal lies now sent Archaon into danger again. Into the lair of daemon royalty. Into the clutches of a creature that had watched them from afar with doom-hungry eyes.

Such miserable intelligence placed the Forsaken Fortress on the Hyborphregor Ice Shelf. The enchanted jewel, the Eye of Sheerian, confirmed its disappearance from where it had been last reported amongst the fiery peaks of the coast. With this, Archaon had set off for the daemon palace. Leaving his bestial army with Eins and his Swords of Chaos, with the storm-wracked skies making flight for the warriors impossible, Archaon had been forced to cross the midnight ice on tuskgor-dragged sleds and mounted on strange daemon steeds. He had killed them all, pushing the creatures with such unrelenting ferocity across the frozen wilderness. The final leg of the journey Archaon had trudged on his own, insisting on no less fortitude from himself than the beasts he had sent to an icy grave.

Now that he was standing before it, there didn’t appear to be a way into the daemon palace. This made a perverse kind of sense to the Chaos warrior. What need such a creature for a gate, door or portcullis at the front of his palace? Why risk such a weakness in fortification, when monsters, roaring armies of bestial half-breeds or daemonic foes might happen upon the Forsaken Fortress and attack? Why not offer them the indomitability of solid rock?

Scrutinising the towering fortress, with the glass storm raging uselessly about it, Archaon saw that half way up the structure, below the daemon dome of the palace, was a great carving in the stone. The eight-pointed Ruinous Star of Be’lakor’s calling, across the dread architecture of the daemon’s chest. It was the same star that adorned Archaon’s shield. Like the Chaos warrior, the daemon prince served doom in all its forms, not favouring one dark god over another. At the centre of the star, however, Archaon saw a sliver of light. A weakness. A crack in the stone, as though the mighty fortification had been breached. Within, the blue ghoulishness of unnatural light shone.

Archaon shouldered his shield and clawed his way up through the snowbank. He had come this far. The Forsaken Fortress would not forsake him. If the thing attempted to descend into the ice it would have to take him with it. Where the ice and palace foundations met the snow steamed. When he reached out to it, the stone felt strange against his gauntlets. It wasn’t the searing cold he had come to expect. Through the metal of his fingertips, the fortification felt warm, as though heated by some infernal fire within. Hauling himself up the precipitous wall and using the crooks and crannies of the volcanic stone for finger and toeholds, Archaon climbed the daemon palace. With the architecture crafted to resemble the infernal prince himself, Archaon felt as if he were ascending the mountainous form of a titan or god.

Sidling along jagged ledges, dragging himself up by his fingertips and leaping for razor-edged purchase, Archaon climbed the stone perversion. When he reached the bottom point of the Ruinous Star, he hauled himself into the great arrowhead cut into the stone. From there he settled his armoured back against one side of the carved shaft forming the arrow and both his boots and gauntlets against the other. Braced between the rock, the Chaos warrior shimmied and scraped his way up the centre of the star, where he found the sliver of an opening. It did not appear to be part of the infernal design. If anything, it looked like damage. The fortress seemed to have been stabbed in the heart. Passing his shield through first and angling his horned helm, Archaon slid his backplate, breastplate and muscular torso through the cleft in the rock.

Within the daemon palace, the sound of the blizzard died to nothing and Archaon was bathed in a dull blue light. It was impossible to tell where the ghoulish illumination came from, since there were no brands or torches. The floor possibly, or the walls. These, unlike the rock-like architecture of the exterior, were smooth. The lines of the chamber flowed. Everything was rounded and organic, as though the ribs, bones and spikes of the daemon’s skeleton had been reproduced within.

Taking the weight of his shield, Archaon drew Terminus. The templar blade smouldered in the gloom of the palace. The Sigmarite sword had travelled with its wielder to hell and back. It had sparked blade to blade with daemon swords and been buried in the corruption of the doubly-damned. Its metal and the carved iconography of the God-King had been stained by the slaying of thousands in the name of the Ruinous Powers… and still a little of its nobility remained. In the deep strength of the blade, the trueness of its cleaving edge and the ring of its metal off enemy steel, it still carried some of the calibre of its former calling. Despite this, and in some ways because of it, there was no blade Archaon would rather have between him and a foe. Indeed, to the daemon and the damned, the sword still stank of faith and burned the flesh with its cold virtue.

Leading the way with the faintly glowing blade, Archaon moved through the rib-lined chambers and rachidian passageways of the palace. He was focused. He was ready. Should any daemon servant proceed from the darkness or rush him from the strange architecture, the dark templar would cleave them in two. There was nothing, however. No horrors haunted the palace. No things waited for him in the shadow. The Forsaken Fortress seemed empty. Yet Archaon felt like he was being watched. The darkness that afflicted the lengths of bone-lined corridors was a mirror through which he could not see but could be seen.

You are far from home…

The voice was everywhere. The boom was bottomless, like the abyss, and the words seethed like hellish flame. It was a voice he had known his whole life yet had never heard… until now.

The Chaos warrior moved across a large chamber, looking about him. He slowly turned and swished Terminus all around. He peered into the dark recesses of alcoves. He crooked his neck to look back the way he had come, the path now lost to shadow. As he moved through the nightmarish interior of the palace, the murk receded to reveal a large figure in the centre of the chamber. Like the Forsaken Fortress, it was horned, cloven-clawed and broad of wing. To Archaon, it appeared to be a replica of the fortress in miniature.

At first, he took it for the daemon overlord of the palace itself, but as his shuffled steps and defensive turns took him closer, he saw the infernal figure for what it was. A throne. Crafted from the same rough stone as the palace in which it sat. The daemon prince’s crouching legs formed the seat, its star-scarred chest the back and its clasped talons the arms. The horned horror that was the daemon’s grotesque head formed a kind of crafted crown, while the leathery, outstretched wings, hewn from volcanic rock, gave the throne a hellish grandness. For all its imposing abomination, the throne was empty, like the palace.

‘I am where I need to be, daemon,’ Archaon answered back finally. His words returned to him with a strange quality, echoing through the torturous skeletal structure of the daemon palace.

That is more true than you can ever know. Though not many who have sought out the Forsaken Fortress have found it.

‘I am Archaon,’ the Chaos warrior spat, angling his helm about the dark entrances to the chamber. ‘I am the chosen of the Dark Gods and the end to the entire world. Nothing is beyond me.’

I am beyond you, chosen one.

‘And yet here I stand, Be’lakor,’ Archaon spat. ‘I have your name, daemon. I have all your names. Shadowlord. Dark Master. Cursed of the Ruinous Gods. You, who have watched me from oblivion, like the craven being you are. I stare back, abyssal thing. I see you now, daemon prince, though there be little or nothing to see. And here I stand, before your cursed throne within your cursed castle.’ Archaon waved Terminus at the darkness in invitation. The blade smouldered with expectation. ‘Time for us both to take a closer look, don’t you think? If I’m lucky, as with your palace, I might get to see inside.’

As Archaon turned, his weapon ready, his good eye and the darksight of his ruined socket everywhere, he set his afflicted gaze once more on the mighty throne. In it, crafted in his own image, sat the insanity that was the daemon Be’lakor within a rocky palace that was the same.

‘Daemon,’ Archaon told it. ‘You have an undue fascination with yourself.’

The beast laughed. It was horrible to hear. Like the deep torment of rock and earth, as the land quakes and continents heave.

And with you…

As the creature spoke, the blue inferno burning within him escaped his ugly maw.

‘I’m here to put an end to that, creature,’ the dark templar told it, moving slowly and steadily in on the thing in the throne. A great infernal blade of jagged black steel stood upright before the throne, held in place by the loosely clasped talon of the stone arm. The daemon prince’s own claw rested on the pommel spike of the weapon.

Oh, you are, are you?

‘But first you will give me the satisfaction of all that is unknown to me, but known to you,’ the Chaos warrior threatened.

You want secrets…

‘I want truths,’ he told it. ‘And I’ll have them, even if I have to cut them out of you, dread thing.’

The living truth that is Archaon, chosen of the Chaos gods.

‘Aye.’

Archaon moved in. The daemon prince reared from his throne of stone, dragging his colossal blade with him. The beast’s wings spread and he thrust his ferocious daemon head forward, shaking the crown of horns as he spoke.

