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Everqueen – Noah Van Nguyen

An Extract from ‘Beastgrave’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

EVERQUEEN

by Noah Van Nguyen

GOD! MEAT!
HAKWIT! DEATHLESS!

- Engravings found in Uha Cavernne, near Greywater Fastness.
Translated from RECORD PURGED by edict of the ORDER OF AZYR.
(engravings attributed to vandals)

The chorus of skaven warp-grinders blasting through earth and stone falls silent. The skaventide is close-near. By the time they’re done, Alarielle will be deader than dead, yes-yes. The smoking carcass of an arrogant god-thing, blown to gnawable gobbets by Skryre’s secret warpstone-thing.

Hakwit’s incisors chitter with grubby excitement. His paws tap-dance in heinous need. He has never gnawed god-meat before. But it will perhaps be easy?

Perhaps. One bite, live forever.

The indecency makes him squeal. All Hakwit’s ever wanted is to live longer – maybe long enough to stand in the back during assaults instead of out front.

Now he stands to live forever. Soon he’ll get his taste.

Moulder’s great rat ogors and hideous stormfiends groan with witless anger. Their tiny brains are scrambled and mutated, but their weaponised limbs and grafted armour are a reassuring presence. Behind them heave Hakwit’s brood: untold thousands of Verminus clanrats surrounded by sneering stormvermin there only to goad them forward. The clanrat clawpacks pile up the walls, gulping deeply of the urine-reeking air. For many, this will be their last smell of home. Hakwit will not be among them.

The final layers of earth crumble away. The old light of Ghyran streams through widening gaps in the wall. The others rise up, fool-rats, into a hysterical storm of Queekish chittering. The tree-things will never see them coming. They are not tricky like skaven. They are not clever.

As soon as the breaches settle, Sylvaneth arrows as long as harpoons crash into the tunnel. Tanglethorn thickets creep out from each javelin, chewing the wounded apart. Moulder monstrosities howl. Verminus clanrats shriek. Then wyldwood roots claw up from the earth, dragging Hakwit’s fellow vermin into war-tilled soil, leaving unsightly piles of rodent flesh half buried, half alive.

Hakwit’s skaventide surges out like a living sea, a teeming blanket of teeth and weapons and mangy fur. Around them are the Grottos of Growth, caves of rebirth which line the foundations of Alarielle’s Verdant Palace.

Hakwit has no choice but to follow the press. He clutches his scrap shield and chipped scimitar like precious meat. More Sylvaneth arrows thump into Hakwit’s clawpack, skewering his brood-rats like lances.

‘They knew!’ Nailteeth squeaks, ducking beside Hakwit. ‘How-how?’

Hakwit, wide-eyed with alarm, cranes his head around for answers. Tree-thing dryads rise like walls around their vanguard, branches interlocked into bristling barriers. Even Moulder-things couldn’t smash through that front, but they’ll trample every last Verminus rodent for a go at it.

Hakwit’s eyes flitter back. Emerald lightning from the skaven’s warpstone cannonry sears overhead. Somewhere, bells toll darkly. Pestilens plague monks dawdle forward in ragged ranks, censers fuming with sick smoke. More clanrats surge out from new tunnels caving open behind them.

Soon these reinforcements will push up against Hakwit’s pack, forcing fool-meat like him into the grinder of battle. The stupid rats in the rear have no idea what they’re doing.

Or maybe they do, and that is why they do it, yes-yes? Fewer rats at the feast means fewer to share Alarielle’s god-meat with. Hakwit, too, is a rodent of ambition.

War-horns blare eerily. Then Hakwit realises they aren’t war-horns at all, but hair-raising hymns. The tree-things sing. They sing while they fight; they sing while they slaughter.

Then oh-no-no-no-no-no. Tree-gargants ahead slam into Hakwit’s line. They glow like summer on fire, hammering into his skaventide. With viridescent flame and swords shimmering with eldritch light, they gut Moulder’s monstrous experiments and pulp Hakwit’s Verminus broodmates under trunk and root. The soil grows muddy with skaven gore.

This is not a battlefield. It is a kill-house. If Hakwit stays, he dies.

Beside him, Nailteeth’s shudder-eyes go steely with resolve. It’s as if the King of Lashes speaks to him, the Great Horned One himself.

‘Ratmen-things!’ Nailteeth screeches, unblinking and mad-eyed. ‘Today-now we eat god-meat! Today-now – we live forever-always!’

Other clanrats in Hakwit’s brood, all fool-meat like Nailteeth, gibber with inexcusable valour. Maybe the King of Lashes really has blessed them. Maybe they really will live forever-always.

More likely, the fool-rats think their numbers will protect them. That even if many other skaven die, they will live.

Hakwit is a venerable three years old. He knows better than to trust anything or anyone but himself. When all is said and done, only clever-rats survive. Survival is a skaven’s only mandate. Survival is a ratman’s greatest strength.

Hakwit cups his paw around his sore-ridden muzzle. ‘I’m with you, Nailteeth! I’m with you! All the way ’til ending-end, yes-yes!’

The other skaven-rats chitter and chant and cheer. ‘God! Meat! God! Meat!’

Idiots. Fools!

Hakwit watches as his brainless brethren press forward against the enraged tree-gargants. If the skaven swarm in, weighing down the tree-gargants’ limbs, maybe they can gnaw through their bark to their heartwood.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll get a few.

Hakwit squeezes to the back of his formation. When he finally pushes free, he drops his shield and scimitar, turns tail and runs.

Skryre’s geniuses name their latest insanity the Gnaw-Bomb. Hakwit’s heard things about it. Rumours. The warpstone warhead uses Shyishan grave-sand as a blighting agent. The arch-warlocks promise it kills gods. They’re certain. So, so certain!

