The sundering, p.21
The Sundering, page 21
Eleven
The Finding of the Circlet
For Malekith, his new freedom was as intoxicating as wine. He turned Indraugnir north and headed for the lands of ice that girded the Realm of Chaos. For several years Malekith and his crew explored the coastline of the frozen northlands, foraying eastwards and westwards in attempts to make charts for future visitors. It proved impossible, as the proximity of the Chaos Wastes and the ever-shifting nature of the ice itself changed the landscape with the passing of every season.
Likewise, any attempt to map the scattered human settlements proved fruitless, for they were nomadic and followed the erratic migrations of elk and other animals. Unlike the men who lived just north of the colonies, these humans were both fierce and terrified. Their weapons and armour were more advanced, forged of bronze, yet there was something about the elves that filled them with horror and they would flee whenever Malekith landed with a shore party.
There was good hunting on the outermost edges of the snowy plains: deer, bears and birds aplenty. The elves fished also, but were forced to head south in the coldest parts of the year, where they traded with other ships for grain and wine. Though some of his followers grumbled about the conditions, most were content, as was Malekith. For many this was the opportunity for them to wrest control from the elements, to forge something entirely new out of the unforgiving wilderness, just as they had done in the forests east of Athel Toralien.
For all the enthusiasm of the Naggarothi, these lands were harsh and resources were scarce. These were not the bountiful forests of the east, but a bleak expanse of unrelenting snow and rock. That the crude humans could survive here was testament that there was some worth in these lands, but Malekith knew that there would be no glittering cities of marble and alabaster. However, he was determined that the north would yield to his will.
Many years after setting out from Athel Toralien, Malekith landed upon an icy coast with the greater part of his followers. They carried their food and tents upon sleds pulled by teams of sturdy horses and were wrapped in coats of fur, and wore thick gloves and boots to protect them from the freezing wind. A few souls were left aboard Indraugnir and told to return to this place every fifty days to watch for the expedition’s return. With that, Malekith and his warriors forged inland to see what secrets the northern blizzards concealed.
In the Chaos Wastes, the Naggarothi found foes more fell than any they had met before. The lands teemed with monstrous creatures warped by the power of Chaos, and every time that the elves made camp the sentries would be tested by some terrifying winged beast or mindless, shambling thing.
The men of this realm were also far in advance of their cousins further south. Whether from unknown allies or gifted dark knowledge by the Chaos Gods, these humans had thick armour of leather and bronze, and hardened weapons. They wielded swords and axes with surprising skill, and some had shamanic powers and assailed the Naggarothi with spells drawn from the dark magic that swirled in great strength throughout the north.
Many of the humans showed signs of Chaos corruption, and had bloated muscles or bestial faces. No few carried ensorcelled weapons gifted to them by the Chaos gods. Malekith slew a chieftain with bat-like wings and scales instead of skin, who wielded a jagged sword that constantly screamed in some arcane and dreadful language. Avanuir also took the life of a tribal champion who had a snake’s body and was clad in armour made of iron-hard bone.
Though Malekith never ventured into the Realm of Chaos itself, often his expedition came close to its uncertain borders. The air shimmered with magical aurorae and crackled with mystical energy. Vast and insane landscapes hovered upon the edge of vision: nightmarish forests of flesh, mountains of bones, rivers of blood and burning skies all lurked beyond the invisible boundary. Even in the Chaos Wastes, the blasted shadowlands surrounding the Realm of Chaos, the daemonic and the unnatural held sway. For the first time in over a thousand years, Malekith pitted his sword against the blades of the daemonic legions of Chaos.
Malekith took ever greater risks, searching for some doom or myth that never materialised. The prince drove his army further and further westwards and northwards, seeking some sign that only he would recognise.