Well you can’t have it, mortal, Be’lakor roared at him, his words searing with hellfire. You impudent worm – bold of word but feeble of flesh.

‘I thought you might say that,’ Archaon returned. As Be’lakor dragged the tip of his infernal blade across the floor of the throne room and turned it upright in his claws, the Chaos warrior did the opposite. Turning Terminus about in his gauntlets, he aimed the point of the crusader blade at the floor. ‘See, you can’t give what you don’t have, daemon.’

Archaon stabbed his Sigmarite sword straight down into the floor of the throne room. Instead of turning the blade tip aside like the smooth rock it appeared to be, the material admitted its length with a shower of sparks. The blade steamed with the honour of its past deeds in the name of the God-King. The stone about it began to bubble and churn. Be’lakor let out a roar that descended into a hideous shriek. The palace trembled about Archaon and the daemon. It shuddered. It quaked. The daemon prince clutched his chest and crashed to his knees. The Ruinous Star scarred into his flesh steamed also. The infernal blade tumbled from his grip, falling straight through the floor with a splatter of stone, as though it had been dropped into a lake.

Archaon turned his greatsword in the broiling stone of the wound. Be’lakor screeched. His wings flapped and his spine arched. His knees sank into the floor and his claws trailed stringy stone where he had splashed the morphing material in his infernal agonies.

‘Now we’re talking,’ Archaon told the daemon. ‘This is a language that both of us can understand.’

Be’lakor’s claws tore at his daemon form. He was becoming one with his surroundings. In the throes of white-hot pain and the purity that still afflicted the crusader sword’s steel, he was changing. The palace was also losing its consistency. Liquid rock glooped and streamed from the ceiling while the ribs and bones contorted within the structure. Be’lakor and palace were as one. Except neither were Be’lakor.

‘Your name, daemon,’ Archaon demanded as his sword burned in the monster’s flesh. Its wings and features dribbled away. The creature sank into the floor. Into itself. It splashed like a flailing swimmer before thrashing beneath the surface of the stone. Its face rippled through the horrific visage of a thousand other diabolical things. Archaon pulled Terminus from the daemonflesh. For a moment everything was silent. The shrieking agony that shook the palace was gone. The Forsaken Fortress had melted to a ruptured, contorted mess.

Archaon lost his footing as the floor seemed to sink through the palace. The Chaos warrior turned the greatsword about in his grip, aiming its tip back at the floor at his feet. Like a corpse in a river, the daemon floated to the surface of the stone. It was a lesser thing now. A thing of arms and hidden form, lost within the twisting folds of a hooded shroud. As the colour of the stone bleached from it, the daemon began to move.

Archaon lifted Terminus higher, indicating his intention to bury the Sigmarite sword in the creature’s extended form once more, but the walls liquefied about him. The palace cascaded around him towards the ice floe. The fingers of one puny arm begged him to desist. The razor gales of the Southern Wastes and blizzards of splintered ice once again intruded on the scene. Archaon was standing in a sea of stone. The sea retracted to a lake. Then the lake to a puddle about the daemon until finally the thing held only its own form. Archaon stepped forward, holding his shield before the maelstrom and Terminus high above his head.

‘Enough of your tricks, dissembler,’ the dark templar told it. ‘Your name.’

‘Long forgotten,’ the creature managed. ‘Along with the face that it belonged to.’

‘Well, Changeling,’ Archaon roared through the howling wind. ‘It matters not that you are known. Only what you know.’

‘You sought me out?’

‘Yes, daemon,’ Archaon said. ‘It is said by the bestial shamans and diabolical creatures of this land that you are a deceiver and that you meddle in the great affairs of this dark world. That you hold a looking glass to both the damned and the damning and that you become what is seen.’

‘I have my questionable gifts, Archaon,’ the Changeling hissed, ‘as the chosen of the Ruinous Powers must have his own.’

‘Then you have held your glass to the infernal prince I seek,’ Archaon said, circling the prostrate monstrosity with his sword as snowfall gathered about the daemon.

‘I have studied him.’

‘Why, darknid thing? Speak and live to hold your mirror again.’

‘It pleases my master…’ the Changeling told him. ‘…the great Lord Tzeentch, to have the Dark Master’s ambitions frustrated.’

‘And so you impersonate Be’lakor, his form, his fortress.’

‘To god-pleasing perfection.’

‘You are a twisted thing, Changeling,’ Archaon told the daemon, ‘on a crooked path to nowhere.’

‘It is my fate,’ it told him. ‘It is the fate of all the Great Changer’s servants.’

‘So I was told by the monstrosities that led me to you,’ Archaon said. ‘Your damned journey, your twisted path, might not be any use to you, lost one. But it might be to me. Archaon, chosen of all the Dark Gods. Choose, Changeling. Assist me or accept that your journey ends here, with my sword as your grave marker, at some Byzantine crossroads on your lost path.’

Archaon grabbed the daemon by the lengths of its twisted shroud and dragged it over to a black snowbank that offered a little shelter from the storm. In the depths of the snowbank’s shadow, the blizzard died to a whisper. Archaon stared at the daemon. About them the southern continent was a blasted winter wasteland of warped confusion. The shredding splinters of ice drifted to the ground and stopped. The snow began to creak and freeze about them as the temperature plummeted. Archaon’s plate scorched his skin with the abyssal cold. He tensed as the daemon creature before him got to its feet in the snow. Subtle but horrific changes were taking place inside the depths of the thing’s hooded shroud. Something more resilient to the benumbing surroundings. ‘Don’t test me, warped servant of Tzeentch.’

‘As I said,’ it told him, ever at change beneath the frosted folds, ‘it pleases my master to frustrate the daemon prince you seek. How may I assist you, great Archaon?’ The Chaos warrior nodded. Satisfied.

‘You have studied Be’lakor?’

‘As I have studied all whose flesh I assume,’ the Changeling said. ‘As I have studied you, Archaon, whose boundless ambition surpasses even your ageless father-in-shadow.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I say too much, perhaps,’ the Changeling tittered. Archaon shook his helm slowly. The Chaos warrior had crossed the surface of the known world and had travelled to hell and back. His experiences – the dark truths, the betrayals and the slaughter – had long washed anything approaching sentimentality from his cursed bones. There were truths he must know, however, even about himself, if he were to proceed in his apocalyptic quest.

‘You say what your Ruinous master wants you to say,’ Archaon told the Tzeentchian monstrosity. ‘You are a miserable messenger. No more. So, let us play your dark lord’s game. You mentioned my father. To which I am supposed to reply, “I never knew my father”. Or my mother, for that matter. I’m an orphan. Abandoned on the steps of an Imperial temple. A temple of the thrice-cursed God-King.’

‘Your mother was a nothing,’ the Changeling told Archaon. ‘Baseborn. Simple. Unremarkable. Unclouded of heart in a way our foetid kind abhor. The kind of heart our masters revel in corrupting.’

Archaon burned into the Changeling with an unswerving gaze.

‘But they never got the chance.’

‘No,’ the Changeling said. ‘Her blood is on you, Archaon. She died in birth. In the labours of delivering the apocalypse to the world.’

Archaon’s gauntlet creaked about the hilt of Terminus. The Tzeentchian servant was enjoying this.

‘And my father?’

‘You have had several, Archaon,’ the creature told him. ‘The wretch whose wife you took and then left to raise your youngling brothers.’

‘I have brothers?’

‘Half-brothers,’ the Changeling cackled. ‘But they are long dead, Archaon. You have outlived them, chosen one.’

‘My father?’

‘Is Be’lakor, of course,’ the Changeling’s cackle became a howling laugh. Archaon surged forwards and landed a heavy kick in the creature’s midriff with an armoured boot. The impact smashed the daemon back, sending it tumbling through the black snow. Archaon stomped after it, standing over its broken form. The Changeling did not get up. It coughed. It wheezed. It choked and spat daemon blood from the recesses of its shroud. The blood sizzled on the ice.

‘The passion of the present will not undo the painful truths of the past,’ the Changeling told him.

‘Be’lakor.’