Or, so-so certain. Not positive. It could work; it might not. Good enough prospects by any rat’s measure.

After the great clans got wind of Skryre’s thing, plans were drawn, alliances made and swarms gathered. Even the Lords of Decay interceded. All skavenkind must unite, they decreed, to murder a god, then devour its carrion.

All gods were on the table. The man-things’ Thunder-Smith in Azyr, or the Gloomspite hordes’ sanity-melting moon. The Dark Four were considered then quickly dismissed. The Great Horned One was already greatest of the Chaos Gods, and the Dark Prince had gone and got themself lost. Seeking to kill any of those would be a wasted effort.

Eventually the skaventide’s war council ordained Alarielle their target. Alarielle was the Everqueen of Ghyran, the mother of the tree-things. The goddess of life. Devouring her, the war council reasoned, would grant the skaven the power in her meat. Together, skavenkind would tear the gristle from the Everqueen’s corpse and chew her bones to dust. Together, they would live forever…

Well, assuming they survived the breaking of her palace. Assuming they got a place at the table.

Assuming the Lords of Decay weren’t lying to begin with.

Hakwit squeals with degenerate pleasure and rodent worry as he squeezes through the ranks of another clawpack.

‘Where does he go-run?’ ask the others, familiar muzzles he recognises and loathes. He despises everything about his kind. They’re all out to get him. He’s out to get them, too.

So lying comes easier than breathing. ‘The tree-things run-flee!’ Hakwit says. ‘Just three whiskers more! Go! Fight-kill! We have them on the back paw!’

The fool-rats grow emboldened and surge forward with vim in their paws and avarice in their eyes. They do not realise the earth underpaw is soaked with skaven guts, not cave water. They do not know they march to their deaths.

Fools. Provender of war. But that is the point, no-no? Power means lying through one’s teeth. Power means living longest. Power means piles of broken bodies and strong legs to climb them.

Back in his tunnel, Hakwit sees the rearguard waiting for him. Ranks of hissing stormvermin skewer other ratmen who also fled. The black-furred stormvermin ignore their snivelling pleas, running them through, cutting short their pathetic excuses.

The pack’s fangleader spots Hakwit. His evil eyes twist up. He is a spiteful thing, quivering with vicious hunger. Hakwit hates him already.

‘You there, clanrat!’ the fangleader snarls, lapping up skaven-gore from the flat of his pitted blade. ‘Get over here and report!’

Hakwit breathes a curse and turns tail again, bolting back to battle. Hakwit fears rat-rats more than tree-things. He calls them rat-rats because that’s what they are. Rat-rats butcher their own brood to wet their blades and call themselves strong. They find inventive solutions to problems they themselves invent. They’re brave, with good morale and healthy coats of fur and no dings in their painted, burnished armour. They have first feeding rights after battle. They’re loud on the charge and quiet when clawlords need first-wave meat-fodder. They’re despicable.

Caught between Sylvaneth who will kill him and rat-rats who will do it faster, Hakwit takes the high road. He clambers up the tunnel’s mouth, grasping roots and vines and wormy soil, scurrying up the cave wall. He reaches the top of a promontory overlooking the Grottos of Growth.

A line of tree-revenants stands before him. Behind them is a rippling pool of pristine water that shines with Ghyran’s life-light.

One tree-thing advances, bigger than the others, a glowing arch-revenant with twinkling wings in a skeletal, oaken body. Tree-things remind Hakwit of undead-things. They both have skeletons, they both have ghosts. One is obsessed with life, the other with death. They seem very much the same. To Hakwit, gnawing bone isn’t much different from gnawing wood. Neither is being slain by them.

‘Kill them all,’ the winged revenant says, brandishing its shield like the glowing moon and its glaive like a blade of light. Its haunting voice reminds Hakwit of a gale in summer. His ears lie down on his head.

Three long years he lived. It was a good run. No one can fault him for longevity.

Then a storm of shadows somersaults out from behind Hakwit. Eshin assassins! They must have followed him up the cave wall.

Night runners cartwheel forward into the tree-things’ lines. Punch blades glimmer in gutter runners’ paws. Eshin throwing stars buzz into the tree-things like hornets, thudding into their trunks like nails.

Hakwit’s found himself between a skaven strike force and the Sylvaneth. He’s not about to wait and see who wins. His goal is clear: survive long enough to gnaw on Alarielle’s corpse. Just a bite, just a morsel. Just a taste.

Lingering here to die with Eshin’s assassins is not part of that plan.

Hakwit scampers across the killing grounds, dodging tree-thing and skaven-kin both. He patters over moss and between glowing fronds into chilling waters.

Sylvaneth flood in behind him. Spite-revenants with gore-soaked branches, Kurnoth Hunters with humming sickles, dryads like bristling briar skeletons. For whatever reason, they guard this mere. Hakwit doesn’t care why – he’s just glad they haven’t noticed him.

He paddles nervously ahead, huffing for breath, chittering prayers for protection. The Great Horned One rewards selfishness. Hakwit doesn’t plan to die, but if he does, he will be sure he lays down his life for himself and no one else, just as his god intended.

In the mere, a massive root bulges from the water, pulsing with soft light. Energy sings from the pool, ringing through Hakwit’s bones. When he reaches the root he sinks tooth and claw in, burrowing into its mushy flesh, ignoring the wailing shift in the tree-things’ spirit-song.

Soon Eshin’s assassins will be dead. Hakwit does not worry overmuch about that. He carves out his hiding place in the fleshy wyldroot. Safe, he peeks outside, gnawing on the root-flesh for comfort. Energy pulses through his scrawny limbs. Warmth runs in his blood like man-liquor. This place will be good to linger-wait. He will survive here, maybe. But better maybe in here than certainly not out there.

