Archaon: Everchosen Read online

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  ‘Mortals are free to do as they will. The gods give them no choice.’

  – Imperial proverb

  ‘Smothered in the midnight

  Draped in woe, sits dread itself,

  Meditating misfortunes unknown.’

  – Anspracher, The Threads of Fate

  PROLOGUE

  ‘O’er those unborn, whose ruin the light will grieve

  wing’d harbingers sit to receive

  and set such servants the world to cleave.’

  – Fliessbach, Tales Untold

  The Republic of Remas – Tilea

  The Lands of the South

  The Year of Light and Law (IC 1586)

  ‘You shall know me by my works,’ the prognosticator howled.

  They knew him by his pain. The agonies erupting from his ruined face. The gasps of relief and hope – both sweet and dangerous – that escaped his broken body in between tortures. They called it the Cracker. An ugly name for an ugly contraption. With the victim’s head braced between the unforgiving metal of a chin bar and a closing crown-cap, the two were drawn together by the slow turn of a handle screw. It had earned such a name for both its effectiveness in producing confessions and the splinter of skulls that echoed through the republic dungeons.

  ‘Battista Gaspar Necrodomo,’ a priestly witchfinder read from a blood-spattered scroll, ‘his holy vengefulness, Solkan – God of Light and Law – has judged you witchfilth and false prophet, denying the poor and ignorant of this republic the comforts of his guidance.’

  ‘You will know me by my works,’ Necrodomo spat. His words escaped the clenched mantrap of his own jaw in a hissing rasp. Bloody lip-spittle sprayed the interrogator sitting opposite. One of the priests milling in the dungeon-darkness beyond tore a strip from his ragged grey robes.

  ‘Grand inquisitori,’ he mumbled, kissing the rag and handing it to his spiritual superior. The interrogator dabbed his speckled cheeks and the whiteness of his beard.

  ‘Again,’ the grand inquisitori said.

  ‘No,’ Necrodomo groaned, his pleadings pathetic and palsied. A priestly servant of Solkan turned the screw and fresh agonies filled the dungeon chamber. Necrodomo’s screams were muffled shrieks of gargling desperation. As the turns of the screw abated, the freshly blinded seer sobbed and moaned.

  ‘You are a charlatan,’ the grand inquisitori said slowly, his voice threaded with the certainty of his age and station. He was the Avenger’s high hand in these low dealings of the world. ‘You are the herald of lies. You are an artist of nothings. You read the eye, the lip, the face and write false prophecy on the stars. You tell gullible widows what they want to hear, no? A sayer of soothings. Saw you this coming, prognosticator?’

  ‘No…’ Necrodomo managed through his shattered jaw.

  ‘If you had stuck to prattlemongering,’ the venerable inquisitori told him, ‘you just might have escaped the attentions of the brotherhood. Though Avenger knows, your professed haruspexery would have been known to him – he who sees all and judges all. Your time would have come, Necrodomo. Necrodomo the foreteller. Necrodomo the skygazer. Necrodomo the reader of futures dark. Now to be known – if known at all – as Necrodomo the Insane. By my order.’

  ‘No…’ Necrodomo whimpered. ‘Know…’

  ‘This, however,’ the grand inquisitori continued, picking up a bony fistful of pamphlets that littered the table, ‘this goes beyond the pilfering of credulous coin. The Celestine Prophecies. Signs and Wonders. Transcendentia. The Days of Doom to Come. The End Times. This is heresy in our midst. This is demagoguery, spreading fear through the people. It is a challenge to the Republic. It is a corruption advertised and an invitation of vengeance. It is what brought us to you, Necrodomo. It is what brought you to this.’

  The grand inquisitori gestured at the quill and pots of ink on the table and the thick, unmarked tome that sat before the groaning Necrodomo, its pages clean and waiting for his confession. ‘Help me by helping yourself, Necrodomo. Confess your crimes to the brotherhood. Allow Solkan into your heart and I promise a death swift and clean enough to take you to his judgement. Why dally here in the meaningless filth of lies and conspiracy? Why suffer here as well as before the Lord of Light and Law? Commit your contrition to these pages and let me grant you the relief of death.’