In truth, Malekith was growing ever more despondent. Nearly fifteen years had passed since he had left Athel Toralien and it seemed to the prince that he was no closer to achieving the great glory he desired. There was no army to overthrow, just scattered warbands of humans and transient daemonic apparitions to banish. There were not boundless riches to send back to Ulthuan, just the unending bleakness of snow, rock and ice: an eternal grinding battle of attrition.
With his company much reduced by hardship and fighting, Malekith felt his search growing ever more in vain. Northwards they pressed once more, unto the very edge of the Realm of Chaos. Though he shared his despair with no one else, the Naggarothi could sense Malekith’s growing frustration and worried what desperate act he might be considering.
For days they were engulfed by a mighty tempest of wind and snow, and though the Naggarothi struggled onwards eventually Malekith called them to a halt to wait out the unnaturally savage storm.
During the night, the tents of the Naggarothi camp buffeted by blizzard, Yeasir confronted his lord. The two were alone in Malekith’s pavilion, wrapped in their heavy furs as they sat upon the cold ground around a burning magical stone; the only fire that could be lit. Canvas cracked and slapped around them, and the wind howled all about.
‘If you but let us know what it is you wish, then we would help you,’ said the Naggarothi captain.
‘What if I was to tell you that I would dare the Gate of Chaos itself?’ said Malekith. ‘Would you still follow me?’
Yeasir did not answer immediately but his look of horror was all the reply Malekith needed.
‘So there is a boundary across which the Naggarothi dare not cross?’ said the prince.
‘I would counsel against it, your highness,’ said Yeasir, picking his words carefully. ‘Yet, if after my protestations were heard you were still intent upon such a course, I would follow you as would the others.’
‘And what arguments would you make to dissuade me?’ asked Malekith.
‘That no living soul has ever entered the Realm of Chaos and returned,’ replied Yeasir.
‘Is that not the point of such an endeavour?’ said Malekith. ‘Were we to venture into the heart of Chaos itself and return, would that not be a legend worth telling for a thousand years?’
‘If we return,’ cautioned Yeasir.
‘I did not know that the cold had cut so deeply into your veins, Yeasir,’ said Malekith with scorn.
‘It is not fear that holds me back,’ said Yeasir sharply. ‘I would gladly march against any foe, mortal or daemonic, but there is no valour in matching a hundred spears against the might of the Dark Gods! If we were to dare such a thing, we would be remembered as fools led by stupidity and vanity, not glory. Worse still, we would not be remembered at all, for if we should cross over to the worlds beyond and not return, then our tale will end with nothing. “They were lost in the snows of the north,” the chronicles would read, and our names would go unremembered.’
Malekith scowled, not out of anger but frustration. He knew that Yeasir’s points were valid, but in his heart he yearned for something more. The longer he remained in the north, the more chance that Bel Shanaar would be succeeded by another prince before Malekith’s return. The prince of Nagarythe could not bear the thought of slinking back to Ulthuan after all this time, to spend his days living out the fading glories of an age past.
‘I will make no decision now,’ Malekith declared. ‘The morning sun may bring fresh counsel.’
And it did.
Before dawn, the storm abated and a calm settled upon the tundra. Yeasir came to Malekith’s tent as the sun was breaking, much excited. Following his captain, Malekith emerged from his pavilion to see what had stirred the camp.
To the north, in the growing light of the day, could be seen distant structures. Upon a snow-swept hill, outlandish buildings rose up from the ice, carpeted with white but unmistakable nonetheless. Their exact shape could not be discerned from this distance, but grey and black rock hewn by hand rather than nature jutted at strange angles from drifts and hills of snow. The early morning sunlight sparkled from icicles hanging from strange balconies and glinted from odd-shaped domes. Malekith gave the order for the company to break camp and make ready to march with all speed.
What Malekith had taken to be a few miles turned out to be several leagues, the distance deceptive in the otherwise featureless snow plain. It took hours of marching before the Naggarothi came upon the outskirts of the strange buildings. No outer wall guarded their border and they seemed deserted. In design they were unlike anything the elves had seen before; not of elven, dwarfish or human hand.
