Chronicles of Ruin – The Red God

Khorne cares not from where the blood flows, as we discover in the latest edition in the Chronicles of Ruin series.

You are born on the eighth day of Golden Harvests, under burning acid rains. In a filthy alley, your mother groans and gasps. Her grime-encrusted nails cut into the hands of the physicians attending her.

Your mother will live, but by a narrow, messy margin. Blood drips into your closed eyes and across your raw, aching flesh. As you are lifted towards the storm in benediction, you do the only thing you can in retaliation.

You scream.

For eight years, you grow amongst the folk of Scant. Set on the southern coasts of the Brimstone Peninsula, the strongpoint is unlovely, lashed by the hissing waters of Vitriolus Reach. On the wildest days, you like to climb the sea barrier to watch the frenzied waves. Otherwise, you take instruction from the lay priests or help your mother and the other Dredgers pick the lava fields for fire opals and phoenix stones. Draining work, and dull, numbing the arms and the mind.

Cyrian accosts you while returning home one day. Cyrian, Azyrite son of Scant’s imports chief. Most blue-bloods aren’t so bad, but he thinks his heritage makes him something. He and his friends spit the usual insults: ‘ashfeet’, ‘soot-dragger’, ‘low-realmer’. You ignore him. Matron Selva always preaches Sigmar’s patience.

Something hits the back of your knee, pitching you into mud. As you pick yourself up, you hear them approach, laughing. You try to remember the maxims of mercy, to show Sigmar’s love for humanity.

‘The soldiers say your da’ went mad,’ Cyrian says. ‘The war broke him, so he just wandered into the wastes.’

Then, another voice. Perhaps it’s Sigmar’s.

Hit him.

So you stand up. And you do.

Your arms flail with a child’s wild, earnest anger. You strike faces. Break noses. Dislodge teeth. You hurl Cyrian to the ground and kick his wailing face.

You do it again.

Again.

Powerful hands haul you back, as Cyrian and his friends run. Grunting, Drobo Vragsson hauls you to his smithy. The duardin is Azyrite too, but he’s always been kind. He cleans you up, smooths things over with the watch. He only offers you some advice: a grudge is a grudge, but it must be handled lawfully. ‘That’s what civilisation is, lad.’

They’d have hit you first, the inner voice says. They started it. Now they won’t hurt you again. That’s what life is.

You like that better.

The next decade is cruel. Dredgers die meaninglessly, caught in lava flows or slain by raiders. Slowly, you grow numb to the deaths, though not to the resentment they bring. Scant’s conclave refuses to spare any guards. Any excess manpower is used to protect the Collegiate mages studying the arcane stones your friends recover at the cost of their lives. You ask one magister, when you can corner him, why they don’t help more directly. He says you do not understand the importance of their work.

He doesn’t look up from his book as he speaks.

Your growing cynicism sparks arguments with your mother, right until the ashen lung sees her wheeze herself inside-out. Folk offer sympathy. You don’t want sympathy. Sympathy is as worthless as misery. You want it to be like when you beat Cyrian. You want it to be simple again.

Perhaps that’s why you join Scant’s Freeguild. Discipline is tight as it can be on the frontiers, but it’s purposeful. You discover a talent for the sword that makes you a totem for your unit. Marat penned a bawdy ballad on the subject. For the first time, you’re really contributing. Their regard is… meaningful.

You’re deployed on the walls when the warband attacks. The marauders’ armour is the red of scabbed gore. Fusil shot eviscerates many, yet they open their arms as if to welcome it. Their howling carries over blackpowder cracks.

‘Blood for the…’

You can’t make it out. But it sounds like a chant. A promise.

Impossibly, some reach the wall, scaling crude bone ladders. The one that rises before you clutches a meat axe in one hand, a skinning knife in the other. You catch her axe on your shield, splinters flying. Desperately, you try deflecting her dagger-thrusts. Doctrine dictates your comrades reinforce you, but they can’t. Your people are being slaughtered.

You need strength. Strength to help. Strength to win. Strength to crush her damned skull. You need it. You will, you plead to the uncaring sky, do anything for it.

