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  The Unending Storm

  Nick Kyme

  Ghaar’eth, called Warson by his followers, beheld the storm in rapt silence.

  His rivals were dead, reduced to blood and viscera at his feet and the feet of his warriors. A modest host, they had still prevailed. The hacked-up bodies of the Arcanites littering the Gargantua Ridge were testament to the Bloodwrought’s and Warson’s growing power and ambition. Soon, all of the Beastplains would be his, would be Khorne’s.

  Until this. Until the storm…

  It struck the sky with such vehemence, a storm without cessation that burned with furious azure lightning.

  ‘Skarku, what does it mean?’

  The slaughterpriest paused in the flensing of skulls to crane his neck and look upon the darkling sky. An eldritch gloaming had fallen upon the ridge, throwing shadows across the huge, ancient bones from which it took its name.

  ‘It is a portent,’ he hissed between knife-sharp teeth. ‘A summons. Khorne calls us to further battle, Warson.’

  Ghaar’eth felt it in his blood, the violent urge never sated. A strong wind ghosted across the ridge, ridding the air of the stench of blood and replacing it with something else. Rain… steel… lightning.

  Grunting, Ghaar’eth put on his helmet of dark iron. A snarling effigy of Khorne formed its nosepiece and eye slits, rising into a crown of twin horns. It matched the brand seared into his face. Other brands marred his naked flesh – kill tallies and carved imprecations to daemons.

  ‘Leave those morsels,’ he growled to his warriors, reaching for his hellbladed axe, which stood embedded in the corpse of the Arcanite sorcerer-king.

  His Bloodwrought reavers left the carcasses of the Arcanites and took up their weapons. Some murmured their displeasure, but the killing urge at the prospect of battle soon quelled any serious discontent.

  ‘The dark feast can wait,’ he told Skarku, who was tying a ruby-red skull to his belt. He had taken the Arcanite’s feathered war-mask too and used it to hide its former bearer’s rictus grin.

  ‘Khorne calls again,’ said Skarku.

  ‘Let the blood flow…’ Ghaar’eth replied, his eyes on the lightning cascading from the heavens.

  After climbing down the ossuary path of the Gargantua Ridge and crossing the floating bone mesas of the Abyssal Bridge, Ghaar’eth and his warband reached the Varnagorn Valley.

  Four immense totems rose from the red earth of this deep valley basin, so high they breached the clouds. None who climbed them was ever seen again. Rumours abounded that the totems, which were carved in the monstrous visages of leviathan beasts too large to have been wrought by mortal hands, were a gateway or bridge between worlds.

  Such talk roused Ghaar’eth to anger, and he had slain all of the rumour-makers who had ever strayed into his path. But when he saw the golden warrior stood between the four beast totems, as if having come from the very sky itself, he began to wonder if the fools whose skulls now arrayed his trophy rack were indeed speaking the truth.

  It did not matter. As the golden warrior turned, his face an impassive mask and his movements suggesting strength, Ghaar’eth knew he had found a worthy warrior to match his wrath against.

  Skarku bellowed incoherently at the golden one, spitting blood and phlegm as a fury overtook him.

  Ghaar’eth cut through the slaughterpriest’s frenzy and cooled the boiling blood of all his warriors with the vehemence of his command.

  ‘Take heed,’ he uttered, his gaze never leaving the golden one who brandished a hammer and a shield struck with images of the celestial heavens the likes of which Ghaar’eth had never seen before. ‘This one is mine.’

  He had fought and enslaved many other warbands, killed those too belligerent to submit to his yoke… the Three Eyes, the Serpentine, even those Fleshchanger Arcanites still wet on his axe blade. Never had he seen a warband with markings such as this. It burned his blood to imagine the martial contest this warrior now presented.

  None would gainsay him – Ghaar’eth had killed all of his rivals in the Bloodwrought, so when he stepped forwards into the arena of the totems, he knew he would fight this champion alone.

  ‘Are you watching, my lord Khorne?’ he whispered, before gesturing to the golden warrior with his axe. ‘Stormrider…’ he shouted into the wind and the tempest, which had risen a beat since he had approached, ‘my axe craves your blood. Your skull shall adorn my temple of victories.’ With the lightning of the heavens coruscating across his golden armour, Ghaar’eth could think of the warrior only as Stormrider, and when he spoke, he did so with a voice of thunder.

