Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

The Gates of Azyr

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

War Storm

- Borne by the Storm – Nick Kyme

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Chapter Ten

- Chapter Eleven

- Storm of Blades – Guy Haley

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Chapter Ten

- Chapter Eleven

- Chapter Twelve

- The Gates of Dawn – Josh Reynolds

- Prologue

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Chapter Ten

- Epilogue

Ghal Maraz

- War in the Hidden Vale – Josh Reynolds

- Prologue

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Chapter Ten

- Chapter Eleven

- Chapter Twelve

- Chapter Thirteen

- Chapter Fourteen

- Chapter Fifteen

- Chapter Sixteen

- Chapter Seventeen

- Epilogue

- The Eldritch Fortress – Guy Haley

- Prologue

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

Hammers of Sigmar

- Stormcast – Darius Hinks

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Chapter Ten

- Chapter Eleven

- Chapter Twelve

- Chapter Thirteen

- Chapter Fourteen

- Chapter Fifteen

- Chapter Sixteen

- Chapter Seventeen

- Chapter Eighteen

- Chapter Nineteen

- Chapter Twenty

- Chapter Twenty-One

- Chapter Twenty-Two

- Chapter Twenty-Three

- Chapter Twenty-Four

- Chapter Twenty-Five

- Chapter Twenty-Six

- Scion of the Storm – C L Werner

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

Call of Archaon

- Beneath the Black Thumb

- I

- II

- III

- IV

- V

- VI

- VII

- VIII

- IX

- Eye of the Storm

- The Solace of Rage

- Knight of Corruption

- The Trial of the Chosen

- In the Lands of the Blind

- Blood and Plague

- See No Evil

Wardens of the Everqueen

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Chapter Ten

- Chapter Eleven

- Chapter Twelve

Call of Chaos Quick Read Collection

- The Unending Storm – Nick Kyme

- By the Horns – Rob Sanders

- The Gift of Khorne – Guy Haley

- Daemon of the Deep – Rob Sanders

- The Last Gift – Josh Reynolds

- The Prodigal – David Annandale

- The Crystal of Fate – Guy Haley

- Gorechosen – Andy Clark

- The Eighth Victory – Graeme Lyon

- Godless – David Guymer

- The Sacrifice – Graeme Lyon

- Lord of the Cosmic Gate – Gav Thorpe

About the Authors

A Black Library Publication

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.

Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.

But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.

Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creation.

The Age of Sigmar had begun.

Vandus, they called him.

It was a name of omen, one that carried the favour of the Golden City. He would be the first, they said. None would set foot in the Mortal Realms ahead of him, though the bringers of vengeance would be close behind. For a long time he had not understood what they meant, for they had had to school him as a child, teaching him to remember what he had once known by instinct.

Now, with the passing of aeons, he understood. The empty years were coming to a close, and the designs of the God-King were at last reaching ripeness. He was the instrument, just one of the limitless host, but the brightest star amid the constellations of salvaged glory.

For so long now, it had just been Azyr, and all else was lost in the fog of time.

But there had been other worlds. Now, very soon, there would be so again.

They were gazing up at him – ten thousand, arrayed in gold and cobalt and ranked in the shining orders of battle. The walls around them soared like cliffs, each one gilt, reflective and marked with the sigils of the Reforged.

Vandus stood under a dome of sapphire. A long flight of marble stairs led down to the hall’s crystal floor. Above them all, engraved in purest sigmarite, was the sign of the Twin-Tailed Comet, radiant amid its coronet of silver.

This thing had never been done. In a thousand years of toil and counsel, in all the ancient wars that the God-King had conducted across realms now lost, it had never been done. Even the wisdom of gods was not infinite, and so all the long ages of labour might yet come to naught.

He lifted his hand, turning the sigmarite gauntlet before him, marvelling at the manner in which the armour encased his flesh. Every piece of it was perfect, pored over by the artificers before being released for the service of the Eternals. He clenched the golden fingers into a fist and held it high above him.

Below him, far below, his Stormhost, the Hammers of Sigmar, raised a massed roar. As one, they clenched their own right hands.

Hammerhand!

Vandus revelled in the gesture of fealty. The vaults shook from their voices, each one greater and deeper than that of a mortal man. They looked magnificent. They looked invincible.

‘This night!’ Vandus cried, and his words swelled and filled the gulf before him. ‘This night, we open gates long closed.’

The host fell silent, rapt, knowing these would be the last words they heard before the void took them.

‘This night, we smite the savage,’ Vandus said. ‘This night, we smite the daemon. We cross the infinite. We dare to return to the realms of our birthright.’

Ten thousand golden helms looked up at him. Ten thousand fists gripped the shafts of warhammers. The Liberators, the greater part of the mighty host, stood proudly, arrayed in glistening phalanxes of gold. All of them had once been mortal, just as he had been, though now they bore the aspect of fiery angels, their mortality transmuted into majesty.

‘The design of eternity brought you here,’ Vandus said, sweeping his gaze across the sea of expectant faces. ‘Fate gave you your gifts, and the Forge has augmented them a hundredfold. You are the foremost servants of the God-King now. You are his blades, you are his shields, you are his vengeance.’

Amid the Liberators stood the Retributors, even more imposing than their comrades, carrying huge two-handed lightning hammers across their immense breastplates. They were the solid heart of the army, the champions about which the Legion was ordered. Slivers of pale lightning sparked from their heavy plate, residue of a fearsome, overspilling power within.

‘You are the finest, the strongest, the purest,’ Vandus told them. ‘In pain were you made, but in glory will you live. No purpose have you now but to bring terror to the enemy, to lay waste to his lands and to shatter his fortresses.’

On either flank stood the Prosecutors, the most severely elegant of all the warriors there assembled. Their armour was sheathed in a sheer carapace of swan-white wings, each blade of which dazzled in its purity. Their spirits were the most extreme, the wildest and the proudest. If they were a little less steadfast than their brothers, they compensated with the exuberance of flight, and in their gauntlets they kindled the raw essence of the comet itself.

‘We are sent now into the heart of nightmares,’ said Vandus. ‘For ages uncounted this canker has festered across the face of the universe, extinguishing hope from lands that were once claimed by our people. The war will be long. There will be suffering and there will be anguish, for we are set against the very legions of hell.’

Besides Vandus stood the great celestial dracoth, Calanax, his armoured hide glinting from the golden light of the hall. Wisps of hot smoke curled from his nostrils and his long talons raked across the crystal floor. Vandus had been the first to tame such a beast, though now others of his breed were in the service of the Stormhost. The dracoth was the descendant of far older mythic creatures, and retained a shard of their immortal power.

‘But they know us not. They believe all contests to be over, and that nothing remains but plunder and petty cruelties. In secrecy have we been created, and our coming shall be to them as the ending of worlds. With our victory, the torment will cease. The slaughter will cease. We will cleanse these worlds with fire, and consign the usurpers back to the pits that spewed them forth.’

As he spoke, Vandus felt the gaze of his fellow captains on him. Anactos Skyhelm was there, lean and proud, master of the winged host. Lord-Relictor Ionus, the one they called the Cryptborn, remained in the margins, though his dry presence could be sensed, watching, deliberating. If the lightning-bridge was secured, those two would be at the forefront, marshalling the vanguard to take the great prize – the Gate of Azyr, locked for near-eternity and only unbarred by the release of magics from both sides of the barrier.

And yet, for all their authority, only one soul had the honour of leading the charge. The God-King himself had bestowed the title on him – Lord-Celestant, First of the Stormhost.

Now Vandus raised both hands, one holding Heldensen aloft, the other still clenched tight. His weapon’s shaft caught the light of crystal lamps and blazed as if doused in captured moonlight.

‘Let the years of shame be forgotten!’ he declared. ‘The fallen shall be avenged and the Dark Gods themselves shall feel our fury!’

The glittering host below clashed their hammers against their heavy shields before raising the weapons in salute and acclamation. The entire vault filled with the fervour of voices raised in anticipation.

‘Reconquest begins, my brothers!’ Vandus roared, feeding on their raw potency. ‘This night, we bring them war!’

A great rumble ran across the floor of the hall, as if the earth were moving. Arcs of lightning began to snap and writhe across the golden walls of the vault. The sigil of the comet blazed diamond-clear, throwing beams of coruscation across the hall’s immense length. Something was building to a crescendo, something massive.

‘This night,’ Vandus cried, glorying in the full release of the divine magic, ‘we ride the storm!’

A huge boom shook the chamber, running up from the foundations to the high roof. The howl of thunder-born wind raced through the hall, igniting into white flame as it reached the full pitch of extremity. The golden ambient light exploded, bursting out from every part of the walls, the arched roof and the glistening floors, and lightning came with it in beams as thick as a man’s arm.

There was a second rolling boom and the space between the walls was lost in a maelstrom of argent fire. The world reeled, as if thrown from its foundations, and the sharp tang of ozone flared, bitter and pungent.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the lightning snapped out, the brilliance faded and the winds guttered away. The hall remained, suffused with a glimmering haze of gold, still lit bright by the light of the comet-sigil.

Only now the marble floor was empty. No voices remained, no warriors stood in ranks – nothing but the receding echoes of the colossal detonation lingered, curled like smoke across the walls of gold.

There was nothing to do but run. Even that was pointless in the end, since you would always be caught, but the instinct remained – the primal desire to keep living, to keep going, to spite the gods a little more before the blood-sun set.

Her tribe had been ravaged since the last series of raids and now numbered less than forty souls. The old had been the first to go – too slow to keep moving, caught quickly, too tough to eat, their age-withered bodies cruelly toyed with before the scream-filled end. Then they had taken the infants, one by one, dooming the tribe to extinction. Those that remained were the ones who had been fast enough, who were not crippled by the poisons that ran deep in the earth or who were not carrying wounds that made them too lame or too weak.

Now even those last survivors were tiring. There was only so much the body could take, and a diet of gleanings from parched fields could not sustain their flight for long.

It was a shame. She had always been told that their bloodline was long, stretching back to a mythical time before the endless night. She had never quite believed the boasts, but now it hardly mattered – they would all be snuffed out at last, even if the fire-side legends were true.

Kalja squatted in the dirt, panting, pressing her palms into the dank soil, trying to recover. The others knelt or slumped close by – Svan, Renek, Elennar, the rest. Kalja pulled in deep breaths, feeling the ash coat her throat, knowing it would make her choke.

‘How close?’ asked Elennar, her dirt-crusted face white with fear.

Renek shrugged, beaten. ‘Does it matter?’

‘They are bloodreavers,’ said Kalja, breathing heavily. ‘They are no faster than us. We can make the delta.’

‘They eat the flesh of their living victims,’ said Svan dryly. ‘It fuels them. So yes, they are faster.’

Kalja pulled herself to her feet. She was emaciated, her cheeks hollow and her skin a pale grey. Her long hair hung in clumps around her face, and she carried a rough, blunt knife at her belt. Old wounds, the product of a lifetime spent running or fighting, crisscrossed her calloused skin.

Ahead of them, to the north, the dusk sky was lowering into a rust red. Flickers of vermillion lightning jumped along the distant horizon, broken by the vast silhouettes of old skull-towers. The earth in all directions was blasted and open, split into great plates and riven by dry gulches. What little vegetation survived in the wastes was black and gnarled, clinging to survival with the same grim determination that the mortals did.

Kalja sniffed. The wind tasted as it always did – hot ashes, the lingering sweetness of mouldering carcasses – but there was something else there too.

‘I can smell water,’ she said, turning back to the others.

Svan laughed hoarsely. It would not be water worth drinking – the streams of the Igneous Delta were spoiled, and dribbled in their winding courses like hissing lines of mercury. That was why none lived there, not even the most desperate of prey-humans. Its twisting mazes might hide them, but only for a while.

‘We will not last the night,’ said Renek, his shoulders bunched miserably.

Kalja spat on the ground. ‘Then stay. They will feed on your eyes while you beg them to kill you.’

A low rumble of thunder ran along the earth. A long way to the south, the braying of war-horns could be heard. Somewhere out on the charred plains the endless armies were marching again, scouring for skulls. They would not venture this far north – there was nothing here but gnawed bones, the remains picked clean by scavengers centuries ago. Bloodreavers, though, would run down anything.

‘We have to go,’ said Kalja, brushing herself down and getting ready to run again. Her legs ached and her stomach growled from emptiness, but there was no alternative.

They broke into a run, all of them, Kalja and Svan at the forefront, limping and staggering north to where the delta awaited, staying alive for just a few more heartbeats amid a world that wished for nothing but to end them in agony.

Rakh chewed, savouring the tastes, the smells, the lumps of juice that rolled down his chin and trailed over his jerkin. He closed his eyes and drifted off into something like pleasure. He could feel the hot fluid flow into him, lending him divine strength. He licked his lips, and the metallic taste was sharp.

‘Enough,’ barked Sleikh, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Long trails of blood smeared across his scar-latticed jaw. ‘More of them to come.’

Rakh scowled and grabbed for more meat. It might have been his imagination, but did the corpse twitch just a little? Always best to begin the feasting while they were still alive. The screams improved the taste, as did the tears.

You had to laugh when the tears came. All the others did. Fail to show enough enthusiasm, and when the famine-times arrived you might find yourself stretched over the knife-block yourself.

All around the gore-splattered campfire, Rakh’s fellow bloodreavers were clambering heavily to their feet. Night was creeping in, making the long thorn-shadows slither over the earth. The temperature was dropping fast, and he felt the bite of it under his armour-plates.

There were fifty of them – a big hunting pack. They would need to capture all the mortals they had spied if they were going to eat enough to stay lean and supple, and that did not account for those that would escape the feast and be permitted to join them.

The bloodreavers were not witless savages, and for those who merited it there was always a way to survive. The price was cheap – join in the meat-orgies, learn to savour the quivering fats of a human’s body, suck them up and roll them around your mouth while you spat out praises to the Lord of Blood.

Rakh had made that choice, a long time ago now. Every so often he remembered the first nights, when all he had wanted to do was retch, when he had rocked himself to fitful sleep, keeping his horror hidden lest it make him the next prey.

These days, he grinned to think of it. All had changed now. He had learned to relish the textures, the crisping skin pulled from the muscle, the polyps, the sleek veinous organs. He kept chewing, tonguing the flesh around his iron-capped teeth.

Sleikh raised himself up, sniffing the night air. The pack-leader’s red eyes stared, peering into blackness. Then he hissed, and a smile twisted his wolfish features.

‘They stink yet,’ he whispered, reaching for his bloody axe handle. ‘This way.’

The others crept closer, fingering their hooks, their axes, their chains. The weapons were poorly made, for who but the warlords of the Brass Keeps could command forges to give them what they needed? The bloodreavers were the scavengers, the gory-mawed beasts that prowled the flickering edges of camp-fires. They used whatever they could loot or fashion from the wilds, and that was enough to break flesh and flense muscle.

‘Follow,’ ordered Sleikh, loping out into the night.

Rakh darted after him, as did all the others, and the hunt resumed again.

Aqshy, the realm was called, though none but the most powerful of its denizens would ever have known that. Here, on the Brimstone Peninsula, the bones of the land were forged in fire, and under its rocky mantle ancient furnaces boiled and churned. Before the ages of ruin it had been teeming with life, lent vigour by the magical currents coursing over its mountains and gorges.

Those years were forgotten now, scraped clean from history by the ceaseless procession of damned armies. The cities of the realm were gone, the kingdoms were gone, overrun and turned into sucking quagmires of spilled ichor. New citadels took their place – temples to violence, clad in bronze and bound in brass, housing thrones of iron around which the blood boiled in runnels. The killing continued even when all possible dreams of conquest had been satiated, goaded on by the whims of cruel gods. The number of the dead had been incalculable, but in truth they had been the fortunate ones, for they had not lived to see what reality was capable of being turned into.

All that remained in Aqshy were the Lords of Ruin – mortal champions of the Pantheon, striding across the earth they had despoiled in the hope of finding something fresh to kill. With the demise of any true resistance, they turned on their own kind, launching swollen hordes at one another in a perpetual orgy of slaughter. The only ones who could survive for long in such a crucible were the Gifted – those blessed with the trappings of daemonic power or possessors of fell weapons. Dark magic swirled and simmered across the bone-strewn wastelands, fuelling the cycle of murder further, provoking the feuds that kept the anvils ringing and the forges blazing.

For the less exalted, all that remained was a kind of half-life, forever clinging to the edge of oblivion. Children were still born, and so the progeny of mankind lingered, but they were never more than prey, slaves or fodder, predated on by the chosen of the victorious Dark Gods. To stay alive for more than two decades was considered fortunate, to make it to three was exceptional. After that, the rigours of life in hell were too destructive. There were no scholars, no princes, no wizards and no priests – just a desperate, scrabbling, grasping fight to draw one more breath, gain one more heartbeat and see one more blighted sunrise before the tides of killing caught up.

Kalja’s tribe, for all the stories they told themselves, were no different to the thousands whose light had endured for a brief time before being stamped out. They ran with desperation but with no hope. Only the manner of death remained an ambition – to meet annihilation cleanly, with little agony; that was the prize.

Kalja pushed the pace, feeling her breathing grow ragged but knowing that a single slip now would end it. Svan kept up with her, the rest straggling behind, stumbling as the land became lumpen and twisted around them.

From the wider Brimstone Peninsula, they had reached the southern edges of the Igneus Delta and the earth was breaking beneath their feet. Fissures opened up, some clogged and dry, others glowing from the exposed fires below. Plumes of sulphurous steam roiled across the crusted landscape, breaking into slivers across the thorny clusters of iron-limbed plants.

It was hard to make any progress in that terrain – they would stumble down a wide gully only to see it end in a rubble-strewn cliff, or they would race across flattened plates before finding themselves surrounded by pools of boiling lava. Everything stank, and the heat dragged at them, making it a torture just to breathe.

‘This place will kill us quicker than they will,’ gasped Renek, limping badly from a gash on his left thigh – the thorn-clusters were vicious.

‘Pray that you are right,’ muttered Kalja, charging onwards, not allowing the weak to slow her. It was just possible the bloodreavers would settle for the stragglers that night, so it paid to keep to the front of the herd.

They reached a long, twisting defile. The further they went, the higher the banks on either side reared up. Soon the edges were too steep to climb easily, and lined with more thorns, and so the only course was to keep going down to the defile’s end and hope that it was not just another blocked route.

As they went, they heard the thud-thud of footfalls behind them. The narrow gorge amplified the sounds of the pursuers, reminding the tribe just how meagre the gap between hunter and hunted had become. Silently, grimly, the fugitives kept their heads down, trying to ignore the burning in their lungs, and kept going.

Kalja was the first to reach the valley’s end. Its two walls narrowed into a slender gorge, and for a moment she thought they would come together completely. In the end, they remained apart by little more than the width of a man’s waist, revealing a tiny gap through which she could push herself.

She squeezed between the two sides, feeling the hot stone snag at her ragged clothes. The cleft ran for more than twenty yards, and with every step the rock underfoot grew hotter and more oily. Soon Kalja was enclosed in almost complete darkness, and the press of solid rock around her made her want to scream.

Then, abruptly, the passage opened out again. She emerged onto a narrow shelf of rock, and the red sky arched away above her, mottled with gravid cloudbanks and scored with lines of lightning.

She pressed her back to the cliff-face behind her and looked out. The rest of her tribe pushed their way free of the cleft’s mouth and lined up along the shelf.

A broken scree-slope fell away before them, dropping steeply down to the edge of a plain. Obsidian-black terrain stretched off beyond that, marked by sinewy trails of fire and barred by the rolling fumes of sulphur-geysers. In the far north, the darkening horizon was studded with mountainous piles of skulls, blackened by flame. In between the pyramids of bone stood the remains of ancient ramparts, all shattered, standing like ribcages against the turbulent skies. Iron scaffolds studded the ruins, some still bearing broken skeletons on their spiked wheels, and rusting gibbets swung in a growing storm-wind.

The stonework ran for miles, scarring the land as far as the eye could see. Once, the place must have been vast, a whole empire of great buildings. Amid the few edifices that remained, one stood out, derelict, isolated among the wreckage at its feet.

Two massive piers of stone thrust up out of the magma-scored earth, buttressed by statues in the shape of men bending under the burden. Pillars twisted atop those piers, each one carved with runes and bearing more images – dragons, serpents, icons of comets and twisting astrological symbols. The pillars combined into two enormous flanks of a single arch, which terminated in a keystone some three hundred feet above the level of the plain. Winding stone stairs ran up either side of the curves, twisting in and out of old turrets and watchtowers. Black-veined ivy cascaded down its flanks, cracking the stone and exposing glowing threads of magma within, but still the bulk of the structure remained intact, dwarfing all else, resplendent even in its degradation.

Kalja stared at it. An entire army, thousands strong, could have marched beneath that archway, and yet it led nowhere. No road had been built across the blasted delta, and the void under the keystone’s curve gaped emptily, revealing more ruins on the far side.

The others picked their way down the slope towards the plain. Kalja snapped out of her reverie and followed them down. Less than thirty of them had made it, though if those at the rear had been taken, it might buy the rest of them a little more time.

‘What is it?’ whispered Kalja as they hurried down towards the arch’s sweeping shadow.

‘I care not,’ said Svan, not even looking up at it. ‘It cannot hide us, it cannot save us. Stop staring.’

But Kalja could not stop. Her eyes were drawn inexorably upward – to the towers, the sculpted stone, the strange runes that she could not read but which somehow felt meaningful. As she looked on, the air under the arch flexed as if it were liquid and had bulged from the far side. She halted.

Nothing. Hot ash-wind blew through the aperture, unchanged by the stone it passed under, still as foul as it ever was. Another growl of thunder shook the skies, and the clouds raced above them, piling higher with every breath she took. It would be a big storm. Perhaps the rain would foul their tracks and put the bloodreavers off their scent.

A scream pierced the dark, high and terrified. The sound came from the mouth of the cleft, and echoed strangely as it surged out into the open. Kalja knew the owner of that voice, and shivered to think of the torment that could make him cry like that. She shook herself down, forgetting about the ruins and concentrating on the old obsession – to take just one more breath, to live to see just one more dawn.

Then she started to run, hunted again, just as she always had been.

The bloodreavers fell into their habitual running pattern – spread out, fanning across the landscape like dogs on a scent. Those on the edges had the sharpest eyes and the keenest nostrils. They could detect mortal fear from a half-league distant, and ran it down remorselessly until it lay shrieking under their fingernails.

Rakh began to pant, falling into the rhythm of the chase. His blade – a pocked cleaver with a human bone handle – swung in his left hand, still wet with saliva and crimson. The others loped hungrily, swinging their blades, making their armour-plates rattle. The musk of blood-frenzy thickened on the hot air.

‘Blood for the Blood God’, he murmured to himself, slurring the words through his damp lips. Where had he learned them? Why did every mouth utter them, from the Realm’s spectral north to its parched south? No priest had ever taught them, for there were no priests in the wilds – the chant came naturally, willingly, as if the very air whispered it to him in his dreams.

They raced down a long, wide depression, veering around outcrops of the black-edged thorn bushes. Ahead of them yawned the mouth of a defile, the twin walls of which reared up steeper as the channel narrowed to a distant point. The prey had gone down that way – even Rakh could smell that.

‘Faster,’ snapped Sleikh, bounding over the piles of rubble, his axe-head swinging.

Beyond the pack-leader, out in the dark, something moved. Rakh was still running, so barely saw it, but he wasn’t delirious – a shadow had detached from the base of the rocks, then vanished.

He craned his neck from side to side, struggling to keep pace with the runners around him. What had it been? Were there more of them? Had the mortals hunkered down, hoping they would pass them?

But Sleikh was sprinting now, making for the gorge’s narrow throat. The oldest and deadliest members of the pack went with him, their bodies made spare and strong by a lifetime of gorging on raw meat. None of them had noticed the movement – they were consumed with the blood-scent now, locked on to the spoor of fear and exertion.

Rakh almost cried out a warning, but the pack-hierarchy clamped his lips shut – break the communal blood-scent and the rest would turn on him quickly, ripping into his sinews with just as much enthusiasm as they would prey.

And that was what doomed them. They had almost reached the mouth of the narrow cleft when the first of the war-horns blared out, cracking the skies and making Rakh’s ears ring. He staggered, half-losing his footing.

Sleikh reacted immediately, spewing out curses, swinging his head to and fro, trying to see where the sound came from.

More war-horns sounded, this time from the other side of the valley, from up ahead, from behind, from everywhere. Rakh spun around, crouching defensively, spitting on his cleaver-blade to slicken it and trying to gauge where the enemy was.

The wait was scarcely more than a heartbeat. They burst from the high sides of the defile, spilling down from the tattered edges like rats spewed from a pipe. Rakh saw the sheen on their armour – scab-red, rimmed with black iron – and cursed his fate.

A warband, then, a Lord’s retinue – better armed, brutally trained, more than a match for them.

‘Gut them!’ Sleikh was shouting, pointlessly, already racing to where the first of the red-armoured warriors was careering down the steep slope.

More warriors were coming up from the south now, hemming them in. They must have followed the bloodreavers for a long time, waiting for nightfall, confident that their prey would be so consumed by meat-lust that they would grow careless. They had been right.

Rakh stayed close to Sleikh, his palms sweaty. The bulk of the bloodreavers came with him, contracting into a knot, turning outwards, keeping their faces to the enemy.

The first of the warband’s fighters came in hard, hurtling from a breakneck descent, their mouths frothing with foam. A burly axeman in furs and black-rimmed plate crashed into Sleikh, barrelling him backwards. The rest slammed into contact, roaring from raw throats, hurling blades in spine-cracking lunges. They were massive, all of them – thick-limbed, clad in iron and steel and bearing axes with icons of ruin scratched into the blunt metal.

Rakh ducked under a wild swipe, then thrust up with his cleaver. The ragged edge bit slickly into muscle, and the warrior before him grunted in pain. Rakh twisted his cleaver and black blood bubbled up from his victim’s mouth. He thrust the gurgling corpse aside, ready to meet the challenge of the next one.

Blood warriors, thought Rakh, ducking out of the path of another short-handled axe. What are they doing here? This is the waste – nothing for them but ashes.

The press of bodies around him doubled as more warriors crashed into the fray, slashing, kicking and punching with their spiked weapons. Gore flew around them in whirling slicks, thrown wildly by the hurtling axe-heads. Rakh ducked again, too slowly, and was struck on his helm with a glancing blow. It made his ears ring and he scrabbled into the shadow of a bloodreaver, avoiding death by offering up his pack-mate.

More than a quarter of the rest were already dead, gutted like fish and gasping bloodily on the rocks. Sleikh had kept the pack together and was fighting hard, trying to reach the narrow cleft where they might at least have a rock wall at their back, but Rakh could see that it was already hopeless – they were surrounded, caught in the open and badly outnumbered. This would all be over very quickly.

He tried to break out, shoving the iron shield of a blood warrior aside and lashing out with his cleaver to clear a path. He managed to down another one – slicing through the creature’s upper thigh, thrusting upward, head-butting him savagely across his exposed face – but he was stumbling amid the churning bodies, desperate to break free.

Somehow, driven by that desperation, aided by the flickering shadows, the screams, the darkness, he shoved himself into a narrow space between moving bodies, and saw the edge of the melee before him. Spitting thanks to the Blood God, he went for the gap, lunging out and slipping on the blood-wet rock.

He almost made it. Too late, though, he saw just why a space had opened up, large enough for him to slip into. Rakh skidded to a halt, falling back on to his withers, his ravaged jaw falling open.

The figure looming before him was gigantic. He towered over the blood warriors just as they towered over Sleikh’s rabble. His armour glistened in the fading light, dull red like spoiled wine. The plates were lined with bloodied bronze, and adorned with skulls. He carried a great brass standard, and above it was set the icon of Khorne in smouldering metal.

This was the leader, then, the champion, the brooding presence that kept the warband on its leash. Rakh had never seen armour so fine, nor a weapon so suffused with earth-scouring power. As the first crack and growl of thunder broke out across the landscape to the north, Rakh writhed in the ankle-thick mire, shuffling backwards, uncaring now about anything other than escape from the behemoth that towered over him.

The champion took a single stride, covering the distance between them effortlessly, and pulled his standard high into the air. Flickers of carnelian slid up its shaft, crackling as they burned from the Khornate icon above. Rakh could only stare up at his killer, already tensing for the agony of the spiked staff’s heel crunching into his stomach. Duly enough, the pole came down, and Rakh screwed his eyes closed.

‘Skullbrand!’ came a voice, roaring out of the night, shaking the earth beneath their feet.

Time froze. The screams died out, the battle-roars echoed into nothing.

Rakh’s lungs continued to pull in air. Slowly, he opened his eyes. The heel of the killer’s staff was just inches from his body, held rigid by the champion. The death’s-head helm above was impassive – Rakh could only see the glowing light of two unnatural eyes burning behind a grotesque mask of iron.

The champion did not move. The warriors around him did not move. As if held by some invisible net, they had paused in their slaughter, leaving the surviving bloodreavers to cower on the ground beneath them.

Grudgingly, the champion withdrew the staff’s spike. Rakh slithered backwards, away from the icon-bearer, glancing up at the warriors around him as they retreated. He managed to shuffle his way over to Sleikh, who had collapsed on the ground with a gaping chest wound. Despite everything, Rakh couldn’t help but eye the glistening flaps of skin hungrily.

‘What is this?’ Rakh whispered.

Sleikh, grey-faced, gestured weakly. Something else was coming down the slope from the east, crunching through the loose stone. Blood warriors were falling back, making passage for it. The icon-bearer waited where he had paused, as still as a graven image, his staff held stiffly at his side.

‘Blood for the Blood God,’ Rakh murmured, issuing the words like a prayer. Prayers never helped, not in this land, but the habits of forgotten generations still persisted.

Another crack of thunder rumbled along the valley’s edge. Rain began to spit, fizzing as it hit the winding cracks in the realm’s charred land-skin. Rakh peered out into the gloom, at once daunted and compelled. An aura of dread hung over the whole tribe now, more complete than that generated by even the icon-wielder and his trained killers. Then the owner of the voice strode out of the shadows, and Rakh’s pulse began to truly race.

This one was colossal. He was decked out in the same elaborate crimson armour as his captain, though every plate and facet was finer, larger, heavier. Everything about him reeked of a dark, majestic extravagance, from the skulls clattering at his belt to the spiked bronze halo rising high over his shoulders. The upper half of his face was hidden by a bone mask, but the lower jaw was exposed – a mottled scrap of age-hardened skin, swollen with distended teeth and marred with scars and snake-figure tattoos. He carried a vast twin-bladed axe, the metal face of which was blotched with old stains and the shaft greater than the height of a mortal man. At his feet loped a huge, scale-hide hound with jaws like a vice and a studded collar around its corded neck. The creature bared yellow fangs at Rakh and let slip a long, grating growl.

Even in a place as fallen and debauched as the Brimstone Peninsula, there were some lords who commanded dread of a different order. Some monarchs of ruin were so deep in corruption that it overflowed like an aroma from them, polluting the very air through which they strode. Rakh was the lowest breed of vermin and untutored in the arts of the God of Carnage, but even he could sense that noxious stink now, dyed deep in the soul of the monster before him.

Their armour rattling, the blood warriors bowed the knee, recognising the paramount slayer among them. Even the icon-bearer inclined his helm, though the gesture was awkward, as if he were still straining on the chain, desperate to resume where he had been forced to halt.

‘Threx,’ said the warlord, with a voice that made Rakh’s teeth ache. ‘Threx.’

The warlord strode up to the icon-bearer and clasped the champion’s head with both mighty gauntlets. His mouth moved strangely when he spoke, exposing filed iron teeth within a pair of chafed raw lips.

‘There will be blood,’ he said, soothingly, yet with a kernel of steel. ‘You know it. You will fill your belly with it. You will gag on it, and we will drink deep as we have always done.’ He patted the champion on the cheek of his helm, like a father might a child, and released his grip. Then he turned away, running a frigid gaze across the beaten remnants of the bloodreaver tribe. ‘But not these. These are mine.’

He strolled up to Sleikh and stood over him. It was all Sleikh could do to meet the downward gaze, and his breathing was shallow and rapid. The warlord stooped, resting his great axe on the rocks and studying the bloodreaver coldly.

‘You are the leader.’ It was a statement, not a question, but Sleikh nodded – to deny it was pointless.

The warlord lifted the axe up, keeping the shaft-end down, and pressed the heel against Sleikh’s pulsing throat. ‘You were careless.’

He pushed down sharply, breaking Sleikh’s neck with a single thrust. Then his baleful gaze moved along, scrutinising those who remained. In his head, Rakh kept chanting the same thing, over and over, Blood for the Blood God, Blood for the Blood God, hoping he would be overlooked and the terror would pass. Even death would be preferable to enduring that lord’s attention – his heart already felt like it was fit to burst, and the sweat running down his neck chilled him.

With a grinding inevitability, though, the warlord’s deathly gaze came to rest on him.

‘Do you know my name?’ the warlord asked, and just listening to those words felt like his bones were being pulled from his body.

Rakh managed to shake his head.

‘I am named Korghos Khul,’ the warlord told him, working his black tongue sinuously over the syllables. ‘Seven warlords of seven keeps offer me tribute in living flesh lest I return to tear their lungs from their unworthy chests. Even now my army marches, and this is but a tithe of those who follow me.’

Rakh wanted to scream. He would have done anything – anything – to escape those glowing eyes.

Khul stooped, coming closer, and foul vapours from his cloak wafted over him. The daemon-hound slunk around his feet, glaring at Rakh with a hungry leer.

‘I seek the final skull,’ Khul said softly, his voice a purring growl. ‘I seek the zenith for my tribute. I have scoured the southlands for a hundred years, and none linger there worthy of my blade’s edge. I have laid the cities of kings low, ever seeking the one who in death could finish this great work, and all I find is dross and wastage.’

As the warlord spoke, Rakh saw visions swirl before him, pushed into his mind by Khul’s malign will. He saw great vistas spin away from him, each one glimmering with the ever-present smouldering of flame, cracked by magma, dominated by the smoking ruins of destroyed keeps. He saw armies marching, whole legions of red and gold, their helms lit by the churning of lurid skies.

