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Realm-Lords – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

Ferendir stumbled on loose rock resting in dry soil. He first fell forward, overcompensated by shifting his weight backwards, then felt gravity – sure and inexorable – seize him. There would be no course correction – he was falling, and the steep, thinly wooded slope was about to thrust him away from its cold, sere face as though disgusted by him. In desperation, Ferendir whirled his arms, hoping to save himself from a painful impact and a merciless slide back down the steep incline. Further on, ahead and above him, he saw his master, Serath, turn back to stare.

Surely that was the worst – not the slip, not the fall, not even the impact to come, but Serath’s cold, appraising glare and silent disapproval.

Then a gentle pressure upon Ferendir’s back steadied him. His fall was arrested, his humiliation postponed. His other master, Desriel, had stopped his backward fall with an outstretched hand. Regaining his balance and planting his feet widely to stabilise himself, Ferendir lowered his eyes. Deep within him, buried beneath layers of physical conditioning and mental inculcation gained throughout his years as a supplicant to the mountain temple, he felt the seething, roiling forces of his emotions, like subterranean waters warmed by geothermal vents, made turbulent by a sudden underground tremor. Embarrassment, relief, fear, self-loathing – all were so close in that horrible instant, so present just beneath the mask of calm he fought to project to his mentors, that he could almost taste them.

Breathe, he ordered himself inwardly. Just as they taught you. Regain your composure. Centre yourself. It was just a misstep… an understandable accident.

But was it? He raised his eyes to Serath again, further up the slope.

Serath makes no such missteps, does he? That is why he looks upon me with such disdain, such disappointment. Nothing I do will ever be good enough for him.

And Desriel. Quiet, compassionate, supportive Desriel. He makes a good show of believing in me, maintaining his patience no matter how often I make mistakes, but he is probably ashamed of me on some level, as well… certain that I’m unequal to what’s ahead.

The trial. My final trial.

Perhaps my final anything.

Stop, that cold, quiet voice within him said again. Fear will destroy you. First things first, now – just get up the mountain without another fall.

Ferendir forced himself to follow the voice’s command. He continued to breathe evenly, consciously, to count slowly backwards as he did so, inhaling on the even numbers, exhaling with the odd.

Inhale. Exhale.

His heart rate slowed. The subtle tremors in his hands disappeared and the sweat upon them began to evaporate.

‘Shall we continue?’ Desriel asked quietly.

Ferendir opened his eyes. Looked up the steep incline of the mountainside. Saw Serath up ahead, silently impatient, still watching, radiating a vaguely disdainful air.

‘Onwards,’ Ferendir said, and resumed his climb.

Today, he faced his final initiation rite as a supplicant and acolyte of his Alarith temple. He could not afford to let a single misstep, a single, foolish mistake, ruin the calm and confidence he had worked so hard to cultivate within himself in preparation for this final, harrowing rite. He must be present, mindful, ready for anything yet expecting nothing.

Today, he would suborn himself to the mountain’s will and beg its blessed sanction.

Today, he would be buried alive.

If the mountain accepted him, he would survive the ordeal. If, on the other hand, it found him unworthy…

‘We linger too long,’ Serath said from above.

Ferendir forced himself not to raise his eyes or meet Serath’s disapproving gaze. From behind him, Desriel answered.

‘Patience, Serath,’ his master said. ‘Our young supplicant was simply recomposing himself.’

Serath persisted. ‘Had he stepped carefully, noted all possible impediments to his passage and skilfully avoided them, he would not have slipped, or fallen, or lost his composure.’

He could hide no longer. Trudging on, never breaking stride, Ferendir raised his eyes to meet Serath’s, however difficult doing so might prove.

‘I beg pardons of both of you, my masters,’ the supplicant said. ‘Please, let us continue.’

He lowered his eyes to the path, set one foot before the other and said no more. He leaned into the steep slope and chose his footholds swiftly but carefully.

The terrain they moved through – deep in the Ymetrican mountains of the realm of Hysh – was sparsely wooded and dreary, slate-grey knobs of cold stone and dry, subalpine soil scattered with towering sentinel trees and blanketed here and there with cushions of moss and islands of sedge. Hand- and footholds were not hard to find – there always seemed to be some jutting stone, the gnarl of a tree root or a narrow shelf of tightly packed earth awaiting his employ. Ferendir concentrated on finding the best of these, determined not to slip again simply because he had failed to closely examine where he planted his feet. As he trudged onwards, he sometimes used his small, delicate hands to assist in his ascent. He could still hear the burbling rush of the last stream they had crossed before beginning their climb, far below them, because the wind-wracked forest around them was so deathly silent, so funereally still.

Ferendir stole a glance upwards at Serath, to see if his stoic mentor yet lingered above him. To his chagrin, Serath had not moved. His master stood, bedecked in his shining white plate armour chased in gold, leaning upon his long-handled stone mallet. One of Serath’s booted feet was braced upon a bleached-white tangle of deadfall wedged between two thin, sickly trees, and the stoic Stoneguard stared down at his long-time apprentice with his familiar reproachful glare. Ferendir could not tell if that expression – so subtle, so inscrutable – was a sign of complete disdain or simple pity. Serath held Ferendir’s upturned eyes for only an instant, then turned his back and began to climb again.

Behind him, Ferendir heard Desriel begin to hum quietly – a slow, melancholy tune. Ferendir recognised the sombre melody at once as one of the temple’s hymns, a wordless song taught to all the servants of the mountain. Its dolorous melody and slow, lilting cadence were designed to sharpen one’s senses, to suppress one’s conscious thoughts and widen one’s consciousness – a sort of musical state of meditation, useful when undertaking laborious physical tasks such as a slow climb up a steep, wind-scoured mountainside. Ferendir was tempted to join Desriel in humming the old hymn – he had always loved the sense of plaintive peace that it stirred within him – but a part of him was reticent.

It was Serath. Though Ferendir now bore down upon his master with his senses and struggled to listen closely, he could not hear Serath humming. Serath, apparently, was centred, focused and fully present without the benefit of the hymn’s quiet, hypnotic power. Therefore, Ferendir, determined to earn Serath’s respect if not his affection, would do as he did, and remain silent, no matter how much he wanted to join Desriel in his song.

They had set off in the early hours of the morning, when the dim Hyshian twilight that constituted night was yet upon them and most of the temple Stoneguard and acolytes yet slept. His masters were each fully armoured and carried their personal weapons – an elegant diamondpick hammer for Desriel, a massive, long-hafted stone mallet for Serath – while Ferendir himself, facing a trial, wore a supplicant’s tunic and had only been permitted to bring along his well-worn yew staff and a small dagger. Their path led them north-west, along one of the many narrow hiking trails that criss-crossed the rolling ridgelines and deep valleys of the mountain, taking them far from the lovely, well-hidden, tree-packed dell in which their temple resided towards the thick, shadowy forests that blanketed the mountain’s western slopes. After hours of following the hill-hugging trail, they finally came to a rocky stream tumbling down out of the woods. At the stream, they left the path and followed the wending waters deeper and deeper into the shady hollows and rough-hewn gullies that formed the uneven geography of the mountain. Just as the full light of day began to bleed back into the world – Ulgu’s darkness waning at last before the imminent glow of the Perimeter Inimical – they finally came to the lower edge of the thinning subalpine forest that marked the beginning of the end of the mountain’s life-sustaining lower slopes. Whereas before the rolling, climbing landscape had been thick with intertwined, leafy decidua and tall, needly dreampines shading banks of shaggy verdibrush and beds of sprouting toadstools, the world above the stream suddenly exhibited signs of weariness and surrender. The spaces between the trees widened. Green turf and fronded ferns were replaced by dry soil, bald stone and isolated beds of spongy moss or obdurate sedge.

Hour by hour they climbed, the light invading the thinning woodlands growing brighter and brighter, even as the gusts blowing down from the mountain’s heights grew colder and more insistent. The world stirred little, only a few lonely birds offering sad songs while from the last clinging shadows beneath the thinning trees they heard the rattle of tiny claws on stone and the soughing, subtle passage of small, fleet bodies. The moribund forest, the steepening mountainside, the air above and around them – everything, no matter how austere and faded it appeared, showed signs that it was alive, awake, hungry. This was one of the most basic lessons imparted to young supplicants of the mountain temple – or any temple, for that matter.

