The Second Sun

Ben Counter

Upon the murderous Norscan peaks, Sigtaal Whitehand let his horse die. It had been lame since the icebound pass, where Sigtaal was sure he had glimpsed fur-clad figures watching him from the crest of the ridge. This particular mountain had no name, for he was perhaps the first man of Sigmar’s land ever to leave his footprints in its snow. Perhaps it would be his grave.

But he did not think so. He was here for a reason. He would continue on foot, he would drag himself on raw and bleeding elbows and knees if he had to. He might die, but not because he gave up and let the cold claim him.

He cut as much meat as he could carry from the carcass of his horse, hurrying before the meat began to freeze, wreathed in the steam from its cooling blood. He looked around him, sure that he was being watched. The dark red stain around the dead horse would have been a beacon to them, whoever they were, a bright blossom against the endless snows.

He took out the tattered book from beneath his furs and wrote down the date, as well as he could reckon it. One thousand, seven hundred and thirty years after the birth of the man-god Sigmar. Perhaps one of the final days of Sigtaal Whitehand’s life. But it would be worth it. The secrets of Norsca were worth dying for. If there was anything he had learned, it was that.

He had seen the titanic obsidian spire around which a host of black, winged horrors flocked. The caverns which moaned with the voice of the mourning, where the hardy tribes of Norsca left their young to learn of sorrow. The eyries cut into the highest peaks where giants once held court, and heaps of enormous bones lay in the valleys below. He had seen the lights in colours that his eyes had never beheld, hovering over the northernmost reaches of the world. There were such wonders here, for those willing to stare at death long enough to witness them.

The mountains ahead levelled into a plateau, perhaps the top of a glacier that wound its way through the valleys and ground down the peaks as it went. Sigtaal thought he could see a darkness there, perhaps a trick of the waning daylight or of his own mind, trying to find some landmark in the unending whiteness.

But no, it was there, definitely. A long crack in the snow he was sure had not been there a few moments ago. Sigtaal closed the book and stood, trying to get a better view.

It was widening. A great crevasse, so inky dark it looked like it led to the centre of the world. He could hear it now, a thunderous cracking like the sound of the spring thaw. Slabs of ice were shearing off the glacier and tumbling away. He even felt it through his feet as the peak he clung to shuddered.

The crevasse had enormous fangs of stone up and down its length. It was a mouth, the maw of the mountains themselves, something vast and alive that was stirring as Sigtaal watched. And he felt from it a hunger, for it was the portal to an immense emptiness.

It was no impulse of logic or desire that compelled Sigtaal to begin walking along the knife-like ridge of flint that would take him to the glacier, closer to the opening mouth of the mountains. It was a pull, an impulse he did not control. It was the same force that had brought him to Norsca from the lands of the Empire, the same that had turned him to the study of witchcraft and hedge magic as a youth. Everything he had ever done, every step he had taken on that forbidding path, had been to bring him here, to witness this appalling, fascinating sight.

Sigtaal saw the Norscans as he set foot on the glacier, and felt its ice shifting beneath his feet. They were indeed the same folk who had been watching and following him for some time. In their dozens they gathered, clad in heavy furs, their women with their hair bound up with bones and their men carrying axes and shields. They were so weathered they looked as though they had been carved from oak.

Three of their menfolk approached Sigtaal. He must have looked like a stooped, sickly child to them, for they were born to the mountains and Sigtaal had never known such hardship in the Empire as he had come across in these mountains of Norsca.

‘I am Sigtaal of the White Hand,’ he said, using the Norscan tongue he had learned early in his journey in the ports upon the Sea of Claws. ‘I have come to learn your ways. The ways of the far north, where the realms of magic meet the realms of man.’

He did not know if they understood him. They might have spoken a dialect far different from those in the south. Or perhaps they simply did not care for what he had to say. One of the warriors spat on the ice – the spittle was frozen before it landed. Then they turned away and, ignoring Sigtaal, went about their business on the glacier.

Their business involved the sledges they had dragged up here, piled high with hide-wrapped bundles. They dragged them close to the great maw, which had now yawed open to its full width. Sigtaal had a good idea of what the bundles contained by their size and shape. It was no surprise when he saw the pallid skin and gnarled limbs, wrapped up in the limp attitudes of death.

The handling of corpses was usually work for slaves and prisoners of war. These warriors and their womenfolk were at some business to which the low-born would not be permitted, even to perform such menial and distasteful tasks. A few stringy, hardy carrion birds circled overhead and alighted on the surrounding peaks, but they did not approach. Even the few creatures that lived here seemed to have a reverence for the occasion.

The bundles were unwrapped, and the women painted sigils on the corpses’ chests in a mix of blood and powdered herbs. The men hauled the bodies to the edge of the mouth and hurled them in, and as they fell, Sigtaal saw there was still a little movement left in their limbs. They flailed hopelessly as they fell, tumbling end over end into the darkness.

Some of them were alive. A few even had the strength to cry out as they fell. Sigtaal could not tear his eyes away as he watched the spectacle.

One of the women, a crone with skin like cracked leather and eyes like flecks of onyx, trudged through the snow towards him. She beckoned him, as if he was a wayward child who had wandered off the path. Sigtaal followed her step by step to the edge of the maw, until he could feel it quivering with a vast subterranean heartbeat.