‘You are his, chosen one,’ the thing coughed. ‘Did you not question, not for once, what you have achieved and how you could have achieved it? Out of the thousands, nay millions of lowly creatures of this world that ache for the power to challenge their stars and change their fate, why should it have been you? Why should you have risen from obscurity? Why should you be the chosen, the Everchosen of Chaos? The Herald of the Apocalypse… the Lord of the End Times?’

‘Then I am…’

‘Nothing… something… everything,’ the Changeling hissed from within its hood. ‘Like me, like all who serve the powers of light and the powers of darkness, you will be what you are needed to be. Have no doubt, though, Archaon of the distant Empire. You are blessed with daemon lineage. You are the son of a prince, chosen one – which in some corners of this foetid world would make you a prince in your own right. You are special not just because of what you made of yourself and your circumstances. Look at you. You stand where no mortal man has stood before. You are undoubtedly an indomitable soul. You are also special because of what others made of you and the circumstances of their own. Principally, your father-in-shadow.’

Archaon leaned in. The tip of Terminus reached into the Changeling’s hood. The daemon leaned back into the black slush.

‘And what does my father want of me?’ Archaon asked through clenched teeth. ‘You have been him. You must know. Why does he stalk me? What does this thing of darkness want?’

‘What he has always wanted,’ the Changeling answered. ‘From the dawn of time. What my master, the Great Changer denied him. To command the legions of hell. To be the master of the entire world again. To subvert my master’s curse of eternal servitude and be the Everchosen of the Chaos gods.’

‘What does that have to do with me?’ Archaon growled.

‘Everything, I suspect,’ the Changeling said before the seething steel of Archaon’s sword. ‘But in truth, I do not know. Some daemon secrets are buried deep, beyond even my arch-powers of study and reproduction. You are wrong, Archaon. I deceive. I do not become. The infernal and almighty have a way of showing you everything, yet truly telling you nothing. Unlike my Ruinous master, I cannot be all and know all.’

‘I don’t believe you, deceiver,’ Archaon told the daemon.

‘That is irrelevant,’ the wretched creature said. ‘I have told you all I know. The rest you must ask of your father-in-shadow, himself. For only he knows.’

Archaon held the Changeling there. The deep freeze of the Southern Wastes crept up through their bones. ‘I have done what you have asked, chosen of Chaos. Destroy me,’ the daemon said finally. ‘Or release me.’

Archaon considered.

‘Before I make that decision,’ the Chaos warrior said. ‘One more thing. You must know Be’lakor’s palace, to have reproduced it so faithfully. Where is it, Changeling?’

The daemon hissed its hatred at Archaon.

‘The Forsaken Fortress appears and disappears at perverse whim,’ the creature told him.

‘This I know already.’

‘Sometimes it remains for weeks,’ the Changeling said, ‘sometimes for seconds. Right now it sits on the Pustular Plain.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Tis a realm far to the west,’ the Changeling said. ‘Where the ice melts to a boggy tundra about a rash of volcanic peaks that suppurate and ooze with disease.’

‘How might I reach such a damned place?’ Archaon asked.

‘By travelling south…’

‘You said it was far to the west,’ Archaon growled.

‘You could never reach the Pustular Plain on foot,’ the Changeling told him. ‘And certainly not trailing an army of beastfiends. The journey is far and the geography between here and there challenging and ever changing. By wing, by sled, by exhausted step you could not make it in time.’

‘Then what could?’

‘In the south, close to the continental interior towards which you have waged war, you will find other daemon palaces.’

‘About the Gate?’

‘The Gatelands,’ the Changeling said, ‘Yes… there you will find the palace of the daemon lord Agrammon. He keeps an infamous menagerie in the palace grounds, housing every dread creature imaginable. His prize possession is Dorghar, daemonic Steed of the Apocalypse. You will need to gain entry to the palace, steal the beast and break it. For it is the only creature I know can make the journey to the Pustular Plain in the time you may or may not have.’

Archaon turned his helm to one side and peered down at the Changeling, attempting to penetrate the depths of its hooded shroud. With sudden violence the Chaos warrior stepped forwards, putting a boot on the daemon’s chest and forcing it down into the black slush. He held Terminus above the creature.

‘The Steed of the Apocalypse,’ Archaon seethed.

‘The fourth treasure of Chaos,’ the Changeling cackled, the information forced from him.

Archaon marvelled for a dread moment. The fourth treasure of Chaos. He had been traversing obsidian and ice for longer than he could remember. Slaying daemons. Butchering beastfiends. Searching. Ever searching. It was one of the reasons he was seeking out Be’lakor, the oblivion prince. Answers. It seemed now he would have them. The eternally burning Mark of Chaos that he wore on his flesh. The fabled armour of Morkar that clad that flesh. The Eye of Sheerian, the sorcerous jewel retrieved from the Chaos dragon Flamefang, now safely ensconced in the skull-face of his battlehelm. All great artefacts of darkness that had belonged to former champions of evil. Those who had borne the blessing of the Ruinous Powers in equal measure. Those who had achieved the title ‘Everchosen of Chaos’. The fourth was a steed worthy of such a warrior. A steed he would tame and who, in turn, would carry him across the Southern Wastes to the Forsaken Fortress.

‘And you were going to tell me this when?’ Archaon roared at the Changeling.

‘You never asked,’ the daemon said silkily. It was true. Archaon hadn’t. The Chaos warrior grunted. Taking his boot from the creature’s chest, he started to trudge back through the snow and rising storm. He had left his army of beastfiends many leagues distant. His winged Swords had been grounded in the storm and, although hardy and ferocious, the monstrous half-breeds that made up his horde were riotous and slow. It was the reason the Chaos warrior had set off alone in the first place. Archaon heard the daemon Changeling’s harsh laughter on the frozen air.

‘Beware, Archaon,’ the Tzeentchian wretch said. ‘The daemon lord Agrammon is a slaver. Take care you do not become part of his infernal collection.’

‘To hell with you, daemon,’ Archaon snarled, holding his shield once more before the shredding gales.

But they were already there.

‘Beyond the maps and charts of man,
where gold lies cold and unplundered,
there lies a bleak and hellish land,
of savage darkness and thunder.

No tree or forest ever grows
in this lightless realm of cold,
a land of ice and midnight snow –
scorched by storms of shrieking souls.

Through swarms of beasts and frenzied fiends,
fights a man who has travelled far –
in him the end comes to these lands,
in search of signs and treasures dark.

A wretched place that knows no peace,
before his blade dread daemons fall –
to his banner flock bands of beasts:
a monstrous horde behind him forms.

He leads them through an ancient gate –
a raging portal overwhelmed –
through which his destiny awaits:
passage to an abyssal realm.’

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

Chapter I

‘The Great Beast is the land’s fury to vent,
Decimation for others to know.
He is the topless mountains’ torment
And unending desolation’s woe.’

– The Cloven Tribal Chant

The Haemorrhagia
The Southern Wastes
Horns Harrowing: Season of the Raw

Archaon went south. Ever south. The ice froze to breaking beneath his boots and the air seethed with burning lethality. The wind howled its mournful goading and the heavens churned their black intention. The chosen of the Dark Gods pushed on through the midnight drifts, the skins and furs trailing about his plate crisp with the biting freeze. Behind him the Swords of Chaos trudged, their black wings held before them to deflect the worst of the snow carried on the burning gales. Decked out in a hotchpotch collection of plate and mail scavenged from daemonic foes felled in Archaon’s path and furs skinned from shaggy half-breeds, they had the appearance of frosted gargoyles. Eins. Zwei. Drei. With the misshapen Vier, twisted to grotesquery, stomping up behind them. His malformed wings, now useless for flight, were extended about Giselle.

Giselle Dantziger. Former Sister of the Imperial Cross. Giselle, who had carried from the Hammerfall the Liber Caelestior – heavy with the secrets of Archaon’s future and inescapable damnation – and changed the fate of all the world. The friend whom Archaon had made prisoner. The prisoner whom Archaon had taken as a lover. The girl who was in equal parts his death and salvation. Whose heart, even in this damned place, still beat with simple devotion to the God-King who had abandoned her touch. Whose touch was torment, burning with an indomitable purity. Whose touch Archaon could not seem to live without. She tripped and stumbled under the weight of the furs in which Archaon had buried her. Woolly hides that he had skinned from the shaggy beastfiends of the continental interior and that had formerly protected the half-breeds from the murderous cold.

