Thragg felt it when the archway opened – a pull in his chest, low and insistent. He stopped mid-stride and pressed the heel of his palm against his ribs and pushed, testing, and the pull didn't diminish. It was directional, and it pointed at Isha.
She stood at the threshold of the completed archway with her hands still raised and her golden filaments dissolving into the framework she'd woven, and her head turned sharply toward him at the same moment he turned toward her. Her green eyes narrowed and her jaw set and her fingers curled into her palms.
"What did you do," she said.
"I was going to ask you the same question."
The archway behind her shimmered with the layered geometry of the passage she'd opened, a corridor of woven light that cut through the collapsed interstice and into whatever lay beyond. The air around it tasted different, hotter, carrying the faintest copper edge that Thragg recognized from the battlefield he'd crossed hours ago. Khorne's territory was on the other side.
The pull tightened when he took a step backward, persistent and not quite painful.
"There is a tether," Isha said. She raised her right hand and turned it slowly, studying the air between her fingers. "A binding, aetheric in nature. It connects your soul-signature to mine with a line that I did not create and did not consent to."
"Neither did I."
"I am aware of that." She dropped her hand and the faint gold shimmer at her fingertips guttered. "The tether is not hostile. It carries no coercive payload and no parasitic draw; it simply exists. It binds us within a functional proximity. I estimate the maximum separation distance at roughly three hundred meters before the pull becomes structurally disruptive."
"Three hundred meters."
"Perhaps less."
Thragg looked at her and then at the archway and then back at her. The mace hung in his right hand and the daemon face pressed into the head was still, its fused eyes sealed, its frozen mouth locked in its permanent snarl.
Nazshara's voice arrived behind his eyes.
The tether is real. I can perceive its structure. It formed the moment her framework touched the archway's anchor points. My best analysis is that the resonance is architectural. Her framework is Old One engineering. I am Leviathan engineering. Both systems were built to interface with the Aetherium's deep substrate. When she wove the passage, she anchored it to the substrate layer where my architecture interfaces with your biology. The two systems recognized each other and locked.
"Can you break it," Thragg said.
I would have to excise the portion of myself that bonded with her framework, which would damage my cognitive architecture. I do not recommend it.
"Wonderful."
Isha's green eyes had narrowed at his silence. "You're speaking to something inside you."
"A passenger," Thragg said. "It confirms the tether. It believes the binding formed because the framework you used to build the passage recognized something in me that shares its origin layer."
Isha's expression shifted. She studied him analytically, her green eyes moving across his body. "What are you carrying, Viltrumite."
"Something old," Thragg said. "Older than your cage."
Her mouth thinned, and she didn't press further.
"Can you sever it," he said.
"If I could sever it, I would have done so before telling you about it." She crossed her arms over her stained robe, and Thragg almost laughed. "I didn't escape one chain to accept another."
Thragg sighed. He walked to the archway's edge and looked through the passage. The corridor stretched ahead in a tunnel of woven light, and at its far end the light turned red and the copper taste grew stronger.
"The passage leads into Khorne's domain," Isha said behind him.
"I know."
"And you intend to walk through it."
"I do."
"Then I have no choice but to walk with you." She stepped up beside him and looked into the red distance and her mouth thinned. "There's a joke in here somewhere, and I refuse to find it amusing."
Thragg stepped through.
The corridor collapsed behind them the moment Isha's bare feet crossed the threshold, the woven filaments unraveling and dissolving into the void they'd bridged. The passage contracted ahead of them, shortening with each step, and the red light at the far end grew brighter and the copper smell became the iron reek of old blood left standing in the sun.
The exit opened onto a ridge of black volcanic stone that overlooked a plain of ash and fire. The sky was red and the clouds were red and the horizon was a smear of darker red that pulsed with the distant war drums.
The aetheric density here is orders of magnitude higher than the ungoverned reaches, Nazshara said. The shaping will that sustains this territory is focused entirely on conflict. Everything here exists to fight, to bleed, or to be bled. Your biology will sustain you. Isha's nature will make her a target.
Thragg scanned the terrain and found the first patrol within seconds.
