Free fateful fiction! Follow Kairos Fateweaver as he puts into action a plan many years in the making that could spell doom for the Lumineth Realm-lords.
Now.
Reality burns and runs like hot wax as the daemon Kairos Fateweaver unleashes the measure of his Tzeentch-given power. The crystalline Hyshian desert becomes a boiling mire of iridescent ooze, into which aelven pikemen sink and scream.
Here, gravity is reversed, and a phalanx of grim-faced sentinels plunge skywards, spinning end over end. There, an aelven noble collapses to his knees, vomiting a globule of molten silver. The shapeless mass transforms into a gauntlet and seizes the stricken aelf by the throat, throttling the life from him.
Half a warhost is annihilated in the blink of an eye.
But the aelves of Hysh are not governed by fear. Forth comes a great diamond squadron of Lumineth riders, helms gleaming even beneath the glowering Chamonic sky. They drive straight for the first mass of gambolling daemons, somehow weaving through a storm of fire and sorcery intact, couching their lances in the moments before impact.
The Fateweaver’s twin heads clack and chatter as he watches his infernal footsoldiers driven into the dirt, their lumpen bodies bursting apart in a spray of flames and lurid colours.
Some of the aelves fall, turned to writhing torches. More ride on, gaining momentum as they gallop towards the Fateweaver.
The eyes of the Vanari riders are bright with hatred. At their head is a champion with a crested helm fashioned in the image of a great eagle. He is tall, this one, and lithe in the way of all aelves. Authority seeps from his every pore. On his silken tabard is embroidered a waxing moon, surrounded by a trio of bright stars. The sight triggers a deeply ingrained memory.
Something about that one. Something familiar, says Kairos’s left head, able to gaze through the great span of history.
Yes, says the other head, this one ‘blessed’ with the power to envisage all possible futures. I see the conjunction of fates gathering around him. He has value, but why?
A sliver of unease pierces the Fateweaver’s gut. Not fear of death. The destruction of his physical form has never troubled Kairos. He is the Change God’s favoured servant and beyond such petty concerns.
But failure? To risk Tzeentch’s ultimate displeasure? Even the mightiest daemon must dread that. Uncertainty seizes hold; he cannot grasp the significance of this moment in time. It sits uneasily at the centre of his temporal understanding, between what will be and what once was. Kairos’s most egregious failing has ever been to bridge that chasm of perception. Yet Tzeentch sent him to this sorcery-ravaged place to make war upon the Lumineth for a reason. Somewhere within his labyrinthine mind lie the answers Kairos needs.
The eyes of the leftmost head, the one who can gaze through the span of history and know its every secret, glaze over white. The Fateweaver’s consciousness unmoors from the present, and the world around him turns blurry and indistinct, like paint running in the rain.
Then.
Beyond the crystalline windows of Tor Ector, the sky burned. Lancing bolts of magic rained from the heavens, shattering the delicate minarets and glass balconies of the most beautiful citadel in Ymetrica.
Two aelves raced along a winding corridor of the great spire of Ecthis, their faces pale and haunted. Both shared features: flaxen hair and ice-white eyes. The merest hint of a crease beneath the leading aelf’s eyes revealed him as the elder of the pair.
‘Vertilion has done it,’ this senior hissed. ‘That mad creature. He plans to annihilate us all, in retribution for imagined slights.’
‘Father,’ the second aelf said. ‘What ca–’
‘Be silent and follow, Celion.’
There was another being present at this place, at this time. It gazed through the skin of reality, detached from the physical realm yet greedily drinking in every memory, every sight and every uttered secret. Both aelves could feel the wrongness in the air, a sensation emanating from the intruder’s presence. In their panic, they attributed it to the looming prospect of an arcane civil war that threatened to engulf their entire world.
This was an understandable mistake, for the Spirefall – the great aelven calamity – would do exactly that. That conflict would shortly claim the life of one of them and condemn the other to an existence riven by guilt and sorrow.
The passage culminated in a sealed door of gleaming aetherquartz, studded with gems and Hyshian runic symbols.
‘Beyond this door lies the heliotropic arsenal of House Ecthillar,’ said the older aelf. ‘Every device, every weapon within was created to safeguard not only the future of our own dynasty but the prosperity of Ymetrica itself.’