He looked into the abyss. From the edge of the vast throat had sprouted shards half of bone, half of ice, and the falling bodies had been impaled on them like insects on thorns. Some were alive even now, writhing feebly as they slid further down, what little lifeblood they still had dripping down into the darkness.

Something murmured there, in the depths. A dim flare of light illuminated a hide of rocky scales, a hint of fang and claw. It was so far below that Sigtaal could not gauge its size accurately, only that it was huge. Sigtaal’s stomach lurched as a red eye swivelled in its deep socket, and as the light died out he was sure it focused on him.

Sigtaal stumbled back from the edge.

‘Are you feeding it?’ he said to the Norscans. He could not make out which one of them was the crone, for flurries of snow were blowing up and they all resembled the same fur-clad shadow. ‘Is that what you are showing me? What am I to do here?’

But the Norscans’ work was done. Their sledges were empty of the dead and the dying. They turned and left, seeming to melt away into the snow. Sigtaal made to follow them, but they were lost in the growing snowstorm and their tracks were blown away as soon as they were made.

Sigtaal was left alone by the edge of the great maw, and even over the heightening wind he could feel the heartbeat of whatever lay below the glacier.

And he understood.

It had all been to bring him here, to this moment, alone on this fathomless glacier, alone with the beast. The paths of magic had led him here. It was not by accident he had learned the secrets he had, or that he had come here, to this place, where he could finally see their true purpose.

Sigtaal Whitehand rummaged through the papers bundled under his clothes, beneath his furs. He pulled out his journal and turned it to a page covered with diagrams and incantations. Collecting that information had taken up much of his life before he had dedicated it to the journey northwards. It had seen a price put on his head, for he had torn parts of it from the tombs of long-dead chieftains or from the rantings of condemned witch-prophets.

The Second Sun would shine upon this glacier, and Sigtaal would know everything.

Upon the seventeenth stroke of the great bronze clock, Associate Comprehender Henning Mohr descended the basalt stair into the archive levels of the Bright College in Altdorf. Fireflies flitted around him as he inserted the seven keys, each carved from a different node of volcanic rock, into the seven locks on the iron-banded door in front of him. The hinges complained as the door opened.

On the obsidian walls hung swords, shields, maces and other weapons and pieces of armour, almost all of them wrapped in a flame that never burned out. Aqshy, the colour of magic that found expression in the fire spells of Bright Magic, flowed strong here, and runnels of liquid fire dripped down the walls. Mohr nodded at the apprentices who sat poring over tomes written by Grand Magisters past, each volume chiselled onto panels of beaten metal, for parchment rarely lasted for very long here without bursting into flame.

One of the knee-high, hooded creatures, a keeper of antiquities, hurried up to Mohr and bowed its head. No one had ever been able to discern the origin, nature or even gender of the keepers of antiquities, and it was assumed among the apprentices of the Order that they had been bound into service some generations ago by powerful Magisters. Mohr wondered what the creature looked like under its hood, and what he himself must look like to this odd inhabitant of his college. He had cultivated the forked beard emblematic of his Order, and was a spindly, lanky man whose hair had tended towards red even before the flow of Aqshy had turned it virulent orange

‘Associate Comprehender!’ said the keeper with typical enthusiasm. ‘For what reason have you graced this place of ancient knowledge?’

‘I seek access to the artefacts of the Verlorenheimer expedition,’ said Mohr.

‘Nothing could give me greater pleasure than to assist you in this!’ replied the keeper, clapping its tiny hands. ‘Follow me!’

The keeper led Mohr through the many irregularly shaped chambers beneath the Bright College. A fellow apprentice was too busy picking apart an intricate brass puzzle box to notice them, while another was in the act of putting out the fire that had started on his well-scorched robe as he slaved over a table full of alchemical apparatus. Finally the keeper came to a room in which the relics of the expedition were still boxed up in a heptagonal study room.

‘It is most regrettable, would you not say, that Verlorenheimer himself did not live to see the fruits of his expedition reach the Empire?’ said the keeper.

‘Yes, very much so,’ said Mohr, wary of getting into a lengthy conversation with the keeper.

‘A wasting disease, they say, that claimed him before he reached our shores. But Norsca is a place of many and unknown dangers!’

‘It is,’ said Mohr. ‘I shall begin my work.’

‘Should you need anything…’

‘I shall come and find you.’

‘Very good, Associate Comprehender!’ The keeper of antiquities bowed as elaborately as its tiny stature allowed, and backed out of the room.

The smell of Norsca’s shores still clung to the two boxes the expedition had brought back. The Bright College often sponsored hardy explorers like Verlorenheimer on expeditions to such perilous places. For whatever reason, the gods had seen to it that the most powerful secrets and artefacts lay in the most inhospitable and dangerous places.

Mohr snapped his fingers and conjured a ball of flame into the air to give him light to work with. He discarded the detritus first. The bones of malformed humans and animals had curiosity value but they were nothing unusual from Norsca, a place whose people suffered a notably high rate of mutation and other strange maladies. Tablets with carved runes were more interesting, and might reward translation.

At the bottom of one box was a mask. It lay face down so Mohr saw only the back of it as he bent down to pick it up. It tingled when he touched it, and he thought he heard a rush of wind nearby. There was even a chill to it, as if it had locked up some of the cold of the Norscan peaks and somehow kept it even in the depths of the Bright College, which anyone not of the Order always felt were infernally hot and oppressive.

