Dauntless Hall
Har Kuron, Aqshy
Half a dozen Blood Sisters were arrayed before the gargantuan doors of Dauntless Hall, their fearsome heartshard glaives flashing under Aqshy’s febrile sun.
As Tivrain and her last companions mounted the stairs and stepped into the shadow of the hall’s enormous facade, one of the Blood Sisters slithered forth. The others fell into a tighter formation behind her, creating a cordon before the doorway.
‘Do you bring news?’ the commanding sister asked. She seemed genuinely eager. No doubt she would have preferred to be on the front lines, fighting alongside her sisters, dedicating all the blood and viscera she spilt to holy Khaine.
‘We’ve come to see your mistress,’ Tivrain said. ‘Vice-Regent Imreth Daemanta.’
The Blood Sister shifted the glaive from her shoulder and planted its ferrule on the marble beside her.
‘If there is news to deliver, Stormcast, you can tell me first, then–’
Their ruse had worked. They were in striking distance of the Daughters of Khaine before they even knew they were in danger.
Pharena’s blade flashed, thrusting forward, right through the Blood Sister’s ribs. For a moment, the pale-faced aelf stared at her slayer, failing to comprehend what had happened.
Pharena twisted her blade.
The Blood Sister crumpled to the marble, limp and lifeless, her glaive clattering loudly.
The others charged – all but one. A single Blood Sister withdrew, swift and sure, making for the door of Dauntless Hall.
‘Take them!’ Tivrain commanded, and surged forward to meet the aelves. ‘Vornus, stop that one!’
As Tivrain, Ibon, Pharena and Golghaar engaged the Blood Sisters remaining, Vornus nocked a lightning arrow upon his greatbow and drew back the string.
The fleeing Blood Sister was heaving the door open, just wide enough to slip inside. She began to slither through – and Vornus loosed his lightning arrow. The bolt flashed as it split the air and buried itself in the Blood Sister’s back. With a muted cry and a shower of webbed lightning, she collapsed in the doorway.
The remainder fought hard, but they were no match for the Stormcasts. Soon enough, all lay lifeless and bleeding upon the threshold of Dauntless Hall.
Tivrain led them inside.
Within lay a long, vaulted promenade lined by towering pillars that hid the many doorways opening onto deeper chambers and side passages. Tivrain knew that their destination, the chamber of the Grand Conclave, lay at the far end of the gallery, under the great rotunda.
They marched on, purposeful and undaunted. For some distance, there seemed to be no one in sight. Tivrain wondered if they might be fortunate enough to reach their destination without meeting resistance. The greater portion of Imreth’s forces had been deployed to defend the city, after all. According to Malascyra, only a skeleton crew of armed soldiers, along with a small army of unarmed thralls, remained in Dauntless Hall to protect the vice-regent. That was precisely why she had urged Tivrain to speed there in the battle’s aftermath – there would be no better time to make the attempt.
Halfway down the corridor, however, a voice called from behind them.
‘Intruders!’ they cried. ‘Betrayers!’
Tivrain and her companions spun on their heels.
A new trio of Blood Sisters, accompanied by half a dozen Witch Aelves, stood at the far end of the promenade, near the entrance. One of the Witch Aelves knelt beside the arrow-impaled Blood Sister that lay in the doorway.
Tivrain bolted forward, placing herself between the Blood Sisters and her companions.
‘Get to the chamber!’ she cried, and called the storm.
The promenade exploded with light and heat as the elemental forces leapt into the structure itself, using its architecture to conduct and direct its energies towards its summoner.
The lightning filled Tivrain – its vessel, its lens.
She unleashed it upon the charging Blood Sisters and Witch Aelves.
The scintillating energies engulfed nearly all their adversaries. Two were thrown off their feet by the concussive force and sprawled, dazed and unable to rise.
A third Witch Aelf, however, somehow evaded being struck. She charged, howling a battle cry, sciansa daggers frightful and bright in the torchlit passage.
Tivrain was about to summon a final bolt of energy when something large and lumbering shoved her aside and marched to meet the oncoming aelf.
It was Golghaar the Scarred.
The Witch Aelf launched herself upon the Sequitor, daggers ready to slash.
Golghaar caught the aelf midair, slammed her to the marble floor, then raised his greatmace. The enormous cudgel fell with horrifying force, crushing the aelf’s skull and slaying her instantly.