There is life in everything, desire in everything, will in everything. One forgets that fact at great personal peril.

Around them, the pines fell away. The only trees remaining upon the mountainside as they climbed, higher and higher, were stunted, pale and permanently bent by the hitching winds that raced down in gusting squalls from above. Those trees – spread far and wide, no hope of creating anything like a true canopy – hunched and curled against the slope, leafless and ragged as sun-bleached banners frozen forever in a wind-whipped frenzy.

Here, even that which grew slowly and stood impassively against the elements was bent into submission, subject to the implacable will of the mountain and its cold, furious winds. Seeing before him the evidence of just how merciless and unrelenting the mountain’s will could prove to be, Ferendir was suddenly filled with a mingling of both awe and dread at what he was about to undergo.

Seeking the desires of the mountain, testing the will of the mountain that he called his aelemental master, was the sole aim of Ferendir’s trial that day. Per the immutable laws of holy Teclis and the aelementiri principles held sacred by his temple, Ferendir would, like hundreds before him, be taken by his masters to a place of solitude and reflection – a place close to the heart of the mountain, in the direct path of the rushing, invisible pathways of deep and ancient energy that its sublime soul radiated. There, he would dig what was, essentially, his own grave. In that deep burrow, his masters would bury him alive. And there, beneath cold, arid soil and rock, slowly, inexorably crushed by the physical presence of the mountain’s will and desire, Ferendir would dare asphyxiation and a slow, panic-stricken, forsaken death in the close darkness, in order to earn the mountain’s approval for his lifelong service. If he was found worthy, the mountain would not allow his expiration. It would, instead, feed him the air required to survive, so that he could rise again transformed and sanctified – no longer an eager supplicant but a hallowed and holy acolyte, warranted, transformed, devoted evermore to the mountain’s service and maintenance.

If it found any part of his mind, body or spirit unworthy, however, he would die.

No amount of preparation, no words from his mentors or the high priests and Stoneguard he served at the temple, could penetrate the mystery of what the mountain had in store for him. The trial, he had been assured, was his only path to enlightenment, and, likewise, the only means of proving his potential worth. To become what he hoped to become, he must dare the nullification of his very existence. Only courting death in so direct and terrifying a fashion would galvanise his spirit, assure his worthiness and empower him to carry on – to begin to lead the life of usefulness and service that he had always hoped to lead.

Behind him, Desriel spoke.

‘Do you see the end of the shoulder above us?’ his master asked.

Ferendir raised his eyes. He saw a place, fifty yards ahead and above them, where the sparse, bent trees simply disappeared, leaving only broad, bald rock pocked with sickly, sere moss and even more stunted furrows of sedge. Though the sun shone brightly upon that vast, empty expanse, he knew it would be cold there, for the gales blown down from the mountain were strong, and there, upon the tundra, there was no shelter, not even so much as a clump of low scrub to break the wind’s cold, crashing force.

‘I see it, Master Desriel.’

‘We are almost at our destination,’ his master said easily. ‘The place of your trial lies just beyond the lower barrens, over that shelf and deep into a box canyon cut into the mountainside. You can almost see the cleft from here, though the colours of the stone hide it well.’

Ferendir stared as he climbed. He thought, squinting and half imagining what the colours visible on the far side of the treeline suggested, that he could see what his master described, but he could not be certain.

‘Must he be entertained?’ Serath called from above. He had pulled far ahead, now almost to the rocky shoulder. ‘The boy is a supplicant, Desriel. Let him make his own discoveries and draw his own conclusions.’

‘There is nothing indulgent in being informative,’ Desriel called back amiably. ‘Ferendir can draw his own conclusions – I was merely imparting information.’

Serath gave a short, swift glance backwards, but never broke stride. ‘You coddle him.’ It was spoken flatly, baldly – a simple fact. It sounded neither like an indictment nor a recrimination.

‘Perhaps,’ Desriel said, so quietly that it might have been only to himself. Again, there was no feeling in the statement – no indicator of shame or embarrassment – only quiet, assured agreement. Perhaps he did… or did not.

Ferendir kept climbing.

Part of him wanted to look back at Desriel, to see his sharp-featured face, his kind brown eyes, the vague ghost of a smile haunting his usually implacable expression. But he would not. If Serath saw him looking to Desriel for comfort, for encouragement, he might take that as a sign of weakness, an indicator – however subtle – of Ferendir’s unworthiness to undertake the final trial.

I need nothing, Ferendir told himself. I desire nothing. I expect nothing. I go to meet my trial willingly, fearlessly, begging only that the mountain will know my heart and find me worthy of being taken into its service and confidence.

Those were the words he told himself, inwardly, silently, ever eager to settle the emotions that stirred and seethed deep, deep in the darkest centres of his consciousness.

Desriel was as encouraging as Serath was dismissive, as supportive as Serath was challenging. Though Ferendir had always drawn a great deal of his strength and confidence from Desriel’s serene, unwavering support, some impulse inside him always strove to impress Serath, to earn his respect and admiration, to draw even a single word of praise from him, however subdued such praise might be. Ferendir knew it was foolish to feel such things, but some dim, deeply buried part of him always seemed to regard his desire for one master’s praise or support as a subtle betrayal of the other, even though their particular temple made it clear that every supplicant had two masters for a very pointed purpose.

This is Hysh, the High Stonemage had said all those years before, when Ferendir was just a young aelf, presented to the temple for training as a supplicant. This realm – the realm that gave birth to our kind – is a place of balance… a place of harmony… a place of reconciled opposites. Just as our twin gods, Tyrion and Teclis, embody warring impulses yoked to the same divine ends, just as the two halves of the Great Mandala express those warring and reconciled opposites, so your masters will push and pull each of you to the very extremes of your own, still-under-formation natures. They will be the warring forces that help each of you to reconcile the war inside yourselves.

Thus, from the start, Ferendir knew precisely why his two masters were so different, and how their differences should have helped him to reconcile the conflicting halves of his own nature. What he had not anticipated was the strange sense of impatience and jealousy that often gripped him when under their tutelage – how he maintained his will to go on, his desire to try just one more time, because of Desriel’s subtle, artful teachings, yet how he craved – all but demanded – even the smallest acknowledgement of his excellence from Serath. One gave a great deal, yet Ferendir felt he’d had enough and required no more from him, while the other gave him nothing, made him scratch and claw and struggle and humiliate himself for even the smallest, most underwhelming compliment – and still, from that master, the one who withheld, Ferendir wanted more. He strove to be like Serath, to be worthy of Serath, even to someday best Serath, yet he constantly found himself circling back to Desriel for some sense of his worth, his potential, his true value.

No matter how hard he tried to be independent and unshakeable like the one, he could not help but seek support and encouragement from the other.

And so, now he would not look back. Nor would he look up again to see if Serath watched him. He would simply climb. He would make that shelf above the treeline. He would follow his masters into that box canyon where his destiny awaited, and there, sheltered from the world and at the mercy of the mountain, he would face his final trial.

And he would not, under any circumstances, let Serath know how truly, deeply frightened he was of what that trial might reveal.

Foolish, he knew, to let his emotions assail him. He was reasonably sure that outwardly he revealed nothing. Nonetheless, the storm raging within him was impossible to deny. He’d come a very long way since his early years as a young supplicant, told time and again that his feelings – and his failure to control them – would be his undoing. He had struggled all through childhood and adolescence, always winning praise and high marks for his understanding, his spellcraft and his physical capabilities, yet also always falling short in the realm of suppressing his emotions and robbing them of their latent power to manipulate and sway him. Now, he found himself on the cusp of maturity, the threshold of adulthood, the very precipice of his initiation to become a committed and invested Stoneguard of the Alarith temple. And yet, for all the prowess and confidence and insight that his many years of study, toil and struggle had given him, there was still a small, isolated part of Ferendir – a part buried deep within him, yet still burning bright with some stirring, combustible force – that constantly assailed his sense of self-worth.