The buildings were made of solid stone, but appeared not have been carved from the naked rock but fused seamlessly from some other stone. The walls met at strange angles, and the empty doorways and windows formed odd shapes of darkness, with no corner square. There were no curves either, no rounded arches or elegantly pointed arcs. Some buildings were low, so that their roofs were no higher than Malekith’s head, while others had several storeys, each of which was a dozen feet high or more.
To begin, the Naggarothi wandered the wide, uneven streets, up sweeping terraces and lines of stairs that changed in height at every step. The roads joined at irregular intervals, and met in uneven, star-shaped plazas. Other than the cold stone there was nothing else, no wood nor metal, and Malekith judged the settlement to be ancient indeed. After an hour’s searching it was clear that the city was vast, larger than anything Malekith had ever encountered.
Here on the edge of the Realm of Chaos, distances could be perversely extended or contracted, and so it was within the city. Short pathways seemed to widen as the elves approached, streets appeared to take longer to walk along than the buildings around them would imply, while eerie avenues that seemed to stretch for miles could be walked along in a matter of moments.
Eventually Malekith and the others ventured inside one of the buildings. It was a grand structure of five storeys, which widened unnaturally as it soared towards the grey skies, its flat walls pricked with hundreds of tiny, dark windows. The lower floor was open, with no internal walls, and the only feature was a wide stairwell that led downwards; there appeared to be no means to reach the upper levels.
Bringing out dwarf-made lanterns that glittered with silver fire, the elves descended the steps. These brought them into a contorted network of passages and rooms, and very quickly Malekith feared they would get lost. He ordered a warrior to stand at each junction with a lamp held aloft, so that no elf was ever out of sight from the route back. In this way, they slowly explored the windowless catacomb. They found no sign of the city’s builders, just blank stone devoid of carvings or colour.
After an hour of searching—far longer than Malekith would have suspected by the size of the building above—they came upon another stair. It rose steeply upwards and double-backed and criss-crossed itself in a disturbing way. That it reached far higher than the ceiling was indisputable, though its position, as far as Malekith could tell, put it in the centre of the storey above where no stair had been seen.
Their breath carving clouds upon the cold air, Malekith and his warriors mounted the steps, continuing to leave sentries at each twisted landing so that no elf was out of sight of another. The elves scaled the stairway in a surprisingly short time, and it opened out onto another empty floor, with wide windows through which they could only see the cloudy skies.
Walking to the nearest window, Malekith looked out and then stepped back with a gasp. The stairwell had brought them up to a floor above where they had entered the building, for down below he could see a few of his warriors standing guard at the doorway where they had come in. The city stretched out in every direction as far as he could see, going on and on until it was lost in a grey haze.
Disorientated, Malekith closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Having recovered himself a little, he leaned out of the glassless window, avoiding looking towards the horizon, and hailed the Naggarothi some sixty feet below. They looked up with startled shouts, and their voices came back impossibly distant.
Disturbed, Malekith ordered the Naggarothi to leave, though it took another hour for them to climb down the winding stairway and trace their way back out of the labyrinthine catacomb. There was much distressed murmuring by the Naggarothi, and Malekith’s usual confidence had been eroded by the unnatural surroundings. Looking up into the sky, he could see no sign of the sun and so only his internal awareness gave him any sense of the passage of time.
He reckoned it to be mid-afternoon, and knew that in these northern climes the sun would set early at this time of the year, barely passing above the horizon for a few hours. Malekith declared that they would leave the city before night fell and seek out its secrets with renewed vigour the following day.
However, with no sun to guide them, none of the Naggarothi knew from which direction they had entered the city. They retraced their steps as best they could from the footprints in the snow, but these soon petered out and could be found no more, though no snow had fallen since their arrival as far as they were aware. Now even more unnerved, Malekith called for the company to gather, and found that five of their number were missing. None could recall where they had last been seen, and the prince feared that they were lost in the city somewhere, perhaps forever.