They came along the base of the ridge in a column of twelve, brass-armored and lean, their bodies the deep crimson of arterial spray. Their weapons were axes and cleavers and single-edged swords with teeth along the spine, and they moved at a loping jog that covered ground with predatory efficiency. The leader carried a standard, a pole of black iron topped with a rack of skulls that clattered against each other with every stride.
The leader saw Thragg standing on the ridgeline and stopped, and the column bunched behind it. Twelve pairs of burning eyes turned upward and twelve mouths opened and the sound that came out was a single sustained note of recognition and hunger.
"Stay behind me," Thragg said.
He dropped from the ridge.
The leader swung the standard like a halberd and the rack of skulls whistled toward Thragg's head and Thragg caught the pole in his left hand and snapped it and drove the broken end through the leader's throat. The body toppled backward into the two daemons behind it and all three went down in a tangle of limbs and brass plate. Thragg stepped over the pile and swung the mace into the fourth daemon's chest and the ribcage folded inward and the body flew backward and struck the fifth and both of them hit the volcanic stone of the ridge base and cracked it.
The remaining seven rushed him in a crescent. Axes came from the left and cleavers from the right and the single-edged swords chopped downward from the center, and Thragg moved through the crescent and broke everything he touched. The mace crushed skulls and shattered weapons and caved in armored torsos, and the daemon face pressed into the striking head twitched with each impact, the frozen mouth widening by fractions.
Twelve seconds, and all twelve dead.
The bodies dissolved into the ash within a minute, their forms losing cohesion and sinking into the ground. The weapons lasted longer, the brass edges dulling and the hafts crumbling, and then those too were gone.
Isha descended the ridge behind him. She picked her way across the volcanic stone and her bare feet left faint impressions of green where they touched, tiny sprouts that pushed through the black rock and wilted in the hot air before they could open.
"This way," she said, and pointed across the plain.
They crossed the ash flats for what felt like hours. The terrain changed as they moved deeper into Khorne's domain, the flat ash giving way to broken ground littered with weapons and bones and the fossilized remnants of battles fought so long ago that the participants had been forgotten by everything except the soil. Rivers of dark fluid cut across the landscape in shallow channels, and the fluid moved sluggishly and carried a warmth that radiated up through the air above it. The sky darkened by degrees as they pressed inward, the red deepening toward maroon, and the war drums grew louder, though their source never resolved into anything visible.
The patrols grew larger.
The second group was thirty strong, and Thragg killed them in forty seconds. The third was fifty, and they came with a creature at their center that stood four meters tall and carried a sword in each hand and fought with a speed that forced Thragg to adjust his timing twice before he put the mace through its face. The fourth group was a hundred, organized into ranks that held formation and advanced with shields locked and spears leveled, and Thragg went through the formation at a speed that turned the ash behind him into a vortex and the formation came apart in a spray of bodies and broken brass.
Isha fought the fifth group.
She didn't fight the way Thragg fought. The tether in his chest surged and the pull reversed direction, and something drained outward from him through the binding toward Isha. His cells registered the loss and compensated within a heartbeat, his Viltrumite biology replacing what had been drawn. She was pulling through him.
Isha raised her hands and a golden green light poured from her palms was brighter than anything she'd produced since the escape from Nurgle's garden, and where it touched the daemons they screamed. Their skin blistered and cracked and the flesh beneath turned grey and then white and then ceased to exist. The daemons that survived the first pulse charged her and she met them with a second, and the ones at the leading edge vaporized mid-stride and the third pulse caught the rest while they stumbled over the gap.
She lowered her hands and the light died and she dropped to one knee. Her breathing was ragged and the glow in her skin had dimmed to almost nothing. The tether slackened between them and the drain stopped.
"You drew from me," Thragg said.
"The tether drew from you," Isha said. She pushed herself upright and her legs shook. "I didn't ask it to. My own reserves wouldn't have sustained half of what I just did. The binding channeled your vitality through my framework and converted it into something I could use."
She looked at her hands. "I'm still a fraction of what I was. The tether is compensating for the difference."
"Life and decay are the same cycle," she said, quieter. "Nurgle understood that better than he had any right to. What I give, I can also take. Even from unwilling donors, apparently."
