I

‘To the unenlightened, those poor, deluded, blind creatures, creation is a stagnant, unchanging thing. They believe the mountains to be eternal, the sky to be everlasting, but it is not so,’ Vortemis intoned, raising his hands to the sky and pausing for gravitas. ‘There is but one constancy to all of creation, and that is change itself!’

I swallowed the groan burbling in my throat. Even with my eidetic memory I could still scarcely count the number of times I’d heard some variation of the sentiment pass through the sorcerer’s fanged, lipless mouth, delivered on his forked tongue, dripping with grandiosity. Ever the central figure in a great drama only he could see, there was almost nothing the Arcanite lord said or did that was not in some way intended to remind his eternal audience of his brilliance and insight.

Besides, the sentiment was patently wrong.

Even for the servants of Tzeentch, to whom the warping power of the Lord of Fate flowed like lifeblood, there were many things that remained unchanged. Vortemis, for example, was still projecting an aura of smug superiority, as though the centuries of failure to corrupt the shadeglass Faneway of Shadespire had simply not occurred. Narvia and Turosh were still listening, enraptured, to the magister’s oratory, despite the acolytes having heard it hundreds of times before.

And I, as ever, still loathed the magister with every fibre of my mutated being.

‘What a peculiar thing this is,’ Vortemis cooed. ‘Peculiar indeed, deluded though it may be.’

The thing of which he spoke was a strange humanoid, a bizarre amalgamation of aelf and beast. The creature was far removed from the brutish gors and ungors that infested the Mortal Realms, or even the avian strangeness of tzaangors like myself: this creature’s form bore no evidence of mutation, no dubious gifts of the God of Magic. It seemed, for lack of a more fitting term, natural.

My beak clicked in irritation, but my jealous anger remained other­wise invisible.

‘It shall be less peculiar when we have peeled back its flesh,’ Narvia hissed from behind her golden mask. ‘All beings of blood and bone look the same on the inside.’

Turosh slammed his boot down on the aelf-thing’s chest, eliciting a muffled yelp. ‘Foolish girl, dwelling on the banality of flesh when the screams are where the true secrets lie,’ he hissed. His golden mask, like Narvia’s, was wrought in the avian likeness of Tzeentch’s mightiest daemons: the man beneath it may have been a poor shadow of those mighty creatures, but his trenchant spitefulness rivalled any being I’d yet encountered. ‘I look forward to tearing the secrets from its soul.’

‘Foolish boy, to think you will have the privilege,’ Narvia scoffed. ‘It was I who first sighted the creature – the honour should be mine!’

The other Arcanite cultist brandished his wicked, curved blade. ‘And it was I who laid it low,’ Turosh snarled. ‘Its blood is mine to shed.’

I pushed their petty squabbling to the back of my mind. I’d suffered many pains, irritants, vexations and injustices over my centuries trapped with Vortemis and his disciples in the Mirrored City, but none boiled my blood so effortlessly as Narvia and Turosh. They were childhood rivals, raised up from the Arcanite cults Vortemis had seeded when Nagash had turned the city into an inescapable tomb, but whereas most children eventually outgrew their paltry rivalries, the Kairic cultists had embraced their opposition as an unholy mandate, as though they both intimately believed that their own success was tied to the other’s failure.

The result was two arrogant, distrustful, wholly unmanageable miscreants whom Vortemis had taken into his inner circle, and by extension forced me to tolerate. I wondered if he’d done so specifically to aggravate me.

I would not have put it past him, despite his outwardly magnanimous façade.

‘Quiet now, children,’ Vortemis rasped, his voice cutting through both the bickering of the Kairic acolytes and my own ruminations like a blade through skin. ‘Neither of you shall bleed this creature until it has revealed to me the whims of the Lord of Fate.’

‘I will reveal nothing to you, monster,’ the aelf-thing spat. Its words were flavoured by a strange accent, unlike any I’d encountered before. All the more reason to discover where in the Mortal Realms we’d been spat out.

The magister loomed over the bound figure. Though Vortemis’ eyes were hidden behind his mask, I could tell he was glaring into the creature’s soul.

Vortemis flicked out his forked tongue. ‘Do you know who I am, thing?’

The aelf-thing thrashed in its aetheric bindings. ‘We do not give daemons names,’ it growled. ‘We simply return them to their gods in pieces.’

The magister laughed; it was a phlegmy, unpleasant sound. ‘So you are clearly unfamiliar with me and my kind,’ he chuckled. ‘But I suppose, to the uninitiated, I might be mistaken for a mere fragment of Tzeentch’s will, rather than something far greater. So allow me to introduce myself, thing – I am Vortemis the All Seeing, Magister of the Eyes of the Nine, Chosen of the Gaunt Summoners. If you have a name, you may give it. K’Charik shall remember it, but I will not.’

I grunted. Vortemis had delivered the same mocking jibe over four hundred times over the course of our imprisonment in Shadespire, and although Vortemis certainly hadn’t recalled a single name or title I, thanks to the perfect memory the All Seeing had cursed me with, remembered them all.

‘I am Sheoch,’ the aelf-thing declared, even as its aetheric bindings began to bite through its flesh. ‘Tracker of Kurnoth.’

‘I see. And Kurnoth is…?’

‘The God of the Hunt, spirit-consort of Alarielle,’ Sheoch snarled defiantly. ‘A terrible force that you shall soon face.’

Vortemis’ mutated face was as incapable of rendering emotion as my own, but I could see sick amusement tickling the creases around his sunken cheekbones, a tic I’d noticed long ago.

‘Strange, I have no knowledge of such a god. As one blessed by Tzeentch to gaze upon the totality of existence and parse the threads of fate, you will forgive me for being sceptical of your threats.’