And beyond all of them, far away, overlooked by eternal night and flanked by towers of beaten bronze, was a pyramid as vast as a mountain, its sides mottled and irregular. Only as Khul spoke did Rakh realise what it was made of – skulls, thousands upon thousands of them, heaped high and lodged fast, their empty eye sockets like flecks of midnight amid the sheen of picked-clean bone.

Rakh’s mind started to spin. Did he want a bloodreaver’s skull for that pyramid? Surely not – there were thousands of those. Why was the warlord telling him these things? Why not just kill him and be done with it?

‘But the stars have led me here now,’ Khul said. ‘Something must yet still dwell in this place, where once there were high walls and strong swords. I need more souls. The Goretide must swell. I must cover this land in eyes, all of which are mine.’

The warlord extended a withered claw, bound in rings of black iron. Within the grasp of two taloned fingers was a single fleshy orb, straggled with pulpy sinew. Flickers of green magic slid across its pale surface.

‘I cannot complete my great work with a mortal’s remains. I seek a worthy capstone.’

Rakh shrank back, already guessing what was going to happen. A dull pain kicked in behind his eyes, and his lids started to bulge outwards.

‘Do not struggle, flesh-eater,’ crooned Khul, strapping his axe to his belt and reaching for a long, curved knife with his other hand. ‘When this is done you may feast on the corpse of your old master.’

Rakh wanted to scream, but no sound came out. The mantra kept running through his fevered mind: Blood for the Blood God, Blood for the Blood God.

Khul’s shadow fell across him, and Rakh felt the knife’s tip press against the underside of his left eyeball.

‘For you are mine, now,’ breathed Khul. ‘Take this as the first sign of your new devotion.’

Beyond the gate, the land rose again. It was shattered, like a burned crust, latticed with fissures and sinkholes. The foul waters of the delta snaked amid the dark plates, hissing where they dribbled against the open wounds of magma.

The lone edifice was behind them now, but it was still visible, dominating everything else and standing like a sentinel against the southern horizon. Ahead of them, hard to pick out in the gloom, there was a ridge. The summit was hunchbacked and crowned with three old towers, all of which were hollow, roofless and part tumbled down. The semi-buried statue of a man with a granite warhammer protruded from the dank earth, his head severed and shattered into pieces.

The rain was falling in earnest now. Swollen clouds above them were lit from within by what seemed like perpetual lightning bursts, making the black land snap with flashes of silver. Water ran in foaming streams over the gravel beds, making the pathways treacherous.

‘This will be a beast,’ muttered Elennar, glancing up at the unquiet heavens.

The air itself felt close, hot and electric. Many thunderstorms had raced across the burned plains in the past year, but this one had an unholy feel to it.

‘Keep going,’ Kalja snapped, slipping in the greasy mud and cursing the rain for coming now.

They reached the towers, which offered little shelter. Twenty-eight of the tribe had made it, all exhausted and drenched. The skinnier ones started to shiver, and their muck-sweat mingled with the streams of rain. The rest shuffled and jostled to get as close to the inner wall as they could. Most hunkered down near the base, pushing themselves up against the stones to avoid the worst of the rain.

Elennar slumped to her haunches. ‘And what happens when they find us?’

Kalja shrugged, taking up her place behind the barrier, too tired to care now whether it hid them or not. They had done all the running they could.

As she slipped down into position, she risked one more glance towards the archway, half a mile away to the south. It dominated the terrain. The rain lashed against it hard, and somehow the clouds seemed thicker over its keystone, as if drawn in by some vast force of attraction.

As she watched, a lone shaft of lightning snaked against it, throwing the statues into sudden relief. She briefly caught the outlines of men in armour, of human faces, of dragons and griffons.

Then it was gone. The rain got heavier. More thunder ground away, getting closer and louder. Kalja smiled wryly. If the bloodreavers didn’t catch them, the weather might still kill them anyway.

She slipped down into the mud, pressing her back against the stones, and closed her eyes.

Khul stood in the heart of the ravine, waiting for the rest of his army to reach him. The Goretide, they called it. A long time ago he had been proud of that title. It had been given in fear, and the fear of others was something he enjoyed.

Now, though, he struggled to remember exactly why. The great battles were all over. Once he had stood on the causeways of the ancient keeps, roaring his heart out at the mortals sheltered within, daring them to come and fight. And they had, back in those half-forgotten days. Their champions had ridden out to face the darkness, clad in steel plate and bearing two-handed broadswords. He had fought and killed them all, and every moment of it had been a joy. Some had tested him sorely – the old sorcerers, the great knights, the mighty warriors from the savage plains. When those great ones had died, he had felt the loss, and kept their skulls as remembrance.

The oldest of the skulls hung on his belt, drilled fast by chains and bleached white by the passing ages. There had long since been too many to count, so he had heaped them into tributes to his divine patron, pouring libations of blood across the pyres before watching them burn. His strength had grown with every season and new warriors had flocked to his banner, and thus the skull-pyres had multiplied.

The sacrifices pleased the God of Battles, and more gifts began to flow. Victory begat victory. He slaughtered the denizens of Scorched Keep in a week-long orgy of bloodletting, and in the deepest vault of that place he found the axe he now carried, one that could tear at the very fabric between worlds. He bested Skullbrand, the only fighter ever to do so, and so the bloodsecrator duly joined his burgeoning horde.

Khul smiled to himself. Threx was a lunatic. They whispered that he had once fought his way to the burning steps of Khorne’s throne-dais itself, and there had challenged the greatest of Bloodthirsters to single combat before being ripped limb from limb. Amused by this, the Blood God had brought him back, gifting him the standard that summoned the howling madness of Chaos to the mortal plane.

Who could believe such a tale? And yet, there was no doubting the powers of the icon Skullbrand bore – on a hundred battlefields, its arcane veil-tearing had brought the Realm of Khorne screaming into solid reality, just one more weapon in the swollen armoury of the god-favoured.

But now, after all the victories, after all the triumphs, there was precious little joy remaining. The old adversaries were dead, their corpses long trodden into the dust. With every passing year, Aqshy passed more completely into the ambit of the Chaos realm, and all that remained to hunt were the verminous and sick. There were other Lords of War, to be sure, many as powerful as Khul himself, but their deaths were empty deaths, and the wars they fought now were little more than squabbles over ruined spoils. The God of Battles still rejoiced to see the blood flow, but for his servants the ichor was all mingled, and the endless cycle of honour feuds had slowly become a deadening procession.

At the sound of tramping boots, Khul looked up. The main body of his horde was approaching, marching up from the south. Its vanguard filled the valley from side to side, a serried mass of plate-armoured warriors. Banners swayed above the ranks, all bearing the sign of Khorne daubed in red inks on flayed skins. With the fading of the world’s sun, torches had been lit, and their angry light flooded up into the rain-swept sky. In another age, Khul might have foresworn such blatant displays of power, but there had long since ceased to be anything to fear from discovery.

All he feared, in any case, was the possibility of failure. His final skull-pyre, the bone mountain raised above the burning plains and surrounded by towering columns melted from the weapons of the defeated, awaited its summit – a capstone, ripped from a spine of a fighter worthy of the honour. When that was done, surely the last Gift would be bestowed – the ascension into daemonhood and an escape from the dreary procession of earthbound wars. Until then, he was locked in his current state, doomed to prey on the lost and damned for eternity.

Khul roused himself from his torpor. The army would not rest for long in this valley. He would drive them hard through the storm, past the valley’s source and into the unknown country beyond. Perhaps something had survived on the very edges of the world, something that would stand up to him and make him earn his triumph.

Grizzlemaw let slip a whine and paced impatiently. The hound too had been a Gift, given after a battle fought long ago, but one for which Khul had no fond recollection. At times he thought the daemonic creature was little more than a mockery, a reminder of the one soul that had slipped through his fingers, and he hated it as much as he loved it.

‘He hungers,’ observed Skullbrand.

The icon-bearer had remained sullen since the bloodreavers had been let go. Khul reached for Grizzlemaw’s collar and hauled him back close.

‘He always hungers,’ said Khul, massaging the creature’s neck roughly. ‘They were hunting, so let them hunt. I told you: you will have your blood.’

Skullbrand said nothing. Grunts and snorts were the most he normally uttered, unless the maelstrom of battle came on him, in which case his throat opened up into such roars that even his own troops shrank back from him.

Khul released Grizzlemaw. The warlord looked up at the skies, and the strengthening rain ran in rivulets down his chin. ‘This storm smells strange,’ he mused. ‘I have been too long in the south. Was it ever thus up here?’

Skullbrand shrugged. ‘You let them go.’

Khul sighed. ‘They have the Eyes, and they have the fear of me. They will lead us to whatever prey lingers here.’

The vanguard of his army was approaching now. At its head was Vekh the Flayer, the stoker of his horde’s wrath. The bare-headed master of pain, his skin stitched and scarred, strode up to him and saluted dryly. Behind him, the army’s march came to a halt, and the troops shouted their salute to Khul, crashing axes against shields. He dismissed them with a shake of his gauntlet and they broke out from marching order, falling to the ground in tribal huddles and taking strands of raw man-meat from their packs to chew on.

‘I thought you had found some rats?’ Vekh asked, looking around him for evidence of a kill.

‘I let them go,’ said Khul again.

Vekh sniffed, disappointed. The bloodstoker enjoyed taking the survivors after battles. Those placed into his care lived the longest of all the captives the Goretide abducted – not that it was something they necessarily welcomed.

‘You should know this,’ Vekh said, slyly, drawing closer. ‘Your army is impatient. It needs kills.’

Khul growled softly – a warning snarl, feline, infinitely threatening. Kills was all they ever demanded. ‘When this is over,’ he said, patiently, ‘I will take them back south, and they will have all the murder they desire.’

‘But not until you take your skull.’ Vekh smiled. ‘Just one more skull. So difficult. Can it really be worth so very much? I can give you skulls – as many as you like.’

‘Your own, then.’

Vekh laughed. ‘One day, maybe. Or maybe not.’

Skullbrand hissed at the Flayer, and ran his gauntlet down the shaft of his standard.

‘Threx is angry,’ Khul explained.

‘Of course he is,’ said Vekh. ‘You let them go.’

Khul stiffened, ignoring the bloodstoker. The Eyes he had planted in the bloodreavers had seen things, and he now saw them as if they were his own. The pack had found a plain of cracked earth, old ruins and an empty gate that led nowhere. They were hunting still, heading towards a rise crowned with three old towers, smelling mortal fear.

That was interesting. The gate was interesting. He had seen such things for himself, long ago when the world was not yet slumped into defeat, and there were legends dancing around those old places like witch-light. He still remembered the dreams, the ones that had come on the cusp of storms, the ones that never had an ending but promised so much.

He had known there would be a gate in the empty wastes, and he had known there would be bloodreavers racing towards it under the glowering weight of thunderheads. He had seen silver lightning race across the northern arc of the horizon and had followed it, sensing the otherworldliness of it even as his followers could smell nothing but the roasting meat of his victims.

‘Get them on their feet,’ he ordered, turning on his heel and marching up towards the cleft in the valley’s throat. ‘We march again.’

Skullbrand growled appreciatively and Vekh gave a sardonic bow.

‘That is more like it,’ he said. ‘I can hear the screams already.’

Rakh barely noticed the gate. His face was bleeding from where the Eyes had been stitched in, and the pain made him crazed. All in his pack were the same – damaged and howling. They sprinted harder than they had ever done before, driven now by a terrible need. They had to find, to seek out whatever scuttling things still squatted in the crevices and drag them into the light. It was no longer about meat-orgies, but about the Goretide and service to the lord with the twin-bladed axe.

The lightning whipped down, over and over, lighting up the ruins with cold flashes. He saw the stonework sway and glimmer, and every burst made his bloody eyes flare with fresh pain. They had run past the gate, sweeping through its mighty foundations, sniffing and panting, following the scents of despair.

Ahead of them were the three towers, each one drenched and lit up by lightning strikes. The mortals were there – scrawny prey-things. Khul would want to see them dragged out, made to squeal. Then they would be running again, searching, their nostrils flared, seeking something worthy of the Goretide’s axes.

Rakh powered up the slope. He saw movement against the wall ahead – weapons being lifted, shadows moving. If he had not been in such agony he might have laughed, for such preparations would not help those who cowered behind the wall. The rest of the bloodreaver pack came with him towards the summit, hissing curses, knowing that the mortals had nowhere else to go and no longer bothering with stealth.

At last, there would be proper killing. At last, the gouges and the hooks would be twisted in deep, and there would be fresh meat dragged back for the master to pick over.

A great crack of thunder broke the skies in twain, and Rakh staggered. He looked up, his face spattered with rain, and noticed for the first time just what had happened to the sky. A vast circle had formed over the summits of the three towers. Like a vortex of storm-seas, it turned with gathering force. The lightning was incessant now, twisting and forking and mutating the night sky into a riot of cobwebbed silver.

Something about that display terrified him. It was like looking into Khul’s pitiless face, only with a different kind of fear – a harder fear, a colder fear.

Rakh shrank back. He couldn’t take his new eyes off the light, which was reaching a flickering crescendo. The rain bounced from the rock, driven into scouring flurries by the wind. Everything was glistening, flashing and burning.

He started to fall back, to slide down the slope. The impulsion given to him by Khul was giving way, replaced by a different dread.

Another crack, and this time the earth beneath him shuddered. Rock plates thrust upwards, tilting to expose rivers of seething fire beneath. The arch of the Gate swelled into flames that coursed over the naked stone, burning blue like marsh gas.

Then he was running, haring back the way he had come. This was no natural storm, it was some conflagration of the daemonic, sent from the pits of madness to swallow them all. The entire landscape was shifting, knocked from its roots by the elemental violence of the heavens. Rakh crashed to his knees, losing his axe in the fall.

He felt a sudden heat. It swelled through the rain, vaporising it and making the air thick with steam. He cried out, but his voice was lost in the greater explosion of primeval forces.

It was as if the world itself were being ripped apart and forged anew – light was everywhere, eye-searing and white hot. For an instant Rakh thought he was being burned alive, but just as suddenly as it had come, the blaze blew itself out.

He looked up, shaking uncontrollably. For a moment he saw nothing, his vision hazy from the flash of light.

And then he saw what the storm had brought.

Khul led his army through the cleft just as the storm reached its height. It had been far too narrow for his armoured horde, so he had exerted his power, calling out words of eternal resonance and raising his axe-blade into the eldritch night.

His god had answered, shaking the earth and remaking it around them. The sides of the cleft shuddered, cracked and were smashed into rubble, exploding in a rain of flying stone shards. The boom of it echoed out across the plain beyond, and the great expanse opened up before them, the path bludgeoned clear as if swept aside by mighty hands.

Khul bellowed with laughter, feeling the sharp pleasure of the power at his command. Even the stone beneath his feet obeyed the will of his dark patron – it would not be long now before the final gift was bestowed and he joined the legions of eternal slaughter.

His warriors surged forward, crying out his name in fell voices.

‘Khul! Khul! Khul!’ they chanted, breaking into a run, unshackling their axes from great chains looped about their armour and swinging the curse-darkened metal in clenched fists. With the crack of barbed whips and the bellows of the warband leaders, the great mass of fighters broke out from the confines of the parched valley, poured through the demolished gap between the cliffs, and looked out over the plain of ruins beyond.

Khul was at the apex of the charge with Grizzlemaw loping at his feet, and was the first to witness the deep veins of magic unleashed in the skies above him. An actinic tempest rampaged across the Gate’s apex, and the colossal energies reverberated through his every muscle. Fell storms had been summoned in the past, some by his own command, but never like this one. Even the rain tasted different – icy, gritty, as if filled with tiny diamonds.

His ravaged old heart beat harder. Some great sorcery was at play here, of a kind he had never encountered before. Grizzlemaw sensed the battle-rage stirring and barked furiously.

‘Advance!’ Khul thundered, exhilarated by what he was seeing, hearing, smelling.

The Goretide swarmed down the long scree slopes, parting around their master and forging ahead, heading down swiftly to the plains. Their banners were raised against the teeming skies, and the sacred signs of Khorne swung up above the ranks of iron helms, already glossy in the rain. Companies of blood warriors marched out towards the Gate’s foundations, chanting litanies to the God of Battles as they shoved against one another. Vekh the Flayer pushed on ahead of them all, lashing them into heights of frenzy. In his wake echoed greater bellows yet, issued from jaws that were far larger than those of the blood warriors in the mass of the horde, and yet still hidden by the swirls of night-shadow and sullen flame.

Khul remained where he was, poised above the expanse, taking in the vastness of it. He saw the old ruins and the demolished walls of age-scoured cities, and the distant marks of a forgotten apocalypse. Threx’s bronze icon had already kindled with an angry fire, feeding from the energy burning around them. Khul stood atop the stone shelf, his eyes narrowing. He looked up at the enormous arch, tracing its outline, noting the runes on the lintels. It had been a long time since he had seen runes of that kind – they should have been extinct, just like their makers. The sight of them fuelled his battle-lust further – their existence was like an explicit challenge. He would take them down, one by one, ripping them from the stone with his own hands.

Down below, more of his battalions fanned out, covering the black lands in a carpet of red. As the last of them reached the open ground, a mighty crack, like the bones of the earth snapping, echoed across the plains.

Khul laughed – he couldn’t help himself. He lifted his arms, and lightning snapped against his clenched gauntlets.

‘I am Korghos Khul, Lord of the Earth! Show yourself, storm-weavers, and test your mettle against one worthy of your strength!’

The storm flared. The tempest churned faster, surging around the Gate under its epicentre. A second crack. Plumes of flame shot up from the ground, spewing oily smoke above them. The stink of ozone filled the air and the rain boiled away in hissing cloudbanks. A low rumble ran across the earth, making the rock-plates grind and crack. It felt as if giants were stirring below the world’s skin, rousing from aeons of slumber to break back into the realms of the living.

Then there was an almighty explosion of light, one that made his army turn their faces away, covering their helms with warding gestures. The banners faltered, the war-cries were silenced and the heavens erupted in sheets of silver flame. The air itself screamed, torn apart by some sorcery so potent and so pure that its elements were sundered from one another and forged anew.

Shafts of iridescence slammed down from the firmament, punching deep into the earth below. The wind’s howl became deafening, racing across the reeling landscape and flattening the iron-limbed vegetation. The Gate seemed to swell, to grow, towering higher over a vortex of gathering power. Even as the land around it was shriven and the hordes were driven to their knees by the tearing gale, the vast arch remained resolute, untouched, carved from the very bones of the world itself and glowering black as obsidian against the storm’s fury.

Only Khul kept his composure. He spread his arms wide before the elemental wrath, and laughed as the fire-scored wind tore at his cloak. He raised his axe high, and lightning snapped and licked up against its dire blade.

And so it was that he alone saw them come. He saw them borne down from the storm by the white-blue shafts and ripped from coils of shimmering magic. He saw them hurtle from the heart of the turning maelstrom, encased in brilliant cocoons of light. He saw them strike the earth with shuddering force. Where they crashed into the ground, domes of energy sprang up, each one swimming with raging coruscation. Then the domes shattered, spraying fragments of crystalline matter across the burning land, exposing the scions of the storm, the ones delivered by the wrath of the skies.

They were tall, taller than the greatest of mortal men, clad in purest gold and bearing warhammers that glistened with seething energy. Masks they wore, gold as their battle-plate, each one gazing impassively out at the devastation around them. Some had pearl-white wings that spread out behind them, bearing them aloft almost as soon as they had landed. Others strode out from their broken cocoons, their movements fluid despite the weight of arcane armour. Their every movement was perfect, poised to perfection and suffused with god-like power. They strode out from the remnants of the lightning that had hurled them into reality, hefting their weapons with an eerie, fluid power.

One of them carried a great standard of gold and bone, and his face was masked with the stark image of a skull. Another propelled himself high into the storm-lashed skies, his wings still surrounded by the blinding aura of the descent. They were the lords, then, the masters of these strange outcasts from the arch of the heavens.

But Khul could see that one alone was the true master of the host. He had come down first, and had emerged from the annihilation of the domes before any other, and Khul had watched him with a greedy yearning. Alone of the warriors he did not tread the earth of the Brimstone Peninsula, but rode a giant beast with skin of dark cobalt and jaws the length of a man. The rider’s cloak, billowing out in the eddies of the storm, was the sapphire of clear skies, and his helm was surmounted with a golden crest. The image of the hammer and comet shone out from a boss on his armour, and like the brothers that emerged after him, he carried that most devastating of the great weapons of old – the warhammer, crimson-shafted and wrought from glittering gold.

As soon as Khul saw this he remembered what it was like to face an enemy capable of fighting. He saw the might in those steel-clad arms, and the artistry in that golden armour, and knew then that these foes were like nothing he had ever faced before. The light of unsullied star-realms shone in their masked eyes, and the calm presumption of victory bled from their every poised movement.

But there was more than that – the mounted warrior held his attention. Khul heard Grizzlemaw growl, and recalled another combat, lifetimes ago, one which had remained unfinished, cut short by the intervention of lightning, just as this encounter had been presaged by it.

It could not be – such things were impossible, sundered by too much time and space – but the feeling was the same, the instinct was the same.

By now his army was recovering itself. They were picking themselves up from where they had fallen, shaking their heads to clear them, retrieving axes, remembering their voices of hatred and murder. Skullbrand strode among them, rousing them to repel the storm-borne host. Vekh had been faster, and was sweeping towards the three towers with flails whirling. Every stroke that he dragged across the back of the blood warriors snapped them from their stupor and roused them back into the lust for slaughter that had seen them tear across the plains toward the Gate.

Khul laughed again. He raised his axe and curls of lightning snapped on to the hell-forged iron.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ he thundered, making those around him froth and snarl with rabid fury. ‘One chosen skull for the pyre of his glory!’

He angled his axe towards the lord of the storm-delivered, and fixed him for the death that would break the back of the glittering host before the night’s end.

‘You!’ he roared. ‘You I shall take myself!’

The passage of the void had been like a death. Nothing, save the Reforging that he had endured so long ago, compared to its straitening pain. He had seen the deep dark in all its abyssal glory, yawning down into eternity over a vault of cold-burning stars. Amid that space, he had seen the snatched images of other realms, lit softly amid the thrown scattering of the firmament. He had seen places of blasted stone, over-verdant forests, and screaming towers of multi-hued madness. All of it was different and all of it the same – warped by the wills of malevolence, turned into variegated hells, lost to hope.

Then the visions had ripped away, replaced by the sheer fire of the descent. He had cried out, feeling the lightning surge through his very body, burning along his veins, spilling from his eyes, his mouth, his hands. Too late did he remember how it had felt the first time, when the God-King had reached out to pluck those he deemed worthy of ascension from the failing battles of the old ages.

Then the agony snapped out and he felt the Realm of Fire solidify around him. He heard the roar of its storms and smelled the acrid smoke of its endless pyres. The cocoon of celestial power bloomed about him, and he saw the dim outline of vast ruins through its translucent veil.

The dome blew out, dissolving in a rain of twisting shards. Vandus breathed in the first air of Aqshy. He tasted it, he heard its tumults, he felt the unstable tremors beneath his feet.

It had changed beyond all recognition – even if his dreams of the old life had not been so fractured, he would not have known the place. The skies were overcast with driving filth, the earth below sundered with rivers of spitting fire. Only the storm, a mere remnant of the Celestial Realm’s purity, contained any splendour – the rest was spoiled.

Lifetimes ago, he had seen the limitless darkness take this world and torture it. He had seen the legions marching under blood-red banners, and the skies riven by the screams of the taken. He had seen the brass cities, where pyramids of scraped-clean skulls served as altars to gods whose victory was soon to be complete. Even now, removed by both time and space, he could remember the way the world had died. Every withered plain and craggy mountain had been taken, polluted by hatreds that were older than the stones themselves.

So much had gone. He could not know how long ago it had been, nor what mortal count of years he had reached before the God-King had seen fit to take him for his own, but he had dreamed in Sigmaron of the old houses of stone and thatch, in which had dwelt all those he had known in the life before life. He still saw their faces – the warriors who had ridden out with him when the skies were lit with dancing fires and the warbands of hell were abroad. Many had been precious to him – those who had fought longest and hardest, who had followed him out into the wilds and lived among the wolves when the light of the sun itself was marred.

There was one face from those years that would never leave him – a woman’s, a warrior just as he had been, the one with whom he had shared his soul. Hers was the only clear vision he still retained, but even then her name was gone. Her skin had been scarred like all the rest of them, and streaked with the grime of constant combat. It had been a hard face, made tough by the rigours of a war without end, but when she had smiled her dark eyes had held the light of stars.

But now that was washed away, seared by the white fire of the Reforging. That world, those faces – all were excised, and what remained was a mere reflection, twisted into horror, more potent than he could ever have imagined.

Around him his warriors hastened to their stations. They had known so little of what they would encounter, save for the vague location of the Gate and the likelihood of resistance wherever they emerged. Their prediction had proved sound – a massive army had already arrayed itself before them, pouring down from a far ridge and milling across the plains to the south of their impact sites. The horde before them outnumbered Vandus’s own vanguard a dozen times, and even a company of Eternals would be borne down by such tides, given enough time. The task now – the only task – was to endure long enough to see the Gate unlocked. Until that was done, they were on their own. Once the portal was opened, whole legions of their brothers would be sent, and the war would commence in earnest.

Vandus saw that already his captains were doing what was required of them. Ionus was leading the Retributors down from the heights and into the valley of fire. They would be charged with holding the line around the base of the portal, and there the Cryptborn’s strange powers would be tested as never before. Anactos had taken his Skyhost soaring into the rain-soaked storm, from where the assault on the magical wards would begin.

As for Vandus, he had the bulk of the Stormhost with him – the Liberators, destined to charge into the heart of the oncoming hordes, to take them on as no foe had taken them on for uncounted years. Their task was to engage the greatest of the creatures of Chaos, to prevent them from approaching the Gate, and to turn their advance in on itself, buying the precious time they needed.

Vandus gazed out over the sheer size of the horde, and a thrill of battle-energy shivered through him. They were immense, and their din was already deafening, but the thought of bringing his sacred hammer among them, of delivering the vengeance so long deferred, made his heart race. He raised Heldensen, and Calanax let slip a metallic roar from his gaping jaws.

‘To me, my brothers!’ he cried, and raw lightning leapt around him.

They answered the summons, shrugging off the last slivers of void-lightning, forming up into phalanxes of gold. Rain streamed down their armour, and yet did not diminish it – amid a fallen world, they shone like furnaces sent to burn away the corruption and salvage what little remained.

Calanax roared again, his mighty lungs hurling smoke and boiling rain far out across the battlefield. The dracoth reared up, yearning to charge into the depths of the host set before them. Vandus held him back for a little longer, scanning across the landscape, deferring back the charge until he had determined the shape of the battle.

Amid the seething mass of crimson-armoured warriors, some were greater than others. He saw a mighty champion striding through the heart of the horde bearing a brass sigil of the Fallen Gods. He saw a bare-headed beastmaster flailing at the bloodied back of a massive creature, his eyes lit with a feral ecstasy. That one would be the first to reach him, and so Vandus silently marked him for the contest.

And yet, they were not the greatest of the army’s masters. There was another, perched high on a cliff-edge to the south, standing alone before a narrow cleft in the rock. Even from so far away, Vandus could sense the overabundance of power, throbbing like a wound in reality. He was the master of this horde, and by his will alone did it go to war. Even as battle called him, Vandus found it hard to pull his eyes from the dark champion.

For an instant, he saw an image from another age – a village, burning, swamped with warriors whose armour was much like those he faced now. He saw a young warrior – blond, grizzled, cut by a hundred wounds – racing to face a warlord with a twin-bladed axe.

And for the first time in forgotten ages, he remembered his name.

Blackfist. Vendell Blackfist.

Across the gulf between them, the skull-helmed lord lowered his axe, directing it straight at him. Vandus felt the impact of that cold malice, striking him like a physical blow. Old mortal emotions raced through his mind, ones he had believed to be long scoured clean.

And yet, he had been Reforged. Those dreams had been torn away, and could never be recovered. All that remained was vengeance, the cleansing burn of sacred fire, the retribution of the long ages.

‘To arms!’ roared Vandus, holding his warhammer aloft and shifting as the dracoth bucked beneath him. ‘Now comes the hour! Strike them down where they march, and may the vengeance of the God-King guide you!’

With a massed roar of acclamation, the Stormhost broke as one into the charge, serried in gold and sky-blue, poised to crash into the vanguard of the enemy with all the fury of the Celestial Realm unleashed.

Anactos, lord of the Skyhost, swept high into the air, releasing a shout of joy as he powered upwards. His Prosecutors came with him, stretching their pinions and glorying in the release of long-held energy.

All around them, the tempest surged. The winds were violent, tugging them one way and the other, ever-threatening to dash them against the rocks below. After the first exuberant surge, they stayed close to the earth, gliding just high enough to survey the battlefield that sprawled away below them.

The Gate was to the south, less than half a mile distant. Already its base was overrun with the warriors of Chaos, unwitting as to its purpose but knowing a bastion where they saw one. Ionus had led his Retributors towards them, and soon battle would be joined around the massive foundations.

More columns of lightning slammed down, releasing the last of the void-sent Prosecutors from their glimmering domes. There were so few of them – they were like scarce points of starlight across the face of eternal night. Set against the monsters that now lumbered and crashed towards them, the vanguard looked painfully fragile.

Anactos laughed freely. His wings snapped back hard, pushing him back up into the heights. To test his skills against such a storm made his spirits sing. The Celestial Realm had been a paradise, one in which even the lowliest towers were crowned with circlets of jewels, but this was another thing entirely. The danger of it thrilled him, just as it did all his swift-winged bothers.

He heard Lord Vandus issue the command to advance, and watched as the Liberators fell into their battle formations. The last few of Anactos’s own troops broke free of their crystalline cocoons, racing to join his aerial vanguard.

‘Faster, and yet faster!’ Anactos urged, addressing his Prosecutors as they wheeled about him. ‘The portal awaits – you know your task!’

With a clap of wings, the Skyhost swung around and swept down low, streaking across the battlefield and towards the empty archway.

For Ionus, there was no rush of combat joy. He had emerged from the storm’s wrath with the same chill disdain as he had ever felt for it. The fires and the lightning meant nothing to him, for they were all fleeting shadows set beside the dread craft that gave him his strength.

Already the shouts of the battle-frenzied were rising in volume. The blood of both sides ran hot, frothing in the veins of every man who bore a blade. It was mere chatter to Ionus, who always spoke in a whisper and whose glance alone reflected nothing but infinite silence.

Following Vandus’s command, he trudged down the slope towards the Gate’s foundations. The ruins of great edifices stretched away on either side, lain low by forgotten wars. He cared little for them, either – the Realm of Fire had never been his domain. Duty alone had brought him to this battle, a duty forged when the God-King had delved down into the uttermost depths of the Amethyst Realm and snatched him away from his destined oblivion. One night, if the fates allowed, he would return to those moonlit vaults, to where the skies were untroubled by suns and where the spirits of the ever-slain dwelt in their perpetual shadow.

Until then, he would lend the Stormhost his subtle powers, commanding the very laws that bound souls to flesh. Not for him a golden warhammer, but instead a reliquary of bone, one that channelled the esoteric forces of Shyish itself.

The Retributors who accompanied him were warriors after his own heart – grim, steadfast, not given to the recklessness of the Prosecutors nor the bravado of the Liberators. They would stand firm against the yammering progeny of nightmares for as long as but one of them drew breath, forming a line of gold that ringed the feet of the portal. His task was to hold the base of the Gate, enduring the horde were kept from its precincts until all was accomplished. Vandus would drive onwards, hoping to gouge a wedge into the centre of the horde and engage its champions, while the Cryptborn would maintain the cordon around the portal. It was a task after his cold heart – reckless valour had little appeal, whereas endurance meant everything.

Already the front ranks of the enemy were loping towards them, their shock fading as the storm raged unabated above, goaded by their whip-wielding slavemasters and propelled by their own blood-fury.

Ionus watched them come, cracking no smile under his deathmask helm. He remembered the oaths he had sworn, as old and hard as the grave, binding him to the service of the one who held the promise of liberation for his beloved lands of shadow.

As the first of them drew within range, the Cryptborn held his bone-sigil aloft in both hands, feeling the cold sigh of unnatural winds curl around its length.

‘Unto death,’ he whispered, and advanced into the maw of hate.

Rakh cowered with the rest of the bloodreavers, unable to believe what he had witnessed. One moment they had been running down the scent of terrified mortals, the next the skies themselves had broken asunder and gilded paragons had hurtled down from rifts in their heights.

From where he crouched, he saw the earth explode in clouds of splintered stone. A dome of silver flared up, raging like starlight, before shattering into a thousand spinning fragments. From its heart came a golden warrior, towering and imperious, his white pinions stretching out like the fell shadow of a vengeful angel. The warrior raised his warhammer high, and lightning curled around it in greeting. The storm boomed and cracked, the air itself singing with strange sorcery, and the angelic warrior leapt up into its heart, thrusting upwards amid a riot of light and racing flame.

Rakh screamed out in rage, reaching for his cleaver. Others of his pack recovered their wits and scrabbled for their own weapons. The bloodreavers may have been debased flesh-eaters, but they had all been raised in a world where fighting was the only form of life – once threatened, they would always strike back.

‘Not them!’ cried Rakh, hauling the others back before they could charge the greater mass of golden warriors. Those ones were already quitting the rise, forming up into battalions to march down into the lowlands beside the gate. There were too many to take on, and they were fearsomely well-armoured. ‘Pluck the birds from the skies!’

The winged ones looked an easier prospect – they had their eyes fixed on the Gate, heedless of those crawling on the ground below but staying close enough to be grasped. There were fewer of them and they seemed more fragile.

The surviving bloodreavers did as they were commanded, and Rakh led them up to the ridge’s summit. They went stealthily, hidden by the drifting clouds of underlit smoke, unseen by the golden warriors hovering just above head height.

As they closed in, Rakh began to believe that it could be done. He picked out one of the angels who had only just emerged from its lightning-dome, still glistening from whatever magic had summoned it and yet to ascend fully into the skies.

‘Take it!’ he hissed to his brothers, and together they sprinted to bring it down.

Rakh leapt, swinging his cleaver wildly at the warrior’s trailing ankle. The thick blade connected, smashing the armoured heel and causing the winged warrior to cry out. The angel tried to gain height but more bloodreavers piled in, leaping as high as they could to try to grasp the creature. Flails and long-chained hooks lashed out, punching into the warrior’s armoured plates and dragging him down to their level.