  ‘Forgive…’ Necrodomo begged through shattered teeth.

  ‘It is not for me to do so. Only the Avenger can grant you that. All I can grant you is an unburdened conscience and free passage. Your crimes are grievous. These bold pronouncements of coming apocalypse, printed and passed between the people. We are the light in the ignorance you sought to spread with your writings of the trembling world and the End Times you profess are to come. The world already trembles, Necrodomo. It trembles with the vengeance of Solkan the Mighty. It trembles with his judgement on the unnatural and the wicked. This is the greatest of your sins, false prophet. Fear is not your weapon to wield. It is ours. Armageddon is not yours to portend. The world is the Avenger’s to destroy at a time of his choosing. If his servants fail, if the land can bear no more evil and the filth of corruption floods the–’

  The oratory was shattered by a single clap. Followed by another. And another. Like the grand inquisitori, the witchfinders and priestly torturers of the chamber turned to the entrance. Stepping down from the rusted ladder that led from the trapdoor in the dungeon’s ceiling, a lone priest in the hooded, ragged robes of the Avenger stood in slow applause. Sallow clouds of brimstone drifted down from the chamber above and descended about the interloper.

  ‘How dare you interrupt the holy work of–’ a priest began.

  ‘Enough,’ the interloper said, the word drenched in the sickly, mellifluous urgency of an infernal order. The final clap was louder and more insistent than the caustic applause that had preceded it. With the sound echoing about the dungeon like a thunderclap, the priests and servants of Solkan proceeded to untie the ropes about their waists and disrobe.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’ the grand inquisitori barked at them. As he stared about in righteous incredulity, the witchfinders and interrogators crafted swift nooses from their belts. The grand inquisitori was out of his seat, his beard shaking and his eyes screwed up with rage. ‘Stop this madness at once. The Avenger compels you.’ He turned back to the priest standing at the ladder. Within the darkness of the interloper’s hood, the inquisitori could make out the pin-prick g
low of eyes ancient and burning like the embers of eternity. The priest hadn’t realised that he had soiled himself. A pool of urine was gathering on the filthy dungeon floor about him. ‘Guards! Guards!’ he roared. Above he could hear the clink of the plate, helms and halberds of the Reman Republican Guard.

  The interloper looked up through the open trapdoor entrance. Something like a momentary storm passed through the chamber above, the influence of the sudden tempest felt on Necrodomo’s apocalyptic pamphlets, which were blown from the table. The screams were brief. With the interloper still staring through the dungeon opening, it began to rain blood. The Republican Guard gaolers were now nothing but a cruel drizzle drifting, dripping and dribbling from the trapdoor entrance. The interloper allowed the downpour to blotch his robes to a gory crimson. As his ghastly gaze returned to the grand inquisitori, the trapdoor slammed shut and thundered with heavy chains securing the dungeon entrance.

  The robed thing moved across the chamber with the dread purpose of something unreal. As it passed them the servants of Solkan dropped from stools and improvised furniture to dance a spasmodic jig from their belt-nooses and the rings set in the dungeon ceiling. The interloper drifted through the forest of hanging priests.

  ‘Sit,’ it commanded.

  The grand inquisitori wailed as his knees gave way, causing him to fall back into his interrogator’s throne.

  The interloper moved towards the throne like an ancient evil. It pulled back its hood, revealing the full, unspeakable horror of its daemonic visage to the chamber. The robes fell like a fearful whisper from its barbed unflesh. It grew with each flagstone-pulverising step of its taloned feet, twisted bones blooming with muscle that ruptured into existence about them, lending the beast a glorious brawn and sinew. It dragged a serpentine tail, shot through with spikes, behind its infernal form, while both the daemon-crown of horns warping their way out of its head and the thumb-claws erupting from the dreadful magnificence of its wings, scraped the dungeon ceiling.

