Chronicle, entry number eighty-eight.
The Primarch Lorgar invited me to lunch.
He took me to a street stall in a fantasy city and ordered two things the vendor called “panchos”: a sausage inside a bun, with sauces.
He ate five.
He told me it was the closest thing to a divine revelation he’d had in years.
Then he stared at the sausage with terrible seriousness and said: “Tobías, when all this is over, I want to learn to cook.” I couldn’t tell if it was a metaphor.
I don’t think it was.
I.
The Tamer
Rein Shroud was a beast tamer.
In his world, that meant he could make pacts with animals and creatures to borrow a little of their power.
For years he had been a member of the Hero’s party, the one chosen by the gods to defeat the Demon King.
Until the Hero decided Rein was dead weight and kicked him out.
Rein didn’t lose heart.
He formed his own party.
And since he was very good at what he did, his new companions were extraordinary: Kanade, a cat-girl of a legendary race, cheerful, always hungry and capable of knocking down a wall with one punch; Tania, a proud dragon in human form; Sora and Runa, two spirit sisters with more magic than common sense; Tina, a household ghost who cooked very well despite not having a body; and Nina, a little nine-tailed fox girl who barely spoke.
When Lorgar arrived in the city of Horizon with the Word Bearers, he did so as always: on foot, preaching.
But this time something interrupted his sermon.
A scream.
Then another.
Then an explosion in the market square.
In the middle of the square, a merchant was writhing on the ground.
On his right hand he wore a ring of black iron.
And something was coming out of the ring: a claw-shaped shadow that grew, twisted and turned into a daemon.
II.
The Daemon in the Ring
It was a creature of shifting flesh, with too many eyes and a mouth that opened in places where no mouth should be.
Its skin changed color every second: blue, pink, violet.
It laughed in a voice that seemed to come from many throats at once.
The townsfolk fled.
The guards fled.
Rein Shroud and his party, who had been eating at a nearby stall, sprang to their feet.
“Kanade! Tania!”
“On it!” shouted Kanade, her mouth full of pancho.
But before they got there, Lorgar was already on the scene.
The Primarch raised a hand.
Chains of golden light burst from the ground, coiled around the daemon and pinned it to the paving stones of the square.
The creature shrieked, thrashed, tried to change shape to escape.
The chains adjusted to every shape.
“Now,” said Lorgar, looking at Rein’s party.
He didn’t have to say it twice.
Kanade punched it.
Tania breathed fire on it.
Sora and Runa hit it with a double spell.
Nina, from Rein’s shoulder, bit its tail.
The daemon dissolved into multicolored smoke with one last shriek.
Silence fell over the square.
Kanade wiped her mouth.
“Who are you?” she asked Lorgar.
“Someone who knows that kind of creature,” the Primarch replied, very seriously.
He crouched beside the merchant, who was still unconscious, and carefully removed the black iron ring, holding it between two fingers as if it burned.
“And who did not expect to find them here.”
III.
The Interrogation
When the merchant woke up, he remembered nothing.
Only that he had bought the ring from a nobleman of the city, one Edgar Fromware, who had sold it to him very cheaply.
The Imperial Arbites—the Imperium’s police, with their black armor, their shotguns and their total lack of a sense of humor—interrogated Edgar Fromware for an entire night.
Fromware was a corrupt, greedy, cowardly noble, and he confessed quickly.
“It was given to me! I only resold it! They told me it was a lucky ring!”
“Who gave it to you?”
“I don’t know his name! He was a knight! An adventurer!”
Nina, the little fox girl, who was sitting in Rein’s lap in a corner of the interrogation room, raised her head.
“I saw him,” she said in a very small voice.
Everyone turned toward her.
“The day he gave the man the ring. I was in the alley. It was a boy. Blond. With a blue cape. Very pretty. And a shiny sword.”
Rein went very still.
“Blue cape,” he repeated.
“Blond. Shiny sword.”
“You know him?” asked Lorgar.
Rein closed his eyes.
“It’s Arios,” he said.
“The Hero.”
IV.
The Hero’s Party
Arios, the Hero chosen by the gods, arrived in Horizon the next day with his party: Leane, the swordswoman, Mina, the priestess, and Aggath, the warrior.
They were coming back from a failed mission against the Demon King.
They were in a foul mood.
And they were used to everyone giving them everything for free.
They walked into the city market as if they owned it.
Arios took an apple from a stall without paying.
Leane took a necklace.
Aggath sat down in a restaurant chair and demanded free food “in the name of the gods.”
The restaurant owner, who had learned a thing or two about the Imperium that week, refused.
