Lord of the Cosmic Gate

Gav Thorpe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With a simple incantation, Rikjard drew forth his army from where they waited in the Cascading Rocks in the realm of Chamon. The tramp of many feet and the jingle of war harnesses accompanied their arrival. Knights riding steeds armoured in shimmering silver scales led the vanguard, their lances tipped with nine-tailed pennants in red and purple. They wore all-enclosing plate, black as granite, decorated with curlicues of gold and studded with gems that glowed with inner fire. Full helms, topped with crests in the shapes of dragonets-rampant and rearing serpents, hid their faces, the gleam of red and blue lighting the shadows within their visors.

The heavy cavalry wheeled as a single regiment towards Rikjard, while the mounted warriors behind broke into smaller groups, fanning out across the ridgeline and into the steep-sided valley in front. They wore brightly patterned tunics strengthened with hexagonal scales or tight-ringed mail. Their horses snorted vapour in the cold of the Thousand Portals, leaving trails of mist in their wake.

The infantry came next, a seemingly unending line of men and women dedicated to Tzeentch. Clad in myriad styles of armour and costume, they were drawn from across seventeen regions of the Realm of Shadow and the Realm of Metal. The homes they had left behind were now no more than blasted wildernesses in the wake of Rikjard’s infernal crusade. Some were hulking fighters wholly devoted to the service of the Great Architect, but many others were tribal warriors sworn to Tzeentch only by their allegiance to Rikjard.

With them came beasts, some nearly recognisable, others monstrously mutated caricatures of their former bodies. Strange things squawked and lumbered, flapped and shrieked before the goads and whips of beastmasters, flanked by the rumbling scythed wheels of chariots whose drivers wore masks fashioned in the likeness of golden hawks.

Every fighter, whether smooth-limbed, armoured behemoth or twisted spawn, was bound in loyalty to Rikjard. Upon their brows or set into their chests, each being sworn to Tzeentch was marked by a fist-sized gem, many-faceted, glinting with every colour of the spectrum. Each stone emitted a wisp of black smoke, as though it still seared the flesh with which it had been magically fused. Legend from Rikjard’s birthplace, the Chasms of the Endless Pyre, said that the gems were blood drops from the cosmic serpent itself, shed when Tzeentch duelled with the titanic star-beast. Each one turned into a stone when it fell into the Mortal Realms, and they were scattered far and wide through time and space. They were both reward and threat, granting the boon of Tzeentch to the bearer, yet bidding them to obey the will of the Great Architect’s chosen lord.

To prove his dedication to the Ever-Changing Overlord, Rikjard had laboured for half a lifetime. Recovering so many drakestones from the ashes of his homeland had been an arduous task, for which he had been rewarded with Tzeentch’s mark. Yet this task had been just the first of many near-impossible feats Rikjard had achieved to earn his current status.

Rikjard did not like the term ‘minions’ – it demeaned the great conquests and accomplishments of his subordinates – but in truth that was their role. Many thought they might accompany him through the veil of the Halosphere and into the Night of Eternal Knowledge, but such belief was a delusion – one that Rikjard had not spent any effort to dispel, it was true.

Only one could make that journey. The mystical formulae were singularly specific in that respect. All calculations returned with a value of one – no more, no less, no fraction or multiple thereof.

And Rikjard would stand in that place and look upon the wonder of all the realms and know the last piece of the Eternal Equation set forth by Tzeentch to bind the universe together. With such power, Rikjard believed even Archaon and his possession of the Allpoints would be rendered inconsequential.

‘We risk much,’ Rikjard told his uncomprehending mechanical bodyguard. ‘The gods themselves have elevated the Everchosen above us. They have tried already to thwart my ambition, but their resistance only strengthens me, for is not all ambition the sweetmeat of glorious Tzeentch? To climb above Archaon is to stand directly in the gaze of the Great Powers. My patron, my saviour, cosmic Tzeentch shall be preeminent, all others laid to slavery before the all-consuming will of the Ultimate Arbiter, and I shall be the Right Hand of Illuminated Destiny.’

A crackle of flames and a flicker of colourful shadows betrayed the presence of another creature arriving at Rikjard’s shoulder. He did not turn immediately, but continued to admire the view as the glorious construct-world resolved into new forms with the slightest tilt of the head or sway of the body.

