The army was moving, a sea of marching columns, and yurts drawn by horses, slaves, and slaver-mawed beasts of burden. Over each mobile tent was a banner of a warhost or southland cult. Among them were the Lordless Hordes, the Great Vanguard, the Red Reavers, and Archaon’s own Swords of Chaos.

The North Pole was a week’s march away.

The grind of the yurt’s rollers was a distant sound, sending slight vibrations through the leather walls, an omnipresent hum. Ingethel slithered around the central plinth where Rainbow Dash was bound, unconscious. A collection of goremages chanted deeply in calling to the ruinous powers. In preparation, they passed around the heart of Feid, a less than stellar acolyte whose corpse lay discarded in the corner. Each cultist took a bite of the still warm meat, and Ingethel scarfed down the last of it.

“We are ready to proceed,” wheezed Arungir, watching Ingethel circle with eyes sewn shut.

“This one is a stubborn soul,” Ingethel said. “Many of your throng will not survive.”

“When has that dissuaded us before?”

The closest thing to a grin creased Ingethel’s face. “Then let us begin.”

The chanting grew louder as one of the cultists approached Rainbow Dash with a recurved dagger. Arungir drew a similar blade from her sleeve and approached Ingethel. Ingethel barely flinched as her throat was slit. Rainbow Dash awoke with a choked out cough of blood as her heart was pierced.

Rainbow Dash screamed and shot into the air, holding a hoof over her thundering heart. She took an instant to get her bearings.

Grass, tall and lush, a sea of wildflowers bowing in waves to the wind. A blue sky. She looked behind herself at a low rumble of thunder. A volcano in the distance, throwing up gouts of ash and smoke. Rainbow remembered this. Rarity described it all; the Warp, the forest, the acid-water, all a trap. She landed and moved in the opposite direction.

“Wait.”

Rainbow froze at the familiar voice. Ingethel stared at her with those unblinking, piss-yellow eyes.

“That way is death.”

“You!”

By the time Rainbow tackled Ingethel, she was transforming into a creature twice her original size. Rainbow dug a claw under Ingethel’s jaw, bleeding out a trail of black, oily fluid.

“You’d better start talking,” snarled Rainbow Dash. “Where am I?”

Ingethel coughed out something like laughter. “You cannot kill me here. I am daemonkind. Besides, both our time is limited. The fate of the mortal world hangs in the balance.

“Where is here?!”

“The borderlands between the realms of Kharneth and She-who-Thirsts. I say again, we do not have too much time.”

Rainbow rolled her eyes. “And why should I follow you for anything?”

“Whether I tell the truth or lie and you do not believe, you will die. You cannot hope to navigate the Warp on your own; not how you’re perceiving it.”

Rainbow Dash considered that for a moment and reluctantly let Ingethel go. Returning to normal form, she paced, angrily exclaiming a series of curt, four-letter words.

Ingethel rose to full height, over a meter taller than Rainbow Dash. “You are impetuous, so prone to acting without thinking. But here, you must learn better.”

“Learn what?”

“The Truth.”

Rainbow Dash snorted. “The truth.”

“Who else can you trust here?” asked Ingethel, waving an arm to the wide world.

“Not you.”

“Exactly.” Ingethel held a claw out to Rainbow Dash. “The devil you know, or the devils yet to come? They will come for you, and will not be patient enough to speak.”

Rainbow bit her tongue, and took Ingethel’s claw.

The world dropped away. In under a second, they were atop the rim of the volcano. The mountain raged silently, rivers of liquid earth cascaded down its sides. Ash surrounded them, and in the time it took for Rainbow Dash to worry about it, she found that she could breathe just fine.

“Am… Am I dead?”

“On the brink. You nearly perished in the metal giant’s fall. I have followers keeping you alive, so I can offer you the choice of the truth or oblivion. Archaon wants you and your friends.”

“What’s he doing to them?” growled Rainbow.

“Each of them will be shown the error of their ways. That is all I can say of it. Look there.”

