Rig

Sigismund sees Typhus first. He shouts a warning that the world is too loud to hear.

From his place at the edge of Gateway Cliff, Sigismund sees the swarming enemy numbers far below part to allow their lord’s advance. Drawn in some hellish chariot and flanked by his retinue of champions, Typhus hastens along the base of the pass to lead his men in the final assault. War-horns boom. The Death Guard in the clifftop vanguard redouble their efforts. Their lord approaches. They will clear a path for him.

Sigismund yells his warning again. But the champion in him sees a new opportunity — the chance to close, face to face, with the enemy lord. This was impossible before, but now Typhus openly presents himself. He is coming within reach, and Sigismund’s black sword is waiting for him.

Sigismund shouts to rally those few of his Seconds still nearby. With their support, he can hold the cliff and make ready.

Perhaps, he thinks, we can drive a way down the ridge, through the flanking line of assault, and meet him on the way up. Typhus will have to abandon that damn chariot and advance in a narrow file with his retinue. The cliffs are too—

The war-horns boom again. Bone trumpets blast the air. Sigismund gazes in horror, his plans disintegrating before they are even fully formed. He sees his enemy properly now. He sees what is coming.

Typhus, lord of the enemy host, carrion chieftain, rises from the murk of the pass. He has not abandoned his chariot at all. He ascends from the pitch-black depths of the gorge as though the darkness below is exhuming him, and lifting him into the winter light. He does not scale the sheer cliff like his swarming men — he rides the air itself, a daemon-deity of extinction borne aloft by the fly-specked murk and noxious vapour. His ascent is stately and majestic. He stands on his chariot of wet bone, the open clam shell of a giant ribcage. Every inch of that bone is scrimshaw-etched with the letters and characters of Death’s alphabet: requiem odes and funerary prayers from the books of the dead held sacred by a thousand civilisations that are themselves long perished from the world. Only their words remain, notched into the bones — hymns that worship Death and acknowledge its inescapable triumph over life. The bones are singing, an eerie witch-blood song that skirls in the freezing air.

Typhus is a behemoth, his bulk increased by fluted cancerous plate, by filth-matted spikes, and by the vast fly-swarm — a living cloak that breathes and plumes from the black-bone chimneys and seeping orifices of his hunched shell-back. He is flanked by macabre champions who make Skulidas Gehrerg seem but a minor impediment. They ride on the skirts of the chariot around him, beneath flapping, cracking banners of human skin. They are all skull-masked, their war plate anointed with white bone-ash and symbols of mortality writ in tomb-dust. Their weapons are drawn ready — embalming knives and mortuary hammers, dissection blades and necropsy chisels, the copper adzes to open the mouth, the excerebration hooks to empty the skull. They are his priesthood, come to officiate the exequies of the First Legion and its allies.

His creaking chariot is drawn upwards by moaning Neverborn of plague and decay. They are his mourners, come to bear his skeletal chariot up the cliff like some rotting gift to the mountain. They are gnarled, contorted things, buckled by carcinoma and neoplasmic cyst, and veiled with soil-stained winding sheets that trail and billow in the wind. They are yoked to the foul chariot by rusted chains, and their broken fingernails claw at the dirty air to find purchase in it to drag the dead-cart ever upwards. Red sprite lightning, baleful and luminous, drifts and sparks in the foul air around the slow cortege.

Typhus brings the howl of the storm with him, for it is his own utterance.

- Abnett, Dan. The End and the Death: Volume III. The Black Library, 2024.