Tariel put himself up painfully and looked at the runic hexcage he installed in his summoning room. It had been a long time since he had trouble summoning a single bloodletter, but maybe this time he went too far.
A bellow of endless fury answered his silenced fear. Reality broke apart as Skarbrand, breaker of a billion bones and once favoured bloodthirster of Khorne, brutally entered the room in an explosion of boiling blood that splattered all over the vast ceiling. Immediately, animated of a murderous instinct, he turned to face Tariel.
For a moment, their eyes locked and Tariel, feeling the impossible hunger for carnage of his opponent, felt his face whitening in fear. The first time he felt a bloodletter thirst for blood, he had been shocked in the same kind of way. But this, this monstrosity had spilled a thousand oceans of blood and was not an iota sated.
Through these eyes of eternal hatred, he saw the only cohesive thought in the abomination’s mind, the only memory it had and the very single thing he felt; a rage so unreal that it made Skarbrand’s own impossible fury seem meek. The rage of the Blood God himself and, for a moment, Tariel felt Khorne’s fingers choking him with a titanic brutality.
It only lasted for a split-second, but Khorne’s ire burnt its way throught the eldar’s subtle layers of psyche and, for Tariel’s complex soul, it seemed an eternity.
As Skarbrand charged, the archon hoped for a moment that his hexcage would hold, but with a deafening crack, the immaterial chains bonding the creature exploded in a ray of light without even slowing the bloodthirster. Something in Tariel broke at that moment or maybe unleashed.
Tariel did not even flinch. He stood real high;
There was no fear left in his soul;
No thought to call his bloodbrides bodyguards on the other side of the door a few steps away from him;
Not even the thought of unsheating his agonizer;
The only thing left in his soul was an all-consuming rage that mirrored Khorne’s own fury.
As the towering mass of muscle and pain to come was barely a few steps from him, Tariel gathered his might and hurled all his fury to the pathetic creature that dared oppose him.
The might of the psychic attack hit Skarbrand with the strength of a thunderbolt and stopped his rampaging charge. Tariel knees failed him and he came crashing on the ground, his body screaming in distress as a presence in the warp reacted to his presence.
All that Tariel could feel was a strong, all-consuming, musk that made his very soul numb in an unbearable pain. There was also a voice... a laughter that seemed to rejoice as it stabbed his mind with a billion shards of ecstasy. Every second lasted ages in a delightful agony as he felt his soul eaten away by the nemesis of the eldar race, She Who Thirsts, Slaanesh the Dark Prince.
An impossibly loud growl made itself head, going stronger by the moment. Skarbrand’s head suddenly turned to the circle of summoning as he recognized the voice. Turning back to his prey, he bellowed his endless rage to the feeble eldar as he rose up his mighty axe forged upon the fury of 5 Bloodthirsters in a pathetically useless attempt to kill the archon in a single throw before it happened.
The loud growl culminated and erupted in a world-shaking roar. A gigantic hand of dripping blood emerged from the glowing runes of endless psychic power. The Hand of Khorne reached out from the warp, took grasp of Skarbrand, Betrayer to the Throne of Skulls, and crushed his physical form to dust in one unholy movement.
Tariel’s soul was set aflame, ripped off of Slaanesh’s grasp in its final moments of existence, his body basking in the absolute rage of a timeless will as it was made alive again. His mind roaring in pain as it was forced back into life.
When the archon regained consciousness, he did not think about how lucky he was to have escaped She Who Thirts or how in pain he was. The only thoughts left in his soul was the smell of blood and the need to kill, to feel bones break under his weapons and flesh be rip apart by his blows.
He did not notice the unholy symbol burned into his very flesh, the mark of The Lord of Skulls.
He keeled and drank from the huge pool of blood left by The Hand.
It tasted good.
