Prologue

It had only ever been a matter of time.

It had almost happened in the winter, when their bones had shown through their hides and their joints had ached and all there had been to eat were the lice they had harvested from their pelts. In such times his folk had no scruples about cannibalism. Meat, after all, was meat.

But although he was the smallest of the herd, Gulkroth had remained alert enough to dissuade his fellows from devouring him. His teeth had remained sharp in his maw even when scurvy had peeled back his gums, and although his muscles were withered by the long, lean hungry months so were all of the herd’s.

Then came the thaw. The ice which had marbled the forest into a chill mausoleum melted. Vegetation grew and animals emerged to feed upon it. The herd, in turn, fed upon them.

It was thus drunk with the sweet intoxication of living flesh that the herd found a small woodcutters’ village in the forest. It was a new settlement, containing half a dozen human families. Perhaps they had thought that they were safe behind their stockade. Perhaps they had thought that the axes of their men or the jaws of their hounds would protect them.

That was the trouble with humans. They thought too much.

The attack had been sudden and ferocious. The herd waited until a party of woodcutters returned to the stockade, and charged through the opened gates. Once inside they slaughtered with joyful abandon, their bellows echoing within the stockade as they painted the walls red.

It was here, surrounded by the maddening brightness and smell and taste of human blood, that it finally happened.

Gulkroth had been feasting on the succulent remains of a child when, with a roar of murderous joy, Hosse had turned on him. Hosse, dull-witted and stupid. Hosse, strong and vicious. Hosse, who stood a head taller than any of the herd and who carried an axe as heavy as a man.

Gulkroth had turned in time to see the promise of death in his fellow’s eyes. Urine spurted down his legs as he leapt away from the blur of the first murderous lunge. Hosse reversed his grip and followed him, rolling his shoulders and chopping down like a woodsman splitting a log. Gulkroth tried to block the blow with his own weapon, but the smile of sharpened rust was no match for the power of the blow. Hosse’s axe shattered through the steel and bit deep into the packed earth where Gulkroth had been standing.

Unarmed, Gulkroth looked around for a means of escape. There was none. The herd, their bellies bulging and their blood-sodden fur swarming with flies, had encircled the two fighters. They howled and shrieked with delight, stamping their hooves and clashing their weapons in their eagerness to see him slaughtered.

The sight of their glee filled Gulkroth with a sharp spike of pure, red hatred. He was suddenly no longer thinking of fleeing. Instead he turned to his opponent. Hosse had just freed his axe and was swinging it back for another guillotine blow.

It was then that the voice spoke to him. It was small and still and quiet, and it was irresistible.

Gulkroth listened to the voice and understood. He turned to Hosse and, kneeling in front of him, lowered his head so that his horns were down and the nape of his neck was exposed.

The herd jeered at this attempt at submission. Hosse didn’t jeer. He just snarled with a deep satisfaction, and swung his axe up to make the killing blow.

Gulkroth waited until the blade was plunging down towards the brittle snap of his spine before he lunged forwards, lifting his head so that his horns jabbed upwards into the matted fur of Hosse’s groin. He felt the jarring impact as his horns bit deep into hard flesh, and heard the grating as the tips scraped through gristle and then against bone.

Hosse screamed, his voice piercing the roars of the herd and echoing off the blood-soaked stockade. Gulkroth snarled with a savage joy and rolled his shoulders as he corkscrewed his horns even deeper into his foe’s flesh, tearing them up through the groin and into the stomach. He was rewarded with a sudden spill of entrails, hot and steaming against the back of his neck, then his horns tore loose and he fell back.

He began feasting upon Hosse even as the beast’s still-beating heart sent arterial blood spurting into the air. The flesh tasted sweet although the respect all around him was even sweeter. When Gulkroth had finished gorging himself the voice which had spoken to him sounded once more within the confines of his skull. This time it was summoning him.

Without a moment’s hesitation he picked up Hosse’s axe and padded out of the abattoir of the ruined stockade. The rest of the herd turned and followed him as he made his way towards the voice.

The stone stood in the midst of a drained lake, a desert of slime and mud and the last dying movements of fish drowning in air.

There was no telling why the waters had vanished, although the land around here often shivered and groaned. Gulkroth wondered if that might have been because of the stone itself. It clawed up from the still-sodden mud of the lake bed, twenty feet of towering stone thrust up towards the sky.

As Gulkroth approached, the voice whispered even more urgently in his head. It spoke of things both terrible and wonderful, but even when Gulkroth felt that he must die with revulsion he didn’t slacken his pace. He couldn’t. Beneath it all, beneath the fear and the horror and the certainty of death, there was the single burning promise of something he could not refuse.

A promise of power.

His hide began to crawl. At first he thought that it was no more than the cancerous aura of the stone at work upon him. It wasn’t until he glanced down that he saw that his fur had come alive. Ticks and fleas and other parasites were burrowing their way out of his body and falling dead into the mud beneath him.

The fish that flapped here were larger than any he had seen before, and he wondered at their mutations. Some had tusks. Others had feathers and fur and the same yellow, slit-pupilled eyes as he had himself.

When he looked up from the abominations his breath caught in his throat.

Somehow he had come to within touching distance of the stone. It loomed over him, and as its voice echoed within his skull he felt his mind tear. Beneath the drying silt and mouldering weed it glowed with a sickening green light.

Gulkroth, not knowing what he was doing, smeared the filth away. The luminosity lit his muzzle and fangs as he bent forwards and started licking the tears of light away from the stone as easily as lichen from a tomb.

Soon he felt the light glowing within him, coursing through his blood and muscle and bones and oh, oh the pain. It tore at every part of him, a screaming agony as his body melted and re-knitted itself.

The sun and the moon chased each other around the world. The fish around him died and rotted and stank. Gulkroth noticed none of it. His world had become one of endless, unendurable agony.

Then, on the third day, it stopped and he climbed to his feet, reborn. When he did so he knew two things.

The first was that the voice was his, and had been all along.

The second was that he was going to destroy the world.

As the green orb of Chaos waxed overhead Gulkroth returned to the herd that had been waiting on the shores of the dead lake and led them back to the world below.