All the Lumineth of Hysh were trained, by the means most useful to their various tribes, to suppress their emotions, to always seek solutions that were, first and foremost, best for the realm itself and all the people who inhabited it – never to put their own desires, their own fears, their own petty preferences ahead of necessity and the maintenance of life and balance.

Emotions, they were taught, were anathema to rational thought, the bane of right and beneficial action.

They were taught to suppress their emotions, to ignore them or to redirect them… but they could not be entirely free of them, could they? That, it seemed, was Ferendir’s eternal struggle – to suppress the powerful, contradictory, wholly unconscious forces that roiled and raged inside him, so that he could do his duty and be of service.

Emotions such as his fear of failure, and dying within the mountain.

Emotions such as his abiding desire to please Serath and earn his respect, while simultaneously hating and resenting him for never granting even a modicum of that respect or praise he so desperately sought.

It was as if no matter how many times he proved himself equal to a task, worthy of a responsibility, he was still, inexorably, assailed by the sense that he was an imposter – a place-holder for some unnamed champion who had yet to arrive upon the scene, to take the place that he’d kept warm and ready for him.

Why should he feel that way, he wondered during his meditations, or in his loneliest hours, alone and unable to sleep. Why, after so many accomplishments, should he still suspect – however subtly, however quietly – that he was unworthy of trust, unequal to challenge?

Was it because he did not trust Desriel’s confidence in him? No. That was foolish. Desriel was the most trustworthy, the most dependable person that Ferendir had ever known. He would not be such a well-respected Stoneguard if his skills and character were not of the utmost strength and purity.

Was it, perhaps, because Serath always seemed so disappointed in him? So dismissive of his achievements and doubtful of his successes yet to come? Perhaps… but that still seemed unequal to birthing and cultivating his many, ever-swirling doubts and their adamant hold upon him. Ferendir’s fears and misgivings were far more intrinsic than anything the actions of any person – even his masters – could inflict upon him, buried so deep inside him, so far beneath his seemingly calm exterior that he could barely imagine Serath’s outward attitudes having anything to do with their creation and sustenance.

Eliminating those two possibilities left a third one, far more disturbing – Ferendir, despite all of his strengths and capabilities, lacked the great, final component that would elevate and distinguish him, that special alchemy of character that made the difference between being merely a talented supplicant, and truly earning his place as a fully fledged, wholly empowered Stoneguard.

He was not unworthy in essence. But because he doubted himself, he would prove unworthy… because the worthy never doubted themselves or their worthiness.

Did they?

A paradox. And a maddening one, at that.

Ferendir glanced upwards. Serath had reached the rocky ledge above. There he stood, just beyond the ragged edge of the sere alpine grass that faded against the mountain’s stony shoulder, his silent impatience subtly palpable even though his face was as stony and unreadable as a sheer cliff. Ferendir forced himself to move swiftly over the last uneven span of ground between where he climbed and where his master waited. He scrambled over the ledge and took his place beside Serath, Desriel following quickly behind.

They stood upon a broad, bare rocky shoulder that receded from the steep slope towards a more sheer, vertiginous cliff wall a few more yards behind them. For a moment, the three aelves – masters and student – stood silent and exultant, the rising cliff at their backs, the sparsely forested slope falling away sharply beneath them. They drank in the stunning vista that sprawled before them: widely scattered spruce and pines, sickly and stunted beside bent, curling birch and giving way to bare alpine rock; the thicker, darker forest lying like a green blanket on the slopes and hills beneath, a broad green valley bounded by the declining spurs of the mountain’s roots, tumbling away below until the land once more rose towards the peak of a neighbouring mountain some great distance away. In the great gulf separating them from the nearest peak, they saw raptors whirling lazily on the thermals rising out of the valley below and heard the echoing screech of a bird of prey carried on the breeze to their waiting ears.

Ferendir studied the sublime scene, awed and reassured by it in the same breath. Birds in flight. Balmy, upswept breezes intertwined with fierce, chill gusts from the heights, the whole of the world before him burnished with gentle golden Hyshian sunlight. Far away, on the far side of the ridgeline to the east of them, lay their home temple nestled warmly into a beautiful, shady dell on a misty promontory beside falling waters. They had set out from that place mere hours before, but now it felt a world away.

Desriel dared a subtle, satisfied smile as he studied the view.

‘Ennobling,’ he said.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Ferendir agreed.

‘It simply is,’ Serath added flatly. ‘It can be nothing else. Come, we’re wasting light.’

He turned from the ledge and began a steady march up the shallow stony slope towards the cliff face. Now that they were out of the forest, Ferendir could finally see their destination – a high, narrow cleft in the slate-grey stone of the mountainside, barely visible because the pattern of light and shadow upon the cliff face painted the sharp rent in a sort of camouflage. Somewhere, deep within the mountainside, his fate awaited him.

Ferendir looked to Desriel. His master only swept his arm sideways, as if to say, After you, supplicant.

Ferendir fell in behind Serath, following his stone-faced master up the sweep of the grassy sward towards the beckoning shadows of the canyon.

The cleft gave the appearance of allowing only narrow passage, but as they entered, it broadened beyond. Though the canyon floor was wide enough for three Dawnriders to gallop abreast, it was nonetheless strewn with fallen boulders of various sizes and mounds of rocky scree deposited by old wash-outs and landslides. A shallow, snaking brook burbled along the canyon floor, under large rocks and over smaller ones, really little more than a steady seep. The walls of the canyon climbed high on either side, angling outwards to a certain height then ominously contracting inwards again, looming precipitously, as though threatening at any moment to collapse. Because the canyon was so narrow and uneven, little light penetrated. As a consequence, the air was still and cool, the silence oppressive. Worse, the meandering path of the canyon meant that Ferendir could not see more than a few dozen yards ahead of him. However deep their destination lay in this accursed place, it was not readily visible.

Ferendir forced himself to stand still, performing a sort of silent appraisal of the place where he now found himself. The presence of all that scree and the absence of plant life suggested it was a young formation, but a hundred thousand geological epochs were clearly visible in the layered regolith.

Serath led the way, picking out the most direct path along the canyon floor, over mounds of fallen scree and past boulders that might have hindered the progress of lesser beings without such nimble feet. Here and there, the little stream would find deeper depressions in the rock and seem to flow for a few metres as a proper body of water before the stone beneath it once more shallowed and it turned thereafter into a vaguely running wet stain along the canyon floor.

At intervals, sharp winds cut through the narrow alley, compressed and solidified by the rock walls on either side of them. Ferendir clearly heard the voice of the mountain itself in that wind, the narrow breezeway giving the cool, driving air a voice of its own, one moment a moan, the next a plaintive sigh. It seemed a strange road they now traversed – working their way at a slow, steady pace towards the mountain’s interior via such a strangled aperture – but Ferendir knew better than to question the route.

His place was not to question. Only to follow.

‘I would be remiss,’ Serath suddenly said, marching ahead of him, ‘if I did not ask you, for a final time, if you feel equal to the trial before you, young supplicant.’

Serath was uncanny. Even wholly unemotional and speaking in even tones, he managed to impart a vague sense of dismissal and condescension. Ferendir fought the urge to be overwhelmed by shame or anger in answer. He only sought the appropriate response to the prompt within himself.

‘The mountain has called to me, master,’ Ferendir said, ‘bid me come to the place of trial and submit myself to its reckoning. Such has been my only aspiration for all my years of education and service. So called, I come.’

‘A worthy outlook,’ Desriel said from behind him. Somewhere, a small stone fell from a great height. It rattled down the throat of the cleft, clicking and clacking in noisy echoes as it did so. ‘I predict success for you, supplicant. Not only in today’s trial but in the years yet before you.’

‘Predict nothing,’ Serath said. Though cutting a path over uneven ground, ground frequently littered with obstacles and obstructions, he yet maintained a swift pace that even young Ferendir struggled to match.

‘Weigh probabilities and analyse all possible outcomes to anticipate that which is most likely,’ Serath continued. ‘Prediction is a fool’s game – the province of non-aelven scryers and fortune tellers. Analysis requires a combination of both knowledge and discernment – clear senses assessing hard facts, nothing more.’

‘Just so,’ Desriel said. ‘And yet, there is a diaphanous membrane connecting the two, would you not agree? A web, if you will–’

‘A web?’ Serath asked.