He turned the mask over in his hands. The mask consisted of the upper half of the face, such as one that might be worn at a midnight revel, but it did not resemble anything that might be worn for pleasure. The eyeholes were carved in the black wood of the mask to resemble two mouths with serrated fangs. The nose was long and pointed, like the mask of a plague doctor.

The wood was porous, covered in thousands of tiny holes. As Mohr examined it, tiny grub-like worms wriggled from the pores, so the mask seemed covered in patches of seething whiteness. Mohr felt his stomach turning over and dropped the mask back into the box.

A native parasite, perhaps, or the grubs of some weevil picked up on the voyage across the Sea of Claws. Mohr moved on.

A book of great antiquity lay among the carved stones and arrowheads that made up most of the relics. Mohr knew instantly that it was not Norscan, for those people rarely used parchment and their alphabet was all straight lines and angles, as befitted text usually carved instead of written. Mohr knew that the parchment used was of high quality and might be even centuries old, and that many of the Colleges (although not the Bright College, given the difficulty of keeping anything flammable intact for long periods of time) possessed tomes that dated since the days of Sigmar, or even older works by high elf mages from eras long past.

On the leather cover was branded the symbol of Aqshy, the colour of magic the Bright Order studied. Its form was antique and a little distorted, but it was definitely the rune that could be found at the heart of all a Bright Wizard’s spells. Verlorenheimer, then, had been telling the truth when he said he had calculated the intersection of powerful lines of Aqshy in those distant Norscan mountains – and, as he had hoped, someone had been there before, someone seeking to understand that power for themselves.

Mohr carefully opened the book, bringing the miniature fireball closer while taking care to keep its flames from licking the pages. He recognised the Imperial tongue’s alphabet but not the language on the first page, and realised that it was written in a code. This was common among practitioners of magic, both for reasons of secrecy and because magic was not always content to be described in a mundane tongue.

Mohr had studied magical ciphers since he had first been brought to the Bright College. There was no arcane code he could not crack. And the author of this one was far from the most cunning codemaker Mohr had ever encountered.

This is the work of Sigtaal Whitehand, he read. And please it you, reader, that you read perhaps my final thoughts…

‘The tongues of men might name me Sigtaal Whitehand! But the aether knows me as Malofex, and I will know the secrets of the dawn of time!’

Sigtaal raised his hands high, and the cold was banished around him as he forced the fire of his soul out into the world. The ice under his feet hissed and steamed. The sky itself seemed to darken, and the whole glacier shuddered.

Once, when he was very young, Sigtaal had learned that he was not a mere man. He was a worker of magic, a being with a parallel soul in the magical world of the aether where the winds of magic had their origin. That being, his magical twin soul, was Malofex, and Sigtaal had listened to the whispers that reached him from that magical dimension that bade him unite the two.

He was Sigtaal, the man. And he was Malofex, the wizard.

The ice was melting under him. He forced the heat up into the air, moulding it as a sculptor moulded wax, and a ruddy light shone down on him. The sky was now completely dark, retreated behind the clouds that gathered as if to watch.

‘From the lost books of Alakan I tore thee!’ he shouted above the groaning of the ice. ‘A magical work that the gods bade me seek! Upon the Plains of Uradesh I cut the contract into my flesh that gave me the power to wield thee! In the dungeons of Klarond Kar I bargained for the truth of thy conjuration! And now I call thee forth!’

The ice cracked around Sigtaal as the glow overhead became the seed of a fireball, twisting and boiling in the air. Chunks of melting ice slid into the crevasse ahead of him. The ice under his feet tilted as it came apart.

Sigtaal focused. He took the wooden mask he always carried, and put it over his face. This was the face of Malofex, and when he wore it, he gave himself over to the magical half of his soul. In another world, a parallel realm, Malofex was echoing his effort, and together they were focusing the raw tide of Aqshy that now swirled overhead as a wind of ash and sulphur. The ice sank around Sigtaal, leaving him standing on a precarious column surrounded by growing chasms that roared out steam as water boiled.

The fireball in the sky grew, and its light was painful. Against the dark sky it shone too bright to look at.

‘I conjure thee, the Second Sun!’

Sigtaal’s robes caught fire. Hair smouldered. His very life force was draining out of him to augment the spell. Illuminated in the harsh light, his fingers thinned and shrivelled into the near-skeletal claws of an old man. His skin became grey and sunken, and fragments of burning ash pitted it like the surface of the moon Morrslieb. His eyes retreated into their sockets, bright sparking flints in their black pits.

The burning wind screamed. The glacier now resembled more the surface of a churning ocean, with islands of ice overturning in the boiling waters. Great clouds of steam billowed up. Sigtaal teetered on his column of ice, buffeted by the scalding winds, wrestling with the power channelled through him.

‘I am Malofex! I am the lord of fire! I conjure thee, the Second Sun!’

The Second Sun erupted above him. It was a great sphere of flame, as if a tear had been opened up in the fabric of the world and the raw, boiling fury of magic had forced its way through.

The glacier disintegrated. Sigtaal now stood alone on a column of ice lashed by a scalding sea, bathed in the furious light of the Second Sun.

The water itself was dissolving away into torrents of steam. It swirled around in a great whirlpool, reaching down to the bare rock of the mountain beneath. The mountain, which had not seen any sun since the dawn of the world. The mountain, which would soon tell Sigtaal everything he had ever desired to know.