  Like a nightmare, it lowered its sight-curdling skull and moved up behind the interrogator’s throne. Necrodomo, still clamped between the bar and crown-cap of the torture device, had no eyes with which to behold the beast. The grand inquisitori found, with his heart in the grasp of terror, cold, dark and despair, that he could not move. As the daemon brought its unseen face forward, both the venerable priest and the prognosticator found their cheeks bathed in the radiance of infernal royalty. A princely power of hellish birthright; a creature of unimaginable darkness; horror incarnate.

  The grand inquisitori felt the thing touch him. At once all that had remained pure and noble in the man shrivelled within his soul. Darkness blossomed within the priest. Every ill-deed committed in the service of selfish weakness and temptation grew through his being like a rampant cancer. His eyes turned to inky twilight as his face became a cadaverous mask of ghoulish anticipation. The daemon clasped the grand inquisitori’s head in its claws.

  ‘You search for darkness in wretched madmen,’ the daemon prince whispered to the venerable priest – every word falling on the afflicted ancient with the force of a furnace, ‘when you should have been searching for it within your own ranks. No matter… You are mine now and have no need for this vessel of flesh. Before I take your soul, there is something you should know, priest. A gift for the journey you are about to take.’ The daemon leant in closer. ‘Your. God. Is. A. Lie.’ With that, the daemon prince crushed the grand inquisitori’s skull between its claws with effortless ease.

  Slashing both the headless body and the back of the throne from the seat with a swoosh of its serpent tail, the daemon prince took a seat before Necrodomo. Necrodomo the foreteller. Necrodomo the reader of futures dark. Necrodomo the Insane. The thing drummed its talons across the desk, prompting the torturous contraption known as the Cracker to rust to disintegration about the blind prisoner’s head. Necrodomo pulled away immediately. The prognosticator was out of his mind with pain, but something spiritual and instinctive told him that he was in the presence of a dangerous evil. He felt fear without sight. Dread without sanity. Being contorted within the vice for so long, Necrodomo found that his legs no longer supported him. Crashing to the filthy floor he scrabbled away from the daemon prince like an animal until he felt his back against the cold stone of the dungeon wall.

  ‘Do not fear me,’ the beast told him. ‘I am your saviour – as you are mine. My name, for all it matters to you madman, is Be’lakor.’ The monster allowed the ‘r’ of its name to hang like a forlorn echo. ‘I am known by many titles: the Harbinger, the Herald and the Bearer. To the northmen, I am the Shadowlord. In the Empire and the civilised lands of the south, I am the Dark Master. To you, mortal, I am simply Master.’

  Necrodomo curled up in agony. He was rocking, shaking and whimpering.

  ‘You are Necrodomo. Though your heretic name shall be whispered in the shadows, your work shall echo through eternity.’

  Be’lakor looked down on the pamphlets decorating the desk. ‘I am an appreciator of your work – charlatan or not. Now I wish to become facilitator. Your masterpiece is yet to be written.’

  The beast laid its claw on the empty tome intended for the prognosticator’s confession. Under the touch of its talons, the leather of the cover moaned and warped to a gruesome ghastliness. Its spine became as barbed bone and the bronze lock-clasps holding its pages closed melted into sets of jaws that snapped open. The cover smoked as hellfire scorched fresh lettering into the leather. As the tome writhed to stillness and Be’lakor removed his talon, the words LIBER CAELESTIOR afflicted the cover in the dark tongue of his Ruinous masters, accompanied by the name BATTISTA GASPAR NECRODOMO.