The ash dissipated from them, and in the plains, three massive opposing armies were forming up, legions so vast they stretched to the horizon. Each marched under flowing banners of their nations, empires that had long since passed. Despite the impossible distance, Rainbow Dash made them out clearly. Men, elves, and dwarfs.

Along the volcano’s slope, squat, fat toads the size of men sat in levitating stone thrones, conversing in worried tones. Rainbow Dash couldn’t make out their strange language.

“Those are the Old Ones, the very makers of this world. Their attempts to get their creations to stop fighting one another have proven fruitless.”

“A bunch of lizard-people created them?” asked Rainbow.

“Indeed. Just about every race in the world. Greenskin, Ogre, and more.”

As warhorns sounded the charge, the Old Ones clapped their hands and disappeared in electrified blazes.

“The hearts of mortals were, and are, vain and vengeful. At that moment, it was as if the four corners of the world had come to destroy each other.”

Ingethel shook her staff a little, making two days of battle pass in under a minute. The changing of the clouds seemed to go unnoticed by the warriors, as they were consumed by battle-lust. A vaguely humanoid shape began taking form in the sky.

Rainbow Dash’s eyes hurt to look at it. “What is that?”

“The birth of a god.”

It suffered as it was born. Blood welled from every pore, and it screamed in both pain and anger at nothing. It staggered drunkenly with half-formed legs that soon became thickly muscled and armored as its blood-sweat hardened. It lashed out without eyes, mistakenly destroying whole worlds in its pocket dimension with every swipe of its claws. Only when its eyes formed, sickly grey-yellow beads, could it see the battle in the mortal world. But it had ended just as it could see.

It fell backward in weakness, and a throne caught it, a throne of brass and skulls. It watched through the veil of reality at tiny things in their camps, praying to whatever gods they worshiped, or the Old Ones, for the strength to win. For all sides, there seemed to be no victory in sight. Corpses were piled knee-deep in a lake of the dead. Countless, fat carrion birds swirled like swarms of flies, their feathers slicked in blood.

The god-thing, though it knew the men weren’t praying to it, thought it might oblige. It held out a hand, and let red ichor drip into the materium.

Blood began to rain on the camps, huge drops that painted men’s heads red with the splash.

In the middle of the night, the battle resumed. No banners were carried, no pre-combat oaths taken. The warriors simply took up their arms in the red rain and dashed for the field.

What resulted, Rainbow Dash could not call battle, but a massacre. Soldiers threw themselves at each other without formation or discipline. Every warrior was his own army, fighting by his own rage and hatred for the enemy. Humanity drank most deeply of this power, butchering dwarf and elf with reckless abandon. The dwarfs and elves fought to the last despite having any direction to retreat.

Men howled themselves hoarse at their victory. Barely one hundred of them were left. The skulls of the fallen rained over the god-thing, each like a mere grain of sand. It grinned at the strength of men.

“So what is this about?” Rainbow asked, sickened by the sight.

“What do you think? Do you not remember what your friend Rarity told you? She, at least, begins to understand.”

“She said there’s other sides to Chaos.”

“There are no ‘sides’ to it. Only how you perceive it. Remember Fluttershy, how she has changed.”

“Your god turned her into a berserker,” Rainbow accused, pointing at the god-thing’s fading image. The world vaporized into clouds of stardust. Rainbow felt ill as nonsense gravity pulled her in every direction.

“Because the Gods are generous; so many gifts to give, but so few willing to accept them,” hissed Ingethel, “Kharneth has heaped power on her, and before you even came here, she felt its benefits. Your dragon-man spoke of her, how she protects you with that strength, and only lashes out when provoked.”

Some semblance of reality asserted itself, dropping Rainbow Dash up to her haunches in a thick layer of snow.

A halo a kilometer across hung in the sky. Churning warp energy was focused in its center, crackling with the un-space of another dimension, but stable. An arctic township was directly under it, milling with primitive men, elves, and dwarfs alike, observing the Old Ones using such technology. Their masters dissolved into streams of liquid light as they flew up to the device, whisked away to parts unknown.

Wiggling out of the snow, Rainbow found Ingethel staring up at the vortex.