‘Between knowledge, discernment and rational analysis lies the web of intuition, Serath – the understanding that leads to true seeing, true knowing, even when what is seen and known defies what is rational.’

Serath was silent for a long time, pressing on, never looking back. He skipped up a rockfall and over a rocky incline in order to cut a track past a massive boulder blocking their primary path. Finally, just as he was about to disappear on the far side of the rockfall: ‘I would call your intuition a false and personalised mask placed upon rational analysis. It is not a web at all, but a line, moving from each object to the next in an unbroken pathway of causation and effect. Nothing more.’

‘We shall agree to disagree,’ Desriel said. ‘As we so often do.’ Ferendir thought he heard a smile in his master’s voice, though he wagered that if he dared look back at him he would see no such smile.

Serath said nothing in answer.

As Ferendir mounted the same rockfall his master had just clambered over, a cold, stiff mistral whipped suddenly, mercilessly, through the narrow rocky pass. It raised a terrible howling sound in Ferendir’s ears and assailed him for an unnerving instant with a bone-numbing cold that made him shudder reflexively and halt his forward progress. He smelled something on that wind, as well… something foul and unnatural. Though he could not immediately identify that scent, the subtle, wind-borne clue yet seemed to stir Ferendir’s whole body to nervous excitement. The beating of his heart increased unbidden, and he sensed a tautness and tremulous energy shooting through all his limbs from the centre of his being to his extremities.

Farther ahead of him, on the canyon floor, Serath stood rigid, his lithe, muscular body squared and ready for violence. His master’s head was tilted slightly to the left and his chin subtly raised, as though he were listening for something and sniffing the scents on the wind the same instant.

Ferendir heard the subtle crunch of Desriel’s soft leather boots on the loose shale of the rockfall. Heaving up beside his supplicant, Desriel drew a deep breath of his own, then slowly blew it out.

Ferendir dared a look at his master. Desriel’s eyes were slowly rolling about in their sockets, studying the narrow confines of the meandering canyon as though in search of something hiding among the ledges and precipitous overhangs.

‘Master?’ Ferendir asked.

Desriel said nothing. He only nodded forward, towards Serath.

Ferendir looked to his other master. Serath stared back at them, gaze steady but narrowed. Clearly he sensed something of import ahead… something unexpected.

‘Slowly,’ Serath said, then led the way. As he progressed, he drew his sunsteel longhammer from where it bumped and jostled, strapped across his back. The brutal spike protruding opposite its flat, terrible head caught the dim grey light in the canyon and glinted.

Desriel had drawn his hammer as well. Ferendir, wishing at that moment that his trial was already passed and that he held such a weapon in his own hands, tightened his grip on his yew staff. Part of him wanted to ask what that strange, unnatural smell portended – what now had both his masters so tense, so on edge – but he knew better.

Follow their lead, he reminded himself. Their actions tell you all you need to know at the moment. Waste no words on idle conjecture…

They pressed on.

In short order, the canyon took a sudden bend to the left. Just past that bend, they emerged from the narrow throat of the canyon into its broad, boxy terminus. The space before them, though bounded by the stony cliff walls, was wide open, large enough to accommodate a great phalanx of Auralan sentinels, forty wide and two hundred deep. At the far end of the box canyon, meltwater from the mountain peaks above trickled or fanned down along the sheer rock walls, collecting in a wide, shallow pool at the back end of the gulf and flowing forth out of the canyon as that persistent trickle that meandered along the path they’d just threaded. High above, where the cliffs receded, mists hung low and obscured their view of the reclining mountainside and snowy peaks that loomed far above them. Streamers of dripping moss and sagging saplings drooped precipitously from the canyon walls, the only signs of life in the otherwise damp and desolate slag heap.

Serath stood at the mouth of the gorge, surveying the canyon before them, still on edge about something. Ferendir sniffed, but could no longer detect that foulness that had assailed him when they’d been mounting the rockfall just moments before. Now, there was only the fresh, mineral scent of the fanning waters from the mountain heights, the vague, distant perfume of pines and loamy soil mingling with the pure, strong scent of wet stone and damp gravel.

Finally, Serath seemed satisfied. He jerked his head sideways, in the direction of the waterfall.

‘This way,’ he said, and led them up the slow, easy incline towards the great pool of dark water at the canyon’s far end.

As they went, Ferendir studied the bare grey landscape surrounding them. He could see no wildlife, but he still sensed it – small, furtive souls threading the dark shadows under the looming rock, tiny claws scrabbling eagerly along narrow cliff ledges, birds making nests in the cracks and crevices far above them, staring down with dark, implacable eyes, wondering just what these trespassing strangers might be doing in their normally quiet, out of the way canyon home. In short, everywhere, life – teeming, edgy, eager.

‘Is this everyone’s place of trial?’ Ferendir asked as they trudged on. ‘Or only mine? Do all come here to seek the mountain’s anointing, or was this place chosen for me?’

‘Immaterial, in either case,’ Serath said over his shoulder without breaking stride.

‘It’s a fair question,’ Desriel said. ‘The boy only wishes to know the how and the why of what he’s about to undergo. He may, after all, someday have to perform the same function for another young supplicant as we perform today for him.’

‘I have a question of my own, then,’ Serath countered, still not looking back. ‘Tell me, Ferendir – how does this place feel to you?’

‘How does it feel, master?’

‘Must I repeat myself?’

Ferendir frowned. ‘Honestly, it feels… anxious,’ he said after a moment, answering intuitively rather than logically. ‘Restive and on edge, as though expecting something unpleasant in the next instant. Whatever we smelled back in the cleft–’

Serath froze. Turned. He speared Ferendir with a probing gaze. ‘You noted it as well?’

‘Of course,’ Ferendir said, vaguely insulted that his master would think him so obtuse.

‘What about now?’ Serath asked.

Ferendir sniffed the air. For the most part, he could only smell the myriad scents of the canyon: cool water, washed stone, damp moss, sandy soil and the vague, musty under scent of sprouting fungi. But there was something else, wasn’t there? Something foul… bitter…

Something that did not belong.

‘We’re not alone here,’ Ferendir said suddenly.

Serath made no reply. He only looked to Desriel, just over Ferendir’s shoulder.

‘Do you concur, old friend?’ Serath asked.

Ferendir turned to Desriel. His other master nodded slowly, eyes darting about, searching the bright heights and dark shadows of the world around him.

‘I concur, Serath. I suggest we be on our way.’

‘No!’ Ferendir said emphatically, instantly ashamed of his emotional reaction to his master’s order. Desriel and Serath both stared at him, seemingly just as shocked by his outburst as he was.

‘We cannot,’ Ferendir said slowly, quietly. ‘I came here to be tested. I will be tested.’

‘Be careful what you wish for, supplicant,’ Serath said, eyes narrowing again. ‘The realms have a way of giving us the things we most desire in ways we never imagined – ways we are often wholly unprepared for.’

‘He’s right,’ Desriel said. ‘This has nothing to do with your trial, Ferendir. Something is very wrong here. Your trial will be tainted by it. Our only option is to go. Come on.’

Desriel turned to lead the way back along their track… but their retreat was already blocked.

Three strange figures stood in a broad skirmish line, obstructing the entrance to the narrow gorge that allowed them access to the canyon.

Ferendir stared, trying to make sense of what he saw, or thought he saw. Their forms were vaguely anthropoid – two arms, two legs, heads and torsos – and yet they were wrong, all wrong. He saw pale skin; black, unnatural eyes; curled flesh and pins and wires; bright, colourful silks stained by soil and sweat and the damp air; the glint of bright jewels and baubles on the clothing and the wearers themselves.

And yet, for all their apparent humanity there was something beastly about the trio. Hands that were not hands. Feet that more resembled hooves. A swishing tail. Faces, twisted and transformed by some blasphemous art that Ferendir could not identify, let alone imagine the ultimate purpose of.

Serath moved up beside Ferendir, shoulder to shoulder with Desriel.

‘Get behind us, supplicant,’ Serath whispered.

The three figures at the mouth of the canyon advanced slowly, casually. The closer they drew, the more terrible they seemed to Ferendir. The young aelf was overwhelmed by a sense of dread and terrible wonder.

