than ever. The armour had hidden his scorched flesh from the view of his enemies and made him more potent than any living being before or since.
Before you can rule others, you must first rule yourself. That was the maxim he lived by.
He had lived for millennia and every passing year had added to his power and to his knowledge. He had studied his mother’s secret grimoires until he was more proficient in sorcery than she. He had outlived the generals who had defeated him in the long gone ages of the world.
As ruthless with himself as with his subjects, he had learned from his errors and drawn strength from his mistakes. No one would ever or had ever beaten him the same way twice. He was still here when his ancient opponents were in their graves. Despite the pain, despite the losses, despite a black despair that would have driven lesser beings to seek eternal oblivion, he endured.
He had toppled kingdoms and reshaped the world. He had lived longer and done more than his father, Aenarion, ever had. He would yet re-unify the kingdom that the treachery of his enemies had denied him. One day soon, all elves would bend the knee before him and acknowledge the righteousness of his rule. Then he would lead them into a new age of glory. They would subjugate the kingdoms of men and throw back the powers of Chaos and a new golden age would begin. All of them would see that they had been wrong.
And it started now.
Glory would be purchased by the suffering of these few slaves. They ought to be grateful to him. Without him they would have lived out their meaningless, insect lives. At the cost of a few of the years that would have swiftly passed anyway, they were being allowed to participate in the creation of a new world order. He pushed the thoughts away. They smacked of needless self-justification, of moral weakness. He was who he was. What he did was right. He need justify himself to no one.
He studied his handiwork with some satisfaction. He had carved the altar to the ritual specifications with his own hands. For six years he had sanctified it with blood and souls. He had forged the black iron sacrificial knife, tempering the blade by passing it through the body of a still living hero six times. He had inscribed the symbols of Slaanesh and his six favoured princes over the period of six moons.
He had prepared the chains from an alloy of truesilver and black iron and inscribed them with runes older than the world. At their centre was a gem so potently ensorcelled that it could entrap the soul of a daemon prince. The finding of that gem and the binding spells it contained was an epic in itself which would one day be recounted across his empire.
Everything was ready. It was time to begin.
He spoke the words he had memorised from the great grimoire and gestured for the first of the slaves to advance to the altar. She tried to refuse but his will bound her to obey. Slowly, one step at a time, as if pulled by overwhelming magnetic force, she advanced up the basalt steps and bowed her head before the altar.
A slash of the knife opened her jugular. Blood spurted into the font. He threw the flopping carcass to one side and summoned the next with a gesture of his armoured hands. The whimpering went on but his will was strong. He would allow himself no weakness. One by one he sent their souls out into the void through the gap in reality his spell had created. They were his messengers to the dreadful being he intended to summon. Their very presence was part of the message.
As the ritual built to its climax, his words took on a strange sibilant resonance, as if they echoed through unseen chasms in the unhallowed places beyond. Somewhere far off, in a darkness so deep it could swallow worlds, something responded.
In a place that was not a place, in a time that lay outside time, N’Kari, Keeper of Secrets, great among daemons, felt the faint irritating tug of a summoning spell.
At first he ignored it. That a being should be foolish enough to draw his attention piqued his curiosity, but not very much. The realms of mortals were full of those who sought to barter their puny souls for the benefits they thought daemons could provide. Sometimes,