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The Long Run – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Long Run

Chris Thursten

It was rare for Hendrick to dream. When his soul was worked upon the Anvil, the images sparked within him were formed of the raw stuff of his soul, but they were not dreams. Mysteries, yes, and agonies, but truths also. As pure and purposeful as cooling sigmarite.

When the God-King spoke to him, these were not dreams either. They were moments of divine intercession, overwhelming, terrible and holy. The high glories he had won and the dark duties he had performed in Sigmar’s name had earned him a rare honour – to be the grounding point upon which the lightning fell. But he was not the lightning.

When Hendrick did dream, he dreamed of pennants snapping beneath an Azyrite sky. He dreamed of bright cold air filling his lungs, the scent of star pine resin and forge ash. The weight of steel in his hands, the press of fine-forged armour about his chest. He dreamed of hunting, of running – always running – in pursuit of worthy prey. He dreamed of the hunt’s end, of voices raised in acclaim.

Were these his memories? Over long ages, in the course of innumerable lives and deaths in the service of the God-King, he became less certain. The details and sensations shifted as mortal fragments found themselves bound up in the trappings of the divine. Devotion drew a mask of gold across his features and the weapons in his hands became the storm-forged instruments of Sigmar’s will. The prey he pursued shifted also, from beasts of the mountains to merciless gor-kin daubed in the blood of innocents. Then warlords, sorcerers, wraiths and worse. Far worse.

He had caught and slain them all, and for this they had called him Silver Wolf and clasped the mantle of a Knight-Zephyros about his shoulders. He was among the first to be granted that title, among the first to claim mastery of the windrider’s art. He was, if not the first of Sigmar’s assassins, then perhaps, for a time, the foremost.

For a time, they had called him by a different name.

Blacktalon.

But only for a time.

The wasteland ran to the horizon, the arc of the heavens bending from deep azure to pale gold at the coming of dawn. This was an improvident place to any who had not been born to it. There was a scintillance in the dust that ran in glimmering eddies as the wind brushed the surface of Chamon, which was as severe as an unsheathed blade. Outbursts of copperweed marred its surface in dark patches, silvery dew gathering in the cups of leaves that craned devotionally towards the empty sky.

Two groups of travellers braved this forbidding place, unlike one another in every meaningful aspect. The first was a ragged throng of mortals pledged to the God-King who had journeyed far already and suffered much. Foot soldiers and weary mercenaries in battered plate marched to the flanks of a wide, irregular column. They protected handgunner companies, hosts of the devoted, and covens of mystics whose visions grew more violent and livid with each day spent in the Realm of Metal.

They called themselves Dawnbringers, these city-born crusaders, but they had come to dread the sight of radiance upon the horizon. Weeks of horror had carved fear into them: fear of silver and of gold, fear of the razor that light revealed.

These wastelands, it transpired, were the stalking grounds of Prince Skiros – a cruel hunter whose predatory devotions had seen him elevated to domains of speed and sensation beyond mortal grasp. Skiros enjoyed countless gifts besides these. His body was long and lithe, sheathed in quicksilver. Six brilliant eyes orbited an ovoid maw thick with black incisors. Bejewelled chains sung against the air where they hung suspended between curling horns. One of the daemon prince’s hands held fast to an ornate hunting trident, while the other gripped the yoke of the greatest of his gifts – the exalted chariot Silkenbite.

Silkenbite was a creature of ruin itself, daemon-forged and possessed of its own dark yearnings. It demanded speed and Skiros indulged it always. Its bladed axles and barbed carriage threshed the glittering sands, tormenting the skin of the realm. So disturbed, the wastelands were transformed into a sensory organ. Every staggering step upon these sands shuddered up through the body of Silkenbite to touch the palm of Prince Skiros.

So Skiros had been favoured by the dark god Slaanesh, and so did a procession of aspirant Hedonites seek his favour in return. Few received it. The prince tolerated only those who could keep pace, abandoning all others to bleed their agonies to the dust. His hunting band comprised preening charioteers and veiled slickblades atop daemonic steeds, whose bifurcated hind talons pounded the sand in the daemon prince’s wake.

The prey that now lumbered its way across the heart of Prince Skiros’ domain was a gift too, another indulgence from the Lord of Pleasure. They had come here heedless of the danger, crossing directly into the wastes from the Realm of Fire, their wayfinders and aether scholars acting swiftly to establish the route that would see them through this desolate place to the battered walls of Vindicarum. The city had suffered, and called for aid. These outsiders had fattened themselves with the wealth of Hammerhal and, in seeking to assist their own kind, unwittingly offered themselves up to the Hedonites.

Skiros was a being of appetite and guile in equal measure. These two aspects of his nature did not temper one another but roiled in him, the eventual slaking of his thirsts intensified by his capacity for patience. He allowed the expedition to reach the trackless heart of the wasteland before indulging himself for the first time. It would not be the last.

Skiros came every morning thereafter, each attack inflicting deeper, slower agonies. Not every crusader was a hammer-swinging partisan or fervid zealot of the Church Unberogen: among their number were bravos of Aqshy who understood what it was to bleed an enemy, to inflict death by a thousand cuts. Yet a mere thousand was an impoverished sum to Prince Skiros, whose paring strikes were so subtle that it was as if the Dawnbringers were being slowly dissolved by the realm itself, digested in the acid gut of the daemon prince’s expansive hunger.

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A Black Library Publication

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Cover illustration by Nuala Kinrade.

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