‘Well, now,’ one of the creatures drawled, ‘what have we here?’

Movement. Boot heels and hooves on bare stone. Ferendir and his masters turned, surveying the great gorge behind them.

There were more than just the three blocking their egress.

They were surrounded.

It troubled Ezarhad Fatesbane that his minions could not cheer for him, sing praises to him, exalt him when he marched through their massed ranks to the overlook. They were trying to surprise their quarry, after all. Undue noise – even for such a justified reason as the celebration of his own person by his servants – would do little to help them achieve his ultimate aim. Just this once, he decided to let the issue lie. They could sing his praises to their vile hearts’ desire later, after the victory was won.

Still, he enjoyed the sight of them – an entire invader host, hundreds of eager daemonettes, stamping fiends and hunkered hellstriders, all pressed close and tight in among the shadows of the tall pines, doing their best to remain quiet, patient and out of sight. Their quarry was just across the little tributary valley they found themselves in, an Alarith temple facing the dawn of a new Hyshian day with not the slightest inkling that its utter destruction lay just around the corner. If all went according to Ezarhad’s plan – and he had no reason to believe that it would not – that temple would be smoking ruins in just an hour or two, and he would be swiftly away with his prize.

His minions bent in silent worship as he passed among them, all bowing their heads in respect or raising their twisted, mutated arms and inhuman hands in supplication. Knowing they could not sing for him or cheer for him, they hissed and gnashed their teeth and grinned horridly in the twilit half-light of the dim glade where they gathered. Tails swished and swooped in joyful adoration. Inhuman feet stamped, skipped and danced. Ezarhad even saw tears of joy and ecstasy on a few of their pale, twisted, wire-pierced cheeks.

I fill them with ecstasy, he thought, with no small amount of satisfaction. I am wondrous to behold – their very reason for being!

And why shouldn’t I be? Am I not Ezarhad Fatesbane, scourge of the Mortal Realms, the one true chosen heir to the Vile Throne of our lord and master, immortal Slaanesh?

He was… at least, in his own mind. His foul comrades, Meigant and Astoriss, both had their own designs on the dread lord’s title and throne – poor, misguided souls. In truth, Ezarhad was convinced that he could bury both of them – he just needed one strong, undeniable advantage.

And that’s what had brought him here, to the temple.

That advantage – the first requirement of his ultimate victory and salvation – lay within.

He raised his four muscular arms, the bangles and tattoos and many-coloured silk scarves adorning those arms making subtle music in the near silence of the forest. As he displayed himself – almost three metres of beautiful pale flesh, pierced with a thousand tiny flashing ringlets, painted with the foul symbols of ancient sorceries and blasphemies from head to foot, his black, marble-like eyes wide and bright for his many supplicants – Ezarhad felt a sense of real satisfaction. How could they help but worship him. Was he not a thing of exquisite beauty? A thing of glory?

‘Soon,’ he promised them all in a quiet voice that only the nearest could hear. ‘Soon, my children, my servants, my lackeys, all of our foul appetites shall be gorged. The time draws near.’

More hisses, strangled laughter and bodies trembling in anticipation. Like children. How he loved and loathed them all at once.

They had been moving into position all night long – at least, what passed for night in this accursed place. It never grew dark, precisely, only yielded to a sort of wan twilight as the realm’s own inherent luminescence waned and the darkness of Ulgu asserted itself for a few short hours. Perhaps once he had taken his place as supreme potentate of Chaos in this realm and claimed it as his own, Ezarhad could do something about that. Draw Ulgu closer to impose a longer twilight, and shorter hours of full daylight from the Bright Periphery. If today’s raid played out as Ezarhad hoped, he knew that there would be very little he would be unable to do. If he could just lay hands upon that gem…

A tall, broad form in armour encrusted with flayed skins and human bones moved into Ezarhad’s path – Kraygorn, Ezarhad’s warlord supreme. The enormous Slaaneshi warrior – nearly as tall as Ezarhad himself, his visage twisted into a form still vaguely human yet also somehow reminiscent of a mountain ram, crowned by a pair of curling horns – bowed low in obsequity.

‘Good morning, my lord,’ Kraygorn said in his low, sonorous voice. ‘I trust you are well rested?’

Ezarhad gave a curt nod, and Kraygorn raised his head. ‘Well enough,’ Ezarhad said quietly. ‘Are the other hosts in place?’

Kraygorn nodded. ‘Hordes poised on three sides of the temple, my lord. Fiends and daemonettes up the slopes at the temple’s rear, hellstriders and invader forces on the flanks, while your best troops are here, at the fore, ready to charge.’

‘And our duardin?’ Ezarhad asked.

‘The sappers have been digging all night, my lord. At last report, they were in position under the curtain wall.’

Perfect.

Ezarhad nodded, satisfied, and kept walking, his jewel-encrusted greatsword jouncing against his hip in its gem-spangled, filigreed scabbard. Kraygorn’s monstrous size and ominous bearing made him a natural leader among the Chaotic hordes enthralled to Ezarhad’s beauty and exquisite wickedness, but there was also something in the creature that made Ezarhad distrust him. A sense of self, perhaps? Some small, lingering measure of confidence and free will? He would have to keep a close eye on him.

The overlook was just up ahead, through a screen of thick pines. Stepping forward through the needles and low-hanging boughs, Ezarhad was suddenly presented with a stunning view from a great height. Beneath him lay a slanting tributary valley folded between two soaring ridgelines of the great mountain that hosted them. Opposite and above where he now stood, foaming water sluiced from a sheer, vertiginous cliff face, plunging over the mountainside towards a broad, roiling pool on a promontory below. There, in a rocky, long-eroded bowl, the waters swirled and churned before cascading over a series of massive stone tiers down the gently sloping valley floor to the tributary river far below.

It was on a rocky, mist-shrouded outcropping above the promontory where the waters stirred that the Alarith temple awaited them, quiet and oblivious in the soft early-morning light. From a distance, it looked peaceful, stately – and wholly unequal to repelling an assault from Ezarhad’s savage forces. Its high, peaked roofs and towers were huddled behind a thick, stout curtain wall, with only a single gate allowing entry via a narrow road that approached the gate under the auspices of the wall itself.

Two thousand, Ezarhad thought, casually assessing the losses likely on that narrow approach. Perhaps three. No matter. I can spare them. I need what waits inside…

‘Have we any clear indication of the number of defenders within?’ Ezarhad asked, assuming that Kraygorn still lingered at his elbow.

His major-domo had no opportunity to answer. Instead, a shadowy figure seemed to melt from the darkness beneath the trees – a slender, black-swathed form slinking cat-like from its place of hiding into Ezarhad’s proud and glorious presence. This was Tyrirra, his primary seeker, scout and spy. Her movements were lithe, smooth and wholly inhuman, as though she were made of swirling smoke, like some nighthaunt from the plains of Shyish. She wore shadows like most of his troops wore flashing jewels or decadent silks, and her knack for appearing out of nowhere – even when Ezarhad himself was not aware of her presence – both troubled and amazed him. He needed to find some means of knowing when she was present, preferably one that she could not counter or circumvent.

One must always keep one’s subordinates in line, after all.

‘Two dozen, my lord,’ Tyrirra said, her voice a feline whisper. ‘Certainly no more than thirty. At least half of those are supplicants, still untested and seeking full initiation into the Alarith Stoneguard ranks. It almost seems beneath the concern of one so great, so ambitious, as yourself.’

Flattery. Ezarhad smiled. He certainly welcomed it, but he could never entirely trust it. Nonetheless, she was both useful and effective. He would do his best to resist the urge to flay and skin her before he’d found some evidence of her possible disloyalty.

‘Under normal circumstances,’ Ezarhad said, ‘such a pitiful little encampment might be beneath my contempt. But these Stone-worshipping fools have something in their possession which could prove useful to me. I shall have it, no matter how many of them – or all of you – have to die for me to acquire it.’