It seizes you suddenly: decisive, furious instinct. Teeth grit, you throw your weight behind your shield. It crunches into her face as your sword finds her gut. Blood spews from your enemy’s mouth. She topples. You follow, taking your shield two-handed to slam it into her skull, twice, thrice, red, bone.

Momentum shifts. Your company takes the initiative, hurling the enemy back. Only a few pause to watch you in quiet horror.

But you won, muses that comforting inner voice. What are they staring at? This is what war is.

You won. Isn’t that enough?

Ash scalds your skin. Hunger twists your gut. Your legs throb with lacerations as you stagger through the night.

You hadn’t been out of balance before entering the ring. It hadn’t even been the first time you’d fought – far from it. Soon after your display on the wall, others in the regiment had approached you, offering entrance into their quiet martial society. Nothing proscribed. Not for officers’ eyes, but no cult. Just a group dedicated to keeping skills sharp while blowing off steam via honest combat. Real blades, of course. It was based on faith; before each bout, prayers were spoken to Sigmar the Warrior.

At least in theory. You’d always prayed to your red god. Maybe it is Sigmar. You’d stopped thinking about it.

The Conclave tore down the hovel you grew up in to build a munitions store today. Maybe that’s where the fury had come from. Fights went to first blood, and sure enough, that blood came when your knife punched out the back of Marat’s mouth. His eyes stayed wide with shock as he slid off the blade and crumpled.

Maybe your stunned compatriots would have covered it up. You’ll never know. In the silence that followed, you’d fled. Out the pit in the tavern cellar and through Scant’s postern gate. Out into the wastes. Marat’s blood on your hands.

Then… Marat was a wastrel. He thought himself a poet, but he was mostly a self-absorbed slave to empty desires. You’d drunk with him, sparred with him, endured his ego and all the spiteful, slurred jibes he later, inevitably, described as jests – what else could you do? Everyone made excuses for poor Marat, abandoned on the frontier by his lady love. But he hadn’t been pitiable. He’d been pathetic. He’d been small.

You’d hated him.

The tribesmen in their scab-plate are hunched behind a boulder when you stumble into them. They tear into something dead with their teeth. You can’t see what. At the commotion, they jolt with feral swiftness, blades bared.

Kill them, your red god hisses. Kill them.

The strength comes again. It’s animalistic and desperate, but it banishes the pain. Wailing, you tackle the largest tribesmen. You still have your knife. With it, you hack open your opponent’s skull. Blood leaks. Cranial meat drifts in it.

No sooner is the deed done than the strength bleeds away. For a moment, all you can see is the ruin of a man beneath you. Your stomach lurches, your arm suddenly trembling with the urge to hurl the stained knife away.

A grunt steals your attention. The warriors are watching you. Perhaps they remember you.

‘Our lord should witness you,’ one growls as they move to seize you.

Where else, asks your muse, do you have to go?

The barbarians’ lord, a man known as Tarzkul, names himself a priest. His warband all worship their own red gods: beings with the heads of lions, with hair made of knives, with claws of brass. Your patron has no form. You’ve never associated it with the Ruinous Powers you were instructed to fear. But Tarzkul preaches that all deities of war – even those with civil faces – are facets of a single, crimson truth: the soul of slaughter that mortals name Khorne.

Khorne. It feels wrong, profane, yet speaking it sees your heart thump. It’s not like you’d had a choice. Not when they’d forced you to eat human flesh at the edge of an axe. Not when Tarzkul had carved his skull rune upon your brow. But then, was that so different to the cometsworn who proudly sported the twin-tailed mark?

‘Blood for the Blood God. Skulls for the Skull Throne.’ This, Tarzkul says, is Khorne’s only commandment. Not unlike the maxims Selva had you memorise, really.

You, along with the rest of a reaver pack, creep through ash-blasted trees towards the ruined tower. Skulls jangle from your belt. Behind the tumbled masonry ahead, Wildercorps rangers skulk.

There is a howl as the elite of Tarzkul’s warband charge from the woods. You spit, following them. Crossbow bolts pierce skulls or punch your fellows from their feet. Blood splashes across your scars. It’s invigorating. You vault the barricade, swinging your axe, bisecting a man’s skull, before sprinting towards the tower and kicking open its wooden door.

