a short story in the Chaos Wastes

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Kinslayer
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a short story in the Chaos Wastes

Post by Kinslayer »

Here is the first short story I have done in a while. I used to do a lot of writing on this site (RPG) so I thought I would share it here. I didn't put it in the History and Fluff section because it is not Druchii related, please move it over if it should be in a different place though. It's probably not finished, I only had the time to go over it once and change a few things so far, so think of it more as a draft than a finished thing...


Flames of Change.

Oblivion.
Korst stared deep into the bottomless depths of his killers dark eyes and saw only his own waiting oblivion. Pain seared through his body as the infernal fire swept over him, a raw agony coursing through his veins that he could not escape. Blood pooled beneath his head where it had struck the ground, washing over his back and arms in one last offering to his daemonic patron as his enemy crouched like a vulture upon his chest, watching him to die.
Then he felt it. A spark of strength entered his battered limbs, one last reserve to be called upon before the end. His muscles bulged, pushing back against the weight of his assailant as the marauder forced his gaze from that of the Herald. His vision swam as his eyes tried and failed to adjust to the violet inferno that still blazed around his flesh, but the moment he looked away from those eyes an unusual clarity returned to his mind, one that he had not been subject to for what seemed like forever.
Gone was the all consuming darkness that his assailants gaze had burned into his mind, and gone was the red blur of battle that had preceded it. Now Korst could think, even if he still could not see. The marauder let loose a blood curdling roar into the green fires that engulfed him as he surged upwards, heaving with all his might to shift the weight of his assailant. As strong as the searing hellfire was that the Herald was unleashing upon him, its body was frail and Korst threw it aside as his roar trailed off into a shuddering murmur of rage. He felt the bloodlust bubbling back up within him, but took advantage of his moment of clarity to suppress the urge, the calling of his master.

Korst's vision finally started to clear as the last of the flames abated in several blue wisps that rose from his heaving chest like smoke. He looked around at the scene of battle that surrounded them, a battle that was coming to its bloody end as the Heralds' flamers seared the flesh from the last of his marauder kinsmen. Only his own iron hard skin had saved him from the flames of change, a gift of his ever thirsty God, but even that had blistered and warped under the corrosive fire. Strips of flesh dripped away, sizzling on the ground around him and causing it to bubble and crack.
He took a moment to examine his injuries as the Herald writhed on the ground, still trying to come to grips with a fate it had not foreseen in his own dark eyes. His skin was in agony but he ignored it, casting his mind back to other times he had been scarred as a momentary distraction. He had to do so, for if he dwelled on the pain now coursing through him he would be consumed by it. He thought of the axe that had once been embedded in the bone of his left shoulder. The bone had healed but the memory of it shattering remained just as potent. He thought of the spear that had almost ended him, punching up through his ribcage and straight into his heart. He remembered the agony of it like it was still there, the jagged tip of the spear splitting his beating heart open and letting his blessed blood flow across his massive chest. How he had survived it he could not say, the marauder had simply put it down to the will of his dark God.

The Herald turned on the ground, forcing Korst back to the present. It raised a gnarled claw as if to summon more flames from the depths of the great beyond and Korst knew he only had seconds to act. He wouldn't survive a second blast, of that he was certain. The marauder chieftain sprang forwards, his movements as agile as a hunting cat despite his battered body. He bounded from one foot to the other, leaning leaning left and right as he reached his fallen axe. He dropped, rolled and turned in one fluent motion, coming up to the side of the searing bolt of screaming purple energy as it instead blasted into the spot he had focused on reaching. The Herald had predicted his thoughts the first time and he had fallen, and he wasn't about to make the same mistake twice.
The Herald must have realised it too, for its dark eyes widened in abject fear as Korst bounded at it. The creature tried to roll aside but Korst brought a heavy foot down firmly on its feathered back, pinning it face down in the dirt as he smashed the full fury of his battleaxe into the back of its left shoulder, shattering bone and shearing the leathery wing off to leave only a bloody stump. Red ichor spurted up from the grievous wound, causing Korst to roar again, this time in victorious thirst. He continued his voiceless roar as he smashed the axe down through the Heralds' beaked skull.

