Respect Your Elders - The First Slann's Chambers

The path to Itzkaitlazloqtzaqitzali Kroak’s sanctum was, to the unwary eye, unguarded. Tik’tokrok had lived for centuries, had spent cumulative decades focusing his attention on the smallest possible details of his work. He was capable of noticing chips in stone tiles that were micrometers wide, and on the long, long trek up the many stairs within Itzoatl, he saw no trace of any flaws in the stonework or any guards to bar his path. This did not, however, mean that he was not watched - with every step the Kroxigor took up the unfathomably ancient steps, he could feel the attention of the pyramid’s wardens focused on him, crawling over his skin like invisible beetles. If he strained his senses to their utmost, he could just barely hear the occasional rustle that signified the movement of the elder Temple Guardians, and feel the gentlest of pressures lift from his scales as they lifted unseen blades away from his vital points.

Tik’tokrok ascended tens of thousands of steps in complete silence. No noise from the outside was able to penetrate this far into Itzoatl, allowing him to focus his attention on the glyphs emblazoned on the walls. They were masterfully carved pictographic images, displaying events in lizardmen history. Curiously enough, the events pictured at the bottom of the stairs were from the present day - mosaics depicting the battle around Itza were prominent, the stylized portrayals showing the Uax as a tidal wave of bodies washing against the temple-city’s walls. Further up the stairs there were other images that Tok’tokrok recognized as significant events from the near past - a gargantuan turtle hovering over the bodies of dead lizardmen. Mazdamundi, sending a surge of energy into the ground beneath him, sending mountain-sized walls of water off to either side while the earth shatters and lava spits forth. A group of slann approaching an ancient, knotted tree. Four lizardmen, one of each caste, gathered around a bowl holding the moon. A constellation of slann battling a monster that suckled at their thoughts. The forces of ruin assaulting the last four lizardmen cities, while in the skies above -

D E L I V E R A N C E

That particular mural hurt to look upon, and Tik’tokrok moved on. Further and further back the kroxigor climbed, and the carved murals on the sides of the stairs became more and more ancient, depicting events that had occurred hundreds, thousands of years before Tik’tokrok had ever been spawned. A horned skaven with grey fur and an ominous destiny hanging over his shoulders. Mazdamundi shifting a continental plate, leaving ruin and death in its wake. A temple-city sinking into the sea. Swarms of skaven being swallowed by a gargantuan serpent. The forces of ruin assaulting the last four lizardmen cities, while in the skies above -

He was at the top of the stairs.

Before him stretched a hallway perfectly sized to allow him to walk through with millimeters of clearance on any one side. There were no joins or seams in the stone, and the passageway stank of limestone. It went on for quite a long ways, longer than his eyesight could perceive.

No sound could penetrate Itzoatl, yet as Tik’tokrok walked steadily onwards, he began to hear things, the sounds of pitched battle irregularly echoing in and out of his perception. Some were echoes transmitted from the ongoing battle outside, the roar of the Uax and the thunder of gun from greenskin and lizardman alike. Others, however, echoed an older conflict, one that Itza’s obsinite bones had weathered millennia before Tik’tokrok had been even a flicker in a spawning pool’s matrices.

The roar of Temple Guard rose against the gibbering shrieks of warp-spawned flesh. A deep bass hum permeated the air as defensive enchantments spooled up to their full power, and sizzling hisses sounded out as daemonic flesh eroded under their touch. A voice burning with frenzied hate roared in crackling words of flame and slaughter, exhorting for the blood of all that heard it to be shed. ”Forward,”, it cried. ”Our foe awaits past the Bridge of Stars!”

Tik’tokrok walked onwards, and began to see things as the hallway stretched on. Apparitions of Temple Guard past whirled in devastating crescendos of movement against swarms of thrashing daemons, ghosting in and out of view. They fought with pristine efficiency, bringing down dozens of foes for each scratch upon their scales, and yet as Tik’tokrok proceeded, they began to fall. Some were bled out by hundreds of wounds, some were struck by malignant clots of dark energy that crippled or destroyed them, and some were struck down by axes and swords and whips of burning, seething blood. One by one they fell, and the hallway was empty once more.

”The coward’s guardians fall,” the voice from before roared, louder this time. ”Onwards! The Gorefather desires the skull of their master - leave these scraps for the hounds!” The stink of charred flesh and dried blood wafted into Tik’tokrok’s nostrils with every smoldering syllable, and the kroxigor found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the vision of the past.

