In THe Lands of The Blind

Rob Sanders

The Many-Eyed Servant, whose many eyes were everywhere at once, blinked his way across the Mortal Realms. Sights. Scenes. The serenity of horror observed but not experienced.

A banquet for the eyes. The daemon drank in the multiplicity of the realms, and of existences beyond that.

Life, death and everything in between played out before him like an unpleasant fiction. Children were born, their cries echoing those of their mothers just moments before. Men roared their rage, groaned in agony and spoke their secret and most desperate thoughts to themselves. Kings and beggars ached for what they couldn’t have, while the beasts that roamed the realms around them knew only the living moment. Here in the lands of the blind, where mortal wretches understood nothing more than the immediacy of their world and their miserable place in it, the Many-Eyed Servant was all-seeing, all-knowing.

The daemon’s gaze focused. In a blink it was drawn back to a story unfinished and a tale untold. Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, was near. A fellow disciple of fate’s dread architect, the god Tzeentch, and a sorcerous champion of darkness, it was he who would find a place in the ranks of the Varanguard – those ushers of the apocalypse, those knights of almighty Chaos selected by the Everchosen to serve the Ruinous Pantheon by his side.

The prince had come far since the Many-Eyed Servant had first seen him. He who had been far was now nearing. He had already faced great trials but he had to be tested anew, for the Everchosen was exacting. Only those of the blackest soul and darkest talents would fight in the company of living doom.

It was for that reason that the Many-Eyed Servant kept his eternal watch. He was Archaon’s terrible gaze cast far across the realms, but here he found an aspirant before their gates.

The Great Spoilage. A rotten wasteland.

Death, as far as the eye could see. Bodies carpeted the land, lying as deep as a lake or shallow sea. Mouldering. Putrefying. Liquefying. Whatever cataclysmic event had been responsible for such devastation was lost to time. Thousands, perhaps millions, had died or been dumped there. Had it been a battle to end all battles? There were plenty of butchered warriors rotting there, but it could just as likely have been a genocidal slaughter, a grand suicide pact or some unnatural disaster that had visited its elemental wrath upon the masses, with corpses raining from the sky.

Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, negotiated the cadavers with difficulty. From the Beaten Path, Zuvius had followed the crows. He had followed them as they moved from battlefield to common butchery. He had followed them as they feasted upon lone travellers and slaughtered armies alike. He had followed them to the Great Spoilage, where it seemed every other crow in the realms was enjoying a scavenger’s bounty.

Like harsh, hilly terrain or the crests of powerful waves, the Great Spoilage was an undulating landscape of cankered flesh and bone. Ribs gave, soiled cloth tore and rotting meat turned to maggot-choked, watery mush about Zuvius’ boots. However, while the land reeked of death, the place was very much alive. Blankets of fat flies smothered the sea of carcasses, filling both the ear and mind with their incessant drone. Rats swarmed through the dead, gnawing, tunnelling and expanding their rancid nests. Crows feasted on both flesh and flies, hopping, swooping and wheeling about Zuvius and his warband as the Tzeentchians made their way across the corpselands. So great was the plague of carrion birds that they blacked out the horizon ahead. Larger pot-bellied scavengers scrambled up and down the fleshmounds, tearing yellowing flesh from bodies and crunching the marrow from bones.

Zuvius held the ragged edge of his cloak over his mouth. The web of melted skin that stretched across the rawness of his scorched face squirmed with revulsion. This place was undoubtedly sacred to the Great Lord of Decay. Its stench saturated the blue straggles of the prince’s hair. Its rank taste was on his smeared lips and silver tongue. Zuvius detested it but in truth could think of no more suitable test or obstacle to place between a servant of the Great Changer and his goal than an expanse of stagnant rot.

The bird Mallofax circled their progress, riding on the rising stench, watching for potential threats. The warband had come across few. Small nests of ghouls picked over the bounty in places, while nomadic looters crossed the corpselands, neither interested in Orphaeo Zuvius or where he was headed. Even Zuvius had doubts about that. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos and Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse, had called for him. Zuvius had followed the signs, followed the crows, but they had led him to a carrion paradise, a mouldering land of dead flesh that undoubtedly attracted every bird in the realm.

Behind the Prince of Embers, Sir Abriel followed. The groaning knight had once been the captain of the royal guard. What remained of that band was now the Hexenguard. They trudged through the spoilage in silence, dark knights of Tzeentch whose plate glowed with enchantments. In their footsteps followed the Unseeing – Zuvius’ coven of blind sorcerers. The wretches staggered and tripped through the dead, one gnarled hand laid upon the shoulder of the sorcerer in front. They looked ancient and helpless, but their appearance belied their true power. With a gesture, the sorcerers could re-craft the flesh of nearby foes into representations of their twisted visions.

Using the sorcerous glaive A’cuitas to cut a path, Zuvius waded through the morass of breaking bones and sloughing flesh. Hauling himself up onto the corpse of a festering gargant, the prince knelt and rested, putting the raw skin of his forehead against his weapon’s haft. As Sir Abriel, the Hexenguard and Zuvius’ wretch-sorcerers climbed up onto the monstrous cadaver beside him, Mallofax returned, perching on the bill-hook of the glaive’s crowning blade.

Zuvius tapped the pommel of the glaive on the gargant’s hide. It was hard, waxy and mummified. Fungi bloomed across the giant carcass. Looking out across the corpse mounds, the prince watched as crows spooked by other scavengers took to the skies, wheeling about in rancid formations before settling once more. He tried to catch his breath but it was difficult. Every lungful of air was concentrated corruption that closed the throat and heaved the stomach. Mallofax flapped. The Hexenguard stood like warped, knightly statues. The Unseeing broke up and spread out across the gargant’s chest, feeling their way across jutting bone.

‘The Varanspire,’ Zuvius said. ‘Where is the damned thing?’

‘Everywhere and nowhere, my prince,’ the reptilian bird told him in a series of hisses and squawks. ‘It exists in the Realm of Chaos. It is here but also there. Near but impossibly far.’

‘Enough with the riddles,’ Zuvius warned.

‘I speak only truth,’ Mallofax said.

‘Well, you’re bad at it,’ Zuvius told him. ‘You should stick to lies, they’re more convincing. I’m beginning to think that we are going to end up the same way as these miserable souls.’

‘My lord?’

‘Perhaps they all set out for this palace of Chaos,’ Zuvius mused, ‘and died on the journ–’

Zuvius felt a quake through the soles of his armoured boots.

‘What is it?’ Mallofax squawked.