Without, Hakwit almost doesn’t notice the flickering glow of the Grottos’ wyld-magic. The Sylvaneth’s spirit-song dies, note by note, distorted to the rhythm of Hakwit’s chewing. The tree-things’ skin-crawling hymns come apart like meat rotting off the bone.

Across the Grottos of Growth, Sylvaneth begin to break, their connection to their realm and their Everqueen fraying. Kurnoth Hunters rout. Dryads’ weakening limbs snap like brittle twigs. Tree-gargants stampede away, howling with fury and pain, shaking the earth.

All the while, Hakwit chews at the root’s soft flesh, wondering when it will be safe to leave.

‘He stole the realmroot’s strength-power!’ Eshin’s deathmaster hisses. ‘Hakwit-rat is a threat-risk. This was for us! This was agreed!’

The others in the war council chitter their assent:

‘Cut it!’

‘Rack it!’

‘Hang it by the paws!’

Verminus’ clawlord speaks. ‘Hakwit wants power. He told us so when we found him. He’s sharp-smart, with wander-eyes. He wants more-more-more. If we’re not careful, he’ll take it. From us.’

‘Make him worm-food before he’s ogor-strong!’ the deathmaster says. ‘Hakwit-rat’s too capable! Too cunning!’

‘Give him to us,’ the master mutator drawls. ‘Moulder needs vermin-stuff for making rat-beasts. Hakwit’s flesh is rich with wyld-magic.’

Pestilens’ plague priest beats his warpstone-tipped staff upon the ground. ‘But the goddess yet livesss! Keep Hakwit-vermin in the ranksss! Our monksss… need… meat-fodder!’

‘Never!’ Verminus’ clawlord howls. ‘He’ll encourage the other slave-meat. They’ll all flee, like him. They’ll seek to live!’

The war council’s bickering continues until the grey seer has had enough. He raises a wizened paw, twitching with a warpstone high, his eyes flickering with sick light.

‘Hasty vermin,’ the grey seer intones. ‘Hakwit must be made an example of. Through him, our fool-maggots may learn their place. Don’t you see? Alarielle’s Ever-meat is just the beginning. When we kill the goddess, we live forever, yes-yes… But when her song ends, her realm will be defenceless. We can make-make Ghyran ours. To do it, we need the slave-rats loyal-true.’

The lord of Moulder huffs. ‘What does His Madness suggest?’

‘Skryre!’ the grey seer snaps. ‘Your Gnaw-Bomb. It is ready-able?’

Skryre’s arch-warlock titters madly. ‘Bomb-bomb, good-ready, yes-yes! Very big! Very strong! Unreliable… Ha-ha!’

The grey seer casts his demented grin upon the others. ‘Our bombardier-rats are certain to die in the final attack. If wander-eyes Hakwit craves power, give it to him! Give him the power to kill god-things! Give him the Gnaw-Bomb!’

Hakwit was promoted.

The skaventide’s war council was so pleased with his accident-triumph they made him master-bombardier of Skryre’s thing.

It should be an honour. It might have felt that way if the war council hadn’t been snickering as they promoted him. Hakwit feels like the butt of a cruel joke.

Alarielle’s Summer Court is nothing but labyrinthine wyldwoods sprawling beneath greater trees as old as the realm itself. The forest is fragrant with the aroma of skaven-blight. Ratkin fill the court, chanting throngs of them, enough to cover the forest floor from one towering tree to the next.

At the centre of this heaving dell, Alarielle’s empty throne sits upon a mountain of old-growth roots gnarled into the shape of a dais. Autumn leaves flutter through rays of dying, crimson sunlight.

Hakwit totters around the throne. The Everqueen is nowhere to be seen. According to Eshin’s spies, she attends to other skaventide attacks throughout the palace. Doomed diversionary assaults, like Hakwit’s in the Grottos of Growth, meant to cover the tunnelling here.

Soon she will return. Hakwit must have Skryre’s thing ready by then.

The Gnaw-Bomb sits in the shadow of the Everqueen’s jade throne. Its flickering core is so monstrously large Hakwit’s neck hurts looking up at it. The acid-green radiation from the warpstone loaded into the rickety scaffold makes his paws sweat. Skryre didn’t have to tell Hakwit the rumours of its power were true for him to know it could kill the Everqueen.

He’s not sure anything else will fare much better.

Then again, nothing is quite as close as he. The heaving skaventide keeps its distance, watching with fierce hunger and jeering gazes as Hakwit and his bombardier-slaves get to work. The war council assured him he would be first to feast. He begins to think they were lying, the rat-rats.

But what choice does he have? Turn around now, they’ll just kill him. At least here he has a say. At least here he has a chance.

Hakwit’s clanrat minions do as he commands, connecting conduits to the mind-bleeding warpstone, skittering away in squealing terror as they finish their assigned tasks. Hakwit doesn’t blame them for following instinct. He plans to do the same. He’ll trigger the Gnaw-Bomb just as Skryre’s maniacs taught him, then scamper to safety, just like in the Grottos of Growth.

Easy-simple. Blow the bomb, kill the goddess. Live forever.

The haunting echo of the Sylvaneth spirit-song gives out. The forest falls quiet. All that can be heard is a dying breeze whispering through the leaves and the nervous chittering of a swarming rodent sea. The last of Hakwit’s bombardiers abandon him, leaving him to curse and fumble with devilry he neither trusts nor understands. He races to complete his job.

Then the basso drone of a monster’s thrumming wings fills the court, tickling Hakwit’s incisors in their sockets. An enormous beetle lands in the highest part of the court’s soaring canopy, shaking every tree in the dell.