‘How do you see it? Is it as magnificent to your daemon eyes?’ he asked, finally glancing back at Tzarathoth, the Tzeentchian herald that commanded Rikjard’s immortal allies. It was almost humanoid in appearance, an ever-shifting form of multicoloured fire and wreathing magical vortices. When the daemon replied, its voice sounded like a distant shriek echoing through a small space.

‘It is anathema to us,’ said Tzarathoth. ‘The reviled star-crawlers have broken it. When they took the Thousand Portals from beneath the gaze of All-Seeing Tzeentch they cursed it, damned it to this perpetual darkness of unillumination. This is not the light of the Universal Inconstant, but the burning of the stars of benighted Azyr.’

‘When the Panoramicon is open, all shall fall beneath the gaze of the Great Changer once more,’ said Rikjard. He consulted a different page in the Metamathicron. ‘According to my Theory of Interstability, declining Azyr and ascendant Chamon with a partial revealing of Ghur is the perfect moment to strike. When the Celestial constellations are dispersed, their power will be weakened and the Starmasters will be sluggish and slow to respond.’

Blinking slit-pupil eyes, Rikjard surveyed the landscape with a more dispassionate gaze. He calculated the inclines and vectors of the converging light rays, triangulating the intersections in a nine-dimensional mystical framework. The Cosmic Gate was no simple realmgate; it was not merely a bridge between two locations. It was a hallway that led between any realm, and into the domains of almighty Tzeentch. Like its godly creator, it was ever-changing – by the time one knew the direction from which it might be entered, its orientation had changed. The Eternal Equation held the answer to predicting the infinitely complex sequence required to ensnare the energies of the Halosphere and force open the Cosmic Gate.

‘There! From that focal point I can make the breach.’ Rikjard indicated a shimmering hill of sapphire above them and to the right, topped by a seven-walled keep. He smiled at Tzarathoth. ‘Summon your daemonic legion – we march to glory!’

The herald nodded, the black orbs of its eyes moving from the sorcerer to the objective. A wisp of flame parted in a grotesque approximation of a grin.

‘Praise Tzeentch!’ Tzarathoth raised its incorporeal arms in supplication, its voice becoming an ululating cry that grated on Rikjard’s hearing and throbbed in his gut. The air around the daemon moved like a glitter of particles that coalesced around its form, first manifesting into a long staff of fire in its upraised hands and then cladding its body in sliding plates of daemonic armour with surfaces that glistened like red oil. It rose into the air and beneath its feet emerged a great disc edged with curving blades and jutting spines. It bore Tzarathoth into the sky on a trail of sparkling fire.

Where the sparks fell, the ground set alight, each flame growing into a new form, reality splitting with a crackle and hiss with each arrival. The first to break through into the Thousand Portals were more heralds – on foot, riding upon their discs, or carried through the air on flaming chariots pulled by howling sky-sharks. These Tzeentchian champions from the Silvered Sands added their calls to those of Tzarathoth, bringing forth daemons in their hundreds, in every manner and form that Rikjard had ever known, and several more he had never before catalogued.

Ranting and shrieking, burning figures and swooping predators ripped through the boundaries between realms. Arcane conjurations spilled across the sky in streamers of multi-coloured flame while pink and blue droplets fell in fiery rain, every Tzeentch-blessed globule bringing forth a new cackling horror.

Rikjard did not pay much attention to the unfolding daemonic spectacle. In his mind he reconfigured his calculations with each new appearance. He tracked and assimilated the Chaotic legion’s multitudinous warriors, estimating the impact of so much magic on the diverging mystical currents that swirled around the Thousand Portals, finessing his predictions.

‘It’s all a matter of mass, balance and trajectory,’ he explained to the thautomaton. ‘Actions and reactions. A tipping point. When all is in motion, that will be the key that unlocks the Cosmic Gate.’

The daemons were gathering about their heralds, moving effortlessly across the ever-shifting landscape in a purple, pink and blue tide. Rikjard’s army was still streaming through from beyond, but he could delay the advance no longer. The Star-spawned Ones would wake soon, and he had to be in position to take advantage of their response.