“Here, you pay.”
“Do you know who I am?” said Arios.
“I’m the Hero!”
“Don’t care. Here, you pay.”
Arios flew into a rage.
He drew his sword.
He slashed the restaurant’s stall and split it in two.
At that moment, the Arbites arrived.
* * *
“You are under arrest,” said the Arbites Judge, a square-jawed man in a black helmet, his shotgun resting on his shoulder.
“For theft, destruction of property and threatening a citizen.”
Arios burst out laughing.
“Arrested? Us? We’re the Hero’s party! We’re blessed by the gods!”
“The Imperium recognizes no gods,” said the Judge.
Mina, the priestess, stepped forward, scandalized.
“That’s blasphemy!”
An Astra Militarum guardsman accompanying the Arbites looked at her with contempt.
“Silence, heretic.”
Mina blinked.
She pointed at herself.
“H-heretic? Me?”
Nobody had ever called her a heretic.
She was always the one calling everyone else that.
She was so thrown that she didn’t say another word for the rest of the arrest.
V.
The Confession
Lorgar visited Arios in his cell that night.
The Hero was sitting on the cot, arms crossed, wearing the face of someone used to everything going his way.
“They’ll get me out of here tomorrow,” he said.
“The gods won’t allow their Hero…”
“Your gods aren’t coming,” said Lorgar, sitting down across from him.
“They never come. I’ve spent many years learning that.”
Arios glared at him.
“And what would you know?”
“I know you gave a cursed ring to a nobleman so he’d sell it in the market. I know you knew what it was. And I know you did it so that Rein Shroud, the man you threw out of your party, would look incapable of protecting his city.”
Arios said nothing.
“What I don’t know,” Lorgar went on, “is where you got the ring.”
“I don’t have to tell you.”
Lorgar leaned forward.
And smiled.
It wasn’t a cruel smile.
It was the smile of a preacher who knows exactly what to say.
“You’re the Hero. The chosen of the gods. The best of your generation. And yet Rein Shroud, the man you looked down on, has saved the city twice this week while you were stealing apples. Everyone knows it. Everyone’s talking about him. About you, no one.”
Arios clenched his fists.
“Shut up!”
“How does it feel to be second best?”
“Shut up! I’m not second best! He’s useless! That’s why I gave the noble the ring! I wanted the city to see he’s good for nothing! A hooded merchant on the north road sold it to me! He said it was a ring to humiliate my enemies! It smelled of rust and smoke!”
Silence.
Arios realized what he had just said.
Too late.
Lorgar stood up.
“Thank you,” he said, and left the cell.
* * *
The trial of the Hero’s party was public.
Arios was convicted of conspiracy, use of daemonic artifacts and endangering the civilian population.
The sentence was the harshest the Imperium could impose without shedding blood: public degradation, the loss of all his titles and fifteen years in an Astra Militarum penal legion.
Leane, Mina and Aggath received lighter sentences.
Mina asked to be allowed to study Imperial theology during her sentence, “to understand what the people who call me a heretic are dealing with.” The request was granted.
Rein Shroud watched the trial from the front row.
When they took Arios away, he didn’t smile.
He just stared at the floor.
“Aren’t you happy?” Kanade asked him.
“No,” said Rein.
“I feel sorry for him.”
Lorgar, who heard him from the dais, grew thoughtful.
VI.
The New Hero
The next day, Lorgar summoned Rein Shroud to Horizon’s main square, before the whole city.
“This world has lost its Hero,” he said.
“It needs a new one. One chosen not by the gods, but by the people he has protected. Rein Shroud, do you accept?”
Rein froze.
He looked at his party.
Kanade was giving two thumbs up.
Tania was rolling her eyes, but smiling.
Sora and Runa were clapping.
Tina was floating with excitement.
Nina was nodding from his shoulder.
“I…” Rein began.
Kanade raised her hand.
“Question! Does being Hero come with free food?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Kanade thought it over.
“Well, he accepts anyway.”
Rein burst out laughing.
“I accept.”
“Very good,” said Lorgar.
“Just say ‘for the Emperor.’ And don’t ruin it.”
“For the Emperor,” said Rein.
The square erupted in applause.
That night, Lorgar sat alone for a while with the black iron ring on the table in his cabin.
He had stored it in a lead box sealed with runes.
Even so, he could feel something inside.
Something familiar.
Something he had known in another life, in another universe, back when he still prayed to the wrong gods.
He wrote an urgent message to his brother Magnus.
It was only four words long.
“I think they’re here”.
Chronicle, entry number eighty-nine.