With his other twisted wing, Vier did his best to protect Khezula Sheerian from the maelstrom. Sheerian, daemonic sorcerer of Tzeentch. To whom the third treasure of Chaos, the enchanted jewel, the Eye of Sheerian had belonged. The ancient carried himself with perpetual pain and the burden of a wizened body. Hunched and using his bone staff to drag the deformity of a bird’s leg through the snow, his filthy robes were a patchwork of sinew-sewn skins and a cloak of heavy black fur. His age-mottled skull was bare to the broiling heavens and the lustrous strands of his moustache trailed behind him in the harsh wind.

Whereas Archaon found that he loved Giselle but in turn was hated by her, the Chaos warrior simply hated Sheerian. Despite his animosity towards the sorcerer, Archaon had found the daemon to be a useful guide. In the depths of the Southern Wastes, where the beast hordes, long-forgotten monstrosities and the dangerous daemons of Chaos held sway, Sheerian’s survival depended as much on Archaon’s sword arm and savage leadership as Archaon’s depended upon the sorcerer’s dark counsel. The sorcerer had his uses. As he hungered for his precious Eye, its intoxicating gift of farsight and the secrets of the world it revealed, Archaon ached for the further treasures of the Ruinous Gods. The artefacts of darkness through which Archaon would earn the dread title Everchosen of Chaos. Sheerian’s cursed knowledge, sorceries and his interpretation of the Eye’s enchanted sights had helped to keep them from harm.

He had guided his worldly master (for beyond Archaon, Sheerian served no other than the dreaded Tzeentch) on towards his destiny. He had revealed the Gore Glacier, the treachery of Algis-Kar and the dark secrets of the Winter King. It had been Sheerian who had revealed the treachery of the daemonic thing Archaon had come to know as the Changeling, and in doing so had not only learned the location of the oblivion prince Be’lakor, but had also betrayed a brother Tzeentchian. If the Great Changer hadn’t been such a twisted entity of unfathomable evil, Sheerian might have feared an infernal retribution. As it was, Archaon half suspected the sorcerer would receive some warped gift or malformed blessing instead.

Thunder crashed across the skies. Lightning slashed the firmament in two, throwing Archaon’s army into impossible shadow against the obsidian ice of the Southern Wastes. A wretched cavalcade of shaggy hide, horn and muscle. Archaon’s horde was an army of beasts.

The Southern Wastes were all but unknown by the men of the east and west and avoided by the elder races. Only the daemon, the monster and the beastman swarmed its black ice floes and mountainous wilderness. Tribes of savage half-breeds fought for warmth in their bones, flesh in their bellies and territorial supremacy. Many were ice barbarians, who wore the frost-threaded furs of conquered enemies and wielded primitive weapons of bone and stone. With no ‘men’ in the Southern Wastes there were no true ‘beastmen’, such as Archaon had encountered everywhere else on his doomed travels. The creatures of the Southern Wastes were an eye-stinging fusion of beast and lesser daemon, the infernal entities that plagued the benighted wilderness with their malevolence. They were beastfiends, led by the foetid best of their kind. Brutes blessed with either dark cunning or murderous might. Shamans who read tribal destinies in blood-splatters on the snow, the distant serration of mountain peaks and the crooks of exotic lightning that afflicted the skies. Beastlords, tyrant-gors and infernal bulls of brazen horn and mountainous muscle. Some suffered the specific sponsorship of Ruinous Gods, with monstrous mongrels and daemon princes leading warherds of the warped, the diseased, the obscene or the blood-mad.

Archaon had united many of the beasts, as was his gift. He was an exalted champion of darkness and the children of Chaos could see that. When confronted with one chosen of the Ruinous Pantheon, they expressed themselves in varying ways. Many simply attacked, like the wild things they were. Deep in their tainted flesh they needed to test him or at least sacrifice their herdkin on the altar of his dark sovereignty. Others had been warned of his coming by shamans and dread prophets, and lent Archaon their horde-strength out of the perversion of spiritual sympathies. Others still saw the growing army coming out of the north, with Archaon at its head, and felt fear or admiration. They saw opportunities for savage communion with their dread deities in the wars to come. The slaughter that seemed to find the champion of Chaos. The unending brutality that stalked his benighted plate and the god-bane of his steel. The butchery that seemed forever in his path.

Some said in their beast tongue that he was uniting the tribes and warherds of the Southern Wastes under a single banner of eternal bloodshed. Some that he was leading them to greater glory about the infernal palaces of the pole – to the Great Gate and the oblivion beyond. To promised lands of fresh suffering and slaughter that they had never known. A few even whispered, with their thick tongues and fang-crowded jaws, that Archaon intended to end the world – and not just the world, but all the worlds that were and would ever be. And man, beast and god would come to know their end at his hand and the power of catastrophe he wielded with it. Whatever the truth, the half-breeds of the Southern Wastes fought, they failed and they fell in behind the droves of beastfiends, pack monsters, centigors and the caravans of herd-sleds that churned up the black snow in Archaon’s wandering wake.

Behind the train of beastfiends, which hoof-trudged, snaggled, butted and roared at one another, shaking their primitive skull-cleavers and bellowing crude threats, another trampled through the snow. He wore only the skins that others had lain across his sharp shoulders and the penitent chains that had always cut into his emaciated form. About his gaunt features and the wild-eyed stare of madness and devotion, he wore a cranial cage. The kind favoured by zealots and flagellants. The kind favoured by Gorst, who had followed his master across both the known and unknown world, from long before he was the abominate Archaon.

Gorst still bore the sacred Hammer of Sigmar, inked into his flesh and hanging as pendants of faith from his rusted restraints. These drew spitting, savagery and monstrous threats from the slaves to darkness about him, as they always had. Beyond their disgust that had long soaked into his skins and the barging snorting and bare-blade threats issued to the mad man, the beastfiends seemed suspicious and uncertain of Gorst. There was something about the symbols of goodly faith, or perhaps the way the lunatic Gorst wore them, that prompted mongrels and infernal creatures to bellow and snort their derision before stomping away. Perhaps Gorst, the all but skeletal man-thing, soft and vulnerable, was simply not worth the trouble. Or perhaps it was because dashing out his brains with a butt or the bulbous head of a femur-club would be far too much trouble as Archaon, who favoured the wretch, would savagely end them for such an affront.

As Archaon slowed, peering through the maelstrom at the light on the horizon, the Chaos warrior gestured for the sorcerer Sheerian, Eins and the beastlord Moraq Half-Horn to come forward. Sheerian struggled with his hunch and his leg through the snow to catch his master up.

‘My lord?’ the ancient managed through the storm. Eins was with him, but as usual the winged warrior did not speak. Like a dark angel he simply drew level with Archaon and matched him step for step like a sentinel or shadow. Moraq Half-Horn dug his sharpened hooves into the sides of the woolly rhinox he was riding. Sitting behind the scrawny beast’s shoulder-hump and with reins of sinew guiding the twin horns erupting from the creature’s snout, Moraq joined them. Archaon’s barbarian horde was made of beastfiends of all the fell tribes he had conquered and the warherds that had joined his number for the honour of the coming slaughter. Many beastlords and chieftains led this assortment of mongrel creatures, routinely fighting one another for the right to lead the horde in Archaon’s name and to report to the Chaos warlord directly. This changed on an almost daily basis. Today it was Moraq Half-Horn.

Moraq urged his rhinox on. The animal was a shaggy, scabrous thing with a will of its own and it fought the beastfiend chieftain for control. Moraq shook his daemonic skull, with its single horn that erupted from one bony temple to curve beneath the creature’s own snout like a crescent. He bellowed and savagely kicked at the beast until it settled.

‘What is that?’ Archaon put to them with brute impatience. Eins remained silent but Sheerian attempted to wrap his thin, cracked lips around the dark tongue spoken by the beastfiends. With no men to afflict their monstrous wilderness there had been no need or opportunity to learn the languages of men. Archaon had found it easier to have the sorcerer translate his demands through the beastfiend’s own tribal tongue. This became more difficult still, given that the beast language of barbarian tribes and warherds were given to regional variations of their own across the continent. Archaon had been a scholar as well as a warrior in his previous calling as a templar of Sigmar, and over time had picked up the basics of the brute tongue. This did not stop him tormenting Sheerian with the duty of translation. Archaon listened to the sorcerer and the beastlord Moraq exchange savage, angry words through the cacophony of the storm.