  ‘We shall wield your prophecies like a weapon,’ the Dark Master told him. ‘We shall make history together, you and I. We shall unite the gods and harness war, famine and plague in honour of a champion of ultimate darkness. We shall craft through destiny, a warrior worthy of the challenges to come. Worthy to bear the blessing of each of my Ruinous masters in equal measure and be called Everchosen of Chaos. He will be the key, as I am the keeper of the coming apocalypse. Between us, we shall herald the coming of the End Times – the doom you spoke of, my friend. Rejoice soothsayer. They are coming. When we do… when I have no more need of your words or his deeds, I shall assume the Everchosen’s flesh in true coronation. The flesh your prophecies shall exalt to the status of legend – and I shall take my rightful place as Lord of the End Times. Once more the world will be mine to plunge into darkness and ruin.’

  Necrodomo groaned and shrieked. If the pain of torture hadn’t driven him into the embrace of insanity, then the daemon prince’s words had. He was gone – a willing host to oblivion that, like a leech, sapped him of the last of his mental strength. The prognosticator moaned insensibilities. He laughed at his agonies and shrieked at nothing. Necrodomo let go and Be’lakor let him.

  ‘No matter,’ the daemon prince said to the madman. He opened the tome to its first blank page and selecting a quill, dipped it into the ink on the table. ‘I will assist you. I will transcribe. I have a name already. The name I shall bequeath my champion. The name I shall eventually take, with the body of the Everchosen I shall possess and assume. A name of your southern tongue, prognosticator, honouring both the ancient I have been and the eternity I have yet to become. We shall be known as… Archaon.’

  ‘There comes to the Emperor’s shores

  one night, driven before a storm,

  a gift in the guise of a child

  unknowing, unknown and unsought.

  ‘From womb to sea he is returned,

  a victim of the churning surf –

  to be saved by a fisherman

  who sees the gift and not the curse.

  ‘The error of the innocent –

  a commoner baseborn and bred,

  will never cost the land so dear

  or put its people to th
e test.

  ‘If murder comes more easily –

  or rude compassion shows its heel,

  then worlds old and new will be saved

  from the coming catastrophe.

  ‘For despite early clemency,

  and the God-King’s watchful gaze

  The child finds its path to darkness

  and returns not man but plague.’

  – Necrodomo the Insane, The Liber Caelestior

  (The Celestine Book of Divination)

  CHAPTER I

  ‘–Art thou some darknid thing?

  Wielding accident and advantage from the shadows?

  Some spirit, some fiend, some godless fury from afar, that stays the dice and winds the thread of life about its claws,

  that turns blood to ice and shivers the spine,

  With dark providence and blessed tragedies?

  Tell me devil, what thou art.

  – Geisenberg, Destinations

  The village of Hargendorf

  Nordland Coast – The Empire

  Dunkelstag, IC 2390

  The north. The north. Always the north. Out of the north they came, riding the storm. The rough wool cloth of their sails knew it. The rotting timbers of their clinkered hulls knew it. The marauders knew it in their hot bones and salt-stained flesh. This was no natural tempest. A wretched squall that had slammed the northmen from their bloody course and swept them south before gales serrated like their weapons, and rain fell like pellets of frosted iron. A blessing from the north. From the Wastes. From the Powers allowed to be.

  Vargs, far from home. Like fire on the water, they lived for the basest expression of their miserable existence. War – wherever it could be found; women and the favours that could be ripped from them, and the cruel laughter that could be drawn from their bellies in the face of calamities wrought. When not engaged in such mordant pursuits, the northmen might have remembered to eat or sleep or attend to their weapons, their vessels or the monstrous darkness to which they had pledged their lives. Their names were made up of consonants that cut the mouth and their hearts were hollow and black. Some bore the ghastly afflictions of their calling but most were ugly enough before – being grizzled of limb, scarred of flesh and ragged of beard. They cursed the elements and spat in the face of Manann, god of the seas for his free passage. They honoured their patron Powers with action. They honoured them with the wolfish howls they roared at the tumultuous skies, as their boats cut through the range of mountainous waves before them and revealed the glint of torches and lanterns. The coast of some victim nation. The darkened shore.