Contents

Cover

Crown of Flames – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Crown of Flames

Noah Van Nguyen

The vagrant mountain ravaged the wastes at dusk. It was a shimmering colossus, a wanderer crossing deserts, and its earth-shaking pilgrimage rattled pebbles on the rock-rusted sand. This mountain now avalanched through Cardand – the lands that had suckled us, the lands that had cursed us. By the time the crush of night had drowned the last dead rays of the smouldering sun, the mountain would be gone.

I had that long to climb its slopes before it blasted from the realm and disappeared.

Jujjar brushed clotted blood from his hands. Sunset gleamed off the studs in his face and plotted out his frown like an Azyrite star map. ‘Take me with you, brother. Sorcery spawned the creature. One of us won’t be enough.’

‘Perhaps not one Jujjar.’ I grinned. ‘But let one Heldanarr Fall suffice.’

Jujjar glowered. He couldn’t see my smile beneath my father’s death mask.

I checked the grimacing metal to ensure it was secure, then tightened my linen heat wraps. The mountain’s thunderous passage tickled the roots of my teeth. Its smallest bluffs were as massive as troubled gargants, and its greatest peaks bowed in worship to a jagged summit that dwarfed the hard hills of Cardand. There, an angry star blazed amidst clouds of smoke, as if the roamer had scraped the sky and captured the sun’s soul in a maze of shrouds.

After all my preparation, if the eldritch entity in that mountain still defeated me, Jujjar’s assistance would have made little difference. This was my duty alone.I snapped a grainy chunk of hiitroot from the canvas pocket tied into my sash. I slipped it under my mask and gnawed. Then I snatched my sickle-edged falx from the sand and guided it into my sash beside my dirk. ‘What will you do while I’m gone?’

‘Hunt rock lizard, if any can be had.’ Jujjar rotated his cracked javelin in his callused hands. ‘Heldanarr… If you don’t return, know that I know you. Our people know you.’ His eyes shackled mine. ‘We will remember.’

Jujjar’s words sent a shiver down my spine. I picked at the dirt under my nails. ‘You needn’t catalogue who I am. You need only await me here at dawn.’

‘And if you’re not back by then?’

My lips wilted. I snared a lungful of scorching air within my chest, then jogged down hot scree into the ash-blown wastes.

Jujjar knew. If I was not back by dawn, he would honour my memory. He would dance with my heathen warriors in the burning manses of our foes. They would celebrate all I had been, all I had done. And if they truly knew me, then at least someone did.

When I fought the Azyrites, I thought I knew who I was. A javelin hurtling through battle’s storm. All my thoughts were of the hearts I’d impale.

Those flames faded in the bloodless dawn, as Aqshy’s heat waxed and sleep traipsed out of reach. Haunted by the snores of my warriors, I became a warship adrift. The seas calmed and I cast my anchor. Then some devious grot would skitter up the chain and cut my mooring.

I longed to prove who I was. I ached to plant my banner in the battlefield life had become and raise a bulwark around it, and be that. All that I had treasured, I had lost. Those deprivations had not broken me – truthfully, a sickness within me worshipped them. But this craving to reforge myself in the crucible of war, it was a needle through my heart, my crown of pain. I was restless.

So when three witches from the Ashwilds sought me out and pleaded for my assistance, it was a breed of salvation. Kneeling before me in my warband’s encampment, the wise women of my folk spoke of a malefic entity which had nested upon a roaming mountain. If left undisturbed, they warned, this baleful creature would come to consume our people to sustain the fell fires of its existence. By the fickle light of our ritual bonefire, the witches begged me to kill it. The potential harm it could inflict was too tremendous to ignore. In the millennia of our people’s history, we had never faced such a monster.

I had smiled and shifted in my throne of pillaged iron. My heart had raced to hear of this peril. Everything I did was for my people. Now I could prove it again, and plant my flag in the smoking soil of this monster’s extinction.

Within, a kernel of oblivion ached for even more. A treacherous fraction of the mortal soul craves annihilation. In this noble undertaking, mine had come for me at last. So whether I lived or died – whether I slew my quarry or not – I would fill the aching gulf in my heart and prove who I was. Then I would rest.

The mountain’s bulk had torn up the wasteland around it. Walls of dust clouded the sky. Growlers of regolith tumbled in viscous torrents of rock oil. I danced from stone to bobbing stone, arms wild, careful so as not to slip and be crushed by the endless avalanche.

When I reached less volatile stone, I searched out handholds and heaved myself higher. Rock oil oozed from the cracks, and pellets of igneous stone hailed down from above. Lavafalls coursed from the mountain’s heights, and misting earthfire cooled and floated down in pumice flakes. In the darkest nooks between boulders, eyestalks extended from chitinous, five-legged monsters. They lurked like spiders in the sand, and their gleaming eyes only retracted into their plated shells when I widened the gap between us.

This caution complicated my ascent. As my arms shrieked in their sockets, the mountain’s constant tremors threatened to dislodge me. I had made it some distance, but if I didn’t rest, I would tumble into the rock grinder and bubbling oil below.

I blinked sweat from my eyes and squinted through the ceaseless gusts. The sun lay entombed beneath the horizon. The distant ridge where I’d stood with Jujjar had dissolved into twilit haze. Beyond the mountain’s pulverised base, the once serene wastes roiled like turbulent waters, as if the eternal stranger now drilled through grey seas. We had entered a liminal space, a mist-ridden gap between realms. I struggled to wrap my mind around this, but I had endured enough to know that some secrets are better left untold.

I turned back and found two pairs of bloodshot eyes blinking in bestial stupidity. A mutant condor hunkered before me. Two naked, sun-scabbed necks drooped from its iridescent coat of mangy plumage. The carrion bird’s heads cawed, then pecked my face.

Click here to buy Crown of Flames.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Kevin Chin.

Crown of Flames © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. Crown of Flames, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

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

ISBN: 978-1-80407-242-4

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

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.