The sky was thronged with pulsating, multicolored clouds. A foul wind blew across the battlefield, tainting the very air with corrosive power. The stones of the Bridge of Stars thrummed in protest as the aura of corruption closed in, fighting back against the oncoming Dhar with the spells woven into their foundation. Their efforts were weak, however, and Tik’tokrok beheld the feet and hooves and probosces of a wall of daemons trampling over them with little effort, obeying their inborn urge to ravage and despoil those things not aligned with their patron powers. He could hear something larger moving behind him, a series of rhythmic impacts on the stones that suggested something that dwarfed even his bulk.

His attention was abruptly drawn upwards, to the top of the structure that stood before him like an immortal colossus. The ten thousand steps at the peak of Itzoatl were guarded by no armies, no garrison of soldiers or looming constructs. A single figure stood at the top of the steps, hardly visible from this low. It was only thanks to the foul radiance in the sky backlighting them that Tik’tokrok could see the Eternity Warden of the eldest slann in existence raise an arm aloft and point it at the intruders.

A tremendous pressure built up in the air, and as the warp-spawned creatures that ghosted through Tik’tokrok surged upwards in a squealing, contiguous mass, light flashed from within the sanctum at Itza’s peak and daemons began to die.

Sheets of flame rained downwards, searing them away. Torrents of blessed water ate away at their flesh. Crackling arcs of lightning arced through crowds of squealing devils, rendering them into ash. As time crept incrementally forwards and Tik’tokrok continued to walk up the steps, compelled by an impulse not his own, the onslaught of spells that battered at the infinitude of daemons grew stranger and more esoteric with every step. Light bent into frequencies that were impercievable to mortal eyes, evaporating flesh wherever it shone. Space bent inwards under gravity’s merciless grip, forming pinpricks of imperceptible darkness that vacuumed in everything that came close to them. Sequences of events started to become disjointed, the flow of time selectively edited so that every swing of a corrupted sword bit only into the flesh of other daemons. Thousands of complex mathematical equations bloomed to life within Tik’tokrok’s mind, the structure of each calculation disproving the existence of a certain daemon, retroactively nullifying their existence.

Tik’tokrok strode onwards as the fabric of reality buckled under the weight of Lord Kroak’s spellcraft. The calamity around him could not touch him, for this was only a memory. Behind him, the booming impacts of gargantuan steps followed, growing louder and louder as he climbed.

At last he reached the peak of the stairs, and stood face to face with Kroak’s Eternity Warden. The saurus was a grizzled wall of albino muscle, almost as tall as Tik’tokrok himself, and adorned with glyph-emblazoned stone armor that shimmered with reserved power. It looked upon him, slitted eyes evaluating his entire being in a single glance, and jerked its head to the side a fraction of a degree. Tik’tokrok took the gesture for what it was, and stepped around the Eternity Warden as it hefted its halberd and set itself in a battle stance. The thing that had walked behind him stopped, the weight of its step setting the plateau to shaking as the Eternity Warden growled two words out from between razor teeth.

”Passage denied.”

Tik’tokrok stood before the door to Kroak’s sanctum, yet a mute curiosity burned within him, and he turned his head to look for a moment. Arrayed in a half-circle, their eyes burning with wrath and their weapons dripping with gore, stood sixteen Bloodthirsters of Khorne, and a greater figure still at their head. [b][color=red]An’ggrath the Unbound[/color][/b] towered above his lesser kin, his form swollen with such extremes of horrific might that Tik’tokrok could only percieve flashes of what he was. Curling horns that stretched to the horizon. Hundreds of hands, grasping axe and mace and sword and jagged, bloody rocks. Curled, knotted teeth with slivers of bloody meat squirming in the crevices between. Eyes of flame and blood and pain that screamed with the voices of millions. He towered over the Eternity Warden like a giant over a skink, and yet he set his stance as if meeting an equal adversary.

The task his master had set burned in Tik’tokrok’s mind, and he moved through the door as the battle behind him began.

As the door sealed shut behind him, the sounds of battle ceased and the strange dreamlike feeling that had guided the kroxigor’s feet faded. Unease welled up within him - was the vision of the past still ongoing? How could he know what was real and what was not?

It matters little. Your task remains.

The words were not spoken, nor did they have sound. They were not loud, nor were they a whisper. They were simply known, and Tik’tokrok’s spine stiffened as he looked towards their source.

Lord Kroak’s chambers were relatively unadorned, at least compared to what he had expected. Tik’tokrok had been granted entrance to a slann’s living space only once, and Prakesh’to’s had been so overgrown with vegetation and the detritus of animal habitation that it was nigh indistinguishable from the outside jungle. In contrast, the entrance room of the eldest slann was almost entirely pristine – the walls were bare of ornamentation or engravings, and there were no artifacts or pieces of furniture to fill the uncomfortably empty space. It was a perfectly blank expanse of stone, marred only by a series of what were unmistakably hoofprints that had melted the stone underneath them as they went, leaving a trail of twisted black stone that led inexorably to the center of the mausoleum-like space.