Zuvius stood, looking down at the yellowing flesh of the gargant. The quake turned into a series of thrashing tremors that shook the colossal carcass. The Unseeing froze while Sir Abriel and his malformed knights drew the notched blades of their longswords. In front of them, a sorcerer of the Unseeing suddenly disappeared. One moment he stood there in his rag-robes, the next he had been swallowed by the cadaver.

Disappearing into a pit of chewed flesh, the sorcerer screamed his way to death. The gargant’s corpse bucked as a terrible creature erupted from it. Feeding quietly on the underside of the great carcass, a horrific maggoth had smelled their freshness. Chewing up through the rot with the shredding teeth of its maw, the thing erupted from the gargant like a monster of the deep. Its arms and legs were but stunted remnants used to propel it through the dead, and its skin was sticky with spoilage. It held there for a moment before blasting a stream of half-digested rot back at the sky.

As Mallofax took off, Sir Abriel and the Hexenguard came forward with swords presented to protect their master. The maggoth went under once more, wriggling itself loose of the carcass. The Unseeing grasped for one another while the Hexenguard pulled Zuvius back from where the giant corpse met the sea of bodies. Cadavers twitched and death-stiff limbs moved as the monstrous maggoth swam and ate its way through the corpses. Zuvius turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets and pursed his lips in disgust. Not only did the prince have to wade through the Great Lord of Decay’s detritus, he now had to suffer the attentions of some Nurglesque monstrosity stalking them through the killing fields.

Zuvius felt the cadaver buck beneath them again as the maggoth rose once more. Chewing up through the body, it exploded from the gargant king’s gut. Another sorcerer of the Unseeing fell back into the pit of shearing teeth and rotting mulch. As he instinctively reached out, a member of the Hexenguard grabbed for him.

‘No!’ Zuvius called.

As the sorcerer thrust out his hand blindly, the tattooed symbols on his bony palm burned with fear. The Hexenguard knight, already a twisted, god-pleasing thing, clutched his chest, his screams joining the sorcerer’s own. His plate screeched as he began to contort and change shape, becoming the frightful vision of terror that flashed through the sorcerer’s mind during his last moments.

Toppling forward, the monstrosity knocked into another member of the Hexenguard. The knight slipped, his armoured boots scrabbling down the pit of rotting flesh. His dark blue steel sword bounced behind him, down into the maggoth’s great trap of teeth. Zuvius lunged and grabbed the knight by the arms. Surging once more, the maggoth clamped its obscene jaws about the knight and thrashed its teeth. Cutting the warrior of Chaos almost in half, the creature tugged, dragging Zuvius over the ragged lip of the pit. Sir Abriel reached for his master. Zuvius scrambled away from the great maggoth but his boots and gauntlets slipped through the slime of the gargant’s entrails.

The Unseeing moaned in their blindness. Mallofax squawked overhead. Zuvius kicked and turned, freeing himself of Sir Abriel’s ghoulish grip. The maggoth’s jaws gaped open and a black pool of digestive rot rose up from within. A warty tongue shot out of the pool like a serpent, wrapping itself around the prince’s leg. As Zuvius kicked and slid towards his doom, the muscular tongue retracted, hauling him to the edge of the maggoth’s fang-lined jaws.

From above, Zuvius heard Mallofax’s half-stifled squawk. The bird was flapping his wings with effort, trying to stay above the cadaverous pit while clutching the metal shaft of A’cuitas in his scaly talons. As the weapon dropped, Zuvius watched the glaive tumble blade over pommel. Both the prince and his weapon were heading for the same place – the maggoth’s foetid mouth.

Zuvius snatched the daemon-forged glaive out of the rank air. Spinning the weapon around, he cut through the monster’s scabrous tongue with one sweep of the heavy blade. It did not stop the beast. Turning A’cuitas about, he aimed the pommel of the weapon down the creature’s cavernous throat. The eye at the end of the glaive’s shaft opened and a stream of lightning leapt from the weapon. Lighting up the darkness of the doom within, the lightning caused the maggoth to retract, tremble, boil, and finally explode.

Zuvius held his position through the black tempest of rot that erupted about him. As a putrescent mist drifted back down, Zuvius used the glaive to climb out of the gargant-corpse’s abdomen. Reaching down, Sir Abriel hauled his master up. With the exception of Mallofax, who circled above, the whole warband dripped with stinking corruption.

‘We are being tested,’ Zuvius said through gritted teeth. Spitting rot from his lips, he once more descended into the sea of the dead and set forth, leading the warband onwards.

‘Where is it?’ the Prince of Embers demanded. They had been walking for days, the rankness of rot and death coating them like a blanket. There had been no sign of the dark citadel that Zuvius had seen in his vision or the gateway leading to it. The Great Spoilage seemed to extend forever, in all directions. The flocks of crows blacked out the sky, the cacophony of their incessant cawing an invitation to insanity.

‘We shall find it, my lord,’ Mallofax assured him.

‘Will we indeed?’ Zuvius roared. ‘Will that be before or after we join the fallen at our feet?’

He turned A’cuitas on the bird, whose cryptic explanations were almost as infuriating as the endless horizon of crow-pecked corpses, and unleashed a blast of lightning that arced across the mouldering landscape and scalded the stench about it. Narrowly missing Mallofax, the stream of energy sent the bird flapping and squawking for the safety of the sky.

He wasn’t the only one. Disturbed by the sudden crack of lightning, the crows carpeting the wasteland ahead of the warband took to the air in a storm of black feathers. As the flock lifted and cleared the path before the Prince of Embers, a fortress was revealed. The colossal castle reached into the skies with clawed turrets, citadels and towers of brick and blade. It was an abominate construction, its concentric walls an unbreachable barrier of dark stone and iron, each more towering than the last. They surrounded a central spire that pierced the heavens and resembled a spiked gauntlet punching victoriously at the sky.

The infernal architecture of the place was as disturbing as it was impressive, a fortress-shrine to Chaos, blasphemous in sculpture and indomitable in design. Its very presence brought forth storms that tore the sky asunder. Daemonic furies perched amongst the spires and circled in furious unnatural squalls. Elevated walkways of blood-stained stone spanned the fields of perpetual flame that raged about the castle and its moat, while its gargantuan gates were lined with monstrous metal teeth.

‘The Varanspire,’ the Prince of Embers said.

‘What else could it be?’ Mallofax agreed, coming in to land on his master’s glaive.

‘Let’s find out,’ Zuvius said.

The corpselands, though they had sapped the vigour of the warband with their stench, their marshy putrefaction and their bone traps, were now nothing to the Tzeentchians. Every crunching, squelching, spore-cloud-disturbing step took them closer to the dark majesty of the Varanspire – the fortress of Archaon, the Destroyer of Worlds.