Sensing the unease in his warriors becoming panic, Malekith bid them to stay where they were, somewhere amidst the criss-crossing arteries of the city’s maze-like roads. Clearly the proximity of the Realm of Chaos was addling their senses, and Malekith could not trust his own eyes. Instead he turned to a deeper sense, of the magic that flowed across the world from the Gate of Chaos.
Closing his eyes and blanking out all other sensation, the prince entered a meditative trance he had learnt from Morathi in his youth. Normally he needed no such concentration to harness the winds of magic, but now he desired finesse and focus and so looked to the lessons of his childhood to give him a centre upon which to concentrate.
Imagining himself as a small speck, a grain of dust upon the ground, Malekith allowed his othersense to reach outwards just a small distance. Magic swirled in all directions, without form or rhythm. Edging out his sphere of awareness, he allowed his mind’s eye to encompass a greater part of the city. Here he could detect a more regular stream of power; an underlying flow that poured from one direction. Fixing that point in his mind, Malekith opened his eyes.
Composed once more, Malekith could feel the gentle but persistent surge of Chaos unconsciously, and knew in which direction north now lay. Turning to the south, he ordered the Naggarothi to follow him.
They had walked for perhaps an hour when Malekith felt a different current in the flow of magic. Something close at hand was causing an eddy to form, much like the dispelling stone of the dwarfs. More confident that he could lead his warriors from the city if necessary, Malekith decided to make a detour and investigate this phenomenon. Now that he was aligned with the winds of magic again, Malekith marched unerringly between the grotesque buildings, guiding the company directly to the source of the anomaly.
There was something about the building that disturbed Malekith even more than the others. It was not as tall as some, but was very broad and rose up like a five-levelled ziggurat, though each successive step was slightly misaligned in comparison to the one beneath, so that the whole structure seemed to have been twisted by a god’s hand in some prehistoric time. There were archways all around its bottom floor, though nothing could be seen of the upper floors. Though he could not reason exactly why, the building brought Malekith to mind of a temple; to what deity or power, he could not fathom.
Malekith commanded half of his warriors to form a perimeter around the building, which stood alone just off-centre in a huge irregular eight-sided plaza. The other half of the company, Malekith led through one of the slanted archways. They followed the corridors, stairs and tunnels within for some time, but ever their path led them outwards so that they stood in rooms and galleries on the outer edge of each level. Malekith felt magic bubbling around him, and could sense a ward upon the inner walls keeping the magic at bay from somewhere within.
Eventually he found a spot where the magic churned violently, though looking about Malekith could see no physical source for such a disturbance. Holding up a hand to command his warriors to wait, he walked to the point where several streams of energy collided with each other. He stood on that exact spot, nauseated by the clashing magical waves.
Looking around he could see a triangular door that could be seen from nowhere else. He pointed and told Yeasir to follow his directions. Confused but obedient, the captain stalked across the floor of the room, following Malekith’s gestures. To Yeasir it seemed as if Malekith guided him towards a solid wall and he hesitated, just a pace from the stone, before the prince’s snarling voice bid him to walk forwards once more. With a grimace, his eyes half-closed in expectation of thudding into the wall, Yeasir took a step; he nearly fell over as he found himself atop a strange angular stair, much like the one they had found in the first building.
Through cunning artifice and magic, the stair was impossible to see, as if the door to it stood slightly apart from the world. Once Yeasir had stepped through, he had disappeared from sight, but he returned in moments and waved for the others to follow him.
The stairs led down for a comparatively short stretch, though such concepts as time and distance were becoming increasingly irrelevant in this impossible city. They led into a chamber, utterly black but for the glimmer of the elves’ lanterns. The air seemed to suck all the light into itself, and even with the radiance from the lamps Malekith could see barely ten paces ahead.
