Direchasm, p.6
Direchasm, page 6
‘Cease your meddling!’ Vasillac shouted. ‘Why do you oppose this glorious deed? The power I will unleash here will change the realms forever!’
‘The only change that is needed to the Mortal Realms is for your kind to be driven back into the darkness,’ Myari said. ‘By the light of the twin gods will that be accomplished.’
‘“The twin gods”,’ Vasillac mocked. ‘Your lords of light, the storm god, the Everqueen, even that mouldering horror Nagash… none of them understand. They cannot win. They are fleeting. Only Chaos is eternal.’
‘Chaos is weakness, and it draws weak fools to its banners. Witness the evidence before me,’ Myari said levelly.
‘You seek to taunt me, to anger me, to make me attack,’ Vasillac said. ‘I’m not such a fool.’
‘Actually,’ said Myari, ‘I was only trying to distract you.’
An arrow struck the Chaos champion in the throat. Its sunmetal tip glinted in the firelight, and exploded into flame that began to consume Vasillac.
Myari looked past the burning champion, expecting to see Senaela, longbow at the ready. Instead, the hunter lay on the ground, horribly burned. Her human-wrought bow hadn’t been designed to fire an arrow of such power, and doing so had destroyed it, with magical force. Vasillac turned towards the ailing human and screamed. Raw power, unfettered and greatly enhanced by the half-finished ritual, blasted into her, and she burst apart. Myari stepped forward and beheaded Vasillac with a single swing of his staff.
IV – BEGINNINGS
Days had passed since Myari’s Purifiers had stopped the ritual.
The mountain’s scream haunted Myari still. It had been something primal, something that echoed deep within his soul even now. It had also brought the site of the ritual crashing down around them. Bahannar and Senaela had been duelling with the dancer Glissete, a battle cut short by falling rubble. They retrieved Ailenn’s body and left the collapsing chamber with Myari, swearing to end what they had started when next they encountered the Dread Pageant.
‘Are you sure that we will see them again?’ Bahannar had asked Myari. ‘Perhaps the power they tapped into will be too much to allow them to return from beyond death’s veil.’
Myari had considered the question carefully.
‘There are many powers in the realms,’ he had replied at length. ‘Gods, great beasts, magic, Chaos… and Death. It is impossible to say for certain which of them might prevail in any place, at any time. But I would guess that whatever curse lies upon Beastgrave will ensure that our paths cross again.’
‘And the human?’
Myari was silent again at this. He had grieved for the human, something he had never expected would be possible with one of her short-lived kind.
‘If our paths are fated to cross once more, then they shall. But her part in this drama is over, her purpose served.’
When Ailenn had returned from death – an experience, Myari was sure, that would haunt his companion for a long time to come – the four Lumineth had agreed that though they had thwarted Vasillac’s scheme, their fates remained in Beastgrave. Though the mountain had been quiescent since the champion fell, it would not remain so. At the heart of the Purifiers’ mission was an oath to prevent any catastrophe that might change the balance of power around the mountain. And so they would.
Vasillac awoke in a dark tunnel deep in the mountain. He clutched his throat and gasped for air, swallowing it in great lungfuls. He pulled himself upright and leaned heavily on his spear, which was lying by his side. He didn’t know how he had come to be here. The last he remembered was killing the whelp who had shot him, and then…
The aelf. The damned aelf had killed him.
He remembered the feeling of his head and shoulders parting. Of seeing his body fall, of the truly indescribable sensation of feeling pain in limbs that were no longer attached to his brain. Dying, it seemed, was the most exquisite of sensations. He couldn’t wait to experience it again.
Vasillac laughed for a long time.
‘I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him that killing me would not be the end. He has bound himself to me now. Our fates are entwined. And oh, what delights await us both!’
The champion made his way down the tunnel. The first thing he had to do was locate the rest of the Dread Pageant. Then he would seek out more of the secrets of this accursed place, and find something that he could use. Something that would bring him back into contact with the aelf. That would be glorious. He would teach Myari how wonderful and terrible and utterly painful death was, over and over.
This was not the end.