As the cadavers began to thin and Zuvius’ boots found the blasted black grit of the solid ground that lay beyond the corpse marshes, the prince noticed other groups moving towards the fortress. Some were armoured and rode on horseback, while others moved in great barbarian hordes. Champions of Chaos and their doomed followers. The Blood God’s butchers. Slaaneshi deviants. Other sorcerers of Tzeentch, and the diseased of the Great Lord of Decay. He shouldn’t have been surprised at the sight, and yet he was. These were other warriors who had fought their way to this dark place from across the Mortal Realms, intent on impressing unholy Archaon with their dark talents and commitment.

Grit became shattered stone and shattered stone the blood-polished marble of an elevated walkway. It trembled with the killing taking place there. Zuvius became part of the madness. Perhaps it was the infectious doom of the place, or perhaps it was the collective insanity of ruinous champions who had fought through so much to be there. In reality, Zuvius knew that the servants of the Chaos pantheon did not really need a reason to fight. Like territorial predators, it was in their nature to kill their competition. Through such unnatural selection did the forces of ruin grow ever more powerful. The weak were sacrificed for the Chaos Gods on the dark altar of the strong.

Warriors of Chaos threw themselves at the prince and his warband. Battle cries and all manner of damned weaponry cut through the air. It was a bloody free-for-all, an unspoken quest to be the last champion standing on the bridge. Zuvius became one with the slaughter. He needed no invitation. With his Hexenguard fighting behind him and the sorcerers of the Unseeing casting nearby champions into horrific new forms, Zuvius fought his way across the bridge. In the shadow of the Varanspire and with, he hoped, the gaze of the Three-Eyed King upon him, Zuvius killed for his new master, for his place in the ranks of the Varanguard. For the Everchosen’s entertainment and for his own murderous whim.

Zuvius moved through the dread butchery. Khornate savages jangled with teeth and skulls while swinging serrated axe blades at sorcerers who smouldered with unnatural powers. Slaaneshi hedonists gutted Nurgle’s children, who were already one with their own agonies. The diseased, in turn, seemed desperate to spread their suffering to all. The greatest hostility seemed to erupt between champions of the same patron. Blood knights on horseback hacked their way through barbarian hordes pledged to Khorne, while the witchbreeds and warriors of the Great Changer couldn’t take their eyes off one another for fear of the treachery they all too well knew existed in the hearts of their compatriots. Mouthing dark enchantments and blasting Tzeentchian flame at one another, they created a spectacular firestorm of mutually assured death and damnation. No champion of Chaos wished to show their weakness before Archaon and his monstrous shrine-fortress, especially not the Prince of Embers.

Zuvius stabbed and skewered servants of the Dark Prince, who moaned their ecstasies while impaled on the daemon-forged weapon. The infected spilled pus and entrails before his boots. Monstrous knights in bone-lined armour stained their plate with their own gore as Zuvius passed his heavy blade through their throats. He stove in the skulls of warrior-enchanters like himself before the cursed incantations that resided there could reach blue Tzeentchian lips.

As Zuvius fought up the walkway, with unnatural flame roaring about him from the broad, infernal moat, he noticed the daemonic furies thunderbolting from the sky. Bringing their leathery wings in close, the fiends snatched warriors from the many walkways leading up to the great iron gates and portcullises of the castle. Tearing horses apart and tossing the remains of Chaos warriors between them like rag dolls, the flocks of furies seem to delight in their sport. Champions screamed as they were dropped from the storm-wracked skies and knocked into the roaring inferno that surrounded the Varanspire.

As the warriors of Chaos killed each other, the daemons thinned out their number, further, protecting the Varanspire from those who would threaten it. Zuvius tried to remain calm as the champions he was fighting were torn from the walkway about him and savaged by the flying monsters. A ragged fury landed on one of the Hexenguard and proceeded to snap his head from his shoulders and feast on his warped flesh. Zuvius heard Sir Abriel issue the low groan of an order. The Hexenguard brought up their battered shields.

Striding on towards the fortress, buried in the shadow of the Varanspire’s mighty walls, the Prince of Embers held his nerve. The raw stench of death was intoxicating. He drank it in, uncaring of the daemons that swooped by. The furies’ attacks became ever more savage and indiscriminate. A muscle-bound barbarian of the Blood God, as broad as he was tall, was knocked from the walkway and into the flames below. A bloated knight of Nurgle exploded with the rank gases of decomposition as a daemon sank its talons into him, while a smooth-skinned marauder screamed in pleasure as he was dragged up into the sky and shredded.

Zuvius tried not to flinch as another of his Hexenguard was snatched from the walkway and his flesh stretched between winged monstrosities trying to tear him apart. A moaning sorcerer of the Unseeing was next, and then another, the wretches never setting eyes upon the horrors that were their end.

Zuvius felt the blood-bead eyes of some plummeting beast upon him. It was a thing unknowing of the Prince of Embers’ destiny. Zuvius’ gauntlets tightened about the shaft of his glaive. He killed the Khornate crusader before him, knowing the fury was sweeping down towards him. With savage beats of its wings it surged, claws and talons ready for the kill.

The prince held on for as long as he could. As he turned the glaive to present it to the beast, however, the thing’s infernal reflexes saved it. Crashing down onto the walkway, it skidded and hauled its head back. Zuvius swung the glaive about him with a devastating reach, but it was not enough. The arc of the blade should have passed straight through the monster’s ugly skull but instead whistled past it, incensing the beast. Screeching its rage, it drew others from the sky and away from their slaughter. Zuvius felt a throng of furies, all enraged by the champion’s challenge, swoop down towards him.

Like some hellish hound, the fury on the walkway snapped and shot forward. Jabbing with the glaive, Zuvius held the creature’s blood-stained jaws at bay. Pretending that he hadn’t seen another fury dropping down at him with outstretched talons, the Tzeentchian kept his focus on the beast in front of him before bringing the weapon up suddenly. Skewering the airborne monster with the force of its own momentum, Zuvius heaved it aside, smashing it into the stone of the walkway. As the first daemon surged, it found the thrash of wing and claw and the spear-point of Zuvius’ glaive. Holding tightly onto the weapon as the thing impaled itself, the champion leaned back out of the snapping, spitting death-rattle of the beasts.

As a third landed behind the sorcerer, cracking the stone, Zuvius unleashed the sorcerous power of the glaive. With the weapon still skewered through the daemons, he blasted the newcomer off the walkway with a stream of lightning. As scraps of the creature and a mist of infernal blood hissed across the surface of the flames below, more furies swooped in on Zuvius. Putting his boot against daemonflesh, he freed his glaive from the bodies of the impaled creatures. Behind him, the Unseeing moaned their blind fear and the Hexenguard stood with shields raised.