“This was how the Old Ones traveled to and from this world,” Ingethel said somberly. “Great gates that let them freely travel the stars.”

“And what does this have to do with this ‘truth with a capital T’ you were talking about?”

“This is when and where gods and mortals first met. Behold, the coming of Chaos.”

The warp gate decided to take that moment to explode. Roaring clouds of un-space expanded across the sky, and mountain-sized chunks of the disc were suspended in it, ignorant of gravity. Millions of eyes in impossible colors glared down from the growing maelstrom.

“This device thinned the border between dimensions, just enough that slivers of the Gods’ power could cross it, and finally meet their progenitors. Mortals had created gods, but felt no joy.”

Blood began to rain on the township, sending mortals fleeing indoors, and Old Ones back to ground. Some were trapped where they stood, unable to look away as their bodies were stained red.

From the growing puddles, humanoid things staggered out, unfamiliar with physical forms.

They emerged as red-skinned warriors, chanting praises of might. Pink and purple women strode alongside, bearing works of art that would have made the blind weep for joy, and shrieking in adulation at seeing the mortal plane. Pink and blue morphing flesh-balls clumsily bounced and amboled about, carrying stacks of books and scrolls, and putrid, zombie-like creatures with their entrails spilled across the ground bore potions, alembics, and promises of health and life. They screamed praise to the gods, and jubilation that the day of communion had finally come.

The mortals attacked the creatures that approached the frozen people, and quick behind them, the Old Ones joined, casting bolts of lightning that vaporized the warp-spawns.

The shards of the Gods retreated, at least until the sky boomed further. The Gods were scorned by mortals, after thousands of years separated, rejected. Slaanesh’s concubines writhed in pain, becoming bull-headed and ugly, and sprouting crustacean’s claws where there had once been dainty hands. Wrath took over Khorne’s prideful warriors, burning their skin away with rage until they were completely alien. Betrayal enraged Tzeentch’s scribes, setting their manner haywire, lashing out at one another as much as the mortals. The potions Nurgle’s mites carried soured instantly, bursting into waddling puss balls that glomped and bit at their attackers.

“This was supposed to be a time of celebration,” Ingethel said sullenly, waving her staff and dispelling the world as an apocalypse rained on the town.

“Jeez. Were you here when it happened?”

Ingethel’s agape maw shut briefly. Her needle teeth cut and gouged her own mouth, though she ignored the wounds. “I would not be born for another six thousand years. However, I did accept their gifts when I was bound in mortal life, as did so many others, but less so.”

“The Norscans?” inquired Rainbow Dash.

Ingethel nodded. “Now you begin to understand.”

Rainbow Dash went blind as her eyes filled with snow again. She hoped this wouldn't become a ‘thing’.

Rainbow Dash found herself in the middle of a norse village. Rune-carved cairn stones stood before every home, and the central lane leading up to what appeared to be the chieftain's hall was deserted. Rainbow could occasionally make out a terrified face in the windows, looking in the direction of one hut in particular.

Ingethel was at its door, motioning Rainbow Dash to follow as she slithered in.

It was not at all what the pegasus had imagined. Trinkets and decor of Imperial design filled the house.

A woman wept on her blood-stained bed. Her husband rushed to her with a wet cloth and began wiping off her bloody hand. Turning to face him, her swollen belly was revealed.

“What are we going to do, Olios?” she sobbed. “She’s going to kill them.”

“There isn’t anything magic can’t solve,” he said. “You put that brilliant brain of yours to work and you’ll find a cure within the week. That was just a miserable, lonely little hag with what, a rusty knife and some gibberish of a curse? She was jealous of us, I say.”

“But I can feel it. It’s so strong...”

Her wounded hand clenched around the rag, and started to shake.

“Ethra. Ethra!” Olios caught her as she fell into convulsions.

“She never could find a cure, but the Gods were listening. Nurgh’leth would cure her, and she would bear three sons.”

“H-how do I know this isn’t some kind of sob-story?”

Ingethel grimaced. “One of your friends will meet them in time. Ask for their names; Otto, Ethrac, and Ghurek.”