The aelf-thing laughed. Blood dribbled from its mouth. I felt a facet of my nature bare bestial fangs, willing my altered limbs to violence.

‘You believe you have come to conquer, but you have come to be consumed,’ Sheoch snarled. ‘Beastgrave will devour you.’

Beastgrave.

I recalled the past so perfectly. My earliest memory was being shackled to Vortemis, bound by an oath that only death could release. My second earliest memory was despising him. And then, after that, came the ordeal of being dragged into Shadespire by the arrogant magister, the trepidation of Nagash’s Katophrane Curse befouling the Mirrored City, the horror of realising that Vortemis could not die while under the curse, and the grudging boredom of understanding that the rest of my existence would be measured in pompous speeches, pointless deaths, and the guilty revulsion of existing as a tzaangor.

But Beastgrave… that was a name I had never heard before.

‘Beastgrave,’ Vortemis mused, flicking out his forked tongue as though tasting the word. ‘So that is the name of the place we’ve been delivered to.’

‘Delivered to,’ Narvia laughed mirthlessly, kicking at the shards of shadeglass piercing the stone beneath our feet. ‘Some cataclysm spat us out here.’

Turosh chuckled, equally without humour. ‘I was on the cusp of greatness in Shadespire, and now we’re stuck in the guts of some forsaken cave.’

The magister cringed. His cerulean flesh rippled with disgust. ‘We are not forsaken, you insufferable simpleton. Do you not see? Do you not comprehend?’

The human’s face was invisible behind his golden mask, but I could read his hesitation in the twitching of his fingers around the haft of his weapon. ‘I… I merely meant to say th–’

‘Your words are wind,’ Vortemis snapped. ‘And you, Narvia, before you think to open your mouth and capitalise on Turosh’s chastisement, I already know what you intend to say, and it is equally as puerile – spare me the aggravation of hearing it.’

The other Arcanite remained silent, but I’d seen her angry enough times to read her rage from the way she withdrew into herself like a wilting bloom. No doubt plots of violence swirled within her mind, as they did in her rival, but whereas Turosh was overt in his scheming, she was clandestine.

I rolled my eyes. Or at least she fancied herself as such.

‘The Changer of Ways has blessed us!’ Vortemis declared, lifting his writhing staff aloft. ‘For centuries we toiled, stagnant, within Nagash’s vile prison. For centuries we, the chosen instruments of the Gaunt Summoners, were trapped in an unceasing cycle of rot and decay. Do you not see? Tzeentch has blessed us by breaking open our cell!’

I clicked my beak again in annoyance. If there was something else that could be said to be immune to change, it was Vortemis’ ability to believe his own bluster.

The magister knelt beside the aelf-thing and traced a finger across its cheek. Its flesh bubbled with mutation from his touch. ‘I was not called here to be devoured, creature. I was called here to fulfil the great work Tzeentch has laid before me!’

The creature, Sheoch, recoiled from the magister’s claw, and I cringed in sympathetic disgust.

‘It is not destiny that calls you, but Beastgrave itself,’ it spat. ‘And no matter what you do, the mountain will be your tomb.’

‘Such delusion,’ Vortemis sighed, cocking his head like the avian his warped form had come to resemble. ‘What I do next is a blessing, sparing you from a lifetime of unenlightenment.’

The All Seeing lifted his head, as though his eyeless face could see sky beyond the endless cave ceiling above. His staff began to glow with sickly unlight. The aelf-thing thrashed in its aetheric bonds as warping magic fought to displace the blood in its veins. Vortemis’ chanting echoed unnaturally through the caverns around us, transforming from a mere reflection of his rasping words to their own unique, twisted chorus. My mutated flesh bristled, like an infant responding to the call of its parent, and it sickened me.

Vortemis slammed his staff into the ground. Sheoch, Tracker of Kurnoth, burst like an overripe fruit.

Rather than shower us with its guts, the ruin of the aelf-thing hung suspended in the air, frozen like a gruesome sculpture of blood and skin and bone. The coppery reek of its blood caused my beak to dribble saliva.

Vortemis approached his handiwork with reverence. ‘Fascinating,’ he hissed. His clawed hand wove through the air as his eyeless head darted back and forth, gazing at a mystery he believed himself alone able to unravel.

But Vortemis of the Eyes of the Nine was not the only one to whom the Lord of Change spoke.

Even as a tzaangor, whose flesh was wrought of the warping magic of Tzeentch, it pained my eyes to gaze directly upon the divining ritual. A sickening sensation, like worms burrowing behind my eyes, only allowed me to glance at it for a moment, but even a momentary glimpse caused the meaning within to blossom in my mind. And then, as though my eyes were snared with hooks, I could not tear them away, heedless of the pain.

For the first time in centuries, since I’d been bound to the service of the magister and dragged into Shadespire, I felt… hope.

And then it was over, the suspended ruin of the aelf-thing slapping wetly to the cave floor. Even with my perfect memory I could not reconcile how long I’d been staring at it. I shook my head and furtively glanced around. Narvia and Turosh were cradling their masked faces as though emerging from a dream.

Vortemis was staring eyelessly at me.

‘What did you see, my child?’ he said slowly.

‘I… I do not know, master,’ I growled.

The magister gazed at me, through me, for a long, long time. I felt nausea gnawing at my guts the longer his blind face regarded me.

‘I know what you saw, my child,’ he mused with a knowing smile. ‘For it is also what I saw.’

‘What did you see, All Seeing One?’ Narvia asked hesitantly, casting a surreptitious glance at Turosh.