‘Protect your prince,’ Zuvius ordered, prompting the Tzeentchian knights to run forward and surround him. Beasts smashed their horned heads against the blue steel and tried to push their snaggle-toothed jaws between the shields. Sir Abriel put his ghastly form between Zuvius and an attacking fury, distracting the creature while the Prince of Embers thrust his glaive over the knight’s shoulder and into the daemon’s open mouth. Retracting the polearm and pulling half the monster’s warped skull out of its jaws with it, Zuvius turned to find another fury almost on top of him.

The beast reared and brought up a wicked claw, aiming to rip down through the Tzeentchian champion. Its eye bulged suddenly and its jaws chomped in surprise as its flesh suddenly rebelled against it. Bones broke within it and leathery skin stretched over the new form it was taking. As it fell to one side, Zuvius could see a sorcerer of the Unseeing behind, visiting the damnation of his dark magic on the thing.

It suddenly came at Zuvius, morphing into something warped, ungainly and even more terrifying than before. The prince ducked a pair of jaws within jaws and rolled between the spawn’s erupting legs. As it turned to reacquire him, the wretch-sorcerer visited his dark visions upon the daemon once more – twisting and sculpting the monster into ever more horrific forms. As a second head and a pincer ruptured from the body, Zuvius batted them aside with the pommel of his glaive. Aiming the opening metal eye of the weapon at the abomination, he prepared to blast it to shreds, but the transformation inflicted upon it by the Unseeing finally – horribly – wrung the life out of the creature.

As Orphaeo Zuvius and his warband fought their way towards the fortress, other warriors of Chaos kept their distance. Some even watched with bitter amusement as daemons rained from the sky to attack their competition. Zuvius spat. He would kill them all. Flicking infernal ichor from his glaive, Zuvius turned around and then around again. Up until now there had always been some winged thing behind him ready to pounce. Suddenly there was not. Looking up, he saw that rather than hauling off or losing interest, small throngs of furies were simply hovering, flapping their bat-like wings. They were waiting for something.

The fortress before him shimmered in shadow and heat. Zuvius looked about. Something was not right. In fact, everything seemed wrong. The flames around them seemed higher.

‘Mallofax,’ the prince called, catching his breath.

‘My lord?’ the bird squawked, swooping in to land on the warrior’s shoulder.

‘Fly on ahead,’ Zuvius ordered. ‘I want to know what we’re walking into.’

Zuvius could see now a tidal wave of fire rising through the flames surrounding the fortress. It was a doom conjured by Archaon’s fell sorcerers. Roaring its way around the Varanspire, the wave would engulf the elevated walkway. That was why the furies had taken to the skies. Zuvius would be damned before he let himself be seared free of the Varanspire like an insignificant insect.

‘Hexenguard,’ the Prince of Embers called. ‘Form up and lock shields.’

Sir Abriel and his Tzeentchian knights moved to create a shell of battered blue steel. Bringing in the Unseeing behind the shield wall, Zuvius watched for warriors of Chaos attempting to take advantage of their distraction. A mounted Slaaneshi warlord in immaculate plate looked down his nose at Zuvius. Khornate killers bedecked in spikes and horned helms fought on towards the Varanspire.

A nearby figure stood regarding Zuvius and the shield wall with suspicion. The champion was a Tzeentchian warrior whose ensorcelled blade crackled with dark energies. He held out the weapon between Zuvius and himself as a warning, slipping off his helmet. A nest of tentacles that had been squirming within dribbled down his breastplate like a beard. The change-blessed warrior regarded Zuvius with dead, deep-sea eyes, before considering the apocalyptic tsunami of flame rolling towards them. Shouting to his cerulean-skinned followers, the champion of Tzeentch and his horde of warrior witchbreeds took cover behind the shield wall of the Hexenguard.

A chain reaction was initiated along the stone walkway. Champions and the servants of Chaos behind Zuvius saw what was happening and saw the blaze encroaching with their own eyes. Some emulated the Hexenguard, locking shields if they had them to present a unified front against the wall of flame. Others abandoned their warped steeds, skidding and scrabbling down behind blue steel.

Zuvius watched as a hulking warrior of Nurgle ran towards him, slimy, pale rolls of fat spilling out of his rusted chainmail. The warrior shook the stone beneath Zuvius’ feet with his determined steps, grubs, maggots and leeches raining from his blight-festered flesh as he ran. Ducking down beneath the shield wall Zuvius waited for the blast wave. The Tzeentchian smiled to himself. He cared nothing for the followers of other fell gods, disciples of his own or champions of Chaos competing with him for the Everchosen’s favour. He only cared for what might be achieved through saving their lives in the undoubted challenges to come.

Zuvius heard the boom of the inferno against the shield wall and felt the shudder of the stone walkway. He watched the Lord of Decay’s monstrous warrior disappear in a rush of flame. Slaaneshi swordsmen on steaming horseback lost their race with the firestorm, while there was little the blades, muscle and fury of the Blood God’s brutes could do to save them in the face of such fiery destruction.

The Prince of Embers felt his hair burn and his flesh blister. The raging flame boomed about him – and then it was gone. The Hexenguard unlocked their shields and the Chaos warriors that had sheltered behind them brought up their heads. They watched the bank of flame roll away.

Zuvius heard the flapping of wings. Mallofax was back. He had flown above the fire and scouted out the fortress approach, its portcullis gate and defences.

‘The gate?’ Zuvius asked as the bird landed on the blade of the glaive.

‘Carnage, my lord,’ Mallofax told him. ‘The gate stands firm against all assaults. Archaon’s warriors wait within.’

‘And the wall itself?’

‘Sheer,’ Mallofax told him. ‘There’s no way in.’

‘There’s always a way in,’ Zuvius growled. ‘There has to be. All those who stand in service of Archaon within once stood beyond the fortress walls.’

Zuvius knew he had to keep pressing forward. He wasn’t going to wait for the infernal wave to come back around. He wasn’t going to wait for the furies to attack again. He had saved the warriors of Chaos on the walkway. If he could just get them and others into range of the fortress’ warped defences, a retaliatory assault on the Varanspire might be able to achieve some momentum. He would lead by example, down a doomed path the warriors of Chaos had already chosen.

Zuvius ran. The bridge between him and the Varanspire was all but clear of warriors. Only those champions already close to the Varanspire’s walls had managed to find shelter from the bank of flame and, hiding in the architectural flourishes of the dread fortification, they had survived the inferno. Now, they were dying.