The watcher beyond the veil could not conceal a thrilling flush of victory. Both aelves sensed this intruding emotion, and for a moment, their eyes flicked about the apparently empty corridor. Then there was a terrible tremor that staggered them, sending spider-webbing cracks rippling across the marble walls.
‘I understand, father,’ said the youth Celion.
‘You do not!’ the elder barks, and his hands lashed out to seize those of his son in a vice-like grip. ‘This war has been brewing for decades, and it will soon stretch beyond the borders of Tor Ector. It will be fuelled by reckless and arrogant souls, tyrants who would rather see Hysh consumed in fire than admit to their hubris.’
‘What can be done?’
‘It will be down to ones such as you and I to guide our kin through this catastrophe. We must act without fear, Celion. Be ruthless, if necessary. The devices in this armoury possess the power to annihilate entire kingdoms. I trust only two souls to wield such power responsibly. You and I.’
‘Father, I–’
‘There is no time for doubt. Only one who shares my blood can break the seals that guard this chamber.’
He seized and twisted his son’s arm so that the palm faced up. One long finger glowing with eldritch power, he branded a sigil into the flesh, searing it with heat and light. Celion hissed in agony, but he did not pull away. When his father finished, the aelf’s forearm was criss-crossed by delicate symbols in Hyshian script. At the centre of these hung the crescent moon and three stars – the sigil of House Ecthillar.
The older aelf held up his own arm and gestured to the door, where the same glowing glyphs were replicated in the form of aetherquartz gems and loops of engraved sunmetal.
The unseen watcher observed this ritual with rapt attention,
Both aelves froze upon sensing again that malignant presence. Celion even drew a slender dagger. For a moment, he imagined that he glimpsed the ghostly outline of a looming monster, its wings limned by sorcerous flames and its eyes – its four eyes – peering at him hungrily from some place far beyond reality.
Not one breath later, the heliothermic energy beam of a city-sized aether-lance array smashed through the arcane wards of Tor Ector, turning Celion’s father to ash and punching a hole a dozen feet in diameter into the tower’s crystalline wall. The force of the blast was such that Celion was hurled head over heels, landing hard enough to shatter one leg and crack his skull in three places.
Miraculously, Celion would survive these wounds. Fate is ever unpredictable. To most, at least.
Now.
Contemporality comes rushing back, and the Fateweaver’s eyes snap open. Not a second has passed, but the aelven riders are swift as the wind, their leader bearing down upon the Lord of Change with lance couched.
The moon-marked princeling!
This one has something that we need, something we have long forgotten. We must take it.
Hesitation has denied Kairos the chance to obliterate his attackers at a safe distance. His conjuration – a sweeping gust of razor-sharp crystal daggers – eviscerates a third of the charging horse-riders, but the rest wheel their steeds with astonishing grace, avoiding the worst of the hail.
Before he can weave a second spell, they are on him. The leader’s lance descends, its tip a gleaming sun-spot that bores into the daemon’s eyes, causing him to flinch in agony.
The polearm pierces the Fateweaver’s chest and punches on through meat and bone, a livid bolt of agony. Kairos staggers, driven to his haunches. The aelven lord drops his cumbersome weapon and turns his steed about for another charge, now with a sabre in hand.
Kairos’s two heads scream with one hateful voice, thoughts overlapping.
No! This reign must not end. Not yet.
Burn them! Twist their flesh.
Fiery serpents spill from the Fateweaver's talons, and an incoming rider bursts into flame, toppling from his horse. Another lance rips into the daemon’s right wing, shredding membrane and spilling feathers. Screeching in pain now, Kairos gathers motes of arcana with which to shape another spell.
But the magic dies on his tongue as the aelf-lord with the eagle helm and the moon tabard crashes into him once more. A sword plunges into Kairos’s flank, and he feels his connection to the physical realm begin to crumble like a rope bridge in a hurricane. Visions flood past the Fateweaver’s eyes, and his avian form convulses, hacking up oily bile.
The hour is lost. But fate is inexorable.
The aelf-lord comes in for the killing blow, raising his sword in a reverse grip to skewer Kairos’s right skull.
The split entity that is Kairos focuses on one last spell. There is a flash of light and a sudden pulse of energy that rocks the rider in his saddle – a meagre little cantrip, in all honesty, hardly befitting one of Tzeentch’s favoured sorcerers.