LAST RITE OF
THE HAG QUEEN
Dale Lucas
Morgwaeth the Bloodied spun just in time to meet the head-on charge of the Hedonite leader. By instinct alone, the heartshard glaive she carried swept into position, thrust straight out before her. The Hedonite chieftain – a ravening half-man with skin the colour of lime-chalk, great, gaping nostrils, broad ears fanned by delicate iron pins and its eyes sewn shut with black wire – collided with the long, curved blade topping her glaive-shaft. For a single, halting instant, the Hedonite’s ribcage resisted the glaive blade before it plunged smoothly through the chieftain’s torso, the fiend’s own furious momentum helping to destroy it. The Hedonite slid a short way along the glaive-shaft, enormous teeth snapping, long, black claws sweeping the air, but Morgwaeth had it. As the hag queen watched, her thrashing adversary wound down like a dying clockwork toy.
All around her, the cavern echoed with their enemies’ shrieks of pained death and murderous fury as Morgwaeth and her sisters sang slaying songs to Khaine, the ancient aelven god of battle and bloodshed. The Bloodied and her cohorts were about their merciless business. Once unleashed, nothing would arrest their butchery save the total annihilation of their adversaries.
Close behind Morgwaeth, the witch-aelves Lethyr and Kyrssa spun and danced among their Slaaneshi foes, each wielding matched pairs of fearsome, gently-curved sciansá daggers like extensions of their own strong, lithe limbs. Lethyr – young and eager to impress her hag queen – chanted her sacrificial hymns in a clear, brassy voice so proud and strong as to make a Stormcast Knight-Incantor envious.
Across the stone hall, Handmaiden Khamyss – one of the renowned Sisters of Slaughter – whirled and wheeled within a circle of Slaaneshi attackers, holding off their incursions with the bladed buckler strapped to her left arm while the intermittent, hypersonic crack of her kruip-lash whip denoted yet another ear shorn from a skull, yet another Slaaneshi limb torn from its socket, yet another body lacerated to bleed foul, Chaos-tainted blood upon the cavern floor. As Khamyss fought, the daemonic golden mask grafted upon her face took on a wondrous and terrifying life of its own, grinning and laughing insanely as though it were truly, magically alive.
Then there was Kyrae; cruel, cold-blooded, serpentine Kyrae. As their melee with the servants of Slaanesh raged, as Morgwaeth and her witch-aelves and her Sister of Slaughter slashed and thrust and whip-lashed to slay their enemies, the melusai Blood Stalker slithered about at the periphery of the battle, rising up at intervals on her coiled, snake-like lower half to take deadly aim with her heartseeker bow and loose poisoned arrows into the fray. And if, between deadly sniper shots, the Blood Stalker found herself beset by some close adversary, she simply snatched out the long scianlar dagger sheathed at her side and slashed the life out of those who challenged her.
‘Blood and souls!’ she cried as she struck down yet another challenger. ‘Blood and souls for our queen, Morathi!’
Already, deep pools of the foul black ichor these Slaaneshi deviants called blood gathered in the dips and depressions marring the uneven cavern floor. A dozen had fallen, but still half that many and more remained. No matter. Morgwaeth was confident she and her acolytes would win the day. These twisted, transformed minions of the God of Excess were no match for she and her Hagg Nar temple sisters and their special brand of ecstatic ritual murder. There was no discipline among the Hedonites, no martial artistry. They were simply addicted to slaughter, hungry to inflict pain and injury. They swarmed in, pell-mell, snapping and clawing, never patient enough to work as a unit, to truly measure or understand their adversaries. All they sought was the ecstasy of the fleeting moment: the exultation of drawn blood, the rapture of screams, the intoxicating thrill of a wounded foe about to meet their doom. Their god was wasteful and childish, a god of sloppy exuberance, foolhardy fulsomeness and wicked waste. Such creatures were no match for the Daughters of Khaine, expert in the dispensation of suffering, initiated into blood rites older than the Mortal Realms themselves.
More would-be slayers charged from Morgwaeth’s right. She quickly yanked the long shaft of her glaive free from the chieftain’s corpse and, in one smooth, deft movement, swept the blade sideways through the throat of one closing Hedonite, then slashed deep into the skin, muscle and bone of its closest companion. The throat-cut Hedonite collapsed, choking on its own foul blood. Its companion struggled, skewered upon Morgwaeth’s blade.