The Primarch Lorgar showed me the ring before sending it to Terra.
He wouldn’t let me touch it.
He only let me look at it through the glass of the box.
It shone with colors I can’t describe.
Blue.
Pink.
Violet.
Colors that change when you look at them.
Lorgar asked me if I felt anything.
I told him I did.
That I felt the ring was looking at me.
He said: “Good. Remember that feeling. It’s important that you recognize it when it comes back.”
VII.
The Interrupted Duel
Magnus the Red received Lorgar’s message on a world called the World of Twelve, where time was a kind of magic and clocks were weapons.
On that world lived a man named Nox.
He had once been a kindly inventor, a clockmaker.
He had lost his family in a catastrophe and, ever since, had devoted two hundred years to a single obsession: gathering enough life energy—the Wakfu—to turn back time and save them.
To get it, he was willing to drain the life from the entire planet.
When the Thousand Sons arrived, Nox was in the middle of a duel against Grugaloragran, an ancient dragon, on a mountaintop.
Clocks floated around him, spinning backward.
The dragon roared.
Magnus appeared between the two of them.
Standing in midair.
Arms crossed.
He stopped time.
He didn’t do it with clocks.
He did it with his mind.
Nox and the dragon froze mid-attack.
The floating clocks stopped.
Even the clouds stopped.
Magnus walked around Nox, studying him with his single eye.
“Such a great sadness,” he murmured.
“Two hundred years of sadness. And all of it turned into gears.”
Then he released time.
Nox realized what had happened.
He looked at Magnus.
He looked at his own clocks, which had just been stopped by someone who didn’t use clocks.
And he fled.
VIII.
The Visit
That night, aboard Magnus’s ship, while the Primarch studied Lorgar’s message in his library, someone appeared in the chair across from him.
It didn’t come through the door.
It didn’t teleport.
It was simply there.
It was a tall, thin creature with iridescent feathers, a hooked beak and eyes that shone with all the colors Tobías Garza hadn’t been able to describe.
It carried a staff with an eye at its tip.
And it was smiling, even though it had no mouth.
“Hello, Magnus,” it said.
Its voice was like many voices at once.
“It’s been a while.”
Magnus didn’t move.
His hand slowly tightened on the arm of his chair until the wood creaked.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“And yet, here I am.” The creature settled into the chair, crossing its legs.
“Don’t you want to know how?”
“Tell me.”
“The orks,” said the daemon, delighted.
“Those green, noisy, wonderfully stupid brutes. They saw your Webway. They thought it was pretty. So they tried to build one. Out of scrap. Out of shouting. Out of the blind faith that if something is red enough, it’ll go faster.”
Magnus closed his eye.
“And it worked.”
“Oh, no. It was a disaster. An absolute disaster. It half-exploded. It punched holes everywhere.” The daemon leaned forward.
“And one of those holes opened onto our home.”
* * *
The daemon explained the rest with the patience of someone savoring every word.
Chaos, outside the Eye of Terror, was weak.
The dark gods had no strength in these new universes, where no one knew them, where no one prayed to them.
But they had found the door.
And now they were looking for something.
“Champions,” said the daemon.
“Souls who want something so desperately they’re willing to pay any price. You know how it works, Magnus. You were almost one.”
“Almost,” said Magnus.
“In another universe.”
“In another universe,” the daemon conceded.
“This one is new. Here, anything can happen.”
Magnus opened his eye.
“Who is your champion here?”
The daemon smiled without a mouth.
“You already know him. You saw him this afternoon. A very sad clockmaker who wants his family back.”
“Nox.”
“He accepted our offer an hour ago.” The daemon rose and began to fade into the air.
“Such a shame. I liked him.”
“Tell your master,” said Magnus, rising as well, his eye blazing with fury, “that this universe is not his.”
“Oh, Magnus.” The daemon’s voice was now only an echo.
“It isn’t anyone’s yet. That’s the fun part.”
And it vanished.
IX.
Alliance in the Forest
Magnus summoned his captains that very night.
Ahriman first among them.
“It’s Tzeentch,” said the Primarch.
“The Architect of Fate. The Lord of Change. He has found a way into the Webway through an ork copy. We have to close that door. And we have to stop Nox before Chaos turns him into something worse.”
“And how do we find him, my lord?”
Magnus looked at the map of the world.
“With local help.”
* * *
The local help went by the name of the Sadida Kingdom: a people of plant-folk who lived in a gigantic forest, ruled by an elderly king and his family.
Princess Amalia, an energetic, bossy young woman.
Her brother Armand, a proud and suspicious prince.