  ‘And lo, did Sigmar see the foulness of Chaos and all it wrought in its manifold evil.’

  Ghaar’eth frowned, ‘Sigmar?’ He laughed uproariously as the stormrider pointed his hammer at him and met the challenge. ‘Sigmar is dead! Khorne cut him down, sucked the marrow from his bones, and drank his blood ’til naught remained but a shrivelled corpse. Ha! You are not of Sigmar, wretch. Let me show you why…’

  He hurled himself at the golden warrior, his axe swinging. Ghaar’eth’s first blow struck the warrior’s shield, releasing a clangour that seemed to resonate with the storm.

  Leaping aside to avoid the return hammer swing, Ghaar’eth punched his fist spike into the golden warrior’s unprotected flank and was rewarded with a grunt of pain. The stormrider struck back, landing a blow against the Chaos champion’s shoulder guard that burned with the fury of lightning. Ghaar’eth recoiled, but shook off the pain to examine the rich wet fluid on the blade of his fist spike.

  ‘So you are flesh beneath all that gold. You bleed.’

  Breathing hard, the golden warrior charged, shouting, ‘Azyr!’ He led with his shield, a crack marking the boss where Ghaar’eth’s axe had bitten deep, but the Warson turned just before the charge hit. He kept turning – legs bunching, axe swinging – in one seamless motion until he felt a satisfying crunch of plate and then bone.

  ‘You must realise something, Stormrider…’ Ghaar’eth told the golden warrior, who tried to stagger away. He couldn’t go far. The hellblade was embedded in the golden warrior’s back and Ghaar’eth clenched the haft like a leash.

  A fount of blood erupted from the golden warrior’s mouth, and Ghaar’eth heard it spatter the inside the mask before it oozed down the warrior’s neck. The stormrider tried to reply, but fell to his knees instead.

  ‘These are Khorne’s lands,’ said Ghaar’eth, wrenching free his axe and eliciting a wail of agony from his foe, ‘and he has made me their keeper.’

  ‘Now…’ he added, taking the haft of his weapon in both hands and eyeing the golden warrior’s neck, ‘I shall take your–’

  A blinding flash of light stopped the oath from being fulfilled as a lightning bolt streaked into the turbulent heavens, taking corpse and trappings both.

  Ghaar’eth followed its path and saw that it led beyond the totems.

  ‘I smell war in this storm,’ he told his followers, who had gathered to witness his victory.

  Sheathing his axe, he placed one booted foot against the totem, took a firm grip and began to climb…

  The Lavasand writhed in agony as the maw-wyrm devoured the Bloodreavers who had slipped into its cavernous jaws and set the desert churning. They had sailed too close to the pull of the great beast, their oarsmen too slow and too weak to escape as the sand bled away into its mouth.

  Their fellow Bloodbound laughed uproariously at this misfortune, the bellows of the Bloodwrought hiding their fear.

  The maw-wyrm was a giant gullet, a pulsing, burning maelstrom that sucked in the hot sand only to belch it forth again in towering spumes of iridescent fire.

  Not only a beast, though – it was also a gate into another place, another realm. Ever since he had climbed the totem and left the dark canyons of the Gargantua Ridge to emerge in the fiery hells of the Lavasands, Ghaar’eth knew the opportunities such a crossing could grant.

  Followers, skulls, the favour of the Blood God.

  A great many warriors had joined his warhost since he had defeated the stormrider and ascended the totems without fear or hesitation, but like Khorne, his yearning for blood and power were never sated. He wanted more.

  Ghaar’eth rode the rust-metal hellbarge with the arrogance of a king, one foot on the deck and the other on its bladed prow. Keen to avoid the same fate as their eaten comrades, the oarsmen drove the ironclad hard, trusting to the blood-furnace at its heart to fuel the bone paddles at its aft and further their efforts at evasion.

  They had to kill it before they could pass through it, this much Ghaar’eth had garnered since the fight had begun. Killing was in his marrow. It was like breath to one such as he, as his appearance would attest. Ghaar’eth’s armour, a gift from his lord Khorne, glinted in the red glow of the cinder-sun, and he brandished a cleaving-spear in one hand.