Korst stood over the fallen Herald as his cry of triumph echoed around the wastes, resonating back as an echo off the nearby altar. It was only then that Korst remembered the black stone structure, and realised that the red mist of bloodlust had once more descended over his vision. He shook his head to clear it and looked up again at the altar, basking momentarily in its aura of dark majesty. It was a stain on the surrounding landscape, a dark slab of cracked onyx cornered by four spiralling pillars and accessible by several low steps on every one of its four sides. It was a gift of the Gods, a conduit for the energy of the Four, of the great powers of Chaos. It was for that reason that Korst was there, and the same could have been said for the Herald a few moments before.
The altar was a magnet to nearby tribes and warbands, lost deep as it was somewhere in the far north of the lands of the Kurgan. Despite bearing a pillar of dark matter at each of its four points, each one bearing the mark of one of the Ruinous Powers, it was only ever consecrated by a single God at any one time. The colour of the lava like energy that seeped out from the cracks in its black form told the witness in which name the altar had last been honoured. When Lord Nurgle, master of death and decay was favoured, the altar leaked a sickly green slime. When the Dark Prince Slaanesh was showing his mark, the altar pulsed from within with an enchanting purple light. Right now the altar was showing the flux of the mark of Tzeentch, the Lord of Change. Blueish-yellow hellfire burned within the altar, leaving a red after impression on the mind that looked upon it. Korst snarled, for he had not yet turned the veins of power within the altar to blood in the name of his patron, Khorne.

The marauder turned his gaze and scanned the surrounding area, before it settled on the three remaining daemons that had accompanied the Herald in his doomed defence of the dark altar. They had only just turned to face him after turning the last of his followers into ash, no doubt confident of their masters' victory until they heard the marauders bloody roar echo around the air. Korst could still hear it circling now, caught on the winds as if bounding around the inside of his head. The marauder chieftain knew that he had to end the three flamers to seal the pact, to complete his dark task and once again consecrate the dread altar in the blood of his masters' enemies. It would not take him long.
Korst sprang back into motion as the flamers suddenly burst into life, the iridescent fires that dripped from the ends of their slithering limbs once more roaring to a blaze, lifting them along ethereal winds towards their prey. Two came straight at Korst as the third tried to slip around his reach and surround him. The marauder let a snarl of annoyance form on his lips. He would have liked to send all three of the fiends screaming back to their own master simultaneously, in a great whirlwind of bloodletting that would test him far more than taking the daemons on one at a time. He promised himself he would make them pay dearly for their mistake, and danced around a stream of pink fire that suddenly erupted from one of the flamers' outstretched limbs.
The marauder ducked and weaved, hot air searing his flesh further as jets of infernal fire missed him by scant inches. His axe came about and lopped off a serpentine limb, before the flat of its head came up to shield his face, parting a wave of daemonic fire that instead passed by either side of his head, burning his long hair away wherever it made contact. He didn't stay long enough to be parted with much of his wild mane, ducking once more and coming about, burying his axe in the back of one of the twisting entities. Before either could respond, he danced into a different spot to the one he set his mind on, and swept his weapon around in a wide arc that split both the flamers in two across the midriff. As they wailed and shrivelled away into nothingness, Korst dived to one side.
The third horror lanced a jet of hellfire straight for his back, but the marauder moved with scant moments to spare, spinning to face the final assailant with a wicked grin splitting his scarred face. Korst could almost sense the great power of his Blood God pouring into the altar in anticipation, and was sure he could feel the soothing patter of blood raining down on his scorched flesh from the dark heavens above as he readied his axe for one final kill. The flamer opened the razor-toothed maw at the end of one of its flailing limbs and the marauder braced himself for the gout of flame that was sure to follow, readying his next course of attack even as he dwelled his mind on a feint.
The flamer began to laugh.

Korst hesitated, lowering his axe a fraction as the giggling jest of the flamer daemon bubbled in the air around him, causing the very air to shimmer with what Korst could only think looked like utter confusion. The daemon slowly started to spin where it was levitating in the air a short distance away, and despite everything in his soul telling him to rush the daemon and destroy it before it span any further, the curious part of his mind that Korst had freed from the red haze of battle urged him to stay and watch. In that moment, the marauder chieftain cursed his clarity, watching transfixed in the storm of unearthly laughter as the flamer span and span and became a blur of every colour Korst could imagine and more besides. Flames licked at the edges of the swirling blur, and Korst almost fell into a hypnotic trance when the flamer suddenly stopped. Only it wasn't the flamer any more. It was the Herald.
Screeching laughter still echoed around Korst's skull, joining the distant echo of his own hateful roar, as the beaked Herald was born again from the swirling flames of change. Its taloned feet hit the ground only long enough for it to crouch and tense, ready to spring forwards as its hands wove together in a magical incantation. Korst's inner curse was still pushing forth onto his lips when the Herald sprang like a hawk, and sank its long talons deep into his chest. Korst's eternal roar of rage turned to one of agony and despair as one of the bird-daemons claws pierced straight into his heart. He felt the next beat of the doomed organ like a boom of thunder inside his unfortunately crystal clear mind, sending agony coursing through his veins just as he smashed into the ground, his left shoulder shattering under the weight of the Herald and searing, multicoloured flame washed over him, making his iron hard flesh bubble and warp as if touched by corrosive acid. As agony tore through him, Korst felt his point of view lurch dizzyingly around and he looked down and locked eyes with the marauder.