Lifting a clawed hand, he waved his mortal army forward. Ten thousand jewels glittered like stars as his mental command throbbed into the minds of his followers. Drums rolled, horns blared and trumpets sounded the advance.

Rikjard felt the change before he saw or heard anything. His host had crossed less than a quarter of the distance to the focal point where he would later be able to align the facets of the Panoramicon. The gibbering and mewling of the daemons, the crunch of boots and rattle of armour hid the subtle ripples spreading through the magic-saturated air of the Thousand Portals. He sensed the disturbance as a hundred tiny perturbations in his calculations, minute fractal cascades giving rise to improperly disproportionate divergences.

Change.

He knew it so well. The Master of Change was his lord and guide, but it was not the hand of Tzeentch that extended over the Thousand Portals. It was the touch of the Star-crawlers, the thieves that had taken the Cosmic Gate from the Great Architect in the distant eons of prehistory.

They had a name, a mortal appellation that did nothing to convey the wholly interdimensional horror of their antithetical nature. The Slann. Starmasters. Heavenly lords dedicated to the purging of all that was and could be. A cleansing blandness that would stop the worlds in their orbits and split the realms from each other for eternity, trapping all in the cosmic amber of stasis.

All around him the lands were changing again, trenches and walls springing into life, towers fading and new fortifications and great shimmering bastions emerging from the mists. His attention was drawn to a newly-revealed wall of faceted opal a few hundred paces ahead, in which another of the Thousand Portals was revealed, and beyond it a maelstrom of swirling energy. Light from no mortal star spilled across the entangled landscape, polluting the rays of the region’s own miniature suns. Shadows wove complex shapes against this white illumination, quickly resolving into a phalanx of blue-scaled saurus.

These warriors-dreamed stood as tall as Rikjard’s most powerful fighters, lizard-like with yellow eyes and bright fronds along their bone-flanged skulls. They bore curved shields of scaled hide furnished with sharpened bones and gold edging. They wore more celestite star-gold upon their limbs in the form of torqs and anklets, vambraces and necklaces, decorated with sharp fangs and portentous glyphs. They advanced in unison, clawed feet scratching at the hard rock of the Thousand Portals.

Rank after rank entered through the gate, forming from the light itself by the will of their slann commander. Rikjard had been expecting their arrival – his success depended upon it, in fact. All the same, he was taken aback by the sheer ferocity of their presence. The impact of their appearance on the swirl of concentric computations forced the sorcerer to make swift and radical adjustments to his calculations.

Other wells of light were erupting as more of the Thousand Portals opened, each producing a fresh cohort of fanged, horned warriors. Around these tight regiments of brutes darted smaller skinks, rapid and nimble, their bows, javelins and blowpipes at the ready.

Looking over his shoulder, Rikjard witnessed more of the slann’s host bursting into reality through portals behind his army. Their appearance did not shock him, for he knew well the reputation of the Cosmic Warriors and the ways of their Starmasters. He was prepared for his foe’s ability to arrive unfettered by geography – not that, here in the Thousand Portals, such physical considerations were really necessary. Nothing here was permanent, all was reflection, distortion, shadow and light. Rikjard raised his silver-wrought wand, its head gleaming yellow. The gems set into the helms of several regiments of his most heavily armoured warriors responded with their own ochre glow as the Chosen turned towards the rear to defend against the unfolding seraphon assault.

‘Where are you?’ Rikjard whispered, scanning left and right across the prismatic landscape. Behind the advancing regiments of saurus warriors, a nimbus of golden light became a streaming river of silver-and-blue starlight, coiling about itself like an endless serpent. Larger shapes shifted in the chromatic oscillations, metamorphosing from indistinct shadows to immense beasts of war as they crossed the boundary threshold between realities.

Bellowing and snorting, a pair of tower-sized bastiladons stomped through the breach. Upon the bony plates along their backs they carried arcane celestial engines – one bore a device wrought with the sigils of the long-dead ancestors of the seraphon, the other a gold-shimmering gem as large as a man, with edges that glittered in the light of a unseen star. They were flanked by teams of skinks that were herding bright-skinned salamanders and spine-encrusted razordons.