As the Witch Aelf’s dying battle cry echoed into eternity, Tivrain heard something else in the distance – the sound of dense, knelling bells, along with shouts resounding down the side passages.
‘Move!’ Tivrain commanded, and led her companions on.
They were just twenty yards shy of the chamber doors when the first of the summoned guards – Sisters of Slaughter, Witch Aelves and Melusai – emerged from side passages far behind them. As Tivrain glanced back to assess their numbers and their distance, she saw that only a few wasted time or energy examining their fallen cohorts. Instead, they saw the running Stormcasts ahead of them and gave chase at once.
Tivrain turned her eyes forward again. The others had already reached the doors to the rotunda. Golghaar held one open while Ibon guarded the other. Inside, Pharena and Vornus were waving, urging Tivrain to join them.
Arrows whizzed by, loosed from the heartseeker bows of Imreth’s Melusai Blood Stalkers. A few nicked Tivrain’s armour and ricocheted off, but none of the hits were direct enough to penetrate or find unprotected joints.
Tivrain slid through the gap between the rotunda doors. Ibon withdrew inside behind her and Golghaar yanked the door shut with a thunderous groan.
Tivrain hastily backed away from the entrance, assessing how it might be barred or barricaded. When she saw nothing other than a simple lock bar, she knew magic would be required.
‘Get the bar in place and I’ll reinforce it,’ Tivrain commanded, then spun, seeking Vornus and Pharena.
‘Close and lock every door,’ she shouted. ‘Quickly!’
‘Already at it,’ Vornus called back from far off to her left.
‘Right away!’ Pharena answered simultaneously from the right.
Warding magic was not her strong suit, but her limited skills would have to do. Tivrain cast a spell upon the main door’s lock bar, though she already knew it would not last indefinitely. As she rushed to reinforce the doors that Pharena and Vornus had closed and barred, she wondered if each spell might be weakened by virtue of how many she had cast.
There is no time for doubt, no time for worry, she reminded herself. Get to work, and let nothing stop you!
The main doors shuddered as the Khainite guards tried to force their way in. The door’s resistance brought curses and barked orders as contingencies were hastily fetched or theorised.
High above, the rotunda’s massive dome was open at the centre, the circular skylight rimmed by slender pillars that held a small cupola aloft above the gap. There was no way to close and bar that breach – meaning that it wouldn’t take Imreth’s servants long to climb to the roof of Dauntless Hall and try to assault them from above.
They had little time… and there were so many prisoners.
Save as many as you can, Tivrain reminded herself. Even one is a victory.
One of the doors began to buckle – the palace guards had improvised a battering ram. It held fast, but Tivrain was not sure how long it could endure.
She turned to Ibon and Golghaar, who stood staring at her with smouldering eyes and determined grimaces.
‘Get to work,’ Tivrain said, and dashed out among the prisoners to do what she’d come to do.
Golghaar and Ibon, meanwhile, each hove up to the first strand they came to, lifted their weapons almost in unison and delivered their bloody mercy.
In answer to the slayings, Azyrite lightning blasted upwards from the Grand Conclave chamber through the skylight above. In the closed space – no matter its size – the blinding brightness of the lightning was shocking, even terrifying. When it blinked out of existence, the cocoons that had held the first two liberated Stormcasts remained, no more than empty, smoking husks.
‘Vornus!’ Tivrain called, already feeling a strange, coiling sickness in her belly, the enormity of what she and her companions were now doing sinking in. ‘See to those far above us! We may not have time to climb up to them or–’
‘Understood!’ he called back, and Tivrain was amazed to note that his voice came from somewhere overhead. A moment later, she saw him, crouching on a wide ledge that ran around the inner wall of the chamber, having clambered up by way of an ancient Anvilgardian statue of some nameless king from the forgotten past.
He loosed his first arrow. High above, its target was subsumed by lightning and borne homeward.
Tivrain spun, seeking the nearest of her brothers and sisters.
The first face she saw was Pyrath Redflame’s.
She thrust out her Incantor’s staff – but could not summon the killing bolt.
End this, a voice said in Tivrain’s ear.
It was his voice – his alone, calm, beseeching.
Why? she wondered. Why you? Why me? What is the bond between us?