And Evangeline, Amalia’s bodyguard, an archer who looked at the Thousand Sons with an expression that clearly said “I will kill you if you touch my princess.”
“They’re giving me an ‘I will kill you’ look,” one of the Thousand Sons whispered to Ahriman.
“It’s how they say hello.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
The Sadida accepted the alliance once Magnus explained that Nox was draining the life out of their sacred forest, the Tree of Life.
Armand was the last to agree, and only after challenging one of the Thousand Sons to a fencing duel.
He lost in six seconds.
He agreed in seven.
* * *
Along with the Thousand Sons had come Astra Militarum reinforcements as well: a regiment of the Death Korps of Krieg.
The soldiers of Krieg were famous throughout the Imperium for three things: their gas masks, their complete lack of conversation and their obsession with digging trenches.
The Sadida guards watched them curiously the first day.
Then they tried to make friends.
They offered them fruit.
The Krieg men didn’t respond.
They offered them water.
The Krieg men didn’t respond.
They offered to play cards with them.
The Krieg men looked at one another.
Then they sat down.
They played for hours.
Without speaking.
Without taking off their masks.
The Sadida did the talking for both sides, laughing, complaining.
The Krieg men just laid cards on the table.
And won.
They always won.
“How do you do it?” asked a Sadida guard, exasperated.
A Krieg soldier looked at him through his mask.
There was a very, very long silence.
“Patience,” he said at last.
It was the only word he spoke during the entire campaign.
When the Sadida woke up the next morning, the Krieg regiment had dug five kilometers of trenches around the forest.
In one night.
Without anyone asking them to.
“Why?” Amalia asked Magnus.
“I don’t know,” the Primarch admitted.
“I think it’s how they relax.”
X.
The Daemons
Nox attacked on the third day.
He didn’t come alone.
With him came his Noxines—little insect robots that drained energy—and something else.
Something that was not of that world.
Daemons.
Pink and blue Horrors that split in two when you hit them.
Creatures of shifting flesh like the one in Lorgar’s ring, but a hundred times bigger.
They poured out of cracks in the air, laughing, shrieking, changing shape.
The Sadida guards fell back in terror.
The Krieg regiment did not.
It climbed out of its trenches all at once, in silence.
A thousand soldiers in gas masks, shovels raised high.
And it charged.
“FOR THE EMPEROR!”
It was the first time the Sadida had heard them shout.
It was also the last.
They charged the daemons with trench shovels, bayonets and a determination the daemons themselves couldn’t understand.
Many fell.
Those who remained kept charging.
Magnus, from the hill, watched them pass by him.
“What beautiful madness,” he whispered.
XI.
Yugo
In the middle of the battle, three more adventurers turned up.
Yugo, a boy in a hat with ears, capable of opening magical portals.
Adamai, his brother, a white dragon.
And Tristepin Percedal, a red-haired warrior, boastful and brave, who carried a cursed sword called Rubilax: a demon sealed inside the blade that talked to him constantly, trying to talk him into doing evil.
“Hey, Pin!” Rubilax squealed from the sword.
“Look at all those daemons! They’re my cousins! Let me out to say hi!”
“Shut up, Rubilax!”
“Just for a little bit! I promise!”
“I said shut up!”
The Thousand Sons looked at one another.
“He’s got a daemon in his sword,” said one.
“And he carries it voluntarily,” said another.
“This is going to end badly.”
“It always ends badly.”
XII.
Commissar King
The battle was being lost.
The daemons kept pouring out of the cracks.
The Noxines were draining energy from the Tree of Life.
Yugo was opening portals to evacuate the wounded.
The Krieg men kept charging with shovels.
And then, from the rear, a man arrived.
He was dressed in the uniform of an Astra Militarum Commissar: long greatcoat, skull-badged cap, gold braid.
He had a vertical scar over his left eye and the face of someone about to pass out.
He walked very slowly, very stiffly, his hands trembling at his sides.
It was King.
The man Magnus had found on the world of heroes.
The “strongest man in the world.” The Supreme Strategist of the Sector.
Promoted to Commissar for merits no one had been able to document, because they didn’t exist.
He had been sent on this campaign by an administrative error.
He had boarded the wrong ship looking for the bathroom.
King reached the front line.
He saw the daemons.
The daemons saw him.
And King’s heart began to pound.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
It was the “King Engine”: the sound of his terrified heart, beating so hard that everyone could hear it.
On his world, people believed it was the sound of a terrible power gearing up to strike.
The daemons stopped.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
One of them, a Pink Horror, stopped laughing.