‘This place, Beastgrave, is more than just a mountain. Its roots are woven into the very bones of Ghur. We sought to anchor Shadespire to the Silver Towers and deliver it into the hands of Holy Tzeentch. Here we have the opportunity to deliver not merely a city, but an entire realm to the God of Magic!’

‘But how, master?’ Turosh pressed.

The magister grinned slyly. ‘I have foreseen both how and where,’ he said smugly, with a flutter of his wings.

I pawed the ground, feigning excitement. It was a speech I’d heard four times before throughout my servitude, the only difference being which particular doomed crusade we were embarking on. The All Seeing was no doubt powerful, but his sorcerous strength was matched only by his inability to see his own failures. Centuries of carnage and bloodshed to corrupt the shadeglass of the Mirrored City had come to naught. Rather than acknowledge the disaster of Shadespire, Vortemis had projected on to his failures the conceit of a greater calling: a gift from the Changer of Ways.

‘Praise Tzeentch, All Seeing One,’ Turosh bowed ostentatiously. ‘You were right – truly this twist of fate was a blessing of the God of Magic.’

‘Indeed, the path beckons,’ Narvia said quickly, kneeling. ‘Lead us onward, magister.’

I glanced at the genuflecting Arcanites. With their faces hidden behind masks it was difficult to tell whether they were truly captivated, surreptitiously sceptical, or feigning awe to hide their true thoughts.

Narvia and Turosh were the finest acolytes of the cults Vortemis had fostered throughout our internment in Shadespire. They were formidable fighters and spellcasters, but, despite the centuries we’d spent in the Mirrored City, or perhaps because of it, they were also trapped in perpetual adolescence: whether they possessed the foresight to see past Vortemis’ posturing was beyond even me.

Whether Vortemis saw beneath their golden masks, to the plots that coiled within their minds, was another matter entirely: he may have chosen ‘the All Seeing’ as a sobriquet, but his gaze was as fallible as any mortal’s, especially when his vanity was stoked.

‘Destiny awaits in the bowels of Beastgrave,’ Vortemis commanded.

I waited until the magister and his acolytes had walked a few steps ahead, as long as I could before the invisible chains binding me to Vortemis tugged at my throat. When I was certain their eyes were elsewhere I dropped my blade to my side and quickly slid it across my ankle. Blood flowed from the wound in a slow trickle, leaving a small trail behind me.

II

Shadespire had been a cursed labyrinth, and thanks to Vortemis’ curse I remembered every dreadful piece of it.

The Mirrored City had been aptly named. The arcane shadeglass from which the city drew its power, the magical substance that had ultimately led to its punishment, had possessed a strange beauty even after the Lord of Death unleashed his Katophrane Curse. Within its ghostly spires one touched by Tzeentch could glimpse the strands of fate reflected and refracted upon themselves, twisting and changing like the flickering of a torch. It was all a lie, though: with Nagash’s curse infecting the very nature of the shadeglass, all who perished within its fastness were doomed to rise again. The eddies of fate did not flow within Shadespire; they curdled, exactly as the treacherous necromancer had intended.

The place we now found ourselves in, this ‘Beastgrave’, was also aptly named.

The cavern system resembled a great stony gullet, undulating despite its jagged rockiness. The sense that we ventured deeper into a ­living creature was both ethereal and corporeal, despite the shadeglass extrusions we passed. Not only did the very tunnels through which we ventured twist like rocky intestines, the walls dripped with liquid amber, reminding me uncomfortably of digestive juices. The bones we passed, of orruks and aelves and creatures even I didn’t recognise, only reinforced the notion.

More subtle was the animate essence of Beastgrave that seemed to seep into my lungs with every breath. I felt my heart battering my ribcage as though battle loomed, yet my nostrils detected nothing of the foe I’d foreseen. I felt burbling anger, stoked by hundreds of years of silent anguish in Shadespire, threatening to take control of my arms and swing my sword, despite the fact that I’d practically made an art form of suffering Vortemis’ prevarication with dignity. I felt hunger gnawing at my stomach, even though my form had grown beyond the need for mortal sustenance.

I found myself salivating, imagining what Narvia’s pale flesh would taste like.

Cracking open Turosh’s bones with my beak and slurping the warm marrow.

Ripping into Vo–

No. Focus.

I physically shook the thoughts from my head. I had the measure of my foe: the mountain we found ourselves in, Beastgrave, was clearly something more than a mere edifice of rock and stone. Whether it was natural or not I couldn’t say for certain: the Realm of Ghur was almost unknown to me. What I did know was that Beastgrave had corrupted the minds of the other Eyes of the Nine, just as the aelf-thing had vowed.

Ironically, it was thanks to Vortemis’ mnemonic curse that I alone possessed the strength to parse Tzeentch’s true message from Beastgrave’s predacious deceptions.

‘I don’t recall this tunnel,’ Turosh called from up ahead, jerking me from my grim ruminations. The young Arcanite had been unusually quiet since the divining ritual. So had his rival, Narvia. I could barely feign ignorance at the conspicuousness of their plotting. Had I cared to, which I didn’t, I could have recalled the number of schemes they had executed in Shadespire, both to further their own ends and to sabotage each other’s plots. During the early years, before the inexorable reality of Nagash’s curse had set in, I’d taken note to pass the time: to maintain my sanity I’d stopped counting at eighty-four.

‘What are you implying?’ sneered Narvia.

‘I imply nothing,’ the Arcanite snapped. ‘I scouted this section of the caves mere weeks ago. This fork wasn’t here.’

Weeks. How amusingly we still clung to such terms when we were in fact incapable of measuring the passage of the time, trapped in the lightless bowels of Beastgrave. It could have been months since we’d been vomited out of the Mirrored City. There was no way of truly knowing.