  ‘Here,’ he bellowed to the throng of warriors at his command, ‘see how the beast is tamed!’

  As he threw the spear, shearing off one of the maw-wyrm’s tusks, he noticed a faint speck on the horizon.

  A storm front.

  ‘Other warriors seek to keep us from our prize, Skarku,’ he muttered to the skull lashed to his belt. Skarku’ s portents had been useful, his challenge to Warson’s rule less so. None would challenge him and live. He had sworn it to Khorne.

  Eyes narrowing, Ghaar’eth walked to the very end of the prow, the hot and foetid breath of the maw-wyrm washing over him as the hellbarge circled the pit of flame. Another eruption threw fire and ash, some of it burning Warson’s armour, but he brushed it away as if it were a minor irritant. His attention was on the horizon. In the seconds that had passed, the speck had grown.

  Somehow, it had become a cohort of winged warriors, blazing with the brilliance of a gilded sun. They came fast, armed with javelins. The one who led them carried a crackling trident. Ghaar’eth’s eyes narrowed as he recognized the leader, despite his unfamiliar shape.

  His curse almost caught in his mouth, emitted as a breathless rasp.

  ‘Stormrider…’

  Turning to his skullgrinder, he soon found his rage again. ‘Yaargen – bring them down!’

  Lightning struck six times as the winged ones swooped upon the hellbarge, clutching spears of celestial fury. Five of Ghaar’eth’s blood warriors died instantly with those heavenly shafts impaling their bodies.

  Only Yaargen survived, evading the blow before hurling his chained anvil. He struck one of the winged ones in the back, who crumpled and fell like a blazing comet. The warrior hit the deck of the hellbarge, but crackled back into the ether before any Khornate knives could fall upon him.

  Ghaar’eth sprang off the prow and ran to the other side of the deck as the ship turned in the maelstrom and the winged warriors followed, eager to avenge their fallen comrade.

  Yaargen reeled in his anvil, the metal steaming from the sheer heat of the Lavasands, and began to swing once more. He finished three arcs before a trident came screaming from the blood-red sky and ended his wrathful bellowing. Ghaar’eth called out to the skullgrinder’s killer.

  ‘Stormrider!’ he said. ‘It is you, isn’t it? Khorne has seen fit to send you to die by my blade once more.’

  ‘I am reforged,’ said the stormrider in reply, his lightning wings holding him level so he could look down upon Warson, ‘by Sigmar. It is by his hand that you and I meet again.’

  Ghaar’eth laughed. So amusing, so arrogant, this golden one.

  ‘Then come, Stormrider,’ he said, stepping back and gesturing to the deck, ‘or will you fight me from the skies like a coward?’

  A rivulet of power that might have been anger flared behind the eyeslits of the stormrider’s mask. He was momentarily distracted, having strayed too close to the maw-wyrm, and had to fly swiftly to avoid a pillar of flame spewed from the beast’s gullet. He was still turning when Ghaar’eth flung his cleaving-spear. Hurled with almost daemonic strength by an arm encased in blood-red metal, it pierced the stormrider and tore him open.

  As the golden warrior wheeled erratically towards the gaping maw-wyrm, streaming blood and light, Ghaar’eth called out to him again.

  ‘Return to your feckless god, Stormrider.’

  He watched as the dying warrior plummeted into the maw-wyrm’s gullet and smiled as the lightning burst of the stormrider’s death sparked violently beneath the sands. Smoke rose in a pall from the beast, its fiery undulations having now ceased.

  The maw-wyrm was dead and the gate to another realm was Warson’s. It didn’t matter where it led, only that his crusade of slaughter could go on.

  ‘Row!’ he roared to the reaver oarsmen. ‘Take us down into the belly of the beast where the unending favour of Khorne awaits!’

  Though the cold nullified most of the stench of the corpse-titans, it could not rob the air of its sulphurous reek.

  Ghaar’eth snarled behind the daemon-mask of his war-helm, ignoring the hissed invectives of the creature bound within it. They only served to irritate the beast upon whose back he now rode, an armoured brute of blood and brass – another gift from Khorne.

