i always wondered this, Archaon and his Warband, before becoming the full Edg--i mean Lord of the End Times he went to the Polar Gates, the Northern one and entered what is presumed to be a Daemon Planet (as the Warp itself would have made him well....another permanent visitor) this is what happened:
A dream. Just like a dream. Archaon found himself walking. He could hear the soft clatter of his plate. The jangle of Dorghar's halter chains as he led the daemon steed on. He reached for a weapon and found the hilts of several hell-forged blades in his belt, as well as the shaft of a hand axe and a sheathed dagger. He brought his right arm up before him. The tatters of a sling still hung about his neck. His arm seemed as new. He extended the fingers of his gauntlet and then clenched them in a fist. How long had he been in this place?
The dull agony of broken bones was gone. In fact, he felt nothing. His legs, striding through the darkness ― perhaps for an eternity ― were insensible to strain or fatigue. He pulled at a finger. Twisted it. Bent it back. Nothing. No pain. No discomfort. This truly was a dream, Archaon decided. A nightmare in which he knew he was trapped but could not, through will alone, wake from. He remembered the Southern Wastes. The Gatelands. The horde. Then nothing. The warping, fluxing, roaring perversities of this realm had passed through him. Stripped him of bodily afflictions, his weakness of the flesh. Reducing him down to his essence: a streaming darkness, passing like an undercurrent through an ocean of others.
A boundless sea within a sea within a sea within a sea. A bottomless abyss as wide as it was deep, dark with the energies that swirled, spumed and crashed through it. A spiritual storm through which schools of savage entities swam, predatory consciousnesses lay in wait and the colossal intensities of intelligences ancient trawled, drawn down on desperate souls. Archaon came to understand himself as part of such a maelstrom, a primordial darkness that was to the mortal world as the glassy facet of a pool.
It reflected the world in dark imperfection but remained suggestive of something unknown but ever present beneath. The surface separated two different elements. Two different experiences of the same world ― one the distorted mirror image of the other. It rippled at the insistence of both, those above and below. It invited those souls and entities so inclined to pass through the reflective illusion of a barrier between such realms, drawing the monstrous from the depths and the doomed to sink into the darkness. Archaon knew he was nothing more than streaming shadow, coursing through darkness. At the mercy of prevailing tides. Surging before stormy fronts.
Dragged along with rapidities. Whirled into the gyres and miniature maelstroms of raging tempests. Twisting and soaring through the streaming presence of other beings ― aethyric evils, exalted essences and the searing passage of pure daemonic will ― Archaon found the dark fire of his soul mauled. It had been torn this way and that by currents of raw knowing, streams of suffering, the downwellings of doom and the countercurrents of crackling ambition and false hope. Rings, eddies, traps, vortices and roiling embodiments ― all threatening to put him from his endless course.
His passage through the formlessness of the chaotic abyss. Archaon felt familiar horrors in the swirling shadow. Things drawn down on him, following the rising star of the Chaos warlord's soul. Infernal creatures he had crossed. Daemons he had slain. Depraved intelligences like the beast Agrammon that slithered and streamed about the crowded constellation of souls that was Archaon and his horde. Monstrous forces of warping, elemental destruction, like the dread presence of theYien-Ya-Long, that stalked the soulfire trail of Archaon and his army through oblivion like a great predator might hunt a migrating herd. These seething entities, who wanted nothing more than to avenge themselves from the beyond, ultimately kept their distance.
They seemed cautious, as though other great forces in the hellish stormscape of the aethyr had already laid claim to Archaon's soul and were keeping watch over their property. Archaon felt the warp-scorching presence of such primordial and Ruinous entities. Of things impossible. Of dread power. Of myriad malevolence. Of promises eternal. Of fears indescribable. Like oblivions all of their very own, the Ruinous Powers burned like great dark stars, exerting an influence on every damned presence and victim-soul about them. Drawing them in. Sometimes they would stabilise the paths of the mighty.
They would hold the exalted on their course to greatness and damnation, extending their monstrous reach and infinite influence to establish a temporary equilibrium between the irresistible forces of their realm-warping presence. Sometimes they would tear lives apart between them and, like behemoths of the deep, filter the soul-carnage left in the wake of slaughter, suffering and the meteoric rise of servant champions.
Several times, Archaon felt the blaze of their direct attentions. To be beheld by such beings through the looking glass stillness of storm centres all but scorched Archaon out of existence. He felt his fate flux and warp at their gaze. It was simultaneously the most wonderful and the most dreadful thing Archaon had ever experienced. He burned in the incomprehension of their interest. In the existential chill of their ignorance, Archaon felt predatory entities close back in. Even there he was not alone. Ever present in the havoc, in the dread and the darkness, Archaon felt the calamitous force of his father. The First Daemon of Chaos. Watching. Waiting. Wanting.