Sigtaal fell to his knees. The Second Sun was made real, and he had no control over it now. He gasped for breath, barely able to find air in the lungfuls of steam.

His hand, in front of his face, was ancient and gnarled. He had given up so much. Never again would he be able to conjure a spell such as this. But once was enough.

Down in the pit of the whirlpool, something stirred. It was the same colour as the rock itself, a vast shape just stirring, covered in pebbly hide. It was immense in size. Sigtaal had not imagined anything could be so huge. Like a fossilised limb of the earth itself it unfolded, its broad back like an island, its head, as it rose, like a battered mountain crag.

Sigtaal saw its eyes, like enormous rubies buried in folds of volcanic rock, look up at him. It rose to its full height and its head was level with Sigtaal. Its enormous undershot jaw was surmounted with a clutch of crystal-studded teeth, and the rest of its face was an unyielding cliff face. A ridge rolled over the top of its head, down its back, and along the island of its hindquarters, breaking into rocky spines. It was like a centaur in shape, a vastly powerful humanoid torso rising from a lower body like that of an enormous dragon hewn from stone.

Its vastness and power did not fit into Sigtaal’s mind. Even lit by the Second Sun, and by the crackles of lightning that flared among the peaks and valleys of its shape, it did not seem that anything like it could be real.

Sigtaal forced himself to look at it, into those ruby eyes.

The thunder of the mountains was its voice as it spoke.

‘Who calls on Kholek Suneater?’ it bellowed. ‘Who dares?’

‘I am Sigtaal Whitehand!’ yelled Sigtaal in reply, his voice almost lost in the rushing of the water and the wind. ‘Called Malofex! In the name of the Dark Gods, I have sought you out, most ancient of beings! You, who were old when the gods walked this world! You, who have seen sights at the dawn of time that none else have seen! Kholek Suneater, father of the dragon ogre race, it is I who call on you!’

The Observatory of Flame was a brass orb topping one of the Bright College’s twenty-one towers. Its lower half was filled with boiling fire, magically robbed of its sound and the worst of its heat, over which was suspended a circular platform. It was on this platform that Grand Magister Ulzheimer was accustomed to spend his time in the College, when he was not serving as a battle wizard to the armies of the Emperor Karl.

‘One moment,’ said Ulzheimer, as he heard the doorway in the upper surface of the observatory opening.

Associate Comprehender Mohr paused his descent down the spiral staircase leading to the platform.

Ulzheimer knelt down and peered into the flames below them. They formed endless landscapes, peaks and valleys, sometimes the images of cities or fanciful maps, sometimes faces, all dissolving back into the fire before they were fully formed. Sheets of beaten metal, along with pointed styluses for inscribing notes on them, were scattered around the platform, already covered in the Grand Magister’s scrawled observations.

Mohr waited for several minutes as Ulzheimer muttered under his breath, occasionally scratching a few words onto the metal pages.

‘Come here,’ said Ulzheimer eventually.

Mohr walked down the steps to the platform. The Grand Magister’s presence was such that Mohr did not need to know the complicated rules of wizardly etiquette to kneel in deference. Ulzheimer was old in a way that made him seem stronger and more powerful than a mere aged man. His own beard was white and waist-length, with silver flame flickering at the tips of his elaborately curled moustache. His robes were black, like volcanic rock, shot through with scintillating red as if lava was forcing its way to the surface. Heavy brass rings encrusted his fingers, and fat rubies hung from the obsidian links of the chain around his neck. His staff, a length of scorched and petrified wood, was propped against the staircase.

Ulzheimer ignored Mohr’s prostration. ‘What do you see?’ he said, gesturing towards the fire.

Mohr looked over the edge. ‘Mountains and rivers,’ he said. ‘An eye, weeping. A herd of horses galloping.’ He looked up at the Grand Magister. ‘The future?’

‘The correct answer,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘is everything. The flame of Aqshy flows through everything. The energy that animates. It is life itself. Thus, it can create and destroy alike. Everything is within the flame, Comprehender. Only when you can see it can you ascend to take upon you the mantle of Magister.’

‘Grand Magister,’ said Mohr. ‘My studies have yielded fruit. I wish for leave to pursue them further.’

‘I see,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Explain.’

‘The expedition uncovered the remnants of a journey by a hedge wizard named Sigtaal Whitehand,’ said Mohr. ‘I have yet to complete my translation, for he used a code. But he was clearly a wielder of Bright Magic, so much as any man could be before the foundation of the Colleges of Magic.’

‘Then it is true,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘that the paths of magic were walked more thoroughly than we previously acknowledged.’

‘He was seeking some great secret,’ continued Mohr. ‘I do not know yet just what he was seeking, or whether he found it, but certainly his capacity with Aqshy was formidable.’ Mohr handed the diary to the Magister, along with a wedge of notes Mohr had taken on his translation. Ulzheimer scanned their contents rapidly, blueish flames licking around the tips of his fingers.

‘You have my leave,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘to continue. But ensure that your findings are passed on to me immediately, and not to anyone else in the College. For there are Magisters, shamed though I am to say it, who would seize your findings and use them to further their own careers and not to pursue greater understanding of magic.’

‘I understand,’ said Mohr. ‘I cannot pretend to understand the politics of our College, for I have not yet ascended far. But I know that some matters are more… complicated than we are informed as novices.’