Screamer-pulled chariots and daemon-fire flamers led the counter-attack, soaring over the heads of streaming columns of horrors with ecstatic leaps. Spurts of blue and pink flames engulfed the front ranks of the saurus, spattering from the reptiles’ raised shields in drops with tiny, laughing faces. War clubs and swords studded with celestite roundels and shards tore at the screamers as they swooped through the dream-warriors, slashing with spiked tails and running barbed fins through the scaled flesh of their foes. From the first of the flaming chariots, Tharkziz the Undenying unleashed bolts of daemonic power, creating a whirlwind of fire that seared through the assembled ranks of the slann’s soldiers.

Tharkziz was followed by more daemon chariots, each carrying a hulking flamer that spat pink fire from maw-tipped arms. The blue horrors that accompanied them jabbed down at the saurus with spears forged of solid flame. The saurus snarled and leapt, using their teeth-edged shields to tear at the undersides of the screamers, their jagged mauls and axes crashing against the bodies of the daemonic chariots. In the wake of Tharkziz’s attack, fire crawled across hide shields and gilded armour, eating into blue scales and muscled flesh. With shrill whines and bestial snarls Chaos daemon and seraphon fell to each other’s attacks. Horrors, screamers and flamers exploded into fountains of dissipating energy, while the saurus returned to the Celestial Realm in flashes of polychromatic light that were reflected and distorted over and over by the mirrors and prisms of the Thousand Portals.

With another thought, Rikjard despatched a portion from the left wing of his army through one of the nearby portals. Savage horsemen and ambling, many-limbed spawn disappeared beneath a rainbow-like arc of black, blues and purples, to emerge from a half-seen gateway beyond the salamanders and razordons. Skinks scattered like leaves before a storm as riders fell on them with whooping battle cries, while misshapen spawn thrashed into their bestial charges with clubbing blows and whipping blade-appendages. Acidic fire and volleys of deadly spines greeted the marauding cavalry and bloated mutants, but Rikjard cared nothing for the deaths of his followers.

‘Show yourself,’ he muttered, signalling for Tzarathoth to split his host in an attempt to encircle the seraphon still streaming from the first celestial gateway. ‘This is not a battle you can win from afar.’

Hooves thundered and claws scraped on unyielding marble as the Tzeentchian knights charged at a wave of saurus mounted atop reptilian cold ones. Lances shattered bloodily against scaled skin while celestite-tipped spears pierced plates of ensorcelled armour. Steeds that were not wholly equine, canine or feline sank steel teeth into the exposed flesh of the cold ones, ignoring the raking claws that scattered the gilded mail coats of the knights’ mounts.

The interplay of attack and counter-attack was unfolding quickly, every movement and manoeuvre, every small victory and defeat changing the parameters of success. Rikjard’s wand left silver trails as he moved his forces with the deftness of a Domination player. His uncle had taught him the strategies of the game even as he had instructed Rikjard in the secret wisdom of mathemagics. To Rikjard, the Thousand Portals were the board on which he played, each regiment of friend or foe a piece to be positioned exactly, every loss an alteration to the complex equation scorched through the thoughts of the Lord of Many Numbers. Possibilities came and went with each passing moment, and all the time the Thousand Portals shifted and turned, air becoming rock, rock becoming air, hills becoming valleys and walled castles becoming yawning chasms. In places, the ground opened to swallow up entire regiments, only to deposit them seemingly at random across the enclosing spheroid landscape.

But this was not random. There was purpose and design behind every displacement. Tzeentch was the Emergent Phenomena, the pattern within the pattern, the predictably unpredictable integer. Rikjard was so close to mastering the Eternal Formula, but he needed the Starmaster that commanded the enemy to show itself. Only then, with the input of the celestial spawn, would he be able to fully unlock the marvels of the Thousand Portals.

Screeches from above drew Rikjard’s attention away from the converging, intermingling lines of Chaos followers and seraphon. From within the orbit of the captive infant suns, a new celestial rift had opened, spilling forth a flock of reptilian flyers. The terradons followed a storm of glittering javelins hurled by their riders, each missile a deadly thunderbolt as it crashed into the heaving daemon horde.