Thragg rolled his shoulder. The drain had cost him nothing he couldn't replace in seconds, and his cells had already rebuilt whatever the tether had siphoned.
They pressed deeper.
The terrain steepened and the ash gave way to blood-red stone, and the stone formed cliffs and gorges and narrow passes where the daemons waited in ambush formations that Thragg dismantled with the mace and his fists and, once, with a thrown boulder the size of a transport shuttle that he tore from the cliff face and sent tumbling through a bottleneck packed with screaming brass-clad bodies.
At the bottom of a gorge so deep that the red sky was a thin strip far above, they found a gate.
The gate was black iron. It stood forty meters tall and thirty wide and the surface was covered in relief carvings of slaughter so detailed that the individual expressions on the dying faces were visible from the gorge floor. And the carvings moved. The dying figures twisted and the killing figures swung their weapons in slow, looping arcs, and the blood that ran from the wounds was liquid, trickling down the iron surface in thin red lines that collected in a trough at the base.
Two guardians flanked the gate. Each one stood fifteen meters tall with wings folded against their backs and axes resting across their shoulders. Their bodies were massive and dense and their skin was the darkest red Thragg had yet seen, and their burning eyes tracked his approach with a steady and patient intensity that the lesser daemons had lacked. They were larger than the Bloodthirster he'd killed in the valley.
Thragg walked toward the gate without slowing.
The guardian on the left spoke. Its voice was deep enough to vibrate the stone beneath Thragg's feet.
"This is the gate of Nareena of the Bloody Ocean, First among the Valkyrie, favored daughter of the Skull Throne. None pass who do not bear the mark of the Blood God."
“Even if he had the mark, you’d still just look for another reason to fight.” Isha said.
“Fair enough."
Thragg swung the mace upward in a rising arc that connected with the guardian's jaw from below. The head snapped back and the neck bent at an angle that would've killed anything with a mortal spine. The guardian staggered and its wings flared and its axe came off its shoulder and swept downward in a stroke aimed at bisecting Thragg from crown to groin.
Thragg sidestepped the axe and drove the mace into the guardian's exposed knee. The joint buckled and the guardian dropped to one leg and Thragg climbed its body in two strides and hit it again across the temple. The skull cracked and the burning eyes flickered and the body swayed and fell sideways against the gate with an impact that shook the gorge walls and sent cascades of loose stone tumbling from the cliffs above.
The second guardian attacked while Thragg was still standing on the first one's collapsing body. Its axe came in a horizontal sweep that would've taken his head if he'd remained at that altitude, and Thragg dropped straight down and the axe passed over him and bit into the gorge wall and stuck. The guardian yanked and the axe came free with half a ton of stone still clinging to the blade, and it swung again, and Thragg caught the haft below the axe head and pulled and the guardian lurched forward off balance and Thragg released the haft and hammered the mace into its throat.
The throat collapsed. The guardian dropped to both knees and Thragg stepped back and watched it fall face-first into the trough of blood at the gate's base. The blood splashed upward in a fan that coated the iron surface and then ran back down, following the carved channels, joining the endless trickle.
The gate opened, and the iron parted at the center seam, the two halves grinding apart with a sound lower than hearing, and beyond the gate the gorge ended and the terrain opened into something different.
It was quiet.
The war drums that had beaten since they entered the territory had stopped. The red sky remained, but it was calmer here, a deep and even crimson without the churning clouds. The ground was smooth black stone, polished to a sheen that reflected the sky above in dark mirrors, and the stone stretched in a broad and level expanse toward a structure at the center of the space.
The structure was a fortress. It rose from the polished stone in tiers of black iron and red granite, its walls sloped inward at angles that denied purchase to climbers, its towers capped with spires that ended in points sharp enough to split the light that fell on them. Banners hung from the walls, long and narrow, and the fabric was the color of fresh blood and the symbols on them were skulls rendered in brass thread that caught the red skylight and burned.
There were no guards on the walls and no patrols on the ground. The silence pressed against Thragg's ears and the only sound was his own breathing and Isha's footsteps behind him and the faint creak of the daemon face in the mace head.
The entity that governs this sub-realm is significant, Nazshara said.