The bitter vortex of his otherworldly presence was a warp-curdled and crushing darkness of his own making and Archaon could feel the distant pull of his aeonian desires. Although Archaon knew from the scorching fleshlessness of his soul that he was not walking through the empty blackness in his plate, with weapons heavy on his belt and Dorghar snorting alongside him, it felt hauntingly real. He understood that it was simply the way his being could experience the impossibilities of the beyond ― the mind-stabbing, flesh-shearing unrealities of this monstrous realm. As he looked about, all Archaon could see was the darkness of his soul reflected back at him. It was a gaze-devouring nothingness. The lethality of the place saturated him.
Looking up was the horror of a never-ending tumble into an abyss. Looking down was the deepest of dreads ― like treading water in an ocean of predatory creatures that could bite you in half at any moment or drag you to oblivion to tear you flesh from chunk of flesh. Looking behind him carried with it the same spine-twisting, sickening expectation of some horrid thing waiting for him to turn before it struck. Everywhere else was moment by moment, heart-hammering horror and the dread of seeing something that could not be unseen ― visions of mindless terror that could not be blinked from the eye. Fearful aspects that were ever present, even when they were not. Archaon's tongue sizzled with the cold bitterness of the void while his nostrils stung with the coppery rawness of his flesh ― wherever it was ― being freshly flayed, over and over again. His ears bled with Ruinous whispers of dark things bargaining for his soul. Their temptations burned to resist.
Their eternal entreaties tore at him like hooks and lines disappearing into the benightment. The shrieking. The screaming. The befriending and the begging. He listened to every word, his nerves the strings of some fearfully abused instrument. He fought their lies and the fragilities of his own soul, unruly parts of himself that desired acquiescence and an end to all torments. There were those daemonic entities prowling the blackness that did not cog, whisper and deceive but attacked like ambush predators ― frenziedly seizing upon the soulfire of the unclaimed, that burned like a beacon in the void.
Things that punched through Archaon like an unstoppable evil, and wrestled him for his soul. Entities that struck with fang and force, to paralyse the spirit and poison the present. Abyssal creatures that feasted on the indomitability of his will, spreading rancid corruptions of the spirit through his resolve, infecting him with the plague of doubt. Infernal enigmas that forced Archaon back through the labyrinthine madness of choices yet to be made as they roasted his resolutions in the warpflame of their unbearable presence.
Other horrors simply launched themselves from the darkness, goring without horn, tearing without claw and snapping without jaw. Such battles for the soul lasted a castle-crumbling age ― and like a castle under siege, Archaon's defences began to crack and tremble under constant onslaught. He could not know that he had been fighting such ravenous beings for a lifetime. In the slave-pit of the soul, Archaon had fought for the survival of everything that he was and ever would be. Such infernal battles shook the very fabric of his being. Approaching it like any other form of combat or martial discipline, he had grown adept at such inner conflicts. He drove daemonic essences, who fought to inhabit his own, before him.
Sending one after another back to the darkness and the dread, enjoying the solitude of several more lonely steps before some other monstrous aberration surged forth with infernal optimism and bottomless greed. Archaon risked a glance behind him. He narrowed the gaze of an eye he knew wasn't there. He blinked the mind-scalding glare of the realm's tumultuous blackness from his darksight. Concentrating through the cacophony of distractions and the sense that not one, but a hundred different dread intelligences were in turn watching him through the darkness,
Something felt hauntingly familiar about the impulse and it occurred to Archaon, as it had occurred to him the thousands of times before, that the pair were routinely carrying out the same insanity over and over again. 'Sorcerer,' Archaon said, drawing the twitch of a response from the daemon.
'Where are we? Your master speaks.'Sheerian didn't answer at first, the sorcerer seeming to overcome ― like Archaon ― some monstrous attempt to steal his soul.'My master never stops speaking,' the Tzeentchian cackled cryptically. 'Where are we? Where your damned path has taken us, my lord. The invisible empire. 'To the depths of hells everlasting. To the cradle of darkness ― the birthplace of daemons and the storm-racked sovereignty of the Dark Gods. Everywhere. Nowhere. Anywhere.
''Speak sanity, sorcerer,' Archaon said. He was barely holding onto his own.'You seek sanity,' Sheerian marvelled maniacally, '…in… this… place?''I seek the Great Northern Gate,' Archaon told him, his bold words sounding hollow as they were swallowed by the dark, abyssal emptiness about them.
''I seek the mortal realm to which we belong. I seek a way out of this infernal place. You are a thing of this darkness. Guide us.''Here,' babbled the ancient, 'there, neverwhere. How can a daemon of this world or the next claim to have been anywhere in a place with no landmarks or features? Can a man who has stood on the sandy shore know his way across the deserts of the ocean bottom? Does feeling the breeze on his face equip him to find his way through all storms? We are lost and we are damned, my lord. We are slaves to the darkness. Accept it and allow yourself to become one with the madness of this place. Eternity will find some use for you ― eventually ― as it did me.'