EYE OF THE STORM

Rob Sanders

The sorcerer opened his eyes. All of them.

The Many-Eyed. Disciple of Tzeentch and subject of Archaon, who was the Everchosen of Chaos and the Ender of Worlds. Envisioner of sights unseen.

The Many-Eyed’s gaze reached far, for he saw as gods do. He was Archaon’s eyes. His gaze reached across the Mortal Realms. Searching. Searching for those who would become giants among men, warriors already pledged to ruin, who themselves searched for greater meaning and dark service. And there was no warlord of Chaos darker and greater than the Everchosen, for Archaon was Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse.

The Many-Eyed missed nothing. He saw through the living and dead, the inhuman and inanimate, and through the eyes of daemons, glinting in shadow. Coins fell from the lids of corpses, laid out on funeral pyres. Statues blinked the dust from their stony orbs. The eyes of cutthroats, kings and all wretched existence in between were spyglasses of the soul, through which the great sorcerer observed. Even the mind’s eye was the sorcerer’s to see. The play of pictures in the blackness behind the face. Memories churned up from the past. Secrets kept and fantasies imagined.

The daemon sorcerer looked for warriors worthy of his master’s blade and plate, seeking out the darkest potential amongst a sea of butchers, corrupters, deviants and witchbreeds. True paragons of Chaos, like Archaon himself. Knights of ruin, ready for the Everchosen’s invitation in symbol, sign or vision, so that they might pass his test and join his baleful ranks – the living, armoured embodiment of Archaon’s wrath, visited upon the Mortal Realms.

The Many-Eyed blinked his way across the worlds of men. He saw as the beasts did, and as the denizens who would act like beasts. In the forgotten reaches of the realm of Ghur, on a storm-lashed wasteland that savage nomads and wind-worshippers knew only as the Blasted Plain, the sorcerer found who he was looking for.

Orphaeo Zuvius. Blessed of the Great Changer. The one they call the Prince of Embers.

The Many-Eyed looked on Orphaeo through the eyes of the Tzeentchians that he led, the twisted wretches of his warband. In the cerulean plate and skirts of his half-robe, Orphaeo Zuvius pressed his slender body against the storm. The skies were bleeding and the winds streamed with blood, while grit plucked at his unholy vestments.

Zuvius steadied himself with the length of a wicked glaive. He walked with the polearm like a sorcerer’s staff. It was a daemon-forged weapon, a shaft of sculpted metal crowned by a blade fashioned in the shape of Tzeentch’s willowy symbol. It was called A’cuitas, and it was a gift from Zuvius’ patron. The Many-Eyed came to know this as he opened the ensorcelled weapon’s eyes – for it had three, like his master, the Three-Eyed King – one that opened in the fat counterweight of the glaive’s pommel and two set in either surface of the blade. The Many-Eyed took this as a good omen. From A’cuitas, the sorcerer commanded a better look of the champion’s gruesome features.

Helmless, his face was a web of melted skin stretched across scorched flesh. The skin strands squirmed continuously across scalded features that might once have been handsome – features now contorted with self-satisfied determination and dark humour. Threadbare tresses of blue hair streamed from his head. Zuvius licked his smeared lips with a silver tongue: another of the Great Changer’s gifts.

The glaive’s blade blinked in the bloodstreaming storm. Now the sorcerer saw through the eyes of the Prince of Embers himself. Zuvius looked up at Mallofax, who sat atop the perch created by the blade’s billhook. The creature was a familiar – a reptilian bird of cerulean plumage. The damned thing spoke to Zuvius in an ear-bleeding squawk that only the champion seemed to understand. The Prince of Embers nodded and looked back at his warband, trailing through the maelstrom of blood and wind-borne grit.

Trudging across the Blasted Plain in his wake were Sir Abriel and the remains of the king’s household guard. Formerly charged with the protection of the royal family – for the Prince of Embers was royal indeed – the knights were now shadows of their former selves. Gone was the lustre of their plate and the mirror-finish of their weaponry. The Great Changer had twisted them as he had done the prince. They were but slaves to darkness, gangling horrors. The knights’ besmirched plate had fused to their bodies and stretched with their unnatural step and reach. Covered in the glowing sigils of ruinous sorcery, they were now the Hexenguard of Orphaeo Zuvius.

Behind the knights, in their shredded cloaks, were the Unseeing – the Tzeentchian sorcerers who completed Zuvius’ warband. Blind wretches, the Great Changer had taken their sight and cursed them with terrible, warped visions of the world about them. Striking out with their powers, the Unseeing turned their enemies into the frightful realisation of their horrific imaginings. With crooked hands on shoulders, the Unseeing formed a line of the blind following the blind – and all following the crunch of their master’s footsteps.

Zuvius closed his eyes against the bloodstorm. Behind them and in the blackness of his lids, the Many-Eyed found light and the roar of flame. The prince’s past was never far from his thoughts – an appalling vision of death and destruction that formed a dark stillness within the madman. It was the eye of a storm, a vision from an age long ago, before Zuvius and his warband were the twisted things they had become. A memory that would not be forgotten, floating to the surface of Zuvius’ mind to sicken and be enjoyed.

Night. The walled city of Stormhaven, ablaze. The tower tops writhed in unnatural blue flame. The people screamed for their lives and then their deaths. The king was dead. Long live the king! The household guard stumbled from the north gate, the only one that was open. The others had been locked shut from the outside. People died like animals behind them, barging and clawing – swallowed by the blue flame. Sir Abriel and his men hacked and coughed, the power of change already finding its way inside them.

With them was Orphaeo – youngest son of the king and the only surviving member of House Zuvius. Surviving – but only just. He too had received the touch of change. Licked by the furious flames, Orphaeo was horribly burned. His face. His head. His hands. He did not cry out in pain. He was calm. The red raw muscles of his face remained uncontorted. He gave the order. Sir Abriel and his soot-smeared knights could not believe what they were hearing.

‘Seal the gate,’ the prince told them, stumbling away from Stormhaven’s mighty walls. There was disbelief, disagreement, dissention even. But Orphaeo Zuvius was now the king and his will was absolute. Burying their doubts, the knights sealed the towering north gate, trapping the screaming innocents inside. They hoped that their liege had a good reason for acting so.

He did.

Ascending the nearby foothills, Zuvius turned to watch his city burn. A city loyal to the God-King, whose walls had stood against storm and ruinous savagery for generations. The prince felt the heat of the fire on his blistering face. He fancied this to be the satisfaction of the Great Changer, bathing him in the warmth of approval. It was a feeling that his face would not allow him to forget.

Mallofax circled the roaring, spitting firestorm of the burning city, the sapphire flames reaching for the heavens. He swooped in to land on Zuvius’ shoulder. Abriel hated the prince’s pet but the dread spectacle of Stormhaven ablaze meant that he barely noticed the scaly, feathered thing. If he had known that it had been Mallofax that was responsible for Stormhaven’s fall, he would have cut the bird out of the air with a swing of his longsword. For it was Mallofax, flying over the walls and arriving one day on the prince’s balcony, that had spoken of such horror to Orphaeo Zuvius, that had taught the prince the secrets of sorcery, the arts of manipulation and the power of change. That, as Tzeentch’s emissary, had empowered Zuvius to turn brother against brother, son against father and the people against their king, all culminating in riot and treachery, atrocity and flame.

Sir Abriel and the household guard gathered about their young king. He was not their king, however. He was no one’s king. He was forever the Prince of Embers – heir to the glowing ashes of a razed kingdom.