Another, a bird of fire, lowered its wings.
The creatures of shifting flesh stopped shifting.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
BA-DUM.
The daemons of Tzeentch, creatures born of lies, manipulation and change, tried to read that man’s fate.
They tried to see his future, his plans, his intentions.
And they found nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Only a perfect void, with no plan, no strategy, no lie.
For a creature of Tzeentch, which lives by guessing the schemes of others, a man with no plan at all is the most terrifying thing in the universe.
The daemons fell back.
King didn’t move.
He couldn’t.
His legs were paralyzed with fear.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
The daemons kept retreating.
One by one, they dissolved into multicolored smoke and went back into their cracks.
Magnus, from the hill, watched it all with his mouth hanging open.
“I sense no power in him,” he said.
“None. And yet, Chaos retreats.”
Ahriman, beside him, was just as baffled.
“My lord, what is that man?”
Magnus was silent for a moment.
Then he smiled.
“A good decision,” he said.
“Letting him live was a very good decision.”
* * *
When the battle was over, King was still standing on the front line, in exactly the same spot.
The Krieg soldiers surrounded him in silence.
Then, one by one, they snapped to attention before him.
King looked at them.
He swallowed.
“Where… where’s the bathroom?” he asked in a tiny voice.
The Krieg men looked at one another.
No one answered.
But that night they dug him one.
With a plaque of honor on the door.
XIII.
The Three Anchors
Tzeentch’s rift was held open by three runic anchors, placed by Nox at three points in the forest.
Magnus located them with his psychic sight and divided his forces.
Yugo and Adamai destroyed the first, using a portal to send it to the bottom of the ocean.
Tristepin destroyed the second, after letting Rubilax out for exactly four seconds (“Freedom!” “Back in the sword!” “Aww!”).
The Krieg men destroyed the third with a shovel charge.
Magnus took care of the core.
It lay at the heart of the forest, among the roots of the Tree of Life: a sphere of twisted energy, in the colors of Lorgar’s ring.
Nox stood before it, clocks spinning around him, his eyes shining with all the colors of Tzeentch.
“Don’t come any closer,” said Nox.
“I’m almost there. Just a little more energy and I’ll be able to go back. I’ll be able to save them.”
“You won’t,” said Magnus.
“He won’t let you. He will never let you.”
“He promised me!”
“He promises everything,” said Magnus.
“That’s his trap.”
He raised his hand.
The core exploded into a thousand shards of light.
Nox fell to his knees, screaming, as his clocks shattered around him.
And then, out of nowhere, one last rift opened.
An enormous hand, made of feathers and blue fire, reached out of it and seized Nox by the throat.
“No!” shouted Magnus, lunging forward.
Too late.
The hand dragged Nox into the rift, and the rift closed with him inside.
The forest fell silent.
From behind, arriving at a run and out of breath, came an old man with a hat, a white beard and a gigantic backpack.
It was Ruel, an old adventurer and friend of Yugo’s, famous throughout the World of Twelve for always arriving late to everything.
He looked around.
He looked at the Thousand Sons, the Krieg men, the Sadida, the one-eyed Primarch, King standing in the middle of the field.
“What did I miss?” he asked.
XIV.
The Fine Print
The official reports end here.
But there was one more scene, which no one witnessed and which is known only because Magnus saw it afterward, in a vision, and told it to Tobías Garza one night when he couldn’t sleep.
In a place between worlds, in the Warp, Nox awoke before a grave.
His family’s grave.
The one he had built two hundred years earlier, in his hometown, before he became what he was.
He knelt before it.
He wept.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m so sorry. I couldn’t save you. I just want… I just want it to be over. I just want to rest.”
A voice answered behind him.
A voice that was many voices at once.
“Oh, Nox. Dear Nox. You didn’t read the fine print.”
Nox turned around.
“What fine print?”
“The contract’s,” said the voice.
“You’re not going to rest. You’re going to work for me. Forever.”
And the Warp swallowed him.
* * *
Chronicle, entry number ninety.
Magnus told me about that vision at three in the morning, in his library, with a glass of wine he never drank.
When he finished, he sat for a long time staring at the fire in the hearth.
Then he said to me: “Tobías, now we know who opened the door. But we don’t know who else has come through it.” I asked him what we were going to do.
He said: “My father is going to do what he always does. He’s going to hold a parade.”
I thought it was a joke.
In this job, I’ve learned that nothing ever is.
I’m a novice writer with many stories still left to tell and a great passion for Warhammer.
I love imagining dark worlds, epic battles, and imperfect characters.
I write to learn.