Vortemis strode up to the fork. His head bobbed back and forth between the paths as though sniffing, smelling, tasting. When he turned back to us he was beaming. ‘Tzeentch blesses us yet, my Eyes.’

‘How do you imagine that?’ Turosh grumbled. ‘We’re lost.’

Vortemis shook his head, seemingly too excited to admonish the acolyte. ‘In Shadespire the Katophrane Curse bound us to stagnation. For the disciples of the Changer of Ways such torpor is poison. Here, in Beastgrave, change flows like lifeblood through its veins!’

‘Are you saying that Beastgrave is alive?’ Turosh asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered. Saliva filled my mouth as the looming hunger of the mountain pressed against the impenetrable wall of my mind. ‘It is.’

‘And what do you know of it, K’Charik?’ Narvia sneered.

I sensed Vortemis’ gaze turn to me at the pointed question. I had to physically choke down the truth before it burbled up from my chest. Instead I dipped my horned head in submission.

‘You speak truth, human. I know nothing.’

‘Perhaps the beastman feels affinity for this Beastgrave.’ Turosh chuckled at his own terrible joke.

Having long since been inoculated to the pedantic jeering of the acolytes I ignored the urge to strike the human’s head from his shoulders. This time, however, the animal desire to kill didn’t fade as it usually did. Unbidden I felt my claws tighten on the haft of my greatblade, my thoughts straying to spurting arteries and blood-gurgle cries. But pragmatism ultimately stayed my hand: there was a battle coming, and as much as I loathed the Arcanites, they were formidable fighters.

I resolved that, after the battle I’d foreseen was won and Vortemis was dead, I would chop both insufferable acolytes into offal. Slowly.

‘K’Charik is correct,’ Vortemis proclaimed, breaking the tension. ‘This place is alive. It shifts and changes. It calls out and draws in. It devours and consumes. It’s… beautiful.’

Turosh grunted. ‘Magister, I do not understand your elation,’ he said, clearly biting down his own frustration. ‘If what you say is true then all our scouting is meaningless. We have no idea where we’re going.’

‘Perhaps you do not, Turosh,’ Narvia sniped. Her face was invisible behind her golden mask, yet somehow I could confidently picture her petulant sneer.

Vortemis grinned and nodded to her. ‘Which way, my acolyte?’ he asked.

Narvia visibly straightened at being addressed by the All Seeing. ‘The left path, magister.’

‘What did you see in the ritual?’ Turosh snapped, tactlessly.

Narvia affected a shallow bow. ‘I foresaw the glorious magister victorious in his quest,’ she quipped. ‘Didn’t you?’ Then, without another word, she haughtily strode past Turosh down the left tunnel, out of sight.

She’d lied. Badly. The fact that she’d lied was in itself not unexpected: I’d quickly learned, during my early years bound to Vortemis, that falsehood was a way of life for those who followed the Architect of Fate. What remained to be seen was why she had lied.

Normally I would not have paid the familiar occurrence a second thought, but what I’d foreseen in the aelf-thing’s blood, the moment I knew was coming, allowed for no errors. I glanced down at the wound I’d inflicted on my ankle. The first had clotted, requiring me to make a second, third and fourth to keep the blood trail fresh for the hunters as we’d descended deeper and deeper into Beastgrave.

I recalled the savagery of the Kurnothi aelf-thing, Sheoch, even as we’d bound it. When its compatriots, however numerous they were, found us I suspected I’d need the Arcanites if I hoped to escape with my life after I’d slain Vortemis in the chaos.

Turosh seemed to likewise smell her deception. He scurried after his rival down the left tunnel, as though terrified of letting her out of his sight. Vortemis paid them no heed, striding confidently, head cocking back and forth, as though listening to secrets only he could hear.

Beastgrave was calling to him, luring him and the Eyes of the Nine to some hideous end with whispers and visions. I was certain of it. Six hundred and forty-nine times Vortemis had sacrificed me in Shadespire: I had no doubts he would do so again without hesitation. Only this time I would not rise from death.

As soon as Vortemis had vanished around the switchback I carved a fresh cut above my hoof, deeper this time, to give our hunters an easier trail to track.

I was running out of time.

III

‘She’s vanished!’

The moment came sooner than I’d expected, but it came nonetheless. Tunnel by tunnel, turn by turn, Narvia had increased her lead over us, ranging ever-farther ahead.

At first it had been subtle. To one who had not spent hundreds of years in her presence it would have been guileful; how she scouted a few steps farther ahead, how she took a few extra moments to respond when we called out to her, how she cast clandestine glances back at us as we weaved through Beastgrave’s shadowy bowels.

But guile had given way to blatancy the moment she thought she could get away with it. One moment she was ahead of us, the next she was gone.

Although Turosh lacked my curse of hindsight he was likewise not fooled. He had watched Narvia with almost desperate interest, looking for some tell, some sign, to reveal her plan. I could almost hear the grinding of his thoughts in his head, a fine pairing to the grinding of his teeth. Whatever destiny he’d seen in the ritual, he clearly believed Narvia played some role in it, either as a tool or a hindrance.

I had no doubt they were both being called by hungering Beastgrave, but they were – if not young – juvenile, lacking in wisdom. I was a creature touched by the God of Magic, and I’d grown old long before Vortemis had bound me to him and dragged me into Nagash’s cursed city. Beastgrave may have ensnared the acolytes, may have even captured Vortemis in his vanity, but I, I recalled the equivalent of a hundred lifetimes with perfect clarity: I could not be fooled.

…but did I truly believe that?

The echo of the vision I’d seen painted itself anew upon my vision, as though responding, unsettlingly, to my uncertainty. Regardless, I’d seen myself free of Vortemis for the first time since he’d shackled me to him: I had no choice but to pursue it.