Zuvius watched the palace towers fall. He watched his own topple, falling like a mighty felled tree through the flames. Its tower top smashed into the city walls before the prince, knocking brick and stone from the defences. Zuvius stood transfixed. The bright blue fires within the city lit up a symbol rent into the wall.

‘What is that?’ the Prince of Embers demanded. Mallofax twitched his head and turned a glassy eye towards the damaged wall. The bird squawked. Through the soul-curdling sounds Zuvius heard the familiar’s dark words.

‘’Tis the mark of the Everchosen,’ Mallofax told him. ‘An invitation.’

‘To what?’

‘The Exalted Grand Marshal calls,’ the bird squawked. ‘The Architect made you but Archaon will break you. You are to be forged anew, Zuvius, like I taught you. Listen to the screams. Look into the fire. Tell me what you see.’

Zuvius watched as the blue inferno flared up through the damaged wall, reaching for the battlements. In the lick and flicker of azure brilliance, the Prince of Embers saw a far off place take form.

‘I see a storm within a storm,’ he said to Mallofax. He squinted at the blaze.

‘And?’

‘Rising from it is a landform, sculpted by the storm,’ Zuvius said. ‘A mesa, shaped like a great anvil, with a path leading up to it.’

‘The Beaten Path,’ Mallofax told him. ‘Your mettle is to be tested there, for the Everchosen selects only the best warriors of Chaos for his inner circle of death and dread.’

Zuvius nodded to himself. ‘You know this place?’

‘Of course,’ the bird said. ‘The storms you speak of rage across a distant wilderness called the Blasted Plain.’

The Prince of Embers jerked his shoulder, prompting the familiar to once again take flight.

‘Then lead on,’ Zuvius said. ‘It would not be wise to keep the Everchosen of Chaos waiting.’

The Blasted Plain was living up to its name. Orphaeo Zuvius put one foot in front of another, forcing his way on through the streaming haze of crimson. There was nothing there but a maelstrom of everlasting gales and the blood of those claimed by the storm. The prince’s hair and robe skirts twisted and tangled in the wind, while Mallofax’s plumage was a constant ruffle. More miserable still was the twisted thing that had been Sir Abriel, and what remained of the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing who followed.

They had reason to feel misery. They had been wandering through the bloodstorm for weeks. Their cloaks and robes were in tatters and their plate scratched and dented. With only the beady eye of the bird Mallofax to guide them and the nods of his beak to indicate their heading, Zuvius and his warband moved from squall to squall. The storms that tormented the Blasted Plain were filled with whirls and eddies. In places, the Tzeentchians were drenched in fat droplets of gore that rained down from a crimson sky, while in others the gales and tempests turned the blood to a diluted smear. Exposure was not the only danger in the perpetual storm. Whirlwinds snatched up shrieking sorcerers of the Unseeing, lifting them into oblivion, while on the rocky expanse, sudden gusts lifted grit and pebble from the ground, blasting them through the Hexenguard like grapeshot from a cannon.

The Prince of Embers left a trail of corpses in his wake. What had been an army of Chaos knights and witchbreeds was now a warband numbering fewer than forty dark souls – still a potent force, but the trials of time, the perversities of the weather and enemy encounters had taken their toll.

He did not regret his decision to brave the Blasted Plain in search of the Beaten Path. He had been chosen. Those knights and sorcerers who had fallen had been unworthy of the Everchosen, and unworthy of him. Zuvius was to be tested. What kind of prospect would he be if he couldn’t even reach the site that had been chosen for his trial? Zuvius pushed on through the bloodstorm. He could not allow it to defeat him.

Still, the depleted ranks of Zuvius’ grand warband did not bode well for the challenges he knew to be ahead. He would have to supplement his numbers with lost wretches looking for direction and dark purpose. Fools were never in shortage. The Prince of Embers would give them purpose and they would give their lives in service of his destiny.

The Chaos champion heard Sir Abriel call something unintelligible through the storm. It was all the twisted knight was capable of now, beyond the devastating reach of his bladework. Peering at him through the bloody curtain of rain, Zuvius saw that Sir Abriel was pointing off to their right with the freakishly long fingers of his warped gauntlet. Following the direction the finger indicated, Zuvius squinted at the outline of tents in the distance – some kind of encampment in the wilderness.

‘Food. Water. Shelter?’ Zuvius said, shaking Mallofax on the glaive.

‘Death?’ the bird returned. Zuvius looked around. After weeks out on the Blasted Plain he honestly thought his warband wouldn’t care.

‘We’re more than a match for a few nomads,’ the Prince of Embers hissed, almost insulted at the insinuation of their vulnerability. Recent encounters and the toll of the storm had depleted his numbers but the Hexenguard and the Unseeing were more than capable of bringing horror and death to a tribe of wind-worshipping savages. Zuvius lurched through the storm in the direction of the camp.

‘Onwards,’ he called. With warped appreciation, the knights and sorcerers of the warband followed their master.

Zuvius pulled back the thick flaps of stitched flesh. Inside, the huge tent was a structure of giant bones. It was like stepping inside a giant ribcage. Torches flickered smokily. Zuvius immediately got the impression of many bodies – no doubt the tribesmen and savages he had been warned about. As Mallofax had predicted, the place stank of old blood and death.

The Prince of Embers stepped forward with confidence, allowing the Hexenguard and his sorcerers in. Regardless of the horrors they could inflict, the Unseeing did not make for an intimidating sight. The twisted knights, however, in their ghastly plate and glowing sigils, would be more than enough to startle the tribesmen. Then they would come to know that warriors of the Ruinous Powers were among them and that the sight of these doom-laden forms would be their last.

As Zuvius blinked blood from his eyes and adjusted to the gloom, he came to realise that he was not standing among scrawny nomads. Instead of wind-worshippers, the tent was filled wall to wall with muscle. Red flesh and scar-markings confirmed Zuvius’ fears. They were not the first warband to take shelter in the tribesmen’s tents. Barbaric servants of the Blood God had beaten them to it. Looking down, the Prince of Embers saw that he was standing in the splattered remains of its previous occupants.

Casting a gaze across the tent, Zuvius made a quiet estimate of his rivals’ strength. It was a veritable warband, all armed to the teeth, with perhaps more in the other tents. Zuvius had nothing approaching their number. A ripple of brute surprise passed through the barbarians, followed instantly by snarls and the wrinkle of lips. Muscles twitched to tautness and weapons scraped as they were snatched from the tent floor. Zuvius saw bloodreavers of the Goresworn, obvious from their decorative scarring. Other savages he recognised from their brazen cuisses and greaves, rattling beneath the broad red musculature of their chests. They were the wrathmongers of Khorne, blessed with the unyielding fury of their Ruinous god.

A stitch-faced chieftain and a wrathmonger closed on the Tzeentchians. The chieftain drew wicked blades from a selection of leather sheathes, holding them like talons in his gore-stained hands. The master of the wrathmongers, wearing the fanged skull of some daemon creature as a helmet, dragged the blood-rusted chain of a flail behind him, ready to yank it forward and hurl the hammerhead attached to the length.

‘Fight or flee?’ Mallofax shrieked, flapping his wings and hovering above Zuvius and his warband. When the champion of Tzeentch didn’t answer, the familiar repeated, ‘Fight or flee?’

‘Neither,’ the Prince of Embers said. The Tzeentchian didn’t move. He made the effort not to straighten and his glaive remained upright in his hand like a walking staff. He didn’t want to provoke the savage disciples of Khorne any more than he already had by simply being there. At the same time, he wanted to present the calm front of a champion too powerful to be threatened by warriors of the Blood God, even in such number.

