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Khul sprang back, evading Vandus’s vengeful strike, panting hard. For all his mastery, he too had taken heavy damage, and his strength, though immense, was not infinite.

‘Will you be taken from me again, I wonder?’ mused Khul, circling the dracoth, keeping his axe-edge high. ‘At the moment when I hold your life in my hands, will your God-King pull you from peril as he did before?’

Vandus barely heard the words. Everything he had done since his Reforging now hung on this moment. He had been sent to Aqshy to slay the warlords who ruled it, and now, with the storm of Sigmar’s wrath circling above him, he was still holding back. His power felt blunted, incomplete. Every time he aimed Heldensen at his adversary, his aim lacked the sharpness it had possessed in a hundred other duels.

The dracoth was undeterred, and lashed out fiercely at the hound. The two beasts were bleeding freely now, their jaws a mess of torn flesh. Khul prowled back for the next strike, his dark outline radiating a casual lethality.

‘Why even return?’ the warlord asked. ‘Can you not see it? There is nothing left. You should have kept the Gate closed — we will come hunting for you now, just as you have done for us.’

The taunt had been designed to enrage him, to place the fear in him that Azyr too might be at peril, but Vandus did not linger on those words. The ones that resonated with him were the others: there is nothing left.

And then he understood. His grief had risen when he had seen what he was fighting for — the fire-scarred wastes, the old ruins. That was not what he had once striven to protect. He had breathed the realm’s parched air and smelled its charred bones, and his mighty heart had sunk.

Even now, an aspect of him was lodged in that other world, the place in which all his old loves had dwelt. He had been a part of that, and in the long years of preparation a part of him had hoped something would be left to retrieve — some survivors, some mark of the old civilisation. When it was clear that the past was lost, that hope had dissolved. He could not fight for the Aqshy of the present as he might have done for the Aqshy of the past.

And therein lay his fault — he had let his old self swim up to the surface, for the grief was not his, it was Vendell’s. Vandus had not been sent to restore the realm of the past, he had been sent to create the realm of the future.

Heldensen roared into flame once more. The sign of the comet emblazoned on his armour burst out with a pure light, reflecting the hidden glory of the Celestial Realm. Vandus pulled the dracoth’s head around, driving him hard at the waiting figure of Korghos Khul.

The warlord gave no sign he had detected the change, and raced to rejoin battle. Their weapons smashed into one another once again, but this time it was the axe that rebounded, its fires wavering. Vandus flung down another blow, knocking Khul back and sending him staggering.

Vandus spoke no words, for his fury was now enough. Khul recovered himself, his laughter gone. In a thousand years he had never been bested, and he surged back into contact, his blade whirling about him in tighter circles.

Vandus angled his hammer down, aiming to catch the axe-head in mid-flight. As he did so, his dracoth missed his aim, freeing Grizzlemaw to strike. The daemon-hound leapt clear of Vandus’s steed, its jaws agape. At the last moment, Vandus wrenched Heldensen to block it, and Grizzlemaw’s teeth clamped on to the golden hammerhead.

That left him exposed, and Khul was there to take advantage. The lord of Khorne sent a vicious swipe whistling for Vandus’s unguarded neck, crying out with triumph as the killing blow swept in. There was no evading that strike, for Khul had poured all his long festering hatred into it, and it was unleashed with an infinite outpouring of his seasoned malice.

‘For the Blood God!’

But Khul’s cry of triumph was cut short. The Lord-Celestant’s outline blazed with azure fire, and he wrenched the hammerhead from Grizzlemaw’s jaws. Khul’s axe-head cut through the haze of crackling lightning, but connected with the lightning-crowned metal. The two weapons clashed again, each one propelled by the entirety of their bearer’s strength. With a thunderous crash, the full power of the storm was unlocked, and this time it was Khul who was thrown back.

His armour still incandescent with shimmering celestial energies, Vandus pressed the attack, and Heldensen smashed through Khul’s hurried guard, knocking the cursed iron aside. Another hammer-blow flew in, angled back, flinging Khul’s blade from his hand and hurling it end over end into the horde beyond. For the first time the warlord’s eyes betrayed fear — he could see the prize slipping away from him, eluding his grasp just as it had done before. He snarled and leapt straight for Vandus, talons outstretched, going for his neck.

Vandus was too fast, though, and Heldensen hurtled around, catching the oncoming warlord full in the chest. The lightning-wreathed head cracked the crimson armour open, and Khul was sent tumbling away, the first roar of true pain leaving his bloodied lips.

The dracoth pounced, going after Grizzlemaw and digging the talons in deep. Vandus pushed clear of the saddle, joining the assault on the daemon-hound. He waded in close, waiting for the coiled spring, and caught the beast in mid-jump. Grizzlemaw was immune to the sacred fire burning along Heldensen’s shaft, but was as subject to the indomitable strength of sigmarite as any mortal creature. The heavy hammerhead crunched into its ribcage, driving in the bones and tossing the broken-backed hound aside.

Then Vandus turned back to Khul. The warlord had been thrown many yards back, hurled into the heart of his own warriors, crushing many of them beneath his armoured bulk. Khul stayed prone, his weapon gone and the fires of Khorne extinguished. Vandus went after him, his hammer now light in his grasp. The moment had come and there was no doubt remaining. The Brimstone

Peninsula of old had been destroyed, and the ruined butcher before him was just one small facet of that tortured past. With his death the new age could begin — the age of renewal.

‘Nothing remains,’ Vandus said, his voice cold. Khul stared up at him, bleary-eyed, half comprehending. ‘Aye, nothing remains, not of this place, and not of the man I once was. You should not have come back to face me, warlord, for all things have changed.’

Vandus Hammerhand drew Heldensen back then, poised to deliver the strike that would end his ancient tormentor. Khul snarled, his throat catching with bubbles of blood, and something kindled under the shadow of his helm — a fell light, igniting like stirring embers.

Vandus met that gaze, and was instantly caught. Visions thrust into his mind, as clear as shafts of fire. He saw eight towers, each bridging the void between the burning horizon and the storm-cracked sky. Between those towers he saw another Gate, a vast remnant of ensorcelled stone and iron, shackled with mighty chains and wreathed in blood-red immolation. And yet this one led not to the glory of the God-King’s realm, but to the depths of madness beyond all mortal reckoning. Under its lintel seethed a gaping wound in reality, one through which unbounded malice bled into the worlds of the living.

Under the shadow of that gate stood the pyramid of skulls — the one Khul had boasted of. In those shuddering visions the warlord lived and climbed to the summit, his progress lit by the baleful glow of the open Gate. Khul carried a lone burden in his exposed claw — a severed head, still glistening with flesh.

Vandus reeled, just for a moment, consumed by the vision before him. He recognised the features on what remained of that face and it chilled him to his soul. Below him, Khul let a smile flicker across his bruised mouth.