He placed his hands over the massive padlock, and exerted his will. The lock clicked open, and the iron chains fell to the ground with a resounding clang. Though still hampered by the confines of the cell, the great creature stretched out, its head rising up to the roof and its wings unfurling around the walls. A grating, iron-hard growl emerged from its chest, and its clawed forelegs pawed at the straw.
‘Now, take the fight to them!’ urged Martak gazing up at the creature’s snake-like neck and marvelling at just how huge it was. ‘You are free – let me guide you.’
The dragon did not move. Though released from its chains, it remained where it was, curled up in a dungeon at the very base of the vast Palace. Its old, old face seemed lost in thought, its eyes narrowing and its nostrils flared.
Martak began to lose patience. If the Emperor still lived, there would be little time to save him. Every moment saw more of the city destroyed, and more lives lost.
‘Come on!’ he commanded, infusing his voice with as much beast-mastery as he could. ‘What are you waiting for?’
As soon as he uttered those words, though, he realised what was happening. The dragon was waiting for something. It had no intention at all of leaving its cell, and its huge head remained motionless, slightly inclined, as if listening.
It was only then that Martak felt it himself. He had been so preoccupied with survival, so fixed on his goal of releasing the dragon, that the tremors had passed him by completely, but now, with his hunters slain and the mighty beast standing before him, he wondered how he had missed them.
The ground was vibrating. Not strongly, as if in an earthquake, but with a steady, persistent harmonic. The straws under his feet were trembling, and lines of dust were falling from the brickwork roof. A low hum filled the chamber, reverberating just on the edge of hearing. It sounded like it was coming from everywhere – the stone, the earth, the air itself.
Martak backed away from the dragon. Whatever he sensed was nothing like the sorcery that had infused the city since the beginning of the siege. It felt... older, somehow, as if it belonged to Altdorf’s very bones. After witnessing the dead raised and the order of nature turned against itself, it should have been impossible to conceive of more potent magic coming to the Reik, but Martak was enough of a mage to recognise true power when he felt it.
‘What is this?’ he murmured, looking up at the roof of the dragon’s cage, any thought of trying to use the creature now abandoned. ‘What comes now?’
For a moment, nothing changed.
Then the first shafts of light angled down from the open dome, harsh and piercing. The Glottkin looked up, as did their surviving troops in the chamber. More shafts lanced through the gaping breach, shimmering like spun gold. They focussed on the altar, seeming to soak into the iron.
Otto started to back away. Ethrac stared at the growing pool of gold, a gathering unease on his face.
‘And what?’ Otto demanded. ‘What is this?’
Spinning points of gold coalesced over the altar-top, clustering together and glittering like stars. Far above, the clouds broke at last, burned away by the lone star riding the high airs. Across the city, beleaguered defenders suddenly stared up into the heavens, noticing the strange play of light dancing across the shattered townscape. The marauders paused in their plunder, and daemons shrunk back, their laughter halted.
‘Just a star!’ protested Ethrac, outraged. ‘You told me – it was just a star!’
The light kept growing, building up into a column of iridescence that hurt the eyes to look upon. A column of pure gold shot down onto the altar where Karl Franz’s body lay like the sacrifice it had been. Shimmering luminescence shot out in all directions, trembling with a blaze of metallic light.
Otto was forced back from the altar, his eyes streaming. Ethrac’s staff shattered in his hands, and its bells rolled across the marble.
With a roar like distant thunder, the rain of gold turned into a torrent, cascading down from the comet and smashing against the altar-top. Rays of severe iridescence radiated outward, refracting and spinning, making the columns around them glisten as if newly gilded. The stained-glass windows blew out, sending shards of diamond-like glass flying into the plague-storm beyond.
Bathed now in a pillar of shifting gold, the Emperor’s body began to change. The harrowed expression left his face and the lines of care smoothed out. His corpse rose, suspended in an aegis of fire. The chains above the altar thrashed and twisted, buffeted by a new wind.
His eyes opened, and golden brilliance flared from the sockets. He righted himself, now floating directly over the altar, and swept his blinding gaze across the cowering mutants below. He seemed to augment, to grow, becoming far more than a man. The last of his armour fell away, exposing a shifting phantasm of pure coruscation beneath. Shafts of gold danced around him, reflecting from the now-dazzling surfaces of the chamber.
It was hard to make out what manner of being now hung above the black iron. Karl Franz’s face could be made out amid the sparkling clouds of light, blurred and fractured, but older faces were there too, coexisting in a merger of souls. A series of Emperors gazed serenely out from the blistering fires, unharmed by them, sustained by them, before the vision shifted once more.
Otto’s flesh began to burn, curling away from the bone in crisping flaps. Ethrac and Ghurk followed, their withered muscles scorched by the rays of light surging from the gathering inferno of gold. The being that had once been the Emperor continued to expand, until an argent titan hung in the chamber’s heart, blazing like the dawn rising.
A voice echoed around the shimmering space, redolent of the old Emperors, but containing a choir of others with it, all speaking in a harmony of different accents and timbres.
‘The Law of Death is broken,’ it announced, and the words echoed among the roar of golden flames. ‘All worlds are now open.’
The titan’s face began to flicker, changing from one to another, now bearded, now smooth, now old, now young. A new visage came to the fore – a ruddy-cheeked youth with a mane of long blond hair, laughing with warrior’s eyes. The intensity of the golden aura became truly blinding, spreading out across the entire chamber in shimmering curtains of brilliance.
‘We are the Empire,’ announced the flickering avatar, its flaming eyes sweeping across the burning vista. ‘We have always been the Empire.’
It raised its hands high, and it seemed that a mighty warhammer now hung from the clanking chains. The titan took it up, and the weapon blazed with the same intense light that filled the chamber.
‘And now,’ it said, portentously, ‘let all things change.’
A hard bang rang out, blowing what remained of the glass out of the windows and making the earth shake. The heart of the golden being exploded, filling the vaults with white-hot illumination. A racing wave of energy surged out from the epicentre, sweeping and ethereal, consuming all before it. The burning bodies of the Glotts were devoured, seared to ash and blown away by the racing storm-front.
A radial wave smashed through the walls of the chapel, rising up in a dome of unleashed power. The hemisphere, swimming with translucence, spread across the entire city, a wall of gold, tearing out from the Palace at its heart and scouring everything it touched. The scorching barrage of flame destroyed every lingering creature of Chaos as it thundered outward, stripping the layers of slime and filth clean from the stone beneath and immolating them into nothingness. The fallen undead were blasted apart, their dry bones turned to powder and thrown into the wind.