“KELLHUS!” he roared in no human voice, a shout that cracked the Horde’s howl, that struck dust from open air.
The Whirlwind continued to feed upon the Shroud, rending and inhaling, ripping it from its roots in the Horde, spinning it into the great bulbous pillar. The creatures were almost upon him.
“I COME TO YOU AS HATE!”
Ordealmen continued to materialize in their hundreds from the shrouded tracts before him, all of them wounded or bearing wounded, all of them monkey-grimacing, faces toppling out of the maelstrom, each as bright as any now, any here, each a silvery angle on Creation.
“AS OUTRAGE AND HEART-CRACKING HUNGER!” he roared in no human voice.
A Shrial Knight emerged from the whipping murk, his white surcoat reduced to violet rags, standing at the side of a body already duned for immobility and wind. The sky had become a tortured wheel, inner rending outer, and the man hung upon the image as though straining to read, his lips moving. Beyond him, where all was shadows, the scabrous masses engulfed all, imploding about each and every flailing Ordealman. Whether heedless or oblivious, the Knight-of-the-Tusk stood motionless as the inhuman avalanche surged toward him.
Cnaiür urs Ski?tha laughed as the first white-skinned figures fell hacking upon him, laughed as the screaming fish-white masses loped toward his laughing. thousands upon raving thousands. He laughed and spat.
“MY BREAST HAS BECOME AN OVEN, MY HEART A BLINDING COAL!”
All the World thronged with shrieking forms, white where not soiled black, a vast wave that swallowed all the survivors hobbling before it, transforming each into flowers of shaking savagery as the masses swept onward. The Whirlwind soared beyond, a monstrous fat-bellied funnel, rising distinct from great smoking sheets.
“MY THOUGHTS BURN AS OIL AND FLAX! TOO FAST! TOO FAR!”
Naked and unarmed, Cnaiür urs Ski?tha, the most-violent-of-all-men, strode laughing into the Horde of Mog-Pharau …
And it parted … not for the smoke steaming from his numberless swazond, nor for the crimson glow poisoning his turquoise eyes, nor even for the shadowy presentiment of four horns rising about his head. The creatures did not so much veer from his infernal path as did the Horde itself. The abominations screeched and streamed and gesticulated as before, only in the spaces about him.
Cnaiür urs Ski?tha laughed and sneered and spat fire.
“ANAS?RIMBOR!” he roared in no human voice. “HEAR ME, DECEIVER!”
Upon his every step a screaming transit opened before him, and so he walked between the Horde, an entity unseen, striding ground trammelled trackless.
The winds began chewing his naked skin.
“I SHALL HAVE MY OWN PORTION! MY OWN PRIZE!”
And it was mad to see so many iterations of one thing, let alone a thing so obscene as Sranc, fields of them, plains, unnatural teeth gnashing, beauteous faces sphinctering—fields upon fields of them!
The barbarian laughed, stood untouched amid great, wheeling shoals of the beasts. He spat fire upon them, laughed more as the creatures kicked and were ruthlessly trampled.
“YOU SHALL SUFFER AS NO SON OF MAN BEFORE YOU!” he boomed to the black funnelling heavens, his eyes now spikes of crimson brilliance.
And in the heart of the Whirlwind he glimpsed rumours of it, the black shining jewel. He leaned back to face the heights, scarred arms askew, corded and smoking.
“A THING FOREVER PASSED AS MORSELS IN THE PIT!”
The winds had become abrasion; blood began weeping from his swazond. Smoke fluted from a thousand slits across his body.
The No-God walked … walked to him.
“ANAS?RIMBOR!” he roared, his voice bestial with fury. “REVEAL THYSELF TO ME!”
A million throats answered.
TELL ME …
The Whirlwind blotted all Creation before him, blowing bodies outward and sucking bodies up as it advanced. A million blasting needles sheared the scars from his skin, leaving his windward surfaces striped in living fire. And they roiled like burning grease within him, the indignities he had suffered, the grudges and grievances he bore! Such a toll as only murder could redeem!
“SHOW THYSELF SO THAT I MIGHT STRIKE THEE!”
Skin pealed back from tissue, sloughed as parchment. Bleeding was struck into mist.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
Even as it blinded the wind laid bare, exposing structures, devouring them, displaying the lurid layers beneath. With Hell’s own eyes, Cnaiür urs Ski?tha peered up into the void and saw … nothing.
“REVEAL! REVEAL THYSELF!”
Flesh disintegrated. A vicious black climbed over all things, grew numb.
WHAT AM I?
Awe is the heart aimed at all horizons.
Awe is how we belong to what beggars our conception.
Awe redeems the vacancy of our imperium, lets us hope and hate as our fathers had hoped and hated, to strive for what the honest heart can comprehend. Awe dares souls to swell beyond the horizon, to shrug away the demented iterations, to believe in what cannot be seen. It calls on us to be what we were and what we remain: Men who can kill for the tale’s sake.
So we might dwell in the husk of ancient certainty unto the end of our bloodless days.
So we might tremble at beauty, numb to truth.
Noxious fumes roped the last remaining light, blackening the face of Heaven, and the roar waxed louder, though pain alone betrayed as much, and the Horde came before the Whirlwind, an oceanic flood of iron, flint, and claw. Ordealmen vanished in scrambling thousands beneath the surge, spurring those toiling ahead, the clouds hobbling through the gutted encampment, condensing into pitched chaos at the Seven Passes. The obscene multitudes rushed the slopes below, loped shrieking, howling, phalluses bent and pinked across their sunken bellies, and the Sons of Men threw back their heads, their mouths pits in their beards, their looks shining and hopeless, eyes that mirrored the flailing that is the final recourse of all blooded things. The threshing edge heaved up. Over. As hornets on honey, Sranc caged them in convulsive thrusting. Punctures welled and spouted. Skulls fractured, and faces bulged like pillows …
Ere Hell opened and Death came swirling down.
The Horde came before the Whirlwind, aye, a deluge swamping the inner foundations of the Occlusion, and the Ordealmen began trampling their brothers, so frantically did they force the backs before them. All the guises of anguish and lunacy lunged motionless about them, faces, all of them slicked, pinched into the shapes of overthrown souls; here an Ingraul with finger bones knotted through his longbeard, his upper teeth missing; and there a splint-armoured Karyoti swaying like a sunflower with the crush and careen, lampblack running his cheeks into his plaited beard, brown eyes peering out across the continent, so that he might smile upon his children in their uncle’s garden, giggling when they should be napping.