Tyrirra nodded and slowly backed out of his peripheral vision. Ezarhad studied the scene before him, weighing the variables of the strategy he had already set in motion. He would be at the rear of the party charging the main gate and seeking to breach the forward wall. The rest of his forces would engage the temple from the other three sides, knowing full well that their task was not to breach the walls or climb over them but to simply keep the defenders busy while the main force, at the fore, could batter their way inside. He would spend a great many mortal and daemonette lives in the effort, he knew – the Alarith were renowned for their ferocity as fighters, for how sternly and stoutly they could hold even the most indefensible position. But he also knew that he could penetrate their defences if only he had sufficient time to do so. He had more than a few surprises held in readiness for the assault. When the moment was right, he would happily deploy them.

‘Sound the horns,’ Ezarhad said at last.

Kraygorn nodded. ‘As you wish, my lord.’

‘Send the rear and flanks in first – then we’ll charge the main gate. Soon enough, we’ll be through that wall, I promise you.’

Kraygorn had already given the orders. In the distance, from the hills beside and around the Alarith temple, Ezarhad heard the foul horns of his phalanx commanders sounding.

Music to my ears, he thought. Soon, this realm – all the Mortal Realms and all the forces of Chaos – will be mine.

Ferendir had heard tales of the minions of Chaos from the time he was a toddling child to the day before the trial he had come to the canyon to submit himself to. Only once or twice had he seen the minions of Chaos up close – usually as corpses after an already-won victory by his fellow Lumineth over the vile invaders. He’d heard of the treacherous Disciples of Tzeentch, the cruel, mad Bloodbound of Khorne, the foul Rotbringers of Nurgle and, especially, the Hedonites of Slaanesh, the most hated and despised of all servants of the Chaos gods to threaten and infect his beautiful home realm of Hysh. Staring at the creatures loping or swaying out of the stony shadows to slowly surround them, he could not say what god they served, let alone whether they were human or daemon in origin. All he saw was a ravening pack of demi-human anthropoid abominations – sick, twisted facsimiles of personhood adorned with appendages that did not belong on their bodies, sporting decadent silks and bright jewels and precious gold and silver even as their horrid faces and sickly skins made it clear they were anything but aristocratic in origin.

The figures directly before them, blocking their exit, were tall, willowy and pale, projecting a strange sort of strength and formidableness despite an underlying inkling of sickness and decay. Each wore scraps of leather and silk, baubles, bangles and chains of gold and silver, jewels upon their wrists, their ankles, or hanging from piercings in their flesh. And though they gave the vague impression of having once been human, Ferendir would not swear on the Great Mandala that they remained so now. Clearly they had undergone myriad changes – sorcerous, blasphemous changes – in the course of dedicating themselves to whichever foul deity they called master.

The male at the fore – the one who had spoken to them – sported ears splayed in great, fan-like patterns, the flesh and cartilage split and skewered on a framework of thin needles anchored into the outer curve of its skull. The final impression given by those flayed and framed ears was of dreadful sails protruding from either side of its head. Its eyes were a horrible deep red that was almost black, like ebony spheres dipped in blood, rolling about salaciously in the creature’s deep-set sockets and glinting with a terrible, malign light. Its thin purple lips were curled back, revealing a wall of purple-black gums housing interlocked rows of needle-sharp teeth. Those teeth gnashed together in an expression that was either a rictus grin or a threatening snarl – it was impossible to tell precisely which. Its companions were no prettier.

Ferendir turned and glanced over his shoulder. Half a dozen more of the strange beings – twisted, malevolent, even foppish – had emerged from the shadows under the looming canyon walls, clearly having lain in wait for the three of them, only revealing their presence when Ferendir and his masters moved to retreat. They made for a bizarre conglomeration of vaguely anthropoid forms sporting decidedly non-anthropoid features, such as snapping pincers, two-thumbed, six-fingered hands with long black claws, or whipping, forked tails that swung and snapped behind them like eager serpents. One of the foul creatures even seemed to have a scorpion tail, rising from the base of its back and arcing over its shoulder, some foul venom hanging as a pendulous, cloudy drop on its curling barb.

Nine Hedonites. Three aelves. Ferendir tried to convince himself those were good odds.

Desriel’s face was slack, impassive, as though what now presented itself to them was nothing more than a mild annoyance rather than a grave existential threat. Serath’s face was harder – brows furrowed, mouth set sharply – but offered no more clear indication of what he thought of the situation than Desriel’s expression did. Ferendir noted – with little relief – that his masters had positioned themselves on either side of him, sheltering him with their bodies from whatever attack the daemons might launch. His masters were prepared for a fight – both armed and fully armoured – but Ferendir himself was dressed only in an everyday tunic, armed with little more than a long stick and a knife barely large enough to gut a fish. Staring at the monstrous enemies now surrounding them, the supplicant felt horribly exposed and helpless.

‘Three little willows, bending in the breeze,’ the fan-eared leader recited, ‘hack through every bough and you’ll have them on their knees.’

The half-dozen creatures that had emerged from the cliffside shadows made strange noises now, some cackling like hungry hyenas, others panting like overheated wolves.

‘You should go,’ Desriel said. ‘This gorge is sacred, and no place for you.’

‘Oh, on the contrary,’ the fan-eared leader said, his purple-black lips widening to reveal an awful-to-behold grin. ‘This is precisely where we belong. Such stark, pristine beauty here… such desolate, untouched purity and harmony. This place cries out for us.’

One of the creatures behind the leader laughed and nodded its foul, bald head. Its eyes were sewn shut, but it wore a mad grin, as though it relished every word from its commander and could clearly see what unfolded before it despite its apparent blindness. The third invader blocking their escape had vicious eyes and tapered, pointed ears – almost like those of an aelf – but no mouth. The aperture was not even sewn or clamped shut – it simply wasn’t there. Where it should have been was an obscenely smooth, unblemished plane of tightly stretched skin.

‘You will not be warned again,’ Serath said darkly. ‘Go now and there will be no need to kill every one of you.’ Ferendir could see that his master was appraising the adversaries now creeping closer from all sides, assessing each in turn, rapidly running through each and every iteration of the possible fight to come and choosing the best courses of action even before the first blow had been struck. Ferendir tried to do the same, but found his fevered mind, unbalanced by shock and panic, unequal to the task of sorting probabilities and variables on such short notice.

The foul creatures hissed and laughed, as though Serath’s threat were a jest to them.

Ferendir knew now that these few fleeting moments – the last before chaos ensued – were all that might be afforded him to prepare himself. Violence was eminent, unavoidable. Using every ounce of his willpower, he struggled to slow his breathing, recalling his many hours drilling with the staff as his only offensive weapon, every lesson ever taught to him by Desriel or Serath or one of the other Stoneguard of the temple regarding the seizure and arrestation of time, even in moments of shock and panic.

This is the Lumineth way, they had reiterated, time and again. Time is fluid. It cannot be stopped, but it can be slowed, if only in our own minds. Use every fleeting moment to your advantage.

Ferendir slid into the proper defensive stance, eyes swinging back and forth between the three monsters before them and the six behind. He was about to defend himself – to the death, more than likely. Not precisely the trial he’d left the temple expecting that morning.

The laughing leader took two steps forward.

‘Tell us, aelf – how would you like your remains displayed? Shall we nail your carcass to the canyon walls with iron spikes while there’s still a little life left in you? Let the birds come and pick at you, day after day, until the life remaining ebbs away and you’re nothing but rotten, listless meat? Or shall we simply split you limb from limb and toss all the separate pieces about in a great, haphazard mandala? We’ll give you just that much, as a courtesy – a choice of where you end up. But how you get that way? That’ll be up to us…’

Desriel caught Ferendir’s eye. He spoke low, so that only his student would hear him.

‘Stay between us.’

Then, swift as a mountain zephyr, he struck.