‘Lethyr!’ she cried.
The witch-aelf spun towards her commander’s cry, saw the Hedonite struggling on the glaive. Shouting a hasty invocation to their dread god, Lethyr sprang forward and tore into the Hedonite with her sciansá daggers. The lilac-skinned Hedonite thrashed and convulsed under the ministrations of the young blood maiden’s blades, then sagged to the cavern floor.
Morgwaeth withdrew her glaive and turned to survey the scene.
The cavern was broad and high-ceilinged, stalactites and stalagmites fringing its farthest edges, while in the centre its domed dark roof arched above an open, rocky floor pocked by smooth, eroded recesses and occasional knobs of rising stone. Not a single Hedonite was left standing, though a few still bucked or twitched where they lay, trying desperately to rise to their feet and fight with what strength remained in them. Foul ichor pooled, thick and coagulating, in the lowest recesses of the cavern’s rolling, uneven floor, while viscera, gobbets of flesh and disembodied limbs lay strewn about, as careless as the cast-offs in a butcher’s charnel house. The only light in the great stone chamber came from still-burning torches thrown down by the Slaaneshi when the battle had been joined, alongside a few shallow pools breeding bio-luminescent algae. Morgwaeth and her Khainite sisters bore light sources of their own – magically-charged jewels that could provide illumination at will – but those jewels had been stowed or extinguished during the battle. Now, the light-stones were once more produced and brought to life, so that each of the Daughters could admire her handiwork and weed out survivors.
Khamyss dispatched one still-breathing Slaaneshi with a powerful downward strike of her blade buckler. Kyrae finished yet another by pulling an arrow from the nearest dead Hedonite and plunging its point dagger-like into the forehead of the still-twitching one. Kyrssa crouched over a prone adversary trying to crawl towards the shadows and slashed each of her sciansá across the creature’s foul throat.
At last, the cavern was still, secured. Morgwaeth smiled. Chaos-tainted blood painted her body from head to toe, already drying to a tacky crust. The rich, rank perfume of fear, madness and ordure swirled around her, intoxicating.
‘Make your offerings,’ she ordered.
With grunted responses, her scattered sisters chose their nearest fallen adversary and knelt beside them in order to extract what life force they could, and to dedicate that life force to their beloved god of death and slaughter. Morgwaeth watched Kyrae slither towards the largest of the many Hedonites she’d struck down and bend over the winged abomination’s still form. She slipped her bow over her shoulders, drew out her scianlar, and gripped it two-handed.
‘To the glory of Khaine, for the exaltation of my mistress and queen, Morathi, I now claim the very life force of this, mine enemy, to present as a gift to thee and thine.’
Having made the invocation, she plunged the dagger into the Hedonite’s chest, just below the ribcage, as taught in the Hagg Nar temple. Her technique was confident, flawless. She made one long incision crosswise, then extracted the blade and plunged it in once more to make a vertical incision intersecting at the centre of the horizontal one. Without hindrance or delicacy, she tore open the flaps of skin and muscle and began tearing out the vital organs of the foul thing she’d slain.
‘Vouchsafe and accept these offerings, O Morathi, Queen of Night and High Oracle to Khaine’s truest servants. Let the energies contained herein feed thee and enrich thee, so that thou may endure for a thousand years and more…’
As she spoke the words and tore each organ free, Morgwaeth saw the ancient Khainite runes upon the curved blade’s length begin to pulse a lambent red in the cavern’s murky light. All melusai carried such blades, and performed such rituals upon their slain foes. While the rest of them simply dedicated their kills to Khaine and prayed for his murderous favour in all their endeavours, the melusai extracted the pure life force of their slain foes, absorbing those latent energies into their scianlar for later presentation to their High Oracle and queen, Morathi. The Daughters of Khaine all dedicated blood and souls to their patron deity, but only the melusai served Khaine’s will by directly feeding and renewing his chief priestess and High Oracle. Idly, Morgwaeth wondered just how much energy was now stored in the dagger that Kyrae carried. Khaine knew they’d certainly slain enough enemies during their time in Beastgrave to make the power borne therein a wondrous cache indeed.
