The End Times | The Curse of Khaine

Epilogue

His every footstep was silent, his movements precise. He had tracked his quarry for hours, and confrontation was at last here. Silently, the hunter entered the glade, approaching the Phoenix King from behind. The hunter’s bow was slung upon his shoulder, but his hand was on his sword’s pommel.

It was pathetic really. Twice before the Phoenix King had detected the approach of Alith Anar, on the Blighted Isle and the Isle of the Dead. Malekith had become the embodiment of Ulgu, the power of shadow, but the so-called Shadow King still thought that he could sneak up on the former ruler of Nagarythe.

It was strange to Malekith that Alith had survived so long, being nearly as old as he was. Malekith had done so only through the armour of midnight and daemonic pacts, his mother, now swallowed up by the Realm of Chaos trying to prevent Teclis unleashing the power of the vortex, had sustained herself with blood-rites and sorcery, while others like Ariel had been divine embodiments, fragments of the gods on the mortal plane. Alith had spent much time with the raven heralds in his youth, devotees of Morai-heg, so perhaps he was the incarnation not of Drakira the queen of vengeance as some suspected, but of capricious fate itself.

Whatever the source of the Shadow King’s longevity, he had not matured at all, and Malekith saw him as the same broken child pretending to be a prince he had confronted and sent running into the darkness before the Sundering had destroyed Nagarythe.

He had advanced to within a dozen paces when Malekith’s voice broke the silence.

‘I have been expecting you,’ the king announced without turning. Clichéd, but Alith Anar seemed to have turned his life into a long cliché in recent years. ‘Have you come to finish what you began?’

At last Malekith turned, his gaze falling across the other.

‘I do not know,’ said Alith Anar, and there was uncertainty in his voice while suspicion vied with hope in his eyes. ‘I should kill you, avenge the horrors you have wrought…’

His words faded into the darkness.

‘And yet your sword remains sheathed,’ Malekith noted, with a faint trace of mockery.

‘As does yours,’ remarked the Shadow King.

‘Perhaps we are neither of us what we used to be.’

‘Perhaps,’ Alith conceded. ‘I wish I could believe that.’

‘Then you have come as my assassin.’

‘No, but I do come bearing a message.’

Alith Anar took a step closer, his gaze hardening as he stared up at Malekith. The Phoenix King smiled, remembering the same resolute look on the youngster’s face moments before Malekith had revealed the fact that he and the tyrannical Witch King of Nagarythe were one and the same, shattering every illusion the boy had held about the world and his former prince.

‘My arrow tip rests next to your heart, and you will never be able to remove it. The agony it causes shall suffice as my vengeance for as long as you serve our people. Fail them, and my next shot will take your life.’

‘Your threats mean nothing,’ Malekith growled.

‘Then you have nothing to fear,’ Alith Anar replied. The moon passed behind a cloud. The Shadow King departed, leaving Malekith alone with his thoughts.

Not long after Alith had left, another entered the clearing. Alarielle stopped beside her husband and held a hand to his arm.

‘It is done?’ she asked.

‘Yes, he was here just now.’

‘It is better this way. If you simply kill him, others will try to avenge him. We are one people again, the aesenar included.’

‘He thinks he has me on a leash,’ Malekith said quietly.

‘Good, it will stop him doing something rash that we would all regret.’ Alarielle slipped something into Malekith’s metal hand and turned away. ‘We will control our own destiny from now on – Morai-heg will tug the strands of fate no more.’

When she was gone Malekith opened his fingers, revealing a notched arrow head of black steel. Perhaps the illusion of fulfilling his ancient oaths of vengeance would mature Alith and make him a useful member of the court. He certainly had deadly skills, and Malekith had an empire to rebuild.

So it was that in Athel Loren the elves made their home again, dwelling in the mystical forest as they had done in the time before the Coming of Chaos. As Lileath had told Teclis, there was sanctuary to be found there, and the perils of the world were kept from them for a time.

The winds of magic unchained by Teclis found resting places in great personalities of many races, across Ulthuan and Elthin Arvan. Nagash and his dead legions still walked abroad and Archaon the self-proclaimed Everchosen of Chaos laid waste to all in his path.

Malekith and Alarielle were wed and he was crowned again as Phoenix King, and they believed the great cycle of the gods and life had started again, rebirth from death, growth from destruction, harmony from discord. Only the future would reveal whether the son of Aenarion could truly overcome so much personal bitterness and strife and become the ruler the elves needed.

Such a pity that neither Malekith nor the elves had any future, for the Rhana Dandra was the End Times and there was to be no new beginning, only more death and misery.

Lileath had lied to them. They had sanctuary, for a while, but all things fall to Chaos.

Eventually.