  Acid snow stung the few places where his bare flesh lay exposed to the elements. It hissed and scored his new blood-wrought armour, which was already notched from days of battle. The Corpulents were slain, rotting in the stinging tundra of this icy waste as he and his vast army marched across the backs of the corpse-titans. If these ur-gargants had ever lived, there was no sign of awareness in them now, other than their slow moaning tread as they crawled endlessly across the landscape through the shawls of snow. At the end of this journey lay another realm. Ghaar’eth had but to ride upon their backs to reach it.

  ‘Glory to Khorne…’ he murmured, exulting in his latest triumph, until he saw the causeway…

  The route of the corpse-titans took them into a ravine across which lay an ice bridge, high and wide enough for them to pass beneath. An army of golden warriors stood upon the span, weapons held fast in their gauntlets, so still and apparently unyielding that for a brief moment he thought they might be statues. The illusion would have held were it not for the clarion of a trumpet.

  Ghaar’eth roared as he realised the golden paladins were about to leap down in attack. His raised his axe high, bellowing to his men. ‘Turn this ice crimson and lay your offerings at the feet of the Brass Throne!’

  Suddenly, the backs of the corpse-titans became undulant battlegrounds as the golden warriors descended. A thunderous cacophony shook the wretched shells of the ur-gargants, resonating through scabrous flesh and bone as the paladins landed and immediately formed up into ranks.

  Spurring his beast, Ghaar’eth charged into the enemy’s ranks, his Bloodwrought hordes hard on his heels. A paladin died when he was gored by the Juggernaut’s brass horn. The horn punched through the warrior’s back with such violence it sent a spray of blood across the masks of his fellows directly behind him. With a snarl, Ghaar’eth cut the golden paladin’s head from his shoulders just before the lightning took him.

  He rode on, heedless of the actinic fury roiling around him, and drove a second paladin under his beast’s ironshod hooves. As the squeal of crushed and yielding metal sounded over the battle din, Ghaar’eth’s eye was drawn to a figure with an arcing blue helmet plume and a lightning-forked facemask.

  Ghaar’eth’s heart stopped as he realised who it was through the bloody melee.

  ‘Impossible…’ he breathed, as the ice in his veins melted into boiling wrath. ‘Impossible!’ he roared.

  It could not be.

  ‘Stormrider…’

  A mighty hammer, as long as he was tall, crackled in the paladin’s fist. He had already taken a fearsome toll upon the army of the Bloodwrought, and now, he turned his steely attention to its leader.

  ‘I see you, despoiler,’ he uttered with a voice as deep and resonant as a thunderhead. ‘You shall never be rid of me.’

  He seemed colder now, the warrior of gold, as if an avatar of lightning were encased in that armour and not a man at all.

  ‘Not a man…’ breathed Ghaar’eth. ‘No man could live…’ He thrust his axe skyward, an imprecation to his wrathful lord. ‘Be thee immortal or some conjuring of the hated Changer, I shall have thy head, Stormrider!’

  Swinging his axe in a wide, sweeping arc, Ghaar’eth spurred his beast through the battle towards his nemesis. None could impede him, and paladins and Bloodwrought both fell to his blade or his steed if they came into his path.

  The clash, when it came, shook the ice scabs from the corpse-titan’s back where they fought.

  Stormrider swung his lightning hammer, and where it met the haft of Ghaar’eth’s own hellforged blade, a storm was unleashed that turned the air white. Frenzied abandon met implacable vengeance as Khornate warlord and celestial paladin fought each other to an impasse. A cordon of the dead grew around them as their comrades sought to intervene but were destroyed. Bloodwrought warriors killed by the paladin piled so high they formed a wall of the slain, whereas a blackened ring of scorched flesh remained where Ghaar’eth had sent the paladin’s allies back to the heavens.

  Soon, none dared the wrath of either fighter and they were left to duel between themselves.

  Discarding all notion of defence, Ghaar’eth drew deep of his lord’s wrath and smashed his axe against the paladin’s upraised hammer haft.

  ‘Stormrider…’ he spat like a curse, breathless with exertion, ‘why… won’t you… die!’

 

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