The room’s dimensions expanded as Tik’tokrok followed the molten hoofprints, the walls unfolding and receding further and further away until the kroxigor was standing in an amphitheatre almost as large as a plaza in the city below. In its center was a miniature ziggurat, no higher than Tik’tokrok’s head, formed entirely of the rigid, glossy gold characteristic of Old One tablets. Strange carvings in a language the kroxigor had never seen festooned its surface, swimming and shifting uncomfortably in his peripheral vision. At the peak of the pyramid was an absolute ruin of an obsinite palanquin, nearly cleaved in half from the impact of some gargantuan weapon. Slivers and chunks of midnight stone littered its surroundings.

The First Slann was not sitting in the palanquin. Lord Kroak had gone to the stars with the rest of the eldest slann, the enigmatic will of the dead ancient driving him to search for something only he remembered from his long-forgotten past. It was not the [i]Itzkaitlazloqtzaqitzali[/i] that perched in the ruin of the throne in front of Tik’tokrok. In fact, there was nothing there at all. The thing that was not there sat and looked at him, and Tik’tokrok blinked mutely as he was fixed in place by no eyes, for there was nothing to see. There was a blankness in his mind that swallowed all thought, and into that void came a voice that was not his own.

There is not much time. You must find what you came here for.

There was a tremendous explosion somewhere behind him, and Tik’tokrok felt a fierce heat wash over his scales. Were there a purple-skinned slann on the throne in front of him, it might have flexed its fingers and set its cool gaze at the thing that had burst into the Star Chamber. A taut thrum might have filled the room, and the air itself might have begun to crackle and shudder as the principles of reality concerning density and mass were altered, causing empty space to become solid and impassable. None of this occurred, for there was nothing on the throne, and no heat at his back. The room was empty, and it was silent, and there was no one there.

The constraints of distance might have torn and bled as Khorne’s greatest Exalted brought his axe down in a brutal arc. Were it not a mere memory, the aftershock of such a blow might have torn the scales from Tik’tokrok’s back and sent him slamming into the far wall. The wound in spacetime might have wept daemons, seven other Exalted with Bloodletters and Bloodthirsters and Bloodcrushers and Blood Hounds and an unending, molten tide of sanguine fluid to accompany them. They might have closed in on the First Slann, heavy brass collars shielding them from the magic of the ancient, instruments of murder gleaming in their hands. They might have looked upon Tik’tokrok and swore that his skull would go to Khorne after the mage’s, even if this was nothing but a memory.

The Itzkaitlazloqtzaqitzali might have said something to the kroxigor as the animate shards of the Blood God closed in, had the latter been there at the time. It would have been almost wholly inaudible next to the furnace bellows of daemonic lungs and the keening cry of reality as it was seized by geomancy’s dispassionate grip and used to bludgeon the magic-immune daemons until their forms dissipated. Whatever Lord Kroak’s last living words were, they were surely something involving a reflection on his own life. Perhaps it had been a murmured message to the Old Ones who had shaped him in aeons past. Perhaps he had sealed a series of instructions detailing how to properly preserve his corpse and teleported it to where the skink Tez-zlati that would later become his Oracle was climbing out of a spawning pool. Perhaps it had simply been a blunt refutation of the daemonic cries of victory. He had not said anything to Tik’tokrok, who was only watching a series of events that had played out long ago.

Look upon the left armrest, and speak the phrase you were given at the appointed time.

Such a statement would have given An’ggrath the Unbound pause for but a moment, which would have been just long enough for Lord Kroak to finalize the shape of the last spell he would ever cast. As his flesh was torn to shreds, the spirit of the first slann would have risen from his broken corpse, glowing with ominous radiance that his physical form could never have contained, and –

Tik’tokrok blinked and shook his head, clearing the fuzz from his vision. It had been an engrossing memory, but no more than that. There was, however, something sitting on the left armrest of the ruined obsinite throne before him. It was a tiny dodecahedron formed of glossy gold, equal in size to one of his scales. Each of its sides had a litany of sigils engraved onto it at near-microscopic scales, small enough that they could hardly be distinguished from each other. Tik’tokrok looked at it in silence. There was no immediate way to interact with it that he could discern, so he deposited it into a pouch at his belt and turned to leave. Perhaps Prakesh’to would know what to do with it.

He made his way out of the Star Chamber, which had shrunk back to an ordinary set of dimensions, and was in actuality quite small and unassuming. He emerged onto the stepped platform where he had been confronted by the ancient Eternity Warden. From the vantage point it offered, he could see near the entirety of Itza, the raging sea of green battering at its walls, and a viridian sun mere hundreds of meters above, blazing inexorably downwards.