Ingethel hung over Rainbow Dash, her needle-filled maw breathing a meat-rotten reek in the pegasus’ face.

“You and your friends have jeopardized such a chance at communion between the gods and the rest of the world. Sending the Elements of Harmony away has been your worst mistake.”

“Yeah, right,” sneered Rainbow Dash. “We saved the world. The princesses can use all six on their own, and they’ll break the hold your gods have on—”

“Have you not been paying attention?!” fumed the daemon. Her rat-tails of hair stood on end. “Each god was born of an aspect of mortal minds; hate, joy, jealousy. The Gods are wrathful because mortals have rejected themselves. That is the true disharmony in the world.”

Just like that, it clicked. Rainbow’s eyes widened.

“Bear in mind that the Gods can save you from the brink of death you lay on. Now see the darkness of the future you will bring, should you fail to bring the true balance. In the future, there is only war.”

Ingethel backed away, slowly being enveloped by the dark void. Rainbow Dash tried to follow, but never got any closer.

“Hey, hey, wait!”

As the last of the daemon vanished, a tremendous blast knocked Rainbow off her hooves and against a snowy boulder.

A hurricane of laserlight blazed all around, accompanied by the shrill scream of a thousand weapons firing at once. Tattooed Chaos cultists in emerald-green robes charged uphill at a layered defence of dog-dirty troops, one of them holding aloft a standard topped with a skull pierced through with a dagger. Armored vehicles coughed ordnance at the defenders, blasting holes in what looked like a church behind them.

Men and ponies were falling, screaming, disemboweled and succumbing to wounds as their allies ignored them and pressed on.

The defenders rose from their trenches as the cultists began to waver and fall back. One of the counter-attackers stood out, wearing a black, gold-embroidered greatcoat, and a shimmering camo scarf around his neck. He swung a sword, coursing with lightning, in lethal arcs. His bulky pistol exploded men’s torsos with nearly every barking shot.

Rainbow tried to change form, but could not focus with the chaos. She tried to run as this man fought like he was possessed, and was getting closer. A nearby missile impact blew her down.

“First and Only!” he roared.

Rainbow Dash glanced back. He was already upon her, his face wrought with hatred and forlorn hope. His sword arm was shot through, running blood down the sleeve as the burning blade came down on her.

As Rainbow screamed, the world was replaced with an ashen plain, broken up by shattered boulder-fragments. Black smoke shrouded the brown-grey sky, rising like a curtain.

The very ground was exploding. Several times a second, gouts of rock and soil burst skyward, and raining down in an after-curse. Soldiers in trench coats and gas masks waded into the storm alongside house-sized tanks, each blazing with a dozen guns and cannons.

She looked up. A metal god strode above her. Blaring warhorns heralded its arms casting blinding lances of sunfire into a trench network. Earth instantly melted to lava, and the cowering defenders became no more than ash-shadows in their ditches.

Either way she looked, the same story played out, waves of soldiers and mechanical monsters attacking along a front kilometers wide.

Rainbow Dash flew away, reaching the clouds in under a minute, but even they were a cloying smog of chemical pollution. Soot already clung to her coat, and left a metallic taste at the back of her tongue.

A city the size of a mountain was the source, its peaks billowing industrial refuse.

How is this even possible? she thought. What kind of future is this?

The planet shot away, and the sky darkened to the black void of space in seconds.

It all came flooding in then, the sound of a galaxy in flames, the immaterial screams of billions of lives, fed to an ages-long war. Vast crusading fleets bearing millions of troopers, dedicated to righteousness or slaughter put entire worlds to the torch. Tears drifted from Rainbow’s eyes as the cosmos burned.

Whole star systems shot by in the time it took to blink. Void battles of thousands of warships were barely noticed. She curled up as a planet hurdled at her, but she stopped just a few meters above the ground.

She landed with quivering knees and short breath. Looking up at the starry sky, she wondered, how was this her fault? What could possibly be done?