‘Mine,’ the chieftain hissed.

‘The scraps, perhaps,’ the wrathmonger rumbled.

Sorcerous sigils burned bright on the plate of the Hexenguard as the ghastly knights formed up in front of their prince with their notched longswords and battered shields.

‘Stand down,’ Zuvius said, his tone perverse and playful. Sir Abriel was unsure. He issued some kind of question from the hole in his face that he used as a mouth. The chieftain and the wrathmonger advanced, their men drawn up behind them.

Zuvius’ eyes moved beyond the furious warband. Rising from a throne of stained skulls – the nomads’, the prince presumed – was a champion larger still. A deathbringer, an exalted champion of the Blood God. Though he had been a man once, Khorne had blessed his chosen with hulking brawn. The warband leader was a veritable wall of muscle. The teeth of great beasts jangled on sinew necklaces while a pair of bull’s horns erupted from his malformed skull. His hands were encased in bone weapons – pronged gougers that extended like a pair of claws. On his back, he carried a battle-axe, the blade of which was as broad as the champion himself.

‘Hold,’ the monstrous champion said. His voice was deep, like some bottomless trench reaching down into the bowels of the realm. His dogs of war stopped in their tracks, as if they had been yanked back on a running chain. The Goresworn came to a halt at the champion’s command. They parted to let the deathbringer through.

Zuvius could see the champion’s mind at work – which was something to be said of such savages. A hardening of the eyes. A tautness in the lips. Zuvius reasoned that the deathbringer had probably fought just about everything that lived and breathed on these plains. He had faced the sorcerous servants of the Great Changer before. Unlike his lieutenants, he was cautious. Wisely so, Zuvius agreed.

‘What are you doing here on the Blasted Plain?’ the warrior called across the tent. ‘Speak fast and true or the bloodreavers here will smash your bones for the marrow inside. The wrathmongers will simply kill you out of spite. At my order, your blood will join that of the storm, in honour of mighty Khorne.’

Zuvius felt the eyes of all on him. The barbarians were aching for the violence to come.

‘That would be ill advised,’ the prince told him, playing for time. Zuvius’ mind whirled. The Khornate savages within the tent would swamp them. Others, responding instinctively to the sounds of battle, would come up behind the Tzeentchian warband. It would be a slaughter, standing on the blood and bones of a previous one. Zuvius tasted the air with his silver tongue. Swords and sorcery couldn’t take him where he needed to go. He would have to rely on one of his other god-given talents. ‘For then you would not hear what I have to say.’

‘And why would the great Skargan Fell-of-Heart need to hear the lies of filth witchbreed like you?’ the Goresworn chieftain hissed, looking back at his master.

‘Because even if only half of what I tell him comes to pass,’ Zuvius said, ‘then his ascension will be assured.’

‘What ascension?’ Skargan rumbled.

‘The Everchosen calls for you, mighty one,’ the Prince of Embers lied.

‘Almighty Archaon?’

‘Aye, my lord,’ Zuvius said. ‘The Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse asks only for the greatest warriors of the age, and he has called for you.’

‘I’ll cut that lying tongue out of your mouth, Tzeentchian,’ the chieftain promised.

‘Kraal, son of Zhufgor, let the sorcerer speak,’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart said. The bloodreavers seethed about their chieftain while the wrathmongers foamed at their snaggle-toothed mouths. ‘How came you by this knowledge?’

‘A vision, my lord,’ Zuvius said.

‘Visions and enchantments,’ Kraal, son of Zhufgor, spat in disgust.

The deathbringer’s mouth curled into a snarl. He nodded his great horned head. A member of the Goresworn stepped up behind his chieftain, slipping his reaver blade beneath Kraal’s chin. In a moment it was over. Zuvius felt the speckle of warm blood across the sensitive flesh of his face. The chieftain dropped and his killer stepped forward.

‘Voark, son of Kraal,’ the deathbringer said, ‘the Goresworn is yours.’

Voark nodded his murderous appreciation.

‘Sorcerer: speak.’

‘I saw a vision in the flames of a burning city, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. ‘Skargan Fell-of-Heart, wearing the sigil of the Everchosen. The Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse is gathering his troops, deathbringer. Khorne knows you belong among them.’

Skargan narrowed the bloody orbs of his eyes at Zuvius.

‘Your sorceries will not work on me,’ he told the prince, tapping the talon-tip of a gouger against his bronze collar. ‘The Blood God will not allow it.’

Zuvius nodded. He had seen such artefacts on Khornate champions before – the Blood God was eager to protect his butchers from the manipulations of magic. But the Tzeentchian did not need such powers.

‘Come between the Ender of Worlds and his chosen?’ Zuvius said. ‘Not me, deathbringer. Not for all the dark glory in the realms. I know my place – in this, as in all things. I am merely the messenger.’

Skargan Fell-of-Heart looked to Voark, son of Kraal.

‘Tell me more of your vision, sorcerer,’ the deathbringer commanded.

‘You must walk the Beaten Path, exalted one,’ Zuvius said, ‘to a place of testing – so that the Everchosen may judge if he chose wisely.’

‘A battle?’ Skargan said with a gory glint in his eye.

‘I suspect, my lord.’

‘You know this path?’

‘I do,’ the Prince of Embers said. ‘And I have seen you walk it to glory.’

‘What do you get out of this, sorcerous mongrel?’ the deathbringer spat. Zuvius thought on the question.

‘Nothing, mighty champion,’ the prince told him. ‘But I cannot deny destiny or the will of the Everchosen.’

Skargan scowled. Zuvius could see that the monstrous warrior didn’t believe him. The prince watched as a flicker of doubt crossed the warlord’s features. To disbelieve a servant of Tzeentch was one thing – common sense even – but to defy the will of the Everchosen of Chaos was something else entirely.

‘Then you shall guide me along this path,’ Skargan said. He turned to address the warriors in the tent. ‘And if I seem displeased with this sorcerer and his wretches or you see them doing something that you know would displease me, then in Khorne’s name – kill them.’

‘As fair as you are wise, my lord,’ Zuvius told Skargan Fell-of-Heart.

Orphaeo Zuvius forged on through the storm of blood. His warband trudged laboriously through a mire of rising gore, while Mallofax flapped his wings and shivered his feathers, shaking crimson droplets from his plumage. The Prince of Embers was now surrounded by Khornate killers intent on his blood. Looking back along the ranks of the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing, Zuvius could see the horde of Skargan Fell-of-Heart following them through the maelstrom. Two wrathmongers strode either side of him like a brute escort and Voark, son of Kraal, walked at the head of the bloodreavers, who swarmed about their beloved deathbringer, shielding Skargan as best they could from the storm with their number.

When Zuvius had seen the true size of the deathbringer’s horde he knew that he had made the right decision in not attacking the Fell-of-Heart and his butchers. Skargan’s warband numbered hundreds of battle-hardened warriors. To destroy them would have cost the prince dearly, perhaps even his life. Skargan and his horde had come to the Blasted Plain to honour their god, baptised in a bloodstorm they thought to be a manifestation of Khorne. They did not know that the storm existed only to scour the plain and claim the unwary. Mallofax had told his prince that the Blasted Plain was a cursed place. Nomads, wind-worshippers and travellers found eventual death in the perpetual tempest, their blood becoming one with the rains.