The rats in the glades back away in nervous, shambling steps. The mammoth beetle peers down from coal-black eyes. Its movements are audible even from here; it creaks with its own mountainous weight.

Sheathed in shining carapace, bristling with sharpened chitin horns as hard as diamond and longer than lances, the beetle’s groaning hulk reminds Hakwit of a prehistoric titan. Like a legend from the mythic past, the thing is larger than life. It should be extinct.

Wardroth beetles are the Everqueen’s chosen mounts. Alarielle’s here. Hakwit glances at the Gnaw-Bomb, hisses a curse. He is not ready. Not yet.

Light explodes from the Summer Throne. Shockwaves of wyld-magic pulse over Hakwit’s head, blasting across the court. The seething skaven host bends like grass folding under a gale. Crisp autumn leaves piled at their paws grow green again, digging into the loam as new growth.

This close, the throne’s radiance is too much. Hakwit tucks himself behind Skryre’s Gnaw-Bomb, shielding his nocturnal eyes from the painful glow and panting with rodent dread.

The blaze fades to a smoulder, and the living force takes form. Alarielle towers before her throne. She half resembles an aelf-thing but is twice as tall as the tallest of rat ogors. Muscles as thick as boughs cord her limbs. Frond-like pinions adorn her glorious wings. Her phantom-white eyes take in everything arrayed before her, scorning all of it. Alarielle is life everlasting, but she is also life ever-ending. Hakwit feels laid bare looking at her, as if only she may permit the blood to flow in his veins and pump in his heart. Hakwit is empty without her. He always has been, and never realised it until now.

The skaventide roars its challenge. All the vile rat-rats and groaning Moulder monstrosities; all the maniacal Skryre contraptions and swaying, chanting plague monks; all the albino stormvermin guarding the war council cabal at the skaventide’s dark heart; all the shrieking daemon-verminlords sent by the Council of Thirteen to champion their children.

Alarielle looks upon these pests and says nothing. It’s as if they are not worthy of her words, nor her contempt. As if they are undeserving of a single mote of her attention beyond the effort required to rid herself of them.

She takes one step forward, her hand strangling the haft of her terrible spear. The name of a dead god sings from its blade – Kurnoth. The whispered syllables trigger Hakwit’s prey instincts; he empties his bladder.

She takes another step, flexing the vicious talon in her other hand. It summons to Hakwit’s mind the turning of seasons into ages, the dwindling of dark glory into oblivion.

Hakwit beholds the Everqueen and his mind wanders old paths of genesis and destruction, rest and rebirth, a circle of never-ending life. It is wonderful, magnificent–

And dreadful. Hakwit’s mind wanders his people’s primordial past. He sees the skaven gnawing their way into existence. He watches pups spill from rat mothers like maggots from rotten flesh, wriggling and squirming – blind, helpless and hungry. They soak in urine-reeking crypts, spawning in endless darkness. They grow in days and fight a thousand wars across ten thousand plains, dying, killing, feeding, dying.

Alarielle is the goddess of this life, too, the radiance beneath the filth. This radiance, and this filth, here in the Summer Court. Alarielle is the spark of creation, existence and extinction. She is life incarnate. And though she offers her gift freely, her tolerance of the skaven is born of disdain. She permits them their twisted version of life because she does not care to take it away.

Until now.

Her wardroth pounds to the earth like a tossed castle. Alarielle glides to the beetle’s back. The wardroth trundles ponderously around, cratering the loam under the anvils of its feet. Then goddess and beast trample towards the roaring skaventide, shaking the wyldwoods and spawning tremors in the earth.

The verminous lines harden into a spear wall. Hakwit is stunned. He cannot move his eyes. The grey seers always claimed skaven-kin would inherit the realms. To see his brood here, standing before the Everqueen’s might, Hakwit finally believes it.

Then Alarielle strikes, and it is like watching incisors cleave through flesh. The battle-line’s scrap spears snap against her wardroth’s shell. The mammoth beetle storms through the horde, trailing a red mudslide.

Glistening pollen streams from amphorae on Alarielle’s hips into the gory mess. The goddess sings a note of her forever-song, and life energy pulses from her lips across the court.

Vines shoot from the gore-drenched soil sketching skeletal tree-things in the air. Alarielle’s god-whispers animate the wood-bones, possessing them with glowing spirits. Soon, forest revenants tear Hakwit’s skaventide apart from inside out.

Skaven trample over each other seeking to escape Alarielle’s wrath. Her wardroth rampages through the living sea. Alarielle stands atop the beetle gracefully, scornfully, unmoved. She doesn’t lower her eyes to the butchery around her.

Sense triumphs over Hakwit’s stupefaction. He must arm Skryre’s Gnaw-Bomb. Everything depends on him!

He turns back to the warhead, panting with terror and huffing with focus. He does just as Skryre’s maniacs taught him, connecting warpstone core to catalyser nodes, flicking off other switches with other names he doesn’t remember and wouldn’t understand if he did. Bit by bit, Hakwit arms the insane Gnaw-Bomb.

He keeps one eye on Alarielle all the while. The goddess’ butchery entrances him. Watching her is like watching a Ghurish ravener-tsunami loom closer on the horizon of that realm. To be transfixed is to be doomed. Alarielle cannot be ignored. Neither can she be survived.

Gibbering Moulder monstrosities stagger towards the Everqueen. Then wyldwood branches slash through their misshapen flesh. Stormfiends – those same horrors of flesh-science and techno-sorcery which make troggoths flinch and Mawtribe ogors withdraw in search of easier prey – break against the Everqueen’s terrible spear like prey-carcasses beneath a butcher’s cleaver. Alarielle works through them with practised elegance, chopping the howling monsters into glistening wet gobbets. Her wardroth bucks its horns here and there, stringing the stormfiends’ offal and rusted metal scraps along the branches of the wyldwoods like ragged pennants.