No matter. Morgwaeth had her own offerings to attend to. Quietly, efficiently, she moved among her kills, offered prayers to Father Khaine and Mother Morathi, and carved the necessary sigils into the flesh of the fallen to dedicate them. When she was finished, she felt both calmed and invigorated, the ecstasy of combat having subsided into the sure, mellow warmth of the victor’s afterglow. She looked to her sisters, to see that they were all ready to proceed.
After all, a treasure awaited beyond the threshold they’d just fought so hard to pass.
Morgwaeth knew not what that treasure might be, but she had some suspicions. It might be some blood-consecrated weapon born by Khaine’s own hand, snatched by an ancient enemy and left here as a burial token. Perhaps it was a stolen reliquary from a long-toppled Khainite temple, or even a magical chalice charged with fell powers from the eldritch ages when the Mortal Realms were young. But in truth Morgwaeth hoped – nay, prayed – that it was the prize for which they’d been dispatched: one of the fabled Shards of Khaine, a literal fragment of their long-ago sundered god, manifest in the material world as an artefact of pure iron, radiating cold, haunted energies and smelling of unadulterated blood magic. That, after all, was what holy Morathi had sent them to locate. That was why they had risked so much, fought so hard, and slain all adversaries encountered without mercy: for the glory of Khaine, for the favour of Morathi and for the aggrandisement of Morgwaeth herself.
The others stared back at her: Kyrssa and Lethyr, their daggers sheathed; Khamyss, her whip now wound about her body in repose; Kyrae, standing upright on her coiled, serpentine tail. All ready, all waiting.
‘Khaine awaits us, sisters,’ Morgwaeth said. ‘Let us claim our prize.’
She led the way into the tomb.
Squatting low and broad at one end of the great, vaulting cavern was a temple or tomb of elegant and ancient design, standing out conspicuously in the middle of the primeval chamber around it, shaped through the ages by steady erosion and blind tectonic force. The sanctum boasted a single entryway, narrow and barely large enough for an individual to pass through, the darkness beyond as black as a starless night. As Morgwaeth and her sisters climbed the short, broad stairway of the tomb towards that beckoning door, the hag queen muttered a low incantation that caused the blade of her glaive to glow red, as though super-heated in a forge – though it radiated no ambient heat. This was all the light Morgwaeth required to illuminate her way.
Kyrae appeared in her peripheral vision. ‘Let me precede you, my priestess. There may be dangers yet awaiting, or a trap–’
‘No,’ Morgwaeth said without even meeting Kyrae’s gaze. ‘I have led us to this place – to the very precipice of glory. I will be the first to meet that glory – or whatever danger awaits.’
Kyrae bowed her head and slithered aside immediately. ‘As you wish, milady.’
Modesty and polite deference might be a virtue among humans or the servants of Sigmar, but the Daughters of Khaine had no inclination to it. One who served Khaine did so proudly, without stooping to the foolish airs of false humility. If the treasure they’d so long sought in the twisting, turning labyrinths beneath Beastgrave truly waited beyond this entryway, then Morgwaeth the Bloodied would be the first to behold it and the first to lay hands upon it. Her sisters, her coven, all the adherents to her grim faith would know that the prize – and the glory it bestowed – were hers and hers alone.
Morgwaeth stepped through the doorway, the glowing glaive held out before her. The others followed, silent, yet eager to see what treasure their leader’s bravery and audacity had won them…
There, in the half-lit darkness: a sarcophagus, its heavy lid already slid aside and toppled, the chamber within unguarded, eager to be plundered! Morgwaeth could literally smell the powerful residue of blood magic now: the metallic tang of copper, the ferrous black astringency of iron, the vague, charred scent of air and matter marred by such savage, sanguine energies.
The crimson light from her glaive fell into the open sarcophagus. Morgwaeth stared, prepared to lay her eyes, at last, upon the prize they sought – the prize she coveted.
Nothing lay within but cobwebs, a few dead, pale arachnids, dry as autumn leaves, and some scraps of old rags or rotted clothing. Horrified to see the tomb so devoid, so bereft of all that might uplift and empower her, Morgwaeth shoved her glaive into Lethyr’s waiting hands and all but dived forward, bending into the depths of the small cell and rifling about with her now-free hands.
