Daemon World (Warhammer 40,000) by Ben Counter

Author:Ben Counter [Counter, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2015-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

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Torvendis can never be fully mapped. The deserts change to forest, the glaciers to rivers of lava, the mountains to ocean troughs and the cities to plains of dust. Trying to chart it seems to make the landscape change even faster, as if Torvendis takes exception to any attempt to unravel its secrets with compass and map. No one on Torvendis ever wakes up to the same world twice, and in a world where even the colour of the sky mutates from hour to hour nothing ever stays the same.

But even the land never changes as much as the patterns of power that have played across Torvendis for aeons, like wildfires flaring and burning out. The undersea empire of the Pontifex Infernus where columns of lava were formed into mighty fortresses and temples, the blood-soaked reign of Ss’ll Sh’Karr, the Coven of a Thousand who ruled a nation of black glass golems, the endless episodes of complete anarchy when banditry and madness were the only laws – each of these seemed an empire that could never fall. But the truth was that every one was just a single face of the endless puzzle box of power on Torvendis, and they lasted no more than the briefest phase of the planet’s past. Just as no map can ever be drawn of Torvendis, no history can ever be written.

There are only legends, and when they are compiled they are revealed to be contradictory and vague, but all equally true. Chaos on Torvendis manifested itself as change and inscrutability – many sages and prophets had tried to divide the planet’s history into neat slices of time, and all died insane. Chaos does not allow itself to be codified, and Torvendis was a world of pure Chaos, deceptively disguised as rock and ocean.

Everyone on Torvendis ended up a legend, or a part of one. The innocents crushed beneath Ss’ll Sh’Karr’s daemon legions were more in death, as a part of the daemon lord’s legacy of madness, than they had ever been in life. Those who eked out an existence in the mountains, forests and deserts played their part, unknowingly forging the borders that separated warring nations. But no one, no matter how great, ever left more than a ripple in the lake of Torvendis’s legends – even monsters like Sh’Karr or the Crimson Knights would become no more than additions to an endless gallery of tyrants, heroes and butchers.

The only legend that mattered was the tale of Torvendis itself, conquered by Arguleon Veq, pulled at by every Chaos power that dared take part in the endless war for domination of the warp. It was a story of how no one man or daemon could ever truly rule, of how Chaos was change and uncertainty and madness, of how every action on Torvendis was a triumph and every change a tragedy. And if anyone on the planet were to be asked, they would agree that this was the one legend that would never end.

The air was thick and hot, and caught in Kron’s throat.

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