‘He says it’s called the Haemorrhagia, my lord,’ Sheerian told him. ‘’Tis a region of quakes and ruptures, where the land fights itself and the black blood of the earth bubbles up from the depths. ’Tis a birthing place of daemons, awash with pitch and flame.’

‘A place to warm our bones and camp perhaps,’ Archaon put to them. Again there was a furious jabbering between the two, replete with grunts, snarls and apparent cursing.

‘He says that it is the territory of the Skullfest,’ Sheerian explained. ‘The bloodied gorfiends of Khorne. They celebrate their allegiance to the Blood God by taking the skulls of half-breeds from neighbouring tribes and daemons that crawl out of the birthing grounds.’

‘And who leads this Skullfest?’ Archaon demanded. Moraq told them.

‘Ograx the Great,’ Sheerian translated. ‘Daemonkin of Z’rughl Ka’kadron’ath the Brassbound, Bloodthirster of Khorne.’ Archaon nodded his helm. The Chaos warrior seemed satisfied. ‘We could always go around, my lo–’

‘No,’ Archaon growled. ‘My destiny will not wait on mongrels and skulltakers. We will go through these tormented lands. We will see how great this Ograx really is. We shall see if he lives up to his father’s reputation. If he does not, it will be his skull honouring the Blood God and his lands.’

Archaon pulled away from the group once more, his boots crunching through the black snow. ‘Ready the horde, Moraq.’ As Archaon spoke, Sheerian translated his savage orders into beastspeak. ‘And pass the word. No snow and scraps for your dark kindred. They feast on red meat tonight.’

The beastfiend bellowed its acknowledgement and hauled its monstrous steed around. Archaon looked back at the infernal glow rising from the dark horizon. ‘Onwards,’ the warlord commanded before pushing on through the snow. Each trudging step took him into the quake-tormented lands of the Haemorrhagia. The black blood of the earth oozed up through the ice, where it took to flame and brought warmth to the glacial darkness. The frozen insistence of the continent interior tried its best to douse the fires of the ruptured ice and land. Flames roared, guttered and hissed in blizzard and storm. The fury of the earth’s hellish interior would not be denied, however. Soon great pits and raging fissures opened about them, forcing the horde cavalcade to slog, weave and sled through the fiery torment. Archaon began to sweat in his heavy furs and armour and, although it was a discomfort of a different kind, it was welcome. The chosen of Chaos and his army of half-breed wretches did not have long to enjoy it, however, for out of the fires’ blinding glare their infernal foes came.

Archaon squinted through the pit-flares and eddies of flame. A snarling smile drew back his lips and his gauntlet snatched for Terminus. The consecrated steel was once again to burn through the bestial and the daemon.

Bovine brutes of blood-stained mane and twisted horn stomped out of the brightness at him. Scores of them, and each branded with the hate-scorched sigil of Khorne. Archaon turned aside axes of razored bone and blades of wicked flint. The Swords of Chaos were about him, shielding their warlord with their gargoyle wings and parrying sweeps of their bone swords. Archaon frustrated their attempts to play sentinel at every turn, hurling himself headlong into the barbarian numbers. He leant out of the reach of throat-slashing flint, rolled out from under the cleaving descent of axe-fashioned shoulder blades and feigned left before darting right, out of the stampeding path of Ograx’s bullfiends. Terminus opened up their backflesh, took horns from heads and stabbed through all but impenetrable muscle and fused ribcage to find the rupturing vulnerabilities within. Half-breeds died and the pits spat forth flaming coals and sprays of cinder in celebration.

They were but the vanguard of Ograx the Great’s beastforce. Directed on by Eins and the staff-shaking Sheerian, Archaon’s bestial horde rushed forward into the fray. Archaon was soon lost in a sea of muscle, shaggy hide and snorting steam. The land trembled beneath the hooves of Archaon’s army and lakes of black ooze bubbled up about them. Pits gaped open and the earth tore apart. Flame reached for the skies. The ground upon which Archaon stood bucked and shuddered upwards, and he roared as the thunderous outcrop reared. He clashed Terminus against the eight-pointed star of his shield. Beastfiends bellowed their infernal celebration. Wretched horns were sounded and rude weapons of bone, twine and stone rattled as they were shaken jubilantly at the skies. Suddenly a hiss rose above the spitting of flame and tearing of the earth – a sound Archaon knew well.

‘Shields!’ he called savagely across the crashing sea of muscle and fur. He brought up his own. The Swords of Chaos extended their wings and enveloped themselves in a bubble of battle-hardened leather. Vier’s warped remnants sprang out horribly, like a storm-shattered tent, to offer protection to the ancient Sheerian and Sister Giselle. The half-breeds of Archaon’s hordes brought up their own defences – hide shields of cured flesh and shaggy fur, mounted on frameworks of entwined ribs. Nothing was wasted in the Southern Wastes. With little in the way of ore and metal to work with, materials were torn from the carcasses of the innumerable beasts that swarmed the continent. Weapons and armour were fashioned from friend and slaughtered foe. Archaon smiled to himself as he held his shield above him. It was raining bone. Rib and fibula – straightened, sharpened, hardened and fashioned into arrows. Archaon waited. He listened to the splinter of bone off his steel and the thud of arrows into hide shields. As the storm passed, the Chaos warlord came out from behind his Ruinous Star.

‘Do your worst!’ Archaon roared. Below him it was as if a dam had broken. The sea of muscle and horn he had been holding back had been released. The base instincts of his legion’s brute nature took over. With Moraq Half-Horn leading the way and smashing his own beastfiends aside with the hammer-head of his saddled rhinox, the monstrous half-breeds of Archaon’s army surged forth through the havoc. Huge shafts of ice and stone erupted from the ground and spouts of pitch fountained about them. Fires spread and turned such fountains into furious beacons of flame.

Archaon leapt from one rising outcrop to another as his savage horde clashed with the beastfiends of the Haemorrhagia. Within furious moments they were among their attackers. Brays of stunted horn and shaved chest twanged their arrows off bows of blood-stained bone and strings of sinew. Horns were blown and a cacophony of weakling warcries rose from chests of red flesh. As Archaon’s brutes waded into the mobs of miserable half-breeds, the brays dropped their cowardly weapons in favour of crooked pikes bearing heads of crafted horn, splintered bone or razored flint. They hurled their wicked shafts at Archaon’s oncoming host but his beastfiends would not be denied. Hoof-hobbling on, sometimes with jagged pikes embedded in furry legs, shoulders and chests, the warherd charged the brays.

There were hundreds and hundreds of the infernal creatures. As Moraq and his beasts cleaved their way through the mob, the darkness gave birth to endless multitudes of red bodies. The murk rumbled with the bestial braying of hundreds more, awaiting their turn to honour the Blood God. To stab and gouge. To skewer and twist their primitive pikes in the flesh of their tribal enemy. Leaping and dropping from rising outcrop to rising outcrop, Archaon could see why Ograx the Great had held the Haemorrhagia for so long. Long enough to become infamous among innumerable other savage chieftains.

The Haemorrhagia rumbled beneath ice and rock. Beneath the thunder of hoof the world split. The ground shook. Flaming pitch vomited for the sky. The hellish earth opened up to reveal its infernal secrets.

Archaon perched with the agility of a cat on a shuddering outcrop. He cast his gaze across the waves of red muscle and twisted horn, rolling in from the twilight of the Wastes. He leapt off the rocky shaft, with Terminus and shield held high. Crashing down through the horde of brays, Archaon cleaved a half-breed in two. He brained beastfiends with his star-emblazoned shield and broke monsters with an armoured boot. He turned. He slashed and smashed through beastmeat. Bone spears split against the metal of the shield and the Sigmarite blade seared through daemon-pledged flesh. About him great rents opened up in the Wastes, and snow steamed away as clefts and chasms swallowed beastfiends whole. The gaping rifts unleashed an infernal glow on the battlefield.