‘The only change that is needed to the Mortal Realms is for your kind to be driven back into the darkness,’ Myari said. ‘By the light of the twin gods will that be accomplished.’
‘“The twin gods”,’ Vasillac mocked. ‘Your lords of light, the storm god, the Everqueen, even that mouldering horror Nagash… none of them understand. They cannot win. They are fleeting. Only Chaos is eternal.’
‘Chaos is weakness, and it draws weak fools to its banners. Witness the evidence before me,’ Myari said levelly.
‘You seek to taunt me, to anger me, to make me attack,’ Vasillac said. ‘I’m not such a fool.’
‘Actually,’ said Myari, ‘I was only trying to distract you.’
An arrow struck the Chaos champion in the throat. Its sunmetal tip glinted in the firelight, and exploded into flame that began to consume Vasillac.
Myari looked past the burning champion, expecting to see Senaela, longbow at the ready. Instead, the hunter lay on the ground, horribly burned. Her human-wrought bow hadn’t been designed to fire an arrow of such power, and doing so had destroyed it, with magical force. Vasillac turned towards the ailing human and screamed. Raw power, unfettered and greatly enhanced by the half-finished ritual, blasted into her, and she burst apart. Myari stepped forward and beheaded Vasillac with a single swing of his staff.
IV – BEGINNINGS
Days had passed since Myari’s Purifiers had stopped the ritual.
The mountain’s scream haunted Myari still. It had been something primal, something that echoed deep within his soul even now. It had also brought the site of the ritual crashing down around them. Bahannar and Senaela had been duelling with the dancer Glissete, a battle cut short by falling rubble. They retrieved Ailenn’s body and left the collapsing chamber with Myari, swearing to end what they had started when next they encountered the Dread Pageant.
‘Are you sure that we will see them again?’ Bahannar had asked Myari. ‘Perhaps the power they tapped into will be too much to allow them to return from beyond death’s veil.’
Myari had considered the question carefully.
‘There are many powers in the realms,’ he had replied at length. ‘Gods, great beasts, magic, Chaos… and Death. It is impossible to say for certain which of them might prevail in any place, at any time. But I would guess that whatever curse lies upon Beastgrave will ensure that our paths cross again.’
‘And the human?’
Myari was silent again at this. He had grieved for the human, something he had never expected would be possible with one of her short-lived kind.
‘If our paths are fated to cross once more, then they shall. But her part in this drama is over, her purpose served.’
When Ailenn had returned from death – an experience, Myari was sure, that would haunt his companion for a long time to come – the four Lumineth had agreed that though they had thwarted Vasillac’s scheme, their fates remained in Beastgrave. Though the mountain had been quiescent since the champion fell, it would not remain so. At the heart of the Purifiers’ mission was an oath to prevent any catastrophe that might change the balance of power around the mountain. And so they would.
Vasillac awoke in a dark tunnel deep in the mountain. He clutched his throat and gasped for air, swallowing it in great lungfuls. He pulled himself upright and leaned heavily on his spear, which was lying by his side. He didn’t know how he had come to be here. The last he remembered was killing the whelp who had shot him, and then…
The aelf. The damned aelf had killed him.
He remembered the feeling of his head and shoulders parting. Of seeing his body fall, of the truly indescribable sensation of feeling pain in limbs that were no longer attached to his brain. Dying, it seemed, was the most exquisite of sensations. He couldn’t wait to experience it again.
Vasillac laughed for a long time.
‘I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him that killing me would not be the end. He has bound himself to me now. Our fates are entwined. And oh, what delights await us both!’
The champion made his way down the tunnel. The first thing he had to do was locate the rest of the Dread Pageant. Then he would seek out more of the secrets of this accursed place, and find something that he could use. Something that would bring him back into contact with the aelf. That would be glorious. He would teach Myari how wonderful and terrible and utterly painful death was, over and over.
This was not the end.
