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By the Horns – Rob Sanders

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By the Horns

Rob Sanders

To Chrysaor, lord of Slaanesh – known to his victims as ‘the Wanton’ – the land was a glorious cacophony of sensations. Beneath his dark plate, the Wanton had skin of cracked alabaster and his eyes were glazed a blood red. He saw nothing with such eyes. He appreciated the world through the splendour of his other senses. To Chrysaor, everything was the screams of the suffering. It was the caress of final breaths on his face and the tang of death on the breeze. It was the taste of ruinous victory.

The day Chrysaor’s sight was taken from him, a pair of great, ribbed horns erupted from his temples. Chrysaor savoured the exquisite agony. Through these, the Wanton experienced the realms anew. Sensitive to every quiver, quake and vibration, the horns allowed the blind warrior to build a sensory picture of everything around him. He could feel the quickening thud of his enemy’s pulse. While eyes had only shown him escaping victims within his field of vision, the sensitivity of the horns – like the antennae of creepers and crawlers – revealed to him so much more. He felt the reverberation of panicked footfalls, the ragged breathing and the muffled quake of a heart stilled in a place of hiding. He could sense these things not only nearby, but leagues away. He could feel fear through a thousand and one betrayals of a victim’s body. He could feel it now.

Lord Chrysaor allowed the blizzard of sensations to wash over him. A groan of satisfaction escaped his albino-white lips. He enjoyed the dread darkness behind his blood-blank eyes. He could hear the terrified shrieks of the fleeing Ashqanti-Bas nomads being tortured and dying about him. Their beasts of burden and roving lifestock were being butchered in squealing horror. He revelled in the thunder of his own marauder tribesmen, as they ran down their prey on hardy, hook-fleshed steeds.

The Sybariss, as his warband were known, were the very embodiment of ruinous depravity. Each saddle-bound savage honoured Chaos through his ignorance. They had no concept of mercy – only indulgence. They searched for their dark god Slaanesh, not only across the ever-changing lands but in the pleasures of their flesh and the resulting agony of their victims.

Beyond the screams of the victims, the Wanton heard the laughter of madness. It was the jubilance of babbling insanity. The moans of willing victimhood. He smelled the bitterness of the hallucinogenic miasma that clouded the butchery. As the Sybariss’ steeds circled their victims and trampled them, cursed vapours poured from the beasts’ snouts. The slaughter became a crowded miasma, the victims’ deep and fearful breaths taking the fragrant fog down into their lungs. Within minutes, fleeing victims were returning. Those who had hidden revealed themselves in a mindless daze. They begged for torment, cackling to themselves and offering their flesh to the marauder savages.

Walking through the horror, the Wanton tapped the end of his hellforged glaive across the ground before him. He found the fallen. They were stripped of flesh and cut to ribbons, quivering with ecstatic agonies. Chrysaor grinned to himself. To hear the horror, anyone would think that the Ashqanti-Bas nomads had been granted their wildest fantasies.

The Wanton felt the approach of a victim, some stumbling, confused wretch coming at him through the vapours. Something weighed down the victim’s step on the left side. The weight of a weapon, Chrysaor concluded. It was an Ashqanti-Bas warrior. He listened. He heard the weapon’s passage through the hallucinogenic murk, the whisper of the razored edge on the air. A blade.

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Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-016-1

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