Once they had it encumbered, the bloodreavers fell on it in a ravening scrum, seizing its kicking legs and pulling it to earth. Rakh clutched its breastplate, hauling his way towards its throat. He caught a glimpse of its golden mask – a blank expression, belying the desperate life-and-death struggle – before he was thrown back to the ground.

The angel was incredibly strong. Despite taking a dozen deep cuts from axe-blades, it struggled on, ever trying to gain loft. Its warhammer, held one-handed, scythed around, smashing three bloodreavers clear and sending their broken bodies tumbling. It kicked out, severing the neck of another and almost breaking free.

Rakh pounced again, hurling his cleaver straight at the creature’s breastplate. The iron edge hit the metal but was deflected, scraping across the pristine surface. The bloodreavers became more desperate, drooling with anger as they battled to pull their prey to earth.

The prospect of healthy flesh to gnaw on rather than worm-infested gristle made Rakh frenzied with meat-lust, and he flung himself into the air one more time. This time his outstretched fingers caught onto something solid – the warrior’s weapon-belt – and he yanked down with all his strength. Others of the pack seized the angel and chains were flung up, clanking onto his limbs and dragging at him. The axes and cleavers got to work, slamming down and breaking up the armoured plate.

Rakh smelled the first gush of the creature’s blood and knew then he would be locking his teeth onto skin within moments. He ripped the warrior’s helm-rim back from its neck and stretched his jaws wide, picking his spot before he plunged down.

The lightning bolt hit him cripplingly hard and he was sent flying, his chest smoking and his jerkin burned to scraps. His head spun and his vision reeled. He reached for his weapon groggily, gasping from the shock and pain, and tried to get to his feet.

More bolts flew in, each one crackling like ball-lightning before exploding with a sharp bang. The deluge scattered the gang of bloodreavers, some of whom were caught by it and cut down just as he had been. Rakh stood up, still bleary-eyed, and stared into the skies.

The angels were swooping in low, hurling bolts of energy right into the midst of the bloodreavers. Now acclimatised to the buffets of the storm-wind, they were hurtling through the air in a blur of gold and cobalt, uncatchable, unreachable, and burning with wrath.

The one that had been pulled to earth got back to his feet, still swinging his warhammer and crunching the skulls of the bloodreavers about him. Rakh stumbled into a charge, holding his cleaver two-handed and determined to bring at least one of those damned flying creatures to its death.

The angel turned to face him, his armour running with blood, and opened the palm of his gauntlet. A ball of white fire slammed into Rakh, this time burning right through what remained of his armour and chewing into his chest. He screamed and collapsed onto his back, clutching impotently at the forks of heat tearing across his skin.

Prone and agonised, Rakh could only watch as the battle-ravaged warrior leapt back up into the skies, bloodied but still capable of flight. His counterparts were dropping to the earth now, landing amid bursts of the searing starfire that shot from their very hands. Others darted down low, airborne still but flying near enough to send their hammerheads blasting into the backs of the fleeing bloodreavers.

Amid all his dizziness, Rakh couldn’t help but spit out a bitter laugh. They had tried to take down one of them, just one, and failed. Now the whole pack was suffering the vengeance of these strange and terrible warriors, and within moments they would be slaughtered to a man.

Rakh lifted his head just in time to see one more of the golden creatures coming for him. There would be no escape this time – he could barely move, and already the numbness creeping up his limbs was near-complete. With his last breath, he could only marvel at what had taken place.

What are these things?

But before any answer could be given the angel unleashed his fire, and Rakh’s brutish world ended in a blaze of pain.

Vekh had seen the danger before any of the others. While the rest of the army were still blinking and staring stupidly at the apparitions from the skies, he had reached for his flail and summoned the bestial presence at the heart of the horde.

For the long march north the behemoth had been shackled, weighed down with spell-wound chains of iron made in the depths of Khul’s forges. They had goaded it and dragged it, never getting too close, knowing what it could do. It had raged at them, lashing out under the burden of the iron collar and the iron yokes, and Vekh had always been there at its side, whispering the maddening words, stoking the fires that ever burned within its ruined mind.

‘Skuldrak!’ he had called as the fires fell from heaven, releasing its bonds with a word and calling the behemoth, the khorgorath, to his side.

And it had come. Despite the pain, despite the madness, it always came, answering the command of its tormentor and trampling the lesser creatures of the horde under its claws. It barged its way up from the very heart of the boiling multitudes until its red-rimmed eyes once more seized on the author of its agony.

Skuldrak was a monstrous creation, towering over even the hugest of the Goretide’s other leviathans. Vast trunks of muscled legs supported a cavernous chest and absurdly oversized arms, each terminating in iron-tipped claws the breadth of a man’s torso. An immense bony head thrust out from bulging shoulders, studded with tusks and pierced with the iron marks of Khorne’s favour. When the khorgorath roared, a welter of fizzing spittle flew from its open maw, drowning out all other calls of battle and inspiring those about it to new heights of savagery.

Skuldrak was Vekh’s own creature, tortured into submission a lifetime ago and now shackled to his merciless lash, just as the entire horde was. The beast could endure phenomenal amounts of pain, something that Vekh put to the test whenever he could, goading it into the fullest extent of battle-wrath, making an already wildly aggressive creature into an engine of pure carnage.

United once more, the two of them – bloodstoker and beast of Chaos – charged across the open plain. Even as the bulk of the Goretide waited for Khul’s orders, Skuldrak lumbered inchoately, bellowing in a haze of apoplexy as the flail bit deeper. For his part, Vekh had to run hard just to keep up, for Skuldrak unleashed was as ferociously fast as he was colossal.

Vekh’s battle-lust, however, was more controlled than his beast’s. He had seen the disposition of the enemy and gauged where best to strike. Their armour was new to him, as was the magical aura that played across their ranks, but every army had its lords, and if those could be struck down then the rest would fall apart. The Goretide was unbeaten, its name whispered with hushed respect even by those steeped in the favour of Khorne – this night would not see a reverse of such god-marked fortunes.

As Vekh neared the first warriors of the glittering warband, their commander was obvious enough – a knight with a crested helm riding atop some kind of draconic beast. Others of the host, larger figures in heavier battle-plate, had already broken formation and were making for the ruined Gate, leaving their flanks exposed. That was a critical mistake, Vekh judged – the ruin was worthless as a redoubt, and they were spreading themselves too thin in order to take it. If this crested beastrider could be killed, the whole encounter would be over with brutal swiftness, leaving only the long hours of torture to come.

‘Skuldrak!’ Vekh shouted, snapping out the spike-tipped flails with abandon. ‘That is the one! Break it now and your pain can stop!’

The leviathan thundered out a tortured bellow and powered towards the lightning-crowned rider. Vekh watched the golden knight respond, turning to face the oncoming charge. The beast he rode was a mighty creature, its scaly head wreathed with flame and its sinuous tail lashing like Vekh’s own flails, but it was far smaller than the khorgorath and had not been driven into the same depth of daemonic rage.

The gap between them shrank to nothing, and Vekh maintained the lash, whipping Skuldrak into a blur of speed. Bony tentacles burst out from the khorgorath’s shoulders, each snaking towards the dracoth rider, ready to snatch him from his mount and break his back.

The rider called out a battle-cry as the shadow of the khorgorath fell across him, hefting his mighty hammer as if it weighed no more than a reed. The weapon arced round, blazing with eye-watering light, and slammed heavily into Skuldrak’s oncoming flank.

A mighty bang rang out, and a blaze of silver light radiated from the impact. Skuldrak, for all its size and momentum, was rocked back on to its mighty haunches, and its hooves gouged deep into the solid stone. The knight swung again, switching back and driving the head deep into the creature’s ribcage.

Skuldrak screamed, at last experiencing pain worse than its master’s gouges, and twisted back to face the snarling draconic mount. Vekh, seeing the chance, raced in close, aiming to dislodge the rider and bear him down to the earth. The cobalt-skinned mount was too quick, though, snapping its jaws just a fraction too slowly to tear Vekh’s head from his shoulders but close enough to make him stagger back from the charge.

Now free to act, the gold-armoured rider rammed his hammer against the khorgorath’s skull as if it were a blade on an anvil. Skuldrak reeled away, roaring. Then the crested helm was turned on Vekh, where the beastmaster crouched, ready to launch a second attack.

‘Know your enemy before he ends you, spawn of ruin,’ came a clear voice, cutting through the battle-roar like a shaft of sunlight. ‘I am Vandus Hammerhand, Lord-Celestant of the Stormhost, and this night your reign comes to its end.’

Vekh snarled, taking up his flail again and readying it for Skuldrak.

‘Then know yours, Hammerhand,’ he replied. ‘I am Vekh, named the Flayer, and I shall wear your skin as my cloak before the night’s end. If you perform well, I may even let you die first.’

The Retributors reached the Gate just ahead of the horde. They spread out in a long line, making their numbers count for as much as possible. Each warrior stood two yards from the shoulder of his brother, giving room to wield the two-handed greathammers with the power they warranted.

Ionus took his place behind the slender line of defence, knowing that it was not yet his time to move into the heart of the combat. As he watched, the formless mass of enemy warriors screamed towards them, shouting incoherently in brutish tongues. Some spoke debased languages that he understood while others raved in the language of the Old Gods, their words steeped in the slow corruption of millennia.

‘Remain steadfast,’ he whispered to those about him. His voice was as dusty and sibilant as ever, but he knew that every Retributor would hear him clearly enough. ‘Trust in the immortal will of Sigmar, the liberator of his people.’

The eyes of the foe were now visible, red-rimmed under beaten helms of iron. Ionus saw the mutilation of their bodies – wounds pinned open, brand-marks across faces, metal studs and spikes pushed through exposed skin. They all bore the marks of Khorne, carved into living flesh and carried above them on banners of cured hides.

‘He will preserve,’ Ionus breathed. ‘He will protect.’

Then the lines smashed together, the rolling tide of frenzy slamming hard into the cordon of gold. The Retributors had waited for the moment of most impact before letting fly with their hammers, and with their release the entire battlefront dissolved in a welter of cracked skulls and sprayed blood. Before they could lean into the return swing, the blood warriors were in amongst them, hacking with short-handles axes. The Retributors held the line, though the pressure of the charge forced them back, testing the slender perimeter before the stairway leading up to the Gate’s great archway.

Ionus coolly watched the fighting unfold. They had known it would be intense, and the sheer volume of hatred did not come as a surprise. The Old Powers had degraded what counted for humanity in this realm, perverting them into mere bestial tools, each one capable of nothing but rage. The damned screamed as they fought, screamed as they were hacked back, and screamed as their guts were torn from them by the heavy sweep of hammerheads.

Behind the Retributors, the Gate loomed massively, lit up by flashes of lightning and the aegis of fire kindled at its summit. The Prosecutors were late reaching their positions, though Ionus could see the first of them soar up against the night sky now, ready to unleash the wrath of the comet. Perhaps they had been waylaid – if so, then the need for haste had become more pressing than ever.

Then, over to his right, the first of the Retributors was brought down. The warrior had already accounted for a dozen of the horde and his hammer was heavy with a black slick of blood, but the press was remorseless. Ionus hastened to his aid, just too late – a long spear-shaft jabbed out, shoved forward by many sets of hands, and the tip punched through the Retributor’s throat, wrenching the helm up and forcing the warrior’s head back.

A huge roar rang out from the horde, and the ferocity of the attack picked up. The two Retributors on either side of their fallen brother closed off the gap, fighting hard to prevent the breach in the line becoming a flood through which the enemy could pour.

By then Ionus had reached the stricken warrior’s side, and he crouched down low beside him. The Retributor was dead, and shards of the spear’s shaft still protruded from the gaping hole in his throat. Ionus pulled the splinters clear and cauterised the wound with a wave of his clawed hand. Even as the blood warriors hammered at the defences, he worked calmly and quickly, bringing his staff to bear. Ghoulish energies pooled and flowed from the bone reliquary, reaching out to latch on to the Retributor’s motionless corpse. There was a sigh like the cold wind across reeds, and the fallen warrior’s body jerked. Spectral lightning leapt from the tip of the reliquary, clamping on to the Retributor’s helm. The warrior burst back into movement with ghostly strands of luminescence writhing across his bloodied armour.

Ionus withdrew as the Retributor clambered back to his feet. The warrior pushed his way back to his place in the line and started to fight just as before. Unperturbed, his comrades moved aside to give him room, and the cordon was restored. Ionus backed away, scrutinising the remaining defenders and watching for any more breaks in the line.

The resurrection briefly cowed the horde beyond, as the work of their blades was undone. The fallen Retributor fought just as hard and just as well as those about him, with the only sign of his demise being the blood across his battered gorget.

Once the shock had faded, though, the blood warriors became even more deranged, as if affronted by the use of magical powers by one other than their own dark lords. They charged back at the Retributors, slamming spike-bossed shields into them, flinging axes with abandon, spitting curses even as the warhammers continued to reap a bloody toll. The Retributors were forced back a step further, managing the retreat expertly but still forced to close the gap between them and the stairs leading up to the Gate.

Ionus remained impassive, trying to pick out the leaders among the horde. His eyes finally rested on a true beast of a man, wading through the ranks of his own, fighting against them just to get closer to the front. He was arrayed in heavy armour of iron and bronze, and alongside a long-handled axe he carried a standard to match the Cryptborn’s own. It was he who roused the lesser fighters to such heights of frenzy, and he who held the enemy’s battle-lines together.

Ionus narrowed his eyes, studying the brass icon he bore aloft. It had an unnatural aspect to it, as if it had been forged in another world and did not belong on the mortal plane at all. Already flickers of red flame were dancing around its head, the harbingers of a greater release to come.

Ionus would have liked nothing better than to push out into the throng then, kicking aside the blood warriors to get at the real danger. When that icon disgorged its foul malediction, there was no telling what horror would be unleashed.

But his place was with the Retributors, holding the perimeter around the Gate lest the enemy guess its purpose and destroy it from its foundations. If he left the line now, the next warrior to fall would not get up and the fragile shield would surely break.

So he held his position, knowing that it was only a matter of time before their tenuous line would be overwhelmed. He risked one more look up to where the skies still boiled with the elemental tempest. The Prosecutors had begun their work, but they had much yet to do. Time was against them all, and with every moment more blood warriors piled into the furious melee under the shadows of the ruins. If the portal were not breached soon…

‘Remain steadfast,’ he whispered, to himself as much as those around him. ‘He will preserve. He will protect.’

Anactos rose up on the swirling hurricane, his wings fighting against the storm-surge. His brothers had been scattered and were working hard to stay close to Gate’s edge. The hordes seething on the earth beneath had tried to attack them again, hurling spears from the fire-lit dark, but Vandus’s charge into the main body of the oncoming ranks had blunted those attacks for the moment.

The Prosecutors had been delayed by the attack of the bloodreavers and now needed to work fast. Anactos’s joy in the flight had long gone, overtaken by the knowledge of just how little time they had. He could see the Lord-Celestant engaged in combat with a massive beast of Chaos, and the Liberator vanguard was already close pressed by a far greater mass of axe-wielding warriors. Ionus and his Retributors were almost completely hidden from view by the blood warriors they fought against, and if either flank of the Eternals’ cordon should fail then all would quickly collapse into confusion.

Anactos kindled fresh comet-fire in his hands, watching as his warhammer transmuted into a spitting ball of blue-edged brilliance that span against his rain-slick gauntlets.

‘Azyr!’ he roared, sending the bolt blazing towards the Gate. It impacted not on the stone, but in the empty void under the great archway. As it struck the point directly below the keystone, it exploded, sending shattering lines of force cobwebbing across the gap.

The whole structure shook and the fires on the Gate’s crown shuddered. From the other side of the gate, the Prosecutor Kallas launched a similar bolt, which struck the same target with the same effect. Pelias sent a shaft of comet-light spinning into contact, and then it was the turn of Valian, the one who had been dragged to earth by the bloodreavers. His comet-fire was weaker, affected by the wounds he had taken, but it struck the Gate’s heart nonetheless, adding to the steady rain of impacts.

As the volleys of raw magic rocked the portal, the runes engraved on its soaring pillars stirred into a dull red glow. More flames spontaneously ignited along its twisting intricacies, surging up old stairwells and bursting through the conical roofs of its watchtowers.

The Gate’s seals were strong, laid down during the last days of the Lost War. Sigmar had made the rune-signs himself, it was said, and his might and subtlety had held the portal fast for the long ages, resisting every attempt made by the Fallen Gods to force the passage to the Celestial Realm. Only the weapons of Azyr itself had the power to unlock those seals, and only then when used with great force. Sending Eternals into battle without using the portal was astonishingly difficult, even when the entire wizard-choirs of Sigmaron were pressed into service to accomplish it. Only if the Gate were released from both sides at once would the road be fully opened, after which the greater force of the Stormhost could pass across the bridge between the Realms unhindered.

Anactos swept upwards again, catching a fire-flecked thermal current and using it to drive himself over the summit of the portal. He summoned up a new spectral warhammer, which shimmered in his grasp before solidifying into sigmarite. Then he hurled it back towards the portal’s rim, and as it flew it transmuted back into celestial energy, streaking like the comet from which it had been born.

The explosion was greater this time – a riot of multi-hued light blasting from the Gate’s empty heart. The storm-whipped void flexed like fabric, distorting the view through the aperture. A great crack appeared through which a faint glister of gold could be perceived, and the runes on the Gate flared, turning to the red of flame.

But then the wards resisted, reimposing the weight of aeons, clamping down on any attempt to break that which had been unbreakable for so long. The remaining Prosecutors of the Skyhost launched their own barrage of comet-fire, keeping up the relentless assault, but no more fissures appeared, and the runes remained in place and smouldering.

Anactos cried aloud with frustration. The constant summoning of comet-fire was draining, and the portal remained closed. Down below, the twin spearheads led by Vandus and Ionus were mere islands in an ocean of raging fury, and for all their valour they would soon be overwhelmed.

‘For the God-King!’ Anactos cried again, racked by pain as he summoned yet another bolt to hurl into the Gate’s heart.

Even as he let loose, and the comet-born fire streaked to its target, he could not shake one terrible, nagging thought.

We have come too late. We cannot break it in time.

Khul was still a long way from his enemy, hampered by the crowds of his own troops, when he realised what the true danger was. He had taken the vast ruin ahead to be some dormant relic of ancient ages. When the gold-armoured hammer-bearers had filed down to surround it, he had assumed that they had thought to seize a remnant of old days – a sentimental move, fighting to hold it against the descendants of those that had first laid it low.

Only slowly, watching the winged angels dive and wheel, did he see what their real aim was – they were not here to take it, but to destroy it, and every action they were performing was bent towards that one goal. Khul had no idea why they would wish to risk their lives for such a pointless achievement, but was astute enough to guess that it was their only hope for survival. For the first time, a tremor of doubt assailed him – he still had the numbers to slay them all, given enough time, but if the Gate held some secret power, something only they knew of, then they could not be allowed to fulfil that aim.

‘Skullbrand!’ Khul roared, rearing up to his full height and letting his axe spike with arcane magics.

Even across the entire breadth of the battlefield, with a thousand voices raised in anger and aggression, Threx Skullbrand heard the summons of his master and turned his crimson helm to heed the order. The bond between them, forged by lifetimes at war, was so acute and so drenched in dark magic that Khul had only so much as to say his name and Threx would hear it.

‘The Gate!’ Khul roared, gesturing to where the angels were pummelling it with their bursts of wild magic. ‘Break the aegis! Summon the Realm of Brass!’

Skullbrand nodded in acknowledgement, and immediately his icon-staff crackled with bronze tendrils. The howl of another wind joined in that of the world’s gales, and the atmosphere above the bloodsecrator began to pulsate like a drumskin.

Khul might have stayed to witness what Skullbrand was doing, always gladdened to see the scions of the great Throne heed the call of a mortal soul, but in the midst of the struggle he had no leisure to stand idly by. He could already see that, incredibly, Vekh and his khorgorath were being battered by the beast-riding warrior. Despite the numbers set against them, the body of golden knights was holding its own, even pushing deeper into the ranks of his own army. They fought with a blend of speed and skill that far exceeded the brutal excesses of his own troops. For too long the blood warriors had fought only the weak and the terrified – it had made them flabby and careless.

Khul snarled as he marched down through the ranks of his horde, obsessed now with bringing down the helm-crested knight before any other might claim the kill. For so many ages he had been searching for a champion whose skull would crown the uncompleted Red Pyramid, his great paean to the God of Battles, and now at last he had it before him – an immortal, clearly; one possessed of the power to command the lightning and whose valour in arms exceeded even the heroes of the forgotten past.

But then Khul halted in his rampage, struck by the same realisation that had assailed him on the clifftop. He suddenly remembered the destruction of that last tribe. He remembered putting their villages to the fire, sweeping across their lands with the force of a whirlwind. None of them had ever submitted save through death. The bloodreavers had never turned one, and the ranks of his blood warriors had never been bolstered by them. Every fight against them, no matter how one-sided, had been turned into a brutal contest of wills, something that had made his savage heart swell with satisfaction.

This was the same. Though these warriors fought in the finest battle-plate, they were cast in the same mould. The beastrider in particular – he was exactly the same, not in his regal appearance but in the sheer tenacity of his bearing.

There had been lightning that night, too. There had been bolts from the heavens that had burned through his horde and nearly turned them back from the final conquest. And then, right at the end, the great warrior – who had defied him and spat curses into his face and readied himself for a duel he could not possibly win – was gone, his place taken by charred earth and the stray crackles of celestial discharge.

Grizzlemaw whined, eager to take up the hunt again, straining on his iron leash. Perhaps the hell-hound recognised something too, and his every muscle twitched with desperation to rend and maim.

‘I know not how you have returned,’ growled Khul, swinging his axe-blade to clear a path through his own battle-incensed horde, ‘but I shall discover it before this night ends, and rip the truth from your shrivelled soul.’

Skullbrand had not welcomed the order from his lord. He had been primed to wade into the attack on the warriors below the gate, already relishing the cut of his axe-blade against their pristine battle-plate. Summoning the world beyond took time, and every moment he spent away from the slaughter made his soul ache.

The ground below him was now ankle-deep in blood, and his boots squelched through it as if through a mire. Most of it had come from of his own kind, it was true, but it mattered not from where the blood flowed.

He raised his standard high and more bronze flames licked up against it, drawn from the fevered storm around him. Every death fuelled the vortex, tearing at the barriers between the world of the senses and the deeper vaults of unreason below.

Those of the horde closest to him, at least those not utterly blinded by their battle-rage, let slip shouts of excitement as they saw the bronze flames leap, and the assault against the enemy redoubled in ferocity. Skullbrand slammed his battle-standard down into the earth. He pushed with such force that the bannerpole sunk in two feet deep, carving through the blood-rich soil with ease.

As soon as it was anchored, the magic leapt from it like steam from a geyser. Skullbrand cried out – eight times, each one a different curse, all of them summoning the Realm of Chaos to the mortal plane.

A column of bronze fire jetted out from the standard’s tip, searing out into the wild night and rivalling the silver lightning thrown by the angels. The earth beneath began to boil, making the blood-slicks bubble and steam. Old charred plates were thrust aside by a new landscape of hot brass, burnished by the seething sea of blood and spreading out from Threx’s position like a breaking wave.

The very air itself screamed, and the rock below cracked. Amid the racing howl of unearthly winds, the Realm of Chaos burst into reality, shoving aside that which had existed before and replacing it with its own writhing pillars of madness.

Skullbrand threw his armoured head back and roared with triumph. More bronze flames engulfed him, surrounding his body in a cloak of immolation. The earth cracked and charred, and the spilt blood erupted from it in gouts of hissing steam. A new rain began to fall, though it was as thick as slurry and stank of copper. Wherever the blood rain fell, the warriors of Chaos seemed to stand taller, to bellow louder, to sweep their axes with greater ferocity. They broke into the eternal chant – Blood for the Blood God! – in a brutal chorus of frenzied voices. Their armour burned with vermillion flames, and the air around them danced with the crackle of daemonic energies.

With the Realm summoned, Skullbrand released his grip on the staff. It remained lodged deep, poisoning reality and twisting the solid matter around it, but it no longer needed his guiding word. The bloodsecrator was now free to give in to his urges, and so thundered towards the slender thread of gold that even now kept his minions from taking the Gate.

‘Slaughter them!’ Threx bellowed, shaking with unfettered wrath and still wreathed in the burning bronze aura of the Blood God. ‘Slaughter them all!’

Vandus smashed his hammer down again, hurling the vast beast of Chaos back into the mass of bodies behind it. His Liberators pressed forward, fighting with their calm skill at arms, each one more than a match for the blood-rabble that faced them but still heavily outnumbered.

The Flayer was another matter – he used his flail as both a weapon and a deception, weaving clouds of darkness about him as he thrust and parried. The dracoth lunged for him, trying to rip his arm off, but Vekh was too quick, darting away before the teeth could close and dragging the spiked tips of his lashes across the noble beast’s muzzle.

All across the battlefield, the contest still lay in the balance. Vandus could see Anactos and the Skyhost weakening the portal’s wards with every strike, but it was not happening quickly enough. The charge of his Liberators had pushed the enemy back in on itself, but resistance was stiffening as the horde brought its sheer size to bear. If the Stormhost could not break the enemy’s resolve soon, Vandus knew he would have to retreat lest Ionus be overwhelmed – they did not have the strength to maintain two spearheads for long. Once he did that, though, then the battlefront would shrink further, allowing the enemy commander to throw his entire horde’s strength at a single point.

‘For Sigmar!’ he cried, blasting apart the skull of a blood warrior who got too close to the arcs of Heldensen.

The behemoth loomed back over him, inured to fear and enraged by the beating it had already taken. As it reached in again to swipe him from the saddle, Vandus leapt up, standing on the dracoth’s heaving spine, and whipped the hammerhead out towards it.

The beast made to dodge, believing the sigmarite was aimed at its flesh, but that was not Vandus’s intended target. With a shout of release, he channelled the power of the comet into the sacred weapon’s crown, and a stream of pure white fire burst from it, cascading into the onrushing beast’s charge and ripping deep into its burnished flesh.

It bellowed in agony, thrashing its great claws and trying to douse the flames that cascaded across it. The pure fires of Azyr pained it more than a thousand blows from its master’s whips, and it stumbled away, roaring in anguish.

With the behemoth seen off, the Flayer circled warily, bereft of his greatest weapon. He replaced his flails with a blade drawn from his belt, and waited for the mass of blood warriors to flank him. In a mirror movement, the surviving Liberators advanced around Vandus, and the two lines of warriors, crimson and gold, faced one another across a rare gap in the swirling melee.

‘Thus shall it be for you all,’ warned Vandus, returning Heldensen to its solid form and taking position back astride the dracoth’s back. ‘Leave this place and you shall endure life for another cursed dawn. Remain here and I shall end you now.’

As soon as the words had left his mouth, a great explosion rocked the landscape and a pillar of bronze energy thundered up from the ground over towards Ionus’s position. The detonation of magic was followed up by screams as the Realm of Chaos burst up from the heart of the battlefield.

Vekh laughed, as did those about him.

‘This is our place,’ he said. ‘You know not what we are capable of in it.’

Vandus quickly saw the truth of it. The warlord’s full tally of troops had now reached the battlefront, and the ranks of blood warriors had become almost endless. Banners to the God of Battles swung by the light of torches, rocking to the beat of human-hide drums, and the mocking laugh of triumph was already on the marauders’ lips. They were undaunted by any amount of losses, and the shed blood seemed to rouse them to ever-greater feats of bravado. Now that the very matter of the Corrupted Realm was spilling freely into the world of the senses, their strength was multiplied further.

The Realm was spreading, unravelling like a pox across the plains, bringing ruin with it. It was but a phantasm yet, but in that vision was the future of all Realms, should they fail. In those baleful fires and boiling metals was the destiny of mankind, the one that the God-King had seen more clearly than any other. It was infinite, and it was terrible.

Vandus hefted Heldensen and looked down at its unmatchable shaft. The gold of it was unsullied, for the blood of the unclean boiled away with its every strike. The sigil of the comet was emblazoned down its length, and icons of honour and splendour had been carved into the holy sigmarite by the priest-smiths of the God-King.

This was not the weapon of a mortal man. Mortal terrors had no hold on him now. He had been Reforged, made into something a little less than the gods themselves, and even daemons had no strength to compare with that.

He drew himself high in the saddle, and the storm-gale made his cobalt cloak billow. He raised the warhammer again and lightning arced down from the heavens to greet it.

‘Fear no scion of the Outer Dark!’ he roared. ‘Their grip is over, their terror is gone! To me, Eternals of the Storm! Dawn shall come again!’

With an answering roar, the Liberators took up their holy weapons, led by their lightning-crowned lord, and the cries of war echoed out once more.

Anactos cried aloud, transmuting his hammer into the pure essence of the comet, and flung the blue-white fire at the void beneath the Gate’s arch. The mixture exploded, sending a radial shockwave spiralling outwards. There was a sharp crack, an echo, a shower of dislodged stone, and he was hurled back.

With a surge of sudden hope, Anactos saw then that the Gate’s seal had been weakened. The bolts of his brothers had almost broken through, but now they were fighting hard just to stay alive, and the rain of comet-fire had slowed to a trickle.

Anactos himself was tumbling now, thrown out of position by the backwash from the explosion. He pushed down hard with his damaged wings, gaining a little loft. Though deathly weary, he summoned up yet another transmuted hammer, ready to convert the energy of the storm into a comet-bolt and send it spinning into the cracking centre of the Gate’s portal.

As he swivelled for the strike, he felt the storm pushing him down again, back into the open maw of the horde below. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a mighty champion in crimson armour, now no more than thirty feet beneath him. The icon-bearer was pulling his twin-bladed axe back for the throw, and Anactos knew that there was no way he could avoid it. He still had the energy of the comet cradled in his gauntlets, though. If he used that, he could smash the Chaos champion apart before he had the chance to loose the blade, giving him time to escape, to fight again, to survive.

Anactos allowed a smile to flicker across his ravaged face. He only had the power for one such bolt, and there was no question what he would do with it. With all his remaining power, he hurled the comet’s essence into the fractured heart of the portal. The very next moment he felt the thrown axe-blade bite into his spine, flung with perfect accuracy by the champion below.

The Skylord arched his back, stricken with purest agony, and plummeted to earth. He cartwheeled helplessly as he fell, unable even to see with any clarity whether he had penetrated the portal’s seals or not. The tempest screamed about him, ripping his broken armour from his breast. He had a sensation of extreme cold, before he cracked to the ground, his wings rent and his armour shattered.

His last living sight was of blood warriors clustered around him, their axes raised and their faces twisted in hatred and mockery.

He grinned bloodily at them. ‘By Sigmar, your breed is ugly,’ he rasped.

Then the blades fell.

The time had come, and Ionus could not longer remain behind his brothers. The Retributors had fought beyond even the stringent standards expected of them, defying exhaustion to hold the precarious cordon against an enemy that knew no fear and lived only for carnage. Despite all their heroism, a third of their number had been dragged down, too far away to be revived by the Cryptborn, their bodies hacked apart by the vengeful mobs. The survivors had been driven back steadily up the wide stairs leading to the portal itself, and there was now nowhere left to go.

Sensing the climax of their labours, Ionus at last joined them on the front line. He took up his reliquary in both hands and swung it like a mace, bludgeoning and thudding it into the oncoming ranks.

But that was not the only weapon in his arsenal – his arts gave him the power to restore life, but also to leech it away. With a dry hiss, Ionus released the storm-spirits from the reliquary’s heart, and crackles of bone-white lightning shot from the tempest above.

The lightning scored down, raking across the oncoming blood warriors and shrivelling them within their armour. Wherever the shafts hit, the warriors of Chaos were burned to death amid the dazzling electric flames, their skin crisping and smoking as it was seared from within. They twitched like marionettes before collapsing, smouldering amid their red-hot battle-plate.

That bought them a moment’s respite but it could not last. The warriors of the horde surged back into contact, their mania undimmed by their losses – indeed, the more of them that were killed, the more their enthusiasm for violence was stoked.

As Ionus fought on, he felt the first pangs of weariness in his arms. Another Retributor fell, disembowelled by a sickening swipe from a cleaver, and the line of defence teetered on the brink. As the passage of the stairway was gradually lost, Ionus caught sight of the great crimson-armoured champion, the one who had summoned the Realm of Chaos with his icon. He prepared himself, ready for the contest that would decide the final fate of the Gate’s defence.

But the icon-bearer did not engage. Instead, he hurled his axe high up into the heavens, its twin-bladed head spinning in a whirl of thrown blood droplets. Ionus followed its path, watching with horror as the weapon struck Anactos Skyhelm in the back, crippling the Prosecutor-Lord and sending him crashing to earth.

If that were all, then Ionus would have felt the grief for his loss and turned back to the fight, knowing the peril they were in. But Anactos, with his final living act, had sent a storm-blast into the very heart of the Gate’s pulsating mouth. Ionus watched it fly towards the target, streaking like a falling star.

When it hit, the impact was unlike the others – the entire expanse of emptiness blew apart like glass, shattering into a thousand shards. A massive secondary explosion blew out from the epicentre, tearing away the world’s storm in a riot of unleashed gold and white.

The shockwave was incredible, racing out like a tidal surge and felling all in its path. Prosecutors were ripped from the skies and tossed like gulls in the storm. Webs of gold shot across the ancient stonework, illuminating the eyes of the giants that held the arch aloft, and the runes crackled with new fires of argent.

Ionus reeled, driven to his knees by the gale, but somehow remained in place to watch the event for which so much had been sacrificed.

‘Hold fast, warriors of Azyr!’ he commanded, his grave-dry voice raising at last. ‘This is the hour!’

As he spoke, the raging tempest within the arch’s ambit exploded. The runes shattered, throwing slivers of red-hot stone high into the gale. Whole beams and buttresses crumbled, and the stairways and towers were thrown down. The rain blew outwards, sent flying from the detonation’s locus and hurled out wide across the raging fields of war.