Korst watched as the marauder chieftain lay sprawled on the ground beneath his taloned grasp, his own dark eyes staring into the dark oblivion that was the Khornate chieftains' soul. He did not need to look away from the marauder to know that his flamers were doing their work around the altar, even as many of them were sent screaming back into the netherlife by marauder axes. The numbers steadily changed in Korsts' favour as they always did, and all the while he sat transfixed on the chest of his chosen prey, staring into the dark abyss of his assailants eyes. Something familiar had caught his gaze and held him there, and the Herald was all but blind to the last three flamers turning on the remaining ring of marauders that defended the dark, blood-consecrated altar he was trying to seize. Before he could crush the life out of the marauder or blast him into spectral ash, a moment of familiarity passed between him and the marauder. He looked down into the darkness of his victims lost soul through his hollow eyes, and in the nothingness he saw only himself. In that moment of weakness, Korst felt the marauders' arms suddenly bunch and strain against him, and he realised too late that he was undone.
The Khornate champion roared a bloody bellow as he surged to his feet, throwing Korst down through a floor of his own flaming creation, and into the darkness beyond. With the last shreds of his sanity, as Korst's gaze spiralled away from his own soul, he realised he had been deceived. The flames of his false reality swirled about him in a flaming blur, and he fell through nothingness with one last roar of unearthly defiance upon his lips. He cried out in rage to the Gods that had betrayed him, but all he heard in response was their resonating laughter as it bounded around inside his warped skull, taunting him in his eternal, pitiful existence as the cycle started over again.
From out of the swirling chaos, Korsts' shredded sanity was put back together just enough that he saw two great orbs of darkness in amongst the swirling colours of change. As he came to focus on them, Korst realised that they were a pair of eyes, the dark eyes of oblivion baring down on his soul. He climbed through the nothingness, transfixed by the darkness of the eyes of his assailant, until he hit the ground on his shattered left shoulder with a sudden thud that sent pain lancing through his body. The pain jolted him back to consciousness, and he felt the world solidify around him. To his right, the dark altar stood, consecrated in the shimmering light of Tzeentch. All about him combat swirled, as daemons and marauders clashed in eternal conflict. Atop him crouched the Herald, its purple hellfire washing over him as the blackness of his own eyes burned through his very soul. There was only oblivion.

Lurching, shrieking and roaring at the nothingness of the empty wasteland, the twisted spawn juddered with internal agonies as its body tore itself apart over and over again, cracking bones and sprouting new ones as its fleshy form churned in a constant state of agonising flux. Sometimes there were the huge muscular arms of a warrior jutting from its howling form, often with bare muscle and glistening red with blood and gore. Sometimes it was grey feathered wings, or grasping hawk-like talons. In other moments, great serpentine limbs of corrosive flame whipped and lashed about the daemon-spawn as it lurched and stomped about on the cracked and broken altar, roaring and giggling to itself in its endless insanity from its many tooth-lined maws and limbs.
He almost pitied the creature, as he stood alone and stared at it from behind the iron skull of a leering helmet, crowned with long horns and an eight pointed star. Almost. The spawn seemed lost in some internal struggle too great for it to even notice its surroundings. It hadn't noticed him for one thing, and the Chaos Warrior very much doubted it was aware that the once consecrated altar it stood defending had long ago cracked and collapsed beneath its own stomping, shifting weight. He watched it for a moment more as it started to rain, red droplets starting to patter down across the spawns twisting flesh from the dark heavens above, before making his decision. Insane and unlikely to follow him as the creature was, it was better that he end its miserable existence here upon its own doomed altar than have it follow him on into the night.
Without another thought, Korst rammed his spear home into the spawns heart, and left it there to die.
Cold73
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Re: a short story in the Chaos Wastes

Post by Cold73 »

Nice story.... good flow of combat...

Would like to read more. Can you write this with Druchii in mind as well?
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Amboadine
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Re: a short story in the Chaos Wastes

Post by Amboadine »

Thank you for sharing, nice work. Do you have an extended version in mind at all? Further adventures?
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Saintofm
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Re: a short story in the Chaos Wastes

Post by Saintofm »

Yeah. Give us more any length u want
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Kinslayer
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Re: a short story in the Chaos Wastes

Post by Kinslayer »

That will be it for this one (this character) I just need to refine the story. When I reread it I get the impression it flows quite nicely at the start (reading it again once you understand it) but it also seems more confusing than it needs to be, at least to me. Essentially what I had in mind was a lost soul wandering in the wastes, come across a spawn which due to the time flux of the wastes is actually himself, how he will end up, betrayed by his gods. Once I started writing it though, I decided to do it from the perspective of the spawns trapped mind first, fighting a constant battle with what he doesn't realise is himself, defending an altar he doesn't realise he has actually himself destroyed. I will be doing more writing, but I'll be focusing on other things.
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