By the Everqueen’s cold hands, blessed skaven life gives way to something natural, something simple, something nourishing and loving and horribly disturbing to behold.

Lines of barking stormvermin plant their halberds between Alarielle’s wardroth and the war council. Hakwit recognises their fangleader: fearless, wicked, cruel–

Then Alarielle’s wardroth jellies the rat-rats and Hakwit recognises him no longer.

A mountainous hell pit abomination swells forward – a thrashing wreck of unsightly limbs and grafted blades that moves like a titanic, heaving maggot. The behemoth howls from the unravelling vocal cords of the dozens of ratkin sewn into it.

Alarielle’s wardroth rams its blade-like antlers into this monstrosity, but the abomination stops it in its tracks. The blight-nightmare screams, slashing at Alarielle-Everqueen with its misshapen, claw-ridden arms.

She slices through its limbs with her spear, digging her talon into its outsize bulk.

The passing of ages whispers from the contact. Pound by pound, the abomination shrivels and falls away. The wardroth dozes through its decomposing remains. Alarielle flicks scraps of the abomination’s husked flesh from her arms. Disgust mars her countenance, as if she is nettled by Moulder’s perversions.

Then a squadron of Skryre doomwheels sheer around the flank, ripping wyldwood trees from the earth like weeds and crushing just-spawned Sylvaneth into splinters. Hakwit holds his breath. Even Alarielle cannot turn her nose up at this. A salvo of warp lightning rips out from the squadron, blasting into Alarielle, one doomwheel exploding when its generator overloads.

Alarielle shields herself with her wings. A jade firestorm burns her green pinions away.

The growth replenishes in seconds. Alarielle bats away the flames, face drawn up in ire, and thrusts her spear into the earth.

Lances of root and thornwood shoot up from beneath the court’s soil, facsimiles of Alarielle’s spear. The lances smash the doomwheel squadron into dry-rotted timber scraps and pieces of pitted iron. Dryads fall upon the scattered crews like scavengers on carrion, shredding them into wet meat.

Alarielle is magnificent, smashing each of the skaventide’s kingdom-killing formations like so much nothing. Hakwit doesn’t worship the Everqueen, but he wants to. It is heresy, maybe, but it is also power. Among his folk, ambition is not a sin.

Enough. The Gnaw-Bomb’s armed. All that remains is to flip the trigger lever and run for dear life. Hakwit glances to the slaughter-woods, to the war council. He must act now. He must kill Alarielle, save the others. It is his duty–

No. It isn’t. Hakwit’s only duty is to climb his people’s hierarchy. If he does that on heaps of his own brood’s dead, so be it. He finally understands what his war council always knew: power is a process of elimination.

Alarielle’s wardroth tramples through a final wall of albino stormvermin and plague monks, tossing them aside like broke-neck pups. Thirteen verminlords close in around her, the final line of resistance between the goddess and the war council.

Alarielle meets the greater daemons’ gazes, at last recognising equals or some shadow of it. ‘Step aside,’ she says. Her haunting voice brings trees to blossom, raising wooden revenants from the earth, spinning up twisters of fallen leaves from the forest floor.

A ponderous verminlord lumbers forward, the court quaking beneath its hooves. It raises its doom glaive in challenge, its dual serpent-tails dancing viciously behind it. The fell daemon reeks of power and malevolence.

‘We do not step aside for queens of faded glory,’ it says. ‘For an age you slumbered, tree-queen. In the bellies of the true people you shall sleep again. When you wake, your wood-slaves will be frass in our warrens and bedding for our pups. Your blood will run in the waste of our folk, unremembered excrement from a worthless, broken queen. You are nothing. Your people are nothing. Now return whence you belong.’

Alarielle shows no interest in the verminlord’s words. Her spear snaps out, lancing through the greater daemon’s skull.

The impaled verminlord shudders upon the spear, then falls limp. Its unnatural essence steams away from its carcass, black blood dripping from its slack muzzle to the forest floor.

Alarielle jerks her spear free. The corpse thumps to the ground. ‘Step aside,’ she says again.

As one the remaining verminlords flee through gnawholes. Some draw shimmering glyphs in the air, others slash reality open like flesh. One pulps the mewling skaven-kin at its hooves, a portal flashing briefly in the spilled viscera.

When they’re gone, the skaventide breaks. Dryads fall upon routing rats like hounds upon their quarry. Alarielle looms over the war council as they prepare for a useless stand.

Skryre’s arch-warlock is consumed by vines. Eshin’s deathmaster dusts away within the grip of Alarielle’s talon. Verminus’ clawlord turns tail and runs. Hakwit can’t keep track of the others, so quickly are they slaughtered.

His sides burst with laughter. Everything the rat-rats arrayed before Ghyran’s wrath-goddess has failed them. Only Hakwit remains. Only Hakwit will feast!

In giggling delight, Hakwit throws the Gnaw-Bomb’s trigger lever. He scampers out from beneath the shadow of Alarielle’s jade throne, scrambling into a knothole in the gnarled roots of its dais. He cowers with fear. He shakes with want and ambition and a black, black hunger.

When the bomb blows, it leaves nothing behind.

Hakwit pads out into the sightly wasteland once called the Summer Court. Ashes snow from the dead sky. He sniffs the burn in the air, ears twitching, listening for threats.

The once lush wyldwoods are a smoking hellscape. The monumental trees forming the palace’s walls smoulder with jade flame. Where hordes of vermin once seethed, now plumes of ash billow over hills of scorched bone. Everything is dead.