Rikjard heard a peculiar noise over the cacophony of war. He turned, seeking the source of the strange croaking. Sensing his unease, his familiar clashed its dagger-hands, eager to kill. The discordant shrieking of ripperdactyls grew louder as a squadron of the winged beasts circled closer, nostrils flared, the tips of the riders’ spears glinting with captured moonlight.

Something small hopped past the sorcerer’s foot – a toad no bigger than his fist, a pungent smell drifting up to Rikjard’s nostrils from the warty intruder. He had not noticed its arrival, but now recollected the barely-felt pop of magic that had heralded its summoning.

He looked at the innocuous amphibian and then back at the ripperdactyls. The vicious reptilian flyers, their hunting cries cutting across the clash of armies, arrowed down through clouds of golden mist directly towards him, as if drawn by the presence of the strange toad.

Grimacing, Rikjard swept out his wand and unleashed a blast of magical flames that incinerated the leading beasts and their riders. Fire crawling across its wings, another dived through the onslaught and snatched up the thautomaton, ignoring the rasp of its blades along its long beak as it lifted the animated machine and carried it away.

Rod in one hand, blade in the other, Rikjard fended off the spear-thrust of the next rider and dodged the snapping of its mount’s sharp beak. An instant later, the sky filled with blinding sparks as a flight of screamers swept into the ripperdactyls. Celestial predators and daemonic sky-sharks whirled and snapped around each other, ascending in a mass of fangs, barbs and talons, showers of blood and ichor spilling down onto Rikjard like rain.

He pressed on, mentally commanding his army to follow, despatching more and more of his forces through the interlaced portals to divide and surround the enemy. The seraphon likewise manoeuvred through the ever-changing pathways, coming together in knots to baulk his advances, using the portals to charge into the flanks of his warriors or retreat from the assaults of his knights and their monstrous companions.

He checked his position, now unable to see the castle towards which he had set out, but confident that he was close to the location from which he would be able to align the Thousand Portals and open the Cosmic Gate. The equation burned brighter, codifying and solidifying like congealing blood, becoming a thing of raw substance yet possessed of naked power.

The ground bucked, toppling mortal and daemon alike. The captive stars spun wildly about each other and a fresh star burst into existence in their midst. Rikjard looked away, temporarily blinded. Blinking away the after-image, he looked at the new orb of white fire. He could see with his wizard’s gaze that it was not truly in the region of the Thousand Portals, but burned at the end of an infinitely long tunnel, its energy forming a funnel into the space between the celestial domain and the Realm of Chaos where the Thousand Portals were trapped.

The Starmaster appeared instantaneously, with a crack of pressurised air and a boom of thunder that rolled around the sphere of the Thousand Portals, echoing and distorting in an impossible fashion. The slann’s bulbous form, so like a gigantic amphibian, belied the near-infinite knowledge and power Rikjard knew it possessed. It floated upon a palanquin forged from the corpses of dead stars, inlaid with glyphs of pure celestite that surrounded the star-spawn with a halo of deadly and protective light.

The daemons howled and bayed at the arrival of their aeons-old foe. Abandoning all pretence of adhering to Rikjard’s plan, they threw themselves towards the slann, desperate to slay the Harbinger of Order. The seraphon responded with equal ferocity, spurred by the cold intellect of their creator-summoner.

All appearance of subtle interplay vanished, the delicately brutal game replaced with a frenzy of bloodletting and ceaseless carnage. Warriors and daemons fell beneath the celestite-shod feet of rampaging monsters while beams of celestial energy scythed along the rows of daemon and mortal, turning bodies to ash, hurling the inhuman back into the void of their creation. Skink priests borne aloft by feathered cloaks became fulcrums for the magic of the Starmaster, coruscating pulses of energy and coronas of protective power turning the crystal lands into a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting energy.

Daemonic infernos engulfed regiments of saurus guards and storms of mutating power swept aside skink skirmishers, turning them to quivering blobs of flesh. Subjected to the battery of Tzeentchian curses, touched by Chaos-born fires, skin became glass, muscle become stone, metal became writhing flesh. Tree-like growths sprouted from the solid ground to impale and tear with jagged crystal branches.

