‘Yes,’ Khalida said. She turned towards Neferata. ‘Time has caught up with us at last, cousin. The Great Land is dead, and soon we will join it.’
Neferata laughed sadly. ‘Maybe it is past time. But I will not do so cowering in a hole.’ She looked at her cousin and smiled. ‘We are queens, cousin. We are daughters of the Great Land, which was old when the world was young. Let us die in a manner befitting our station.’ She extended a hand. ‘Will you join me, Khalida?’
Khalida stared at the proffered hand, and, after a moment of hesitation, took it. Down below, the warriors of Lybaras, Khemri, and Sylvania raised their shields, as if bronze and steel might be enough to resist the destruction sweeping towards them. Frightened humans cowered behind skeletal warriors and armoured vampires, seeking protection from those they had once feared.
And then, the final darkness swept the last of the old world away.
The world came apart and the hungry dark stretched out towards the stars, unsated. The raw stuff of Chaos consumed the heavens in an orgy of uncreation. Stars flickered out one by one, until only darkness remained. It might have taken moments, or millennia, but the Dark Gods were not bound by the flow of time, and did not mark its passage.
But even as the ashes of the shattered world settled in the void, the powers and principalities of Chaos moved away, already bored by their triumph. The four great powers turned upon one another, as they always did, and mustered their forces for war. The Great Game began again, on new worlds, and the Dark Gods broke off from the swirling void at last. Had they not done so, they might have noticed a mote of light, within the dark.
The tiny pinprick of light tumbled through the dark. It had once been a man, though it had forgotten its name. It fell for what might have been centuries, until it came to a shard of the world that had been. Desperate, it reached out and caught hold of the shard with a grip that could shatter mountains, saving itself from the storm of nothingness.
As it slumped, exhausted, thought and memory returned, and soon, its strength as well. And with strength came memory – a name. And with that name came purpose. Gathering what remained of his strength, he stretched out a hand.
And then a miracle took shape in the void…
About The Author
Josh Reynolds is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt, all three featuring the White Scars, and the Blood Angels novel Deathstorm. In the Warhammer world, he has written The End Times: The Return of Nagash, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen, and the novels Neferata, Master of Death and Knight of the Blazing Sun. He lives and works in Sheffield.