‘Perhaps that is the first step on a path to true wisdom,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘You will learn much, Mohr, if you keep your eyes and ears open and are always wary of the agendas of those around you. Your endeavours will see you rise like ash upon the winds of Aqshy, Associate Comprehender, if you continue to show shrewdness as well as determination.’

‘Then I shall go to my studies,’ said Mohr. ‘I shall bring you my findings soon. I feel there is much more that Sigtaal’s writings have to tell me.’

‘As do I,’ said Ulzheimer. He pointed down at the boiling flame. ‘I can read it in the fire. There, you stand enrobed in the garb of a Grand Magister, under the ruby crown of Teclis. The flame sees it. It is only one future, but it is the one into which the Bright winds flow most readily. Our path of magic favours you, Mohr.’

‘Then I bid you farewell,’ said Mohr. ‘We will speak soon, if it pleases you.’

‘Go,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘And bathe your soul in the flame.’

Mohr bowed again, and as he ascended the staircase out of the Observatory, Ulzheimer was still staring into the prophetic fire, his unblinking eyes reflecting the orange spark of Aqshy’s will.

It was not Sigtaal who stood before Kholek Mountaineater, the father of the dragon ogres. Sigtaal was a man, and no man could look on the appalling wrongness, the sheer scale and unbounded horror of that monster, without collapsing into a ball of terror and madness. It was Malofex who stood his ground, Malofex who saw the culmination of a lifetime’s journey in the cliff face of Kholek’s vastness. Malofex was a soul of the aether, magic made into the echo of a man’s soul, granted its form by the Dark Gods.

‘Tell me,’ said Malofex, ‘The truth of the world. Before it was perverted by liars. Before it was forgotten.’

‘For I am old,’ said Kholek.

‘Older than these mountains,’ said Malofex.

‘For I am mighty.’

‘As mighty as the storms above us.’

‘For I am terrible.’

‘As terrible as the dark of night.’

Kholek leaned over Malofex, the red orbs of his eyes settling on the human. Compared to the dragon ogre, Malofex was the size of an insect. ‘And what are you?’ he said, his voice like a landside.

‘I have walked the path of magic since I could understand that there was more in the world than this base flesh and earth,’ said Malofex. ‘I am he who opened the Bone Gate of Morr. In the land beyond, I learned of the Mountain God. I drank from the Pools of the Trackless Wood and saw a vision of a world before man, and of the first civilisation of sons born from the rock. And in the library of the Porphyry Tomb I read the name of their progenitor, Kholek Suneater. So I sought him out and now I stand before him. And I bid you, tell me! Tell me what the world knew when it was young, what has been forgotten!’

‘Ah,’ said Kholek. ‘And so I, who am a god, am to you no more than the scratchings of a madman. You honour Kholek Suneater no more than the half-lies of your own race, than the ramblings of your own dreams!’

‘No!’ cried Malofex. ‘I dedicated my life to finding you! What greater honour can a man give?’

‘Exactly,’ said Kholek, and if that vast rocky face could sneer, it did then. ‘A man. What is a man? A thimbleful of blood and bone! I have heard the sound of your cities as they spread like mould. The sound is the cawing of a nest of birds! The yowling of wild dogs! The history of your kind, everything any soft-fleshed insect has ever achieved, amounts to nothing more than the itching of a parasite suckling on the earth.’

Malofex dropped to his knees, holding his hands up as if begging. ‘And so I am here!’ he cried. ‘To rise above the mediocrity of my kind! To become more than a man could ever be! When our time has gone, when we wither away and the vermin take our cities, Malofex will remain! For I will armour my soul with such knowledge that the passage of time will not wither it. Knowledge that only one as great as Kholek Suneater can speak! Such truth that only one who slept at the heart of the world, who is as awesome as death itself, can recall from the dawn of time!’

‘So you summoned me,’ said Kholek, ‘to become more than a man?’

‘Yes!’ replied Malofex. ‘Yes, god of the mountains!’

Kholek’s eyes narrowed into red specks, dancing in the light of the second sun. ‘Kholek Suneater is summoned by no one,’ he growled.

There was still enough of Sigtaal Whitehand in Malofex’s soul to feel fear. He took a step back, and the icy column teetered below him. ‘But Lord Kholek,’ he said, silently praying to his gods to keep the tremor out of his voice. ‘Think on what you can reap from an end to your slumber! My kind think themselves secure in Sigmar’s Empire. Not one among them could comprehend one such as Kholek Suneater. And those are just the lands of my birth! The elves of Ulthuan are womanish and weak. Their brethren in Naggaroth care only for maiming one another. The dwarfs huddle in mountain holds. Not one of them could survive against an army of the north, blessed by the Dark Gods, with the mountain god at its head! You could rule this world! You could sit upon a throne cut from these mountains, all the people of the world battling to pay you fealty!’

‘And so the mighty Malofex will prove to the world that he is more than a man,’ said Kholek, a mocking note in his voice. ‘The mighty Malofex, who conjured this.’ Kholek pointed a granite claw at the second sun burning overhead.

‘The greatest magic,’ said Malofex. ‘Beyond the means of any mere man.’

Kholek reached up and plunged his claw into the Second Sun. He grimaced, revealing teeth like broken white tombstones. The sun shuddered, its light reddening, and as every muscle in Kholek’s enormous body ground together beneath his hide the sun shrunk towards his hand.