Rainbow heard the bellow of a steam whistle beyond the narrow alley she’d dropped into. She stepped out into harsh light and busy, dense crowds. The very air vibrated with the thrum of massive hovering zeppelins with electrified engines. Brilliant floodlights shone from the eyes of enormous golden skulls on their prows, sweeping the crowd and blinding Rainbow momentarily with their dazzle.

She navigated the masses and streets, gazing on the high-towered buildings , none of which was without some icon. A warhammer, a solar eclipse, fluttering banners of the state, and soldiers on the rooftops. Equine skulls, crammed with electronics and metal tentacles lazily hovered over the crowd, snapping pictures, or carrying scrolls or slates in insectoid claws.

Rainbow Dash found herself at the back of a throng gathered before a raised stage of polished granite. An obese stallion in silk robes and a high headpiece was at the podium, supported on wheezing piston-legs.

Rainbow Dash quickly tuned him out as she looked over the titanic statues on golden plinths behind him. The princesses, Shining Armor, Karl Franz, and others cast long shadows over the crowd.

Where am I in all that? Rainbow thought. Where’s Spike, or Twilight, or—

“Excuse me.”

Rainbow Dash jumped. A young stallion, no older than fifteen years was looking right past her. His eyes looked empty and dead.

“I have to get by,” he said.

“H-hey, do you know where this is?”

He spared her a momentary glance. “Canterlot? Please, I have to get closer and hear the Patriarch’s good word.”

“Good word?” Rainbow muttered.

“And look down there!” the preacher bellowed, his voice amplified through megaphones on an orbiting zeppelin. He pointed at a mile-wide crater in the lowland.

Rainbow Dash gasped at the familiarity of the location. Ponyville had been there.

“That was where the great betrayers would foment their lies, the very birthplace of the evil that our good royalty give their all to fight, even now!” The patriarch pointed to each of the seven monsters engraved in the relief behind him, each of them was being cast into the jaws of a greater monstrosity, back into the Warp. Whoever created this took great artistic liberty, but Rainbow Dash could make them out. Her and her friends, vilified, despised. He pointed at Twilight Sparkle first.

“The Arch-Traitor, most favored of Celestia, and her lizard-beast shows us that even the mightiest can fall. Gird yourselves with faith, and be grateful our minds are not so open. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.”

“No,” Rainbow muttered to herself as everyone else gave grunts of approval.

The patriarch ranted on each of her friends, calling them the Pony Eater, the Iron Mare, Destroyer, Fleshmonger, and Rainbow Dash herself, the Deceiver. Her blood boiled.

“And may their names be forgotten to all but the damned—”

“Rainbow Dash!”

The patriarch paused, and adjusted his hat as it started to slide off. “Who said that? Who disrupts this tempering?”

“Twilight Sparkle!” Rainbow Dash shouted again, ignoring the rapidly increasing number of eyes turning to her. Her sight was fixed on the lying preacher. “Spike! Pinkie Pie! Applejack! Rarity! Fluttershy!”

“And who are these ponies, who are clearly so important that you interrupt?”

“Those are the motherbucking Elements of Harmony, and we betrayed no one!”

The crowds began to back away from her as a pair of soldiers approached. “Miss, you will come with us for questioning.” He placed a hoof on Rainbow’s shoulder.

The last thing he would ever do.

Rainbow’s entire right side erupted in a tide of morphing muscle and toothy flesh, grabbing both the soldiers and slamming them to the ground until blood and brains were dashed across the tiles. Just as quickly, Rainbow transformed to metal form as gunfire raked down from the rooftops, panging harmlessly off her while she strode through the panicking masses. The fat preacher tried to run, but his artificial legs barely managed a trotting pace.

More guards stormed the stage, escorting him away, and firing fruitlessly on the shapeshifter. Rainbow Dash swatted them all aside with the wrecking ball of biomatter her tail had become. With heavy clubbing, she shattered the preacher’s legs; things he hadn’t been able to feel for many years.

“D- De- Deceiver…” he spat. “This is a holy world. The Princesses own the very land, sea, and sky, and my faith guards my soul from the powers you surrendered to!”

Rainbow Dash glanced up at the statues of Celestia and Luna. Their gold-wrought eyes seemed to glare at her.