Desriel’s movements were fluid and quick, like a fox bounding through choked underbrush without stirring a single leaf. One moment he stood beside Ferendir, between his student and the foul daemons looming across the narrow entryway to the gorge. In the next instant, Desriel bounded forward, spun three times like a whirlwind, then struck with his whistling pick hammer. He smashed the skull of the nearest of the Chaos servants – that foul creature without a mouth – and the monstrosity fell, trailing a glut of thick black ichor and diseased brain matter. Before the corpse even touched the ground, the eyeless monstrosity charged, levelling its matching pincers at Desriel. As Ferendir watched – wide-eyed, amazed – the eyeless beast thrust, swiped, stabbed, those pincers slicing the air like a pair of foul shears – yet not a single stroke touched Desriel. His master’s strong, ropy body curved, bent and darted in perfect counterpoint to the death strokes of his adversary. The moment the attacker’s defences were spent, its confusion and frustration mounting as it failed even to draw a small drop of blood, Desriel thrust out the head of his pick hammer and the blunt weapon struck home. It cracked the eyeless monstrosity’s teeth and sent the creature reeling back, stunned and stumbling. Without skipping a beat, Desriel spun in a full circle, using his movement to build momentum. The pick hammer struck the creature’s head, crushing its skull, and it hit the stone, heavy and limp, beside its dead companion.

Ferendir was eager to see how Desriel might now meet the fan-eared leader of the trio, but already he sensed movement and imminent danger closing from behind. He whirled, staff ready to repel any comers. Briefly, he caught sight of Serath, standing fast and immovable, swinging and thrusting with his massive stone mallet as the beasts from the cliffs charged and attacked. Serath swept their foul feet from beneath them, putting a few on their backs before crushing one hapless skull then caving in another’s bare barrel chest. By the time the first three – downed with non-lethal force – could overcome their shock and agony to even attempt to rise and attack again, Serath had already laid out two more of their sinister companions.

That left only one – the monster now charging Ferendir. It was a frenzied, fully bedecked jester of sorts, its long, trailing hair dyed several colours of the rainbow, its half-torn motley checked and striped in clashing colours and bedecked with tiny tinkling bells. Though seemingly human from the waist up, the foul thing’s lower half seemed more goat-like, its thin, skeletal form capering about nimbly on small cloven hooves at the ends of furry, backward-bent legs. One hand bore impossibly long fingers not unlike the long, bald legs of some mutated spider, while the other hand had been replaced by a strange metal apparatus resembling a barbed and sharpened hook.

The beast cackled and hooted as it came, the sound maniacal and blood-chilling.

Ferendir recalled his quarterstaff drills and began a series of defensive swipes – side to side, low, high. He struck twice, deflecting two haphazard blows from the terrifying jester’s hooked extremity, then saw an opening. It was only for an instant, but – just as he’d been instructed on numerous occasions by his teachers – a strange sort of calm came over him. Time seemed to slow, allowing him an eternal instant to clearly recognise and exploit his enemy’s point of weakness. He lunged, thrusting the end of his walking staff towards the jester, and stabbed it square in its skinny, bobbing throat. The strike sent the beast reeling backwards, choking and sputtering, allowing Ferendir another instant’s opportunity. The young supplicant charged, swinging the staff in a broad arc towards the jester’s rainbow-crowned head. Just as he expected to feel the yew wood connect with his adversary’s skull, to hear the satisfying, sickening crack that would accompany a palpable hit, something went wrong.

The jester threw up its hook hand, blocking the strike. The sharp inner edge of the barbed hook bit into Ferendir’s yew staff and held fast. Ferendir tried to draw back, to prepare himself for another attack, but his staff would not move. The barbs and serrations of the hook were set into his staff’s grain like a spring-loaded trap holding unwary prey.

The jester smiled, a forked purple tongue darting salaciously from between its pointed teeth. In the next instant it lunged forward, reaching for Ferendir with that foul, spidery hand, its long, multi-jointed fingers spreading wide as it sought to draw the young aelf into its embrace.

Ferendir acted on instinct – dangerous, he knew, but the present situation left him little alternative. Still holding his arrested staff in one hand, his other hand dove to his belt, snatched his sheathed dagger and swept the short blade upwards, right into the path of the grasping hand. The blade bit deep, black ichor glutted forth, and the jester howled in pain. As the creature’s shock overtook its reason, Ferendir yanked. This time, his staff was freed. He swung the yew sideways in a sloppy, single-handed strike. This time, he felt the impact and heard the satisfying crack he’d hoped for the first time. The jester fell to the rocky floor of the canyon. Not allowing himself time to think – let alone to hesitate – Ferendir bent and drove the point of his dagger deep into the jester’s corpse where its heart hopefully lay. The fiend howled and bucked for an instant, then fell silent, its whole foul form twitching as it expired.

He rose, yanking the dagger free, and tried to take a step back. He wanted – needed – to remove himself from the chaos – from imminent danger – for even the briefest of moments. To breathe. To appraise. To formulate. For an instant, he saw Desriel engaged in a desperate fight against the leader of the daemon horde, while Serath held off three more adversaries all at once. But that instant was all he managed to snatch.

Too late. Another of the monsters – this one tall and muscular, sporting four sinewy arms each ending in massive, thick, six-fingered fists – lumbered out of the fray towards him. The stomping brute lowed and roared like some daemonic bull, and its enormous fists began to swipe and pummel the air, seeking Ferendir’s fleet, graceful form. The young aelf danced backwards, as fast as his feet could carry him, trying to come up with some means of overpowering or at least slipping away from the sudden onslaught. His adversary was enormous, towering, blotting out the world before him, those seeking, slashing fists like hurled boulders.

Something caught Ferendir’s boot heel. Before he could recover, he was falling. Down he went again, reliving his humiliation from earlier in the day – You fell! You fool! What would Serath say to that? You’ll never know because you’ll be dead! – before finally landing on his back. The impact was on rocky, uneven ground, and more than a few pieces of shattered stone cut deep into him. There was no time to indulge the pain, however – there was only the mandate of the moment: to avoid those fists, those enormous, thundering feet, that thing looming over him and blotting out the light of the sun itself.

Ferendir used his legs to kick himself upright and followed through into a forward somersault. Just as the looming monster bore down on him and drove its four fists in quick succession into the stone that he had lain on just moments before, he tumbled between its planted feet and came out on the far side, now behind his adversary, still feeling the ache in his muscles and bones from when he’d hit the ground so mercilessly. Ignoring the pain, Ferendir scrambled to his feet, turned and drove his staff between the four-armed monster’s legs. He planned to lay all his weight on the staff and try to trip the creature – but, miraculously, it did the work for him. The beast tried to turn, got its legs tangled on his staff and immediately plunged face first towards the rocky floor of the canyon. The moment the brute’s face hit the stone and it roared in pain, Ferendir was upon it. He brought his staff down once, twice, three times, with all the strength he could summon. The brute grunted and groaned with each strike. But on the third, his weapon failed him.

The staff snapped with a sickening crack. Suddenly, Ferendir held only half the length of wood he had the moment before. His opponent was stunned, but would not stay down for long. Already he saw the great muscles under its taut, pale skin rippling, its back arching as it sought to lift itself once more.

Ferendir considered drawing his knife, but the small blade seemed paltry, wholly incapable of dealing his huge opponent a painful wound, let alone a fatal one.

But there, protruding from his opponent’s belt – a massive sheathed scimitar, handgrip tilting tantalisingly towards Ferendir. With no other options, Ferendir went for the blade. As his adversary managed to get its knees underneath it and rise up onto all fours, Ferendir snatched the big, curved sabre from its sheath. Its weight was uneven and ill distributed, but he corrected quickly and took the only action likely to save his life.

He brought the blade down, hard and fast.

The four-armed brute’s head separated from its shoulders and went rolling away in a jet of black, foul blood. Its body lost all rigidity and collapsed upon the stone.

A nasty gout of the monster’s blood splashed Ferendir and he reeled back, gagging and spitting, hoping that nothing had got in his mouth. Savagely wiping the ichor away, he spun, still gripping the overlarge, heavy sabre, and surveyed the scene before him.

Every other minion of Chaos was dead, save two crippled survivors.

One was the fan-eared leader, now lying in a horridly twisted position, at least two of its limbs shattered and crushed. Desriel was keeping the crippled alpha pinned in place with the blunt head of his pick hammer.

The other was the scorpion-tailed creature – said tail now lopped off and bleeding a thick, sticky substance that looked like cloudy honey onto the stone. That beast had been crippled and immobilised by Serath’s martial prowess, and now thrashed defiantly, impaled on the ferule spike of Serath’s stone mallet.