Arms of sorcerous stone shot out from the Varanspire wall, grabbing warriors and dragging them to their deaths in the solidifying wall. Boiling spawnflesh spurted from the mouths of daemonic gargoyles decorating the ramparts, splattering down on the warriors below. Coated in liquid horror, the spawnflesh assumed the shape of lesser daemons that assimilated the warriors’ dissolving forms. Braziers situated either side of the gate smouldered with a debilitating fog that, when breathed in, afflicted the victim with blistering burns to the skin, an agonizing blindness and a lung-curdling cough. Arrow slits sang with the thud and whoosh of crossbows and monstrous spear-shooting ballistas. Each bolt was crafted from hell-forged iron and carried a bound daemon within. Even if a striking bolt or spear failed to kill an approaching warrior, the blood-mad daemon that bled from the iron to possess the injured victim shredded both their flesh and soul.

Zuvius ran towards the fortress with his warband following, while the knights, butchers and swordsmen who had taken shelter behind the shield wall stomped across the bridge after him. Zuvius didn’t care whether this was out of a desire to kill him or to attack the Varanspire. Once they were in range of its dread defences, intentions would matter little. The Chaos fortress was a challenge that could not be ignored. The Chaos warriors accelerated across the bridge. The energy of their charge was almost infectious: blood knights in full plate, wasted warriors in leper’s robes, barbaric pleasure-seekers whose flesh was stuck with pins and shards of bone, and sorcerous champions like himself, wielding daemon-forged blades. The growing horde charged along the walkway. The fortress wall grew higher above them and the monstrous gate hove into view, shimmering in the heat of the broad moat.

A great arch lined with iron teeth, it was sealed by a series of warped portcullises, each lowered one behind the other. Through the grille of the bars Zuvius could see the warriors of Archaon, armoured silhouettes in thick plate mounted on fearsome steeds. They waited, weapons sheathed, seemingly unconcerned. They were confident in the Varanspire’s defences. Zuvius snarled. He would make them pay for their arrogance and serve Archaon all the better for taking their place. No warrior would breach the Varanspire while the Prince of Embers stood in their path.

Suddenly he was amongst bodies – the unfortunates who had failed to breach the Varanspire’s defences before him. Zuvius would not fail. Their remains were trapped amongst a forest of iron shafts and ballista bolts embedded in the stone. Zuvius could feel the raging daemons bound to the iron reach out for him in their fury. Savages and warriors who had shed their plate sprinted ahead of Zuvius, desperate to get out of the killing ground. They could not, however, for the fortress was designed with such desperation in mind.

Within seconds, the vanguard of the horde was dead. Such was the power behind the crossbows and the infernal ballistas that within a blink, daemon-bound bolts and spears were thudding into the stone about them. Marauders were thrown off their feet by shafts that hammered into their chests. Black projectiles hit the ground about Zuvius’ feet while shards of stone showered him where the missiles from ballistas shattered the walkway. A daemonic roar could be heard with their passing. Half-stifled screams and grunts of sudden death filled the air as Chaos warriors were impaled by the missiles and staked to the bridge.

There was no avoiding such an onslaught. Mallofax, who soared above the stabbing storm, had called it carnage; the bird had not been wrong. Aspiring champions, pledged to all manner of Dark Gods, died with brutal indifference. They had braved the lethality of the realms to reach the Varanspire and now it was their undoing. Alongside them, Zuvius heard members of his own warband dying. He ran on through the forest of iron and the impaled warriors. The heart-stopping whoosh of a ballista bolt nicked Zuvius’ ear and thudded straight through the battered breastplate of a Hexenguard knight. Zuvius heard the daemon in the missile rip the armoured warrior apart in seconds.

Step after feverish step took the Prince of Embers on towards the gate. It grew before him, its iron teeth threatening to swallow him whole. Madmen and driven warriors of darkness ran beside him. Behind them pounded a swollen blightking of Nurgle, who seemed to soak up bolts and the Varanspire’s daemonic heralds with his diseased flesh. As they neared the gate, the hail of bolts from above began to ease. Confidence welled up once again in Zuvius and those about him.

Suddenly, Sir Abriel’s shield flashed before him. The Tzeentchian knight put his willowy fingers on Zuvius’ chest to slow him. The prince heard the thud of several opportunistic bolts slam into the shield – daemon iron that had been meant for him. He didn’t usually waste sentimentality on the Hexenguard but immersed in the death and destruction, he found himself grinning hysterically at his father’s former captain of the guard.

When the ballista bolt came, it sheared the shield in two and did much the same to Sir Abriel. Skewered through his ruined chest and down into the stone, the groaning knight was pinned. Zuvius wasted a few precious moments trying to pull Abriel free before coming to his senses. The knight was all but dead already; Zuvius would not end the same way.

‘Sorry, old friend, but this is the price of entrance,’ the prince told the warped knight as the bound daemon ravaged what was left of him. With screams echoing about him, Zuvius ran for the gate.

A huge Khornate knight in baroque plate smashed into the portcullis with his colossal axe, causing the metal gate to shake. Feverish berserkers thrashed at the grille with their axes, while pus-swollen warriors of the Lord of Decay put their backs and bellies into lifting the colossal portcullis. It would not move, however. Even if it had, two more lay behind it, as secure as the first. With a metallic squeal, the hell-knights beyond the gates thrust the length of their fellspears through the gate grilles and skewered the Chaos champions hammering to get in. With infernal discipline, the knights withdrew their weapons and allowed their victims to fall before thrusting forth and impaling those that took their place.

Dark champions, filled with a warrior’s ecstasy at surviving the sorcerous flames and the storm of bolts, threw themselves at the fortress gate. Sparks flew where their hammers bounced off daemon-forged metal. Light-armoured deviants covered in tattoos, chains and studs reached through with their cruel blades, attempting to slash at the machinery that raised the gates, but nothing worked. Archaon’s hellish garrison were ready for them. The interlopers would die at the gate. With a whoosh of steam, a foul liquid cascaded down the walls and turned the besiegers to screaming statues of melting flesh. All the while, the skin of champions blistered as they stumbled blindly through the diseased smoke of braziers.

Zuvius felt the fight leaving the attacking horde. Even dread warriors such as these needed some expectation of success, but the Varanspire gave them none. For a moment the prospect of braving the ballistas back across the walkway began to assume a grim appeal. Zuvius knew he had to rally the besiegers. He had to find an advantage.

‘My sorcerers,’ Zuvius called. ‘My Unseeing, move on. Show me what you can see through this wretched gate.’

The Prince of Embers knew the cost of the sacrifice and accepted it. Before the Varanspire and under the gaze of the Three-Eyed King, he had to relinquish the trappings of a Tzeentchian warrior. Those that fought for Archaon cared not for the Dark Gods they formerly served or the warbands that in turn served them. Their only concern was the wish and whim of the Everchosen of Chaos – for to be one of his knights was to forsake all other things.