In the midst of it all, the Gate itself changed. Old stonework crumbled and cracked, revealing a structure of purest ivory beneath. The faces of the statues were fully exposed, the patina of ages seared away, their serene faces once more gazing out over the Realm of Fire. A gale surged under the arch, driving out the last of the corrupted flames and replacing them with an inferno of gold.

And then, through the archway itself, sent hurtling into the heart of the tempest by arcs of cerulean lightning, came the Legions of Azyr at last. Rank after rank of Liberators materialised on the battlefield, sent through the ancient ways between the worlds and allowed passage by the unsealed Gate. Whole warbands of Prosecutors soared under the archway before riding high on the eddying winds, their hammers already glowing white. In their wake marched the Retributors, hastening to the aid of their surviving brothers on the great stair.

Despite himself, Ionus could not help cracking a dry smile of vindication. This was why they had dared the passage of the void, and it was for this that the labour of long ages had been expended.

The Gate was open. It would never be closed again. The Realmswar, so long in abeyance, had begun once more.

‘And so begins the time of vengeance!’ the Cryptborn declaimed, holding his reliquary aloft and releasing cold fires from its casket. ‘Now march, my brothers, and bring death to the enemy!’

When it happened, even Khul paused in his rampage. He felt the stormwind tear past, and saw the red flames of Khorne extinguished. The Gate’s portal blew apart and the besieging warriors were driven from its edge, replaced just moments later by a whole new army – ten times the number he had faced just a moment before, with more arriving all the time.

He gazed out at their sheer perfection. They were arrayed just as the others in a shimmering display of gold and cobalt, each of them bearing the hammer sigil on their peerless armour-plate. If they had been a formidable foe before, they were now truly daunting, a test for the greatest of all the Realms.

At that, Korghos Khul let slip a harsh laugh of pure pleasure. The Blood God had blessed him beyond measure. The long years of boredom and futility were forgotten in an instant, replaced by the fervour that only came from mortal danger.

His host felt likewise, and their war-cries reached a new pitch of feverish intensity. This is what they lived for. This was the glorious gift of the one who sat on the Brass Throne. No worthy enemy could blunt their fury, for their only fear was to be surrounded by weakness and decay. The return of the Celestial Legions was as welcome to his kind as the return of a great and noble ally, for it presaged nothing but eternal combat, the one thing that victory had deprived them of.

For all that, Khul quickly saw that the conquest of the Gate was doomed now. The lightning-chased Legions were swiftly reinforcing it, driving Skullbrand’s forces back down the slope and out on to the plains. The greater prize still remained, though – the beast rider yet lived, and was reaping a bloody swath through all that stood before him. There was no sign of Vekh, and the khorgorath was long gone. Other mighty beasts of the horde were being assailed by whole companies of Celestial knights, and the shape of the entire battle now hung in the balance.

It was only as Khul watched the helm-crested captain fight his way into the heart of the horde that the last of his long-discarded memories came rushing back. The Direbrands – that was what they had been called – the last of the great peoples to resist, the ones he had fought for a generation to subdue. Their chief’s name had been Blackfist, his very hands charred by the fires of battle but still able to carry the warhammer that had ever been his weapon.

But back then, just when Khul had thought that combat would at last be joined, the chance had been ripped away from him, lost in a snarl and a snap of lightning. He had raged beyond all reason at the loss, and his fury had lasted for a whole year before slipping into uneasy slumber. Even the Gift of Grizzlemaw, given to him in recognition of the slaughter of Azyr’s last free people, had not compensated, and the Realm of Fire had suffered grievously under his wrath.

Vendell Blackfist.

The more he watched, the more certain he became. Even if all else were cast into the fires of defeat, this was the task for which he had been sent to this place: to take the final Direbrand skull and place it atop the Red Pyramid. Such a sacrifice would guarantee his passage into ever-living service to the Blood God, from whence he would lead the forces of ruin into war across the planes of eternity.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ Khul thundered, throwing his arms wide and goading those about him into a frothing madness. ‘Skulls for his Throne!’

His horde did not waver. Not one of them turned to flee, for the blood warriors fed on slaughter as a lesser breed gorged on meats. The sight of the swelling ranks of golden warriors was like a drug, and they charged back into the grinder of battle with wild-eyed ecstasy on their scarred faces.

Khul let them go. He gave Skullbrand his head, and expended no energy seeking Vekh. Only one task remained for him, the one that he had been yearning for since the end of the ancient wars and the coming of the long victory.

‘The last of the Direbrands,’ he growled, striding out with Grizzlemaw at his side. ‘By the god who gives me strength, how I have longed for this day to come.’

Vekh watched the arrival of the Legions of Azyr, and his battle-frenzy turned to blackest rage. More clearly than any other, he saw the certain doom of the battle across the plains, and he howled his disbelief into the storm.

The blood warriors about him fell back, their aggression blunted at last by the advance of the lightning-borne. Vekh roared back at the horde, grabbing for their iron collars as they surged past him, ready to hurl them back into the fray, but the numbers were too great – a battle had a momentum to it, a rhythm like the tides, and the swell had been turned.

Skuldrak lumbered away, wailing still as the last flames of Azyr consumed its flesh. Vekh let it go, turning his flails instead on the mortals within range.

‘Back!’ he screamed. ‘Back!’

His whips cracked, snapping like loosed serpents, wrapping around the necks of the craven. Two of those closest to him lost their heads as the coils pulled tight, and others had their flesh lacerated. Hot blood splattered across Vekh’s armour, spurring him further.

He clambered up to higher ground, reaching an outcrop of black rock standing tall amid the boiling hordes. He screamed all the while, his scarred face running with spittle and his eyes blazing.

‘Stand fast, spineless filth!’ he bellowed, hurling the barbed scourge around him in wide arcs. ‘Recover your fury! Recover your rage!’

It should have been impossible for one man, no matter how mighty, to stem that gathering rout, but dread of the bloodstoker had been inculcated into every fighter of the Goretide since the earliest days of the Realms’ corruption. Those that did not die under the agonising lashes were stung back into the only emotion left to them: rage. The first one halted in his charge – a lumbering champion with severed hands clanking from chain-lengths about his neck. He turned, roaring in pain, before setting off back towards the oncoming enemy. Vekh’s whip slashed around again – four more blood warriors remembered their battle-lust, then eight, then a whole company.

‘Tear them apart!’ raved Vekh, driving them back, his arms pumping, his instruments of pain biting in a whirl of black-edged steel. ‘Cut them limb from limb and bathe in the blood that flows! Bring me skulls, enough to rival Khul’s own! Blood! Blood for the Blood God!’

He marched back down from the outcrop, laying about him with every stride. Roars greeted him – the recognition of a whole army. The rot had been stemmed and their kernel of defiance rekindled. They came with him now, chanting death-curses again, revelling in the weals that scored their angry faces and blood-raw backs.

Vekh drove them hard, hunting for any more that dared to pull clear from the field. The fiercest fighting was ahead of him, sundered by a sea of bodies. He had let the beastrider best him, drive off his khorgorath, and that insult could not be borne.

‘Follow me!’ he roared, goading his warriors into a charge. ‘The one who rides the beast! Kill him first, then kill them all!’

Vandus fought with the strength of a man renewed. With the breaking of the portal, a weight lifted from his arms, and Heldensen flew once more with the first vigour of the charge. Calanax pounced, catching blood warriors under his claws and shredding them to ribbons. The Liberators around him pressed the advantage, bolstered now by new warriors arriving at their backs. The horde of the enemy still outnumbered them but the gap had closed, and now the Eternals’ greater strength and skill was beginning to tell.

All of them knew that this was just the first of many Gates that would be opened. The God-King himself had closed them, right at the end of the age of darkness when the Realms were overrun. It had been His final act before the ways of the void were denied, and after that only the Celestial Realm had been preserved intact. Just as the last hope was failing, He had extended his reach into the heart of the losing battles. Those who fought on, even as their deaths were assured, were taken – pulled clear of the killing fields and dragged through the fast-closing portals.

After that, isolated from the Realms amid the spires of Sigmaron, came the agony of the transformation – the long change in which cleansing fire stripped the old life from them and gave them immortality in its stead. They were augmented, made stronger and faster than before. They were given the great warhammers to bear, and gifted armour of sigmarite cast in the purest shade of gold. The Reforging had been accomplished, and Legions of the Stormcast Eternals created.

All this had been done in the knowledge that one day, when enough strength had been assembled, they would each go back, the ways would be made straight again, and the arch through the abyss would be restored. To have failed here in the Realm of Fire would have set all that in ruins. The Fallen Gods would have redoubled their efforts, building new armies of daemons and the corrupted, accelerating their design to plunge every land into the one realm of pure Chaos before any hope of reconquest could be attempted.

The war ahead would be long, surely longer and more painful than any that had come before, but at least that first step had been taken. Vandus knew that other assaults were being launched even now, each across a different portal of the sundered kingdoms. One by one, the God-King’s armies were hammering at the closed doors, and one by one they would all be breached.

The knowledge of that gave him joy of a kind he had not experienced before, not even in the bliss of the Celestial Realm itself. At yet, even as he slew with abandon, pushing the enemy before him in a welter of cracked bone and broken armour, that joy was tempered by a greater realisation.

The face that he still bore in his dreams, the one that had never left him even amid the golden spires of Sigmar’s city, was long gone. Only on his return to the Realm of Fire did he truly understand how many years had passed, and how far sundered he was from the lives of all he had known. There would be no going back to the world he had once striven to save, for it was utterly destroyed, replaced by a living hell of endless violence. As his warhammer scythed around him, bringing destruction to all that stood in its path, Vandus saw that this victory would not give him what he had yearned for. He was conquering for others, those who would come afterwards to repopulate these scoured lands, but not for himself.

The Direbrands were gone. Vendell Blackfist was gone. All that remained was the thing he had been made into: the Lord-Celestant, the instrument of the God-King’s will.

‘For Sigmar!’ he thundered, wrenching his thoughts back to those of war. ‘For the Celestial Throne!’

And yet, even on the cusp of his great triumph, the war-cry was more angry than triumphant, and a hollow ring had entered into the words of glory.

Ionus led the charge down from the Gate and onto the plain below. All the momentum was with his forces now, and the blood warriors were crushed beneath the armoured boots of his retinue. Storm-spirits whined and swooped overhead, forming a protective shield above them. The Retributors were irresistible, striding with resolute confidence towards their brothers in Vandus’s column. Once the two flanks of the Legion joined up, the core would be unbreakable.

Even as he advanced south, though, Ionus remained vigilant for a reversal in fortunes. This was a dangerous time, and the enemy remained powerful. The icon-bearer was still alive, and the horde fought on amid the driving rain.

‘Do not give in to pride,’ he warned those about him, striving to keep them focused. ‘Those whom the fates raise up they may also cast down. Remain wary! Look to your brothers!’

As if to prove the truth of his words, a mighty bellowing broke out from the lower reaches of the delta, far beyond where any Eternal had yet penetrated. Something huge was barrelling up from the depths, roaring in berserk fury. Blood warriors were already running from it, unable to restrain whatever force had been unleashed within their midst.

Ionus let his staff blaze with pearl-grey illumination, lighting up the sea of warriors before them and exposing the source of the booming war-cries.

A second khorgorath had been loosed against them, and it was charging with all the force of a rolling tidal wave. Blood warriors and Liberators alike were crushed and swiped from its path, their armour no defence against the writhing nest of bone tentacles. Its mighty claws swung like jackhammers, gouging long trails in the earth before flinging the debris high. Ionus saw the drooling madness in its bestial face, and knew then that it had been flayed to within a hair’s breadth of destruction. It would recognise neither friend nor foe, but would destroy all in its path until the furnace of its existence was ended forever.

The Retributors about him immediately threw themselves towards it, all of them heedless of the danger and determined to bring their grandhammers to bear.

‘Leave it!’ cried Ionus, knowing that the creature was beyond their ability to kill, but he was too slow to prevent the clash.

Two score Retributors placed themselves in the beast’s path, and were swept aside. Many of them managed to strike it, breaking open huge wounds in the leviathan’s flanks, but nothing halted its rampage. One lone warrior held his ground before it, smashing the face of his lightning hammer into the khorgorath’s blood-streaked maw. The beast backhanded him with a flailing arm, sending the huge gold-armoured knight careering back into the following ranks of blood warriors.

‘Withdraw!’ cried Ionus, wrathful now. ‘The beast is mine!’

He swept to the forefront, blocking any more of the Retributors from taking the monster on. The khorgorath locked its red eyes on him and thundered in close, lowering its massive head like a bull on the gallop.

Its force was almost unstoppable – a living mountain of muscle and sinew, all allied to a soul of fire. Even the Cryptborn, with all his mastery of the laws of life and death, felt a beat of doubt as he saw the colossus bearing down on him.

‘Shyish!’ he cried, thrusting his staff before him and bracing for impact.

The khorgorath crashed into a summoned wall of pale grey energy, and its blood-red body instantly changed colour, whitening like embers after the fire’s death. Its headlong charge lurched to a halt, and it skidded to one side, dropping its enormous shoulder as its legs gave way.

Ionus remained steadfast, pouring on more of the deathly, soul-sapping magic. The khorgorath writhed amid the clutching strands of grey, its mighty heart hammering, its jaws clenched open in agony. It reached out with a claw, determined to strike at the source of its pain, but Ionus sidestepped the blow. His reliquary blazed with a frigid flame and the beast of Khorne crumpled to the dust, its brutal spirit spent.

As the khorgorath expired before him, Ionus at last released the spell and clutched the staff for support, his head light. Summoning up such force, with so little preparation, had almost ended him. The Retributors surged onwards, fanning around him to press the advantage. Before them lay a long path of ruin, the channel gouged by the khorgorath’s devastating run, strewn with the bodies of both Eternals and blood warriors.

It was only then, just as the dust was settling and troops on both sides were able to recover, that Ionus saw what purpose the charge had served. Standing amid the detritus was a skull-masked lord, one who bore a huge axe one-handed. He held a daemon-hound on an iron leash. He smiled coldly, and strode towards the Cryptborn at the head of a phalanx of plate-armoured guards.

‘Your task was to die here,’ the warlord told him, coming closer with every ponderous stride. ‘I loosed this beast to drive a road towards my prey, and yet you remain to bar the way.’

As soon as he saw the axe flickering with baleful energies, Ionus knew he was outmatched. Even had he not released the death-essence to fell the khorgorath, the contest would still have been beyond him.

He pulled himself up to his full height, kindling new ghoulish light above the crown of the reliquary.

‘You do not know what it is to die,’ Ionus said dryly, preparing for the clash.

All around him, his Retributors charged once more into battle, aiming to take the warlord out of the contest. They were met by the lord’s bodyguard, and the two flanks of warriors clashed together, neither side unable to reach the other’s master.

‘Your kind is not of this world,’ said the warlord, his cruel voice more intrigued than angry. ‘At least, not all of you are.’

‘All worlds are the realm of Sigmar,’ Ionus replied, happy to keep talking for as long as possible – it gave him time to recover. ‘When we are done with them, your kind will be but a foul memory.’

The warlord nodded slowly, as if he approved of the sentiment. ‘But you are different,’ he mused, still holding back from the charge, though his hound pulled at the chain. ‘You say “Sigmar”, but it does not mean the same as when the others chant his name. What are you, I wonder? What path has led you to fight alongside these lesser souls?’

Ionus smiled beneath his deathmask. If things had been different, he might have been pleased to recount the tale. He would have told of the debt he owed the God-King, and the ancient curse that his choice had made him subject to. He would have told of Nagash, the deity who slumbered still but would be sure to come for him when the toll of years was complete. He might have said that, yes, he was different, and that he was the Lord-Relictor of the Stormhost, privy to secrets that not even the Hammerhand had been made a party to, and that every road ahead of him was dark and filled with pain whatever the outcome of this battle.

In the event, he merely leaned on his staff, drawing what strength from it he could, and gave the warlord a grim salute.

‘I know your purpose,’ Ionus told him. ‘With what power I have, I will prevent you.’

At that, the enemy warlord laughed out loud. ‘I care nothing for you, death-lord,’ he said, loosing the hound’s collar, ‘but you stand between me and my prey, and thus your time draws to its close.’

The hell-hound pounced, leaping for the Cryptborn’s throat. Ionus swatted it aside with a blast from his reliquary, but by then the warlord had swept into contact. Khul brought his axe down, aiming to shatter Ionus’s pauldron, but the Cryptborn shrank back, blocking the strike with the reliquary’s staff.

The impact was crushing, forcing him down to his knees. Ionus pushed back, but his strength ran from him like water from a broken jar.

‘Should you live, be sure to seek me out when all is over,’ whispered Khul, pressing down savagely. ‘There is room in my ranks for one such as you.’

Then he suddenly released the pressure. Ionus tried to rise, to slam his staff into the warlord’s chest, but the movement had only been made in order to clear space for another strike. Khul, snapping his arms around, swept his axe crossways, catching the rising Ionus square in the throat. The blade clanged into the Cryptborn’s gorget, and he was ripped from his feet and thrown through the air. As he tumbled through the dust, his vision going black and his senses deserting him, Ionus loosed a final flurry of storm-spirits, aiming to suck the life from the warlord just as he had done with his lesser warriors.

Grizzlemaw, though, was in their path. The daemon-hound snatched the spirits from the air, and ripped them from reality with a shake of his neck.

Ionus felt their deaths as an icy spike through his heart, and his last strength gave out. His golden helm struck the ground, and his hands slipped free of the reliquary’s staff.

Khul walked towards him idly, hoisting the axe high and preparing to use it, when a lone voice cut through the battling warriors around them.

‘No further.’

Khul turned, and a broad smile creased across his bony jawline. Grizzlemaw growled and raised its hackles, but the warlord merely prepared himself, bracing the axe across his body and planting his feet firmly for the onslaught.

‘Then all is accomplished,’ he said, his deep voice resonant with pleasure. ‘You face me at last, and thus my final trophy finds its home.’

Setting eyes on Khul at last, Vandus felt a surge of old emotions. His dracoth roared, desperate to strike, and the daemon-hound did likewise. In every direction, Liberators, Retributors and blood warriors remained locked in mortal combat, a sweep of violence that ran from the Gate’s edge to the mouth of the valley beyond. Everything was in motion, everything was poised.

And yet he could not move. The warlord of Chaos stood before him, just as he had been in the other age. He had grown in stature since then, and there were more skulls hanging from his iron belt, but the crimson helm and the black-toothed mouth were the same, as was the crackling axe-blade at his side that had laid whole kingdoms low.

For the first time since setting foot in this land, Vandus felt his twin lives truly blur. He was the Lord-Celestant, bringer of Sigmar’s wrath. He was the chief of the Direbrands, doomed to die before the blades of the Goretide.

Khul fixed him with his dark eyes and amusement twitched across his exposed mouth.

‘The one who ran,’ he said. ‘That is what they named you, in the later years. They cursed that name even as I killed them.’

Those words hit home. Vandus remembered how it had been – the howl of anguish, the pleading to be sent back. Every soul he had pledged to protect had died that night, bereft of the warhammer that would have been wielded in their defence.

‘This realm is now taken from you,’ Vandus said, holding the dracoth back, loath to launch the attack that he had been created to make. ‘The Gate is secured. You have no purpose here but to die at my hand.’

Khul remained smiling, and flickers of blood-red fire raced across the edge of his axe-blade. ‘No purpose? You are my purpose, Direbrand. You are the culmination of my great quest, and when your age-bleached bones are placed atop the pyre of Khorne, then all these realms will be mine.’

The voice was so terrifyingly familiar. Vandus remembered the raw fear, how he had forced himself to fight through it. All mortals were subject to that fear – Khul was a creature of a maddened pantheon, a mere cipher for their limitless malice. The stuff of Chaos leaked out from his every pore, and though he was already less than a man, it would take but a fraction more power to make him far greater than a daemon.

‘The God-King foresaw this day,’ replied Vandus. His voice was as steady as his weapon-arm, but it belied the turmoil within – he spoke to remind himself as much as he did to challenge his old adversary. ‘You laughed then, but your defeat was already ordained.’

‘Laughed?’ roared Khul, outraged. ‘Gods of Ruin, boy, I was enraged! I laid a dozen kingdoms in ashes and still my thirst was not slaked.’ But he was laughing truly now, his eyes shining with a raw exuberance. ‘If I had known that you would return, that the only one of my enemies who had ever escaped me would come back to me, I would have spared them so much pain.’ He fixed Vandus with a sardonic look, utterly unafraid, drenched in the strutting confidence he had always displayed before the kill. ‘They died because you left them, Direbrand. That is the truth of it, and you know it in whatever heart your God-King has given you.’

Boy. That was what the warlord had called him, just before the lightning had come. In truth he must have been little more than a child then, bearing weapons forged from crude metal and defending collections of hovels barely capable of standing in a gale. Now he was the first of the Legions of Azyr, gifted power beyond mortal reckoning, and still the word ‘boy’ cut him to his soul.

Vandus. Vendell.

That was enough.

He released his hold over the dracoth, and took up his warhammer as the creature powered into the charge. At the same moment, the daemon-hound pounced, joined by its master in the race to combat. Khul leapt high, striving to reach Vandus and launching a great circuit of his axe. Vandus parried, and the two weapons clanged from one another, sending a shockwave blazing out from the impact.

As the two warriors spun apart, the dracoth took on the daemon-hound, and together the two beasts fell into a snarling, snapping brawl. Khul swept back in close, thrusting his blade at Vandus’s body, and this time the collision nearly wrenched Heldensen from his grip.

‘Your gifts have not made you stronger,’ said Khul, mockingly. ‘You were weak then, you are weaker now.’

Vandus swung the hammerhead across, generating huge momentum, but the blow rebounded from Khul’s counter-strike and the fires along its ensorcelled length guttered out. Calanax was holding its own against Grizzlemaw, but nothing seemed to harm the Lord of Khorne. They traded more swipes, denting and cracking the armour they both wore, and neither broke through to give the decisive wound. The wider battle raged about them, though no warrior dared to intervene in their lords’ duel, locked as they were in deadly struggles of their own.

Khul changed tack then, falling back by a stride’s length. The dracoth sensed the retreat and thrust after him, trying to seize him by the neck. Grizzlemaw leapt for the creature’s scaled shoulder and lodged fast, driving its yellow teeth into the flesh. The dracoth reared, wrenching himself from the daemon-hound’s grip, giving Khul his opening as Vandus struggled to control his mount – the warlord’s axe found a way through, biting deep along Vandus’s armoured thigh, and the Lord-Celestant cried aloud.

The blood warriors in earshot roared with scorn as they heard the sound, and the Liberators felt a shard of doubt enter their souls. The duel had become the locus around which the entire battle revolved – with no breakthrough from either army, it had come down to the survival of the lords that led them.

Khul sprang back, evading Vandus’s vengeful strike, panting hard. For all his mastery, he too had taken heavy damage, and his strength, though immense, was not infinite.

‘Will you be taken from me again, I wonder?’ mused Khul, circling the dracoth, keeping his axe-edge high. ‘At the moment when I hold your life in my hands, will your God-King pull you from peril as he did before?’

Vandus barely heard the words. Everything he had done since his Reforging now hung on this moment. He had been sent to Aqshy to slay the warlords who ruled it, and now, with the storm of Sigmar’s wrath circling above him, he was still holding back. His power felt blunted, incomplete. Every time he aimed Heldensen at his adversary, his aim lacked the sharpness it had possessed in a hundred other duels.

The dracoth was undeterred, and lashed out fiercely at the hound. The two beasts were bleeding freely now, their jaws a mess of torn flesh. Khul prowled back for the next strike, his dark outline radiating a casual lethality.

‘Why even return?’ the warlord asked. ‘Can you not see it? There is nothing left. You should have kept the Gate closed – we will come hunting for you now, just as you have done for us.’

The taunt had been designed to enrage him, to place the fear in him that Azyr too might be at peril, but Vandus did not linger on those words. The ones that resonated with him were the others: there is nothing left.

And then he understood. His grief had risen when he had seen what he was fighting for – the fire-scarred wastes, the old ruins. That was not what he had once striven to protect. He had breathed the realm’s parched air and smelled its charred bones, and his mighty heart had sunk.

Even now, an aspect of him was lodged in that other world, the place in which all his old loves had dwelt. He had been a part of that, and in the long years of preparation a part of him had hoped something would be left to retrieve – some survivors, some mark of the old civilisation. When it was clear that the past was lost, that hope had dissolved. He could not fight for the Aqshy of the present as he might have done for the Aqshy of the past.

And therein lay his fault – he had let his old self swim up to the surface, for the grief was not his, it was Vendell’s. Vandus had not been sent to restore the realm of the past, he had been sent to create the realm of the future.

Heldensen roared into flame once more. The sign of the comet emblazoned on his armour burst out with a pure light, reflecting the hidden glory of the Celestial Realm. Vandus pulled the dracoth’s head around, driving him hard at the waiting figure of Korghos Khul.

The warlord gave no sign he had detected the change, and raced to rejoin battle. Their weapons smashed into one another once again, but this time it was the axe that rebounded, its fires wavering. Vandus flung down another blow, knocking Khul back and sending him staggering.

Vandus spoke no words, for his fury was now enough. Khul recovered himself, his laughter gone. In a thousand years he had never been bested, and he surged back into contact, his blade whirling about him in tighter circles.

Vandus angled his hammer down, aiming to catch the axe-head in mid-flight. As he did so, his dracoth missed his aim, freeing Grizzlemaw to strike. The daemon-hound leapt clear of Vandus’s steed, its jaws agape. At the last moment, Vandus wrenched Heldensen to block it, and Grizzlemaw’s teeth clamped on to the golden hammerhead.

That left him exposed, and Khul was there to take advantage. The lord of Khorne sent a vicious swipe whistling for Vandus’s unguarded neck, crying out with triumph as the killing blow swept in. There was no evading that strike, for Khul had poured all his long festering hatred into it, and it was unleashed with an infinite outpouring of his seasoned malice.

‘For the Blood God!’

But Khul’s cry of triumph was cut short. The Lord-Celestant’s outline blazed with azure fire, and he wrenched the hammerhead from Grizzlemaw’s jaws. Khul’s axe-head cut through the haze of crackling lightning, but connected with the lightning-crowned metal. The two weapons clashed again, each one propelled by the entirety of their bearer’s strength. With a thunderous crash, the full power of the storm was unlocked, and this time it was Khul who was thrown back.

His armour still incandescent with shimmering celestial energies, Vandus pressed the attack, and Heldensen smashed through Khul’s hurried guard, knocking the cursed iron aside. Another hammer-blow flew in, angled back, flinging Khul’s blade from his hand and hurling it end over end into the horde beyond. For the first time the warlord’s eyes betrayed fear – he could see the prize slipping away from him, eluding his grasp just as it had done before. He snarled and leapt straight for Vandus, talons outstretched, going for his neck.

Vandus was too fast, though, and Heldensen hurtled around, catching the oncoming warlord full in the chest. The lightning-wreathed head cracked the crimson armour open, and Khul was sent tumbling away, the first roar of true pain leaving his bloodied lips.

The dracoth pounced, going after Grizzlemaw and digging the talons in deep. Vandus pushed clear of the saddle, joining the assault on the daemon-hound. He waded in close, waiting for the coiled spring, and caught the beast in mid-jump. Grizzlemaw was immune to the sacred fire burning along Heldensen’s shaft, but was as subject to the indomitable strength of sigmarite as any mortal creature. The heavy hammerhead crunched into its ribcage, driving in the bones and tossing the broken-backed hound aside.

Then Vandus turned back to Khul. The warlord had been thrown many yards back, hurled into the heart of his own warriors, crushing many of them beneath his armoured bulk. Khul stayed prone, his weapon gone and the fires of Khorne extinguished. Vandus went after him, his hammer now light in his grasp. The moment had come and there was no doubt remaining. The Brimstone
Peninsula of old had been destroyed, and the ruined butcher before him was just one small facet of that tortured past. With his death the new age could begin – the age of renewal.

‘Nothing remains,’ Vandus said, his voice cold. Khul stared up at him, bleary-eyed, half comprehending. ‘Aye, nothing remains, not of this place, and not of the man I once was. You should not have come back to face me, warlord, for all things have changed.’

Vandus Hammerhand drew Heldensen back then, poised to deliver the strike that would end his ancient tormentor. Khul snarled, his throat catching with bubbles of blood, and something kindled under the shadow of his helm – a fell light, igniting like stirring embers.

Vandus met that gaze, and was instantly caught. Visions thrust into his mind, as clear as shafts of fire. He saw eight towers, each bridging the void between the burning horizon and the storm-cracked sky. Between those towers he saw another Gate, a vast remnant of ensorcelled stone and iron, shackled with mighty chains and wreathed in blood-red immolation. And yet this one led not to the glory of the God-King’s realm, but to the depths of madness beyond all mortal reckoning. Under its lintel seethed a gaping wound in reality, one through which unbounded malice bled into the worlds of the living.

Under the shadow of that gate stood the pyramid of skulls – the one Khul had boasted of. In those shuddering visions the warlord lived and climbed to the summit, his progress lit by the baleful glow of the open Gate. Khul carried a lone burden in his exposed claw – a severed head, still glistening with flesh.

Vandus reeled, just for a moment, consumed by the vision before him. He recognised the features on what remained of that face and it chilled him to his soul. Below him, Khul let a smile flicker across his bruised mouth.

‘For the Blood God!’ came a frenzied cry, cutting through the tumult.

The spell of the vision broke, and Vandus’s gaze snapped up.

The words were not the warlord’s. The whip-wielder had returned, driving a fresh phalanx of blood warriors and bloodreavers before him. The newcomers crashed into the battling lines, scattering the vanguard of Liberators and pushing them back deep into their own ranks.

Vandus alone stood firm, recovering himself and smashing aside the blood warriors that slammed into him. He slew swiftly, his hammer scything, but hundreds swarmed at him, driven by the merciless goad in their midst.

Vandus’s dracoth reared up, tearing and ripping his way to his side, and the two of them were reunited amid a swirling sea of foes, each fighting furiously just to stay on their feet and not get dragged under the bow-wave of the assault.

‘For the God-King!’ Vandus cried, remounting even as he shattered the skulls of those trying to haul him down.

They were pushed back towards the Gate, where they were joined by Liberators fighting back after the shock of the charge. The crush intensified, and the fighting rose to an apex of desperate brutality. There was no room for art, no space for finesse – Celestial resolve was pitted against a riptide of mindlessness, and the Hammers of Sigmar fought back then as savagely and as pitilessly as those they faced.

Caught in the centre of it all, driven westward, Vandus caught a last glimpse of Khul, trampled by his own kind, lost under the rampage of ironshod boots. It was impossible to tell whether he lived or died, but he was soon beyond all hope of reaching.

Freed of his baleful presence, though, Vandus felt a sudden lifting of the dread that had hung in their air since the warlord’s arrival. The tenor of the storm itself changed, and all across the battlefield the Eternals sensed it. A great shout, issued from thousands of immortal lips, rose up into the maelstrom-driven air.

Sigmar!

The battle-chant resounded across the Igneous Delta for the first time in mortal memory. The Gate remained open, and more Eternals were coming through the portal with every passing moment.

The dracoth swept his serpentine head from side to side, gouging out the throats of all within range. The Stormhost regained its shape, responding to the onslaught as they had been trained to. The final charge had been vicious, but even the champions of the horde, those steeped deepest in battle-rage, could see that with Khul’s defeat, the night was already lost. This land’s marred sun would rise soon, casting red light over a new vista of gold and cobalt.

Vandus raised his warhammer aloft, and it blazed with the unbound splendour of the lightning’s heart.

‘Azyr!’ he cried. ‘For the God-King!’

And as one the Hammers of Sigmar took up the shout, surging back at the enemy with the light of the Celestial Realm burning in their eyes.

Hours passed before the last of the enemy was beaten back. Even in defeat many of them still fought on, bitterly contesting every last tract of ground. More Eternals fell in that fighting, brought down by the savagery of the blood-crazed horde.

But Vandus came among them again, his strength now unmatched, and the last resistance was broken. Khul never returned. Of Vekh the Flayer there was no sign, nor of the beast he had enslaved. Skullbrand, bereft of the leadership of his master, was hammered back into the west, and with him went the last of the Realm of Chaos, melting back into the earth in rippling waves of oily smoke. Phalanxes of Liberators pursued the defeated horde, only halting when the dangers of becoming isolated became too great. Then they set the banners of Azyr to fly on the ruined walls, and mounted a guard on the hollow towers. With the rising of the sun, the entire plain was taken, ready for the next assault. Others would already be preparing to cross the void to secure what had been won, but the Hammers of Sigmar could not rest for long – their task had long been ordained, and before the blood had cooled on the battlefield they would be marching again.

Only when the last of the enemy had been slain did Vandus return to the Gate. By then he had given his dracoth freedom to hunt freely, and now he walked across the earth in the manner of the rest of his Eternals, his footfalls sinking deep into the gore-rich soil.

Ionus was waiting for him at the foot of the stone stairway, leaning heavily on his reliquary staff. The Cryptborn bowed as the Hammerhand approached, as did all the Stormhost present.

‘So his faith in you was vindicated,’ said Ionus, dryly. ‘In the end.’

Vandus smiled. ‘You witnessed it. Did you doubt?’

‘When I saw you fight like a callow youth, yes. Not at the conclusion. What ailed you?’

Vandus looked about him. The sheer despoliation still had the power to chasten. ‘This place,’ he said. ‘Though we were warned, there could be no preparing.’

Ionus grunted. ‘That was why you were charged with forgetting. The Reforging should have made you whole.’

‘And you, then, Cryptborn? You have forgotten too?’

Ionus let slip a harsh laugh. ‘Well, we must both learn – there can be no going back.’

‘No, but there may be a second forging, for you and all the others.’ Vandus looked out over his army, their armour now streaked with blood and soiled with the filth of the Igneous Delta. ‘This was mine.’

The two of them began to walk up the long stone stairwell, Ionus limping heavily. Above them soared the arch of the Gate, now glinting in the light of the world’s sun. Age had been stripped away by the storm’s wrath, and the artistry of its makers was revealed once more.

In time, more than Eternals would come through that portal. Artificers and stonewrights would return, making good what had been laid low. This ground won was just a fragment of the Brimstone Peninsula’s vast expanse – they had established a mere pinprick of light against the swath of darkness that ran off into every compass point. When those points of light were united, drawn together by the coming of many Stormhosts, then the war would flourish in earnest.