LAST RITE OF
THE HAG QUEEN
Dale Lucas
Morgwaeth the Bloodied spun just in time to meet the head-on charge of the Hedonite leader. By instinct alone, the heartshard glaive she carried swept into position, thrust straight out before her. The Hedonite chieftain – a ravening half-man with skin the colour of lime-chalk, great, gaping nostrils, broad ears fanned by delicate iron pins and its eyes sewn shut with black wire – collided with the long, curved blade topping her glaive-shaft. For a single, halting instant, the Hedonite’s ribcage resisted the glaive blade before it plunged smoothly through the chieftain’s torso, the fiend’s own furious momentum helping to destroy it. The Hedonite slid a short way along the glaive-shaft, enormous teeth snapping, long, black claws sweeping the air, but Morgwaeth had it. As the hag queen watched, her thrashing adversary wound down like a dying clockwork toy.
All around her, the cavern echoed with their enemies’ shrieks of pained death and murderous fury as Morgwaeth and her sisters sang slaying songs to Khaine, the ancient aelven god of battle and bloodshed. The Bloodied and her cohorts were about their merciless business. Once unleashed, nothing would arrest their butchery save the total annihilation of their adversaries.
Close behind Morgwaeth, the witch-aelves Lethyr and Kyrssa spun and danced among their Slaaneshi foes, each wielding matched pairs of fearsome, gently-curved sciansá daggers like extensions of their own strong, lithe limbs. Lethyr – young and eager to impress her hag queen – chanted her sacrificial hymns in a clear, brassy voice so proud and strong as to make a Stormcast Knight-Incantor envious.
Across the stone hall, Handmaiden Khamyss – one of the renowned Sisters of Slaughter – whirled and wheeled within a circle of Slaaneshi attackers, holding off their incursions with the bladed buckler strapped to her left arm while the intermittent, hypersonic crack of her kruip-lash whip denoted yet another ear shorn from a skull, yet another Slaaneshi limb torn from its socket, yet another body lacerated to bleed foul, Chaos-tainted blood upon the cavern floor. As Khamyss fought, the daemonic golden mask grafted upon her face took on a wondrous and terrifying life of its own, grinning and laughing insanely as though it were truly, magically alive.
Then there was Kyrae; cruel, cold-blooded, serpentine Kyrae. As their melee with the servants of Slaanesh raged, as Morgwaeth and her witch-aelves and her Sister of Slaughter slashed and thrust and whip-lashed to slay their enemies, the melusai Blood Stalker slithered about at the periphery of the battle, rising up at intervals on her coiled, snake-like lower half to take deadly aim with her heartseeker bow and loose poisoned arrows into the fray. And if, between deadly sniper shots, the Blood Stalker found herself beset by some close adversary, she simply snatched out the long scianlar dagger sheathed at her side and slashed the life out of those who challenged her.
‘Blood and souls!’ she cried as she struck down yet another challenger. ‘Blood and souls for our queen, Morathi!’
Already, deep pools of the foul black ichor these Slaaneshi deviants called blood gathered in the dips and depressions marring the uneven cavern floor. A dozen had fallen, but still half that many and more remained. No matter. Morgwaeth was confident she and her acolytes would win the day. These twisted, transformed minions of the God of Excess were no match for she and her Hagg Nar temple sisters and their special brand of ecstatic ritual murder. There was no discipline among the Hedonites, no martial artistry. They were simply addicted to slaughter, hungry to inflict pain and injury. They swarmed in, pell-mell, snapping and clawing, never patient enough to work as a unit, to truly measure or understand their adversaries. All they sought was the ecstasy of the fleeting moment: the exultation of drawn blood, the rapture of screams, the intoxicating thrill of a wounded foe about to meet their doom. Their god was wasteful and childish, a god of sloppy exuberance, foolhardy fulsomeness and wicked waste. Such creatures were no match for the Daughters of Khaine, expert in the dispensation of suffering, initiated into blood rites older than the Mortal Realms themselves.
More would-be slayers charged from Morgwaeth’s right. She quickly yanked the long shaft of her glaive free from the chieftain’s corpse and, in one smooth, deft movement, swept the blade sideways through the throat of one closing Hedonite, then slashed deep into the skin, muscle and bone of its closest companion. The throat-cut Hedonite collapsed, choking on its own foul blood. Its companion struggled, skewered upon Morgwaeth’s blade.