Malofex stood again, and tried to grasp at the winds of Aqshy, his mind reaching out to snatch at the slippery magic. But it evaded him. It seemed drawn to Kholek, as if the mountain god commanded its respect now.

The Sun shrunk until it was contained in Kholek’s enormous claw. The heat melted the hide of his palm and fat drops of molten rock dripped off him, bursting into steam as they hit the water. Kholek looked down at Malofex, smiled, and crushed the Sun in his hand.

The Second Sun was snuffed out. Instantly, a dark as profound as night fell. Kholek was a deeper darkness looming over Malofex.

Lightning crackled across the black clouds overhead, edging Kholek’s form in blue-white light. Thunder cracked, shaking the slender ice column under Malofex.

‘I feel the heartbeat of your world even as I slumber!’ bellowed Kholek, his voice louder even than the thunder. ‘I feel the scum of your kind spreading! I hear their cities fall and their graveyards spill over! And I have heard the same happen to the elves of Ulthuan, and the sorcerer-lords of Nehekhara; the dwarfish holds and the god kings of the lizardfolk. All grow, all wane, all die. And there has not yet been an empire that is anything more to Kholek than the scrabbling of vermin underfoot!’

‘Lord Kholek!’ cried Malofex, his voice lost amid the thunder even to his own ears. ‘I grant to you my world! I grant to you an eternity of godhood! It is yours to take! This is my gift to you, to honour the mountain god in return for the truth only you know!’

‘Your world?’ roared Kholek, and the gale of his voice nearly threw Malofex off the column. ‘This rotten fruit, riddled with maggots? This cesspit of cowards? This cartload of ignorant dregs? For whom should Kholek Suneater stoop so low, that he would spend his waking days as a lord of the squabbling filth? Should he abase himself so for Malofex, the conjurer of tricks? The people of the northlands threw me their dead and their captured because they feared me. Malofex demanded I wake so he could bleed me of my knowledge. He will know why the men of these lands forsook their dead in their dread of me. He will know why this world still shudders when I stir in my sleep!’

Malofex dissolved away. He fled to the aether, to join the winds of magic. Sigtaal Whitehand was left behind, cowering before the mountain god.

Lightning lashed down, bright bolts falling into the boiling ocean. They earthed onto Kholek and power rippled across him. He glowed from the inside, the light bleeding from his mouth and eyes, picking out crazed patterns across his cracked hide.

Sigtaal was yelling, his throat raw, but the sounds had no meaning. His strength was gone, his Second Sun extinguished, and all that remained in him was terror. He lost control of his body and crouched down, head buried in his arms, unable to move. Malofex’s mask fell from him, and the only face he wore now was his own.

Kholek Suneater picked up Sigtaal between two claw-tips. Sigtaal writhed like a worm on a hook. He flailed uselessly, eyes wide and streaming tears. Kholek held Sigtaal above his head and opened the great ravine of his mouth.

Even through the terror, Sigtaal understood what was happening. He shrieked a wordless prayer to the aether, for Malofex to return to him, for his gods to impale Kholek on a bolt of glittering fire or send a legion of daemons to rescue him. But there was no answer.

No, there was an answer. From far off across the reaches of the aether, carried on the winds of magic from the other side of the world.

Laughter. Faint and distant, but unmistakeable. The laughter of those who have kept a pet to perform for them, and grown tired with it, and now mocked it as they abandoned it to its fate.

Kholek dropped Sigtaal into his mouth. Sigtaal tumbled down the hot rocky tunnel of his throat. Darkness closed around him, smothering, and he was still alive as he went down.

Kholek waded through the ocean, knocking aside the flimsy pillar of ice with an idle swipe of his claw. He hauled his vast form out onto a rocky peak, and bathed in the lightning that ripped down from the wounded sky.

On the churning waters, even now freezing back over, floated a book of bound parchment. On its cover was the rune of Aqshy. It washed up against the rock shore, becoming encased in ice even as Kholek absorbed the storm’s fury and contemplated the world into which he had awoken.

Beneath the courtyard of the Bright College, beneath the furnaces that drew the torrent of fire magic from the winds of the aether, even beneath the steel catacombs of its past Magisters, lay the basalt warren of the College’s depths. An ancient volcanic eruption had created a seam of glittering black stone, riddled with natural tunnels and vents, far beneath an unsuspecting Altdorf. The Bright College was founded on the spot where that volcanic fury had once erupted and far below the rock was still hot enough to remain fluid, its slow, angry churning filling the tunnels with the growling of a beast waiting out the next million years until it could erupt again.

Here, in the heat and darkness, lay the places where the Bright College kept its secrets.

Mohr had rarely glimpsed these tunnels, and then it had only been in the company of senior Magisters. Those visits had been cautionary, to illustrate what happened to Magisters who strayed off the path. Among these secrets were the natural oubliettes, barred with meteoric iron, where Black Magisters were imprisoned. The criminals of their kind, transgressors against the Order that had trained them, left to rot in the dark.

Mohr passed across a grate in the floor, and tried to ignore garbled screaming from beneath. A side chamber was half-filled with lava, in which was suspended by chains a naked man with a long black beard shot through with red. Mohr tried not to let his eyes linger on the sight, but he could not help seeing that the chest rose and fell with breathing, for this was not an execution – it was a prisoner, still alive. Mighty doors of obsidian and bronze shuddered as the madmen inside battered against their confinement. Sometimes one would find a way out of his cell and the Grand Magisters would order the flaming beast beneath the ground to rise up and flood these chambers with magma. It had happened before, none knew how many times, and here and there were footprints or handprints seared into the rock, or the shallow impressions of contorted bodies in the hard black stone.