Both the creatures branded with Archaon’s mark and that of the Blood God fell to a fiery doom, braying and bellowing away their misfortune. Archaon hopped across the parting fissures, cutting and cleaving through the blood-soaked brays as he went. He jumped the flaming crevasses that opened at his feet and butchered his way through beastfiends as he stormed across the trembling ice. Creatures thrust at him with unthinking savagery, stabbing and cutting, but the pikes sparked and splintered off the unhallowed armour of Morkar.

‘Enough!’ Archaon roared as he bludgeoned brays with his heavy blade. Blood leapt from the screeching beastfiends with every furious strike. ‘I want the Great One!’ Archaon shouted across the torment of the earth, the whoosh of flame and the suffering he had created in his wake. ‘I want the champion of Z’rughl Ka’kadron’ath. The Brassbound’s kindred. The bestial prince. Ograx of the Blood God – where are you?’

Archaon’s words were hot but his mind cut through the chaos and confusion like cold steel. He wanted to draw out the monster – and it worked. The Haemorrhagia shook with the thunder of the half-daemon’s roar. A great shaft of black rock erupted from the ground with an explosive shower of cinders, carrying the form of Ograx the Great high above the fray. Archaon felt his face contort into something halfway between a snarl and a smile. As another spur of ruptured earth rumbled skyward nearby, Archaon took the murderous steps and barbarian lives it took to reach it. As the rock took him above the steam, smoke and glare of the battlefield he saw his opposite. The bestial warlord Ograx.

He was big, even for one of the southern half-breeds. The light of the fires gleamed off the brazen surface of his shaggy legs and cloven hooves. They were living metal, like a sculpture that had achieved a life of its own. A belt of flayed flesh and fur scabbards sat on his hips, surrounding the nightmare creature in a nest of weaponry: flint-serrated swords of bone, pick axes of sabre teeth, scapula hatchets and short, broad blades of daemonic design. Ograx’s broad chest was a wall of red muscle, from which hung shrunken skulls, furs that danced in the wind and scraps of armour torn from his infernal victims. His face was a glowering mess of scars and bovine madness, amongst a princely crown of bifurcating hell-horn. As the two warriors of Chaos were thrust up at the sky, Ograx pulled a mighty axe from where it had hung across his mane-trailing back. It was a primitive weapon of bone and blood-stained sinew, holding the colossal length of the axe-head in place. The haft was a twisted spine while the axe-head was an actual head. A previous victim. The cranial-crest and snaggle-toothed upper beak of some Tzeentchian daemon. Rancid flesh still clung to the prize.

‘Now, creature!’ Archaon called at the beast-champion. ‘Your master has waited long enough for the skull of one of his own.’ As the Chaos warrior was finding, Ograx was easy to provoke and manipulate. He was a living fortress of flesh and fury. Fury, however, could only take the monster so far. It had little trouble taking Ograx across the flaming gulf between them, however. With a daemonic roar the bestial prince was in the air, his skull-axe held high above him. There wasn’t enough room for both of them on the rocky outcrop and the beast’s hooves alone would crush him into the stone. At the last moment, Archaon leapt for a rocky shaft rising beside them. As his previous purchase crunched below the landing daemon prince, the Chaos warrior pushed himself immediately back.

Slamming Ograx with the star of his shield, Archaon knocked the bestial champion from his footing. With a bellow of raw frustration, the creature scraped down the side of the shaft with his hooves and the claw of a hand. Brazen hoof-tips and talons sparked down the rock as the monster heaved himself to a halt. The skull-axe swooped about, forcing Archaon onto one foot as the daemonic beak bit into the rock at his toe. Kicking the weapon away, Archaon swung Terminus below him, batting the skull-axe clear and cutting away crag and cranny from the rockface. As the furious Ograx was forced further down the shaft, the stone ledge upon which he was perched gave way and plunged the hulking half-breed down into the flaming pit that had opened about them.

Leaning out, Archaon peered down into the steaming glare, looking for some sign of Ruinous life. It came in the form of a scapula hatchet flung furiously from the inferno and nearly taking the Chaos warrior’s head off. Pulling himself back to the trembling shaft of rock, Archaon swore. Another razored shoulder blade came spinning at him like a throwing-axe, and the dark templar shattered it with a cleaving blow from his heavy blade. Seeing the red eyes of the half-breed prince searing up at him from the murky glare of the pit, Archaon released his grip on the shuddering spur and dropped down at the beast.

It was a long drop. Archaon’s boots found their way to an incline of trembling rock, but it was all he could do to not plunge face first into the flaming lake of pitch that sloshed, spat and fountained with explosive insistence about the roasted isle upon which he had landed. Skidding through the scree, the Chaos warrior skipped back into a regular step. Ograx was suddenly there. Out of the smoke. Out of the steam. More importantly it was the half-breed’s skull-axe that came for him. Allowing himself to skid beneath the terrible arc of its daemonic beak, Archaon was forced to release Terminus and put both hands behind his shield. As the blade rattled along the surface of the hot stone, Ograx turned with merciless force and intention. His axe struck Archaon’s shield and smashed the dark templar back. Rolling across his pauldron and furs Archaon brought the shield back up at a crouch but again the skull-axe was there, with the monster’s bone-shuddering brawn behind it.

Archaon risked a glance behind him. Terminus had come to a stop at the burning shore. The greatsword had skidded and bounced its way across the pitch pools of bubble and flame and was slowly sinking, blade first, into the black slurp. Still at a crouch, Archaon began to work his way over to the weapon but Ograx had him. Again and again the skull-axe came for him. Archaon could feel the beast-prince’s god-fuelled might behind each strike. Ograx wanted nothing more than to slam the beak straight through Archaon, armour and all. And between his infernal weapon and the brute strength in the mountain range of muscle that ran down his arms, Archaon had no doubt that he could do it.

Skidding. Kneeling. Shuffling. The dark templar watched his blade sink while his shield and his bones took the mindless and unrelenting onslaught of the creature. As the cross guard descended, Archaon threw himself into a messy roll, arm over arm, holding the shield close. Ograx was all over him. Stomping through the grit and pools of pitch with his hooves, the half-breed brought his axe down on Archaon with furious insistence. With each roll the Chaos warrior just managed to get the shield between him and the impaling beak. On the roasting shoreline Archaon reached out for the sinking Terminus, the fingertips of his gauntlet trapping the pommel as Ograx battered his shield – and the shield, in turn, battered Archaon into the ground.

Clawing Terminus up out of the boiling pitch, the Chaos warrior heaved back at the skull-axe with his shield and an exhausted arm. Archaon swung the weapon at the half-breed’s legs. The edge of the greatsword sparked off the creature’s brazen leg, failing to cut into the metal. The raw frustration of the strike took Ograx from his cloven hooves and put him on the burning rock. Archaon swung Terminus down at the half-breed’s chest but the prone creature got the bone shaft of his axe between the blade’s edge and its intended target. The insistence of the parry carried up the Chaos warrior’s sword arm, jarring his shoulder. Boiling pitch flicked from the steel and scorched a line across Ograx’s broad chest.

Archaon heaved Terminus down at the monster but the half-breed was incredibly strong and pressed the haft of his skull-axe back at the dark templar. For a long time the two warriors held each other there. Archaon adjusted his balance and the angle of the blade. The daemonic bone of the axe’s spine would not break under the templar blade’s cleaving edge, however, and the pair assumed the trembling stillness of a quake-tormented sculpture, Archaon matching his skill and indomitable will against the bestial savagery of the muscle-bound monster.

Archaon became aware of movement about them. From the bubble and slurp of the steaming pitch, the creatures of hell were emerging. Wretched daemons and winged horrors crawled forth from the depths. Slick and black with pitch, many of the gargoyles were aflame and climbed up the walls of the pit, their talons taking them up towards their prey. They dripped with the black blood of the earth and extended jaws and wings lazily, as though they had just been awoken from infernal slumber in the dark womb of the below. This changed things for both Archaon and Ograx. From the shrieks and screams above, the monstrous beings of the Haemorrhagia were indiscriminate in their slaying, with bodies of the warlords’ beastfiends flying down into the hellish pit. As half-breeds of the Blood God and the eight-pointed star thrashed and boiled in pitch and flame, the creatures began to claw their way up the searing shore towards the two warriors.

