‘Not a fool,’ Neferata said softly. She sank down and cradled Isabella, as if the other woman were a child. ‘Just a man.’ She looked up at him. ‘You survived.’
‘I did. Thanks to Settra.’
‘Settra,’ Neferata said, unable to believe her ears. She shook her head, dismissing the thought, and asked, ‘Nagash?’
Arkhan extended his hand. Neferata’s eyes widened, as she took in the slow dissolution of Arkhan’s skeletal fingers. ‘The Undying King is gone, and his magics with him. Soon, I will join him. The Incarnates have failed, and the world is coming undone beneath our feet.’
Neferata looked up. ‘We will all join him. The world is done,’ she said. Isabella whimpered, and Neferata murmured comforting nothings to her. ‘All our striving, all our pain… for what?’
Arkhan was silent for a moment. He looked down at her and then placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘For the chance at something better,’ he said. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. ‘Do you feel it, Neferata?’
She jerked her hand away. ‘Feel what?’
‘One last roll of the dice,’ Arkhan said.
‘Spoken like a gambler,’ Neferata said. She hugged Isabella close and stroked the whimpering vampire’s matted hair. Crimson tears rolled down her cheeks and plopped into the dust. Arkhan reached out and wiped them away, before he turned away, to face the growling dark that crept through the streets towards them. ‘The End is here, my queen. The all-consuming black fire of the empty spaces between worlds. I see it, even as Nagash must have seen it. It will devour the world, bit by bit, until nothing is left. Until our world, our history, is but dust on the cosmic wind. When they have finished toying with the remains, the Ruinous Powers shall turn away. They will turn their attentions to other worlds, other times, and it will be as if we never existed.’ Arkhan extended his hand without looking at her. She took it, and he hauled her to her feet. She still held Isabella. The city trembled around them, and a strange light rose from the cracks in the street.
‘But I see something else, in the void… I see a figure, shining with the power of light and the heavens, swimming through the dark, determined to stir the embers of our passing and free the seeds of a new world, and new life,’ Arkhan went on, his rasping, creaking voice filled with something she thought might be wonder. He touched his chest, and she saw a light shimmering through the rents in his robes. He glanced at her. ‘There may yet be hope, though that word feels strange to say.’ He looked down at his chest, and touched a black mark on his robes, in the shape of a hand. ‘I thought she had cursed me, but I think she knew, in the end, that it would come to this. I see a figure, small in the darkness, but it will grow stronger, and I will help, even as oblivion claims me.’
Neferata looked at him. Questions danced through her mind, but she could not speak. She wanted to tell him to abandon whatever mad fancy had seized him. She wanted to tell him that her powers might sustain him, that together, they could hold off the end of everything. But the words turned to ash on her tongue. Arkhan turned fully towards her, and caught her chin in his crumbling fingers.
‘Run, Neferata. Run and perhaps you may yet outrun the end. Perhaps you may survive, to flourish with those seeds of life I will help plant in the world to come. Run to Sylvania, fly back to our people, and lead them, in these final hours. Lead them into death, and into the new life the old gods of the sands once promised us.’
‘Arkhan…’ Neferata murmured. She caught his hand, and kissed his mouldering bones, and then stepped back. ‘I will lead them.’
‘I will buy you what time I can. It will not be much, but it will be all that I can give. Go, quickly,’ Arkhan said, turning back to face the destruction. Neferata turned without another word and ran, Isabella cradled to her chest. Behind her, Arkhan extended his arms, as if he might bar the doom of all the world through sheer determination. Amethyst energy crackled along his bones and leaked out through the cracks in the same. His robes flapped about him as he lifted his staff high, and spat the words to every spell and incantation he knew that might hold back the tidal wave of destruction.
She could almost imagine him smiling, in those last few moments as she fled Middenheim on the back of her abyssal steed. A flash of purple from behind her and the crack of splitting air told her of his fate, and she closed her eyes to weep for the only man she had ever loved.
The world died around her, as she fled. Middenheim fell first, consumed by the nightmare forces awakened in its depths. The hungry darkness crept outwards from the void where the Fauschlag had once stood, and crawled across Middenland, consuming the Middle Mountains and the Drakwald. It was at once empty and full of squirming, abominable shapes, like vast serpents or the writhing tendrils of some immense, unseen kraken. Riots of colour and sound filled it, only to vanish and reappear. The keening of a thousand daemons washed across the stricken land ahead of it.
Beastmen stampeded out of the Drakwald in their thousands, fleeing before a doom that called out to them, even as it drove them mad with fear. Neferata saw them below her as she flew, vast hordes of panicked animals, and the Children of Chaos were soon joined by others – humans, orcs and even ogres, all fleeing before a doom they could not understand, and had no hope of escaping.
The darkness grew, devouring one province and then the next, over the course of the days and weeks that followed. Talabecland vanished, and then the Reikland, swallowed up by the cacophonous void birthed in the heart of Middenheim. Averland fell next, and then the others, one by one. In their mountain holds, the remaining dwarf clans saw nothing of the end, and would not have fled, even if they had.
The Grey Mountains crumbled, and even its staunchest defenders could not prevent the wave of desolation from washing over what remained of the kingdom of Bretonnia. The great forest of Athel Loren vanished, as if it had never been. The new-born over-empire of the skaven followed, and no burrow was deep enough to hide the scurrying hordes of terrified ratmen from obliteration.
The world shuddered down to its roots as it was consumed. In Sylvania, what was left of the peasantry, as well as refugees from Averland and the Moot, sought safety in the ruins of Castle Sternieste, where the dead made ready to protect them as best they could. By the time Neferata reached her lands, the sky had gone black from horizon to horizon.
Her abyssal steed smashed into the battlements of Sternieste, its form wreathed in smoke. It groaned and shuddered as Neferata hauled Isabella off its twisted form, and lifted the nearly comatose vampire up. Her retainers met her on the battlements, their eyes wide with fear. ‘Mistress, what–?’ one began.
‘The end,’ Neferata snarled. ‘Where is Khalida? Where are the liche-priests? Where are the necromancers? Summon them all! Gather them here, so that we might–’
‘We might what, cousin? Escape our fate, one last time?’
Neferata turned, and saw Khalida, once High Queen of Lybaras, and once her cousin, standing nearby, staring out at the encroaching darkness. Even now, her thin limbs wrapped in crumbling wrappings and her ceremonial vestments tarnished with age and battle, she was the very image of a queen. Neferata snarled in frustration. ‘And you would meet it gladly, then?’ She shook her head. ‘I will not go like a sheep to slaughter. Not now, not ever.’
‘You speak as if we had a choice, cousin,’ Khalida said.
‘There is always a choice,’ Neferata began, but the words died in her throat as she saw the distant shape of the great bone wall raised by Mannfred in the year before Nagash’s resurrection crumble like sand. The darkness swept over it, and Sylvania shuddered like a dying beast. Below, in the courtyard, the surviving humans screamed and wept in fear. Neferata shook her head. ‘Too late,’ she muttered. She looked down at Isabella and kissed the other vampire on the brow. ‘I am sorry, little one. I was not fast enough.’