‘Vortemis!’ Turosh called, sprinting back to us. ‘Vortemis, she’s gone! She abandoned us!’

The magister absorbed the Arcanite’s pronouncement with strange serenity. ‘You proclaim her betrayal with such certainty, my acolyte. Is it not more likely she is lost within this great labyrinth?’

I craned my head, grasping at a distant echo only my bestial senses could hear: it sounded like a woman screaming.

Whether oblivious or indifferent the other Eyes paid it no heed.

‘I know her,’ Turosh growled. I spied his arm muscles twitching with the desire to inflict violence. ‘I know what she saw in the ritual.’

The All Seeing turned his eyeless gaze on the acolyte. ‘Indeed?’ Vortemis mused. ‘Your foresight does you credit, Turosh. Truly, a gift of the Changer of Ways! What, then, would you suggest we do?’

The Arcanite froze. I would have chuckled had the whole display not been so pathetic. I knew, beneath his golden mask, the young man’s heart was warring between truth and lies, and the murky depths that run between. Not unexpected: to be touched by the Architect of Fate was to sail on a sea of falsehoods and truths, none fully revealed, even in retrospect. But to navigate the sea so poorly was, frankly, embarrassing.

‘I’ll go after her,’ Turosh finally declared.

‘No, I’ll go,’ I announced quickly. Vortemis and Turosh looked to me.

Turosh scoffed. ‘You, beast? With your leash?’

My tzaangor rage surged to the fore, almost breaking free of the chains I’d wrapped around it. The only thing that prevented me from lopping his head from his shoulders was my vision: battle was coming, and I needed him. And because I was confident that Narvia was already dead.

‘Turosh is right, my loyal guardian’s place is at my side,’ Vortemis said, nodding. ‘Besides, your ankle is wounded. Turosh will make better time on foot in finding Narvia.’

My blood chilled to ice. I looked down at my lacerated ankle, then up, slowly. Despite having no visible eyes Vortemis was already meeting my gaze, his face unreadable, as far removed from humanity as my own.

What are you thinking?

What do you know?

The young Arcanite turned his sneering mask to me. ‘Wait here, magister. I will return soon.’ Then he turned and sprinted down into the darkness, vanishing around a switchback. The echo of his footsteps faded as though swallowed.

So we waited, listening to the rumbling of the mountain’s bowels and the drip-drip-dripping of liquid amber sloughing from toothy stalagmites. We waited until the hunger gnawing at my spine became almost unbearable and I had to pace to distract myself. We waited until Beastgrave’s ravenous whispers had eroded whatever sense of certainty remained to me.

And then we waited longer.

I finally turned to Vortemis, who had stood, swaying, as though listening to a silent melody, since Turosh had departed.

‘They’re not coming back, are they?’

‘No,’ he replied simply. ‘They are not.’

‘And you knew they wouldn’t?’ I snapped. I guiltily bit down my rage. By Tzeentch, there was something about this accursed place that whetted my ire, as though starving, animal hunger saturated the air.

The magister turned his eyeless face to me, allowing his expression to convey how pedantic he thought my question to be. ‘Narvia and Turosh chose to shackle themselves to the past.’

I waited for further elucidation, until it was clear that none was forthcoming. I finally choked out, ‘What does that mean?’

Nothing. I stamped some shadeglass beneath my hoof and gripped the haft of my sword, waiting for his reply. By the Changer of Ways, if I had to hear one more cryptic statement…

Vortemis was silent for a moment. He waved his hand before and then, seemingly at random, selected a new pathway deeper in the mountain. ‘They sought to return to Shadespire,’ he finally explained.

Shadespire. The very mention of the Mirrored City filled me with anger and, to my silent shame, fear. Since coming to this damned cave I had thought myself done with that accursed place. Had I been wrong?

‘Is such a thing possible?’ I asked.

Vortemis shrugged nonchalantly, his azure pinions rustling. ‘Beastgrave told them it was.’

We walked on in silence. I never let my blade rest easy in my grip. I began to hear new sounds, lacing the whispers already gnawing at my mind. Sibilant susurrations, like those I’d heard when I’d beheld the vision. But… deeper. Hungrier. Phlegmy, choked with the blood and bones of the dead. Or was it? The more I tried to focus, the more it vanished before me, like mist.

Finally, when I could stand it no longer, I gave voice to the words beating hot against my ribcage, threatening to rip from my throat.

‘You knew all of this would happen.’ It wasn’t a question.

The magister made a wet croaking sound in his throat. ‘Of course. I know what they saw in the ritual. Why would you think such knowledge would elude me, my child?’

The image of Vortemis collapsing, blue blood spurting from his neck, etched itself onto the back of my eyes. It was all I could see. I could smell it. Taste it.

‘Did you see my vision, master?’ I asked. I was barely able to keep the expectant quaver from my voice. I gripped my sword tighter and clenched my beak. Would he attack me? Could I kill him here? This wasn’t what I’d seen. Could it still come to pass?

Vortemis scoffed again, cutting my thoughts short. ‘Of course I did!’ he crowed as he patted me tenderly on the shoulder. ‘You saw me fulfilling my destiny, as you always do, my child!’

I vented my ire strangling the haft of my greatblade, wishing it was Vortemis’ scrawny neck. I heard laughter that wasn’t my own echoing from up ahead. The All Seeing gave it no notice.

We turned a final switchback, coming to a precipice overlooking a vast chasm. The rock looked somehow raw, as though recently torn asunder without time to heal. The air grew subtly warmer the closer we drew to it, and the faint stink of rotten meat grew stronger. I approached warily where Vortemis strode confidently forward: I was uncomfortably reminded of some enormous, yawning maw, ringed with shadeglass teeth, waiting to devour me.