Alarielle towers over the wastes. The Gnaw-Bomb’s malign energy flash-petrified her into a charred husk. She is frozen in the portrait of her final moments. Her wings are defoliated twigs. Heaps of her wardroth’s burnt chitin blow in the wind like chaff.

Hakwit titters in breathless admiration and gluttonous joy. He scampers around Alarielle, clapping like a pup, worshipping the ruin of her corpse. He licks the stinging sores in his mouth, groping across her wooden husk, searching where he might sink his incisors in, where fire-hardened wood might give way to tender, cooked god-flesh. It was a long day filled with unexpected turns. The black hunger howls in Hakwit’s belly. This will be a meal worth remembering, if not savouring. He must be quick. He must disappear before more tree-things come.

Then the statue shudders. Hakwit squeals and scurries back.

Verdant shoots sprout from Alarielle’s tortured timber. The stems coil to the ground, swelling like tubers into new flesh. Supple life fills the Everqueen’s reincarnation. When it is done, her old shell withers away into nothing.

Alarielle-reborn gasps, inhaling deeply of the ash-laden air. She collapses to her knees, drifting song-notes carrying from her lips. It is a familiar, haunting melody. A dirge.

‘You,’ she says, without looking. ‘You did this. I smell the realmroot on your breath. Beneath your musk, beneath your reek. You stink of ambition. Of waste.’

Hakwit’s nostrils flare. Terror courses through his veins. Alarielle thinks he’s responsible? He is a clanrat.

Then again, he is a clanrat. To a goddess, what meaningful difference might there be between the very greatest of vermin and the very least?

Every ounce of Hakwit’s rodent instincts tell him to flee. There is no more winning this. There is only surviving. That was what made him better than his fool-meat brood, yes-yes? Hakwit knows how to survive. He knows he must, at all costs.

But Hakwit has spent his long life inching up his degenerate people’s hierarchy. It has got him next to nowhere. He cannot let this opportunity slip past his paws. His greed will not let him.

‘Yes-yes!’ Hakwit says. ‘I did this. Me, Hakwit… the Great.’

He glances around for weapons. A knife of pitted iron, or a plague monk’s infectious stave. Anything to kill Alarielle-reborn while she is still a mewling pup, before war once again runs in her veins like warm sap.

Alarielle’s torpid gaze wanders up. An autumnal melody ripples around her, echoing in Hakwit’s ears. ‘What did you want, that you went this far?’

Hakwit sneers. Alarielle is stupid for a goddess. Perhaps that is not fair, because she has not lived where he has lived…

But that is the point, for nothing is fair! She would know if she had come from where he came from. She would know if she had craved what he craves.

‘Life!’ Hakwit screams in haughty glee. ‘I came to eat you! To live forever! What else?’

Alarielle’s eyes turn bitter amber. ‘You razed my palace. You killed my children. For life.’ She scoffs. ‘You don’t know what life is. Life is love. Life is serenity. Look at you, you hungering, wretched thing. You don’t deserve life.’

Hakwit lifts an iron stave, ashes falling from it. She isn’t wrong. Not that it matters now.

Panting, he creeps closer. One good crack. That’s all it’ll take. ‘Sleep-sleep, god-thing!’ he says. ‘This will only hurt.’

Alarielle’s features twist. Roots blast from the battle-scarred ground, wrapping around Hakwit’s weak limbs. They wrench the stave from his paws, dragging him down like chains.

Alarielle sighs, and the fragrant warpstone burn clears the air. Ruddy light blazes from her flesh. Wrath fills her eyes. Her proportions swell back to their old immensity.

The Everqueen fixes her eyes on Hakwit. That same gaze that ignored all the skaventide’s monstrosities, all its numberless hordes, and now it focuses on him.

Flames replace the ice of her contempt. Fury dispels her scorn. ‘You thought you could kill me?’ she booms. ‘The goddess of life can no more be slain than the god of death can be remade in flesh. I am life, Hakwit. I am the beating heart of this realm. My breath is the purity of creation. My tears are the waters of vitality.’

Across the court’s devastated ruins, new growth gushes from the ashes. Saplings march into the air. A sylvan dell reclaims the lifeless wastes.

‘Yet my song,’ Alarielle says, mournfully, ‘is a precious and fragile treasure. Rejoice, rat. For among the living and the dead none have come so close to ending the eternal song as you. Your stuff taints this place. I feel you in the realmroots. I could spend eternity trying to purge you from the spirit-song. I would do nothing but make your reek stronger.’

Then she lifts her arms. ‘Yet I can accept this. Nay – I consider it a tribute. Life, even from you, is still life.’

‘Wait!’ Hakwit shrieks, shivering. ‘Wrong-wrong, great green one! You cannot kill me! You mustn’t!’

Alarielle scoffs. ‘You lack the slightest comprehension of what I can and cannot do.’

‘You are life-alive!’ Hakwit squeaks. ‘You cannot kill! It’s wrong-wrong! Alarielle is life-alive! She cannot kill Hakwit!’

The Everqueen’s aura dims. Around her, newborn Sylvaneth creep through the boughs of the restored wyldwoods. They seem as uncertain as Hakwit about what Alarielle will do.

Then the Everqueen relaxes. ‘It would be too easy.’

Hakwit blinks in disbelief. ‘It would?’

Alarielle nods. ‘I will not kill you. I will give you what you seek.’

The grumbling in Hakwit’s belly ceases. His ravenous hunger evaporates like steam. The roots chaining him relax, and his gaze flickers down.

Green shoots coil from his belly, pushing him open like a flower blossom. His mangy fur falls away in clumps, replaced by creeping moss. Grass curls from his claws. Fronds rustle in his ears. Leaves burst from the splaying boughs of his upper paws. His legs sink like roots into the earth, tasting the warp-poisoned loam.