She took a deep breath as her eyes began to water, and her hoof became a mace of bone spikes. “I’m not the one that deceived you, and my name is Rainbow Dash!”

Giving a shout of indignation, she changed again, a miniature hurricane of feathers and warpstuff, growing, coalescing to mimic Fluttershy in size and form. She casually tossed the preacher into the street, and went for the statue of Luna. With a squeal of tearing metal, Rainbow broke the princess’s head off, and, like a dagger impaled Celestia through the neck with her sister’s horn.

Rarity had the awful need to scratch her back, but resisted. The openings were still fresh.

She rolled her shoulders, the action stretching the cut-out swaths of her back where cords of blue muscle were exposed. She hissed at the burn, and felt a warm trickle of blood as clotted wounds were torn. Her right arm felt worse of all. Across her collarbone, a clear pattern of stitches denoted where it had been reattached. It still felt like it hung off wrongly, a bit slower to react to her thoughts.

Her surroundings were lost in the tight, windowless space, which rocked and shook as it was moved to heaven knows where. There must have been thick walls and nullifying wards put on the metal box, as Rarity couldn’t feel the Winds of Magic. She felt cold and empty without its presence, and blind now that she couldn’t mind-see where she or her friends were. She rested her head against the cool metal.

Rarity had known for a long time that the gods of Chaos were not inherently malevolent. Soon after her mutated endowments, she could hear the heartbeat of creation in the Warp, but she had still misunderstood.

’You ignorant mule.’ Egrimm Horstmann’s words still rang.

The Elements of Harmony wouldn’t have worked. The true imbalance wasn’t in the north, but the south. A world in denial, gods scorned, and the power of the Warp rejected. The Old World must be shown the error of their ways.

The box lurched, then became still. There was a fifty-fifty chance of it being a good or bad thing.

The wall to her right fell away, and her senses were immediately overwhelmed. The Winds crashed back into her mind, setting every nerve on fire with its power the sounds of thousands of voices rang outside in a rising and falling chorus.

'Aaaaiii… aaaaaii.'

A bulky warrior stood at the opening, and he jabbed a thumb back for her to get out. Rarity stepped out into fading sunlight. A tent city was set up that stretched to the horizon, encircling a mound of ancient, petrified corpses, in which a standard of black iron, forged in the shape of an eight-pointed star, was buried halfway up its shaft. The breadth of the icon itself was taller than a man. Thousands of warriors surrounded the corpse mound, chanting, praying, begging for the hour to come.

A great maelstrom swirled in the sky, a million eyes staring down hungrily at the world from a vortex. Mountain-sized bodies of rock lazily drifted in its grasp, splitting and reassembling at random.

Rarity looked to her left; friends emerged from their own holding boxes. Rainbow Dash was pale, her eyes bloodshot. Applejack twitched constantly, gritting her four rows of teeth, and forcing her own body to obey and walk. Spike wore all his panoply of war, resting his claws on the pommel of his sword, point down in the ashen earth. The ground shook as Fluttershy cast a shadow over Rarity. She snarled, wriggling in the trappings that bound a massive iron howdah to her back. Drummers hammered away on their great leatherbound instruments, and eight-pointed stars hung from banners on each corner.

Pinkie Pie was last to emerge, and was something else entirely. Sweet cream trickled from seams in her waffle cone ears. A carapace of peppermint covered her like an insect's exoskeleton. A deep, jagged crack bisected her otherwise porcelain-perfect face into white and pink halves. This divide ran down her neck, chest, and underbelly. She glared around unblinkingly, letting an orange and black tongue run along her carnivorous teeth.

The drums and chanting went silent at once, giving way to a shrill ringing of countless bells.

Rarity looked up as the sky darkened. One of the largest eyes in the vortex wept a single burning tear that headed for the standard. The comet struck with a fantastic explosion of dust, but destroyed nothing, Black tendrils of smoke spread along the ground in an ethereal carpet, and a titanic figure rose from the crater.

Rarity had never heard its name before, but it was spoken to every mind in the congregation.

Be’lakor.