They crossed the stone plain and reached the fortress gate, and the gate was open.
Beyond it, a courtyard of polished black stone, and beyond the courtyard, a hall.
The hall's doors stood wide and the interior was lit by a fire that burned in a broad hearth at the far end, and the fire was the deep and settled red of coals that had been burning for a very long time. The walls were hung with weapons. Thousands of them. Swords and axes and spears and cleavers and things with no names, mounted on iron brackets from floor to ceiling, and every one of them showed the marks of use. Notched edges and stained grips and hafts wrapped in leather darkened by decades of sweat.
A throne stood before the hearth, iron and plain and sized for someone tall.
The throne was empty.
Thragg stopped at the hall's center and looked at the weapons on the walls and the fire in the hearth and the empty throne. Isha stood at the entrance and didn't cross the threshold. The tether had been tightening since they entered the fortress – Khorne's domain didn't appreciate the binding to a life goddess, and the deeper they went the more the effective range compressed. By the time Thragg reached the hall's center the pull hurt. Isha looked warily across the interior, and the golden shimmer in her skin had gone dark the moment they'd passed the fortress gate.
"This is her domain," Isha said. "The First Valkyrie's seat. Her personal territory within the Blood God's realm."
"Where is she?"
Isha raised one hand and pointed past the throne, past the hearth, toward a door set into the back wall of the hall. The door was smaller than the rest of the architecture, human-scaled, and it stood ajar.
Thragg walked past the throne and through the door. The tether protested. The pull sharpened into something close to real pain as the binding strained against the hostile territory, and Thragg walked through it.
Beyond the door, a garden.
The garden was enclosed by the fortress walls on all sides, open only to the red sky above. The plants that grew in the soil were dark and strange, their leaves the color of burgundy and their stems thorned with barbs that glistened with moisture, but they were alive and they were tended. The beds were orderly. The paths between them were swept clean. A small fountain stood at the garden's center, and the liquid that flowed from it was clear. Of all the things Thragg had seen in the Blood God's realm... this he had not expected.
She sat on a stone bench beside the fountain with her back to him.
Her wings were folded against her back, each membrane pulled tight against the bone-struts, and the armor she wore was different from the battlefield plate he'd seen before. Lighter, fitted closer to her body, and the crimson etchings along its surface were dim. The curved horns rose from her skull and swept back, framing her head, and her hair fell between them in dark strands that shifted when the air moved.
She didn't turn when he entered.
Thragg stopped on the garden path three meters from the bench and looked at the back of her head and the curve of her shoulders and the folded wings.
"Nareena," he said.
She was still for a long time.
Then she stood from the bench and turned, and the face that looked back at him was hers, changed. The jaw was sharper and the cheekbones were higher and the skin was a deep red that looked forged, and her eyes burned in their shadowed sockets. But the proportions were hers – the way the brow sat above the eyes, the line of the nose and the set of the mouth. Thragg had memorized those details on a scrap-world a lifetime ago.
She looked at him and her burning eyes moved across his face and down his body and back up again, and something complicated happened around her mouth and her brow.
"You look exactly the same," she said.
Her voice was different, deeper, layered with a resonance her old voice never had. But the cadence was the same – the rhythm of her speech, the way she leaned into certain syllables. Thragg knew that rhythm.
"You don't," he said.
She looked down at her armored body and the horns and the wings folded at her back and the clawed gauntlets on her hands. She flexed her fingers and the claws clicked against each other.
"Yeah," she said. "I don't."
Thragg set the mace on the garden path, and the daemon face pressed against the stone and the frozen mouth twitched once and went still. He straightened and looked at her, and three meters felt like a lot.
"I came to find you," he said.
"I know." She folded her arms across her chest, the way she used to on the scrap-world when she was deciding whether to be angry or amused. "You tore through Nurgle's garden. You killed your way across half the Blood God's domain. You beat a daemon into a mace."
She glanced at the weapon on the ground. "Loser."
"Word travels."
"In this place, everything travels. Every kill echoes. Every drop of blood spilled in the Blood God's domain is tasted by every creature that serves him." She looked at him and the burning light in her eyes dimmed by a fraction. "Your violence is very loud, honey."
