Death comes for us all, but as one Khorne worshipper discovers, that can present additional problems when in the Realm of Death…
The soldiers made their stand amidst the menhirs that crowned the Black Ridge. These ancient monoliths of pockmarked obsidian had witnessed all manner of bloodshed and butchery ever since some unremembered Shyishan civilisation carved them millennia ago. Now they would play host to another slaughter.
The rocks formed a sturdy cage that would make any headlong assault costly. But they were located on the edge of a sheer cliff face, and the sole route down from the ridge was through Garak Tar and his sworn axes.
‘None escape,’ shouted Garak, and his men formed a rough semicircle, cutting off any possible angle of retreat. Like wolves sensing blood, the warriors of the Dark Gods closed in.
Muskets cracked, filling the night with flashes and gouts of white smoke. Voices joined in a stubborn attempt at a Sigmarite battle-hymn. But this night was not for the faithful. The song petered out as soon as Garak’s men unleashed their own war cries and charged headlong up the slope. Bullets cut down some, but no more than half a dozen fell before the rest were in amongst the stones, forcing their way past shields and wavering blades. Then came the sharp snap of axes hewing through bone and the screams of the maimed and the dying.
Garak Tar caught his foe’s sword in one hand, grinning maniacally as the edge sheared open his palm but clinging on regardless. The man tugged and swore, eyes huge with panic. Garak smashed an axe through his forehead with a wet thud then kicked the twitching corpse away, already searching for his next victim.
There were hardly two score Steelhelms left now, faces pale and terrified as they clustered to await their end. Garak snorted derisively. Were these soft Sigmar worshippers so craven that they could not face their slaughter without mewling and trembling? Take away their guns and cannons and they were such pitiful things. How had they ever dared stake a claim to the realms?
He let himself go to the battle fury, succumbing to the gushing river of crimson that coursed through his brain. His world turned red. Time became meaningless. His axe rose and fell again and again. Soon his hair was matted with hot blood and his boots crunched on the broken bodies of the fallen.
The stones of Black Ridge stood silent witness. Amidst the carnage, neither Sigmarite nor Chaos-sworn saw the runes etched across them glow, awakened for the first time in many long years.
When the madness finally lifted from Garak Tar and the last of the Sigmarites had been hacked to pieces, he walked the field of corpses. He kicked irritably at the remains of those he had slain. None had provided a great challenge. For all their firepower and their stubborn faith, these were hardly the so-called God-King’s finest.
‘I must find a worthy triumph somewhere in this wretched land,’ he muttered.
The skies – already bruised by streaks of muddy-red cloud – turned dark and heavy. At first, Garak thought it to be some sign of the Dark Gods’ favour. But in fury and fervour alike, the power of Chaos burned hot. This scarlet sky brought instead a bone-deep chill that caused the hairs on his arms to stand up.
Shadows crept along the walls – twisted, clawed things. When the wind blew through the standing stones, for a moment, it sounded like laughter.
‘Do you know what this place is, fiend?’
Garak spun, axe already held up high to strike. He squinted, searching amidst the human wreckage for the source of those words. His gaze came to rest upon an old grey-haired figure, lying slumped amongst a tangle of headless comrades. The man’s face was pallid and wracked with agony. A skinning knife had been thrust into his belly: a slow but certainly mortal wound.
Garak smiled, striding across to the stricken Freeguilder. His warriors prowled behind him, their armour splattered with blood and draped with fresh trophies.
‘Know where you are?’ the man repeated.
‘No,’ Garak said. ‘Some meaningless hill. To me, one corpse-littered battlefield feels much like any other.’
‘Once, this place had a purpose,’ the man rasped. ‘Aye, and a dark one. We Stygxxians didn’t always worship the God-King, no, no, no. Long ago, some of our kind bowed our heads to… another.’
He raised a trembling finger and gestured to the stones that loomed overhead. For the first time, Garak realised that they formed a crude upturned hand.
‘The legends say that a tribe of killers lived up here on the Black Ridge. Harsh and cruel they were, and many enemies they made, like all such folk do. Eventually they made so many, they was hunted near to death. And so the last of them came here to this place, and here they gave their souls and their flesh to the master of Shyish, so that they’d have their vengeance against those that dared defy ’em. Wraiths, they became: murderous fiends of bloodshed.’
The man’s eyes fixed upon Garak, and there was no fear there. Only mad hatred.
‘Most of my kin know nothing of those ancient rites. But some of us remember. Some of us still fear Nagash enough to pay him due homage, behind the backs of our war-priests.’
The utterance of that cursed name seemed to summon another sudden flurry of cold winds. Despite his indifference to the old fool’s rambling nonsense, Garak found himself gripping his axe and scanning the darkness of the hill for signs of movement.
‘That is why I led you here, reaver,’ the wounded soldier continued. ‘You deserve to rot in the Oubliette for what you’ve done to me and mine. If Sigmar won’t hear my plea, perhaps Old Bones will.’
Garak laughed, and his men laughed with him. ‘You seek to frighten me with children’s tales? I, who have spilled the blood of kings and emperors and sown the fields with the skulls of my enemies? Battle is joy to me, you weakling coward.’
‘This isn't a battle. This is vengeance. Nagash akh-to hizzar.’
And with those final hissed words, the man seized the shard of metal in his gut and tugged it loose. Blood spurted forth in an arcing jet. The old soldier gasped, eyes bulging with agony. Garak planted a boot on his chest and drew his skinning knife. He looked around theatrically, to the amusement of the Flayed.
‘After that speech, I expected more,’ he said, and they laughed heartily.