The daemon was of grey skin and batlike wings. Cloven hooves ended its furred legs, and rough horns ran along its elongated head. It scanned around, nothing but hate on its wrinkled, noseless face. It’s body language said it didn’t want to be here.

“Who now demands the attention of the Gods?” it growled.

“I do.”

Be’lakor turned around. Archaon was standing just under the standard’s peak, nearly at eye level.

The daemon snarled, “You again?”

Archaon chuckled. Be’lakor glanced at his claw, which was suddenly holding a saddle of furs and chainmail. The daemon prince looked up to the vortex, silently uttering a curse.

“Where is the replacement, then?”

On cue, Twilight Sparkle manifested beside Archaon in a flash of teleportation.

Her mouth hung slightly ajar, each struggling breath letting out a thin red vapor. Short spikes of bone jutted through tears in her hide, under which a savage musculature wormed and writhed. Her predatory eyes locked on Be’lakor, then she spread her wings wide, wrinkled and ribbed with bony fingers.

Be’lakor snorted and began attaching the saddle to Twilight’s back. Claws large enough to tear men in half worked with swift dexterity. Be’lakor hated it. Such menial labor, being the altar boy of the Gods. As she adjusted the strap around Twilight’s barrel, he made sure to tighten it a bit too much.

“The Gods are watching, Kastner. Make sure they are not ashamed,” Be’lakor growled, rising back to full height.

“Diederick Kastner died fourteen years ago,” hissed Archaon. “You know you speak to Their anointed one.”

Be’lakor ground his jaw. “I know. I…rrrgh... apologize.”

Archaon placed a hand on the shaft of the war standard. The hot metal was alive with the souls of the dead piled around it.

“Carry this.” he said.

“What?”

Archaon turned back to the daemon. “You were relegated to the sidelines of the last Great War, but now you will see it from the front. You will bear this standard.”

Be’lakor’s claw drifted to his sword. “I am not your flagbearer...”

“You betrayed the Gods and now pay the price. You will listen to the Chosen One of the gods you traded your mortal soul to. Now, obey.”

Faster than any mortal eye could perceive, Be’lakor drew his sword, rage fueling a mighty roar as he swung at Archaon. The Everchosen cooly stepped aside, and the massive blade bit a foot deep into aeons of petrified dead.

Be’lakor struck the mound again, and again, while Archaon stepped over to Twilight. Archaon dug a boot into the stirrup, and before mounting, met Twilight eye-to-eye. An instant of understanding passed between them, no longer master and slave, but their unholy alliance. He vaulted up. At the same time, Be’lakor freed the standard and raised it high, the star of Chaos burning with arcane fire, and he roared in rage and dismay.

Solid waves of cheering erupted from the army, crashing against the mound, howls of adulation from tens of thousands of throats. No sooner had Be’lakor planted the standard than the massed Swords of Chaos began to march around the mound, their arms snapping out and hammering their breastplates in salute of the Everchosen who raised the Slayer of Kings in response.

At some unseen signal a flame ignited on the ground and blazing lines of rainbow-flame traced eight arrows in the ground, each pointing at someone in the inner circle. Spike, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Horstmann, Valnir, and others knelt. The adulation soared to new heights as the Star of Chaos seared itself into the sands of the Wastes, the Everchosen’s forces roaring themselves hoarse in his praise.

Pinkie Pie couldn’t keep her silence any longer, and added her voice to the din, her senses burning in pleasure at the sheer deafening volume of the cries. The Decadent Host echoed weirdly over the plain, ecstatic shrieks of pleasure and debasement that should never have been given mortal voice.

“Fly.” Archaon ordered.

Twilight smiled, and jumped off the remains of the mound. With great beats of her wings, she climbed, carrying the Everchosen in ascending circles over the warhost.

Hellcannons thundered in salute and Kholek Suneater hefted Starcrusher over his head in respect. The wind picked up the ashes of the ages-long dead which rained like confetti over Archaon’s mighty army as thousands of warriors cheered, their cries resounding long into the darkness.

Author's Notes:

Wooo! Third arc!
Bottom image source