And the rain came down harder than ever, strumming fat droplets against Zuvius’ plate. As they moved across the Blasted Plain, the Chaos champions left corpses in their wake. Moving from maelstrom to maelstrom and subject to the perversities of the storm, both Skargan and his sorcerer guide had lost members of their warbands. Twisters suddenly made landfall, stirring up the shallows and snatching bloodreavers up into the sky. One of the hulking wrathmongers was claimed by a sinkhole in the flooding mire. The temperature would change rapidly: in one moment red icicles hung from the plate of the Hexenguard, then an hour later Zuvius would lose a sorcerer to a balmy haze of swirling red steam.

‘What is it?’ Zuvius asked as Mallofax began to squawk and flap his wings furiously.

‘This storm has teeth,’ the bird said cryptically. Zuvius gave the familiar a quizzical look before the patter of bone against his plate told him all he needed to know. As the rising gale whistled through his skirts and the ragged ribbons of the Hexenguard’s cloaks, it carried with it teeth, fangs and splinters of bone. Zuvius felt a shard cut across his cheek. Another tore through his skirts and plucked at the flesh of his leg. As the tempest intensified about them, so did the hail. It shredded through one of the wrathmongers and turned a bloodreaver into a bloody smear.

‘The hollow!’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart bawled through the storm. The horde had just passed a flooded hollow and the deathbringer directed his savages down into it.

‘Do we follow them?’ Mallofax squawked.

Zuvius looked about as the Hexenguard closed in with their shields, giving their sorcerous lord shelter. It was their best chance to escape Skargan’s warriors. Conversely, the storm might still eat them alive and the Khornate warband was not without its uses.

‘Do we have a choice?’ Zuvius said, marching towards the hollow, teeth and bone rattling against the metal of the knights’ shields.

Slipping and sliding down into shallows, Zuvius looked up at the wind streaming blood and bone above. The hollow offered shelter but was flooded with a crimson murk that sloshed around their boots. Zuvius wondered how long the squall of razored teeth and bone shards would last.

‘How much further?’ Skargan demanded, pulling fangs from his red flesh. Zuvius didn’t know.

‘Not far,’ the prince said.

‘What does that even mean?’ Voark, son of Kraal spat. He could not hold back his ire. Looking around for his own son, Skraal, the bloodreaver continued, content that there was not a blade heading for his back. ‘This sorcerer-filth is trying to get us killed out here. Leading us from trap to trap.’ One of the wrathmongers grunted agreement from nearby. Zuvius realised that he had to stop this before Voark ignited the Blood God’s hatred of sorcerers in Skargan and his horde.

‘Apologies, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. The deathbringer’s monstrous features creased with disgust. He despised any man who would beg for his life rather than fight for it. Voark allowed cruel glee to creep across his lips.

‘I can hold my tongue no longer,’ Zuvius spoke quickly. ‘My vision revealed knowledge that I was too fearful to grant you.’

‘What knowledge?’ the Fell-of-Heart snapped. He eyes narrowed in fury. ‘You would deny me all that you know?’

‘Having met your chieftains, I could not believe it,’ Zuvius said. ‘No champion commands warriors as fervent and loyal.’

‘Believe what?’ the deathbringer fumed.

‘That the bloodreavers and the wrathmongers would betray one another,’ the prince told him, with as much grave sincerity as the Tzeentchian could muster through his sly lips. ‘And through each other – you.’

Skargan looked incredulously at Zuvius, at the wrathmongers and at Voark, as if he did not know which of them to kill first. Voark made the decision for him.

‘Turncoat wretch! I knew you were planning something,’ he shrieked, drawing his reaver blade and pointing it at the nearest wrathmonger. At Voark’s accusation, the bloodreavers started to advance, only to be caught in the terrible arc of the wrathmonger’s hammer-flail. Splatting through bloodreavers, the warrior roared in confusion, heaving his devastating weapons about him on their wrist-clasped chains. Others erupted around him, cutting down swathes of warriors with ugly swings of their flails. Agile bloodreavers leapt and ducked out of the weapons’ devastating paths, those too slow becoming a splatter of flesh chunks and detached limbs. Running back at the crimson hulks, the bloodreavers swarmed the wrathmongers, climbing up onto their backs and globed shoulders, knifing and stabbing with their short, cruel blades.

For a brief time there was mayhem. Wrathmongers stamped fountains of crimson rainwater about them as they charged throngs of rabid bloodreavers. The warriors danced out of their path and slashed at them with their razor-sharp blades. Skargan Fell-of-Heart cut through the havoc. Grabbing his colossal battle-axe from his back, the deathbringer strode through the shallows and into the murderous clash. Smashing one of the wrathmongers down with the flat of the monstrous blade, Skargan shattered his skull helm and knocked him unconscious.

Turning savagely, he stamped out with his boot, landing a kick on the chest of Voark, son of Kraal. The warrior flew through the air with a crunch before splashing into the shallows.

‘This is good?’ Mallofax squawked from Zuvius’ glaive.

‘I’m not sure,’ the Prince of Embers said. The ruthless violence and bloodshed about him was distracting. Being butchered by Skargan’s savages was not part of Zuvius’ plan, but having them butcher each other was not desirable either. He had acted to distract them from killing him, but he needed to harness their strength for the trials ahead. He had a feeling that he could not achieve his fell goals without their strength. Standing in the flooded hollow, Zuvius’ sorcerous instincts twitched.

‘Wait a minute,’ he told the feathered familiar.

Zuvius saw a cloud forming through the bloody shallows of the hollow. The waters began to thicken to a muddy paste about the boots of the Chaos warriors, slurping and bubbling. Arms of pink brawn and sinew broke the surface of the unnatural mire, clutching with daemonic claws.

Zuvius watched as infernal horrors spawned from the water about them – a plague of Tzeentchian monstrosities drawn to the deliciousness of treachery and dissention in the ranks of the horde.

The hollow filled with the roars and screams of the Blood God’s servants. Grabbed about the boots and ankles by the frightful appendages, they were dragged down into the sludge. Jaws formed in the fleshy surface of the shallows, brimming with row after row of jagged fangs, and Goresworn killers were swallowed whole. A wrathmonger had his leg chewed off, sending him into a sludge-punching fury, but his fist became entangled in the sinewy stickiness of daemon flesh.

Faced with a common enemy, the butchers forgot their former enmity and visited their rage upon the spawning pool in which they stood. Zuvius smiled to himself. The Great Changer, in all his perversity, had sent a blessing. The Khornate horde was once more unified in the face of a common enemy. They had swiftly forgotten their desire to end the prince. The daemon attack, meanwhile, was thinning out the dissenting forces. The appearance of the horrors not only gave Zuvius a chance to fight at the Khornate savages’ side, but it would make them easier to manipulate than ever.

The sludge seemed like a single monster but from it individual creatures of nightmare rose, stretching themselves free. Wrathmongers splattered the daemons within the monstrous arcs of their hammer-flails, while the bloodreavers struck grasping limbs from the creatures with their blades only to find two more erupt from gushing, pink stumps in their place.

The horrors seemed never-ending, scrambling free of their spawning pool like a plague of jubilant insanity. Their grotesque bodies were all fang-filled maw and beady eyes that frantically set upon new victims to maul. Clawed, muscular legs helped them to bound and latch onto Skargan’s berserkers, while an eruption of supernaturally strong arms tore armour, limbs, helms and heads from the warrior-victims.

‘This cannot be,’ Mallofax shrieked above the carnage. ‘These are the lesser playthings of our master.’