Yet the aelf is stunned long enough for Kairos’s left head – the prophet – to dart out, seizing and severing the warrior’s forearm in one shearing bite. The limb spins into the air, and the Fateweaver snatches it in his beak, swallowing it with a peristaltic convulsion of his gizzard. The aelf-lord growls and slumps in his saddle, the white mane of his steed stained blood-red.
Kairos has time for one triumphant shriek of laughter before the lances of three more aelven riders plunge into his innards, and the realm of mortals disappears in a fading, kaleidoscopic whirl of colours and sensations.
Soon.
As the screams and cries of alarm begin to echo through the halls, Celion Ecthillar will leap from the chair in his study, drawing his longsword. The one-armed Lord-Regent of Ymetrica will march to meet this disturbance without fear, his stride swift and certain.
And yet, a worm of uncertainty will wriggle into his heart, for there should be no disturbance at all here at the heart of Tor Ector, rebuilt in all its former glory after the horrors of the Spirefall.
Two masked killers will await the Lord-Regent as he exits his quarters at the summit of the spire. He will cut down both with an economic thrust and slash of his blade, barely slowing.
‘Who are you?’ he will ask one of his dying opponents as the man convulses and shudders. ‘How did you breach these walls?’
‘He guided us,’ the man will mutter. ‘The Ineffable One. He knows your mind, aelfling. He knows your shame, and that of your ancestors.’
Shame. That word will trigger something in Celion’s mind. Memories of a tragedy from his youth, still as raw as ever. A dreadful suspicion will descend as his sword finishes the dying trespasser.
Celion’s missing hand will begin to pulse with waves of agony, driving him to his knees. By this time, it will have been more than a century since that fateful battle against the Change God’s daemonic flocks. The phantom limb has haunted him ever since, a constant and unpleasant reminder of his mortal fragility.
Usually, the pain has been manageable. Only now it will become excruciating, as if – somewhere far away – someone is plunging his severed hand into a vat of boiling oil, and despite the distance, he can feel the full intensity of every screaming nerve.
The pain will draw him like a leash. It will guide him to the hidden chamber of House Ecthillar, into which no living being has entered for more than five centuries. Now the entrance to this vault – the secret shame of his dynasty, sealed and forgotten – will be littered with the corpses of Vanari warriors, their bodies smouldering and melting in the afterglow of powerful sorcery.
There shall stand the twin-headed daemon from his dreams and his memories, eyes bright with triumph, surrounded by kneeling supplicants in avian war-masks.
‘My master desires that which lies beyond these doors,’ the daemon will rasp. ‘Naught but crude toys of aelven make, but enough – if cleverly deployed – to reignite the old feuds between your people.’
‘No aelf of Hysh will ever raise arms against kin again.’
The two heads will tilt mockingly. ‘No?’
Celion will pivot his blade into a reverse grip, the glittering point aimed at his heart.
‘Did you think I would allow this? Without me, you cannot enter. I will die before I let you and your filth take a single step across that threshold. I will–’
But Celion’s defiance will fall on deaf ears. The daemon’s left head will begin to convulse, lurching up and down. Its maw will open to disgorge a pallid lump of flesh, half-dissolved by acid juices. An aelven limb. Celion will cry out and fall to his knees, instinctively grasping with his good hand for an arm that is not there. His sword will clatter to the floor.
‘There is magic in your veins,’ the daemon will say, spittle drooling from its beak. ‘That power is both the key and the lock. While you live, I may plunder what I wish. And I do not give you leave to die. Not yet.’
Clutching its grotesque trophy, the daemon will trace the same glowing glyph-marks that it witnessed centuries before. Celion can do naught but stare in horror, feeling the phantom sensations in his absent fingers as they brush across the Hyshian runes yet unable to exert any control.
The vault of Tor Ector will yawn open.
Celion will scream in helpless rage and charge the Fateweaver. A mere gesture from the daemon lord will stop him in his tracks – the aelf paralysed by a binding spell channelled through his own missing limb.
Once more the shameful secrets of the Ocari Dara will be unleashed upon Hysh, this time not by the aelves responsible for creating them but by the servants of Kairos Fateweaver.
Celion will survive just long enough to see the final damnation of House Ecthillar before being consumed in the fires of his dynasty’s hubris.
Such is fate.
Bend fate to your will with the magical power of the Argent Shards, and watch as the Mortal Realms twist into hellish madness and reality is reshaped in the warped image of Tzeentch.