Hakwit’s eyes recede into uneven knotholes, and soon nothing is left but a living statue of him, nothing but the parting thought that at least now he had what he wanted…

Life, everlasting.

The forest-folk still taste his reek. His pestilence haunts Ghyran’s realmroots. His desire poisons their song – and makes it whole.

It is said the Everqueen cannot forget him, for he almost killed her. It is said she does not want to, for his near triumph is a lesson well learned.

Too, the ratkin remember him. Wherever skaven are found, so are their myths of the Undying Rat.

Do not say his name, for it brings him closer, and the priests of Sigmaron dare not tempt fate. But do not forget him, either, for the Undying Rat proves an instructive example.

Just as we fear the gods, so too might they fear us.

- From Of Myths and Monstyrs in the Mortal Realms
Friaress Oltona Hieronymides, Dollon Abbey, upper Sigmaron
Published in the fourteenth year of the Lightning Indiction of His Most Holy Reign

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noah Van Nguyen is a writer who lives with his wife in Vietnam. Stories he’s penned about the grim darkness of the far future include ‘Vova’s Climb’ and ‘The Last Crucible’ – and in the Mortal Realms, ‘The Huntress of Ghur’. In his spare time, Noah enjoys drinking coffee, studying foreign languages, and secretly propagating heresy.

An extract from Beastgrave.

The stink of burning flesh slammed against Ludvik’s senses and drove the last wisps of sleep from his head. He was roused from exhausted slumber by the blaring of the watchtower’s trumpet, and the foul stench was enough to snap him into full awareness. No mistake, no idiot’s jest. Calamity had befallen Locmalo, and every inhabitant of the town was being called to action.

As he rushed from the earthen barracks he shared with twenty other men, Ludvik saw flames leaping up into the night. They threw eerie shadows across the clustered timber buildings. Several of the structures were alight, with fire flashing from their windows and doorways. Plumes of smoke rushed up from beneath crumbling sod roofs – long grey fingers that spilled upwards into the sky.

More than the roar of the flames and the blare of the trumpet assailed Ludvik’s ears. Screams rang out from the burning homes. He saw a ragged figure emerge from Marek the cooper’s house. The fire-wrapt shape took a few stumbling steps and collapsed in the muddy street. Steam sizzled off the dying frontiersman’s smouldering clothes.

Ludvik’s first instinct was to run for the nearest well and seize one of the buckets laid there against the threat of fire. As he turned to do so, another sound impressed itself on his awareness. A sound more frightful than the shrieks of people trapped in burning houses. Inhuman howls and bestial war-whoops rose from beyond the log palisade that encircled Locmalo. Ludvik felt cold horror rush through him. He knew the sort of creatures that made that savage din, just as he knew the doom that now reached out for the settlement. A doom the humans had long thought to defy.

The children of the forest had come. Come to punish this invasion into their domain. Come to sweep away the creep of civilisation into the wild places and stamp out the human trespassers.

Ludvik’s hand fell to the long-bladed hunter’s knife that was always strapped to his arm. The frontiersmen had learned to their cost to never be without some means of protection, even when in the safety of their own beds. He had seen Udalrich’s body. He had been murdered in the night by a stealthy prowler. The inhuman killer had cut him open to eat his liver, all without waking the other dozen men in the barracks.

‘They have broken through the outer wall!’ The shout carried down from the frantic sentinel up in the watchtower between blasts on the trumpet. The reaction of the men around Ludvik was a mixture of despair and anger. For himself, he felt only a kind of sickness in his belly, a sour churning of the soup he had for supper.

Two palisades defended Locmalo – an outer and an inner fence of sharpened logs. Between these was a cleared pasture where the people grazed their herds. Ludvik himself had two cows out there, animals he had purchased with the pelts he had captured through the autumn. It was his first step towards becoming independent, establishing himself so he would not have to brave the forest and the beasts that yet lurked beneath its boughs.

Ludvik heard the agonised wailing of the cattle. The attackers were in the pasture and slaughtering the livestock. For a moment, all he could think of was his own loss. Then a cold chill swept through him. If the attackers found a way through or over the inner wall, it would be men not kine that would be massacred.

Ludvik ran towards the walls. He saw the beadle with a cartload of spears handing weapons to anyone who came near him. Men and women, old and young, anyone with the strength and heart to carry a bow or swing an axe, were hurrying to the palisade to take up the fight. Ludvik hurried to the beadle and snatched a spear from the cart. He took only a heartbeat to judge its quality before he was moving again. The muddy streets of Locmalo were a bedlam of fright and confusion. As the defenders ran towards the walls, fiery objects came hurtling down into the settlement. Ludvik saw one of them splash in a puddle of mud. It was an old skull stuffed with dried dung and sealed with pitch. He saw the crude glyphs daubed on the skull in streaks of blood. He trembled. Their enemies had called upon witchcraft to aid the attack.

More of the skulls came flying over the wall. They burned with an ugly orange glow as they sailed through the air. One of them struck the roof of the tannery. It shattered like an eggshell and splashed its contents across the roof and the nearby walls. Timbers were instantly set alight. Ludvik felt there was an unholiness about the way the flames spread. The fire’s hunger was more than natural.

‘To the wall! To the wall!’ The command was shouted by Squire Dytryk himself. He stood near the main gate, Locmalo’s five militiamen arrayed around him in a compact bloc. Only one of the soldiers wore his armour. The others had been stirred from their sleep with barely enough time to grab helmets and shields. The squire himself only had a bearskin robe on, though he’d picked up his sword before dashing out into the street.

‘To the wall!’

The cry was taken up. The direction gave the defenders focus, something to fixate upon before fear and confusion could break their resolve. Ludvik joined the line of spears that formed about the base of the wall. He jabbed upwards at the dark shapes trying to climb the palisade. He felt grim satisfaction when a horned figure fell back into the shadows and a thin rivulet of blood trickled down the shaft of his spear.