‘Lethyr!’ she cried.
The witch-aelf spun towards her commander’s cry, saw the Hedonite struggling on the glaive. Shouting a hasty invocation to their dread god, Lethyr sprang forward and tore into the Hedonite with her sciansá daggers. The lilac-skinned Hedonite thrashed and convulsed under the ministrations of the young blood maiden’s blades, then sagged to the cavern floor.
Morgwaeth withdrew her glaive and turned to survey the scene.
The cavern was broad and high-ceilinged, stalactites and stalagmites fringing its farthest edges, while in the centre its domed dark roof arched above an open, rocky floor pocked by smooth, eroded recesses and occasional knobs of rising stone. Not a single Hedonite was left standing, though a few still bucked or twitched where they lay, trying desperately to rise to their feet and fight with what strength remained in them. Foul ichor pooled, thick and coagulating, in the lowest recesses of the cavern’s rolling, uneven floor, while viscera, gobbets of flesh and disembodied limbs lay strewn about, as careless as the cast-offs in a butcher’s charnel house. The only light in the great stone chamber came from still-burning torches thrown down by the Slaaneshi when the battle had been joined, alongside a few shallow pools breeding bio-luminescent algae. Morgwaeth and her Khainite sisters bore light sources of their own – magically-charged jewels that could provide illumination at will – but those jewels had been stowed or extinguished during the battle. Now, the light-stones were once more produced and brought to life, so that each of the Daughters could admire her handiwork and weed out survivors.
Khamyss dispatched one still-breathing Slaaneshi with a powerful downward strike of her blade buckler. Kyrae finished yet another by pulling an arrow from the nearest dead Hedonite and plunging its point dagger-like into the forehead of the still-twitching one. Kyrssa crouched over a prone adversary trying to crawl towards the shadows and slashed each of her sciansá across the creature’s foul throat.
At last, the cavern was still, secured. Morgwaeth smiled. Chaos-tainted blood painted her body from head to toe, already drying to a tacky crust. The rich, rank perfume of fear, madness and ordure swirled around her, intoxicating.
‘Make your offerings,’ she ordered.
With grunted responses, her scattered sisters chose their nearest fallen adversary and knelt beside them in order to extract what life force they could, and to dedicate that life force to their beloved god of death and slaughter. Morgwaeth watched Kyrae slither towards the largest of the many Hedonites she’d struck down and bend over the winged abomination’s still form. She slipped her bow over her shoulders, drew out her scianlar, and gripped it two-handed.
‘To the glory of Khaine, for the exaltation of my mistress and queen, Morathi, I now claim the very life force of this, mine enemy, to present as a gift to thee and thine.’
Having made the invocation, she plunged the dagger into the Hedonite’s chest, just below the ribcage, as taught in the Hagg Nar temple. Her technique was confident, flawless. She made one long incision crosswise, then extracted the blade and plunged it in once more to make a vertical incision intersecting at the centre of the horizontal one. Without hindrance or delicacy, she tore open the flaps of skin and muscle and began tearing out the vital organs of the foul thing she’d slain.
‘Vouchsafe and accept these offerings, O Morathi, Queen of Night and High Oracle to Khaine’s truest servants. Let the energies contained herein feed thee and enrich thee, so that thou may endure for a thousand years and more…’
As she spoke the words and tore each organ free, Morgwaeth saw the ancient Khainite runes upon the curved blade’s length begin to pulse a lambent red in the cavern’s murky light. All melusai carried such blades, and performed such rituals upon their slain foes. While the rest of them simply dedicated their kills to Khaine and prayed for his murderous favour in all their endeavours, the melusai extracted the pure life force of their slain foes, absorbing those latent energies into their scianlar for later presentation to their High Oracle and queen, Morathi. The Daughters of Khaine all dedicated blood and souls to their patron deity, but only the melusai served Khaine’s will by directly feeding and renewing his chief priestess and High Oracle. Idly, Morgwaeth wondered just how much energy was now stored in the dagger that Kyrae carried. Khaine knew they’d certainly slain enough enemies during their time in Beastgrave to make the power borne therein a wondrous cache indeed.