He lowered the blade to the man’s temple, ready to slide it beneath the skin. As soon as the razor-sharp tip pierced flesh, a great fountain of blood burst forth, flooding across Garak’s arm in a scarlet tide. The soldier convulsed, screaming, as more crimson liquid poured from his mouth and nose. Through it all, those hateful eyes remained fixed upon Garak’s, and though they were stricken and bloodshot, he saw within them a glimmer of triumphant spite.
Darkness gathered over the tor like a funeral shroud. The wind picked up, howling incessantly, stirring the branches of the trees into a frenzy. Garak felt the chill bite into him, as merciless as the deepest winter. His fingers ached, the tips beginning to turn blue. He could no longer feel the pitted leather wrappings of his axe’s haft.
‘What trick is this?’ Garak growled.
Gore gushed up from the earth, sloshing around the ankles of the Chaos warband. These men and women were no strangers to such visceral sights; indeed, their brutish lives were defined by the infliction of suffering, mutilation and slaughter. Yet even they flinched and retreated as the blood spread, turning the hilltop into a bubbling, scarlet morass.
The surface of the goreflood rippled, and shapes rose from within: faceless, cowled things, keening with an inhuman blend of rage and grief. Chains clattered wetly, clogged by thickening blood. Bladed limbs clashed with a dull chime.
Garak had charged lines of roaring cannons without blinking. He had once leapt upon a gargant’s back and hacked the brute’s head from its shoulders, laughing as the dying creature tried to pry him loose. He had killed more beasts and mortals than he could recall. And yet, at the sight of these spectral horrors, an unnatural, dreamlike fear seized him. For the first time in a thousand bloody skirmishes, he hesitated.
‘Back, spirits!’ shouted one warrior, striding towards the crimson wraiths and swinging his cleaver blade.
The weapon passed right through the slick robes of the nearest gheist without result. The horror moved with impossible speed. Its own blade ripped through the Chaos Warrior’s guts and tore up through him in a vertical slice. As the man toppled, his killer’s hollow gaze snapped upon Garak. It screeched: an ear-splitting scream of insane fury, swiftly taken up by more cloaked figures as they rose from the steaming crimson pool. Scythe-armed and skull-faced, gore-slick hair streaming behind them, they lurched towards their prey. The nearest of Garak’s men were ripped to shreds, flayed alive by whirling blades.
Even faced with such a terrible sight, the warriors of the Dark Gods did not break. These were men and women carved from hard stone, survivors of atrocities beyond count. They bellowed their oaths and met the ghostly onslaught, and when their axes bit into spectral matter, some found their mark. Spirits exploded in bursts of boiling crimson. Others juddered and howled as whatever terrible animus held them together was shattered. Garak growled away his own fear and lashed his axe at an onrushing figure, feeling the tactile crunch as the weapon struck… something and sent the thing reeling.
But it was not enough to banish a scattering of the blood-dripping nightmares, not when scores more were spilling from between the ritual stones. The red mass enclosed the armoured warriors in a whirling cage, their screaming voices joined in an insane chorus.
Above the cacophony, Garak could still hear the old man’s wheezing laughter, laced with triumph. Then he saw him. Somehow the man was walking, staggering through the nightmarish cloud of wraiths with blood still spewing from his wounds. His eyes bored into Garak. There seemed nothing human in them any longer, save a malignant pleasure.
‘Join me,’ the man croaked, extending a hand. ‘Join me and be damned, reaver. All are one in Nagash.’
Gheists descended upon him like crows falling upon a corpse. They bore him down, and the old man sank beneath the surface of the blood pool, laughing until the very last.
Panic seized Garak. He feared no honest, warrior’s death. But this was different. It was unnatural, and the sight of the wounded soldier’s nightmarish demise filled him with such terror that he turned and fled, trying to carve a path through the swirling wall of gheists to freedom. Claws raked his arms, tearing loose strips of flesh. Something pierced his right eye, and one half of his vision went pitch dark.
Still he struggled. For a moment, he glimpsed the clear night sky through the spectral mass. He saw the ragged path leading down from the tor, a route back to sanity. He reached for it, desperately. Then the chains slipped around his throat.
He was dragged from his feet, choking and struggling. Cold metal constricted with the strength of a coiling serpent, squeezing his windpipe. He gasped for air that would not come. Fleshless faces screamed at him. He saw what remained of his warriors: each flensed to the bone or sliced into quivering lumps of meat.
For him, it seemed there would be a different fate. He twisted, trying to see what manner of fiend had ensnared him. His captor was a spectre of chains and sopping crimson robes. Torturous implements dangled from the wooden frame it carried on its back. It had him in its grasp, and try as he might, he could not break loose from those rusting links of iron. Infernal cold sapped the strength from Garak’s arms, and each time he struggled, he felt weaker. His axe slipped from his grasp. The chained thing gave a rattling crack that might have been a laugh. It drew him in like an angler, dragging Garak towards the bloody pool from which it had emerged.
He prayed then. Not only to the Dark Gods but to any deities that might glance upon his damned soul and grant him mercy. His final plea was to Nagash. To Old Bones himself, he sent a desperate, silent plea for clemency.
But there would be no pity this night on the Black Ridge.
Garak felt the chill waters of the gore-pool engulf him, gushing into his eyes and down his throat. His heart ceased beating, skewered by terror and frozen by the icy grasp of the chains that now held him fast. But there was to be no release, no sudden, blissful slide into oblivion. Only pain and terror, stretching ever onwards. An infinity of agonies.
For Garak Tar, this was only the beginning of his torment.
Battletome: Nighthaunt is available to pre-order right now, alongside the new Lord Vitriolic, Spearhead, dice and warscroll cards.
