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Lord of the Cosmic Gate

Gav Thorpe

‘And unto the ninth positional lies the gradient of the damned, invested by the decayed septet of the incongruent ratio…’ muttered Rikjard of the Many Numbers. He consulted his grimoire of archaic formulae, flicking through the tattered pages with fingers tipped with bird talons. Though his claws made it easier to gouge the faces from the foes of all-blessed Tzeentch, the clarity of Rikjard’s notations had suffered since the All-seeing Master had seen fit to gift him with such digits. ‘Ah, here it is, with the Conglomerations of Aesthetics. Aelf-lore, ripped from the mind of their great calculist himself, Narruthias of Telemor.’

Beside him, its head no higher than his waist, Rikjard’s thautomaton familiar buzzed and clicked. The lensed eyes looking up at him reflected a moon-round face and scalp feathered in a rainbow of colours. Innards composed of tiny, ratcheted wheels whirred as the thautomaton raised its four dagger-tipped arms and tipped its head to one side. Black sparks of corrupted energy flashed along wire-veins and sparkled on the edges of its serrated killblades.

‘Yes, soon enough,’ Rikjard told his artificial companion. ‘The field of battle awaits.’

The sleeve of his robe slid back as he raised a hand to encompass their surrounds, the material like fish scales, tinkling gently with the movement. His gesture swept across a landscape of polygonal hills and valleys, curving upwards without a horizon to form the inner surface of a sphere. At the centre, far above his head, eight small stars revolved around each other in complex orbits. If he could but align them he would open the Cosmic Gate, the fabled Panoramicon that led into the heart of Tzeentch’s domain.

Walls and towers of many-coloured crystal littered the lands of the Thousand Portals, refracting, reflecting and channelling the light of the Chaos suns to create bridges of rainbows, shadow-gates and half-seen castles of chromatic power.

In the far distance, if it could be called such in a self-enclosed globe of reality, another shape lingered on the edge of vision – an immense vista of endless curtain walls and bastions, glass-sided towers and crystalline monoliths. The Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch, abode of the Great Architect itself, to which the Thousand Portals had once been a mere outer bastion.

Rikjard stepped to one side, just a few paces, but his view changed completely in those steps. The juxtaposition of light and dark, the play of illumination through the prismatic landscape shifted everything, creating forests of ruby-leaved trees and lakes of shimmering gold fed by a river that frothed over angular rocks of marble-like stone. The vision beyond changed also, revealing a new facade of the Crystal Labyrinth that lay beyond the Halosphere – the mystical boundary that both powered and imprisoned the energies of the Thousand Portals.

‘Beautiful…’ murmured Rikjard. The thautomaton juddered slightly, its part-mechanical, part-magical brain unable to process the concept.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-036-9

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