The aelf-thing’s ominous words echoed in my skull. I gazed down into the chasm, seeing nothing but unending, hungering darkness.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

Vortemis turned to me and smiled serenely. ‘Where we were meant to be, of course.’

Then I heard the hunting horn.

IV

The aelf-things came in a thunder of hooves so loud and fierce that I was for a moment stunned: I’d spent the equivalent of a hundred lifetimes fighting against lurking horrors and otherworldly predators, but I’d never seen a foe move so quickly and attack so ferociously.

The hunter-servants of Kurnoth exuded savage fury as they charged towards us. They all were crowned by the same fiery manes as the creature we’d sacrificed. Two bore the same shaggy, hooved legs as the ‘Sheoch’ creature, one armed with a curved wooden bow and the other a bellowing horn and a wicked blade. The third, bounding ahead of them, was a monstrous, slavering feline.

And the fourth towered above the others, its aelf-form ending not in legs, but the muscular body of a powerful stag. Curling elk antlers crowned its head, and its face was hidden behind a bronze mask. The spear it carried was as long as I was tall, and the heavy armour rattling on its flanks looked capable of turning aside forged steel. It radiated savage, bestial majesty in a way no gor ever could.

The huntmaster. The one whose spear would end Vortemis’ life, just as the vision had shown me.

The magister was, unsurprisingly, already prepared for battle, eldritch energies crackling around his staff and arcing between his fingers. ‘You seek to stop Vortemis the All Seeing, Magister of the Changer of Ways?’ he shouted in challenge as they charged towards us. ‘Fools! You are mere instruments of destiny!’

The servants of Kurnoth spared no breath on a response as they dived in to slaughter us. The hunting beast lunged ahead of the others the moment Vortemis unleashed his spell.

Crawling magic slithered from the magister’s hand like a brood of crackling serpents. The writhing miasma enveloped the feline. In an instant its body exploded into a riot of mutations, spidery legs and tentacles and claws bursting through its flesh as its golden fur warped into scales and barbs and slug-skin. The two smaller aelf-things gaped in horror. Vortemis laughed raucously.

The Kurnothi slammed into me like a battering ram, hacking and stabbing and kicking in a desperate, blood-pounding, wordless screaming crash. I held like a wall of stone, fighting to keep my hooves beneath me.

In an instant Vortemis and I were surrounded, outnumbered, with our backs against the hungering pit. The two smaller aelf-things engaged me in a storm of slashing steel and whistling arrows and savage war cries. My greatblade surged with the rage flowing through my limbs, parrying blow after blow. They did not fight like the animals they appeared to be; their strikes were too precise, their tactics too considered. And yet their bestial nature lurked beneath the surface in their bared fangs and animal howls; how I could sense their mouths watering as they drew blood. I was taller than each by a head, and stronger, but they were faster. They were dangerous.

What I wouldn’t have given to have Narvia and Turosh fighting beside me, damn them.

‘K’Charik!’ Vortemis yelled. ‘Protect me!’

I spared a desperate glance towards the magister. The roaring huntmaster had descended upon Vortemis before he could conjure another spell. The magister was battling with his crackling staff, but I’d fought his battles long enough to know that close combat was not where his gifts lay.

The half-moment was enough to earn me an arrow in my chest. I screamed in anger and snapped the wooden shaft. The aelf-thing with the horn lunged forward to slice open my throat with its blade. I grabbed it by the neck and hauled it kicking from its feet. Keeping its thrashing form between the archer and me I tightened my fist until I felt gristle crack beneath my claws.

I heard the magister scream again. The aelf-centaur’s spear had scored a deep gouge in Vortemis’ shoulder. The sorcerer fought on, spewing warp-fire from his mouth and claws, but the huntmaster’s assault was too furious, too savage, for the All Seeing to conjure his fearsome spells.

‘Help me, K’Charik!’

The chains binding me to Vortemis tightened like a barbed manacle around my throat. My grip loosened, slightly. It was enough. The thrashing aelf-thing slashed at me with its blade. Nauseating agony blossomed as steel sliced through my eye. Half-blind, I caught its arm in my beak and snapped it from its body with a wet crack. My prey would have screamed if it had breath: all that emerged from its mouth was a pitiful squeak.

Raw hunger rushed through my body as its blood trickled down my throat. With a roar of tzaangor rage I crushed its throat with a wet crunch.

‘K’Charik!’

My bones could resist my master’s curse no longer. Compelled by the chains of fate I dropped the corpse and staggered towards Vortemis. As soon as my back was turned I felt another arrow thud into my flesh, then another, then another. The first two buried themselves in corded muscle. The third penetrated deeper, finding something soft. I felt strength draining from me with the blood leaking from my wounds. I wanted to turn back and defend myself. Still Vortemis called me; heedless that I was dying.

The magister cast his writhing staff skyward. The air of Beastgrave suddenly split. A screeching riot of cerulean limbs and lamprey mouths leapt into being behind me. The gibbering horror tackled the archer before it could loose the killing arrow. Flames belched and arrows flew and screams echoed as the daemon and archer grappled. I did not know which combatant would win. I did not have time to find out.

Obeying arcane sorcery beyond the ken of beastmen I staggered grudgingly to Vortemis’ defence. Towering before me was the great huntmaster, brazen and powerful and bellowing for my blood. It reared on its hind legs and kicked in challenge before charging us, spear held before it like a lance. I fell into a defensive stance between it and Vortemis, who was bleeding from a dozen wounds.

‘Die, foul monster,’ the Kurnothi huntmaster growled before lunging in for the kill.