‘The daemon horrors of Tzeentch,’ Orphaeo Zuvius said, spinning the shaft of his glaive about him in willowy gauntlets. The prince’s warband were not immune to the creatures’ attentions. Infernal monstrosities dragged members of the Hexenguard down into the fleshy embrace of the pool to crack their plate in writhing knots of daemonic muscle.

The sorcerers of the Unseeing, meanwhile, clutched to one another in their blindness. Judiciously deployed, they were among the most powerful wretches at the prince’s disposal. Their sorcerous powers could transform even the most deadly opponents into statuesque spawn of ruptured flesh and twisted bone, visiting the form of their dread visions upon the enemies about them. Against these formless monstrosities, their powers were all but useless. The daemonic horrors already took the form of the sorcerers’ nightmarish imaginings.

‘The Great Changer must be displeased,’ Mallofax flapped. ‘The Exalted Grand Marshal’s invitation has angered him.’

‘No,’ Zuvius said, gritting his perfect teeth as he lopped off the clawed fingers of a reaching daemon with a graceful swing of A’cuitas. ‘It is an honour. The joint damnation of this hollow strengthens our association with the Blood God’s barbarians. Battle is like ale shared across a table to these brutes.’

As a member of the Hexenguard was pulled apart by two multi-limbed horrors, Sir Abriel splashed up through the slime to smash aside another monstrosity with his shield. Holding his glaive by the base of the shaft, Zuvius wheeled around, allowing the heavy blade of the weapon to lop limbs from the attacking creatures.

‘Why do the Great Changer’s daemons try to destroy us, then?’ the bird squawked, unconvinced.

Zuvius turned A’cuitas around in his gauntlets, aiming the pommel of the glaive at the horrors emerging from the pool.

‘For perversity’s sake,’ the prince said, with a grin of insanity. ‘Why else?’

His daemon-forged weapon’s searing blue eye opened. Lightning cracked from the glaive, causing the air to burn and the heart to jump. As the jagged bolt struck the nearest daemon, the thing seemed to rupture, exploding in a shower of pink slop. Aiming the sorcerous weapon across a line of advancing creatures, Zuvius had the lightning jump from monster to monster, turning one after another into flinch-inducing splatters of flesh.

Stomping through the curtain of gore, Skargan Fell-of-Heart was a destructive machine. His great axe was everywhere, chopping daemons asunder, lopping off limbs and cleaving the gibbering creatures in half. The clawing, strangling, savaging things climbed across his muscular frame only to be gouged free by the bone blades the deathbringer wore on each meaty fist. Flinging them off and down at the floor, Skargan sent them shrieking back to the fleshpool before stamping down on them with his boots.

‘You!’ the deathbringer roared at Zuvius. ‘This is your doing.’

The Prince of Embers was tiring of the belligerent champion and his savage lieutenants. Thrusting A’cuitas forward, Zuvius impaled a creature before tearing the weapon back and turning it around in his hands. Blasting lightning into the stricken daemon, Zuvius coated Skargan with filth.

‘Does this look like my doing?’ the prince shot back, before passing the glaive behind his back and thrusting it to the side. The Tzeentchian horror coming at him opened its gaping mouth and attempted to swallow the weapon. The glaive blade was momentarily lost in the darkness before bursting forth out of the daemon’s back. Zuvius turned to the approaching champion of Khorne. ‘Does this look like my god favouring me?’

Skargan Fell-of-Heart considered the prince’s words, with all of the calm thought of which he was capable. Furious at his brute conclusion, the deathbringer carved out a circle of destruction about him. Chopping. Hacking. Obliterating. His battle-axe dribbled ichor. The colour in the hollow was changing, however. The pink that had clouded the shallows and solidified to a spawning fleshpool was now dashed with azure. Every time a pink horror was mulched into formlessness, blue claws would prize the ruined daemonflesh apart. As the dying monstrosity rippled and quivered, a blue horror would climb out of its corpse, followed by another. Apart from its colour, each was identical in form to the foul being from which it proceeded.

Zuvius pursed his smeared lips. He was once more caught between the fury of the deathbringer and perverse circumstance. Looking up, he saw that the wind had dropped. The storm of fang and tooth was passing. The fat droplets of the bloodstorm still hammered down about them, however.

‘It is an affliction of the land, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. ‘A hellish hole through which daemons bleed into the world. A flesh without end, my lord, living, dying and dividing. We must withdraw.’

‘Never!’ Skargan roared, tearing his gouging talons through a creature before batting three blue clawing beasts away with the flat of his axe blade.

‘Get the sorcerers,’ Zuvius commanded, sending Mallofax off in the direction of the Unseeing. The Prince of Embers would not die in some squalid hollow with a mindless berserker. As the sound of the bird’s squawking led the blind wretches back up out of the hollow, Zuvius pointed a finger at Sir Abriel and the slope behind. Batting mad creatures aside with their knightly shields and cutting down horrors with their notched longswords, the Hexenguard covered their master’s retreat.

Stepping back up the incline and towards the howl of the bloodstorm, Zuvius crackled lightning down on the creatures rushing Skargan. Dripping with pink and blue daemonblood that sizzled with sorcerous energy, and with monsters exploding about him, the deathbringer had a moment to take stock. His warband was dying, overrun by the daemon plague, despite the bloodreavers’ savagery and the devastation of the wrathmongers. A single decision separated Skargan Fell-of-Heart from annihilation.

Zuvius watched as the deathbringer exercised judgement beyond his powers. Skargan believed that the Everchosen of Chaos had demanded his dark service. Zuvius had put that belief in the champion’s mind. Pushing several wrathmongers back up the slope and snatching Voark, son of Krall, from a small massacre of bloodreavers, Skargan bellowed his order across the hollow.

‘There is no glory to be had here,’ Khorne’s champion roared, pointing his battle-axe back up at the storm. ‘Onwards! To the glory of the Blood God and the Exalted Marshal!’

With Skargan’s command cutting through the red haze of berserker rage, the horde began its staggered withdrawal from the hollow. Stumbling up the incline and away from the Tzeentchian swarm, the host re-entered the bloodstorm.

They were drowning. Drowning in blood.

The heavens broiled with fury and a crimson rain hammered down, flooding not just the hollows, cuttings and craters of the Blasted Plain but the storm-wracked wilderness itself. Zuvius and his Tzeentchian knights waded through the wounded waters. The Unseeing half-stumbled, half-swam. Mallofax flew, the bird buffeted this way and that in the gales that swept across the rising waters of the shallow sea.

Following the Prince of Embers through the deluge were the warband of Skargan Fell-of-Heart. Wading in disbelief through the waters, the Khornate warriors had never quite got over their rout at the hollow. Their champion’s order to retreat from a fight and the soul-crushing demands of their trek through the storm and flood seemed to be breaking them. The cursed land and the daemons that haunted it notwithstanding, Zuvius had manipulated them with his lies. He had convinced Skargan to take this road to self-destruction and he was not finished with the deathbringer yet.

‘Mallofax?’ Zuvius called up through the storm. In the past hour, the prince had felt the blood slopping and splashing lower and lower against his plate. ‘Are the waters receding?’

‘We are on the Beaten Path,’ the bird shrieked, swooping down onto the blade of A’cuitas. ‘Look!’

Zuvius peered through the blood-streaming sky. A dark silhouette was rising above them, a feature so large and tall that even the unnatural storm’s best efforts could not hide it. Zuvius recognised the mesa from his fiery vision, eroded by the erratic elements into the rocky shape of a colossal anvil.