Archaon risked a withdrawal. Leaning back he brought his blade off the axe haft, allowing Ograx to move. As the bestial prince brought his skull-axe around for a leg-smashing sweep, Archaon resisted the urge to bury Terminus in the prone half-breed and settled instead on smashing his heavy blade down on the skeletal weapon. The skull-axe was smashed from Ograx’s clawed grip and bounced across the hot stone out of reach. Archaon brought Terminus up to finish the job. To bury the monstrous creature in bludgeoning blows with the blade. He had grown accustomed to such wretches – the bested in battle – begging for their miserable lives or at least hiding fearfully behind outstretched arms and faces fixed with dread. This was not the end Ograx the Great had promised himself. He arched his back, leaning into his death. A growl trailed off into a hiss of hate as the champion gave Archaon the full horror of his half-daemon visage and the infernal glow of his eyes. Ograx dared Archaon to end him. For his innumerable sins, Archaon hesitated.

The Chaos warrior was hit from the side. The world became a tumbling mess of rocky floor and leathery wing. Archaon had been tackled by several creatures that had hauled themselves up the shore. Bounding for him and taking the dark templar down, like some great cat of the plains might a horse or rhinox, the daemonic furies had him on the ground. Archaon became aware of tearing claws, snapping jaws and the slip and slide of pitch-slick flesh. There were four of them, he thought. They savaged him with primordial strength and speed, searching for the soul hiding within the inconvenience of flesh. Between the slap of wing and the snap of jaw, Archaon caught sight of Ograx. He had left the half-breed prince prone and without his daemonic weapon. The brute was swarming with furies. Archaon didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted – either the creatures had sensed in Ograx an easier kill or a more formidable threat. The Chaos warrior settled on the sting of the latter. The monsters would not have been the first to be fooled by the muscle and rage. They would pay for their primitive assumptions.

Archaon rolled, dashing the brains from a snapping fury. His gauntlet, clutched in a fist about the hilt of his templar blade, landed a snout-crunching blow on another before the Chaos warrior rose from the hot stone and shook a third from his armoured back. The fiend received an elbow to its mangled maw, knocking it stumbling back into the pitch rolling up the shoreline.

‘Meet Terminus,’ Archaon snarled, turning the Sigmarite blade with a bend of his wrist. The things circled on all fours, wings held close to their backs, spitting and hissing like the creatures of hell they were. One lunged at him but he punched it aside with the star-blazoned surface of his shield. Another came for his throat but Archaon swiped it down with a flourish of his blade. The blessed steel burned through daemonflesh in a way the pitch had failed to, and the beast released an unearthly shriek of agony. Archaon suddenly felt pain of his own as the third monster latched onto his wrist with its crushing maw. Whirling into a savage turn Archaon dragged the beast around and sent it slamming into the creature he had just opened from the chops to the naval. Still dragging the monster, he thrust Terminus forward, taking the first daemon through the chest. It released its infernal claw-hold on reality and died right there on Sigmarite steel, leaving the dead meat of its horrid, worldly form skewered on the blade.

Death, right there before the fury’s burning eyes, had persuaded the third brute to unclamp its twisted maw from Archaon’s arm. The Chaos warrior turned on it and with a savage thrust of the head, smashed its face back into its skull with a butt of his skull-helm. A back slice with his greatsword cut the distracted monster all but in two, leaving Archaon facing one lone and uncertain beast.

‘Come on, thing of darkness and flame, don’t disappoint me now…’

With a predator’s patience it paced back and forth before surging for him. Archaon moved, allowing the beast to pass by before bringing the flat of his heavy blade down on the creature’s skull. There was a wet crunch that sent the daemon to the floor. Stalking up behind it, Archaon stamped down on the monster’s head, crunching his heel against the burning rock beneath. He paused to soak up the havoc in which he found himself.

Above, a three-way battle had unfolded about the opening pit. The savages of his own warherd were taking the fight to the Blood God’s beastfiends, while both were forced to defend themselves against the infernal horrors that were crawling up from cracks, flame-howling pits and fissures that were opening up across the lands of the Haemorrhagia. He saw Moraq Half-Horn, still fighting from the saddle of his slain mount. His Swords of Chaos, like lieutenants amongst the half-breed savages of Archaon’s horde, slashing with boneswords and parrying with unfurled wings. The sorcerer Sheerian, mumbling incantations and tapping his staff on the flesh of passing brays, prompting limbs to erupt from bestial torsos that clawed and strangled the afflicted creatures. The misshapen Vier, keeping Sister Giselle beneath his own mangled wing – the girl holding her furs about her like a comforting embrace, her face inflicted with the blankness of a battlefield stare. Before him Ograx the Great was a nest of writhing daemons. Archaon could hear the bellow and roar of the mauled half-breed.

The Chaos warrior allowed a snarl to fall from his lips. Slipping Terminus into his back-scabbard and shouldering his shield, Archaon scooped up Ograx’s weapon from the roasting stone. He hefted the axe, feeling the weight of the daemonic skull. Turning the spine in his gauntlets, he spun the beak and the skull-crest around. The grit crunched beneath his boots, flames roared from the pit and furies snapped and snarled with savagery. Within the mound of infernal flesh, Archaon could hear Ograx the Great bellow his pain and frustration. Archaon nodded to himself. It was decided.

Lifting the skull-axe above him like a woodcutter, Archaon brought it straight down on the nearest hellfiend. Like a pick into stone, the beak of the weapon thudded through the back of the fury, prompting the creature to screech its agony and surprise to the heavens. Archaon tore the creature off the Blood God’s chosen, dragging it back across the hot stone. Resting a boot on its thrashing form – a frenzy of wing and claw – Archaon finished the monster with another heft of the daemonbone axe. He peeled the infernal beasts from Ograx. The skull-axe crunched through torsos and hooked heads from shoulders. Archaon battered monsters aside, allowing them to claw and skitter their way through the trembling grit, before slamming the axe-head into them and then the brutes into the stone.

Finally, Archaon saw the bestial prince, his face and broad chest further mangled by the claws of the furies. Ograx was drowning in winged daemons, both alive and dead. Many still had the beastfiend’s assortment of flint blades and scapula axes buried in their infernal flesh. Archaon dragged the carcasses from him as the bestial prince held a fury’s head before him, smashing its face with a clenched fist while its twisted jaws snapped for him. This had gone on long enough, Archaon decided, and heaved the skull-axe over one shoulder. He brought the bone weapon down with such force that its beak cleaved straight through the back of the fury’s head and out through its face, drizzling Ograx with honouring gore from the Blood God.

The beastfiend heaved the daemon to one side, leaving it atop the mound of other corpses, and got unsteadily to his feet. The two warriors of Chaos regarded one another as the havoc of battle, firestorm and slaughter unfolded about them. There were few words suitable for such an encounter, even in the beastfiend’s dark tongue, and Archaon did not deign to use them. Actions spoke louder in the cacophony of Haemorrhagia. Turning the gore-dribbling skull-head of Ograx’s axe in his gauntlets, Archaon placed it in the hot grit at his feet and kicked it across to the bestial prince. Ograx watched the weapon bump and hiss through the grit to his hooves. As the monster slowly picked it up, Archaon found his own hand twitch. The muscles in his arm were tensed and ready to reach for Terminus from his back-scabbard. Ograx was a savage. A daemonic half-breed. A barbarian disciple of the Blood God. Anything might happen.

Ograx looked up about the edge of the pit. His brays were falling into the pitch and flame, forced back by the savage hordes of Archaon, where they were being torn apart and discarded by the furies of the Haermorrhagia, climbing up out of the fiery depths. Ograx pulled a horn from his furs and put it to his ugly lips. As he belted a lungful of air through the crude instrument, the very air about them trembled. The sound threatened to stop the heart and burst the ear. The brays of the Blood God knew the sound.

