Clint Werner - Blood for the Blood God

Against the champion, Sanya’s magic was incapable of working any harm. It was the Sul’s turn to know how it felt to be powerless.

With a moan of horror, Sanya felt her back press against the iron wall of the chamber. Backed into a corner by the Skulltaker, she made a desperate lunge for freedom. The champion’s mailed fist caught in her flying hair, jerking her brutally from her feet. The Skulltaker ignored the fallen woman, interested more in the object that had flown from her hand to rattle across the floor. He stalked after Enek Zjarr’s skull, reaching down to pick it up from the floor.

Sanya shrieked, desperate courage filling her. She leapt at the Skulltaker, jumping onto his back, trying to pull him away from the fallen head. The champion reached behind him, closing an iron fist around the woman’s shoulder.

In a single, savage motion, he ripped the sorceress from him, bringing her slamming down in an overhead manoeuvre. A sickening, spine-snapping crack sounded as Sanya struck the floor. Even in her agony, the crippled woman tried to push Enek Zjarr’s head from the Skulltaker’s armoured fingers.

“Stop him!” Sanya shrieked as the Skulltaker gained his last trophy. The monster turned away, marching back to the howling forge. The fleshy stump of daemonic malevolence was gyrating and pulsating with excitement, its teeth gnashing in hungry expectation.

“Stop him!” Sanya screamed again, her desperate eyes fixed on Dorgo. The warrior could feel only the faintest tug of her will against his, the witch’s pain befouling her powers.

“If he drops the skulls into the forge, it will be the end of us all!” Sanya cried. Her eyes went wild with terror as she saw Dorgo turn away from the scene, moving towards the doorway of the Black Altar. “It will be the end of the domain! The land and everyone in it will be consumed, absorbed into the realm of the Blood God! Nothing will survive! Think of your people!”

Dorgo turned back. He watched as the Skulltaker dropped the first of his trophies into the greedy maw of the forge. The entire structure shuddered, gripped by some titanic tremor. The howling of the daemon’s spirit rose to an almost deafening din, the blood-stink of the chamber intensifying into an overwhelming reek. Dorgo could feel things scrabbling at the corners of existence, clawing for entrance as old walls began to fracture. Something colossal, a presence gigantic beyond understanding, was looming down from some unimaginable height, casting its shadow of terror across the world.

Dorgo stared into Sanya’s fear-maddened eyes. There was no pity, no mercy in his gaze, only a cold satisfaction. There was enough sanity left in the sorceress to know despair when she saw the ice in Dorgo’s gaze.

“Everyone will die!” she pleaded again.

“Better death than a life of slavery under the Sul,” Dorgo snarled.

The Black Altar trembled again as the armoured fist of the Skulltaker dropped another trophy into the slavering mouth of the forge. Dorgo struggled to keep his footing. There was no hope, only a choice of evils, but it was his choice.

Dorgo made his way back out onto the Black Altar’s jaw, deaf to Sanya’s wailing screams. He braced himself as the structure shook again, as pillars of black flame leapt up from the pit. He moved out along the jawline, climbing towards one of the immense anchor chains.

Whether he fell into the pit or was consumed by the rising flares, Dorgo could take comfort in one thought.

When the Skulltaker dropped his last trophy into the forge, the Sul would know the choice that Dorgo had made.

Somehow, Dorgo was able to cross the horrific pit. Even in the oldest of his tribe’s legends, even in the tales of Teiyogtei, Dorgo had never heard tell of such an impossible escape. Choking vapours, pillars of fire as tall as mountains, the bucking violence of the chains and their scalding heat, such odds even the boldest liar to assume the mantle of shaman would not have dared to tell. Yet, by the grace of what gods Dorgo did not know, somehow he had reached the other side.

He had emerged from the glowing light set into the breast of the bloodthirster’s corpse, scrambling down its charred husk even as it crumbled away beneath him. Dorgo had barely reached the ground before he saw the enormous body collapse, falling in upon itself like a burning log. Even then, the dissolution of the carcass was not complete. The shapeless chunks continued to fall apart, disintegrating into dunes of blackened ash.

Dorgo stared across the horizon, struck numb by the horror that beset his eyes. The landscape of piled bone and skeletal ground was changing, shifting in subtle, uncanny ways. Mounds of bone resolved into familiar peaks. Trees and rivers began to manifest into phantom shapes. Dorgo found that what he looked upon was horribly familiar, that he looked upon hills and mountains that he knew from the lands of the Tsavags. As Sanya had warned, the domain was being absorbed into the realm of the Blood God.

It was not a clean, pure sort of transference. The arrangement of hills and forests was erratic, far different from the way they had existed in the mortal world. The ghastly landscape the places of the domain intruded upon was not banished, but horribly merged into the substance of mortal stone and mortal tree. The strange image of the lands around the domain being stretched to cover the hole where the kingdom of Teiyogtei had once been suggested itself to his mind and would not be unseated. The domain had not been conquered. The realm of Khorne had not expanded.

The domain had been absorbed, consumed, torn from the mortal world and scattered through the spectral borderland of the Wastes. It was conquest in a deeper, more terrible fashion than the cruellest warlord could understand.

Dark clouds gathered in the sky, scarlet lightning flashing through their sombre veils. Red, pasty drops began to weep down from the clouds, a rain of blood. Dorgo could see stretches of the bone-littered Wastes bubbling and frothing as crimson pools spurted up from beneath the earth. All colour drained away as the crimson gore covered the land. The ground was lost beneath the rising tide of blood. Dorgo sloshed through the growing sea, rushing to gain one of the surrounding hills. A roar that was not thunder rolled through the desolation, and he thought again of that hungry howl in the depths of the forge.

Fierce winds tore at the heavens, sending the blood-rain splashing down in nearly horizontal sheets. Dorgo felt the sting of the drops sizzling against his skin, hot with an unholy fire. Tremors shook the earth, great geysers of black flame erupting from beneath the expanding sea of blood. Terror, brutal and malignant, scratched at his mind, hissing words of doom into his soul.

Dorgo at last reached his hill, scrambling up a surface that was slick with blood: trees covered in thorns, grass as bloated and obscene as that of the borderland, rocks with the sinister suggestion of bony arms. Nothing, not even in the most abandoned reaches of the domain had ever been so malevolent, so eager for a man’s blood. He could almost see the thorny arms of the trees reaching out for him, could almost feel the skeletal rocks clawing at his feet.

Always, there was the pulsing, pounding rage pressing against his skull, turning his brain crimson with thoughts of murder and savagery. Death, destruction and carnage, and the lust to exult in slaughter and ruin, pawed at his mind, trying to twist it, to consume it as the Wastes had consumed the domain. Dorgo screamed, trying to keep his last, tenuous hold on what he knew to be himself, trying to keep from being absorbed into something else, something monstrous and ancient and eternal.

The sea of blood continued to rise, swallowing the hill below him. Dorgo climbed higher, ever higher, fighting his way through brambles and brush alive with knife-edged thorns. The stinging rain became a burning deluge, welts rising up from his scalded skin as it struck him.