Zuvius nodded absently at the bird. They were climbing, ascending the path that would take them up to the strange land. This path would test him, even more than it had already. Like a piece of bronze, Zuvius would be remoulded. The bronze had no comprehension of the blade it could become and the power over life and death it would wield. The Everchosen had selected his raw materials in Zuvius. The Tzeentchian hoped to now be hammered to hold an edge, to become a weapon worthy of Archaon’s choosing. It was on the Beaten Path and the mesa that he would be tested and reforged. Zuvius pledged in the dark recesses of his heart to become that which would please the Everchosen of Chaos: a vision of death and destruction to earn the demigod’s gaze.

‘Deathbringer,’ Zuvius called, prompting Skargan Fell-of-Heart to push roughly past several of his horde and slosh onwards through the shallows. ‘The place I saw in my vision,’ the Tzeentchian told him honestly, pointing to the silhouette of the anvil-shaped land formation. ‘There challenges will be issued and destinies realised.’

The champion of Khorne didn’t seem to hear Zuvius. Instead he barked a barely intelligible order to his warband, urging them on through the strength-sapping flood.

‘Out of my way, sorcerer,’ Skargan said, striding through blood and pushing past Zuvius, ‘for gods help any wretch that stands in it.’

Standing aside, Zuvius issued an order to Sir Abriel and the Hexenguard, bringing them to a halt. The stumbling progress of the Unseeing was also checked by squawks from a hovering Mallofax. Zuvius let the spent savages of the Goresworn through, the wrathmongers stomping miserably up the Beaten Path after their master.

Several hours were spent ascending the weathered mesa. The storm still raged about them, with dark droplets hammering into the rocky surface of the colossal formation.

Skargan stomped off across the mesa with his warband following in a loose, exhausted formation.

‘I am here!’ he roared, announcing his arrival with bombast only the blessed of Khorne could manage. ‘Here to be judged. Judged worthy of your favour.’

The deathbringer’s words were lost to the storm. The skies howled above but no answer came. The champion’s face creased with anger. His horde gathered about him in expectation, driving the Fell-of-Heart’s frustration further. They had travelled so far and given so much. He would not be humiliated in front of them. He would slaughter them all to a man before suffering doubt to cross their faces.

‘Test me, Lord Archaon!’ Skargan roared. ‘End me if you can, Ender of Worlds.’

The blasphemy passed unheeded. Blood rained down. Skargan lowered his battle-axe.

‘The Blood God’s chosen is displeased,’ Mallofax squawked. As Zuvius watched rage take the Fell-of-Heart, he knew what was coming.

‘Ready yourselves,’ Zuvius warned his Hexenguard and sorcerers.

‘The sorcerer betrays the Exalted of Khorne,’ Voark hissed through the ranks of the Goresworn. ‘He lies for his amusement and that of his twisted god.’

Two of the wrathmongers flanked their furious master. Skargan himself steamed, his burning hatred for Zuvius and his sorcerous kind turning the droplets of bloody drizzle on his red skin to a searing haze.

‘Unworthy…’ the deathbringer roared.

Sir Abriel’s sword cleared its scabbard with a whoosh, followed by the blades of the rest of the Hexenguard. The Unseeing began to moan. Blind though they were, they had some inkling of the butchery to come. They would recraft the enemies of their prince, sculpting, breaking and contorting his foes to uselessness and agonising death.

As Orphaeo Zuvius went to answer the champion of Khorne, it suddenly stopped raining. It had rained forever on the Blasted Plain – yet here on the Beaten Path and the rocky mesa, blood suddenly ceased to fall. The storm died and the clouds that boiled above them began to clear. Such was the unexpected change in the weather that Zuvius, Skargan and their followers forgot one another and looked up into the sky.

‘What is happening?’ the Fell-of-Heart asked.

‘This is vision become reality,’ Zuvius told him. ‘We are about to be judged. Now we shall see who is truly unworthy.’

After the storm, distant thunder. The darkness was bleached clean by a blinding light. A swirling vortex of lightning streams fell from the sky and hammered into the mesa between the deathbringer’s warband and Zuvius’ Tzeentchians. The rock cracked with the force, sending spidery fractures through the surface of the landform. Everyone stumbled back, shielding their eyes.

Zuvius forced himself to look, despite the eye-scalding brightness of the intervention. The air burned. Snapping arcs reached out from where the lightning had earthed. The spreading storm created shapes from the crackle and static of bifurcating bolts, almost as though the power seethed across the surface of invisible figures that were already there. The crackle grew to a blinding intensity until finally, in a crescendo of light, heat and sound, armoured figures were suddenly among the Chaos warriors, having burned into reality.

‘Stormcast Eternals,’ Mallofax squawked in alarm. ‘The God-King’s vengeance made metal and flesh.’

Zuvius turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets, causing Mallofax to take flight. The interlopers were no champions of Chaos, sent by the Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse to test them. These were not the legendary warriors of Archaon’s inner circles, taken from the very ranks the Prince of Embers wished to join. These were warriors crafted beyond the Mortal Realms – the Stormcast Eternals of the God-King. Zuvius had never seen such champions of light. They had been a fantasy, a myth, a rumour – but now they were a searing reality. As they stood before him, it seemed impossible that they were anything else.

Clad in celestial silver plate, the Stormcasts were armoured perfection. Their helmets were moulded and close-fitting, presenting a cold mask of terrible impassivity framed in the spiked halo of their calling. Zuvius could almost hear the laughter of the Dark Gods. Tzeentch, revelling in his perversity. In Lord Archaon’s trial, the Great Changer had presented Zuvius with both opportunity and certain death. The Everchosen had led him to his doom, into a trap with a sworn enemy.

A warrior – especially a sorcerous one – had to rely on more than a sword and the muscles used to swing it. Zuvius hadn’t known what he would face at the end of the Beaten Path. He had tricked Skargan Fell-of-Heart into standing between him and whatever it might be. Perhaps the deathbringer might end them all and catch Archaon’s eye after all. The Prince of Embers had to take that risk. Sigmar’s living weapons, heralded by the thunder and riding the storm, had given him no choice.

‘Exalted one,’ Zuvius called over the crackle of lightning. Skargan looked through the lightstorm at the Tzeentchian. ‘It’s time. As I promised you: an enemy worthy of your blade. Here, on the great anvil of the world, Archaon means to craft a warrior worthy of his banner. In the fire of battle, you will be forged anew. I have seen it, Skargan. Here, in the eye of the storm, I have seen it.’

The Blood God’s champion levelled his axe at the column of lightning that spawned the champions from its blinding brilliance.

‘Only the faithful,’ one of the Stormcast Eternals called, his words burning on the air with dread purity.

‘Bring me heads,’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart growled to his savages.

The first of the celestial warriors marched forward, undaunted. Skargan and his Khorne-worshipping savages were the kind of mindless barbarians that brought death and destruction to the realms. Zuvius felt a perverse glee in the clash of such warriors.

Advancing with bows of gleaming metal that crackled with a spiritual energy, the Stormcasts drew back arrows almost as long as a man was tall. As they held them there, the metal missiles glowed as though heated by some internal source of energy. With the arrows shafts of crackling brilliance, the Stormcasts let their missiles loose. As they left the bow, the arrows turned into bolts of lightning that shot forth in a streaming barrage too fast for the eye to follow. The loosed lightning blasted straight through members of the Goresworn, turning the impact sites on their chests into a molten vortex of flesh and bone before blazing on through a second and third victim.