Why should it matter? he answered. I suffer. We suffer. End this, Tivrain, for only you can.
Still, inexplicably, she could not.
She spun away from Pyrath. The Stormcast entangled directly behind her was familiar as well – a tetra, half their pate shaved smooth while a long curtain of hair fell over their brow and ear on the opposite side.
Do your work, the gaunt stranger commanded, their voice reverberating in Tivrain’s mind as though it came from every direction at once. End this.
Tivrain hurled a bolt of arcane energy at the death-faced Stormcast hanging directly behind her. A pillar of lightning erupted upwards, leaving only empty, seared web tendrils.
They went about their terrible labours. All around them, the rotunda crackled, trembled and smoked with each new strike of Azyrite lightning that leapt into the sky. In short order, the chamber was filled with smoke from the smouldering cocoons, devoid of their former contents. Amid the clangour of the battering rams at the doors and the crackling of the lightning, Tivrain heard mournful singing.
It was Ibon. As he moved, prisoner to prisoner, he half hummed, half sang one of their Stormhost battle dirges, a low hymn to death’s familiarity and the impossibility of peace for the ever-living. Though Tivrain had never known Ibon to be soulful, or to betray any feelings that he could not bottle and control, she noted now that his soot- and bloodstained face boasted fresh tear tracks.
Still he sang. Still he performed his merciful, murderous duties.
Tivrain understood all too well. Tears stained her cheeks too – she openly wept as she went about her lethal work.
The others moved with deft efficiency, sometimes shocked or nearly singed by the skeins of lightning that bloomed around them but wholly undaunted.
Vornus suddenly appeared, dashing past Tivrain towards a strand some distance away where prisoners still hung.
‘They’re all gone,’ the Judicator said as he ran past. ‘All of those above.’
Tivrain glanced upwards. The cocoons highest on the strands were blasted and smoking, their prisoners freed from them forever. How many was that? Fifteen? Twenty?
All around her, there were empty cocoons, and yet there still seemed to be so many awaiting their deliverance.
Pharena marched with deliberation from prisoner to prisoner, standing before each for a moment and staring into their faces before plunging her sword into their exposed throats, or through some joint in their armour revealed by the thin membranes of their cocoons. She stood still and strong as the lightning took them, almost basking in its glow and its ambient heat, refusing to bend from it or shield herself.
Tivrain had to force herself to stop watching the young Stormcast at her work.
Suddenly, Golghaar howled. Tivrain turned just in time to see him fall to his knees. A barbed arrow protruded from his leg, having found the joint at his knee. She took two steps towards him before a new arrow plinked off the marble at her feet and clattered away. Tivrain spun and looked upwards.
Melusai archers crouched beneath the cupola, raining arrows down upon them with terrifying speed.
Vornus cried out. He, too, had taken an arrow, the point having ploughed down into the space between his neck and the gorget of his armour.
Nearby, Ibon plunged his warblade into one of the Stormcast prisoners. The slaying was answered with a bolt of lightning, and that lightning caught two of the archers as it leapt into the sky through the open space beneath the cupola. Even as those archers fell the great distance to the marble floor and impacted, more slid into their positions and continued to loose arrows down upon the Stormcasts.
‘Tivrain!’ Golghaar shouted. His voice sounded strained, as though his throat were constricted.
Tivrain turned back to Golghaar again and saw, with mounting horror, what had become of him – he was paralysed in the very same position he’d fallen into when the arrow brought him to his knees. Already the veins on his pale neck stood out in vile relief, turning purple-black as Tivrain watched.
The venom that Imreth had taunted them with – the paralytic. The arrows were tipped with it!
Before she could become another victim of the venom, Tivrain dived into the shadows, seeking cover behind one of the rotunda’s massive pillars.
More arrows struck Golghaar.
Across the chamber, Vornus took three more arrows in his exposed flesh. Clearly, one dose of the paralytic could be resisted for a time, but more doses meant a more rapid effect. Vornus twitched convulsively, struggling to fight immobilisation and failing.
Ibon, meanwhile, continued to dash among the prisoners, holding his shield above him in an effort to deflect the falling arrows. He dispatched the imprisoned Stormcasts with ruthless efficiency, and with each liberation, lightning blasted out of the rotunda. More than once, it laid archers low above them, but there always seemed to be another to take the place of the fallen.
