King Volkord

2518

Oh, to be young again.

It was not the first time the thought had surfaced these past days. He flexed young fingers, tensed muscles not yet withered by age.

He breathed ashen air into strong lungs, and felt a fresh corpse pulp beneath his booted stride. Hannesberg was no more. The capital, once his prized endeavor, stood empty in its brass enormity. His work of art had become the island itself, a blighted hellscape that was tribute to Khorne's domain. Black clouds spat thunder amidst a blizzard of ash, choking the life from forests and their scheming denizens with stunning haste.

But the overture, his opus, was only just taking shape. The Empire had come; their immense ships and innumerable soldiers crowded the island from all sides. For two-hundred years Volkord had awaited this moment, and it fulfilled every expectation.

The Empire fought with only the bile a personal slight could produce.

Such fury propelled the invasion. Volkord smiled as he imagined the embarrassment that must have fuelled such a crushing strike. That he had ruled for hundreds of years beneath their collective noses must have been the transcendence of wounded pride.

And so it unfolded about him, the war that would complete the murder of Svarland. The dwarves fought with suicidal conviction, as they had since that first, distant war. What few compunctions remained to them were now stripped as their home choked on its own ashes.

So many decades of patient indoctrination had delivered the ferocity of his own warriors, all in promise to this moment. He would allow neither himself nor his enemies a rout, such was the base act of a mongrel dogs. Only in true battle, war of impartial savagery, could the Blood God's name be venerated.

He was the eye, the intersection between eight points of advance upon the enemy. The storm of battle raged, his chosen knights of empowered flesh and steel reaping the enemy as if parting wheat.

He unsheathed his sword, daemon metal hissing in the particulate wind. He could feel its hunger, a bloodlust that overflowed from tool to wielder like a creeping disease. He strode forward, his own forces receding tidal from the advance.

He closed with the enemy. Arrows burst into hair-fine splinters as they impacted his skin, and rifle balls fragmented into harmless shrapnel. The countless infantry were as toys to him; objects of small scale and nonexistent depth to be tossed aside as he saw fit. They charged to meet him, distant cavalrymen maintaining the useless hail of bullets.

Volkord swung his weapon two-handed, though he could not muster any interest for these precursors to his prize. It was not the clean death reserved for history's many worthy opponents. Instead of coming cleanly apart, the infantrymen clotted on the end of his blade like manure upon the shovel. The distractions folded about his blade, tiny bones snapping as their fellows encased them in their own grizzly deaths of their own, momentum pulping the soldiers into layers of red glue and impacted skin.

Valka would have enjoyed such a battle.

The thought seemed to materialize from nothing. A driving sword nearly took his eye out as he was briefly frozen by the anomalous concept. Who was Valka? He did not know, though the name seemed distantly familiar.

A feeling came with it, something entirely alien to him. Was this regret? Nostalgia? Weak feelings. Distractions. However brief, he was vaguely unnerved by their presence, and he dismissed them as he continued to dissect the Empire's resistance.

The rogue emotions did not trouble him again, as his prize finally deigned to grace the field of battle. The black clouds parted, a minute tear that nevertheless appeared to glow with heaven's own light. A shaft of gold cut through the hellish atmosphere, and from the rent in Volkord's perfect ceiling descended Emperor Karl Franz.

The Imperial maggots cheered, an elated cry rendered insulting beside the magnificence of their lord. He was astride a griffon, majesty solidified in its own right, armor of brilliant gold wrapped about his regal frame. In his hand, held high beneath the beams of holy light, was Gal Maraz. The hellblade keened in his hand, singing in elation at so magnanimous a foe. Volkord could only match its excitement.

The sea around Volkord parted; they too had known this was to be the centerpiece. All who saw their warlords meet froze in witness of what was to come.

The griffon landed before him, vast wings whipping up clouds of gray sleet. Franz swung about and stepped clear of the mount, falling debris only now beginning to collect on the crest of his plumed helm.

Volkord spread his arms wide. "He finally comes. Long have I waited for such a challenge, Emperor Franz. Long have I sought an opponent worthy of my power, for all other foes have withered before my presence. Come, let us do battle worthy of the cruel gods who-"

"I'd heard tales of the daemon king of Svarland," Franz said, his voice mundane in the face of Volkord's unearthly timbre. "Yet before me stands only a man."

All at once, Volkord's mind ran empty of platitudes.

He hacked at the tiny man. He let the hellblade scream. He let the fury at such a slight fuel his limbs with killing power.

Franz swung Gal Maraz, a disciplined arc that betrayed no effort of wielding such a heft. The hellblade exploded in Volkord's hands, its roar of bloodlust suddenly transformed into wretched agony as the shards spun distant in localized pirouettes.

Volkord had no time to contemplate this impossibility before another hammer strike mashed his left arm into his body, vambrace pitting flush with the plackard beneath. Volkord staggered, his face a mask of pain.

Pain. Another foreign sensation. He screamed his defiance, disbelieving of the sudden, terminal change. He strode forward, in time for another blow to his knee. The agony was white-hot anathema to decades of invincibility, and the leg crumpled beneath him.

Humiliation cut into him as he felt himself kneel. He tried to rise, tried to take a stance, any stance, but this one of supplication. He looked up at Karl Franz, the man's face twisted with bored disdain. He raised Gal Maraz. Volkord felt his face warp with indignation.

"This not my fate! I am the Blood God's chosen! I am the butcher of dynasties! Such is not the fate of Hjol-"

The hammer fell.

…

He was falling. The clouds roiled black and violent, the ground opposite an immense stream of slaughter.

Black chains seared limbs that were not his, pain knifing into decrepit, wrinkled skin. Whose hands were these? Whose pain was this? Fear gripped him, a pit more dark and terrible than any human emotion.

He looked up, pyroclastic wind burning agony into his veins. Others were chained to his descent; blackened figures of mummified, cracked skin thrashed weakly against their own bindings, their toothless mouths pulled into soundless screams.

Above him hung an outlier. Its skin too was blackened, its features hollow and creased with fathomless age, but its lipless mouth remained shut. Tears of blood ran watery from eyes of frigid blue, each stark against the hellish sepia that drowned all else. The stare was like twin shards of ice through Volkord's heart.

He tried to turn his head away, not comprehending why this corpse unnerved him so. The charred bindings dug deeper, and forced his head upward like a superheated vice.

He started screaming then, but no sound came from his desert throat.

In the time required for Volkord's headless body to crumple to the ashen ground, an eternity had already passed in the Hel of his soul. On and on he fell, a spectacle ever mocked by laughing daemons.

But the ground never came.