The wrathmongers battered aside Voark’s bloodreavers, swinging their hammer-flails about their hulking bodies. Zuvius saw the flails smash into the metal arrows with a resounding clang, but fail to turn the missiles aside. A celestial warrior came forth with an even larger bow clutched in his silver gauntlets, aiming it up at the crystal clear sky. Raising it to the heavens, he blasted a lightning storm up at the stars that then fell towards one of the wheeling wrathmongers. The barbarian had incredible reflexes for a warrior of his size and somehow dodged the descending blast of energy. Erupting into a maelstrom of furious arcs upon impact, the snaps and cracks of energy seized upon another wrathmonger and several nearby bloodreavers like a tentacled beast. At first stricken by the power coursing through their bones, the warriors began to smoulder and blacken, burning from the inside out. Crashing to their knees as the lightning storm died away, the charred remains hit the stone floor and shattered in a cloud of ash and soot.

Zuvius heard the clatter of shields as Sir Abriel and his monstrous Hexenguard formed up before their prince. The Stormcast Eternals would not be deterred, however. Stomping forward in their immaculate plate, they aimed the lightning of their bows straight at the ruinous knights. As all became blazing white before them and the metal crackled and snapped, the Hexenguard instinctively lowered their shields. Running forward, the knights set upon the warriors of Sigmar, smashing at burnished plate with their notched blades. Pushing back Sir Abriel with a stamp of his silver boot, a Stormcast stove in the ghoulish helm of another knight with the reinforced nock of his bow. Loading it once more, the warrior turned to blast a stream of lightning straight into a charging wrathmonger’s head. The decapitated barbarian stumbled on several steps more before thudding to the ground.

The Prince of Embers could stand by no longer. It was in the nature of a Tzeentchian to manipulate, lie and allow others to assume the burden of circumstance in their stead. In presenting his sworn enemies, the Everchosen had assigned him a trial that could destroy them all. The Stormcasts were not some monstrous aberration of Chaos, a horde without number or champion blessed by the ruinous pantheon. They were an implacable foe for whom the destruction of all that Zuvius craved was absolute. The prince knew that he would have to throw everything he had at them.

Helping Sir Abriel back up to his feet, Zuvius felt his gauntlet creak about the A’cuitas. Dark desire drove him into a run and he hurled the glaive at the nearest Stormcast. A’cuitas closed its eyes as the blade of the daemon-forged weapon cleaved through the warrior’s breastplate. The glaive sat there, embedded between the sculpted pectorals of the plate as something horrible happened within. With a blast of spiritual energy that knocked Zuvius back, the eye slits of the Stormcast’s mask lit up. Something proud and lost died within the suit of armour. Like a bolt of lightning launching up from the realm and into the sky, all that the Stormcast warrior was disappeared in the momentary afterglow of the blinding arc of raw energy.

The death seemed to feed the rage of Skargan’s warband, with the wrathmongers indulging their berserker fury and the bloodreavers throwing themselves at the advancing wall of celestial plate. Taking dark inspiration from Zuvius’ kill, the slayers doubled their efforts, taking the fight to the Stormcasts that marched forth from the storm.

Wrathmongers swung their great hammer-flails about their mountainous frames, smashing Stormcast helms aside with one impact before taking them clean off with a second. Voark and his warriors swarmed Sigmar’s Stormcasts, jumping, clutching and climbing – prizing apart plate from sculpted plate with the tips of their reaver blades. As another champion of Sigmar died nearby, skewered on the tapering blades of several Hexenguard, Zuvius ordered his warriors back. He looked up at the blood-swirling sky. He hoped that the Everchosen was watching, that the prince’s sorceries, manipulations and slaughter had pleased monstrous Archaon.

‘Form up,’ the Prince of Embers called from behind the wall of warped shields. Lightning bolts crashed into the metal as the Stormcast Eternals unleashed the power of their bows at the knights. Sir Abriel and his gangling warriors staggered back. As Sigmar’s celestial heroes pressed their advantage, the Prince of Embers willed them on. His knights had taken the fight to the mighty Stormcasts but it was now time to visit upon the God-King’s warriors the true power at his disposal.

‘Now!’ he called. The Hexenguard parted their shields and pulled to one side, allowing the Unseeing through. The sorcerers thrust their gnarled, outstretched hands forward and the symbols tattooed into the flesh of their palms burned with dark enchantment.

Zuvius hadn’t thought it possible for beings such as the Stormcasts to scream. The mesa was suddenly afflicted with horror as flesh, metal and bone contorted and changed shape. One moment the Stormcasts were sacred knights of purity and doom, the next they were horrific statues of twisted plate and ruptured innards. Blood pooled about the stillness of their forms as they suffered their final agonising moments frozen in place – warped representations of the sorcerers’ nightmarish imagination.

As a bolt blasted over Zuvius’ shoulder, Mallofax beat his wings for the sky, the bird shrieking and leaving behind a cascade of blue feathers. Stalking confidently forward, the Prince of Embers snatched A’cuitas from where it had fallen on the floor after striking a Stormcast down. He moved through the fray like a madman, untouched. The cold determination of Sigmar’s holy warriors was nothing to him. The blood fever of Khorne’s barbarians was nothing to him. The dark sorcery of the Unseeing and the swing of swords clasped in the Hexenguard’s stretching limbs were nothing to him.

He spun his glaive about him elegantly, passing it about his wrist and across his back. With vicious turns of the shaft, Zuvius brought the blade down through the enemy, slashing ragged paths through celestial plate and flesh. Pillars of spiritual energy vaulted back to the sky at each merciless death like comets unleashed. The Prince of Embers sent the Stormcasts blazing back to their god, the Tzeentchian’s devastating downcuts and heart-stabbing thrusts a whirlwind of death.

The Hexenguard moved up behind their prince in a wedge of dark plate and blade, forcing their ghoulish way through Sigmar’s disciplined ranks. The Unseeing followed in a huddle, moaning and thrusting out their palms in sorcerous fear, turning armoured attackers to warped visions of plate and bone.

Zuvius was a force of serene destruction. He reached out with the length of his glaive to stab and stove in the masks of Stormcast helms. He swung the shaft of the daemon-forged weapon about him, smashing through the metal of bows and cutting gashes in the breastplates of advancing enemy warriors. He carved a path through the Stormcasts. Reckless insanity lifted his spirit as he ended those of pure heart about him.

He knew he had done well in the eyes of Tzeentch and the Everchosen of Chaos. A true warrior of Chaos served the Dark Gods not only to the best of his ability but through the abilities of the best. Skargan Fell-of-Heart and his host were battle-hardened slayers whose talents were best put to work in the service of a greater darkness than Khorne’s simple bloodlust. Zuvius had put them exactly where he needed them to be, turning their strength againstthe warriors of the wretched God-King. Here, on a mesa crafted to celebrate Zuvius’ victory, the Stormcasts and the mindless savages of the Blood God wasted their lives on one another.

Stormcasts marched out from the column of lightning with their glaives thrust out before them. The shimmering weapons were like sword blades mounted on shafts and the armoured warriors used them to cut bloodreavers in half. Slicing down through the savages of the Goresworn from the jaw to the hip, they marched on through the fallen flesh, coming together to skewer individual wrathmongers on their blades.

Zuvius felt the death about him as Voark, son of Kraal, was bludgeoned into the rocky surface of the mesa by a Stormcast with a glorious mace. He was avenged almost immediately by one of the wrathmongers who brought around the hammerhead of his chain-flail in a brutal arc. It struck the warrior, smashing through the plate on his back and turning him into a shower of mangled plate, gore and blinding light.