Tivrain caught sight of Pharena behind a pillar farther along the circumference of the chamber. Pharena motioned to Vornus, then lifted her blade ever so slightly.
She was asking permission.
Tivrain gripped her Incantor’s staff and began to summon the storm. When the staff’s crested headpiece crackled with gathered energy, she cried out to Pharena.
‘Now!’
Tivrain leapt from cover and unleashed a massive lightning storm towards the rotunda. The archers took cover as the lightning engulfed the dome and blasted the pillars beneath the cupola.
Down the central aisle, Pharena scrambled from cover, dashed to Vornus and raised her sword in both hands. She brought the blade down right into his throat. Lightning engulfed the two of them.
Above, the dome had collapsed. Great chunks of masonry calved and came crashing down into the chamber.
The first massive shard crushed the paralysed Golghaar. Lightning bore him back to Azyr, his twenty years in exile finally ended.
More falling debris tore or shredded the resinous strands holding the prisoners’ cocoons. All came crashing down – strands, cocoons, imprisoned Stormcasts – torn and entangled. Several fonts of lightning erupted into the sky as the masonry slew the prisoners struck by its collapse.
Tivrain shrank back against the pillar, hoping to avoid the falling debris. When the dust and smoke began to clear and the cacophony of the collapse settled, she dared a glance.
She could not see Pharena or Ibon.
Outside, the battering rams continued to hammer the door.
Above, Tivrain heard voices – the archers, regrouping. With the cupola collapsed onto the dome, she guessed they could not resume their perch, but that did not preclude some other way in.
A nearby mound of debris moved, masonry and dust shifting violently.
Tivrain hurried to it.
It was Ibon, half buried, half crushed. Blood burbled from his open mouth, and he twitched and groaned, trying to heave the mass of broken stone off himself and failing.
Tivrain stared into his mournful eyes.
Ibon met her gaze. He nodded.
Tivrain raised the pointed ferrule of her staff, ready to bring it down in a killing thrust.
She hesitated.
How much do I owe him? she thought. How much has he taught me? How often has he been a mentor to me? A friend?
‘Forgive me,’ Tivrain said, staring into Ibon’s eyes.
‘Nothing… to… forgive,’ he managed, choking on his own blood.
Tivrain brought the ferrule down, into Ibon’s throat, and she was engulfed as the lightning leapt skyward to bear Ibon home.
‘Tivrain!’ Pharena shouted.
Suddenly there came a strange sound – buckling metal, cracking stone.
The main door into the rotunda was flexing, pulsing, as though in the seizure of some powerful magic. The lock bars were holding, for the moment, but Tivrain could already see them expanding, counted hundreds of slowly developing cracks in the doors.
Not long now…
Tivrain sought Pharena.
The Liberator lay half reclined against a pillar. A pair of black-fletched arrows protruded from her.
Tivrain knelt beside her. The tears in her eyes stung.
‘I cannot move,’ Pharena said.
Tivrain nodded… but she did nothing.
‘You have to set me free,’ Pharena said.
Tivrain nodded… but still, she could not oblige.
Why? Why am I so loath to harm her? To surrender her?
Suddenly, she and Pharena were not alone. A ghostly image of Pyrath knelt over the Liberator, looking down upon her with sorrowful eyes full of both love and pity. In that instant, Tivrain thought she felt some strange, unutterable bond between the three of them – brilliant adamantine chains forged of aethereal matter, binding them as surely as shared suffering, shared slaughter… or some bond of blood.
Pyrath’s gheist raised his eyes to Tivrain – not simply looking at her but looking into her.
End this, he begged. For her… for me… for yourself.
The noise from the groaning door intensified. The wood had begun to splinter and crack, the lock bars buckling under their unnatural expansion.
‘Hurry,’ Pharena pleaded. ‘I can’t be… I won’t be…’
She was completely unaware of Pyrath’s spiritual presence. Her eyes rolled around all that surrounded them, and her meaning was plain.
She would not be a prisoner, not like those they had just risked so much to set free.
Tivrain forced herself to her feet. Both gauntleted fists tightened around her Incantor’s staff.
‘Remember me,’ Pharena said.
Tivrain unleashed an arcane bolt. The moment it blasted through Pharena’s chestplate, a fierce pillar of lightning exploded upwards, into the Aqshian sky.