They both knew that other portals were under attack now. Some would succeed, carving new paths into the territory of the great enemy. Others would no doubt fail, though their valour would still be a testament to the God-King’s vision. This was just the start, the unfolding of a thousand battles that would sweep across lands long lost to despair.

‘And what of Khul?’ asked Ionus, breathing heavily as he climbed. His wounds had been grave, and even the Lord-Relictor would take time to recover from them.

‘He lives,’ said Vandus. ‘The shame of his survival will haunt him, just as mine did me.’ He looked out across the ruins. ‘He will return, once his broken body has healed. We must be ready.’

Ionus nodded. ‘And so we will be.’

Vandus said nothing of his vision then – the Gate into the abyss, the pyramid of skulls. He would be compelled to, in time, for already his mind was turning to the campaign to come. He would have to bend Ionus to his will before the Stormhost marched next, and that would not be easy.

The two of them reached the summit of the stair. Above them soared the archway, now free of the fires that had raged across it. The air hummed with an actinic charge and lightning still flickered around its edges, but only the deep bloodstains on the stone marked the true scale of what had taken place under its shadow.

The air tasted of ashes, and the copper tang of blood underpinned it all. The great heaps of bone were visible in the distance, hazy in the dawn, and beyond them reared the faint outlines of greater towers.

Ionus halted, and shot him a wry smile. ‘You have tidings you wish to share,’ he said. ‘But take a moment, lord, to consider what has been done this night.’

‘And just what has been done, Cryptborn?’ asked Vandus, feeling the weariness of the long fight catch up with him at last. ‘We are conquering a burned wasteland. Whatever evil we succeed in slaying, we come too late.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Ionus. ‘Perhaps not. Come – I have something to show you.’

Throughout the night of horror, they had never moved. They had hugged the stone, burrowing down as if they could somehow tunnel their way out of harm’s way. The sky itself had burned, riven with flames of both bronze and silver, and the rocks below had groaned and cracked.

Of all the fears she had endured, that had been the very worst. Kalja had long been resigned to her own life ending in bloodshed, but this was different – the world was ending, tipped on its axis, dissolving into a screaming vortex of madness.

At the start, she had been glad to see the bloodreavers retreat, but then she had seen what they were retreating from. The storm-borne were daemon-kind, surely, thrown down from the fiery skies and sent to visit anguish on the mortals below. Their faces were horrific – golden masks that gave away nothing – and they bore enormous weapons of fire and steel. Each one was far taller than a man, and their voices were fell and strident.

The others of the tribe had been shaking by then, locked down, caught between the gathering of armies too vast to comprehend. Their long flight across the delta had ended at the hill of the three towers, and Kalja’s faint hopes of holding off their pursuers amid the ruins had at last been exposed.

But then, slowly, the shape of the battle had changed. Kalja had seen the daemon-kind take on the bloodreavers, and after them the larger horde that had followed. All the fighting had been concentrated on the massive arch-ruin, and the hill-side where they sheltered was forgotten.

They were not daemons. She saw that as she had watched, half in terror, half in fascination. Though they inspired fear, it was not the mind-numbing dread of the aethyr-born, but a cleaner fear, one generated solely from their warlike mien and savage bearing. They were brave, astonishingly so, throwing themselves into the very centre of the great army that had followed them over the plains. For a long time they had been isolated and heavily outnumbered, surely destined to die below the ruins they were striving so valiantly to hold, and at one point she had got to her feet, ready to race down into the inferno to join her blade with theirs.

Svan had pulled her back. ‘Are you mad?’ he had hissed. ‘Leave them to slaughter each other!’

But this had not been just another of the endless feuds between rival powers – this had been something new, something that no one had witnessed before. She had continued to watch, desperately urging the newcomers to prove their worth, even when it looked like their demise was imminent. When the Gate had opened and the second great host of gold had emerged through it, she had had to quash a cry of joy, burning up from inside and threatening to spill from her mouth.

After that, the battle had raged with even more intensity. The storm had thundered and the lights had become blinding. She had not seen the end, for the noise and the elements’ torment had at last pushed her back down into the meagre protection of the stones about her, crouched like an infant, her hands clamped over her ears.

Right at the end, though, when the horde had finally been broken, there had been fighting at last. Some of the warlord’s warriors had fled in their direction, and Kalja and the others had taken up arms in their frozen fingers. She had killed one blood warrior, catching him unawares as he vaulted the walls, but then others had rounded on her, their blades glinting by the light of the fires.

She had hissed a curse at them and prepared to die with as much ferocity as she could muster, when one of the golden knights burst among them. His movements had been of a different order to those he fought – his warhammer had flown in a blur of speed, crushing and maiming with every bone-jarring hit. Those he had not slain quickly fled, limping off into the dark and carrying life-ending wounds. Then the masked killer had turned on Kalja, his warhammer angled to end her too.

She had been too shocked to move. As the rain had scythed down, she had stood stock-still, her blunt knife dripping in her hand. The masked killer had hesitated, clearly unsure. Others of the tribe, scattered by the blood warriors’ attack, had crept back, all of them gaping up at the newcomer, like her too overwhelmed to intervene.

‘If you are here to kill me,’ she had said, forcing the words out through fear-tight lips, ‘then do so now.’

On hearing the words, the gold-armoured warrior had relaxed his grip on the hammer. He had fallen to one knee before her, bringing his head to a level with her own, studying her face intently. Kalja had suffered the scrutiny, feeling wretched and filthy set beside his splendour.

‘You are whole,’ the warrior had said, and his voice had been deeper and more resonant than anything she had ever heard. There had been something else there, also – astonishment, perhaps. ‘By Sigmar, you are whole.’

Vandus listened to the mortal tell her tale, not interrupting until the end. Ionus stood besides him, as did Avaren, the Liberator who had discovered her. Smoke from the pyres drifted across the plains below them, a dirty brown that stained the overcast sky.

The Lord-Celestant tried to resist the urge to stare openly at her. Part of him was appalled by her very existence – she was a wretch, her bones protruding starkly, her rags hanging from a skeletal frame in layers of filth. For all that, she stood proudly before them, her shoulders pushed back, her fingers fidgeting at the knife-hilt tied to her belt. There was defiance there.

Once she finished speaking, he went up to her, falling to one knee as Avaren had done. Even stooped he was far taller than her, and set beside his war-finery she looked almost comically fragile.

And yet, he thought, they endured here throughout all the ages of darkness. Could we, with all our gifts, have done the same?

‘What are you called?’ he asked, speaking as gently as he could.

‘I am named Kalja,’ she said.

‘How many of you are there?’

‘Just what you see, lord.’ Less than twenty had survived the night, and all those who remained were sick and famished.

‘And are there more, out in the wilds?’

‘How many, I know not. If others live, then they are hunted as we were.’

Those words made him angry. These were the children of humanity, the last remnants of a once-great people. For them to be chased down like beasts was the darkest of the blasphemies that had been visited on this cursed land.

‘Do you know what we are?’ he asked.

The woman stared at him blankly. He might as well have asked her how best to compass the moon. She had known in her life nothing but the theology of Dark Gods, and the name of Sigmar had never been uttered in a mortal’s hearing. The sigils he bore on his armour were as esoteric to her as the icons of Chaos were to him.

Seeing her confusion, he reached up and lifted his helm from his head. For the first time, she beheld him as he truly was. There was immediate recognition there, for although Vandus was an Eternal, changed and augmented by the powers of the Celestial Realm, his features were still those of a man.

‘We are salvation,’ he told her. ‘We are the end to pain and the beginning of hope. While one of us draws breath, you will never be hunted again. We are the warriors of Sigmar, and this is the dawn of his Age.’

Some of what he said made no sense to her, but the tone of his words clearly struck home, for a line of tears ran down her grimy cheek. For an instant, Vandus was reminded of the old image, the one he had cherished even in the midst of the lamplit halls of Sigmaron.

When she had smiled, he remembered, her dark eyes had held the light of stars.

He might have pressed Kalja further then. Perhaps, if the fates had allowed it, he would have discovered that she was some scion of a tribe he had known, maybe of even the Direbrands themselves. He almost asked her, for her defiant face was so similar, so redolent of the one he had known.

But the question died on his lips. He had passed the test amid the fires of war, and would not tread that path again. It mattered not where this human came from, nor what blood ran in her veins – she was a daughter of Sigmar, and her survival alone was surety that the return to the Realms was not made in vain.

‘Then,’ she asked, looking unsteady on her feet, ‘are the wars over?’

A desperate hope was burning in her brown eyes, one that vied with exhaustion. She had been taken to the very edge of extinction, as had all her people, though Cryptborn assured him she would survive.

Vandus would have loved to have told her that they were over, but here, in this place, at the first reunion between those who had been left and those who had returned, she deserved the truth.

‘When all is accomplished, they will be,’ he said. ‘From this day forth, every last tithe of strength will be spent to reconquer what was lost, and to hold it, and to rebuild anew.’

Then his faint smile faded, for he could still smell the ashes of burning, and knew that the bloodshed of the past night was but a foretaste of what was to come, in this and every other Mortal Realm.

‘But for now,’ he said, never letting his eyes leave hers, ‘I tell you truly, they are only just beginning.’

Chapter One

God-forged

The bolt struck Vandus Hammerhand like a spear flung from the heavens. First there was light, a searing luminescence so bright it eclipsed all sense of being and self. Then pain brought him back with white daggers of pure agony. Heat, fury, and the drumbeat of immortal vigour rushing through his veins reached a crescendo so loud it turned into deafening silence.

Then peace, a feeling of true solace and quietude.

Vandus would come to learn it was always this way. This is what it meant to be born of the storm and borne by the storm.

Reforged, wrought anew. Brought back. This is what it was to be eternal. But as with all such godlike deeds, this apotheosis did not come without a price.

Before…

After defeating Korghos Khul, the Hammerhands went north.

Though the Goretide were scattered, their ranks would swell again. The war against the dominion of Chaos was far from over, but Sigmar’s Stormcasts had won a great victory at the Gate of Azyr. Now that momentum had to be seized upon were it to mean anything.

And so the Hammerhands went northward.

Thousands clad in unalloyed sigmarite crossed the Igneous Delta. Liberators bloodstained and begrimed by war marched with grandhammers slung across the burnished plate of their shoulder guards. Dour Retributors strode in grim silence, their massive lightning hammers held firm across their chests. Above the infantry, retinues of unearthly Prosecutors had taken wing and soared across the blighted sky. At the clarion sound of the warrior-heralds’ war horns, their masked brethren below would close ranks and raise shields, knowing an enemy horde approached.

There had been many enemies, for the Igneous Delta and its surrounding lands were overrun by those bound in blood to Khorne.

It would fall to other Stormcast Eternals to hold the realmgate they had opened to Azyr. At least now they had a foothold at the Brimstone Peninsula, something to defend. But the vanguard could not rest. They had to forge on, despite the lead in their limbs.

Only when night had fallen and they reached the crags did they stop to make camp on a sheltered plateau of rock. Here the army had mustered, whilst a few of its leaders had walked up the shallow incline to a second smaller plateau from which they might gauge the best route onwards.

‘This is a strange land,’ murmured Dacanthos as he regarded the rime of frost around the fingers of his gauntlet. He clenched it in a mailed fist, shattering the ice that had formed.

‘Agreed,’ said Sagus, leaning on the head of his lightning hammer as the caustic wind of the delta tried to sear his armour. The air was rank with the stench of blood and cinder. It carried a foul cawing, like the mockery of crows, only deeper, as if uttered from the throat of a larger beast. Several carrion-creatures had already been seen.

The Hammers of Sigmar had left the scorched desert behind them. Here, on the rugged crags and low hills, a deep winter prevailed.

Snow hid some of the land’s deformity, its hillocks like the petrified claws of some ancient leviathan, a golem trapped forever in its final moments of agony. Eight stunted crests rose up from the smothering tundra like horns, and there were hollow cavities where eyes might once have been.

‘It is a grim place, enslaved to darkness,’ uttered Vandus, his voice deep, his distaste unmasked. From the edge of a rocky promontory, he looked out across the Igneous Delta and beyond. Swaths of forest colonised much of the eastern lands, but the trees looked unnatural, bent and tortured, their limbs petrified.

The Lord-Celestant’s eyes narrowed. He could have sworn he saw something stir within the dark heart of the forest. His gaze went skyward to an even greater and larger mountain fastness than the one his warriors had camped on. Clad in ice, it appeared more like a glacier. Oily mists crept from its footings, lathering the earth below in a foul tar.

Further north, Vandus discerned the forbidding silhouette of an immense tower, obscured behind scads of pyroclastic cloud. It was one of eight brass towers that surrounded Khul’s domain. Here then was their god-given mission, though he knew his own destiny lay elsewhere.

‘Rank indeed,’ snarled Vandus as he turned away to speak to his men. ‘But there is worse below…’ He gestured for Dacanthos and Sagus to join him at the cliff edge, certain those below them would not notice three figures watching from on high.

Sagus’s gauntlets cracked loudly as he clenched the haft of his hammer, and when the Retributor spoke it was with barely restrained anger.

‘Wretched filth… I would see them seared from this land, scraped away like dirt from a boot.’

Dacanthos had no words. He merely stared through the lifeless eyes of his mask, his body trembling with righteous anger.

Far below in a smoke-choked basin of tar-black rock, shawled by drifts of ash and snow, were mortal followers of Khorne known as the Bloodbound.

Hordes of the warriors had gathered to rest, after a long march. A great fire burned, spilling a column of smoke that almost reached the promontory where the Stormcasts were watching. Garbed in spiked leather and furs matted with dried blood, the tribesmen left their arms and torsos exposed. These Vandus and his men had come to know as bloodreavers. The lesser of the vast and mighty Goretide, they were nonetheless brawny and muscular fighters. What they lacked in skill, they made up for in aggression and devotion to Khorne.

Bellowing and fighting, they revelled around the fire. Long shadows cast by their bodies contorted in the fell light, transformed into an echo of what they might become should they live long and worship with enough devotion. A bloodreaver’s altar was the battlefield, his offerings slaughter and death.

They were a rabble, but a dangerous one. Their blades were thick and sharp, notched by battle and stained black with the blood of innocents. But of late they had grown arrogant and complacent.

‘When do we bring the storm’s wrath, my Lord-Celestant?’ Dacanthos said at last.

‘Soon,’ said Vandus, half-turning as he felt the presence of eyes upon them. ‘After I have consulted with our Lord-Relictor.’

All three warriors turned as one to face Ionus Cryptborn. The Lord-Relictor emerged from the shadows, as if he were a part of them and they him. Morbidity clung to Ionus like a curse, and his skull-helmed visage gave him a grim aspect that was entirely in keeping with his demeanour.

Ionus gave a shallow bow, disturbing the oath scrolls attached to his golden war-plate. He rasped, his voice like the last stirrings of a disquiet spirit.

‘I crave your ear, Lord Hammerhand.’

Hanging his tempestos hammer, Heldensen, on his belt, Vandus nodded at the other two warriors, who departed with muttered reverence to the relic-keeper.

Only once they were gone, back down to the plateau where the army mustered, did Vandus speak further.

‘I shall not be dissuaded, Ionus,’ he warned.

‘You have spoken to me of the Red Pyramid of skulls, and I now understand that is not something you can ignore,’ said Ionus, slowly taking off his helm to reveal a gaunt, sinister-looking face. ‘I only wish our paths were conjoined. That you, like I, were headed to the brass towers as Sigmar has ordered.’

There was rebuke in Ionus’s tone, regret that they would be parted for the battles to come. It sat ill with him, but his Lord-Celestant had fixed his gaze on thwarting Korghos Khul and destroying the dread Gate of Wrath.

‘But I know your purpose is unwavering, my friend,’ Ionus concluded.

Vandus nodded. He was smiling as he turned towards Ionus and removed his war-helm, holding it in the crook of his arm. In sharp contrast to the Lord-Relictor, Vandus had a noble face and the clean, chiselled features often represented in the statues of heroes. Those monuments to old glories, to an age torn down, were gone but Vandus would see them rise again. He extended a hand to Ionus.

‘Fate shall see us together again, brother.’

The corners of the Lord-Relictor’s mouth only curved up a little, but he clasped his Lord-Celestant’s forearm in the manner of warriors.

‘Aye. The tower shall fall and I’ll make for your brotherhood. United, we shall triumph against any fell beings who claim lordship over these lands. The domination of Chaos is at an end.’

Vandus’s good humour faded, as he was reminded of what he had seen and the desperate battle they had fought and won at the Gate of Azyr.

‘It is possible he survived?’ Vandus asked.

‘Khul?’

‘Who else?’

‘He lives.’

Vandus raised an eyebrow. ‘You sound certain, brother.’

‘It is a feeling. Nothing more.’

Vandus caught an inkling that it was much more, but kept his silence for now. The ways of the Relictor were veiled to him, and perhaps that was for the best. But if Khul did yet live, as Ionus professed, then that meant the vision could still be proven true.

Vandus’s head, cut off and brandished aloft by Khul, exulting as he capped his dread pyramid.

‘I saw my own demise, Ionus,’ said Vandus, after a moment.

‘The vision we spoke of, the one that is leading you to the Red Pyramid?’

Vandus nodded.

‘And you would still step into Khul’s domain, knowing it means your death?’

‘I would.’

Ionus frowned. ‘But why? Unless you believe you can defy prophecy.’

‘Have you not said before that we are architects of our own destiny?’

Ionus gave a curt laugh. ‘I say a great many things, but not all are intended to be heeded on face value alone.’

‘I follow this path because I must, my friend. If I do not stop Khul then who else will?’

‘And if you challenge him, you may end up fulfilling his prophecy for him.’

‘Then that is a chance I have to take.’

Ionus regarded the Lord-Celestant for a moment, and not for the first time was reminded why Sigmar chose Vandus to be the vanguard of his storm.

‘Yes, I believe it is. Still, I hope he does not kill you, Vandus.’

It was meant in humour, but Vandus grew serious.

‘Are we truly immortal? If fated to die, can we?’

‘We are as immortal as Sigmar’s will, but even the God-King does not always get his way.’ Ionus gestured to the Bloodbound they had come to vanquish, then to the land beyond and all its perfidy both seen and unseen.

They stared at the revelling hordes below, and after a brief silence had passed Ionus said, ‘They think they are the death of these lands. They think they have already won.’

Vandus laughed. ‘They are not death, brother. We are death.’

He slammed his helm back on, demonstrably belligerent, and turned at last to the Lord-Relictor. ‘And it’s past time that we dealt our gift to those heathens beneath us.’

He raised Heldensen aloft, so the warriors amassing on the plateau would see it, and cried out in a clarion voice. ‘Stormcasts, to arms! This night, we mete out death and Sigmar’s judgement!’

A great cheer rose up from the golden throng, loud enough that the hordes below heard it. Some of the wretched tribesmen began to look up at the Stormcasts who now emerged above them, others scrambled for blades, a few even began barking orders.

‘Vermin,’ snarled Vandus, as he felt the armoured tread of an entire chamber of Hammers of Sigmar gather at his back. Ionus was at his side, skull-faced once more. It would be their last battle together for a while. If Sigmar willed it, their paths would cross again.

‘Scurry all you like, it will avail you nothing.’

Heldensen flashed like a golden flame against the darkness. This time, more than a thousand hammers joined it in salute.

Ionus roared, unable to hold his righteous fury at bay a moment longer.

‘Smite them and cleanse this land!’

And the storm descended on burnished wings and in a crushing tide of gold.

Chapter Two

Raw wounds

Like a red-raw wound, dawn broke over the heaped and tangled corpses left in the tar valley. Their skin was blackened, as if scorched by lightning.

Vandus and his Hammerhands left the bodies of the bloodreavers behind to rot in the sun. They had destroyed them, leaving none alive. They had also left Ionus and his Thunderstrike Brotherhood and headed for the southernmost brass tower, one of eight, and symbolic of Khorne’s domination of the Brimstone Peninsula.

It was no mere thing to deny his duty to the God-King, but Vandus knew he had been shown Khul and his pyramid of skulls for a reason. This vision had to come from Sigmar himself; he was convinced of it.

At the head of the column of Stormcast Eternals, Vandus peered through the narrow eye slits of his mask at the shimmering heat haze that had fallen upon the land like a veil. The ice-clad mountains were long behind them now and the desert reigned once again. A lava plain surrounded them, choked by poisonous fumes and drifts of ash.

A ridge began to form through this miasma, stained a sickly yellow from vents of sulphurous gas eking through fissures in the rock.

‘Volatus Ridge,’ murmured Vandus, recognising the region. His gaze strayed upwards, and he called out into the clouded sky.

‘Kyrus!’

First came the beating of wings and then, from out of blood-red sunlight and gangrenous smoke, came one of the warrior-heralds.

As the Prosecutor landed, he folded back his lightning wings and bowed.

‘The skies are clear of foes but wretched with filth, my lord. What is your bidding?’

Kyrus was a dutiful warrior, but his mood was akin to a tempest and ever turbulent. He had raged at the death of his former leader, Anactos Skyhelm, swearing vengeance. Now Prime until Skyhelm returned, Kyrus was determined to be worthy of the honour.

‘Take your warriors and fly beyond that ridge,’ said Vandus. ‘I want to know what lies ahead, beyond this foetid pall.’

Nodding curtly, Kyrus took flight, celestial corposant dissipating in his wake. Vandus watched as a retinue of gilded Prosecutors soared alongside their leader, resplendent on the wing, before he ordered the column to march on.

Where the others went on foot, Vandus rode the back of Calanax. The dracoth snarled at the stench of the air as if it were a foe that could be cowed by its wrath. Vandus quickly soothed the beast by patting the back of its scaled neck.

‘Easy, my friend. This land has us all disquieted.’

Calanax growled in acquiescence but kept a mindful eye, as did they all. Arching his serpentine neck, the dracoth watched the rapidly disappearing Prosecutors and gave a muted cry as the heralds were lost from sight.

As the Hammerhands trudged towards the Volatus Ridge, a bile-hued fog rose up around them. It stank of sulphur, but gathered too fast and moved too insidiously to be natural. Nothing in this land was natural – all had been warped by ruin.

The pall thickened, and for the Stormcasts it became impossible to see much farther than their outstretched gauntlets. Vandus wasted no time in slowing the advance, wary as they delved deeper and grew blinder with every step.

‘Sagus.’ Vandus summoned the Retributor, whose armoured paladins had been guarding the rear flanks of the column. ‘Your warriors are to take the core as we take the Sigmarund formation. Dacanthos,’ he called. ‘Liberators to encircle. Malactus’s Judicators will form the inner ring, behind a wall of shields. Both of you, be wary.’

The two warriors made the sigil of the hammer across their breasts and went to their duty. Heraldor Laudus Skythunder sounded the orders, and the formation of the column changed rapidly and efficiently into a walking circle of sigmarite.

Vandus took position behind the Liberators’ shieldwall, ahead of the Judicators with their skybolt bows and at the foremost part of the circle that faced towards the ridge.

‘Onward,’ he called, and the clank of god-forged steel resounded.

By now, the yellow cloud had completely engulfed them and the Stormcasts could not even see their feet or the heads of their weapons. Something was coming, Vandus could feel it.

‘Hammerhands,’ his voice rang out like a pealing bell, almost enough to cleanse the spiritual fog that he knew burdened the hearts of his men. ‘Hold true, hold together, and we shall triumph.’

A trumpet clarioned, and Calanax echoed it with a shrilling cry of its own, but even the usually strident notes of the Hammerhand heraldor were robbed of clarity by the miasma.

‘My lord…’ muttered a Stormcast, Baered, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers in the shieldwall and advancing slowly. ‘Do you see that?’

Vandus saw it well enough, and nodded grimly. Apparitions had begun to coalesce in the fog. At first they were indistinct, mere wisps of cloud that struggled to hold their corporeality, but they quickly changed, anthropomorphising into souls long dead and cruelly brought back.

Every man beheld a different form: a wife, a daughter, a son. The only thing the apparitions had in common were that they were dead, nothing more than revenants whose only purpose was to torment.

And they were not silent.

Centuries ago, Vandus had been Vendell Blackfist, a blacksmith chief and tribesman. He had lost everything to Chaos, his entire people. Every one of them returned to haunt him now, their bile-yellow figures made manifest in the fog. Though he knew them all, these were not the men and women of his former life but spirits formed from bitter memory who meant to harm.

Help us…

Kill us…

Betray us…

Vandus quickly shut his mind to them, and urged his warriors to do the same.

‘Have the courage to banish these unquiet devils.’

The shieldwall clenched closer, as if withered by the onslaught of the spirit host.

How Vandus wished Ionus Cryptborn were with them now.

A spectral hand reached for him… his dead wife, with the ghostly figures of his sons cowering at her feet. The mask held his emotions firm, but he wept behind the cold metal.

‘Begone…’ he rasped, voice trembling, but found his resolve. As he lashed out at the spirit forms, their aspect changed.

Talons grew in place of fingers, and the eyes of the once beloved became hollows in hundreds of fleshless skulls. As one, the spectral figures shrieked their final death cry and the shieldwall buckled as men fell to their knees or chased after illusory versions of their loved ones.

‘Hold firm!’ Vandus roared, reaching down from the back of Calanax to seize Baered by his gorget and haul him into formation. ‘Dacanthos,’ he cried, hoping his Prime could help restore order, but it was already too late.

The stench of blood rose in Vandus’s throat. The Bloodbound were here, warriors of the Goretide.

A guttural war cry ululated through the murk, echoing wildly so Vandus could not tell where it originated from. He barely parried the blow aimed at his neck, before Heldensen’s haft came to his rescue. The grunting brute, a bloodreaver, snarled at him and tried to carve through the hammer with his axe. Vandus kicked him hard to the ground. Then Calanax lurched forward and took off the bloodreaver’s head as he was still sprawled on his back.

Another ran in from the right and this time Vandus caught sight of the warrior and turned, crashing Heldensen down into the bloodreaver’s shoulder. Bone shattered as the hammer drove on into the warrior’s chest, spraying Vandus’s armour with gore.

More attacks flew in, not just against the Lord-Celestant but against all the Liberators in the broken shieldwall. It began sporadically at first, isolated clashes of blades, but grew in intensity.

Soon, a surge of brawny warriors in bloodstained metal and furs charge into the gilded throng of beleaguered Stormcasts. Some made it through the gaps in the Liberators’ line and began to cut down the Judicators. A few of Malactus’s men panicked, unleashing their skybolt bows heedlessly. Their Prime bellowed for them to cease as fellow Stormcasts were struck in error.

‘Dacanthos, reforge the shieldwall and protect Malactus’s retinue,’ said Vandus, as the Liberator-Prime appeared through the fog.

His armour rent and battered already, Dacanthos nodded wearily and ran back into the fight, hurling orders like they were spears to unite his warriors again.

Hundreds of skirmishes unfolded at once as Vandus fought in a sea of indistinct figures. Bellowing until he was hoarse, he managed to corral a small host together. They locked shields, an island of gold amidst an ocean of bloody red.

Vandus rode on into the miasma with Calanax, the beast clawing as his rider swung left and right with his hammer.

Hauling himself in with the reins, he drew close to the dracoth’s neck. ‘We must break up this assault, old friend, and give our comrades time to reorganise,’ Vandus told him, receiving a growl in reply. His eyes went skyward as he prayed for some sign of the returning Prosecutors, but the vile fog was too thick.

As he looked down again, something lumpen and horrific loomed out of the miasma. A khorgorath. It savaged a band of Liberators who had strayed away from their brothers, tearing down their defence as if it were parchment and not god-forged sigmarite. One of the warriors shuddered as the khorgorath’s bone tentacles impaled him. Another lost his head, swallowed down the beast’s grotesque gullet. Two more lost limbs, dying in crumpled heaps of blood-flecked gold before the storm reclaimed them.

The khorgorath bellowed in exultation.

Vandus had fought these beasts before. This one was as wretched as the others. Incarnadine skin wrapped around a muscular body. Its legs were thick and ended in hooves. Its arms ended in claws. The tiny eyes set in its tusked and horned skull betrayed the malice which drove the beast.

The filthy cloud seemed to retreat in the khorgorath’s presence, as if fearful to approach, or perhaps it parted so the beast could hunt all the easier. The thought that the fog might be sentient brought a tremor of unease to the Lord-Celestant, as did the sight of his warriors being slain so easily. It took an act from his dauntless mount to overcome it.

Calanax knew these abominations too. He spewed forth a gout of crackling storm breath at the khorgorath. The beast howled, engulfed by lightning. Calanax did not relent. Pulling against the reins, he galloped towards the khorgorath, his rage unceasing until the monster was nothing but charred meat.

It was only once the carcass had shrivelled to a blackened mess that Vandus realised his mistake. The dracoth’s unruly zeal had separated the Lord-Celestant from the rest of his chamber and now they were too far away. Silhouettes of his men were barely visible and, worse, they were dying. Lightning flashes broke amidst the fog, searing the image of the dead in frozen memorial before vanishing with an echoing crack.

Thunder rolled above, the God-King’s anger made manifest.

Knots of warriors were managing to band together; Vandus saw some lumbering blindly as they got close to him. Others fought alone. As the shieldwall broke apart, so did the martial coherency of the entire chamber. Heraldor Skythunder attempted to restore some order but a thrown axe struck his neck and he fell.

‘Mercy of Sigmar,’ Vandus breathed. And the thunder boomed in answer.

They were being slaughtered. Above the din of battle, he heard another sound like a fell humming. Belatedly, as he was about to turn Calanax around, he realised what it was.

Chanting.

Something else loomed from the sulphur fog, dredged from the hellish depths of the Realm of Chaos. A host of red-skinned daemons, snorting and spitting as they loped towards the Lord-Celestant on bent-back limbs.

Vandus felt the furnace heat coming off their bodies as the bloodletters closed, a ring of eight with black blades clenched in their wiry fists.

As the daemons bore down on him, Vandus heard the chanting intensify, coming not just from one throat but many. A ritual was taking place, a dark sacrifice that had brought these creatures into existence.

As the daemons sprang at him, Vandus swung Heldensen in a wide, looping arc. Three of the bloodletters were smashed back and discorporated in welters of dark ash before they could hit the ground. Calanax caught a fourth in his jaws and snapped its body clean in two. The dracoth reared up, trapping a fifth under his claws, then bellowed in pain as a hellblade bit through his scaled hide.

Vandus fended off a blow against his vambrace, but felt searing in his side as one of the bloodletters breached his armour. He crushed both their misshapen skulls with his hammer, before Calanax gored the last of the daemons with his horns.

But obscured by the fog, a second summoning of the bloodletters fell upon them, this time in droves.

‘Back, Calanax!’ Vandus cried urgently, realising, isolated as they were, that they would be overwhelmed.

The dracoth growled his agreement and retreated. All too quickly, the onrushing daemons that had been nought but shadows in the fog began to take form as they got close.

Their loping gait was unearthly fast, and Vandus realised with a sick feeling in his gut that he and Calanax would not escape the trap.

But they would die with honour.

The dracoth held its ground as Vandus bellowed his defiance at the daemon horde.

‘Sigmar! Glory to the God-King of Azyr!’

None knew what truly happened when a Stormcast died. Whatever his fate, Vandus resolved to meet it with fierce courage in his heart.

Dacanthos and a host of Liberators rushed to their Lord-Celestant’s side. Their shields locked just as the daemon horde reached them. Hell-wrought steel met Azyr-forged sigmarite and failed to breach it.

‘Part! Part the line, now!’

The Liberators responded at once to Dacanthos’s order, the shieldwall folding back in an inverted spearhead to let the daemons in.

Sagus and his waiting Retributors were arrayed behind the wall. They fell upon the bloodletters as the daemons barrelled through, and utterly destroyed them with their lightning hammers.

Overhead, Vandus heard flights of skybolts as the Judicators let loose.

Partial order had been restored. Under the leadership of its captains, the chamber had alloyed together again and forged towards their leader.

‘How, brother?’ Vandus asked Dacanthos in a brief moment of respite.

‘Your armour, Lord-Celestant,’ replied the Liberator-Prime. ‘It was our beacon.’

Only now did Vandus realise his war-plate had taken on a refulgent glow, as celestial light poured forth from every piece of it. The glory was fading now, but it had been enough to anchor his men and bring them back together.

Vandus raised Heldensen aloft in salute.

Thank you, Sigmar…

For who else could have intervened on his behalf?

With the daemons vanquished, the Sigmarund could be reformed. This time, Vandus took his place in the shieldwall with Calanax.

Despite the turn in fortune, the Bloodbound did not relent. Nor did the hellish fog lessen.

‘We are still fighting blind,’ said Sagus from the rear ranks.

‘Aye, and if anything, their numbers have swelled.’

A great broiling clash had erupted, hordes of bloodreavers and blood warriors driven to frenzy and hurling every ounce of fury they had against the Stormcast Eternals. Time and again, the shieldwall would fold, and the Retributors would attack and the Judicators let fly.

All the while, the chanting persisted, growing louder and more urgent with every passing moment. No further bloodletters came, but Vandus felt the oppression on his soul as he had in the Igneous Delta when the blood priest had called forth the Realm of Blood and Brass.

But this was something different, some manifestation that came from the very twisted nature of the land and how Chaos had corrupted it with its malign presence.

Something else was coming, invigorated by the slaughter.

Vandus knew he had to end the battle swiftly. His warriors needed to attack, but the blinding fog would render such a move suicide as they would be cut apart piecemeal again. Maintaining formation would ensure survival – but not if the Bloodbound sacrificed enough to Khorne to bring forth some hell-beast from the red pit.

Death or damnation lay in either choice.

As a blast of clarion trumpets broke through the clamour of battle, Vandus realised it was not his decision to make.

Kyrus had returned.

From the high vantage above the cloud, Prosecutors swept down in small flocks to unleash their celestial hammers against the Bloodbound.

As his warriors continued their harrying attacks, having cut a small swathe of open ground between the Bloodbound and their other Stormcast brothers, Kyrus landed nearby to speak to his lord.

‘Lord Hammerhand, it seems we have arrived back just in time.’

A pair of crackling hammers materialised in Kyrus’s gauntleted fists and he flung them at a clutch of bloodreavers who had tried to resume the close quarter crush.

Kyrus was joined by a host of his brethren who interceded against the Chaos horde so he could give his report.