Mohr lit his way with the miniature fireball as he walked. It orbited around his head, staying close, as if afraid. He came to an arch of smouldering wood, its embers permanently glowing. Mohr swallowed, muttered a few words of prayer, and walked through it.

Burning hands held him. He could not see them, but every flaming finger was etched in pain on his skin. He grimaced and forced himself to remain calm.

The bronze face in front of him was an image of one of the most ancient Magisters of his Order. He had consented to forsake death and remain in spirit here, as the steward of the Bright College’s secrets.

‘What do you seek?’ demanded the face. It was as tall as a man, and it was wrought with the deep lines and stern expression that it had possessed in life.

‘I seek the Apocrypha Incandescent,’ said Mohr.

‘The Apocrypha? And what does an Associate Comprehender want with that? You are little more than a freshly scorched adolescent! Do you still soil your britches at the sight of a naked flame, boy?’

‘I have been given leave by Grand Magister Ulzheimer,’ said Mohr. ‘It is essential to my studies into the history of the Bright Wind.’

‘Ulzheimer?’ said the face. ‘Year by year they change more and more. A burning intellect? A relentless determination to master the flame? So many pass through these halls! But yes, I think I recall him. Stares into the fire. Seeks the future.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mohr. ‘I must learn of the Apocrypha. Everything depends on it.’

‘Ha! It has been many years since one as inexperienced as you dared to make his way down here, and I have few enough opportunities for mirth. It should be amusing enough to watch you grapple with the Apocrypha.’

The burning hands let go. Mohr dropped to one knee and gulped down his pain as he forced himself to remain calm.

‘My gratitude,’ he said.

The face grunted in response and solidified against the wall.

The chamber beyond was a great natural fissure. Its sides soared up into blackness. Mohr could not help imagining the lava flowing through here, incinerating everything, stripping the flesh from his bones and then charring those bones away to nothing.

From chains that reached up out of sight hung iron cages, and in each was a relic of the Bright Order. Too dangerous or powerful to be kept in the college proper, they waited down here for the time someone would have to wield or consult them. An executioner’s axe with a blade of red crystal. A breastplate wrought from the flayed face of a red dragon. A dwarf-made gauntlet that still glowed with the fires of its forging.

In one cage was the book, bound in red leather, that Mohr knew to be the Apocrypha Incandescent. Once, a Magister had gone mad and barricaded himself in a wing of the Bright College, melting all the locks shut and conjuring daemons to fend off intruders. When the Bright Wizards finally broke in they found nothing of him save a pile of bone ash and this book, in which he had recorded all the madness that coursed through his mind. Some of it was prophetic. Some was gibberish. And some referred to spells that had otherwise been lost to the College.

Mohr opened the cage with a key of black crystal. He took out the book and laid it on the floor. Its pages were tough hide, slick with whatever treatment had rendered them fireproof. Mohr leafed through the pages, words of fevered madness catching at his mind, until he found the reference he had been looking for.

He placed the journal of Sigtaal Whitehand on the floor next to it, at a page displaying the same symbol he could see in the Apocrypha Incandescent.

It was an orb surrounded by rays of flame, variations of Aqshy’s rune forming a halo around it.

It was the Second Sun of Malofex.

Mohr let his miniature fireball settle on one shoulder, like an obedient bird, and began to read.

Mohr did not see Ulzheimer approach.

He felt the tap of the staff on his shoulder and broke from his thoughts. He realised his mouth was dry and he ached. He could not say for how long he had been sitting on the floor, bent over the two books.

‘Associate Comprehender,’ said Ulzheimer, a faint smile on his lips. ‘It does us no good to see our young wizards worked to death. Your fellows wonder where you are. I knew you would come to consult the Apocrypha, and so I came here to find you.’

‘I appreciate your concern, Grand Magister,’ said Mohr. ‘I have… I have lost track of time, it seems.’

‘Then the Apocrypha holds something that fascinates you?’

‘Yes, Grand Magister!’ Mohr jumped to his feet, the Apocrypha in his hand. ‘Here. The Second Sun of Malofex. In all the history of the Order, we had thought it existed only in the Apocrypha. There have been but a handful of wizards who have ever attempted to cast it, let alone succeeded. The last was four hundred years ago. And yet… here, look!’

Mohr picked up the journal and held it up for Ulzheimer to see.

‘The Second Sun,’ said Ulzheimer, quiet wonder in his voice.

‘Sigtaal Whitehand was practising this magic before Teclis laid down the foundations of the Colleges,’ said Mohr. ‘Do you see, Grand Magister? He had moulded from the wind of Aqshy a conjuration that even with the accumulated learning of centuries, the Bright Order can no longer replicate.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Ulzheimer.

‘But that is not all. What if this signifies a tradition of Bright Magic that has been forgotten entirely? One which existed before the Colleges of Magic, and later became incorporated into the Bright Order when it was founded? The spells we study now might have been wrought first not by wizards under Teclis’s tuition, but by men like Sigtaal Whitehand, hundreds of years before! In fact, the Malofex that the Apocrypha claims first created the Second Sun may be Whitehand himself! He uses the name to refer to himself in his journal. It seems a secret name, perhaps a ritual identity under which he practises his magic.’

