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Blessed Oblivion – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Blessed Oblivion

Dale Lucas

‘Shield to shield, brothers!’ the Liberator-Prime barked. ‘Close ranks the moment the refugees are through the lines!’

Klytos fell into formation, tower shield at the ready, warblade heavy in his gauntleted fist. He took a moment – the briefest of moments – to close his eyes and summon his last, fragmentary memories of the people he had loved in life.

A woman: sea-green eyes in a smooth, tanned face.

A newborn: small, impossibly fragile in his seemingly enormous hands.

An old man: face eroded like a time-worn cliff, tears on his filthy cheeks.

He stirred his memories before each battle, knowing that if he fell, he would next incarnate with even fewer of them dwelling inside him. He’d already lost their names, most meaningful details of the life he’d lived, even the smallest inkling of where or when that long-ago lifetime had unfolded. When next he was smashed and reforged upon the Anvil of Apotheosis, there was no telling what might remain, if anything.

That thought terrified him.

A jostling. Klytos opened his eyes. His fellow Celestial Vindicators formed a vast wall of shield bosses, gleaming blades and shining turquoise armour to either side of him. For days they had protected a massive refugee band effecting a desperate retreat across the Hallost Plains towards the sea, mere hours ahead of the trailing Khornate warhost. Now, at last, the servants of the Blood God bore down upon them.

They could run no further. It was time to make a stand, however desperate.

‘Prepare to close ranks!’ the Liberator-Prime shouted. Klytos’ world was a storm of panic and terror as the refugees fled through their spaced ranks. As he often did, Klytos saw the ghosts of his lost loved ones in the faces of the mortals they now stood to defend: there, his wife, as a fleeing mother clutching her infant; nearby, an old man with a face like his father’s – or was it his grandfather’s? – hobbling along on a crutch. Phantoms. Echoes of a past that every death and rebirth took him farther and farther away from.

The last of the refugees – the lucky ones – were just about to pass through the massed ranks of the Stormhost. Out on the plain, scores of unlucky stragglers were overtaken by ravening Flesh Hounds or cleaved by bloodied hellblades.

The order came. ‘Shoulder to shoulder, my brothers!’

The shield wall closed. A shock wave rippled through the Stormhost, Klytos and his comrades absorbing the impact of hundreds of charging, screaming bodies as the Khornate vanguard met them. Barbed spear tips and bloodied sword blades thrust and swiped at Klytos and his Stormcast brethren around their enormous shields.

Barely discernible above the tumult: ‘Make them pay, brothers! Strike! Forward!’

The battle line moved as one, the shield wall crushing the forward ranks of barbarian marauders and lesser daemonspawn. Klytos lowered his shield, warblade thrusting and slashing, mowing a bloody swathe through his amassed adversaries. All was chaos and slaughter: a storm of churned soil, clods of torn-up turf, gouts of diseased blood, gobbets of hewn flesh, the deafening ring of steel upon adamant sigmarite. Klytos revelled in the carnage: it filled him with a dutiful calm.

Then, a blasphemy enormous and terrifying advanced from the surging fray: an Exalted Deathbringer, a tower of rippling, knotted sinews and taut, leathery skin the colour of dried blood. Tall and looming, it waded through the massed bloodletters and skullreapers clogging Klytos’ vision like a man striding out of a rolling surf.

The monstrosity bore in its hands an enormous, double-headed axe. As it closed on the front rank of the Stormhost – on Klytos – it drew that axe back over its broad shoulders and began hewing, right and left, indiscriminately slashing down foul comrades and shining enemies alike.

Its monstrous blade split Klytos in two, and the holy lightning of Sigmar Heldenhammer stole him from the field of battle…

That night, the slaughter abated and the plain secured, the Stormhost established a perimeter around the refugee camp. Inside that perimeter, the mortals stoked cook fires, fed empty bellies with meagre provisions, tended the wounded and comforted the dying. A chill wind skated over the Shyish plain, now moaning, now sighing, offering melancholy harmony to the hymns of the Knights-Incantor.

The songs, which should have stoked Klytos’ courage and focused his warrior’s heart, now filled him with a strange sense of disaffected dread. True, he was now reforged, ready once more to rejoin the eternal struggle against Chaos… yet he was nonetheless diminished; thinned, like clouds effaced by the wind.

Klytos had died many times, his very essence torn out of the Mortal Realms and returned to the Chamber of the Broken World, there to be superheated into molten impermanence, smashed by the Six Smiths upon the Anvil of Apotheosis, and finally reformed. Vague recollections of some of those deaths yet haunted him: the searing pain as his skull was crushed beneath the hammer of a beastlord; the taste of blood as he was ridden down by the thundering hooves of charging Gore-Gruntas; the panic and terror that gripped him as he was butchered and dismembered by the accursed blade of a laughing daemon prince. He even suffered a recurring nightmare of slowly succumbing to suppurating pustules and a writhing maggot infestation courtesy of the vile plague sorcerers of Nurgle… though he was not sure if that benighted vision was a true memory or only a dream.