Inside, a fire gutters low. The wizard – the one you had questioned in Scant – stares up at you. He is lying on his back, chest ripped open. Tarzkul crouches over him, muttering a prayer to war, carving out organs. Gore slathers his arm to the elbow.

He’s stolen your kill.

Tarzkul senses you, turning as if to speak. You’re already on him, though, axe swinging. He’s skilled enough to deflect the blow. His counter almost pitches you to the ground. No artistry; all fists and blades. His dagger rakes your side as his teeth, sharpened and brass-coated, impale your shoulder. Pain floods you – and with it, raging power.

You grasp Tarzkul’s head. He looks at you, his snarl choked, as if he senses favour has shifted. You draw on every ounce of fury before twisting. Bone snaps. Just to make sure, you slam your forehead into the priest’s.

Then seven times more, until his skull breaks.

The haze fades as you drop the corpse. The strength, though: this time, it lingers. Grunting, you test your wounds. Rather than bleeding gashes, your fingers brush hard scales. A gift.

You shed blood, growls your red god. It doesn’t matter from where. Only that it flows.

Give me more.

So you do.

You no longer measure months or years. Only kills, and the gifts they bring. Opening the throat of Odro Thundermaw earns you armour that melds to your flesh. Burning the Pavonine Seer on her emerald pyre sees horns crown your skull. In the crypts of the Artestii dynasty, you win the axe Warbreed, which hungers for wounds as much as you do.

There are other kills too. Challengers, rivals, those who are simply there. Their names…

You don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Not all grant gifts, but Khorne approves nonetheless. With every skull, he roars in your mind. It reminds you that you have purpose.

Your followers name you Deathbringer. Or maybe ‘a’ Deathbringer, for the warband has swollen and there are many champions now. Lumbering mutants that weep and roar. Knights atop brass beasts. Even prowling, red-fleshed things from beyond the split veil of worlds. You barely heed them, any of them. You just want to kill again, to feel the strength, the acknowledgement. To remember that you’re alive.

The wave-lashed Sigmarite strongpoint before you seems a hovel. The rain falls red today, and the sky is bloody. You charge, undaunted, through the lead hail streaming from the defences, screaming your exultancy.

Ladders already brace the wall, corpses piled around their base. You climb, arm over arm. At the parapet appears a bearded duardin, arms marked with the distinctive burns of a smith. You drive Warbreed into his face and drag his twitching corpse over the wall. You’re up. Other gore-crusted warriors slaughter through Sigmarites. Men rush you as a pack. You rip your axe through three of them, break another with a headbutt, before snapping the neck of some cleric as she bellows.

A cry draws your attention. Some Marshal confronts you, clutching a greatsword. You loom over him, shadow falling long. His patrician Azyrite sneer, marred by an ill-healed nose, flickers. Is that… recognition?

His footwork is expert. Arcing silver fills your vision as he slices scars across your chest.

But it’s just pain. Just scars. That’s all life is. The only thing to do is rage against it.

Anger ignites like a thousand furnaces. It’s more complete than ever. Transcendent. Stone shudders as you bear down on your foe, world narrowed in the totality of rage. Nothing can harm you. You are a weapon, not a warrior: death, butchery, eternal. You catch his blade and shatter it. You catch his chest and shatter it. Before the Azyrite falls, you grab him by the arm, the ankle, and pull until he comes apart in an ichorous spray. His spine dangles like a twitching eel.

Your roar shakes the heavens. The settlement burns. Warriors spill into it, mad with murderlust, baying for Khorne’s bloody tithe. There’s still resistance. You’ll kill them. You’ll kill them all. You’ll stack their bones until—

The axe slams into your back. Cold flushes through you. Staggering, you tumble from the parapet. It’s a long way to the ground. You hit it all the same.

Above, the sky is still burning. You croak, writhing in the ruby pool spreading beneath you, reaching for your axe. A salivating warrior sprints past. Did they kill you? Did they, in their frenzy, even realise?

Vision dimming, you strain to hear your red god. Haven’t you pleased him? Haven’t you slain well?

But there’s nothing.

He cares not from where the blood flows. Only that it does.