taking place outside. He prayed that if they waited long enough, they would be unnoticed by their enemies and escape with their lives. He hated himself for his cowardice. He hated himself for running. It seemed unworthy of his proud ancestry. The only defence he could offer up was that he was young and he did not want to die.
At last the screaming had stopped and he had dared to peek out through a gap in the shuttered windows. He had seen lines and lines of silent faces watching the building. Some of them belonged to brazen horned, crimson-skinned daemons. Some of them belonged to cultists. Some of them belonged to people who had once been his neighbours and who now gazed at his house with features dazed and numbed and subtly altered.
As if his looking upon them had broken some evil spell, they all shouted and rushed forwards, smashing in through the doors and revelling through the halls of Sardriane’s home, smashing the ancient furnishings, burning the ancient tapestries, maiming and killing the retainers, howling with insatiable blood lust and something else, a primitive deep-throated pleasure that was even more disgusting than their desire to do harm.
They had overpowered Sardriane and his mother and carried them to their leader, a strange creature whose outline shimmered and shifted constantly sometimes suggesting a crab-clawed hulking daemonic thing, sometimes the most beautiful woman he had ever imagined, sometimes the most noble king. He had thrown himself towards the monster, trying to strike at it with a dagger he seized from the scabbard of one of his tormentors, and had been struck unconscious by a blow to the head.
That was the last thing he remembered until this moment of bleak consciousness, when he had come to and been confronted with this evil parody of his mother. He wished that he was not awake now. He wished that he was not seeing anything. He wished that it was all a horrible dream. He knew it was not. He had seen more elves die in the last few hours than he had ever expected to see die in his life. He had witnessed a whole small town wiped out and he was not even sure why. The sheer malevolence of it was virtually incomprehensible. He closed his eyes again and wished the whole thing away.
‘You are awake, little elfling. Do not pretend otherwise.’ The voice was impossibly sweet and impossibly malevolent and still it bore an odd resemblance to his mother’s.
‘Go to hell,’ he said. His mouth felt dry and it took a huge effort to force the words out, but he felt the need to make up for his earlier cowardice by a show of defiance now, even if it would do him no good whatsoever.
‘I will eventually,’ said the thing that looked like his mother. ‘Most gratefully too shall I leave this tedious place. But there are a few things I need to put right before I go. You shall help me.’
‘Never.’
‘Oh, but you will. You will help me by dying. Eventually.’
Sardriane swallowed. He did not like the sound of this at all. He had heard tales of what Chaos cultists were capable of, and this thing was mistress of such a cult. Judging by the earlier slaughter, the stories of their cruelty were not exaggerated.
‘You are going to kill me... so do it.’
‘I will at the end, but first you will beg me not to, and then you will beg me to do so, and then when I have broken your will and your sanity and made you worship me and love me, I shall kill you. I might even tell you why.’
‘I do not care.’
‘That is simply perverse, which I admire. Don’t tell me you are not in the slightest bit curious why I have slaughtered your tiny little town and killed all of your family and yet let you live.’
‘I have had other things on my mind.’
The daemon’s laughter was gentle and mocking. It reached out with one soft hand and caressed his cheek. A thrill of depraved pleasure came from the contact, a magical spark jumping from one to the other.
A moment later the tip of a thumb claw flipped out his eye. He did not feel much pain, only an odd ripping sensation and then a wetness as the empty socket filled with blood. The daemon muttered something and raised its hand and twisted. Sardriane’s brain lurched as it tried to cope with the impact of what was