I poured my fading strength into my blade, parrying and hacking with force that would have chopped a man in half. Vortemis howled a litany of unknowable prayers, spewing foul fire and warping witchery. The huntmaster fought with the ferocity of a beast and the grace of a peerless warrior.

I scored wounds as my weapon found the gaps in its armour, but it was vigorous where I was weary. A powerful kick, too fast for my flagging limbs to dodge, cracked a rib. The huntmaster’s spear stabbed through my shoulder.

Step by step, blow by blow, it forced us towards the cliff.

Vortemis was laughing as the huntmaster slowly killed me. Cackling insanely, like the demented creature he was. ‘Fool!’ he crowed. ‘With every thrust you do the bidding of Tzeentch! You have delivered me! You cannot fight fate!’

The magister unleashed a bolt of power. The huntmaster reared and pulled back his spear. And then, suddenly, I saw it: the perfect moment, foretold by the vision in the divining ritual.

The second stretched impossibly, turning the blinking of an eye into a lifetime. Suddenly I could see every moment of my tortured life, every infinitesimal strand of fate weaving together into a tapestry, confirming what the God of Magic had foretold; the moment for Vortemis to die had come.

‘May Tzeentch damn you,’ I snarled as I emptied every iota of my remaining strength into the swing of my sword, arching towards the magister.

I already knew how Vortemis would move to avoid it, forcing him into the path of the huntmaster’s thrusting spear. I’d fought beside him through countless battles over hundreds of years. I knew his every tic, every spell, every strategy, because for reasons I would never understand Vortemis had made me able to do so. And so I waited, feeling atrophied muscles around my beak pulling into a vestigial smile, as I prepared to spend my final moments watching the huntmaster kill the creature I hated most.

But Vortemis didn’t dodge. In a fraction of a heartbeat I saw his head turn, unnaturally, until he was staring at me with his grinning, eyeless face. Calmly, he leaned left instead of right.

Schlst.

My greatblade chopped messily through Vortemis’ neck.

Vortemis the All Seeing, Magister of Tzeentch, Lord of the Eyes of the Nine remained standing on the precipice for a haunting moment before his head slumped on his spurting neck, barely attached by gristle and sinew. Then his pinions sank, his knees buckled, and his staff slipped from his grasp. My master’s lifeless body slumped backwards like a puppet with its strings cut and disappeared into the lightless chasm below.

He’s dead.

He’s actually, finally dead.

The realisation felt like a balm on my burning wounds. My impending death, for a single, perfect moment, held no dread for me, no remorse: for the first time in as long as I could remember I was finally free of Vortemis the All Seeing. That truth alone flooded my muscles with exuberant rage and roused the bestiality of the tzaangor, defiant of the towering huntmaster before me.

I can fight my way free. I’ve fought through worse.

I shook blood from my face, took my greatblade in both hands, and roared in challenge like the beastman I was.

‘Come, meet your death, servant of th–’

The words died on my tongue.

My claws went to my throat as my sword clattered to the ground. White-hot agony bloomed beneath my fingers as I felt flesh parting as though slashed by an invisible blade. My eyes went wide. Hot, acidic blood gurgled into my mouth, more than I could swallow. I felt vitae spurting between my fingers. I tried to scream, tried to breathe, but all I could do was gag on blood from my slashed throat. Though darkness began to creep across my vision I could see the aelf-centaur warily backing away from me. My hoof slipped on the edge of the chasm. My knees gave way beneath me.

And I fell.

Down.

Down.

Down, into shadows without end.

My vision grew dark as the blackness of the abyss swallowed me whole.

V

I am dead.

The thought anchored itself in my mind, gaining surety from the tortuous perfection of my memory. I’d died before, in Shadespire. Hundreds of times. Each time I remembered the sensation of being dead, of being free, before Nagash’s damned curse vomited me back into the world of the living. After the first time I’d been returned to life death lost its grim allure. I knew the promise of oblivion was a vile lie; a cruel punishment inflicted by a false god on arrogant fools who’d endeavoured to deny the divine its due.

Now, ensconced in darkness that knew no end, there was a certain lurid peace to it.

But slowly, like an ember gradually catching fire in tinder, I felt consciousness returning to me. To my body. To the warped, unnatural flesh that grudgingly jailed my soul. And with the prickling sensation dawned a truly hideous realisation, the likes of which I hadn’t felt in centuries.

I’m not dead. I’m alive.

I opened my eyes.

I was prone, but… floating. I glanced around, seeing the walls of Beastgrave pass beside me, its floor pass beneath me, yet my limbs remained unmoving. It took me a moment to realise that I was recumbent but borne aloft by a magical hand.

I craned my neck to look ahead. Before me, mumbling a tune in a language I’d never heard, stood Vortemis.

‘You disappoint me, my child,’ the magister hissed.

I tried to speak, but my tongue felt dry, turgid. I grunted and clicked my beak.

‘Can you stand?’ the magister asked.

I nodded my head. Without turning his eyeless face the All Seeing perceived the gesture. The bonds around me vanished and I crashed to the cave floor, my sword clattering beside me. As the aethereal funeral-wrappings sloughed away I was slowly able to rise to my hooves. My clawed hand went to my throat, feeling the parted flesh knitted to wholeness without a scar.

‘We’re alive,’ I choked out. ‘How is that possible?’

Vortemis continued walking without breaking stride. ‘I had hoped the answer would have been obvious to you, my child. At least before you decided to embarrass yourself with that foolish attempt at rebellion.’

My eyes caught something glittering in the unnatural darkness. ‘The shadeglass,’ I breathed, feeling the grave-chill of the Mirrored City seeping through the cave walls.

Vortemis nodded sagely, raising his staff to illuminate the chamber we found ourselves in. Jutting from the cave wall, between strange statues and ominous carvings, were thousands of glittering shards, lodged like daggers in flesh.