Ferendir barely knew what to do with himself. Nervous energy pulsed through him, sending his heart into a thrumming storm and making his small, delicate hands shake. He made fists at his sides, lowered his head and all but willed himself to calm down, to restore his serenity, to regain his composure.

The danger has passed, for the moment. Dispel your nerves. Dispel your fears. Find yourself again, the conscious you, the purposeful you, not simply the instinctive, reactive you…

‘Fools,’ the leader spat from where it lay. ‘This is but a small reprieve for you – a misleading calm before the storm that will lay you to waste before it.’

Ferendir’s concentration broke. He could not complete his calming meditations while that foul beast thrashed and cursed so close by. The scorpion-tailed abomination pinned by Serath snarled and spat curses as well, but they were not in a tongue Ferendir knew to speak – thus it was easier to marginalise its speech, to pretend it was just some background noise like the roaring fall of water or the whisper of trees combed by a cold east wind. But the other… He could not block it out, for it spoke in words he understood, and what it said…

Desriel leaned on the pick hammer, using his weight to apply pressure to one of the immobilised Hedonite’s broken bones. The creature howled in agony, but then, a moment later, shocked Ferendir by breaking into raucous, almost exultant laughter.

‘Blind,’ it sing-songed, ‘unknowing, unseeing, unready, unworthy, all of you…’

Its companion, held immobile by Serath, began to sing its own taunt in its own vile tongue to the one who held it down upon the stone. Ferendir, standing exactly between his masters, saw both of them exchange dread-filled, mordant looks. Then, without warning, Serath raised his stone mallet and brought it down in a swift, cruel arc upon his quarry. The scorpion-tailed Hedonite died mid-guffaw, its skull crushed, its foul voice silenced forever. Serath then moved to stand beside Desriel, the two of them now looking down upon the broken-limbed, fan-eared Hedonite with cold, inhuman indifference.

Ferendir edged closer, though something within him did not want to. He was still shaking inwardly, still feeling raw and exposed by what had unfolded around them, the violence that had met them and drawn them in and forced their hands…

‘How did you find this place?’ Serath demanded of the creature.

The monster smiled vilely and shrugged. ‘Just a morning stroll, eh? Combing the countryside for a nice, quiet place, is all.’

Desriel leaned on his pick hammer. Ferendir thought he heard cracked bone creak against itself. The Hedonite howled but still managed to force out a cackle at the end of its long, agonised scream.

‘Is that all you can manage?’ it taunted.

Serath started to lift his own enormous hammer. Desriel stopped him by raising a single hand.

‘This place is sacred,’ Desriel said calmly, ‘and out of the way. What brought you here?’

‘Sacred!’ the Hedonite spat. ‘It’s a pile of dead, wet rock and scree! What a pitiful people you are, holding such a slag pit as this scar upon the mountainside sacred!’

Desriel calmly applied pressure to his pick hammer again. He did so slowly, this time, subtly. The pressure caused the Hedonite a great deal of pain. It seemed to well up slowly but surely, once more dragging a scream out of it and making its broken, barely human body shake beneath the weight of its captor’s weapon.

‘To the fires with all three of you!’ the Hedonite snapped. ‘There will be others! More will come, I promise! Our master makes no demands if he sets us free, only that we follow our noses and do his good work where we find untouched canvas in want of pigment.’

‘Untouched canvas,’ Ferendir muttered, barely understanding the metaphor.

The vile creature turned its red-black eyes upon him. ‘All the Mortal Realms are surfaces in want of colour and shade,’ it said, as though explaining a very simple concept to the lowest of dullards. ‘The blood we spill, the havoc we wreak – all is our art, expressed and created to serve our god in the making! The one whom we serve!’

Then, without warning, Serath swung his stone mallet low. The spike opposite the blunt head bit deep into the Hedonite’s brain, and it said no more. Once more, the gorge was quiet, still, the only sounds the distant hitch and moan of the mountain winds and the water falling down the cliffside, burbling over stone and scree as a seeping, seeking stream.

For a long, silent moment, Serath and Desriel studied one another, seeming to communicate silently without any words passing between them. What they each seemed to clearly recognise and convey towards the other as the danger now presenting itself was a mystery to Ferendir, but he yet saw how gravely they met one another’s gazes, what a terrible weight and oppression now lay on both of them. After a moment, Serath broke away and took off at a swift, steady trot towards the narrow canyon that had led them into the hidden gorge.

Desriel looked to Ferendir. ‘Do you know who these vile creatures belonged to? What power they serve?’

Ferendir nodded. ‘Slaanesh, the god of excess,’ Ferendir said, hoping that was the right answer. That had been his first assumption, given the bizarre extremity of their body modifications and the colourful, haphazard nature of their raiment.

‘Just so,’ Desriel said. Miraculous. Even now, after fighting for his life and killing a slew of adversaries, with danger clearly at their doorstep, he would not stop teaching his student lessons. ‘We have to go now, quickly. We’ll follow Serath back through the canyon to the mountainside.’

Desriel moved away from the strewn corpses of their enemies, backing away while never taking his eyes off Ferendir. When he saw that the young aelf was still rooted where he stood – by shock, by ignorance, by simple failure to understand what was happening – he gently urged him along.

‘Come, supplicant,’ Desriel said. ‘There’s no time to waste. We must away.’

‘But, master–’

‘Come now,’ Desriel snapped, as insistent and forceful as Ferendir had ever heard him. ‘Questions can come later. Just follow me.’

He turned and broke into a run, following in Serath’s wake. Ferendir, completely at a loss and unable to make sense of what was unfolding, fell in behind his master, struggling to catch up but keeping pace easily once he did so.

Threading the narrow canyon seemed to take no time at all, a strange phenomenon, since following it upon their entry had struck Ferendir as a long, meandering stroll into the back of beyond. Clearly it was only his misgivings, his wariness and lack of surety, that had made the time spent seem to stretch so interminably. In short order, they were once more emerging from the narrow ravine through which they’d entered and jogging down the gentle slope of yellowed grass and bare rock towards the place where the mountainside grew suddenly steep and gave way to forest shadows and jostling trees.

Serath was far out in front of them, already standing at the place where the slope dropped precipitously into the forest below when Desriel and Ferendir emerged from the canyon’s mouth. His feet were planted wide, and he stood staring out across the wooded valley beneath them towards the great, rolling ridgeline that separated their current position from their place of origin. Ferendir knew that on the far side of that huge, curving ridge lay the shadowy vale where their temple waited, folded into a misty cleft between untrod forests and the shoulders of the mountain’s south-western slopes.

Before he’d even reached the drop-off to stand beside his two masters, Ferendir saw the horrible sign that so transfixed Serath: a small, subtle indication against a vast, unchanging natural backdrop that something very horrible – very wrong – was currently unfolding at the sanctified site they all called home.

Smoke.

It rose in three thin tendrils, white, grey and black, drifting lazily up from the mountainside before the buffeting winds caught it in their currents and blew it forcefully southwards, turning the three distinct twisting columns into a single feathered, half-effaced smudge of soot and vapour. Worse, a bevy of small black forms were already wheeling and bobbing on the thermals rising from the valley beneath the smoke columns, forms so small at this distance they almost appeared to be gnats.

But Ferendir realised quickly just what they were, and what they portended.

Scavenger birds, smelling death, eagerly awaiting the cessation of hostilities before swooping in to break their fast on carrion and corpses.

Something terrible – unspeakable – was unfolding back at home.

Serath leapt over the ledge and began a rapid descent of the steep, forested slope.

‘No time to waste,’ he said absently, more to himself than to either of his companions.

Ferendir looked to Desriel. Desriel, for the first time in the whole of Ferendir’s memory, looked genuinely worried. His eyes were wide, his brow furrowed – if only in the slightest – indicating that, for all his training and mental conditioning, he could not hide his fear and anxiety. Ferendir opened his mouth to ask a question, but his master spoke before words could tumble out.

‘No more questions,’ Desriel said with finality. ‘We need to move, and quickly. Keep up, now.’

He set off behind Serath. Ferendir, knowing that there was nothing left for him but to obey, to follow and to stay with them, did as he’d been commanded.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-359-2

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For dad, who was always willing to wait.

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