He looked at the garden and the tended beds and the fountain and then back at the empty throne in the hall behind him. "The daemon I questioned said you were leading the Blood God's host against the Interex. Burning cities. Drowning rivers."
"I am." She uncrossed her arms and spread her clawed fingers and looked at them. "Part of me is there. The part that fights. The part that breaks walls and plants banners and leads Bloodthirsters through breaches into cities that have never known war. That part of me is always fighting, somewhere. It's what the Blood God made me for." She closed her hands. "This part, the part that tends a garden and sits on a bench and remembers what it was like to have a husband – this is the remainder."
He took one step forward, and the distance became two meters.
"I miss you," he said.
Nareena's mouth opened and then closed and the muscles in her neck tightened. The burning light in her eyes brightened and then something changed in it, fire forming at the edges of the lids instead of water. Thin lines of molten light traced down her cheeks from the corners of her eyes and left faint scorch marks on the red skin below, and the tears fell from her jaw and hissed when they struck the stone at her feet.
She stepped forward and raised one gauntleted hand and pressed the palm against his cheek. The claws rested against his temple and behind his ear and the metal was warm and the touch was careful.
"It was not your fault," she said. Her voice cracked on the last word.
Thragg's hand came up and covered hers against his cheek. Her gauntlet was hard under his fingers and the claws pressed gently into his skin without cutting.
"I should have killed them sooner," he said. "I had the power to end the Rangdan before they ever touched you. I held back because I wanted Argall to earn his strength through the war, and you paid for that decision."
"And Argall earned exactly what you wanted him to earn." The burning tears continued to fall and the scorch marks on her cheeks deepened. "You made a choice for your son's future. I would have made the same choice. You know that."
She stepped closer and her forehead touched his. The horns curved above his head and framed them both in an arch of bone, and her burning eyes were close enough that the light from them played across his face in shifting waves of orange and gold.
Thragg pulled her against him and her arms went around his back and her wings opened halfway in a reflexive spread that enclosed them both in a canopy of dark membrane. The armor she wore pressed against his chest, hard edges and raised plates and the carved symbols of a god he despised, and beneath all of it her body was warm and solid and real.
He kissed her.
Her mouth tasted like blood, but her lips still felt as they did before. The kiss lasted and the burning tears fell against his skin and left faint marks that his cells healed before the next tears landed, and her clawed fingers dug into his back hard enough to score the surface of his skin and he didn't pull away.
When they separated, her burning eyes held his, and the tears had stopped and the scorch marks on her cheeks were already fading.
"Thragg," she said, the same way she'd always said it. "The woman you knew. Your wife. The woman I once was…."
She placed her palm flat against his chest. "She isn't here anymore."
Thragg's hand tightened on her arm.
"I died on that scrap-world," Nareena said. "I died with a weapon in my hand and rage in my throat and the Blood God heard me. He hears every death that carries fury, and mine was loud enough to reach across the veil and catch his attention, and he decided I was worth keeping."
She pressed her palm harder against his chest. "And I was reforged. The memories are mine. The feelings are mine. I remember every morning I woke up beside you and every argument we had and every time I watched you try to teach Argall patience when your own patience was a frayed wire held together by stubbornness. I remember Sereen's face when she was small enough to carry."
Her jaw tightened and the burning in her eyes flared. "I remember all of it. But the woman who lived those memories is gone. What stands before you is Nareena of the Bloody Ocean. The First Valkyrie. Khorne's daughter. A creature built for war and sustained by slaughter, and the longer I stand here talking to you in this garden, the more the Blood God's attention turns toward this place, and his attention is not something either of us wants."
Thragg looked at her.
She held his gaze, and the burning eyes didn't waver and the hand on his chest didn't move and the wings folded slowly back against her shoulders, closing the canopy, letting the red sky fall across them both again.
"I will always love you," she said. "In whatever way this thing I've become is capable of love. But you cannot save me, Thragg. There is nothing left to save. There is only what I am now, and what I am now belongs to the Blood God, and the Blood God does not release what he has claimed."
“I love you,” Thragg said. “And I won’t stop trying.”