The Unseeing moaned as they stumbled through the bodies before the gate. They flinched as they bumped into the grille and laid their gnarled hands on the bars. Several died immediately, the cruel points of fellspears bursting from their backs. Reaching through the warped grille, the wretch-sorcerers struck out their palms.

Tattooed symbols burned in their flesh as the horror of their visions was unleashed on the armoured warriors beyond. The screams of the Varanspire’s hell-knights fortified the resolve of the faltering champions of Chaos trapped outside the fortress walls. Through the grille, Zuvius could see the twisted silhouettes that the Unseeing had created. As a fresh cascade of boiling oil came down the towering walls, the sorcerers’ screams joined those of their victims – robes were set alight and flesh was burned from bones.

‘Get back!’ Zuvius called, gesturing to the knights of the Hexenguard and the rest of the champions clustered at the gate. He raised his glaive. The gates would resist a sorcerous blast from the daemon-forged weapon, but the stone of the wall might offer a different opportunity. He adjusted his aim, pointing the glaive to one side of the portcullis.

The metal eye of the pommel opened and Zuvius blazed a continuous stream of lightning at the wall. It crackled and glowed with the blinding power of the arcing blast. As the sorcerous stream ceased, Zuvius walked up to the point of impact. All about the side of the portcullis the stone of the gate had turned to a dark glass. Jabbing at the smouldering crystal with the pommel, the prince shattered the wall around the edge of the portcullis grate.

The Hexenguard filed through first. The Tzeentchian knights found only warped sculptures of mangled flesh, bone and plate on the other side. The horde swarmed the opening, a lord of Khorne pushing past in his blood-dripping cloak and great horned helm to lead the way. Newly filled with resolve and a desire both to impress the Everchosen and destroy the unworthy among his servants, champions of all powers and patrons followed him. Zuvius watched pleasure-bound killers enter, armed with blades that glistened with poison. Hulking sacks of indomitable pestilence followed, with the cerulean-skinned warriors of Tzeentch. Barbarian berserkers jangling with skulls clawed at each other to be the first to the fighting within. They were a horde of unwitting puppets, all serving as a distraction for the Prince of Embers.

As Zuvius entered and moved through the gallery of twisted death the Unseeing had sculpted in the barbican, he found Mallofax. The bird had risked the sky-bound furies to fly over the wall and gather intelligence for his master of the trials to come.

‘Speak,’ Zuvius commanded.

‘Daemons, my prince,’ Mallofax told him, hopping from statue to statue. ‘The legions of hell, fighting for the Everchosen.’

As the barbican opened up onto another stone walkway, Zuvius found that his horde had run straight into the determined resistance of the hell-knights who had escaped the gaze of the Unseeing, and a throng of daemon shock troops – things unleashed to immediately check the advance of any besieger entering the fortress.

Beyond the barbican troops, the lord of Khorne had dived straight into combat, his cloak and monstrous axe wheeling about him in a spatter of blood. Inspired by his fearless example, the champions of other dark gods fell in behind him – the Chaos lord was the point of a wedge that the horde was driving through the ranks of savage Varanspire daemons. Horned plaguebearers tore warriors of Chaos limb from limb with their diseased claws. Pallid nightmares of claw and dread feminine form snapped off heads with cruel elegance. Fury-red fiends of horn and claw danced death through the horde, wielding hellblades in devastating arcs of destruction. The lord of Khorne found himself fighting for his life against a trio of bloodletters, turning a storm of swords aside with brutal swings of his axe.

No less devastating were Archaon’s Knights of Ruin. Decked in plate of black and gold, they were broad and powerful, and thrust their fellspears through champions of Chaos, sometimes two or three at a time, impaling them like stuck boars.

The Hexenguard moved about their master, giving Zuvius the protection of their shields while sweeping through lesser daemons with longswords. As change-blessed flesh and bone stretched, the arcs of the tapering blades surprised the infernal creatures and opened up throats and bellies. As a plaguebearer clawed through the Hexenguard shields, the daemon batted one of the knight’s heads from his armoured shoulders with a diseased hand. It beat another into the ground with a fist before pulling out a jagged, rusted cleaver and swinging it with droning abandon at Zuvius.

Like his former patron, the Prince of Embers had a special hatred for the Lord of Decay’s foetid daemon foot soldiers. Bringing the blade of his glaive down, he knocked the creature’s weapon to the floor before slicing its hand from its gangly arm.

With the foul thing at a disadvantage, Zuvius brought the pommel of the glaive around to smash the daemon in the face, before turning the shaft in his hands and ramming the blade straight into its swollen belly. Pushing through the shields of his Hexenguard protectors, Zuvius forced the plaguebearer back. Rot-infested entrails tumbled from the thing’s cleaved form. Slamming it into the back of one of the Everchosen’s ruinous knights, Zuvius turned the glaive blade like a key, bursting the rest of its putrid organs.

Feeling the blow, the blood knight turned around. Despite the weight of his thick plate, the warrior moved like a striking serpent, his ensorcelled blade a blur of runes and dark steel as it smashed A’cuitas aside. The knight seemed drawn to the Prince of Embers’ confidence and lethality, recognising the competition. Perhaps, Zuvius thought, he had seen him issuing orders to the horde outside the gate and gain entrance with his crackling power. The knight stared at the prince through the eye slits of his helm, the ornate headdress of metal horns thrumming with dark power.

Zuvius felt the intensity of the knight’s attentions. He was hungry for the kill. The prince’s life was his to take and every second Zuvius was allowed to breathe was a grievous insult to the Everchosen of Chaos. His sword was a stabbing, sweeping, cleaving instrument of cold steel. Relentless in the economic savagery of his attacks, the warrior backed Zuvius towards the barbican wall, away from others of his warband and the horde that might help him. Away from the other dark knights of the fortress who might take the honour of the kill.

Working his glaive around, Zuvius turned the cuts and swings of the ensorcelled blade aside. The knight moved with incredible speed and assurance, pressing the prince to his limit. He felt the warrior’s attacks burn with the desire to end him. Zuvius backed into the barbican wall and sparks flew as the knight carved his blade into the stone. The prince ducked and weaved around into an alcove doorway.

‘Expect to get no further,’ the knight hissed through his helm. A haft-ringing deflection knocked Zuvius’ weapon aside. A brief stream of lightning scorched and crackled away to nothingness on the smooth stone. The knight had the measure of him now. He wouldn’t allow Zuvius to press his sorcerous advantage.

As the murderous thrusts and stabbing attacks forced Zuvius through the spike-inlaid doorway and up a crooked spiral of stairs, the prince felt the dread knight gearing up for the kill. Even with the advantage of higher ground, Zuvius could not get past the warrior’s defensive sweeps. It was as though his weapon were part of him, moving with speed and force to knock the glaive aside.