‘Hold!’ Archaon called, the boom of his voice amplified by the pit. At the signal of the two warlords, the bestial hordes slowed to the stillness of a standoff. Creatures stood obedient and uncertain. Even the ferocity of flame and tearing earth seemed to die away. Ograx called out orders in a bullish voice. Archaon had his own: ‘Destroy the daemons that crawl from the depths,’ he ordered his savages. Warcries and thunderous threats built in the chests of half-breeds as bestial kin found a brute camaraderie in the faces of their former foes. With the thoughtless compliance of a yoked animal, the creatures fell on the plague of winged monstrosities crawling from the pit, stabbing, bludgeoning and mauling the furies with a shared and monstrous rejoicing. The gods would have their grotesque games and Khorne would have skulls for his eternal throne.

Climbing up the side of the pit, slashing and skewering furies from his path as he did, Archaon hauled himself up over the edge. He turned to find Ograx the Great behind him. Archaon offered the bestial prince his gauntlet. After a moment’s feral consideration, Ograx put his claw in Archaon’s hand and allowed the Chaos warrior to help him up. The battle continued about them. The Haemorrhagia vomited forth all it had – firestorms, the rebellious earth and the scourge that was spawned from the bowels of the Wasteland interior.

Archaon directed his horde to take the battle to the very land itself. It was as if the Southern Wastes themselves were contesting his supremacy. Such winged monsters were the stuff of nightmares. Daemonic creatures of whim and monstrous fancy. They were no match for Archaon, the savage hordes of the dark templar and Ograx the Great combined. As the ire of the land died down, the flames faded and the boiling pitch drained away, the great rents in the landscape came together like healing wounds, and winged horrors that failed to crawl back into the dark womb of the earth were torn apart by bestial hordes beneath the flayed flesh of Archaon’s banner.

The Chaos warrior walked through the carnage. The land was a carpet of daemonflesh, rotting away with supernatural speed. The Swords of Chaos stalked close by, ever watchful for treachery. Through the muscular silhouettes of beastfiends, Archaon caught sight of Giselle. The girl was shadowed by the misshapen Vier, whose twisted body towered over her. It had been Archaon’s instruction that the winged marauder not leave her side. The girl for her part had not been the same since their encounter with the Chaos dragon Flamefang, and their unfortunate arrival on the damned shores of the dark, southern continent.

Giselle wandered as if in a horror-drunk daze. Her face was at once disgust and disbelief at the ghastliness she had endured, and the bleak acceptance of her fate to come. Archaon, who cared little for his own hardships and almost nothing for anyone else’s, could barely look her in the eye. They had been intimate once but that had been a long time ago. The girl’s remonstrations and Sigmarite curses had become a lost hope to save him. Such cares had become futility, infatuation and perhaps even love.

Archaon himself found little space in his heart for such sentiments, crowded out by the darkness and doom that he had become. He desired an end to all and yet, when it came to the girl, Giselle Dantziger, there was a part of him that desired existence. Not just the endless violence and burning desire for wars to be won and foes to be conquered. Another kind of existence. Fleeting moments of flesh against flesh and hearts that seemed to beat as one in the hollow emptiness of the world. Perhaps he had indeed fallen for the girl, but he would never admit that to himself, let alone to Giselle herself. Besides, their time at the top of the world had passed. Archaon had fallen so much further since then. He had been lost, but now he was truly damned.

Yet still he kept the girl alive, rather than cast her aside as he had so many. Her hallowed touch was agony to him. Somehow, in this benighted place – or perhaps because of it – the girl’s simple faith in a false god, a God-King, had not abandoned her. It had been a long time since he had known such agonies. Now her mere existence seemed to burn his soul. She was a little of what remained; in the stale echo of her original affections continued to live the man he had once been. It was a weakness, Archaon knew this, but he could not bring himself to end the half-felt, half-remembered scintilla of his former existence. A life the many dark deeds of his doom had eclipsed and he could barely remember. For Archaon it seemed to live on only in his consuming hatred for the world, the gods that plagued it and the mortal multitude that were the slaughter-in-waiting. Only in Giselle did he exist as anything else and, for some perverse reason, Archaon couldn’t find it in himself to destroy that. So, Giselle Dantziger lived on. A ghost of a girl, buried in furs and surrounded by fiends who would die to protect her in the most lethal of lands, simply because Archaon, their dark lord and master, wished it so.

The sorcerer Sheerian approached, hobbling with his staff. Moraq Half-Horn was with him, dwarfing the ancient with his brute bulk. The half-breed, in turn, was buried in the shadow of Ograx the Great.

‘A truce, my lord?’ the Tzeentchian put to him. Like everything the sorcerer said, it was some kind of a subtle challenge.

‘An assimilation,’ Archaon settled upon.

‘But how can we trust such a mindless animal?’ Sheerian asked. Ograx snorted, the stinking mist engulfing the ancient. The sorcerer stumbled back a little but was undeterred. ‘A servant of the Blood God, for whom any of our skulls might serve as tribute.’

‘I’ll trust a mindless animal over a Tzeentchian sorcerer any day,’ Archaon told the ancient. ‘A mindless animal can be loyal. This is more than I can say of the Great Changer and his duplicitous minions, for it is in their nature to cog, lie and deceive.’

‘My lord,’ Sheerian protested.

‘It is done,’ Archaon said. ‘The bestial prince and I have reached an accord, at least for now. If my skull had been destined for the Blood God’s throne then I don’t doubt that Ograx here would have been the one to take it.’ Archaon gave the hulking monster a slight nod, which the half-breed returned.

‘Pray, sir…’

‘Pray yourself,’ Archaon said, ‘and keep your foetid gods happy, for I don’t get to choose, sorcerer. I am to be Everchosen of the Chaos gods, the Herald of Ruin in all its cursed forms, not just the Powers towards which I feel wretchedly inclined. Now, convey my words in the dark tongue of the beast. Inform Ograx here that his warherd will join my own and that together we shall travel south and bring the wrath of the half-breed to the Gatelands and the infernal kings who grow soft within their palace walls.’

Archaon watched the bestial prince carefully as Sheerian spoke his words in the guttural tongue of the beastfiends. He saw Ograx look down on Moraq Half-Horn and then back at Archaon. When he spoke, it was with savage pride.

‘Well?’ Archaon asked.

‘Ograx the Great wonders for whom he fights,’ Sheerian translated.

‘Tell him he fights for the glory of his god,’ Archaon said, ‘and through him the glory of all the Ruinous Gods – for it is through them that the darkness of all the world will be realised. Tell him I am the instrument of that realisation – chosen of all gods as he is chosen of his – and as such he fights for me, as the best of all the half-breeds of the Southern Wastes do.’

Something seemed to trouble the creature.

‘Or he can fight for his life…’ Archaon warned. Ograx moved quickly for such a hulking beast. He was suddenly behind Moraq, his great, bulging arm around the half-breed’s neck. He picked the creature up by the arm-lock and his infamous half-horn, the chieftain’s back against the scarring of his broad chest. Moraq’s flailing hooves and thrashing arms told of the incredible force behind Ograx’s mighty frame. Suddenly it was over. Moraq Half-Horn’s body fell like a rag doll at the bestial prince’s brazen hooves, while the beastfiend’s head – replete with the shock on the unfortunate creature’s face – remained in Ograx’s grasp. The monster threw the head down at Archaon’s boots.

The dark templar stared at the half-breed hulk. His Swords of Chaos had cleared their bone blades from their wing-sheathes and Sheerian had stumbled back into his master in shock at the sudden violence.

‘Treachery, my lord,’ the sorcerer screamed. ‘Skulls for the Skull Throne of Khorne!’

‘No…’ Archaon decided. He didn’t move. His muscles were tensed but he didn’t want Ograx to know his display had startled him. ‘A skull for me,’ the dark templar informed him. ‘The Blood God’s diplomacy, if such a thing exists. An offering. A bargain to be made – but with conditions.’ Archaon looked straight at Ograx. ‘The half-breeds fight for you, correct?’ Archaon put to the bestial prince. ‘And with them, you for me.’

Ograx the Great nodded his ugly head slowly. Archaon nodded his agreement also.

‘Ready the horde, mongrel prince,’ Archaon said turning to leave. ‘We march on the continental interior, the Gatelands, where daemons rule and worlds beyond our own wait to be discovered.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2015.
This eBook edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover by Raymond Swanland.
Map by Nuala Kinrade.

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