‘I saw the miasma overhead as we returned. It clouds only you and your chamber, Lord Hammerhand.’

‘It follows us?’

‘Akin to a cloud of sulphurous flies, yes. I also saw something beyond the ridge, another Warrior Chamber.’ He turned as a trumpet sounded, the signal to take wing.

Lightning crackled across Kyrus’s gilded pinions as he arched his neck to the heavens.

‘Prosecutor,’ Vandus said quickly, knowing the prospect of reinforcement close by meant nothing if they failed here. ‘Fly high and turn back this cloud for us. Once our sight is returned, I shall order the attack and crush this vermin.’

Kyrus nodded curtly, leaving with his warriors and soaring aloft with peals of thunder.

As the Prosecutors departed, the Bloodbound rushed in again and the press of battle resumed. It did so only for a short while longer. Above, the storm rumbled and thunder broke heavily across the sky.

A tempest was born in the heavens, and it drove the poisonous fog away.

Above, Kyrus’s retinue were beating their celestial wings in concert. And as soon as Vandus could see the warrior-heralds through the rapidly dissipating sulphur cloud, he knew it was time.

‘Break ranks and attack!’ he yelled, Calanax rearing up in belligerent abandon.

The shieldwall split as the Liberators allowed the heavier armoured Retributors to come forth. Well-drilled Judicators moved to the flanks and loosed an endless enfilading arrow storm into the scattered rear ranks of the Bloodbound horde.

With the Retributors unleashed, the Liberators broke up into smaller warrior-bands and struck down any who had escaped the wrath of their brothers’ lightning hammers.

Riding at the speartip of the attack, Vandus spurred Calanax into a loping run. The dracoth’s ground-eating strides soon had them leading the charge. The Goretide warriors were still numerous but had been scattered by the sudden attack and disorientated by the disappearance of the fog.

Vandus saw the bodies of their dead, men he knew the Stormcasts could not have slain, and balked at the blood price Khorne’s worshippers were willing to pay for their lord’s favour.

One of the Skull Lord’s chieftains still clung to the hope that his dark master would avail them. But the shadow of the Realm of Chaos was fading, just as the sulphur clouds receded into nothing. Towers of brass and pyramids of skulls, the crimson rain of fury unbound and the brazen bellowing of daemons from beyond the veil; all became as smoke and echoes.

It had felt different to when the bloodsecrator had unleashed hell before the Gate of Azyr, but no less disturbing. Vandus would be glad to burn this patina of blood and violence from his armour.

He would begin with the chieftain.

From the back of Calanax, Vandus levelled his hammer at the brutal-looking warrior.

The dracoth quickly despatched the few followers the chieftain had left. Vandus then dismounted, his eyes never leaving his prey. Bellowing with fury, the chieftain came at the Lord-Celestant with a flanged maul.

Vandus parried his reckless attacks, before crushing the chieftain’s shoulder and disarming him. Calanax pounced, pinning him down.

‘Is this the graven image of your lord?’ asked Vandus with disgust, regarding a sigil burned into the chieftain’s chest. Tattered remnants of images persisted in the wake of the blood sacrifice, and Vandus found it hard to keep a rein on his anger. In his mind, he saw himself crushing the chieftain to pulp, grinding his bones and devouring his heart, rending his limbs and…

Vandus slowly closed his eyes and made his heart still. When he looked out again, he was calm and the blood rage had passed.

‘It is fell, indeed, isn’t it,’ spat the chieftain through red-rimed teeth. He rasped, finding it hard to breathe with his chest crushed beneath the dracoth’s claw. ‘Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows…’ he murmured, as a horrible gargle rose up from his throat.

Vandus glared at him. ‘Your warlord, the one known as Korghos Khul – does he yet live?’

Despite his fatal injuries, the chieftain laughed.

‘One such as he is not so easily killed,’ he said. ‘You seek a reckoning? He said you would.’

‘He is here?’ asked Vandus, his voice suddenly agitated. ‘Where?’

The chieftain laughed again, coughing up gouts of blood before he continued.

‘At the Red Pyramid, you will meet again,’ he said, growing more animated with every word. ‘Your severed head in his hands…’ blood foamed and frothed in his mouth, ‘…held aloft for the glory of–’

Calanax tore off his head and swallowed it down.

Vandus released the grip he had on Heldensen. His body trembled with anger, and he had not realised how tightly he was clenching the hammer’s haft.

Sack the Red Pyramid, and then defeat Khul. End him this time. It was as he had said to Ionus Cryptborn, and so it must be.

‘Gratitude, my friend,’ Vandus murmured, stroking the scales on the dracoth’s back and eliciting a rumbling growl from the beast.

With the death of the chieftain, the battle was all but over.

Throngs of Liberators struck down blood warriors and bloodreavers, their zeal for carnage much diminished.

Volleys of skybolts from disciplined firing lines of Judicators took down packs of khorgoraths, who fell, pinioned by lightning-wreathed shafts.

Prosecutors ranged the flanks to destroy any who fled or had been spared annihilation by the vengeful Retributors. The armoured paladins were relentless, and crushed almost everything in sight.

In short order the Chaos war host was vanquished utterly. Not a soul remained.

Vandus played his part, he and Calanax hunting for khorgoraths. Heldensen sang a litany of purification as it smashed skulls and broke limbs.

It was Kyrus who interrupted his leader, gently coming down from on high to stand before Vandus and his steed.

‘Lord-Celestant…’ Always so dutiful, so dignified, yet the tumult of righteous fury still raged in his eyes and radiated off his blazing wings.

‘The other Warrior Chamber you spoke of?’ asked Vandus, as Calanax gored the last of the blood warriors they had been fighting.

Kyrus nodded. ‘I will lead you, my lord.’ He gestured towards the distant ridge line with one of his crackling hammers. ‘Over there.’

‘Dacanthos,’ Vandus called, ‘finish up these scum and meet us at the edge of the ridge.’

The Liberator-Prime crashed his gauntlet to his chest in salute and affirmation.

Vandus had already reined Calanax in, turning the dracoth’s head in the direction his Prosecutor had pointed. ‘Lead us then, brother.’

Leaping skyward, Kyrus flew low and steady so his Lord-Celestant could keep up. He need not have bothered, for Calanax was preternaturally fast and the three of them reached the Volatus Ridge swiftly.

The sight beyond the edge of the ridge and into the valley below was a welcome one. After several days of unremitting battle against a seemingly endless tide of foes, the possibility of reinforcement was at hand.

‘Stormcasts,’ said Vandus, as Calanax perched at the very edge of the ridge. The relief in the Lord-Celestant’s voice was almost palpable. ‘We are not alone, after all.’

‘It is the Goldenmanes,’ uttered Kyrus, his sight keen and far reaching enough to discern the precise nature of their allies.

Vandus could see the blue and gold of the Hammers of Sigmar, but not who led the warriors. Despite that fact, he knew the leader of the Goldenmanes well.

‘Lord-Celestant Jactos. Hunting down Goretide stragglers.’

Though the battle was distant, Vandus could see that the chamber chased down a beaten foe. Their pursuit looked a little unruly. The Goldenmanes’ heraldor was already sounding the victory.

‘As bold and headstrong as ever, it would seem.’

Vandus smiled at the irony of Kyrus’s words, eyes narrowing as he tried to find Jactos Goldenmane in the throng below. His good humour quickly turned to horror as he saw a second enemy force had amassed, hidden in the crags on either side of Jactos’s triumphant scrum of warriors.

‘They haven’t seen them,’ muttered Kyrus grimly.

Vandus scowled, and lifted Heldensen.

‘Hammerhands, to me!’

The others were coming. They needed to move quickly.

Chapter Three

Blooded

Victory was near. Jactos could feel it, and revelled in exultation. His warriors had attacked a large warband of the debased wretches claiming dominion over this land, and defeated them in short order. The remnants had fled and now, led by the Prosecutors, the Stormcasts gave chase, determined to run the barbarians down.

‘Glory to the God-King!’ roared Jactos, fighting alongside his Lord-Castellant, Neros, and a retinue of paladins.

Jactos watched his Prosecutors soar after the fleeing bloodreavers, ruthlessly casting down their hammer bolts. The warrior-heralds were the only retinue capable of outpacing the zealous Lord-Celestant, who cut down his foes with runeblade and warhammer.

Jactos was a peerless swordsman, and had a quickness of thought and reaction even before he had become Eternal. Now, he put his god-forged talents to use destroying the Chaos worshippers. A thrust through the heart of a blood warrior had the man spitting gore. As Jactos pulled the blade free, he advanced, turning on his heel and slashing the next foe’s midriff. His warhammer came down in the same movement, cracking skulls, and his warcloak spun around as he sundered a host of bloodreavers.

‘Hunt well, Eriad,’ he murmured, smiling ferally behind his gilded mask as he watched the Prosecutors arc through the sky like spears. He could almost imagine the destruction they would reap. How Sigmar would exult at this triumph.

The voice of Neros arrested his reverie. ‘Our forces are spread thin, my lord. Should we slow and consolidate?’

Jactos glanced over his shoulder. They had left the Judicators behind and even his Liberators were struggling to hold the pace. Only at the Lord-Celestant’s urging had the hulking Retributors managed to keep up.

‘I want this victory, Neros. Our foe is nigh on defeated. Let us revel in it and show the Chaos gods that Sigmar has returned, and that he means to take these lands back.’

Jactos’s zeal was infectious. The Lord-Castellant nodded, brandishing his halberd.

‘In Sigmar’s name, destroy them all!’

Jactos laughed. So full of belligerent joy was he that he failed to notice how the valley had narrowed into a ravine, or that the Prosecutors had not returned from their sortie.

Oblivious to all but his imminent triumph, Jactos drove on.

It was only when he saw that the crags had taken on the aspect of skulls and the fell wind whispered his name that he realised something bad was about to happen.

On foot, it took some time to reach where the Prosecutors had harried their enemies, and the narrowness of the ravine had obscured the end of it from sight. Until now.

A deep basin of rock awaited the chamber of Jactos Goldenmane, and the slope that led to it was thick with ash. But what caught his eye first was what lay at the base of the sheer-faced cliff.

A golden Prosecutor and half of his retinue, impaled on claws of iron thrust out of the very earth like talons, dying like spitted boar. It must have happened quickly.

The cry of anguish from Jactos was louder than a death knell. ‘Brothers!’

Neros was about to raise his warding lantern to call the other Stormcasts to their side when something whipped down from out of the crags. The Lord-Castellant jerked and grunted, an axe protruding from his chest. He sank to one knee, blood spoiling the front of his golden war-plate as it flowed from a terrible wound.

A second axe hurtled down at them. Then came a third. A deluge of black iron followed.

Jactos parried the blades out of the air, coming to Neros’s side, but many of the Retributors were not so swift.

Lightning flashes lit up the crags as a thunderhead of desolation erupted amongst the Stormcasts. Sigmar was reclaiming the souls of his warriors. As the flares died down and the fallen were cast heavenward, the macabre skulls in the rock appeared to be grinning wider than before.

‘Stormcasts, to me! To me!’ Jactos bellowed, hearing the urgent clarion of his heraldor.

The tumultuous roar from the crags swallowed the trumpet calls and obliterated them.

Droves of Bloodbound warriors spilled like vermin from hidden caves and fissures missed by Eriad’s Prosecutors.

The other retinues hurried urgently to their Lord-Celestant’s side, but were strung out across the valley. As they entered the mouth of the narrow ravine, Jactos realised his second fatal error.

‘Wait! Hold fast, hold fast! Don’t–’

Too late. Another horde emerged from their hiding places to engulf the Stormcast rearguard. Khorgoraths held back by the whip of a bloodstoker were unleashed to reap heads. Running at the very back of the warriors, the Judicators turned too late. They had barely unleashed a single skybolt when the Chaos monstrosities fell upon them.

Jactos faltered, caught halfway between Neros and where his much-depleted Retributors prepared to meet the charge of a vastly larger force.

The Lord-Castellant yet lived, but waved Jactos away.

‘Leave me. Marshal them! Bring the host together or it won’t matter either way.’

A gryph-hound seized Neros’s shoulder in its powerful beak and began to drag the Lord-Castellant towards the waiting Retributors. Neros had dropped his halberd, but still had the warding lantern. With the other hand, he grabbed his loyal beast’s harness and held on as it took him, trying to keep them both alive a little longer.

What had begun as certain victory had cruelly turned to abject annihilation.

Jactos saw his chance at glory fading, his opportunity to show his worthiness to his God-King. How deeply he had wanted to be first, how much he had envied Vandus Hammerhand for the honour that had been bestowed upon him. Jactos knew his fellow Lord-Celestant warranted such a boon, for there was something about Vandus, something fated and undeniable. But if the honour of leading the vanguard was not to be his, then at least Jactos could forge his own glory elsewhere.

Now all of his ambitions were ashes, and he tasted the bitterness of that failure as if choking on them.

‘Shieldwall!’ he cried, trying to wrench something back from this debacle, but the Liberators were too far away and some had rightly gone to the aid of their beleaguered comrades in the Judicators.

Thinking fast, he turned to Priandus, the leader of his Retributors. He had only moments, for soon they would be engulfed by the warriors rushing down to meet them. As he spared a glance at their killers, Jactos saw another army silhouetted on the ridge line, and knew that their doom was assured.

‘Priandus…’

Priandus had clenched his two-handed lightning hammer across his chest. His gaze was unwavering as he regarded the foes that would surely end him. A handful of Retributors stood with him, shoulder to shoulder.

‘Go,’ Priandus uttered, grimly. ‘They won’t come for you until all of us are dead. Our sacrifice will mean something, at least.’

Jactos led the bulk of the Retributors off at a pace towards his Liberators, hoping to bring his scattered forces together.

At Jactos’s command, one of the hulking warriors hauled Neros to his feet and half-carried the Lord-Castellant as the gryph-hound loped along after them.

Through sheer desperation, Jactos brought the disparate factions of what was left of his men together. As they formed ranks, locking shields and standing side by side, the Lord-Celestant spared a last glance for Priandus. But the Retributor-Prime was lost from sight, swallowed by a barbaric host of blood-sworn warriors.

‘Make them pay,’ he bellowed to his men, the rancour he felt filling his heart until it overflowed. What few Judicators remained let fly. Retributors and Liberators stood beside each other to meet the charge that would surely end them all.

The Bloodbound army met them. Both of its armies, twin bloody mauls of seething violence and unfettered destruction.

Caught in the middle, the Stormcasts’ defence shuddered, but held, a circle of gold that defied the darkness. Jactos fought hard, determined to be the exemplar for his men. The act of bravura was a pointless one, but he sought to make amends anyway. At least Neros was alive, protected by the Judicators and around them the Liberators and Retributors. At least, for now.

Jactos began to despair as he saw the third host descend, the one shown in silhouette on the ridge line.

His despair quickly turned to hope, then joy, as golden war-plate, not the blood-red of Khorne’s disciples, shone in the blazing sun over the Volatus Ridge. Seeing reinforcement, his warriors fought even harder. They shouted their defiance and roared in exultation of their saviour.

‘Vandus! Vandus! Vandus!’

Their cry became a mantra, and it armoured them better than a thousand sigmarite shields.

Hammerhand he was called, and he led his Stormcasts down the ridge with cloak flapping and a call to arms upon his lips.

‘Hold fast, Jactos!’

Vandus rode a dracoth as he spearheaded the vanguard, and in his wake he brought death.

The battle did not last much longer after that. Between the Hammerhands and the Goldenmanes, the Bloodbound were crushed. Ground down beneath armoured boots, pinioned by skybolts or smote by the celestial hammers of winged avengers, the slain were many.

It was over. Jactos lived, as did his shame.

Vandus approached him during the aftermath, as the Prosecutors chased down the few survivors.

‘Well met, Jactos,’ said Vandus, offering his hand.

Jactos nodded, grateful but weary.

‘Your arrival was timely, Lord-Celestant.’ He regarded Vandus with a deep sense of respect, taking off his war-helm before he shook the other warrior’s hand. Long, golden hair flowed from beneath, making it obvious how Jactos’s honorific came to be. He had a noble bearing, so very different from the barbarian blacksmith lord who looked back at him.

‘I watched you from the ridge,’ Vandus said, his dark eyes honest and hard. ‘You overreached, Jactos, and spread your warriors too thinly. Remember, we are outnumbered in this land and know not of all its perils.’

Jactos stiffened a little, chastened. ‘Is that the wisdom of Sigmar talking?’

Vandus held up his hand. ‘No, just the words of a smith who knows something of the ways of war.’

‘You are as much a blacksmith as I am an orruk,’ Jactos replied, clapping Vandus on the shoulder, ‘but I heed the wisdom, nonetheless.’

All amongst the Stormcast force sought to further Sigmar’s glory and exact vengeance against those creatures who had put the realms asunder, but Jactos wanted it more than most.

A cry from across the bloody field of battle interrupted them.

It was Neros, his warding lantern held aloft and his gryph-hound by his side. Warriors who basked in the glow of the lantern saw their armour restored, the deep axe grooves and clefts melding together with the power of celestial magic.

No such balm could cure Eriad though, still impaled on the iron talon.

Jactos rushed over to the stricken Prosecutor, with Vandus not far behind him.

‘We cannot remove it,’ uttered Neros in a low voice, his back to Eriad who twisted in pain, ‘not without killing him. Even the lantern cannot save him.’

Jactos looked upon his Prosecutor grim-faced. The spike driven through his body should have killed him, but something about the metal was refusing to let Eriad die. Jactos saw tendrils of it had split off from the shaft and wormed their way into Eriad’s skin.

‘It… burns… my lord…’ rasped Eriad, his every breath an agony.

Jactos drew his runeblade, and the star-sigils upon the steel shone brightly.

‘Sigmar awaits you, brother,’ he told the Prosecutor solemnly. ‘He calls you back unto his halls as a hero.’

About to enact this mercy, Eriad’s outstretched hand stopped the Lord-Celestant.

‘W-wait… Will I die…? What will… become of me?’

Jactos faltered. He had no answer. None knew what it meant to be Eternal.

‘Let the storm carry him, brother.’ Vandus’s voice came from behind him, reassuring yet urgent.

‘Close your eyes, Eriad,’ said Jactos, after a moment. The Prosecutor had barely lowered his eyelids when Jactos thrust the runeblade up into Eriad’s chest, piercing his heart and ending his torment.

Above, a thunderhead had gathered and from its tumultuous depths came a single arcing bolt of lightning that struck Eriad and engulfed him in a glowing coruscation. With the thunder of a tempest unleashed, the bolt turned Eriad’s corporeal body into blinding light and carried him back into the heavens on the fury of the storm.

All who saw felt the awe and disquiet of witnessing a miracle.

‘Is this the fate of every man wrought on the Anvil of Apotheosis?’ murmured Jactos. ‘Are we destined to ascend back unto the stars when we are slain? And what then?’

He felt a strong, reassuring hand upon his shoulder and knew then why Vandus had been chosen above all others. He heard it in his voice and felt it in his words.

‘Fear not the storm, Jactos. For it is both life and death to us. Ours is not to question. It is but to do our duty and, when the time comes, to die well in Sigmar’s name. It is why we were forged, it is a hope for all mankind and there is no greater honour than that.’

Jactos nodded slowly, and reached for his war-helm again.

‘I hear the call to arms, Vandus.’

‘As do I, brother.’

‘I hear it calls to you from across the wastes and the Red Pyramid.’

‘I beheld a vision,’ Vandus told him. ‘A warlord, the slayer of the Direbrands, climbing a red pyramid fashioned of bloody skulls. A gate lay beyond it, a portal to the Realm of Chaos itself.’

‘Such a gate would spew forth hellspawn beyond count.’

‘Aye, and I must close it. Even now, my Lord-Relictor seeks out the brass towers from which the gate yokes its power.’

Jactos turned, and there was lightning in his eyes through the slits in his mask.

‘I pledge my sword to this task, Vandus. The Goldenmanes will stand with the Hammerhands and consider it a great honour.’

Vandus smiled behind the implacable face of his war-helm, his voice conveying his emotion.

‘It is I that is honoured, brother. Let us stand together then, and crush the Goretide.’

‘The warlord in your vision, Vandus, he yet lives?’

Vandus’s mood turned bleak and wrathful. ‘If he does, then it is he we must overcome. His will, his dominance is everything. Break that, and we break his warband.’

‘With hammer and blade, then,’ uttered Jactos, as a cry of ‘Sigmar!’ echoed around the gathered chambers.

Jactos revelled in it, just as he rejoiced that in Korghos Khul he saw a chance to restore his tarnished honour.

Chapter Four

Taker of skulls

Korghos Khul lived. He was lying on his back, dimly remembering the moment his own warriors had trampled him in their zeal to get to the Stormcasts.

He had fought the golden warrior, the one who had once been Vendell Blackfist. Khul had the better of him, and yet the wretch had escaped death a second time. Even in his stuporous state, the warlord of Khorne vowed there would not be a third.

And as he lay there, plotting vengeance even as he stirred from unconsciousness, he came to a realisation.

In spite of his survival, something had changed. He felt it in the shimmering heat of the air, heard it in the deep rumble of thunder overhead and beheld it in those who had come with the lightning, cast upon the storm.

For a time, after the battle, he had drifted in and out of a black daze in which his dreams were dark. Far from being restful, his torpor was a fitful sleep and wracked by paroxysms. His eyes opened, flickering in palsy against the sun, as something he had not felt in many years formed into being.

Defeat.

And with that realisation came the Blood God’s rage, urging Khul to his feet and fuelling limbs driven to the brink of exhaustion by the one known as the Hammerhand, a man resurrected, reborn, a man Khul should have killed decades before…

‘Vendell Blackfist… Vandus…’

As he muttered the name of his nemesis, he became aware of scavengers rummaging through the corpses, taking their fill of flesh, and soon they became aware of him.

The Igneous Delta looked as it had when Khul had fallen, a stinking, lava-strewn plain of scorched black rock. Only now it was his fellow Goretide that were coming for him, not the golden warriors from before.

Far from being cowed by Khul’s revival, the bloody chieftains and champions who prowled the dead saw a unique opportunity.

It was the way of the Bloodbound. The only road to Khorne’s throne was to climb a pyre of skulls.

Five warriors surrounded Khul, each with an axe or blade. They circled slowly, murderous ambition in their eyes, especially when they saw Khul was unarmed.

Khul grinned, exposing sharp, angular teeth. Through the eyeholes of his skull-faced helm, the world had turned a visceral red. He clenched his fists until the knuckles cracked.

‘Come then, take your chance and let’s see who Khorne favours.’

With a roar, the scavenging chieftains attacked.

A bearded brute of a warrior went first, swinging wildly with his axe. Khul deftly caught the chieftain’s wrist, fending off an overhead blow before pulling the warrior down, wrapping a muscular arm around his neck and snapping it. Before the chieftain hit the ground, Khul had taken his axe and embedded it in the chest of the second warrior. In a welter of gore, Khul wrenched the blade loose and flung it into a third aggressor, pitching him off his feet, the axe haft protruding from his face.

Three slain in as many breaths gave the other two pause. It was a momentary hesitation, yet ultimately fatal. Khul bellowed and charged, and the fourth chieftain hacked at him, but his sword only ate into the meat of Khul’s forearm, shearing through the armour and holding fast. Seizing the champion’s ruddy beard, Khul head-butted him until his faceplate cracked and then the bone beneath. The chieftains’ body capitulated, his legs buckling like broken reeds. Khul snatched up his sword.

As the champion fell, Khul was left facing the last attacker.

‘You’re thinking this was a mistake,’ Khul told him, his chest heaving up and down with barely restrained fury, his skin drenched in blood. ‘It was, but if you bare your neck I will make it fast.’

Eyes wide and suddenly unsure, the chieftain adjusted the grip on his axe and then looked to the weapon Khul had taken from one of the others. Blood dripped off the blade.

With a sudden movement, Khul lunged forwards and cut off the chieftain’s head. Then he butchered his flesh until nothing remained but a red ruin.

‘No place for the weak,’ he slurred, half drunk on rage, ‘at the foot of Khorne’s throne.’

Slamming the sword into the ground, he went to retrieve his axe. Its voice echoed in his skull, drawing his attention as it demanded for its bloodlust to be slaked.

‘Aye,’ Khul muttered to the axe, wrapping his meaty fist around the leather haft, ‘you’ll have your fill.’

He regarded the five corpses and began the grisly work of taking the heads and flensing them of all flesh and muscle.

After a short while, five bloody skulls stared at him through hollow eyes, their rictus grins suggesting they were much happier in death than they had ever been in life. Khul stacked them one atop the other, erecting a slaughter shrine so he might convene with his god.

As he ate the defeated chieftains’ flesh, he grinned, as if listening to words only he could hear, for the plains were almost silent. Then he heard a sound, one that emanated from the corporeal world. Strips of skin and sinew hanging from his teeth, Khul looked up sharply.

His axe was already in his hand as a daemonic hound sloped out from amongst the bodies.

‘Grizzlemaw…’ uttered Khul, both greeting and curse at the same time.

The beast had gorged itself, its mouth a ruby red from the feast. It was looking intently at Khul, deciding whether it should attack. Scenting Khorne’s favour, it relented and padded to its master’s side.

Khul seized it by the neck, despite the hound’s monstrous size.

For a moment the beast resisted, but Khul would not be denied and it heeled before his dominance.

‘You are mine, creature,’ he hissed to the beast, and heard it growl in acquiescence.

In the distance, Khul heard chanting. He smelled roasting flesh and saw the glow of immense fires on the horizon. A gathering of his warriors.

‘The feast is over,’ Khul murmured to his hound as he released it. ‘War calls.’

He snarled, his rage still molten at his defeat, but smiled through his clenched teeth at the prospect of a fight and an adversary most worthy.

The stronghold was close.

‘I shall take your skull, Vendell Blackfist,’ Khul whispered as he headed northward, ‘and then… ascend.’

Chapter Five

Bringers of the storm

Ithar cried out in agony. Ionus Cryptborn carefully but firmly placed his hand over the stricken warrior’s forehead to stifle his anguish. A mote of healing celestial magic entered the Retributor, but did little more than ease his pain. It would take more than this to sustain his life.

‘Be still, brother,’ Ionus whispered, one eye on the skies in the hope of seeing Sturmannon’s Prosecutors return.

Ithar’s heavy sigmarite armour was badly torn and rent. Huge grooves had been carved through the gilded breastplate and into his flesh. Bones had been shattered, organs pierced. In places, the flesh was burned. Though paladins were the hardiest of the Stormcast, they were not invulnerable. Ithar teetered on the brink, his stony-faced Retributor-Prime looking on.

‘Will he live?’ asked Theodrus, hefting his lightning hammer meaningfully. ‘Or is mercy all we have left to give him?’

Ionus raised his hand for calm.

‘I need a moment longer, Theodrus,’ he told him, returning to his ministrations.

It had been an ambush. Eighteen souls badly bloodied by a hunting pack of khorgoraths.

Ever since parting ways with the Lord-Celestant, Ionus’s chamber had been attacked at every turn. Monsters and peril were ubiquitous in these lands, it seemed. After a hard march, they had reached sight of their objective, a looming tower of brass. As the paladins had led the column through a narrow defile in a forest which bore blades instead of leaves on its trees, the khorgoraths had struck.

The four warriors who had lost their heads to the beasts were gone, with only ribbons of corposant to mark their passing. The rest had lived, but were brutally wounded. Now, Ionus had to try and keep them alive. They would need every hammer in the battle to come.

So far, he had managed to save all but two. Ithar was the last.

‘Sigmar…’ he intoned in a sepulchral voice. ‘O Lord of Azyr, Master of the Storm…’ Ionus clenched the relic hammer, holding it aloft as he let go of Ithar’s mouth with his other hand and gently placed it upon the warrior’s chest. His reliquary-icon stood nearby, driven into the earth. The skeletal totem bound to it, a sword in its bony fingers as it hung in silent repose, looked on as if in judgement. Ithar’s golden mask was lying next to it, split from crown to chin.

‘Heed my prayers and bestow your grace upon this paladin so he might rise to fight again in your name. Heed me, Sigmar!’ Ionus cried aloud, as black clouds began to gather overhead. ‘Grant us your glory. Bring forth the storm!’

A lightning bolt arced down from the heavens and struck Cryptborn’s hammer. He shuddered as the immortal god-power went through him and into Ithar. Slowly, a cerulean glow began to suffuse the fallen paladin, reknitting the wounds in his flesh.

In moments it was over and Ithar was restored.

Ionus sagged, the effort draining, and glanced at the hourglass he had set down the moment he began. The last few grains trickled down its neck as Ithar sat up.

‘Rise,’ said Ionus, standing himself.

‘Praise the God-King,’ Theodrus murmured, and held his hammer to his chest to venerate the Lord of Storms.

‘We are whole again,’ Ionus told him, although he sounded weary. ‘The tower awaits.’ He spoke to his entire Exemplar Chamber, who had been silently looking on. As if the Lord-Relictor had summoned them, Sturmannon’s Prosecutors swept in from the north.

The gathered paladins made room for them to land. Ionus held his ground, but stood ready to receive them.

‘I bear tidings, Lord-Relictor,’ said Sturmannon.

‘The tower’s garrison?’

‘Is nothing we cannot overcome, but there is something… unnatural about it. This is no mere keep, wrought of stone and metal.’

‘It’s a temple, Sturmannon,’ Ionus told him, in a voice as deathly as the grave, ‘pure and simple. A monument to war, and it must be cast down.’

‘I saw a priest upon the parapet, one who bore a totem that was utterly unlike your reliquary.’

Ionus knew of whom Sturmannon spoke. Ever since they had won the battle on the Igneous Delta, Ionus had wondered what had happened to the blood-priest. Now he knew, and it was ill news indeed.

The brass tower was close. Ionus could feel it, and strove to marshal his violent thoughts, for he knew they were not entirely his own. As he pushed the urge for blood from his mind, as he saw his fellow Stormcast Eternals do, another thought intruded. It slipped in like a shadow, at first unseen but chill as the grave.

A cold, ancient voice echoed in the Lord-Relictor’s skull and the sound of it froze his very marrow.

A tithe is owed. A tithe shall be given.

A soul for a soul.

A hand on Ionus’s shoulder brought him around. At first he thought its fingers were made of bone…

‘Lord-Relictor?’ asked Theodrus, his concern obvious even behind the gold mask he wore.

‘All is well,’ Ionus lied, clapping the Retributor-Prime on his back. ‘All is well. We march. With all haste, brothers.’

Chapter Six

The Red Pyramid

Khul reached his lair on the third day. Grim menhirs stood at the edge of his domain, guarding a red-stained path that fed into an immense flagstoned courtyard. A great archway of stone sat in the middle of it, surrounded by warriors and raised up on a black dais. Beyond that was the Red Pyramid, its great shadow eclipsing all.

There was no fortress, no stronghold as such. Khul had no need for one, such was his dominance of these lands. He had all but conquered the Brimstone Peninsula, but his throne room was little more than a stone chair and the wealth of trophies that surrounded it.

Hordes thronged the courtyard, though they were wise enough to give Khul’s throne a wide berth. They were some of the many warbands he had brought together to form his Goretide. The bloodreavers and Chaos warriors present were but a portion of the martial strength of Khul’s armies.

Blood soaked the warlord’s skin, hair and armour. His skull-mask was flecked with arterial spray. Khul had carved a red ruin across the Brimstone Peninsula, severing heads to satisfy his blinding rages and slake his thirst for retribution.

Throughout this bloody fugue, barely realising the carnage he was reaping, a vision struck Khul over and over like a hammer blow to the skull. More than once, it had staggered the warlord, a bestial roar so powerful it had made his ears bleed and his teeth tremble. It was his god speaking to him. Khul’s head echoed with the promises of Khorne, bellowed from atop the mountain of skulls where the Blood God had fashioned his throne.

Khul saw himself, astride the lofty peak of the Red Pyramid. He had become a true champion of Chaos, axe brandished at the hellish sky, where clouds churned in torment and a crimson rain drenched the land. Khul too was painted red – red with the endless slaughter he had committed in Khorne’s name and red with the Eye of the Gods upon him.

Chosen.

Exalted.

In his mind’s eye, Khul saw himself changed, his human body becoming but a shell for what lurked within. He grew, his flesh stretching and blackening with the hellfire of metamorphosis. Armour plate buckled and then split as a grotesquely enlarged musculature broke through.

Pain.

He gritted his teeth, lurching onto his knees. Hugging his chest, he bent over as two immense wings, black and glossy as obsidian, pierced through the skin of his back and unfurled. Horns sprouted from the bony growths in his temples. Hooves tore his boots to shreds.

When he arose again, he was no longer a man. A dark aura wreathed his iron-hard flesh, and a rugged mane as black as night trailed from his immense head and neck. A giant stood upon the Red Pyramid, and mortals wept at the sight. Khul had ascended to claim a daemonic crown and war by his master’s side forever as a prince of slaughter. Craning back his head, Khul bellowed, and his cry of exultation and fury echoed across the vastness of Aqshy…

Abruptly, Khul’s thoughts returned to what was, not what would be if he were to raise his pyramid of skulls and claim his reward. As he walked the red-stained path, Khul would not forget his promise, nor what had been promised in return.

‘An immortal to crown my tribute, lord…’ he murmured, stepping upon the bone-wrought flagstones of the courtyard.

Grizzlemaw snarled in agreement, as if it had somehow been privy to Khul’s thoughts of ascension. It loped behind the warlord at a short distance, its muzzle and fangs red from feasting. It halted as its master did.

Khul had stopped to regard the gate. It was hard not to, such was its presence, even with the looming Red Pyramid behind it.

The Gate of Wrath was immense, a great and powerful edifice that had stood through the ages and endured wars of conquest. Even from a distance, Khul felt the anger and hatred emanating off the ancient structure. Though carved of stone, it was no mundane ruin. Khorne had whispered to him of its raising. It had been anointed with blood, and its very mortar was human bone meal and ground viscera. The archway held within it a portal. Light bled from it and shadows roamed within this churning miasma of blood, held in place by the confines of the arch. It was a doorway to the Realm of Chaos, and the Blood God’s throne of skulls.

Warriors flocked to this place of loathing and destruction, drawn by its evil, overwhelmed by the bloodlust it evoked.