The mesa was brightest about Skargan. As brilliant as the continuous column-stream of lightning was in bringing forth the God-King’s warriors, the maelstrom of blazing death about the Fell-of-Heart was brighter still. Skargan was unstoppable, killing Stormcast after Stormcast for his god and the Everchosen. While his warband died about him – the Goresworn’s savagery was no match for the Stormcasts’ implacable, armoured advance, and the wrathmongers went to their deaths with reckless abandon – Skargan was a rock upon which the Stormcasts smashed themselves in the storm. He was death. He was fury. He was the exalted avatar of Khorne.

As the Prince of Embers approached, leading his warriors and killing with judicious flair, he saw Skargan gouge skulls out of masked helms with his bone claws, impale Stormcasts on his monstrous horns and smash bows from the cowardly grip of Stormcast Judicators. He broke armoured warriors in two with savage kicks and wheeled about him with his axe, the weapon taller than the deathbringer himself. He chopped through plate, he cleaved limbs from torsos and he felled mighty warriors of the God-King’s holy storm. He tore heads and helms from bodies with his bare hands and rammed the shaft of the battle-axe back through throats and chests.

There was no stopping him. With the bodies of his warband about him, Skargan roared his challenge to a cloaked lord in immaculate celestial armour. Flanked by two of his brothers, the lord leading the host closed in, wielding a great halberd in one gauntlet and a warding lantern in the other. Zuvius could feel the soul-scarring magical energy coming off the lantern and flinched as it was unleashed. Skargan Fell-of-Heart cared nothing for its terrible light. His red flesh cooked on the bone at its proximity.

He killed the celestial leader’s guardians, his axe screeching through their armour before sending their soulfire raging for the heavens. The lord came at the deathbringer with all the righteous fortitude of Sigmar himself. He smashed the warding lantern back and forth across Skargan’s horned skull, battering and momentarily blinding the Chaos brute. For a moment, Skargan was caught off guard and stumbled. Wielding the length of the halberd in one gauntlet, the lord chopped at Skargan with elegant sweeps of the axe blade and thrust with the bladed spike that crowned the weapon. He smashed the bone claws of the gouger Skargan held up to defend himself and ripped through the smoking flesh of the Chaos champion’s forearm. The lord landed a kick on the deathbringer’s muscular chest with an armoured boot before cutting one of the monstrous horns from the warrior’s head.

For a moment, Zuvius thought that he might have to face the mighty Stormcast lord himself. As the champion swung around the warding lantern for another disorientating blow, Skargan raised his axe with both hands. Instead of batting the magical weapon aside, the deathbringer’s wrath-fuelled swing smashed the lantern into a blinding nova of magical energy. Surprised by his weapon’s destruction, the lord staggered back. Skargan bellowed as the fierce flash of the lantern’s destruction bathed his Khorne-pledged flesh in the God-King’s scalding brilliance. He would not be stopped, however. Blindly back-swinging with his axe, he cut the halberd in two. Aiming with a slayer’s instinct alone, Skargan brought his axe down and cut straight through the lord.

Plate, flesh and bone sheared away in two halves as the axe blade sparked. Zuvius watched the blinding essence of the warrior rocket into the sky. As it did, the column of lightning burning into the rock of the mesa crackled and spat to nothingness, leaving behind only heat and an afterglow.

‘Hold,’ Zuvius commanded. Sir Abriel and the remaining Hexenguard locked shields and waited, while those sorcerous wretches of the Unseeing who had not been skewered or blasted by the Stormcast Eternals grasped blindly for one another. They were not the only ones to have lost their sight.

The deathbringer was a mess, but an impressive mess. His red flesh was burnt and raw, smouldering about him. The bulging muscles of his arms, chest and back hung like ribbons where the God-King’s warriors had sliced and stabbed, exposing rib and bone. One of his great horns was but a smashed stump while the champion’s eyes were misty with the scorching brilliance of the warding lantern. It was obvious from the clumsiness of his movements that he was blind but he still clutched his battle-axe to him with the murderous talent of ten sighted warriors.

Mallofax flapped down to land on Zuvius’ shoulder. The sound seemed to spook the deathbringer, who looked about and then up into the sky, expecting the judgement and reward of Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos.

‘Filth sorcerer,’ Skargan growled. ‘Is that you?’

The Prince of Embers turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets, aiming the pommel of the daemon-forged weapon at the deathbringer. The eye opened in the metal.

‘Aye,’ Zuvius said. ‘It is me. I have bad tidings for you, exalted one. You have been judged unworthy.’

Skargan’s ugly features screwed up in fury. He peered blindly up into the blood storm.

‘By who?’ he roared, challenging the gods. ‘By Khorne? By the Everchosen?’

‘By me,’ Zuvius told him. As the lightning leapt from his glaive and struck the deathbringer in the chest, Skargan Fell-of-Heart exploded. In an air-cracking blast of blood and flesh-scraps, the Blood God’s champion turned into a crimson mist, thick and bitter. Zuvius cocked his head towards Mallofax.

‘I sent him back to his dark god,’ the prince said, a crooked smile on his lips. ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’

Orphaeo Zuvius didn’t have to wait long for his judgement and reward. He had been reforged to the Everchosen’s liking, and the bodies about him erupted in blue flashes. The unnatural lightning reached up into the sky with a whoosh and surrounded him. It sizzled in the blood rain, the licks and flames encircling the Prince of Embers and forming shimmering shapes.

‘What do you see?’ Mallofax asked of the prince. Peering hard into the heat and light of the furious vision, Zuvius looked about. In the surrounding energy, he could make out the outline of a great fortress.

‘Jagged spires,’ he said, ‘towers and keeps, reaching up into horror-choked skies. Walls – spiked, colossal and thick. A fortress of ruin so large that it spans the Mortal Realms.’

‘You see the Varanspire,’ Mallofax told him, ‘the fortress of the Everchosen. Your invitation is extended, my lord. You are worthy and he calls you to his service.’

The raging wall of flame that encircled them suddenly died. Everything became ominously still. The skies cleared to reveal a darkness beyond. Then came the flapping of wings. While Mallofax hopped between the prince’s shoulder and A’cuitas, a flock of carrion birds descended from the darkness to feast on the flesh of the fallen.

‘And where do we find this Varanspire?’ Zuvius asked.

‘It sits in the Realm of Chaos,’ Mallofax said, ‘linked to the Eightpoints, a nexus of gateways connecting the Mortal Realms.’

‘A place of unrivalled destruction and death,’ Zuvius said.

‘Yes, my prince.’

Zuvius licked his mangled lips. He stabbed at the rock, tapping the pommel of his glaive on the surface of the mesa. The carrion birds took to the air in a swirling flock, startled by the impact. Mallofax flapped his wings also but retained his purchase.

‘Invitation accepted,’ Orphaeo Zuvius said. The knight that had been Sir Abriel followed with the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing.

‘What now my lord?’ Mallofax asked.

‘We follow the crows,’ the Prince of Embers said, ‘and trust in their appetite for death.’

About the Author

Rob Sanders is the author of ‘The Serpent Beneath’, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius and Tech-Priest, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken. He has also written the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos along with many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

The storm breaks as the Stormcast Eternals go into battle for the first time. Read the first book set in the Age of Sigmar.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

The Realmgate Wars: Call of Archaon – 2. Eye of the Storm © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. The Realmgate Wars: Call of Archaon – 2. Eye of the Storm, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-701-6

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