At last, she was alone.
Alone… save one.
The door was blown apart by the powerful Khainite magic unleashed to undo Tivrain’s own. The room was filled with a hot inrush of air and a storm of flying splinters as the lock bars exploded, clattering to the floor, and the hinges whizzed like arrows through the rising smoke.
Tivrain turned to face the infiltrators. Beyond the smoking cocoons, the fallen spider-strands and the piles of collapsed masonry, she saw a figure silhouetted in the doorway, striding forward, eyes alight with malign wych-fire, hands bleeding darksome Ulguan energy like black, smoking flames.
‘Your suffering will be unending, Stormcast!’ Imreth Daemanta roared. ‘I promise you a hundred lifetimes of agony, of suffering, of screams echoing in your own mind because your mouth will not utter them!’
But one remains, Tivrain thought, and found him – the recipient of her final mercy, the prime motive in her decision to come to this terrible place.
Pyrath Redflame, suspended in his cocoon, eyes open, still as death.
Tivrain charged towards him, Incantor’s staff in hand.
Imreth unleashed a fusillade of her foul magic. Black flames burst forth, racing across the chamber towards Tivrain.
Tivrain threw herself behind the pillar closest to Pyrath’s cocoon. Imreth’s attack engulfed the column and dissipated in an instant, barely missing her.
‘Bring her to me!’ Imreth shouted. ‘I want her alive, do you hear me?’
Boot-heels beat the marble floor. Khainites poured into the chamber, fanning out on either side.
Tivrain judged the distance between her and Pyrath – two long strides, perhaps three. Could she reach him before one of those Khainites sank a paralytic arrow in her flesh? Before Imreth hurled some accursed magic that robbed her of the last choice she hoped to make before she met her fate?
She looked to the ferrule at the base of her staff – long, sharp, sure.
She dashed from her cover towards her quarry.
‘There!’ Imreth shrieked. From the corner of her eye, Tivrain saw more black flames exploding towards her.
Bowstrings hummed in the darkness.
‘For the fallen!’ she snarled through clenched teeth, plunging the ferrule of her Incantor’s staff towards Pyrath Redflame’s heart. ‘For the resurrected!’
Sigmarite met sigmarite. His breastplate held fast for only an instant before her powerful blow drove the spike into his heart.
Pyrath Redflame exploded into a glorious, crackling, white-hot skein of lightning as thick as a tree trunk, blasting skyward beyond the roof of the chamber of the Grand Conclave.
Black fire engulfed Tivrain in the same instant. It did not burn her physically but burrowed deeper, igniting every nerve ending, arousing every pain centre.
Screaming in agony, Tivrain Greymantle dropped her Incantor’s staff and fell to her knees, a balled-up, trembling mass of muscle and bone enduring the worst mortal pain she had ever known.
For what seemed an eternity, the black flame roiled around her, tearing at her from within. When at last the pain dissipated and Tivrain opened her eyes, she saw that she was surrounded.
Witch Aelves and Sisters of Slaughter formed a tight cordon all around her.
She stared at her empty hands.
No weapon… no hope. This is my punishment, she thought. And perhaps it is just.
The barbed whip of a Sister of Slaughter lashed out and coiled about her left arm. Another encircled her right arm, yanking it in the opposite direction. A Witch Aelf rushed up behind Tivrain and took hold of her braid, pulling it backwards.
Imreth strode into their circle.
‘You meddlesome fool,’ she snarled. ‘You shall endure every experiment and torture I had devised for your cohorts, a hundred times over. Alone! Eternally!’
Tivrain had no retort to offer. She had done what she came to do, failing only in her last and greatest hope – to free herself and follow her companions back to the Anvil of Apotheosis.
Little matter, she thought. I have done my duty, fulfilled all my oaths.
A shadow fell over her.
A fell wind stirred the dusty, smoke-filled air.
Tivrain lifted her face. Above, through a narrow crack in the dome, a lithe aelven form descended, borne on a pair of leathery black wings.
Malascyra Stormwrack alighted right before Tivrain Greymantle.
Tivrain met the Harpy’s crimson gaze.
Malascyra’s vague half-smile and the subtle nod she gave made her intentions clear.
Tivrain saw the Harpy’s barbed sickle flash forth from its sheath.
Then there was only a blinding, blessed white light.