‘Yes,’ he mused. ‘It appears the Necroquake shattered the very foundation of the Mirrored City across the Mortal Realms. Perhaps beyond as well. The magic of the Katophranes, along with the curse wrought by the Lord of Death, lingers within the shadeglass.’

I felt sickness rising in my stomach. I’d been smashing shards of the accursed shadeglass since the moment we’d found ourselves in Beastgrave, and never once did it occur to me that such a thing was possible.

We turned a corner, finding walls coated in freshly hardened amber. Beneath the golden surface I saw Narvia and Turosh, trapped like insects. I cautiously approached and ran my claws over the warm surface.

‘Are they…?’

‘Alive?’ Vortemis finished. ‘Briefly. They suffocate in minutes, before the curse brings them back to life.’

I felt my blood curdle at the thought of awakening from death to being trapped, utterly immobile, until choking to death, only to be brought back to suffer again. How long had they been trapped in Beastgrave’s foul stomach? Hours? Days?

I placed my palm on the surface of the amber. I imagined, maybe, that I could feel the acolytes thrashing in animal panic against their prisons as Beastgrave devoured them. ‘Are you going to save them?’

Vortemis shrugged, never breaking stride as he strode past. ‘I’m called to matters of greater import, K’Charik,’ he said, as though the answer should have been obvious.

I felt the chains of fate tugging at my neck. Pushing the two acolytes from my mind I grudgingly fell into step behind the magister. ‘How did you know?’

The All Seeing scoffed at me. ‘After all this time, you still think so little of me to ask such questions? Have I not taken you under my mighty wing? Have I not given you a precious gift of my holy knowledge?’

I slammed my blade against a shadeglass shard, shattering it. Normally I did not allow myself to indulge in such animal displays, but by Tzeentch, my rage was veritably seeping from my pores. ‘You act as though you care for me,’ I said bitterly. ‘As though I’m anything more to you than a tool.’

Vortemis turned slowly. His fanged mouth was curled in a scowl. His cerulean pinions rustled. ‘K’Charik, we are all tools of the God of Fate. When I wrought your consecrated flesh, and cast the spell that bound your soul to mine, I had hoped to forge you into something special, something beyond even the blessed form of a tzaangor.’

I laughed sardonically at the sheer, unrepentant gall of the magister. ‘You speak of my curse as though it were altruism, yet you still thought to make it impossible for me to kill you. You knew a day would come when I’d seek to be free of your yoke.’

Vortemis clicked his tongue dismissively. ‘A precaution I foresaw I would need, given the barbarity of the tzaangor, a trait I’d hoped to marry to wit and wisdom. Unfortunately, despite my sincerest efforts to curtail your short-sightedness you seem determined to chain yourself to the past. You cling to the life and form you’ve left behind, rather than the destiny Tzeentch promises.’

‘You never meant for me to fulfil my destiny,’ I growled sullenly. ‘You merely chained me to yours.’

‘You think yourself my equal, is that it? That Tzeentch would choose a dumb beast for greatness? Allow me to disabuse you of this grievous delusion, you stupid, insolent whelp,’ the magister hissed. Gone from his voice was the lofty jocundity, replaced by the cold malice I always sensed lurking beneath the surface. ‘To be my slave, to bask in even one iota of the glory that awaits me far outstrips anything you could have accomplished in your meaningless life!’

Out of the corners of my eyes, like smears upon glass, I glimpsed unseen things gathering around Vortemis, daemons drawn to him by the intensity of his anger.

‘You speak of glory?’ I roared. ‘You dragged the Eyes of the Nine into Shadespire and got yourself imprisoned for centuries! Your plan to corrupt the Faneway for the Gaunt Summoners came to naught! And now, once again,’ I shrieked, throwing open my arms to encompass the darkness we’d fallen into, ‘you’ve followed a false portent, thinking yourself chosen by Tzeentch for greatness, and are lost in a chasm from which there is no escape!’ I snarled. ‘You have failed, Vortemis the All Seeing. The only greatness you ever achieved existed only in your deluded mind.’

I expected Vortemis to kill me where I stood, or as close as could be managed in a place infected by the Katophrane Curse. I could see the murderous desire, the malevolent viciousness in his soul, etched in his skull-like face. I felt it too, as the ancient hunger of this damned place stoked my own thirst for blood. I took my blade in two hands as I saw Vortemis’ clawed fingers twitch and wriggle with arcane power begging to be released.

But the magister didn’t attack. He simply smiled, turned his back, and continued on his way deeper into the chasm.

‘How little you know, my child,’ he cooed, his words once again dripping with saccharine. ‘You think me lost? I am exactly where the Lord of Fate wishes me to be.’

I suddenly realised that I could see the cave walls around me. A sickly crimson glow, the colour of blood spilled in anger, trickled into the tunnel the deeper we walked. In the wounded light I beheld sinister statues lurking in aphotic shadows. A deep, ominous rhythm grew to accompany the echoing of our footsteps, like the beating of a heart or the toll of distant war drums. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed unknown… things flitting between the statues: it took me a moment to realise it was the statues themselves.

My flesh prickled and my palms grew sweaty: in that moment I profoundly understood that the vision I’d seen had been Beastgrave all along, patiently luring me to a place that mortals were never meant to be.

‘Where are we?’ I asked, as the shadows around us seemed to lengthen into hungry fangs.

Vortemis slowly turned. His lipless mouth was stretched too wide in a manic grin, made ghoulish by the crimson light.

‘In the Direchasm!’ he proclaimed aloud, throwing his hands to the sky like a zealot addressing the faithful. ‘In the realm of the Silent People!’