As the walls opened out onto a stone landing, Zuvius readied himself for the end. Archaon did indeed only select the very best warriors for his ranks. As their blades clashed and the knight backed Zuvius across the landing, barbican archers in dark helms and with bare, scarred chests moved their bows, arrows and ballistas across the stone floor. With the sound of battle within the walls alerting them to a breach, the archers were intent on moving their deadly weaponry over to the arrow slits on the other side of the landing so that they could once more target the horde below.

‘Think never to wear the dark plate of the Everchosen,’ the unhallowed knight spat as he attacked. Sparks lit up the landing as Zuvius turned the ensorcelled blade away, each deflection a little slower, each lethal lunge of the blade a moment closer to ending the prince.

As they reached the end of the landing, Zuvius saw the knight’s eyes widen with surprise and hostility. Instead of skewering Zuvius, the rune-encrusted blade pointed towards an archer standing behind the prince. Turning, the prince saw that the archer was standing next to an unloaded ballista and was holding the heavy, iron bolt above his head like a cudgel.

‘This dubious honour is mine,’ the knight shouted at the archer, warning him off.

Zuvius knew that this was his last chance. This knight of ruin, this warrior acolyte of the Destroyer of Worlds, would slay him. Touching the pommel of the glaive to the metal of the knight’s weapon, Zuvius allowed the briefest stream of lightning to course through the blade. The sword leapt from the knight’s gauntlet with a sudden shock and rattled across the floor, away from them both.

As the knight and Zuvius stared at one another, the sorcerer thrust the crowning blade of A’cuitas back, stabbing the archer through the chest. Without looking, Zuvius listened for the cacophonous clatter of the heavy bolt on the floor. Zuvius knew what to expect next. The knight was so skilled with the sword, the prince wagered, that he wouldn’t continue the combat without it.

Grunting his hatred, the knight made a run for the ensorcelled blade. Zuvius was right behind him. With the haft of the glaive in both gauntlets, Zuvius thrust the weapon over the knight’s head. As the warrior’s ornate helm was knocked to the floor, Zuvius hauled him back. The knight reached for his blade, but it was just out of reach. Zuvius pushed the glaive’s blade to the knight’s throat, and the warrior was forced to grasp the weapon at his neck instead.

Without his helm, Zuvius could see the knight was some kind of albino, with unnaturally pallid flesh. His mouth opened, gulping for air, and the sorcerer caught a brief glimpse of his black tongue and needle teeth as he bucked around. Like a tormented animal, the dark knight – who had been so deliberate in his murderous bladework – reared with Zuvius on his back and flung them both at the wall. Zuvius held on for his life as the knight backed and battered them both against the stone. Heaving the shaft of A’cuitas ever closer, his arms burning with the effort, the prince felt something give, and the knight suddenly go limp. Riding the cascade of hell-forged plate and muscle to the ground, Zuvius held the knight there for a few moments longer, just to make sure. Getting to his feet, Zuvius turned his blade about in his gauntlets and struck the dread knight’s head from his shoulders.

‘You fought well,’ Zuvius told the corpse. ‘Just not well enough. The honour might have been yours but the pleasure was mine.’

Archers came around the corner armed with their bows and improvised weapons. Turning A’cuitas on them, Zuvius arced lightning from one killer to another, turning each into a wall-splattering eruption of blood.

Leaning against the glaive, Zuvius took a moment to catch his breath. At the arrow slit he heard the flap of wings. Mallofax settled in the opening, watching his master with beady, black eyes.

‘Where have you been?’ the prince asked.

‘Our siege does not go well, my lord,’ Mallofax squawked. Zuvius went across to the arrow slit and peered down at the walkway leading from the barbican. The Varanspire’s daemonic shock troops were taking the Chaos horde apart. The Hexenguard were all dead. Champions of different fell gods fought side by side against the Everchosen’s monstrosities, killing the dread things when they could. Only the Khornate lord in his blood-baroque armour and gore-drizzling cloak seemed to be making headway. With his axe dripping with infernal ichor, the bodies of bloodletters, plaguebearers and daemonettes twitched at his feet. Zuvius thought on the mess he had made of the archers who had been about to open fire on the walkway.

‘The siege goes better than it might,’ Zuvius corrected the bird.

Zuvius looked down on the horde below, the champions of Chaos doomed to become little more than a daemon-slain distraction. His gaze followed the walkway spanning the exterior wall and the next. While the Everchosen’s knights, sorcerers and daemons haunted the fortress corridors and clung to the architecture like warped gargoyles, the colossal courtyard in between blazed with torches: an assembly ground for monstrous hordes, led by countless champions and Chaos lords who fought under Archaon’s banner. They waited to be summoned to battle at the Everchosen’s order, somewhere in the Mortal Realms, while other armies of darkness arrived with the spoils of war to take their place.

There was no way that the invading horde could fight through such numbers and horror. Zuvius would have to find another way. The horde could still serve his interests as a timely distraction. He would not tolerate a challenger for the Everchosen’s attentions, however. Scooping up the iron bolt the archer had dropped on the floor, Zuvius loaded and cranked the ballista. He could feel the hate of the bound daemon radiating off the cursed iron. Aiming the weapon down through the arrow slit, he lined it up with the back of the Khornate lord that was still leading the fighting.

Allowing the Blood God’s champion to finish one of Archaon’s black-armoured knights with a bludgeoning swing of his axe, Zuvius fired the ballista. Mallofax flapped his wings at the sound and hopped onto the prince’s shoulder.

The iron bolt speared through the warrior’s back and out from his chest, and the lord of Chaos staggered. The released daemon savaged at the warrior’s soul while a daemonette leapt on him, scything with her claws, but the Khornate champion somehow fought on. Tearing the creature from his pauldron, the Chaos lord smashed her into the ground. Falling to his knees, he took the legs out from beneath another daemonette as she ran at him. Dropping his axe and falling onto all fours, the Khornate lord was surrounded by stalking bloodletters. The daemons waited for a moment and then pounced, tearing into the Blood God’s champion with horn and claw, pulling free his skewered heart and snarling skull.

‘What now, my prince?’ Mallofax asked.

‘Now we find the Everchosen of Chaos,’ the Prince of Embers told him.

The Varanspire.

Orphaeo Zuvius negotiated the leagues of fang-lined battlements. He stood in the monstrous claws of tower turrets, watching greater daemons on the wing, hunting furies in the storm-wracked skies.