No matter. Morgwaeth had her own offerings to attend to. Quietly, efficiently, she moved among her kills, offered prayers to Father Khaine and Mother Morathi, and carved the necessary sigils into the flesh of the fallen to dedicate them. When she was finished, she felt both calmed and invigorated, the ecstasy of combat having subsided into the sure, mellow warmth of the victor’s afterglow. She looked to her sisters, to see that they were all ready to proceed.
After all, a treasure awaited beyond the threshold they’d just fought so hard to pass.
Morgwaeth knew not what that treasure might be, but she had some suspicions. It might be some blood-consecrated weapon born by Khaine’s own hand, snatched by an ancient enemy and left here as a burial token. Perhaps it was a stolen reliquary from a long-toppled Khainite temple, or even a magical chalice charged with fell powers from the eldritch ages when the Mortal Realms were young. But in truth Morgwaeth hoped – nay, prayed – that it was the prize for which they’d been dispatched: one of the fabled Shards of Khaine, a literal fragment of their long-ago sundered god, manifest in the material world as an artefact of pure iron, radiating cold, haunted energies and smelling of unadulterated blood magic. That, after all, was what holy Morathi had sent them to locate. That was why they had risked so much, fought so hard, and slain all adversaries encountered without mercy: for the glory of Khaine, for the favour of Morathi and for the aggrandisement of Morgwaeth herself.
The others stared back at her: Kyrssa and Lethyr, their daggers sheathed; Khamyss, her whip now wound about her body in repose; Kyrae, standing upright on her coiled, serpentine tail. All ready, all waiting.
‘Khaine awaits us, sisters,’ Morgwaeth said. ‘Let us claim our prize.’
She led the way into the tomb.
Squatting low and broad at one end of the great, vaulting cavern was a temple or tomb of elegant and ancient design, standing out conspicuously in the middle of the primeval chamber around it, shaped through the ages by steady erosion and blind tectonic force. The sanctum boasted a single entryway, narrow and barely large enough for an individual to pass through, the darkness beyond as black as a starless night. As Morgwaeth and her sisters climbed the short, broad stairway of the tomb towards that beckoning door, the hag queen muttered a low incantation that caused the blade of her glaive to glow red, as though super-heated in a forge – though it radiated no ambient heat. This was all the light Morgwaeth required to illuminate her way.
Kyrae appeared in her peripheral vision. ‘Let me precede you, my priestess. There may be dangers yet awaiting, or a trap–’
‘No,’ Morgwaeth said without even meeting Kyrae’s gaze. ‘I have led us to this place – to the very precipice of glory. I will be the first to meet that glory – or whatever danger awaits.’
Kyrae bowed her head and slithered aside immediately. ‘As you wish, milady.’
Modesty and polite deference might be a virtue among humans or the servants of Sigmar, but the Daughters of Khaine had no inclination to it. One who served Khaine did so proudly, without stooping to the foolish airs of false humility. If the treasure they’d so long sought in the twisting, turning labyrinths beneath Beastgrave truly waited beyond this entryway, then Morgwaeth the Bloodied would be the first to behold it and the first to lay hands upon it. Her sisters, her coven, all the adherents to her grim faith would know that the prize – and the glory it bestowed – were hers and hers alone.
Morgwaeth stepped through the doorway, the glowing glaive held out before her. The others followed, silent, yet eager to see what treasure their leader’s bravery and audacity had won them…
There, in the half-lit darkness: a sarcophagus, its heavy lid already slid aside and toppled, the chamber within unguarded, eager to be plundered! Morgwaeth could literally smell the powerful residue of blood magic now: the metallic tang of copper, the ferrous black astringency of iron, the vague, charred scent of air and matter marred by such savage, sanguine energies.
The crimson light from her glaive fell into the open sarcophagus. Morgwaeth stared, prepared to lay her eyes, at last, upon the prize they sought – the prize she coveted.
Nothing lay within but cobwebs, a few dead, pale arachnids, dry as autumn leaves, and some scraps of old rags or rotted clothing. Horrified to see the tomb so devoid, so bereft of all that might uplift and empower her, Morgwaeth shoved her glaive into Lethyr’s waiting hands and all but dived forward, bending into the depths of the small cell and rifling about with her now-free hands.