Ulzheimer shook his head. ‘The flames did not lie, Mohr. You will rise high. You will one day look out upon Altdorf from your own tower here in the College, I have no doubt about that. Might we, young Mohr, master the Second Sun once more?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Mohr. ‘I have not yet finished the decoding of Whitehand’s journal. He took extensive notes on the Second Sun, and other spells besides. Added to the Apocrypha, it might make the spell possible again.’

‘So, there is yet more to find in this journal?’ said Ulzheimer. He took the book from Mohr and turned a few of its pages himself.

‘There is. Whitehand created the Second Sun for a specific reason. I believe he was trying to contact something.’

Ulzheimer raised an eyebrow. ‘A summoning?’

‘An awakening,’ replied Mohr. ‘But I do not know what he meant to awake. Certainly Whitehand believed it was the key to a great revelation for him. Those references are untranslated, but I will crack them soon.’

‘I have no doubt you will,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘but not this night. You would not be the first young wizard to become lost down here, endlessly pursuing his studies, until he wastes away. I will not have that happen to you. Return to the surface, rest and eat, and return tomorrow.’

‘I…’ Mohr paused. ‘If you believe it would be wise, Grand Magister.’

‘I do.’

‘Then if you would accompany me,’ said Mohr, ‘I would be most grateful. I do not think the keeper of this chamber took a liking to me.’

‘It is not something to be taken personally,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Let us go.’

Ulzheimer fell into step behind Mohr as they made their way towards the chamber’s entrance. Mohr did not see the dagger that Ulzheimer drew from his robes.

It was rare that a gathering of such Magisters was found, even in the Bright College. Their duties tended to keep them apart, and there was always the danger that so much magic in one place would cause spontaneous combustion. This time, it was worth the risk.

Ulzheimer was joined in the relic chamber by half a dozen other Magisters, each one more ancient and powerful than the last. The greatest of their kind, those through whom the Bright Wind coursed more fiercely than any other. Even among the Bright Order, they were a secret society. Even their fellow Magisters did not know their minds. The secrets they held had been passed down for thousands of years, and never had they left that circle.

‘So,’ said one. ‘It is true. It was Malofex’s journal they found.’

‘We know his human name,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Sigtaal Whitehand. And moreover, the means he used to wake the mountain god.’

‘And it was?’ said another Magister.

‘The Second Sun,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘As we suspected.’

‘Not all of us,’ said yet another. ‘Some of us were adamant it was the Ninth Sigil of Katam, or that the secret lay with the shattering of the Fulmination Stone. I myself favoured the Blinding Wind of the Burning Heavens as the spell required. This revelation moves us much closer to his goal.’

‘It is hard to believe,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘that Malofex really awakened Kholek Suneater. The Second Sun must have been gifted to him by the Blessed Gods.’

‘It certainly was no great skill of his own,’ said the first Magister bluntly. ‘Malofex was a fool. Or Sigtaal, I should say. An idiot. He awakened the mountain god and had no means to appease him. He deserved his devouring. We shall not make the same mistakes.’

‘And it will be us,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Not those who come after. Not a generation distant in time. Us. We gathered here. Now we know how, we can do it again. We can wake him. We can find out what he knows.’

‘And that?’ said the first Magister, pointing at the body.

The corpse of Associate Comprehender Mohr lay on the floor of the chamber. The dagger blow had killed him so quickly that surprise had barely registered on his face. He had been dead before he hit the ground. The blood that had pooled around him had already been baked to a hard crust by the heat of the tunnels.

‘He will not be missed,’ said Ulzheimer.

Another Magister spoke up. ‘It was a risk to let him research the journal,’ he said. ‘It should have been kept within the circle. You should have done it yourself, Ulzheimer.’

‘No,’ replied Ulzheimer. ‘Malofex left traps in his writings before, and it has cost us some of our finest minds. This way was far safer.’ Ulzheimer snapped his fingers and from the shadows waddled the diminutive form of a keeper of antiquities.

‘It gives me such delight to serve you!’ it squealed. ‘How might your desires be sated by the labour of this servant?’

Ulzheimer formed a complex symbol in the air with the fingers of his left hand and muttered an incantation. The cages rattled as if alarmed by what they heard.

A patch of blackness on one wall opened up into a portal the height of a man. Through it could be seen multicoloured flame, through which leapt bounding, gibbering, inhuman figures.

‘I desire not to touch this corpse,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Deliver it to our masters.’

‘Of course!’ said the keeper. It hefted Mohr’s body and hauled it through the portal. Glowing hands seized the body and dragged it through.

Ulzheimer took the journal of Malofex from his robes and held it before the Magisters. ‘We have everything we need,’ he said. ‘We will awaken Kholek, and we will do it right. This I promise you, my brothers.’

‘When?’ asked the first Magister, as the portal closed and Mohr’s body vanished from sight.

Ulzheimer smiled. Fire glittered in his eyes.

‘Soon,’ he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BEN COUNTER

Author of the Soul Drinkers and Grey Knights series, freelance writer Ben Counter is one of Black Library's most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors, and has written RPG supplements and comic books as well as novels. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England, where he can sometimes be seen indulging his enthusiasm for amateur dramatics on the local stage.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Clint Langley

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