In search of Archaon, Zuvius explored the citadel, its towering heights and corrupting depths. There, all the Chaos Gods and Archaon, as their undisputed champion, were celebrated. Shrines and temples dedicated to the Ruinous Powers turned Zuvius’ heart black. Labyrinthine libraries of sorcerous tomes threatened to claim years of his life, while crowded fighting pits were places of perpetual death. Zuvius walked through miles of corridors sizzling with dark intent. He found lavish chambers that were nests of writhing daemonflesh, and stagnant ruins in which time almost stood still. Indeed, the heart of the Varanspire barely seemed to observe the natural laws at all – an architectural nightmare crafted in darkness, stone and fire.

On the courtyard expanses he passed beneath banners depicting the symbols of the Everchosen and the unruly hordes of ruin: spawn, savages, Chaos knights, enslaved monstrosities, charismatic champions and dark warlords, all serving dread Archaon. Mallofax warned his prince of lesser daemons and infernal beasts haunting the fortress corridors ahead.

While the diversionary sacrifice of his warband and the besieging horde had allowed Zuvius within the Varanspire’s walls, it had been his patience and cunning that had allowed him to traverse the walkways and courtyards, the ramparts and corridors. When he needed to, the prince murdered with silent impunity, strangling the lesser guards of the fortress garrison with the A’cuitas’ haft and stabbing the blade up under chins, through backs and into helms.

With every treacherous blow Zuvius got nearer to his goal, until he walked straight through the monstrous gates of the citadel spire itself. Mallofax hopped and flapped down empty corridors ahead of his master.

Lost in this hellscape, each twist, turn, deathly drop and corrupting flourish was dedicated to the Everchosen of Chaos. Only the strangest of daemonic creatures stalked the dream-like depths, feverish abominations writhing with tentacle. Daemon monstrosities that struggled to keep their form, erupting with mouths and limbs that spewed forth sorcerous flame, drove Zuvius on through the insanity. Magical hellfire not only thundered up corridors and through chambers but scorched the very nature of reality itself. Zuvius stumbled away from the heat, light and sound, driven down into one corridor and then the next, until he could no longer escape the corruptive bloom of daemon flame coming at him from all directions.

As the booming inferno enveloped him, Zuvius simultaneously lost and found himself. Blinking the nightmare from his eyes, the Prince of Embers stumbled across a gargantuan chamber of black marble that he couldn’t remember having entered before. It was dark magnificence given form. Mallofax hopped and staggered behind him across the polished floor. A forest of colossal pillars rose to the ceiling and Zuvius stumbled between them. Into each was crafted the horror of screaming faces.

Pushing himself between two pillars, Zuvius suddenly caught sight of the back of a monstrous throne, a thing sculpted of darkness and ossified ambition, a thing that radiated unholy power and struck a chord of dread in the Prince of Embers’ heart.

‘This is it,’ Zuvius said to Mallofax. ‘This is a throne room fit for the Everchosen of Chaos. A place of doom and dark majesty. We have made it, Mallofax.’

Zuvius staggered about the corruptive splendour of the throne, keeping his distance as he moved around in front of it. The throne itself was blinding in its dark brilliance and the prince found himself crashing to his knees in exhaustion and dread.

‘Mighty Archaon,’ Zuvius managed, his helmet off and forehead to the floor. ‘You have summoned and I have answered. I have travelled far and fought hard in your name, all to take a place at your unholy side. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos, Destroyer of Worlds and men: I supplicate myself before you. I pledge myself to you in bringing an end to this world and all others.’

‘You seek Archaon?’ a voice came, burning with age and sorcerous power.

Zuvius brought up his head and stared into the radiating darkness. He got the impression of a gaunt figure rising from the throne, at one with the unholy dread of the object. It walked down the steps towards the kneeling Zuvius. The prince rubbed the darkness from his eyes. He could make out a skeletal figure and sorcerer’s robes. The thing’s features were warped, and blinked with a thousand eyes. Zuvius burned under its fell gaze.

‘I seek Archaon,’ Zuvius confirmed, holding his hand out in front of him to ward against the darkness, and getting to his feet.

‘In a fortress he has barely set foot in?’ the sorcerer said. ‘Before a throne upon which he has never sat?’

‘Archaon is not here?’

‘And never shall be.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Zuvius told the sorcerer honestly. ‘I am–’

‘You are blind and foolish,’ the sorcerer said. ‘That is all that matters. How came you to be in this place?’

‘I followed the crows,’ the Prince of Embers said.

‘For where the Everchosen treads, the crows indeed follow,’ the sorcerer said.

Zuvius heard it. Faint at first. The distant flapping of wings. The caws of hungry carrion birds. The sound grew, booming about the cavernous chamber. Suddenly they were everywhere. Birds, black of feather and sharp of beak. A storm of crows swarmed through the pillars in all directions – flying at Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers. A squawking Mallofax was lost in the thunder of the flock. Zuvius was lifted from the ground but remained in place, being shredded from all angles. They ripped his armour from his form and tore at his skin with their beaks and talons. Zuvius screamed as they pulled the remaining hair from his scalp and his eyes from their sockets. Like a torrent of darkness, they baptised him in death.

Zuvius crashed back down to the marble floor. Black feathers floated down beside him, an agony on his raw flesh. He felt blood spill down his face from the empty sockets and drip to the floor. He heard Mallofax squawk his misery from nearby.

‘My prince…’ the bird said, but got no further.

The sorcerer moved painfully close to the Prince of Embers and leaned in, causing Zuvius, blind, to angle his head awkwardly this way and that, trying to fix on the presence.

‘Your trials are over,’ the sorcerer told him. Orphaeo Zuvius didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead he settled on a dumbfounded silence. ‘What did you expect? Some kind of dark coronation? The Everchosen of Chaos here to recognise you personally for your dread service? Service to Almighty Archaon is recognition enough.’ Zuvius nodded slowly in his private agony.

‘Don’t worry,’ the sorcerer said as he left him, the horror of his voice growing distant. His words were laced with a dark amusement. ‘There are none so blind as those that will not see.’

The Prince of Embers knelt there, the sorcerer’s parting words echoing horribly about the colossal chamber. They were everywhere, melting into his mind behind the empty sockets of his eyes. There, on his knees before the empty throne, Orphaeo Zuvius came to know the true nature of damnation. He had forsaken all in his search for the Everchosen of Chaos and Archaon, in turn, had forsaken him. Letting the torturous darkness where his eyes used to be sink down into his soul, the Prince of Embers became one with the potent doom of the place. The wicked laughter of insanity. A haunting whisper in the fortress depths. A cautionary tale never told.

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 – 6 In The Lands of The Blind © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. The Realmgate Wars: Call of Archaon – 6 In The Lands of The Blind, 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.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78251-954-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(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.