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In THe Lands of The Blind

Rob Sanders

The Many-Eyed Servant, whose many eyes were everywhere at once, blinked his way across the Mortal Realms. Sights. Scenes. The serenity of horror observed but not experienced.

A banquet for the eyes. The daemon drank in the multiplicity of the realms, and of existences beyond that.

Life, death and everything in between played out before him like an unpleasant fiction. Children were born, their cries echoing those of their mothers just moments before. Men roared their rage, groaned in agony and spoke their secret and most desperate thoughts to themselves. Kings and beggars ached for what they couldn’t have, while the beasts that roamed the realms around them knew only the living moment. Here in the lands of the blind, where mortal wretches understood nothing more than the immediacy of their world and their miserable place in it, the Many-Eyed Servant was all-seeing, all-knowing.

The daemon’s gaze focused. In a blink it was drawn back to a story unfinished and a tale untold. Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, was near. A fellow disciple of fate’s dread architect, the god Tzeentch, and a sorcerous champion of darkness, it was he who would find a place in the ranks of the Varanguard – those ushers of the apocalypse, those knights of almighty Chaos selected by the Everchosen to serve the Ruinous Pantheon by his side.

The prince had come far since the Many-Eyed Servant had first seen him. He who had been far was now nearing. He had already faced great trials but he had to be tested anew, for the Everchosen was exacting. Only those of the blackest soul and darkest talents would fight in the company of living doom.

It was for that reason that the Many-Eyed Servant kept his eternal watch. He was Archaon’s terrible gaze cast far across the realms, but here he found an aspirant before their gates.

The Great Spoilage. A rotten wasteland.

Death, as far as the eye could see. Bodies carpeted the land, lying as deep as a lake or shallow sea. Mouldering. Putrefying. Liquefying. Whatever cataclysmic event had been responsible for such devastation was lost to time. Thousands, perhaps millions, had died or been dumped there. Had it been a battle to end all battles? There were plenty of butchered warriors rotting there, but it could just as likely have been a genocidal slaughter, a grand suicide pact or some unnatural disaster that had visited its elemental wrath upon the masses, with corpses raining from the sky.

Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, negotiated the cadavers with difficulty. From the Beaten Path, Zuvius had followed the crows. He had followed them as they moved from battlefield to common butchery. He had followed them as they feasted upon lone travellers and slaughtered armies alike. He had followed them to the Great Spoilage, where it seemed every other crow in the realms was enjoying a scavenger’s bounty.

Like harsh, hilly terrain or the crests of powerful waves, the Great Spoilage was an undulating landscape of cankered flesh and bone. Ribs gave, soiled cloth tore and rotting meat turned to maggot-choked, watery mush about Zuvius’ boots. However, while the land reeked of death, the place was very much alive. Blankets of fat flies smothered the sea of carcasses, filling both the ear and mind with their incessant drone. Rats swarmed through the dead, gnawing, tunnelling and expanding their rancid nests. Crows feasted on both flesh and flies, hopping, swooping and wheeling about Zuvius and his warband as the Tzeentchians made their way across the corpselands. So great was the plague of carrion birds that they blacked out the horizon ahead. Larger pot-bellied scavengers scrambled up and down the fleshmounds, tearing yellowing flesh from bodies and crunching the marrow from bones.

Zuvius held the ragged edge of his cloak over his mouth. The web of melted skin that stretched across the rawness of his scorched face squirmed with revulsion. This place was undoubtedly sacred to the Great Lord of Decay. Its stench saturated the blue straggles of the prince’s hair. Its rank taste was on his smeared lips and silver tongue. Zuvius detested it but in truth could think of no more suitable test or obstacle to place between a servant of the Great Changer and his goal than an expanse of stagnant rot.

The bird Mallofax circled their progress, riding on the rising stench, watching for potential threats. The warband had come across few. Small nests of ghouls picked over the bounty in places, while nomadic looters crossed the corpselands, neither interested in Orphaeo Zuvius or where he was headed. Even Zuvius had doubts about that. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos and Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse, had called for him. Zuvius had followed the signs, followed the crows, but they had led him to a carrion paradise, a mouldering land of dead flesh that undoubtedly attracted every bird in the realm.

Behind the Prince of Embers, Sir Abriel followed. The groaning knight had once been the captain of the royal guard. What remained of that band was now the Hexenguard. They trudged through the spoilage in silence, dark knights of Tzeentch whose plate glowed with enchantments. In their footsteps followed the Unseeing – Zuvius’ coven of blind sorcerers. The wretches staggered and tripped through the dead, one gnarled hand laid upon the shoulder of the sorcerer in front. They looked ancient and helpless, but their appearance belied their true power. With a gesture, the sorcerers could re-craft the flesh of nearby foes into representations of their twisted visions.

Using the sorcerous glaive A’cuitas to cut a path, Zuvius waded through the morass of breaking bones and sloughing flesh. Hauling himself up onto the corpse of a festering gargant, the prince knelt and rested, putting the raw skin of his forehead against his weapon’s haft. As Sir Abriel, the Hexenguard and Zuvius’ wretch-sorcerers climbed up onto the monstrous cadaver beside him, Mallofax returned, perching on the bill-hook of the glaive’s crowning blade.

Zuvius tapped the pommel of the glaive on the gargant’s hide. It was hard, waxy and mummified. Fungi bloomed across the giant carcass. Looking out across the corpse mounds, the prince watched as crows spooked by other scavengers took to the skies, wheeling about in rancid formations before settling once more. He tried to catch his breath but it was difficult. Every lungful of air was concentrated corruption that closed the throat and heaved the stomach. Mallofax flapped. The Hexenguard stood like warped, knightly statues. The Unseeing broke up and spread out across the gargant’s chest, feeling their way across jutting bone.

‘The Varanspire,’ Zuvius said. ‘Where is the damned thing?’

‘Everywhere and nowhere, my prince,’ the reptilian bird told him in a series of hisses and squawks. ‘It exists in the Realm of Chaos. It is here but also there. Near but impossibly far.’

‘Enough with the riddles,’ Zuvius warned.

‘I speak only truth,’ Mallofax said.

‘Well, you’re bad at it,’ Zuvius told him. ‘You should stick to lies, they’re more convincing. I’m beginning to think that we are going to end up the same way as these miserable souls.’

‘My lord?’

‘Perhaps they all set out for this palace of Chaos,’ Zuvius mused, ‘and died on the journ–’

Zuvius felt a quake through the soles of his armoured boots.

‘What is it?’ Mallofax squawked.

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