The End Times | The Curse of Khaine

This had once been a wilderness jewel of Ulthuan, where princes and kings had hunted beasts and sojourned with their courts. Now it was a ravaged, twisted mockery of its former beauty. Even before the druchii had come Chrace had suffered dearly during the daemonic intrusion. Swathes of the forest had been warped by their presence, the ground itself ripped and buckled in abhorrence of their invasion. Mountaintops had tumbled and avalanches cut swathes through trees that had stood proudly for several thousand years.

The course of the daemonic attack could be charted by the warped, withered remains of the trees left in their wake: some were petrified, leaves of stone grey and lifeless; others had become ice structures, slowly melting as the season turned to summer, crystalline imitations of what had come before; whole mountainsides were desolate, nothing left but rotting stumps and a thick slurry of decaying mulch.

At first Malekith had been encouraged, finding Phoenix Gate barely held against him, and the advance across the Annulii had been swift. Trusting that his plan to draw the bulk of Tyrion’s forces south with Darkblade’s army had succeeded, the Witch King had readied his host to plunge down into the foothills and plains of Chrace, to sack Tor Achare and seize the coast where the crossing to the Blighted Isle was shortest.

From then nothing had quite played out as he had planned. The people of Chrace knew their lands as well as they knew their own families, and they used every part of it to their advantage.

The Chracians would not meet his force in pitched battle preferring, as they had done during previous wars, to wage a guerrilla campaign of ambushes and feint attacks. The mountains were dotted with concealed fortresses – outposts that could sustain a thousand warriors yet not be seen even if a scout passed within bowshot.

Even though the landscape had suffered much brutality in recent times, its ways and means were still a secret to be unlocked. The Whiteweald was no place for dragons to fight, the cover of the deep forests and caves more than enough sanctuary against the mightiest beasts of the sky. Whole Naggarothi regiments disappeared pursuing their foes into the wilds, but despite this the commanders who now adorned the rough trail leading to Malekith’s pavilion had sent thousands to their doom in fruitless efforts to catch the elusive enemy.

Kouran approached, secretly alerted to his master’s emergence by the Black Guard standing sentry around the pavilion. His face was stern as he saluted the king.

‘My king, another three regiments were lost in the night,’ the captain reported. He motioned to the right flank of the advance, on the other side of the steep valley. ‘From the Ghrond host stationed to the north.’

‘The north?’ Malekith growled. ‘You told me yesterday that our northern flank was secure. Not even a Chracian hunter would pass the picket, you claimed.’

Kouran answered with a silent bow of the head, admitting his mistake and accepting whatever chastisement Malekith was prepared to dispense. The Witch King glanced at the heads around him and knew that killing Kouran would almost certainly seal the fate of the expedition. With Morathi in Ghrond and the traitor Ezresor slain, Malekith relied almost wholly on the captain of the Black Guard to keep order and ensure the loyalty of his subjects.

‘The blame is not yours,’ said Malekith. ‘There is more than the skill of peasant hunters at play here.’

He tilted his head back, closing his eyes to concentrate on his magical sense, allowing his consciousness to flow into the Iron Circlet. There was a jarring transition as part of his mind slipped into the Realm of Chaos and then back to the mortal world, for all intents and purposes detached from his physical form.

It was harder to maintain a sense of self in these mountains, where the howling winds of magic were funnelled into Ulthuan’s vortex. The influx of daemonic energy and the expansion of the Chaos Wastes had turned the vortex into a wild maelstrom. In Naggarond it had been simplicity to move his thoughts from one part of the world to another, and even to project his avatar into far-flung locations. From the Annulii it was a trying task simply to maintain a coherent pattern of thoughts amidst the buffeting mystical storm.

Drawing on the depths of his will, Malekith moved his roaming eye from the camp, momentarily lifting away towards the clouds for an overview of his situation.