Into the maelstrom pushed Rikjard, his knights charging again and again, bludgeoning a path through the seraphon, their numbers rapidly dwindling. The Lord of Many Numbers did not care for their fates – their purpose was to die for him and nothing more. The equation shortened as he drew closer to his goal. The possibilities and endless permutations dwindled as destiny and reality converged to the single point he sought.

Buoyed up by the death and destruction, the power surged and frothed around Rikjard like surf on a rocky shore. The slann had been both the lock and the key, as he had known it would be. It was the anchor that tied the Thousand Portals to their prison between realms and Tzeentch’s will was the blade that would cut them adrift again.

Triumphant, head buzzing with the near-complete formula, Rikjard ascended the flat slope of the hill, seeing again in the corner of his vision the edifice he had first spied on entering the Thousand Portals. His feet left the ground. Rikjard seemed to step on air, but from another viewpoint he ascended on steps of light, spiralling up to the heights of the insubstantial tower. He felt close enough to reach out and touch the slann’s gate.

Instead he raised his silver wand, making the last adjustments to the disposition of his servants.

With these final movements, and accompanied by the death throes of stegadons and the cries of wounded warriors, the Thousand Portals aligned.

At first there was light, white and blinding, It separated, splitting again and again, dividing into every shade of the spectrum both visible and beyond. Like glass shattering, the light fell away, leaving an abyssal blackness, the darkness of the utter void.

Rikjard felt the Cosmic Gate open, sensed it with every part of his being – the unfolding of dimensions, the ripple of energies spreading away and then returning, converging on a central point inside his skull.

He saw the star at the far end of the slann’s gateway and the last piece of the equation resolved into his thoughts, its secret ripped from the heart of the alien sun.

‘I know it!’ Rikjard cried, his voice echoing through time. ‘The power is mine!’

The star grew brighter, hotter.

Closer.

Rikjard had the sensation of movement. Falling. More than that, he was being dragged, pulled toward the slann’s star-home. From within, he would shatter the barriers between realms and take his place at the right hand of Tzeentch.

Formless took on form and the solution to the Eternal Equation made itself known to him.

0 = ∞

He considered this for a moment.

∞ = 0

There had to be some mistake. There could not be infinite nothing. What could that mean?

The star pulled him in, and the answer came to him as its fronds lapped at his dissipating body and soul, scattering the particles of his form and thoughts.

Infinite nothing. More than death. Less than life. Oblivion.

He had been wrong.

Rikjard of the Many Numbers felt a sense of utter failure, but only for a moment, and then he was no more.

The slann Xalanxymanzik blinked once and sent a telepathic signal to its skink-manifestations that the battle was to cease. The Thousand Portals fell silent as the seraphon disappeared, their memory-forms collapsing back into celestial potential as Xalanxymanzik returned his thoughts to the domain of his origin, leaving behind the trappings of mortal, constructed thought.

Abandoning the Chaos daemons and men to their self-defeating machinations and conflicts, the Starmaster folded itself back through the dimension bridge to the celestial void. The battle against the one called Rikjard had taken much effort, and the solution to unlocking the Cosmic Gate had almost been revealed.

But not this time.

So to age-long slumber Xalanxymanzik returned, its drifting thoughts moving towards ever-more esoteric domains as physical concerns faded. A dream-shard split from its near-dormant musing and fell like an insubstantial feather, borne far upon cosmic winds until it descended into one of the Mortal Realms and touched upon the mind of a human. There it nestled, awakening thoughts never before conceived.

Perhaps this time the mystic formula would unravel itself and the Cosmic Gate would open, revealing the innermost power of Tzeentch, and laying the heart of the Great Architect exposed to attack. Nurtured by its human host, the Eternal Equation started to grow again, fuelled by a hurried, desperate, mortal ambition that the slann could never possess. The essential component, the missing variable.

The Chaos factor.

About the Author

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Deliverance Lost, as well as the novellas Corax: Soulforge, Ravenlord and The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs. He is particularly well-known for his Dark Angels stories, including the Legacy of Caliban series. His Warhammer 40,000 repertoire further includes the Path of the Eldar series, the Horus Heresy audio dramas Raven’s Flight, Honour to the Dead and Raptor, and a multiplicity of short stories. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. He lives and works in Nottingham.

The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.

Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-036-9

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(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.