A few hunters with bows moved among the spearmen, adding their arrows into the mix. Ludvik wished he had gone back for his own bow as he watched his comrades ply their deadly skill. Whenever an enemy presented itself, an arrow would speed towards it. Even when they missed, the threat from the archers was enough to make the attacker drop back.

Behind the line of spears, those settlers with axes and swords clutched their weapons with anxious fingers. As much as Ludvik envied the hunters with their bows, he was thankful he had at least a spear to drive the attackers back. If all he had was an axe or his knife, he’d be forced to stand idle with the others. Watching and waiting. Dreading the moment when he would be called into the fight. The moment the beastkin forced their way into Locmalo.

Ghroth watched the fires rise, their glow illuminating the inner palisade. The herdchief wiped the string of saliva that dripped from his fangs. The smell of cooking human was almost intoxicating, far more than the scent of slaughtered cattle. It did not take much to goad the brays and ungors of his warherd into charging the wall. The real test of his authority was getting the larger gors to restrain themselves. Few beastkin understood patience or had the discipline to plan for the future, however immediate it might be.

Ghroth was one of those few. His craftiness and his ability to delay gratification, were what set him apart. It was why he had supplanted the old herdchief, waiting until after a vicious fight with the tree-fiends of Thornwyld before challenging him for his position. He wore the horns of his rival, bound around his left hand like a spiked gauntlet. It was a reminder to the rest of the beastkin of his strength. When the warren of humans was crushed under his hooves, that too would serve as a reminder to the warherd. It would be a display of his wisdom. An example of his power.

The ungors and brays threw themselves at the walls. Smaller and slighter than the more bestial gors like Ghroth, their lack of bulk was something of a benefit to them as they tried to clamber up the logs. Covered in fur, with hoofed feet and nubby horns, these beastkin were closer to humans in appearance than others in the warherd. The brays in particular had manlike faces and builds – Ghroth even employed them to decoy humans in the forest by making them think the brays were men like themselves.

With their present task, there was no question of the brays being mistaken for humans. The frontiersmen were attacking anything that tried to get over the walls. At the edge of panic, their desperate efforts were fending off the beastmen. Many of the ungors fell into the pasture with ugly gashes and cuts. A few of the brays collapsed with arrows through their chests.

‘Small horns never get in.’ The comment came as a sullen growl from the armoured brute that stood beside Ghroth. A full head taller than the herdchief, Kruksh had adorned his black-furred girth with metal plate looted from dead humans and orruks. Even his goat-like face was banded with strips of mail. The grotesque greenskin cleaver he carried would have been impossible for most gors to wield.

Ghroth glared into the bestigor’s beady yellow eyes. Kruksh grunted in contempt. There was no cunning in his gaze, only the impertinent confidence of a creature that relied solely upon his brawn. ‘Small horns not need get in,’ Ghroth stated. He gestured at the injured ungors and at the tips of the spears that could be seen waving behind the wall. ‘Small horns fight. Show where manflesh fight. See where manflesh strong.’ He gave Kruksh a piercing look, trying to find some awareness there. ‘See where manflesh strong, see where manflesh weak.’

Kruksh slapped his chest and snorted. ‘All manflesh weak,’ he asserted.

Ghroth bared his fangs at the implied insult. He raised his arm, ensuring Kruksh could see the sharpened horns of the old herdchief. The bestigor lowered his head and averted his eyes. There was no challenge there. At least not yet. Ghroth resisted the impulse to tear out Kruksh’s throat. Right now killing the humans was more important. Besides, it was more practical to kill a rival in front of the entire warherd. That way all of the beastkin would know their place.

The sharp tang of smouldering dung made Ghroth turn. He watched a pair of ungors run towards the palisade with smoking skulls in their hands. Loops of dried gut were wound about the skulls and, as the beastmen drew close to the wall, they swung the weird missiles in an arc. When the arc reached the right speed, the ungors let go and sent the skulls flying over the wall. A moment later there was a loud whoosh and flames erupted from the settlement.

Ghroth stalked over to where the ungors had received their macabre weapons. His nostrils flared in revulsion at the unnatural scent of the creature crouched beside a stack of skulls. Useful as magic might be to the warherd, none of the beastkin liked to be near something as steeped in the arcane reek as the shaman Sorgaas. The cloaked mystic was daubing glyphs on the skulls with the severed head of a serpent. He dipped the reptile’s blunt nose into a bowl of blood and painted the sorcerous signs on the bones. Normally the smell of blood would excite Ghroth, but the shaman’s activity had corrupted the scent, made it somehow rancid.

‘More flame for manflesh,’ Ghroth growled, trying to make the words more of a command than a question. He was chief of his warherd – even the giant bullgors obeyed him – but he still felt a tremor of fear when the smell of Sorgaas was in his nose.

The shaman looked up from his labour, the hood of his cloak drawing back to expose a lupine muzzle covered in blue-black fur. A single horn rose from above his nose, branching out into two sharp points. The entirety of the horn was stained with glyphs, and talismans dangled from its bifurcated tips. Cold eyes, yellow and slitted like those of a serpent, stared up at Ghroth. Sorgaas lifted a hand that was scaly, with black talons at the tip of each finger, utterly unlike the slender gloved member that held the snake’s head.

‘All will burn,’ Sorgaas said. He turned his talons towards the pile of skulls. ‘Magic enough for all of these. This is why I tell you to wait.’ He thrust his claw skyward and pointed at the stars. ‘Now is the time when my magic is strong. Now is when the gods of men are weak.’

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Cover illustration by Nuala Kinrade.

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