Hundreds gathered in the shadow of the gate, devouring the battlefield slain, cannibalising hearts torn from the chests of the fallen. Drums fashioned from hollowed-out skulls beat a raucous tattoo in time with the blare of thigh-bone horns. Some danced, a crude and belligerent performance intended to please the Dark Gods and bring their gaze upon the performer. Others fought for favour. Many just took their fill of flesh.

It was ritualistic. Shamanistic.

Even above the manic fervour of these men, Khul could hear the clangour of industry, the sound carrying across many leagues: the towers.

Forged of hell-brass and studded with the skulls of the unworthy, there were eight of these grim monuments. Each marked a point in the star of Chaos, the eightfold path upon which all worshippers of Khorne trod. And in the middle of that star was the Gate of Wrath.

Daemon blacksmiths and slaves in their thousands had toiled to raise the towers that stretched far across the Brimstone Peninsula. And though they were distant, nearly lost in the palls of unearthly smoke that blighted the sky, Khul felt their malign presence.

Chains that no mortal eye could perceive held the gate in thrall. Each was made not from metal, but from deeds. To the far south lay carnage, conquest, massacre and destruction, and to the north, fratricide, dismemberment, cannibalism and butchery.

A slaughterer’s oath, carved out in death and blood, bound each metaphysical chain to one of the eight towers and together kept the Gate of Wrath open.

Even then it struggled against its bondage.

Though he was still mortal, Khul had sight beyond the corporeal realm. He saw how the chains strained to hold their quarry. The tempest, the one creeping across the heavens in brooding thunderheads, the storm that had brought the golden warriors was the cause.

A threat manifested in Khul’s mind. They would come for the gate.

As he stepped into the maddening light emanating from the Gate of Wrath, Khul felt an unquenchable desire surge up from within.

For the first time since he had arrived, he noticed that the bodies being feasted upon were not just the Goretide’s fallen enemies. Many were warriors of Khul’s warband, feeding on their own instead of waging war against the golden warriors.

Khul saw Hrulkar the slaver-king, Goreklad the torturer-lord, Fenskar the skull-collector, Agrik the beast-master… Chieftains and champions all.

‘Weak… wretched…’

A tremor afflicted Khul’s hands. It grew into a tremble that ran up his entire arm. Then he was shaking, every bone wracked by a delirious frenzy that had froth spewing from his mouth.

Through a cage of clenched teeth, Khul spat to his flesh hound, ‘Slake your thirst.’

Several of the bloodreavers closest to their warlord looked up from their revels, their mouths and jerkins spattered and bloody.

‘Behold, Lord of Skulls,’ roared Khul, his voice ululating across the encampment until all had stopped what they were doing to look upon him. ‘A red dawn!’

The first bloodreaver barely had time to cry out as Grizzlemaw leapt and tore out his throat.

Others raised their weapons, at last realising their lord’s madness.

It would not save them. Screaming in rage, Khul tore into the throng with an unstoppable fervour.

The sun blazed overhead like a baleful eye observing the slaughter.

Two against hundreds, but Khul and his hound would not be denied. His savagery caused some to flee. Those who stood their ground were cut down, their heads cleaved. A great many heads, sacrificed unto the altar of Khorne from which all violent acts ultimately stemmed.

And throughout the carnage, the Blood God spoke to his chosen vassal, his voice the roar of endless destruction and the screaming of the damned. Khul gritted his teeth, but his agony was soon usurped by blinding, all-consuming murderlust.

It was a day of blood, a red dawn as Khul had prophesied.

The sun had dipped and grown cold in the black night by the time the massacre was done.

Khul sank to his knees. He shuddered with every laboured breath, driven to the brink of exhaustion by his reaping. Razors, not air, sawed in and out of his lungs. His heart thundered in a raging tattoo. And though his muscles burned and his limbs ached from the immense tally of the dead, he stood and found himself surrounded by a lake of blood.

Countless barbarian heads floated amidst the gore, but it was the reflection of the portal that caught Khul’s attention.

It began innocuously enough, a bubbling foam that rose to the surface of the crimson pool as the foul slick began to boil. Then there was intense heat and the stench of dying things, of burned metal and offal, the reek of a furnace.

Something stirred within the miasma of blood, a disturbance that formed ripples across the lake. Slowly, inexorably, a horn jutted forth from the congealed blood. It curved into a hook, black as sackcloth and wet like oil.

Khorne’s foot soldier blinked as it became corporeal, rising slowly. Khul saw the chain it had used to gain passage into this realm, and he heard snapping bone as the daemon’s hooves crushed the skulls from the Blood God’s endless battlefield underfoot.

To those untouched by Chaos, the bloodletter would have simply appeared to rise as if the lake was as deep as an ocean. Khul knew it was fathomless and he also knew that no daemon of Khorne could ever manifest in so gentle a fashion. As the summoning required blood and violence, so too did manifestation, and a host of bloodletters had vied for the right to enter the mortal realm. Daemon fought daemon, ensuring a slaughter from which only the strongest could emerge triumphant.

The one before Khul now was the first, therefore it was the mightiest.

The bloodletter was an exemplar of violence given form: bent-back limbed with an elongated snout, and red and iron-hard skin shimmering with heat haze. It bowed, horns dipped in respect but not acquiescence, as its black and hateful eyes regarded the warlord.

‘Are you the one who summoned me?’ it asked in both question and challenge, its resonant voice like metal scraping bone.

Khul nodded, his axe held loosely in his hand.

The bloodletter carried its own weapon. It was forged of no metal known to man or any creature of the Mortal Realms. A hellblade.

‘Then…’ uttered the daemon, as it drank in the slaughter arrayed around it and the offering in blood, ‘…we shall serve.’

The aetheric chains dangling in the pool had no anchor above, but went taut as a horde of bloodletters pulled their bodies forth into reality. Blinking and scenting, their long pink tongues tasted the air. They were not alone.

Hulking metal beasts emerged with them – bloodcrushers, the brass steeds of Khorne. They were no mere mounts; they were monsters. Far larger than any horse, there was something distinctly bullish about them but clad in armour plate stained with the blood of a thousand slain foes. The beasts bayed and growled, smoke exuding from their nostrils, their fell noises metallic and oddly discordant. Even for Khul, it grated on his senses and filled his mind with visions of conquest.

It took only moments for the warlord to have a legion of daemon riders at his command, their dread banners swaying with chained skulls and strips of leathery flesh.

As one, they raised their weapons.

Their leader, one of Khorne’s heralds, saluted with its sword.

‘Name the ones we are to murder,’ it rasped, its blood-cinder breath tainting the breeze.

‘Vendell Blackfist,’ Khul replied, for Khorne had shown him the army that marched on his towers and the one who was leading it. ‘Devour his vassals, but bring him to me so I can cut off his craven head.’

The herald bowed once more, and the bloodcrushers surged southwards. The earth trembled under the stampede of their mounts and red lightning cut ragged strips into the heavens.

‘Now you shall face a storm, Blackfist,’ said Khul.

His deep laughter boomed louder than the thunder.

Chapter Seven

Towers of brass

‘How do we breach the tower?’ asked Theodrus, the Retributor’s eagerness for battle obvious. ‘What are your orders, my lord?’

Ionus Cryptborn had mustered his army in a massive gorge, veined with thin streams of lava. The darkness of the night, alloyed to the sulphurous smoke rising from the basin of the flume, was enough to conceal their ranks, but not caustic enough to trouble a Stormcast.

The reflected glow of the lava gave their armour a lambent shine, though not bright enough to give away their position.

‘Patience, paladin,’ Ionus uttered. ‘I learned long ago it pays to be wary when attacking your enemy’s stronghold. And we are not so unscathed as to throw our caution aside.’

A dread aura bled off the brass tower.

Its armaments were clad in metal and shimmered with heat. Skulls had been hammered into the sides and piled up at the base like macabre footings. Foul, daemonic gargoyles leered down from the battlements. Spikes, thick chains of iron and a heavy, barbed portcullis kept aggressors at bay, though who would challenge the might of the Goretide in these lands was beyond the Relictor.

No archers or war engines defended it, but the walls were thick and its vantage high.

Evidence of a forest surrounded the tower, but its trunks had been cut down. The stumps remained, oozing red sap that looked uncomfortably like blood. The gruesome sight of it put Ionus in mind of severed necks, rather than trees, as if an army had been sunk deep into the earth surrounding the tower and decapitated one by one as they struggled helplessly.

Perhaps they had been, but he had no desire to find out.

Either way, the garrison would see them coming and send out an army before Sigmar’s chosen could even reach the outer border. If they were trammelled it would give the warriors inside time to organise a defence or summon further reinforcements.

The attack had to be swift and decisive. It was bad enough he had parted ways with Vandus and left the Lord-Celestant unsupported; he could not fail in this also.

‘If we could move unseen…’ Ionus murmured, and eyed the tumultuous sky and burgeoning clouds overhead.

Behind the grim facade of his skull mask, Ionus smiled.

‘I know what must be done.’

Rhoth slumped against the battlements, gorged on flesh and drunk on the ale his kind fermented in vats of black iron. A heady brew, it brought blinding anger to the fore at first before surging through the body like a fever and leaving behind a burning need for more.

‘Empty…’ he slurred to Gannon, another of the bloodreaver garrison.

Rhoth reached for his axe, grabbing the haft on his third attempt.

‘Eh, swine. I am speaking to you.’

But Gannon wasn’t listening, nor were the other warriors standing watch on the parapet. Instead, they were looking and pointing.

Heaving up his body to peer through the brass spikes that crowned the edge of the tower, Rhoth saw what had caught the attention of his fellow tribesmen.

‘What is that?’ he asked, briefly wondering if his hallucinations from imbibing the dark ale had yet to abate.

A storm rolled towards them – a massive belt of cloud. Howling gales raced along with it, and thunder boiled around it as lightning flashes lit up the dark hollows within.

‘Like nothing I have ever seen,’ uttered Gannon, as the half-chewed femur dropped from his meaty grasp.

The storm was not of sky, but surged across the ground like a carpet of fog.

Rhoth shook his head, to try and shake off his torpor. ‘How is that possible?’

Inside the storm, all was calm as the Stormcasts doggedly advanced. Even the lofty Prosecutors were concealed by the rolling thunderhead their Lord-Relictor had summoned. The slow beats of their wings crackled in time with the dolorous footfalls of the heavily armoured paladins.

Ionus led them, his icon held before him like a guiding beacon.

‘Make ready,’ he told his warriors, scarcely needing to raise his voice such was his mastery of the storm. ‘When we reach the threshold, they will be undone.’

‘I will strike for the tower’s summit,’ said Sturmannon, flying by the Lord-Relictor’s side.

‘Be careful, we know not what horrors it might yet possess.’

Again, Ionus’s mind went back to the blood-priest, the one he knew lurked somewhere within the tower. Once more, he thought of Vandus fighting alone, against Khul and against prophecy.

There was no time left for regret; the gatehouse now loomed before them. An iron portcullis barred the way, threaded with skulls and studded with spikes. But as the storm veil parted and revealed the warriors within, no foes came out to meet them. The gate remained shut.

Instead the bloodreavers on the parapet hurled insult and obscenity, believing themselves safe behind their walls of brass. A few threw axes between jeers or tossed rocks, remaining steady.

None of the Stormcasts fell, their armour fending off the desultory efforts of the garrison.

Theodrus mustered the Retributors, preparing to rip the tower down a piece at a time if necessary.

‘We can batter those gates into submission,’ he told his Lord-Relictor belligerently, ‘and then the curs within…’

‘Hold,’ Ionus ordered, though he knew the Retributors were eager to be unleashed. Sturmannon’s Prosecutors were the same, held aloft on their wings of light, beyond the reach of a hurled axe. Insults bit deeper and spurred the herald to want to act.

‘I can sweep them off that parapet, Lord-Relictor.’

‘No, wait…’ Something felt wrong, but Ionus had yet to identify his worry.

The cut-down trees, a buried army with heads cut from the bodies of its soldiers, the deep red soil and the apparent reluctance of the garrison…

‘When have you known a servant of Khorne to ever refuse a fight?’ he asked.

‘Lord-Relictor, we cannot delay,’ Theodrus replied, and signalled the attack.

Ionus let it happen, having no good reason to stop it. But when the Retributors had passed into the decapitated grove, and the gargoyles crouched atop the tower began to speak, he realised his concerns had been justified.

By then, it was already too late.

In the dark keep of the brass tower, a hulking figure regarded the army outside the gates through a murder slit in the wall.

He smiled as the Stormcasts came closer, urged by the murderous desire the tower evoked in all warriors.

‘You have come for blood,’ Threx Skullbrand whispered to the darkness. ‘And you shall have it.’

Their voices were iron, the grinding of metal against metal. Far from being grotesque statues, the gargoyles had another purpose than mere macabre decoration.

Ionus saw the danger, but his warning cry was stolen by the deep chanting of the statues.

‘Stand fast,’ he cried, ‘and defend yourselves!’

The cut-down trees… they were a trap. Not necks or trunks, but vents.

The ground underfoot began to tremble, before a fount of scalding blood burst from the red soil and took a piece of the vanguard with it. Retributors flailed, catapulted skyward.

Armour was scorched, flesh burned, and warriors came down to earth thunderously. Lightning flashes lit up the night as Sigmar reclaimed his own and the strength of Ionus’s chamber was eroded.

He heard shouting, confusion, and fought to restore order.

A second eruption of blood followed swiftly, and the air was filled with the death cries of Azyr’s paladins. Some tried to brace against the blood plumes but were torn off their feet anyway. No sigmarite plate nor lightning hammer would avail them.

Two further eruptions burst forth, spattering Cryptborn’s armour with hissing gobbets as he took what shelter he could. He grimaced as the blood crept inside the aegis of his plate and scalded the flesh beneath.

‘Enough,’ he snarled, watching Sturmannon’s Prosecutors whirling and diving to try to avoid the horrific blood rain.

Muttering words of power, Ionus called upon the Lord of Storms and unleashed lightning from the heavens.

A cerulean bolt arced from the clouds, as straight and pure as a spear. It struck the summit of the tower, lighting up the darkness. It utterly destroyed one of the gargoyles and silenced the rest. The blood-rain ebbed and no more lightning flashes split the night.

Ionus heard the jeering of the bloodreavers anew, and turned his grim visage upon them.

‘So the Bloodbound are craven!’ he bellowed like a clarion horn. ‘I thought as much. Those who skulk are unworthy to hold a blade!’

The howls of laughter coming from the parapet turned to shouts of belligerence. A moment later, the portcullis began to rise.

‘Dolts and simpletons,’ Ionus muttered, ‘easily goaded.’ He nodded to Theodrus to lead the attack. ‘Vanquish them. Leave none alive.’

Baying and snarling, a horde screamed out from the mouth of the tower. Bearded warriors, clad in blood-red plate and hefting thick blades, crashed into a wall of charging Retributors. The gilded paladins bore the brunt of the blood warriors’ fury and blunted it against their iron-hard resolve and formidable armour. The garrison of the brass tower had never fought such a foe as these, led by a warrior for whom death was preferred to failure.

Anger drove Theodrus. Anger, and guilt.

Memories of his former existence, before his Reforging, were vague and fleeting. For some it was this way, while others remembered more. No one knew why or needed to ask. But in the surge of battle, when his blood was up and righteous words upon his lips, Theodrus remembered.

He remembered the temple on the hill. He remembered the old man and the day he staggered into his village speaking of horrors. Raiders had come to the temple, intent on defiling it.

All knew the dangers beyond the walls of the village, how remote the temple was, but Theodrus could not let this sacrilege stand. He had been Thaed back then, though the name meant little now. Thaed had taken most of the village warriors and ridden hard for the temple. But when he arrived, he saw it was empty, there were no raiders in sight. What he did see was a great flame light the sky, glowing ominously from the direction of the village. The old man had lied to them, for he was not old and not even a man, not really. Without warriors to protect it, the village burned along with all in it, including Thaed’s own kin.

He merely existed for a time afterwards, wandering the wilds until the raiders returned. But they were not just raiders anymore. They were conquerors now, their ranks swollen with monsters. Thaed stood no chance as their onslaught swept the land, but he stood anyway and begged for death with a blade in his hand. The light came swiftly after that, and the memory of his pain faded until the day he raised a weapon in anger again.

As he fought, Theodrus spoke the names of his kith and kin, every man, woman and child amongst them. He let it steel him, his desire to avenge them keener than any sword, harder than any hammer. Lightning struck, evil men fell dead and Theodrus led the line.

‘Avenge them!’ he cried, tears of grief and hate filling his eyes, unseen behind his impassive mask. ‘Avenge them!’

No amount of retribution would ever be enough, but on he slew.

Chapter Eight

Dark tithes

In the shadow of the tower’s grim walls, the swell of battle was intense. Ionus rejoiced grimly as he fought shoulder to shoulder beside the Retributors.

At the front of the line, the struggle was at its fiercest. Axe blows rained in from the blood warriors, the air shimmering with the heat of their rage as they cut through even god-forged sigmarite.

Several Stormcasts lost limbs, great gouts of crimson ejected across their gilded plate. One was impaled on the blade of a serrated sword. His mask drooled red as its wearer coughed up blood. Another died instantly, head severed from body, and disappeared in a blazing coruscation of light a moment later. Across the line, flashes lit up the dark as a hellish frenzy of hacking goreaxes took their inevitable toll.

It became a scrum, brutal and attritional. The front ranks on each side quickly enmeshed as vigour and momentum took individual combatants deeper into their enemy’s formation. In truth, the Bloodbound had none, just a mob of bellowing and frenzied killers.

Whereas the blood warriors fought with fury and abandon, the Retributors embraced discipline and determination, fighting as one. Their lightning hammers rose and fell with relentless efficiency, crushing skulls and splitting the hefty war-plate of their enemies. Even as the barbarians died, they fought on, driven by rage, but the paladins were thorough and smote their enemies until there was little left but mangled remains.

Slowly, painstakingly, the Retributors reformed their ranks and began to push towards the tower.

‘Into them!’ roared Cryptborn, smashing a blood warrior aside with his relic hammer. ‘Do not relent!’

He raised his reliquary staff and a bolt of lightning crackled forth, destroying a slew of enemies.

‘As one, as one!’ cried Cryptborn, a wash of gore spraying across his skull-mask. He briefly caught sight of Theodrus urging his retinue forward. ‘Theodrus! Hold them. Hold them back.’

Pausing between hammer swings, Theodrus turned at the sound of his name, nodded and brought his men into order.

His paladins slowly formed the hammer, an offensive formation intended to blunt an opponent’s attack against a wedge of armour, many ranks thick, before pushing through with a narrow but even deeper column. To the Prosecutors whirling and pitching above, it would resemble a hammer, hence the name.

At the thought of the heralds, Ionus looked up.

Sturmannon’s retinue harried the tower ramparts, darting beneath hurled blades and spears, before sweeping in to unleash their celestial hammers. As agile as they were, not all the Prosecutors succeeded and heralds fell from the sky, burning like comets with wings ablaze.

Spears of light arced heavenward before they even struck the ground.

Scowling, Cryptborn pushed on into the fray. His eyes met those of Theodrus.

Pure as pools of azure, they shone with devotion but burned with vengeance. Theodrus raised his hammer aloft.

‘For Sigmar and Azyr!’

A roar came in answer from the swell of sweating, grunting, blood-slick warriors. A huge figure barrelled into the fight. He was more of a beast than a man, with a thick neck and broad shoulders. In one meaty fist he clenched a jagged-bladed axe, notched from splitting bone. In the other hand, he had an immense totem, pulsing with evil light. Furnace heat bled from the icon, the skull-image of Khorne resplendent in its anti-glory. He was the demagogue, a chain of skulls festooned about his neck denoting his rank, and crimson war-plate crested with spikes – the rage-maker.

‘Bloodsecrator…’ breathed Ionus Cryptborn.

He was the one from the battle for the Gates of Azyr. He had proclaimed his name to his Blood God, beseeching his favour. And he had received it, a most terrible boon that brought a rain of blood and blinding fury to anyone it touched: Khorne’s realm, manifest in reality.

‘Threx Skullbrand,’ said Cryptborn.

Heaving his own warriors aside, Skullbrand buried his axe in a Prosecutor who had swooped in to engage him.

The herald’s breastplate split, a ragged red cleft between the parted metal. He gaped, clutching crackling air before his hammers could form. Skullbrand finished him with a savage headbutt and grimaced as another flash of light soared heavenward.

‘Kill him!’ shouted Cryptborn, knowing what would happen next as he battered through the throng to reach the bloodsecrator. ‘Bring him down!’

Another Prosecutor arced towards the bloodsecrator, angling sharply, intent on avenging his comrade. A third flew swiftly after him, clenching a pair of crackling hammers.

The first died when he was caught by the throat. With the Prosecutor choking in his grasp, Skullbrand ripped off the gilded arch of his wings. Each crackled before its light ebbed to shivering corposant. The herald’s neck was broken with a savage twist, his lifeless body like a hurled spear as it struck his chasing comrade. He fell.

Skullbrand slew this one too, slamming a hobnailed boot on the Prosecutor’s chest to hold him down before an axe in the warrior’s emotionless mask ended his suffering.

Theodrus and his paladins had smashed a path clear, and Ionus burst through the enemy ranks and charged.

As Skullbrand met the eye of the Lord-Relictor, the bloodsecrator grinned. He knew it was too late for anyone to stop him.

With a triumphant roar, he rammed the icon of Khorne into the blood-soaked earth.

The stench of foetid blood rose high in the gorge, tainting the air. A storm of wrath burst from the icon, throwing Ionus off his feet.

A knot of paladins rushed to their Lord-Relictor, as a horde of Khornate bloodreavers spilled into the gap between the bloodsecrator and his foes.

Ionus cursed as he got to his feet.

‘Close ranks,’ he snarled, and could only glare at the hulking blood-priest.

You and I shall meet soon, he promised.

For now, the battle continued. The Stormcasts were in the ascendancy but it was far from over.

The crimson rain began again, driving the Bloodbound into fits of apoplexy. Soon the paladins were hard-pressed again, and the baleful roar of distant daemons in a realm of carnage seemed close and at hand.

The unsettling taint of Khorne’s own domain and the frenzy it evoked in his followers were merely opening acts to what followed…

It began as thunder, a deep rumble that came through the earth, rather than the sky.

A cloud of dust arose, barely visible in the darkness… Then an army resolved, roving along the night-black horizon. Moonlight glinted off their armoured barding.

‘Cavalry?’ growled Theodrus, in a brief moment’s respite.

Around him, the two forces clashed fiercely.

‘No mortal kind,’ rasped Ionus. ‘Those aren’t horses, nor are their riders knights. At least, not of flesh and blood. I–’ he began, before violently convulsing. At first, he thought it might be the effects of the icon, trying to turn his mind to reckless hate. But as the chill swept through his marrow, turning his bones to ice, he knew it was something else.

Something old, and from the past. From before, when he had been someone else.

The brass tower faded, becoming as incorporeal as smoke. The faces of his fellow Stormcasts froze in dark ice.

‘No, not now. Not this!’

Even as his mind was wrenched away, Ionus could hear the oncoming stampede of the bloodcrushers until even that bled away to sepulchral silence.

He opened his eyes, not realising he had closed them, and found he was standing in a long hall of cold, grey stone. Dust motes trickled from the ceiling in an endless, sad rain.

Darkness, abject and all pervasive, blinded Ionus to much of his surroundings. He imagined mausoleums, the slow creak of rotting wood, bones and earth as chill as winter frost.

He knew this place, for he had been here before in another life. The Deep Barrows – one of the many underworlds of Shyish, the Realm of Death.

‘Why am I here?’ he asked of the dark.

His own voice echoed back like a taunt.

‘Answer me!’

A tithe is owed. A tithe shall be given.

The same words returned, haunting and ageless as before.

A soul for a soul.

A malign intelligence regarded Ionus from the shadows, though he could scarcely perceive it. The only thing he could discern was a vague silhouette, and two piercing orbs of baleful green. Neither leavened the dark. Instead, they drank in the light.

You defied me once before, Eonid ven Denst, uttered the voice. It was the sound of depthless winter, of ancient wisdom beyond comprehension. It was entropy and the slow return to order. It was death incarnate.

Ionus’s reply carried some steel. ‘It has been a long time since I was known as Eonid ven Denst.’

A dry rasp like the whispering of thousands of corpses issued from the darkness.

Laughter, Ionus realised. He was being mocked.

A tithe is owed. A tithe shall be given, the voice repeated, though the shadow of its owner remained unmoving.

A soul for a soul.

Eldritch light flared into being, sculpted into the resemblance of a woman.

The shadow moved, leaning forward on its throne as Ionus cried out and reached for his wife. His sigmarite-clad fingers began to erode and rust before he could touch her, the grace Sigmar had given him undone in an instant.

It took just moments to reduce Ionus Cryptborn, Lord-Relictor and Stormcast Eternal to Eonid ven Denst, Amethyst Prince.

The simulacrum of ven Denst’s wife writhed in agony, her mouth open in a silent scream that he could only hear in his memories.

‘Please!’ begged ven Denst, his pale face awash with tears. He could feel her now, but as his skin gently brushed against hers she began to wither and decay. ‘Please…’ His voice, once so strong and formidable, became a whimper. ‘Please…’

Ven Denst sank to his knees, with only a pile of ashen remains in his grasp.

He looked up to face his tormenter. Only darkness looked back, but it was well beyond pity or compassion.

‘You promised me that you would keep her. That we would be reunited in death.’

With eternal life comes eternal pain. You should not have defied me. I remember everything. I remember the Days of Shattered Bone.

Ven Denst let the ash fall and rose to stand before his accuser. He felt his former strength returning. A gauntleted fist, not the hand of an Amethyst Prince, clutched his relic-hammer. He was Ionus Cryptborn again.

A last thought struck Ionus, of Vandus on his knees, besieged by Chaos, and a dark champion looming over him with a ready axe. It was the prophecy as Vandus had described it.

A tithe is owed. A tithe shall be given.

A soul for a soul.

‘Release me,’ uttered Cryptborn, then bellowed when no answer came. ‘Release me!’

He slammed down his reliquary staff and a great flash of light blinded him.

As it faded, he heard voices and smelled blood, the reek of hot metal and sulphur.

A retinue of paladins surrounded Ionus, fending off a horde of attackers. Theodrus led them, an unyielding bulwark of sigmarite against an ocean of fury.

‘Lord-Relictor…’ His mask could not hide the concern in his voice.

Ionus raised a hand to show he was all right. ‘Where are the daemons?’ he asked, still groggy but rising to his feet.

Theodrus did not need to answer, as the thunderous charge of the bloodcrushers hit.

A spearthrust of daemonic cavalry burst right into the heart of the Stormcasts’ ranks. Ionus could only watch as his battle formation was breached in several places at once. The beasts the daemons rode were truly monstrous. Warriors were crushed under iron hooves, gored by horns or torn apart with savage teeth.

Lightning cracks tore apart the darkness.

‘Hold them!’ roared Ionus as he felt the line roll and turn as men were slain. ‘Reform as one!’

A Retributor flailed, spitted. A knot of his comrades rushed in and smashed the steed apart with their hammers, but it was hard going. As well as proving incredibly strong, the daemonic beasts were nearly impermeable to all but the most determined of attacks.

After being so close to victory, now the Stormcast Eternals were firmly on the back foot and assailed from all sides.

As their numbers diminished, the Prosecutors could only harry the edges of the enemy’s ranks. Any that came too close to the bloodcrushers were cut down, Ionus ordered them back so as not to sell their lives cheaply.

The hammer formation of the paladins had become a circle, with all its warriors facing outwards and fighting almost innumerable foes. It was the task for which Sigmar had made them, but Ionus knew his chamber’s martial strength was finite. He began to see the wisdom of striking for the Gate of Wrath and denying Chaos its endless hosts.

‘Together,’ he roared again. ‘As one, brothers. As one!’

Theodrus bellowed in unison with his Lord-Relictor, chanting the names of the fallen and hurling them like curses at his enemies. He dragged a red-skinned daemon off its steed, first pummelling the rider and then breaking the beast apart.

Others were not so successful.

Ionus saw a clutch of Retributors brought down by half a dozen of the daemons. Some were cut apart by hell-forged blades, others were simply crushed to death. None survived, and the line shrank further.

Inwardly, Ionus groaned. They had been winning. Now it was beginning to unravel. He had lost sight of Skullbrand, but still felt the presence of the bloodsecrator. The red rain stained his armour, and robbed it of its lustre. Thunder rolled across the heavens again, but it was the voice of the Blood God, not the Lord of Storms. It began to wear upon him, slowly eroding his will.

A clutch of Stormcasts, Theodrus amongst them, flew back into the rear ranks. A massive daemonic steed and its rider ploughed in after them. The head of the beast snapped left and right, reaping limbs.

Only Ionus stood before it as it reared up onto its hindquarters.

As it crashed down, the sheer force of it almost took Ionus off his feet. In the end, he staggered, and barely parried a blow that rang against the haft of his relic-hammer. He felt his shoulder jar painfully, and grimaced behind his skull-mask.

Summoning the storm, he sent a bolt of arc lightning into the beast. Fearsome tendrils of crackling celestial magic coursed over its metal hide, but did little more than enrage it.

The rider swung again, and Ionus batted the blow away with his hammer. He countered by smashing the beast’s foreleg and, with some relief, saw the armour crack and its ichorous essence flow from the wound.

Stamping and snorting, the frenzied beast tried to crush him, but another paladin got in its way and fell instead. Ionus quickly moved closer so he was harder for it to see. Snarling and baying on the beast’s haunches, the rider had to fight to stay mounted.

Ionus struck again, another blow against the foreleg. This time the armour split apart, and viscous black lifeblood gushed forth as the daemon steed bellowed in pain. A third blow crippled it and the beast sank down sharply, pitching its rider forward and onto the ground where Theodrus crushed it with his hammer.

At the same time, Ionus rammed the hilt of his reliquary staff into the beast’s eye and drove it deep. He called upon the storm again, the bolt lancing down from a blood-red sky. No armour could protect the daemon steed now, sundered by Sigmar’s holy wrath.

‘We are failing, Lord-Relictor,’ uttered Theodrus breathlessly.

Blood warriors and bloodreavers clamoured for battle, hacking with furious abandon. Scattered amongst their swollen ranks were khorgoraths and even larger beasts now that the tower had given up its entire garrison.

‘Don’t give in to despair, Theodrus,’ Ionus told him.

But as the blood-rain anointed the Stormcasts in hellish red, Ionus knew they could not last much longer. He felt the presence of the tower sapping his strength as more fell beneath the armies of the Blood God.

A long shadow stretched out from the unholy tower. It fell across the Khornate host as if their lord had his eye upon them and granted them his favour.

Ionus looked to the tower, then to his foes. He saw a chance for salvation.

‘Praise Sigmar…’ he whispered, before he spoke to his brothers.

‘Theodrus, hold them off. Keep them at bay for as long as you can.’

Ionus left the fighting rank, the others closing the gap as he retreated into the depths of the Stormcasts’ slowly diminishing throng. Once there, the paladins encircled him and forged a small patch of earth in which the Lord-Relictor could pray.

On his knees, the reliquary staff in both hands, Ionus beseeched the Lord of Storms. His voice was a mere rasp in the tumult, but he fought to make it heard. Again, he invoked Sigmar and closed his mind to the savage imprecations trying to unnerve him.

He clutched the staff tighter, and shut out the din of battle around him.

‘Lord Sigmar, hear me…’ he prayed. ‘Bring forth your lightning, and allow me to be its vessel.’

A low rumble broke across the sky, not the hollow clamouring of daemons this time but the righteous voice of a God-King stirred to anger. It began slow, a distant flash to part the blood-red cloud, the wind rising to cleanse the air.

Ionus prayed harder, his fingers clenched so ardently that his knuckles ached.

‘Sigmar…’ he rasped, and felt another presence upon his shoulder – one that gave him strength. ‘Sigmar!’

A column of coruscating lightning roared from the heavens, so pure and bright that no servant of Chaos could bear look upon it. Daemons screamed in agony, whilst the mortal followers shielded their eyes. It hit the ground at the tower’s footings, blackening the earth. Not even a god-sent bolt could have smote Khorne’s monument outright, but Ionus had discerned its weakness. Where the lightning struck, fissures tore through the ground until it was wrenched apart.

An ominous cracking sounded, emanating from the tower. Brass squealed as it lurched against its own weight, leaning ponderously towards the chasm that had now formed beneath it. Seizing the chance, Theodrus and the Retributors who had fought through the throng of enemies slammed their hammers into the lurching footings of the tower.

Still blinded from the god-lightning, the host of Khorne was slow to react as the tower capitulated and came crashing down on them.

A huge pall of dirt and debris spilled up and outwards, as a great clangour of sundered metal resounded across the battlefield. In a single stroke, Ionus had tipped the scales of the fight. Bodies of mortals and daemons alike were crushed by the cursed stone of the tower, their limbs reduced to a mangled ruin. The foul stink of sulphur tainted the air as the bloodcrushers were banished, but it was the screams of the Bloodbound that lingered longest. Those that were left looked on aghast at what had become of their warhost and the magic of the storm-priest who had struck down the tower.

With the cheers of the Stormcasts ringing in his eyes, Ionus roared for them to attack.

Everything had turned. Even the dread rain had abated as a cool twilight, presaging the dawn, pierced the veil of ruddy cloud that had so besieged Sigmar’s chosen.

As the Retributors fell upon the survivors, they smashed what remained of the tower, breaking it apart with their hammers until it was shards and dust.

The surviving daemons fought on until even their fell lord deserted them and they dissolved back into the blood of the fallen. Many of the mortal followers fled, their will to live greater than their desire to fight and die for Khorne.

After a few hours it was done and there were none left to vanquish. A heavy toll had been paid for the victory, though, as nearly half of Cryptborn’s men had fallen.

If Threx Skullbrand lived, Ionus could find no sign of him. He was still searching through the rubble and the corpses when Theodrus approached him.

‘I witnessed the miraculous this night,’ said the Retributor-Prime, humbly kneeling before his Lord-Relictor.

As Ionus looked around, he saw they all were. Even the Prosecutors had taken a knee, their heads bowed in reverence.

‘We have triumphed,’ he said, raising his voice so all could hear. ‘And in so doing averted a great evil. But our task is hardly done and I shall ask more of you before the end.’