He had once tried to keep count of his many deaths and Reforgings, but that count was now lost, like so many other expendable bits of him – gaping, bleeding spaces in the fabric of his consciousness that should contain something yet did not, like the persistent itch of a long-lost phantom limb, empty cavities in his memory stirring impulses he could barely understand or articulate.

The woman was a ghost in his imagination now. He remembered the wood-brown colour of her skin, the cool depths of her eyes, but he could no longer conjure features to make her face anything more than a blurred mask.

Or the babe. Was it a boy? A girl? He yet recalled how small it was in his seemingly enormous hands, but that image – a trembling newborn – was all he could summon.

Then there was the old man… Klytos no longer remembered a face, or a voice, or any wisdom imparted. All he could remember, with great effort and concentration, was the feeling of bony, arthritic hands in his own. A presence, not a person.

Why? Why could he not simply forget, and be content to do so? He saw the after-effects of Reforging in every member of his conclave: the way Barnavos eternally stared into the middle distance, reciting chains of numbers and formulae; the way Hareggar treated the scouring of his war-plate and the oiling of his sword blade as crucial rituals, demanding almost religious fixation; the way Jennaeus, when he thought no one was listening, recited a constantly transforming list of all the ways he had died, making of his many, painful ends a strange, martial litany.

‘The sting of a spear, the bite of a blade,’ he would mutter. ‘Cleft in twain, unwound, unmade…’

Eagerly, hungrily, he listened to the holy hymns of the God-King, praying that the deep and sonorous harmonies of the Knights-Incantor might banish his doubt and grief entirely. He knew that such merciful amnesia, the salvation of an eternal present, should beckon to him, tempt him… but it only filled him with a sense of overwhelming panic and impending tragedy.

A great shadow fell over him. Klytos raised his eyes to find Liberator-Prime Gracchus looming at his elbow. Klytos shot to his feet. Gracchus laid one gauntleted hand on his shoulder pauldron.

‘You fought well today, young Klytos,’ the Liberator-Prime said gravely.

Klytos nodded. So far as he could reason out, he had been fighting in this Stormhost for several centuries… and yet, to every Liberator-Prime who had ever commanded, he was always ‘Young Klytos’.

‘I am proud to serve,’ Klytos said, and meant it.

‘I am surprised,’ the Liberator-Prime said, ‘to find you back in our midst so quickly. Sigmar must have great need of you.’

In truth, Klytos had been just as surprised. Reforgings usually took longer than several short hours to complete. He had idly wondered if his rushed reconstitution might account for how disordered his thoughts now were, how rattled and empty he felt.

‘Sigmar’s will is all,’ Klytos said, and he meant that too. Or did he? His own feelings defied his understanding.

The Liberator-Prime studied him for a long, curious moment. ‘Something troubles you,’ he said. It was not a question.

Klytos felt fear stir in him. He could not tell Liberator-Prime Gracchus the truth. Give voice to his shame? His fear? Impossible!

Luckily, Gracchus spoke again before Klytos was forced to. ‘Duty,’ he said at last. ‘Your Reforging has left you disoriented, and only duty will restore the sense of order your still-adjusting psyche now desires.’

Klytos nodded eagerly. ‘Command me,’ he said, all but begging. Anything but sitting here, contemplating it all.

The Liberator-Prime turned towards the dark landscape stretching beyond the ragged edge of the camp’s firelight. He indicated a cluster of low, rolling hills to the north-east. ‘Earlier, patrols reported signs of scouts in those hills. Investigate and report. And if you find anything, your first task is to make the Stormhost aware, not to slay those you find single-handed. Am I understood?’

Klytos saluted his commander. ‘Understood, Liberator-Prime. I live to serve.’

Eager for a purpose – a mission – his mind still awhirl with self-recrimination, Klytos took up his shield and his warblade and trudged off into the night, as commanded, each long stride leading him farther from the camp. In truth, he was thankful for the lone patrol, dearly hoping that duty and vigilance might somehow assuage the storm raging inside him.

Having cleared the ragged edge of the firelight, he scanned the doleful, moonlit landscape surrounding him. To the north, the bright crimson bonfires of Khorne’s warband littered the plain to the black horizon. He knew their withdrawal after the day’s bloodshed was only a brief reprieve before another, inevitable clash.

He was closer to the hills than the camp he had left behind when he heard the sound of excited voices, followed by the unmistakable tumult of a battle: barked orders, pounding feet and ringing steel.

‘Take them!’ he heard. The voice was throaty, inhuman.

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A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jon Cave.

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