‘I speak for the chamber when I say we are yours to command, my lord,’ said a vehement Theodrus, ‘into the Realm of Chaos and back if so needed.’

Ionus put a hand on the paladin’s shoulder in comradeship. ‘It may yet be, brother. For we are not attacking another tower. Instead we go north. Now rise.’

With the clanking of sigmarite armour, the chamber got to its feet.

‘East?’ asked Theodrus, and Ionus could hear him frowning by the tone of his voice.

‘To Vandus, and the Gate of Wrath. Our brothers will not be alone when they face Korghos Khul.’

The Retributors saluted as one. Ionus knew it had hurt them to abandon the Lord-Celestant.

This is Sigmar’s will, thought Ionus, but he heard the voice of another, gnawing at the edges of his mind. It was one whom he owed a debt, one who was determined that debt would be fulfilled, a creature so ancient and powerful it would not be denied.

Chapter Nine

Wrath unbound

Vandus stood upon the hill and looked out across the ashen expanse of the Brimstone Peninsula. In the distance, he could still make out the banners of Jactos Goldenmane as his fellow Lord-Celestant forged farther west.

Looming over them was the monolithic Red Pyramid of Korghos Khul and standing in its shadow, the Gate of Wrath itself. It was little more than a vast courtyard of stone, but thronged with warriors.

‘Two prongs, my lord,’ said Dacanthos. ‘We will trap the Goretide and crush them.’

After their reunion in the shadow of the Volatus Ridge, the Lord-Celestants had formed a plan that would see Jactos attack from the far west and Vandus from further east on either side of one of Khul’s brass towers. Both armies avoided its garrison. Bitter fighting against the warbands that currently held sway over the Brimstone Peninsula had seen both armies pushed farther apart than Vandus would have liked, but their strategy could still work.

Khul’s hordes, his Goretide and the lesser warbands that paid him fealty, were in disarray. They had responded to the incursion by Sigmar’s warriors with aggression but without strategy, attacking the many Thunderstrike Brotherhoods alighting on the Brimstone Peninsula. It had left Khul’s stronghold vulnerable, along with the Gate of Wrath.

Vandus meant to take full advantage of the warlord’s lack of foresight. He and Jactos would take the stronghold together and destroy the realmgate. Bereft of reinforcement, Khul’s martial strength would suffer a major blow.

It was a sound plan, but Vandus still frowned. At the parting of their chambers, Jactos had seemed ever eager in spite of the near annihilation his warriors had faced.

‘He overreaches,’ said Vandus, eyes narrowed.

‘Lord Goldenmane will rein them in.’

‘No, he won’t.’

Cursing Jactos’s recklessness under his breath, Vandus took up Heldensen from where he had thrust it down and went to where his Warrior Chamber waited below.

‘It seems our fellow Hammers of Sigmar have set a fast pace,’ he declared loudly to his throng. ‘Who here thinks we can match it?’

Every Stormcast shouted in affirmation. ‘Aye!’

‘I thought so,’ Vandus told them, hiding his irritation at Jactos and determined to reach the Goldenmanes quickly. ‘Onward then… To glory!’

As Laudus Skythunder urged the Hammerhands forward with blasts of his clarion horn, Vandus lingered to watch the Red Pyramid.

‘He is up there now,’ he said to Calanax who was waiting for his lord nearby, growling in sympathetic ire.

‘Khul’s reign must end,’ swore Vandus, reminded of the vision that prophesied his death, ‘and I shall be the one to do it.’

The courtyard echoed to the metallic ring of an axe being sharpened.

Khul was alone and seated upon a throne, his legs apart with an orruk’s skull at his feet. It had been a brutish creature whose iron-hard bone made for a serviceable whetstone. It was a needless task, for the edge of his Khornate axe would never blunt. So sharp was it, and such was the potency of the dark sorcery bound into the blade, that it could cut the very fabric of reality itself.

As he carved into the orruk’s skull, Khul regarded the ragged banners hanging from the racks arrayed about him and the many trophies of conquest he had won.

Nothing had stood in his path, no king or rival warlord.

‘Was I not honourable?’ he asked of the revenants of foes long dead. ‘Were you not beaten by the stronger opponent?’

He had won every battle, though not always according to his twisted sense of martial pride. Sometimes his desire for glory had forced his hand towards less than honourable deeds. It rankled Khul, though he could attest that every challenge he had ever been given had been accepted, fearlessly and without doubt. And there had been many. He had never known defeat. Now it was different though. Despite his savage joy at such worthy foes to fight, he felt the threat to his dominance posed by the golden warriors. Surely, it was a sign from Khorne that Vendell Blackfist led them. Khul believed it was more than fate that this had happened.

‘Destiny brought you to my domain,’ he said to the piled skulls around him. They stared at him with hollow eyes, the unworthy, the weak and the craven. There was no place for them upon the Red Pyramid. Khul would not insult his lord with such tawdry offerings.

No, only kings and chieftains would suffice, and they were all dead in these lands. Khul had slain them. Except for Vendell Blackfist, an immortal to crown his glory and ensure his ascension to daemonhood.

Clenching the orruk skull in one mighty fist he crushed it into bone splinters, discarding what was left.

Rising from his throne, he went and tore down every banner.

‘Nothing!’ he bellowed, smashing his trophies underfoot.

At the foot of the throne, Grizzlemaw stirred from its slumber but did little more.

Khul seethed.

He knew the bloodcrushers had failed, that Threx had been defeated and one of the brass towers had been cast down. He felt it in his blood, in the way it boiled and how Khorne’s anger pained him. The chains fettering the Gate of Wrath strained and twisted, and Khul heard them scream for release.

His gaze strayed beyond the borders of his lair to where he knew his prey watched him.

‘Soon, Vendell Blackfist,’ Khul promised, barely heeding the massive war host gathering and awaiting his command. ‘You and I, to the death.’

He was about to turn away when something else caught his attention on the horizon. An army, distant but still discernible.

‘Not you, Blackfist…’ Khul whispered, then smiled. ‘He brings another to fight his battles for him, the craven.’ He shrugged, laughing. ‘Then let the blood flow.’

A bloody mist had risen from the ground to envelop Jactos and his warriors, not enough to cloud the way ahead but disconcerting all the same. It stuck to the Stormcasts’ armour, robbing it of its sheen and fouling the joints.

‘This war-plate feels like lead,’ groaned Lord-Castellant Neros, trying to scrape the worst of it off.

Jactos felt the unnatural weight of the blood too, but chose not to answer. He was intent on what lay ahead.

They had battled hard and through seemingly numberless warbands to reach so far into Khul’s domain, and the intense fighting had driven a wedge between the Hammerhands and the Goldenmanes, forcing them apart and onto separate paths. Though he would only admit such vainglory to himself, Jactos welcomed it. He wanted this, without any other Warrior Chamber from any Stormhost to intervene. Now he was determined he would face the warlord before Vandus. Though it hurt his pride to confess it, he had failed in the shadow of Volatus Ridge. Now he would make amends and show Sigmar he was worthy of his glory.

He grinned as the pyramid emerged from above the mist, hazy but recognisable. But still there was more.

Great menhirs, carved into the likeness of daemon kings, marked the threshold of Khul’s domain. The stone obelisks were huge and towered above the crimson mist. Their bestial features were contorted in snarls of rage and unfettered wrath. A killing urge bled off them, like sweat off a mortal man, and they clenched whips, maces and axes in their clawed fists.

‘Bloodthirsters…’ uttered Neros, recognising the image of the foul greater daemons wrought into the stone.

If Khul’s domain was protected by such beasts then the task before the Stormcast Eternals was great indeed. Even with the other Stormhosts, like the Anvils of the Heldenhammer and the Lions of the Sigmar, Bloodthirsters would pose a significant threat.

It did little to sour Jactos’s ebullient mood.

‘Have heart, brothers,’ he said, gesturing with his runeblade to the lair that lay beyond the menhirs. ‘Our quarry is near.’

Neros hefted his halberd as he thrust the light of his warding lantern forth.

‘It is not all that is near, my lord.’

The Bloodbound hordes came swiftly from the mist. They always did, ubiquitous as bones in this parched land. Their war cries split the air – not an ambush this time, but a pitched battle.

‘It seems Khul has not left his borders unprotected after all,’ said Jactos as he drew his hammer.

Glory beckoned. He had but to dispatch these wretches first.

‘Stormcasts!’ he cried. ‘To arms!’

Elsewhere, others fought with equal fervour and conviction.

Vandus and his Warrior Chamber would not be outdone by the Goldenmanes.

A ragged throng of warriors charged at them across the ash plain, kicking up clods of burning dust and cinder.

The Hammerhands met them in serried ranks, Liberators to the fore with shields upraised and, behind them, the Judicators. Malactus held his arm aloft to halt his retinue.

Every warrior armed with a skybolt bow turned it heavenward as one.

‘Release!’

Malactus’s voice carried far. It even reached the blood-soaked tribesmen barrelling across the plain. Some faltered as they heard it, wondering what it portended. The answer came swiftly on the lightning shafts of hundreds of skybolt arrows.

Evil men fell in their droves, scythed down by the deadly accuracy of the Judicators. Driven by their bloodlust and momentum, bloodreavers tripped and scrambled as they struck falling bodies. Heavily armoured blood warriors crumpled with arrows in their gullets or eye sockets. The Bloodbound battle line, such as it was, fragmented and scattered. The Liberators did not hesitate, and swept into them with their shields, battering warriors aside or crushing them underfoot. Any who had fight left in them were swiftly dealt with by hammer and blade.

The massacre was quick, but not painless. Not for the Bloodbound.

Vandus had been at the core of the fighting, letting Calanax have his rein as he stood with his retinues. It had felt good to be an integral part of the brotherhood.

In spite of this, Vandus’s mood soured when he saw how far Jactos had gone. The Lord-Celestant himself was somewhere amidst the distant scrum that Vandus now saw.

Decanthos joined him at the front. ‘They’re closing on the Red Pyramid.’

Vandus nodded, and the scowl he wore behind his mask was obvious from his voice.

‘Swifter than us. At this pace, our chambers will not breach the threshold to Khul’s domain at the same time.’

The massive Chaos idols that led to where Khul had made his lair appeared to mock them. Each depicted a different greater daemon of Khorne, a dread pantheon of bloodthirsters. Vandus saw one with ragged wings clutching a pair of axes. Another had a whip coiled around its wrist. A third hefted a double-bladed axe.

Looming above all was the Red Pyramid and, in front of that, the Gate of Wrath itself. An archway not unlike the one they had seized on the Igneous Delta, except this one was bent to darkness, a portal to the Realm of Chaos. With it under their control, Khul’s warhorde would be unstoppable.

‘We should make haste,’ said Decanthos, ‘and hope these fell creatures are not also in service to Korghos Khul.’

Banners and totems swayed on the horizon as more Bloodbound hordes clamoured for war. The lands around the Brimstone Peninsula were choked with them.

Vandus bellowed for his dracoth and Calanax came running.

As he mounted the saddle, he turned to the Liberator-Prime.

‘The Gate of Azyr was a mere prelude compared to this, Decanthos.’ Seeing others had gathered and were listening, Vandus raised his voice to address them all. ‘We stand at the threshold of hell. Know this is why we were forged. Here is our chance to turn back the tide of evil that has swept across these lands and enslaved them. I shall not falter as I face Chaos, nor will I blink before the daemon. I will stand and declare I am Stormcast Eternal, chosen of Sigmar! Will you declare the same?’

The affirmation from his warriors was deafening. It drowned out the war cries of the tribesmen in the distance, and stunned them into silence.

‘Azyr!’ bellowed Vandus.

‘Azyr!’ came the thunderous reply.

‘Bring. Them. Death!’

The tide was endless.

Scores of bloodreavers, daemons and monsters died beneath sigmarite hammers, and yet still they came, undaunted, unceasing.

Jactos and his warriors were deep into Khul’s lair now, far beyond the snarling faces of its stone guardians. Vandus had covered much ground, but it would be the Goldenmanes and not the Hammerhands who would claim this victory for Sigmar.

Barely a hundred of his brave Stormcasts remained, as the azure flashes that followed every death and return to Azyr became all too common.

He had lost sight of Neros, cut off during the last push, though he thought he still could hear the strident defiance of his Lord-Castellant. Jactos’s retainers still cleaved to him, though, his paladins and a clutch of battered Liberators. None faltered, and they fought without fear, plumbing depths of endurance that would have killed lesser men.

Unlike the servants of Khorne, though, the Stormcasts’ ranks were not without limit. Hard as it was for him to admit, Jactos knew they were waning.

Assailed on all sides by lumbering khorgoraths, hell-spawned slaughterbrutes and swathes of mortal Bloodbound, the Goldenmanes were beleaguered when Jactos at last reached the foot of the Red Pyramid.

His intent had been to make for the Gate of Wrath, to confront and defeat Khul on its very steps and thus earn eternal glory for Sigmar. But instead, he had been driven here. And though he was but a few more strides from the gate, his path was severely impeded by enemies. Not until Jactos saw who descended from the Red Pyramid did he understand why he had been driven there.

A deep thrust with his runeblade disembowelled a khorgorath and it fell to the hot earth, blood steaming on the foetid air.

‘To me, Liberators!’ shouted Jactos to his men. ‘To me, Retributors!’

No rallying note sounded from his heraldor this time. Ulius Stormcry had fallen, his voice now silent.

Jactos fought on as if he had heard the clarion call anyway, and came face to face with the one he guessed was the warlord Korghos Khul.

A brute, clad in blood-red armour and with a skull-helm masking the upper half of his face, strode down the Red Pyramid. Bone crunched beneath his heavy tread, skulls splitting and spilling their teeth. Khul appeared not to notice. As his gaze fell upon the Lord-Celestant, his eyes narrowed.

A creature padded around the feet of the warlord, a monstrous red-skinned hound with a brass collar and a flanged crest of skin under its gullet. As Khul gripped the back of its neck, the hound snarled in hatred for the Stormcasts.

‘Grizzlemaw can smell fear,’ said the warlord, casually stepping off the pyramid and standing before Jactos. His gauntleted fist was wrapped around a double-bladed axe that exuded deathly potency. Khul sneered. ‘You already look defeated.’

Undaunted, Jactos levelled his runeblade at the warlord.

‘It shall be your head, not my Lord Hammerhand’s, that adorns your Red Pyramid,’ he declared. ‘Then I will see it sundered into nought but bone and ash!’

‘Ah…’ remarked Khul, ‘so you have come to save Vendell Blackfist from my blade. Brave, but misguided. You must realise, whelp,’ he said, hefting his axe in both hands as he advanced, ‘that prophecies are seldom wholly accurate.’

As if sensing what was about to take place, the retainers of both champions stepped back and an arena in the dirt formed.

With a roar, Khul leapt at Jactos and battle was joined.

Neros finally caught sight of Jactos through the fray, and saw his Lord-Celestant assailed on all sides.

‘He fights the Lord of Khorne,’ he rasped, powerless to intervene.

Even from a distance, the duel looked fearsome. Khul’s sheer aggression and apparent strength would test any Stormcast, but Jactos weathered and parried every attack. His riposte was lightning fast and telling. Khul took a hard hammer blow against his chest and fell back.

Jactos was winning… and Neros dared to hope, wishing he were by his Lord-Celestant’s side.

But as he battled alongside his comrades in a sea of foes, all the Lord-Castellant could do was watch.

An ever diminishing circle of warriors fought beside Jactos. Only a few Liberators and Retributors from those Stormcasts separated off from Neros’s men remained. And though they battled like the heroes Sigmar had reforged them to be, they were not inviolate.

A Liberator fell, his shield split in two, his armour the same. A paladin crushed a khorgorath’s skull, only to be hacked apart by a dozen axe blows. It became an attritional grind, one the Stormcasts were destined to lose.

As the last of his men died, Jactos knew he fought alone. His world had shrunk down through the eye slits of his mask to focus on the brutal warlord trying to kill him and the scrap of earth upon which they fought.

He weaved aside as the axe came close, tearing sparks from his sigmarite armour, then replied with a thrust that Khul could barely turn away.

A hefty punch almost staggered him, and black slashes flared behind Jactos’s eyes. Ears ringing, he placed a kick into Khul’s guts and sent the warlord sprawling. He recovered quickly, on his feet before Jactos had a chance to kill him with a single decapitating blow. A clear note of sigmarite against daemon-forged metal rang discordantly as runeblade met axe of Khorne.

Jactos’s hammer struck armour, putting a crack in Khul’s pauldron and sending the warlord to his knees. Blood welled into the gap as Khul bellowed in pain and threw the Lord-Celestant back.

‘You cannot prevail,’ uttered Jactos, defiant despite being surrounded. ‘Sigmar will reclaim the Mortal Realms from tyranny.’

Rising to his feet, Khul laughed and spat up a gobbet of blood.

‘Look around. It’s already over, fool.’

Though Khul’s followers could have overwhelmed Jactos in moments, they were held back by the warlord’s will to meet the challenge alone. Even the hound was kept at bay. It had become a duel, one that Jactos realised he would likely not survive even if he did best Khul, a contest of arms pervaded by a strange sense of honour.

Then I shall return again, reforged to enact my vengeance, he vowed.

‘You’re wrong, scum,’ he told Khul. ‘It has only just begun!’

Jactos unleashed a hail of blows with blade and hammer against Khul, who still wielded his brutal axe in two hands. The warlord used the haft like a pole arm, warding off the Lord-Celestant’s attacks with surprising speed and restraint.

The might of Sigmar flowed through Jactos’s veins, and no Khornate tyrant could hope to match that. These Bloodbound curs had spent too long fighting emaciated tribesmen and harrying slaves; they had not fought warriors like the Stormcasts before.

‘Your reckoning has come!’ spat Jactos, hammering Khul’s defence as the warlord backed off.

A wild swing from the warlord was met with a deft parry against the haft of Jactos’s hammer. The Lord-Celestant then lunged with his runeblade, driving it into the meat of Khul’s thigh.

‘Not so easy to slay true warriors, is it, warmonger?’

Khul shook his head, staggering from the wound in his leg.

‘Know when you are beaten,’ Jactos declared, revelling now. He hacked down with hammer and blade as one, putting the warlord back on his knees again as he threw up a desperate defence.

Jactos should have finished his opponent, but instead kicked him away. Like most of the Stormcasts, he could remember parts of his past, the person he used to be and the life he had led. Those memories grew sharper during battle, and Jactos’s mind flooded with images of his burning village and the grinning barbarians who had tortured and goaded his kin.

He had a chance to redress the scales, and mete out punishment in kind for what was inflicted upon him and his own.

Another reckless swing by Khul was deflected with ease, as Jactos prepared to end it.

‘I prove your prophecy false, warlord,’ he said. ‘I have saved Vandus Hammerhand and thwarted you.’

The warhammer came down, but Khul caught it. With a savage snap, he broke the Lord-Celestant’s wrist and threw away the hammer.

Jactos tried to counter with his runeblade, but Khul attacked too quickly, inhumanly so, and cleaved his arm at the elbow. A golden forearm, the hand still gripping the sword, fell in front of Jactos who had trouble comprehending what had just happened. He could not stop staring at his severed limb, until the iron vice of Khul’s gauntleted hand wrapped around his throat.

‘There is something you should know about prophecies,’ Khul told him, heedless of the Lord-Celestant’s choking. ‘The beholder sees what they want to see, what they believe in their hearts to be true. I do not need the skull of Vendell Blackfist to crown my ascension. Yours will serve just as well.’

Khul released his grip, and the axe blade fell.

Neros cried out when he saw Jactos fall, head cut clean from his noble shoulders. His anguish turned to dismay when there was no lightning flash, no return to the heavens. No resurrection.

‘He is truly dead…’ the Lord-Castellant whispered, scarcely able to believe it.

It was an honourable end, but a permanent one. A death without hope.

Neros fought on, his voice hoarse from bellowing orders and urging his warriors to never surrender.

Only when he heard the trumpet call of Laudus Skythunder did he take heart and find reserves of strength he did not know he possessed.

‘Fight them!’ he roared. ‘To your very last. Hold on, brothers, for the Hammerhands are with us! The Hammerhands are with us!’

Oblivious to the ongoing battle around him, Khul stooped to retrieve the immortal’s head. Part of the dead warrior’s helm had been smashed apart by the killing blow, and through the broken mask Khul saw the fear and confusion writ upon dead features.

‘Such arrogance,’ he murmured. ‘The cur expected to beat me.’

A shallow cleft had been left behind where the axe had cut reality itself. It soon closed, but within the sliver Khul saw the realm beyond, the realm of his master he so desired to ascend to. And that was not all. A remnant, little more than a vague shadow and a near-silent scream, persisted where the warrior had stood before his death. The blade had cleaved his soul as well as his body, cutting the tether between Aqshy and the celestial heavens from where he had been cast.

‘Damnation and horror are yours to endure for eternity,’ he whispered calmly to the shade of Jactos Goldenmane as it bled away into the Realm of Chaos.

Khul then stood, turning as he hefted his axe on to his shoulder, and began to climb the Red Pyramid. He clenched an immortal skull in his fist. It was the last skull he needed for his ascension.

Chapter ten

The deepening storm

By the time the Hammerhands reached Neros, the Goldenmanes were reeling and would have been destroyed were it not for the other chamber’s arrival. Hordes of khorgoraths surrounded them, tearing off heads as a veritable lightning storm raged above the battle with the discorporating bodies of the Stormcast Eternals.

Bellowing to Sigmar and Azyr, Vandus charged into the frenzied ranks of the beasts on the back of Calanax. His Warrior Chamber was hard on his heels, led by a spearhead of Liberators wielding twin blades and hammers. In their wake came the shield-bearers, acting as a protective vanguard for Malactus’s Judicators.

The storm deepened as the skybolts took flight, arcing down in crackling volleys. Chained lightning wreaked havoc as shock bolts were unleashed. Boltstorm crossbowmen took to the flanks, killing khorgorath with intense, destructive fusillades. A booming rumble amidst the tumult presaged the unleashing of a thunderbolt crossbow as one of the Chaos monstrosities was blasted apart with a single deadly quarrel.

With the khorgoraths’ ranks so depleted, the Liberators fell upon them with disciplined fury and cut them down.

It was nothing compared to the fury of the Lord-Celestant.

Vandus reaped a brutal tally with Heldensen. By his hand, khorgoraths died by the score. His mount was also deadly, and together they hewed a red path to Neros.

‘Your arrival is timely, Lord Hammerhand,’ said the venerable Lord-Castellant, ‘but I fear you are too late.’

From his vantage in the dracoth’s saddle, Vandus saw over the thronging Bloodbound to where a single gold-armoured body lay headless in the dirt.

‘And we are still beleaguered,’ said Neros.

‘Not for long,’ Vandus replied grimly, gesturing to the south where a golden phalanx of warriors had already entered the fray and was advancing fast.

An Exemplar Chamber, led by a Lord-Relictor.

‘Ionus Cryptborn has arrived.’

Ionus smashed through the unruly ranks of the Bloodbound, his skull-mask spattered with gore. Bloodreavers and blood warriors died swiftly and painfully to his hammer blows as he led one phalanx of Retributors into the fray.

Noble Theodrus led the second phalanx, each cohort of paladins arranged on either flank of the battlefield. Two hammers of unrelenting, righteous might swept into the mortal worshippers of Khorne and destroyed them as the Stormcasts met in the middle.

Prosecutors flocked overhead, under the keen command of Kyrus. Ionus called to him as he flew by.

‘Thin the herd,’ Ionus told him. ‘Forge me a path to Lord Vandus.’

Nodding curtly, Kyrus went about his mission. He swiftly mustered his warriors into a thin lance and drove them ruthlessly down into the heart of the Chaos army.

Ionus clapped Theodrus on the shoulder, who was busy crushing the last few remnants of the horde they had just vanquished. ‘There, Theodrus…’ Ionus pointed to the bloody havoc being wreaked by the Prosecutors, ‘…our path to the others.’

About to lead the Retributors out, Ionus stopped short as crippling pain seized him. He clenched his shoulder beneath the pauldron, and felt the chill of the grave fall upon him like a deadly mantle.

‘Lord-Relictor!’

Ionus felt Theodrus’s hand supporting him, but the Retributor’s words were lost to him as another voice took hold.

A tithe is owed. A tithe shall be given.

A soul for a soul.

‘There… is… nothing for you…’ spat Ionus, gritting his teeth. The strength of Sigmar filled him, warming his frozen bones and restoring the vitality his old foe had sought to take from him. ‘I defy you,’ he declared. ‘I defy you!’

The chill faded, and the dread presence that had enveloped Ionus dissipated. A fell reminder was left in its wake.

I shall remember this. His soul or yours, Eonid. The tithe will be paid. It will be paid…

‘Aye, but not this day.’

Theodrus heard everything, and leaned in close to his Lord-Relictor as he helped him stand straight.

‘What plagues you, my lord?’

‘An old menace, brother. One I believed gone. Pay it no mind,’ said Ionus, seeing the Chaos hordes amassing again. ‘And reunite us with Vandus. Be quick, as the lightning from which you were wrought.’

Theodrus obeyed. With the Retributor-Prime at the fore, the paladins rushed into the furrow being cut by the Prosecutors. None would stay their wrath.

At last, they were closing but the distance to the Gate of Wrath was swarming with the followers of Chaos both mortal and daemon alike. Just beyond the gate itself was the Red Pyramid, as forbidding as any monolith Vandus had seen in these benighted lands.

The light was fading as the sun began to dip. He hoped it did not bode ill. It mattered little now. They would succeed here, now, or they would perish. There was no retreat, not for any of them.

Spurring Calanax, Vandus charged into the warbands that Khul had allied against them. He struck down a red-skinned daemon that had leapt to tear out his throat. Another bloodletter disappeared beneath Calanax’s claws. A third was ripped in half by the dracoth’s jaws.

Vandus whirled Heldensen around his head in a punishing arc. In the hands of the Lord-Celestant, it was a twin-tailed comet smiting everything that dared to step into its path. As gouts of lightning spewed from Calanax’s mouth and Heldensen slew without cessation, Vandus began to feel invincible.

Ever since his vision, the one where Khul had placed his head upon the pyre of skulls, Vandus had felt a power growing within him. Destiny had brought him to this place, to this moment. It was a fate determined not just by gods, but by his own indomitable will and sense of purpose. It stretched back through time, to before all of this, to before the Direbrand tribe and the dreaded age of Chaos. It went further and further, a legacy that began before time itself.

Vandus knew not how this was possible, or even what it meant, but he was certain it would be he who ended Khul’s reign. At last, he realised why Sigmar had chosen him, why he had been the vanguard.

This knowledge filled him with glorious purpose.

‘We are the storm!’ he roared, Heldensen held aloft and crackling with power. ‘Bringers of retribution and light. Reforged by Sigmar to reclaim these lands in his name and restore order. I am the lightning!’

The Hammerhands roared in answer. ‘Azyr!’

But the road to the Gate of Wrath was long and choked with the lost and the damned, an unholy Chaos warhorde without end.

‘Righteousness versus damnation,’ Vandus murmured to himself, his gaze alighting on the grim archway that led to Khorne’s own realm. ‘One must break before the end.’

Vandus had not seen the danger. So intent was the Lord-Celestant on reaching the Gate of Wrath that he had become oblivious to the true threat in their midst. But Ionus saw it, and he knew what it portended.

As he began to marshal his powers, he cried out and let the magic of the celestial carry the strength of his voice like a thunderhead.

‘Lord Vandus!’ he cried, his deathly voice echoing across the battlefield so that all in gold turned to heed him. Ionus gestured with his hammer. ‘Atop the pyramid!’

The beast’s skull exploded against Heldensen’s might, and as its lumbering body fell Vandus looked up to see the Red Pyramid. Close now, it throbbed like an angry wound and stirred feelings of wrath in the Lord-Celestant. Between it and the Gate of Wrath, he felt the unholy presence of Khorne.

But it wasn’t this that had caused the Lord-Relictor to cry out. Vandus saw it now, through the battling warriors – he saw the figure clambering up the rugged flank of the pyramid, a mountain of skulls dedicated to Khorne. The daemonic hound scrambling by Khul’s side was but one of the gifts the Lord of Skulls had bestowed upon his champion. The dread axe he bore was another. At least one further boon remained but it was neither beast nor blade, Vandus realised. No trinket, but metamorphosis.

Ascension.

As Khul climbed, moving with certain strength and an eager fervour, Vandus saw the offering the warlord planned to give.

A golden helm, blood still drooling from the severed neck of the head inside it.

‘Jactos…’

Grief and anger struck Vandus like a double-edged sword.

The vision disproven, but the prophecy about to be fulfilled.

‘I must stop him now.’

But an endless swathe of red stood in Vandus’s way and he had not the lightning forged wings of a Prosecutor to bear him over it.

Chapter eleven

Servants of the gods

Hell and fury raged across the Brimstone Peninsula as two gods fought for supremacy. Their struggle rent the land and sky as blood boiled up from the earth and lightning struck down from the heavens.

Wading through the hosts of Chaos, ever closing on his Lord-Celestant’s side, Ionus Cryptborn had never seen such destruction. As well as the Hammers of Sigmar, he saw the distant banners of the Lions of Sigmar and the Anvils of the Heldenhammer. Truly, this was a conflict like no other.

Despite the presence of the other chambers, all hope rested with Vandus. He was the one, chosen by Sigmar to launch his crusade of liberation. It had to be him. But even the Hammerhand himself, with all the gifts that Sigmar had bestowed upon him, could not reach Khul in time.

As if the mindless beasts and frenzied tribesmen who had allied themselves to the warlord’s banner knew of the import of this moment, a vast horde impeded Vandus.

A retinue of Prosecutors had seen the danger, but as they flew towards the grim ziggurat of skulls beyond it, gouts of scalding steam engulfed them, spewing from the maw of the gate and sending the heralds tumbling earthward. They crashed to the foot of the Red Pyramid, where an eager rabble of bloodreavers cut them down before they could rise.

As he watched the distant slaughter, Ionus knew it would be up to him to turn the scales back into Sigmar’s favour and so he beseeched the Lord of Storms again. As he gathered the lightning unto his hammer and prepared to channel it through his reliquary staff, the old wintry chill returned for one final attempt.

A tithe is owed.

With a fierce effort of will, Ionus shut out the ancient voice that plagued him and unleashed his power. Cold light played about his eyes.

‘Sigmar speed you!’

A coruscating bolt of lightning leapt from the reliquary staff to strike Vandus and Calanax. As one, rider and mount disappeared into the azure light, which arced a second time and earthed itself violently into the foot of the Red Pyramid.

As the lightning flash diminished, it left behind a scorched ruin of skulls and something else.

Vandus rode the lightning and for a moment became engulfed by an all-consuming storm. It ended swiftly, the brief lightness of his being soon growing heavy again as his body returned to flesh and blood.

Calanax was with him, no stranger to the storm path, and bellowed a warning as he looked up towards the summit of the pyramid.

Vandus followed his gaze, and saw Khul poised to claim right of ascension.

Memories were fleeting of the old life, of the man he had been before the apotheosis, but even when he had fought Khul as Vendell Blackfist, the warlord of Khorne had been prideful. He had honour of a kind. Vandus would use it against him.

‘Khul!’ He bellowed above the tumult and the din of war unbound. ‘Korghos Khul! Slayer of the Direbrand tribe! Face me now, or I name you coward!’

So close…

Gripping the immortal’s head in one hand, Khul reached out with the other to clamber the last few steps to the summit when he heard the challenge.

He could almost taste the promise of daemonhood in the sulphurous air and the taint of blood on the breeze. Khorne would deny him if he turned his back now. No exalted champion could refuse a challenge and still believe himself worthy of the Skull Throne’s greatest honour.

Khul slowly turned to face his accuser. His gaze met that of the golden warrior, and for the first time he saw Vandus Hammerhand and not the blacksmith chief who had escaped death by luck.

‘You have no true understanding of what it means to be chosen,’ Khul whispered through clenched teeth. ‘Of my sacrifice.’

Anger rose up within him, volcanic and incendiary. He looked to the blackening skies, pride and ambition clashing violently within him.

Khul screamed with insensate rage and vaulted from the side of the pyramid.

Shimmering, azure rain pelted from the sky. As it met the smouldering earth of the Brimstone Peninsula, it turned into a vaporous mist that clouded the battlefield in an eldritch gloaming.

Lightning struck, cascading in a barrage from the storm-wracked vaults above. Ionus smiled grimly as it sheared loose an avalanche of skulls from the side of the pyramid and buried the bloodreavers below. One macabre feast was usurped by another as the skulls gnawed and snapped at the tribesmen drowning amongst them. Ionus saw one of the bloodreavers attempt to surface before being dragged under by a mass of bony teeth.

His attention turned to the Lord-Celestant.

‘It’s just you and him now,’ Ionus whispered, as Vandus spurred Calanax through the deluge of skulls to meet Khul.

‘Die, fool!’ roared Khul, his axe promising eternal damnation as the raw magic of Chaos bled from its blade.

Too late, Vandus saw the momentum was with the warlord as Khul leapt down upon him, and though he tilted in the saddle to prevent himself from being cut apart, the fight had really begun.

The whispered screams of the souls claimed by Khul’s axe filled Vandus’s ears, and for a moment he thought he could hear Jactos’s voice amongst them. Another cry drowned them out, that of Calanax.

Khul’s axe was embedded in the dracoth’s flank, but not deep enough to kill him. Through godly intervention or simple fortune, Calanax was spared his soul being wrenched into the Realm of Chaos but was still badly wounded. As Khul wrenched the axe loose, the beast sagged and fell onto its side, almost taking Vandus with it.

Crying out in anger, the Lord-Celestant leapt from the saddle and came at Khul with Heldensen.

By now, the two were fighting on the red earth at the foot of the broken pyramid and Khul wrong-footed Vandus to sidestep the crushing blow. Viperously, he swung the cleaved head of Jactos into Vandus’s face, making his helm ring with the impact.

Vandus gagged as blood spattered his gilded mask, finding its way into his eyes, nose and mouth. He tried to recover, but the daemon-hound was upon him before he could raise Heldensen. He stumbled, and for a brief moment felt doubt. Khul was a warrior-king, a warlord who had enslaved an entire region to his Goretide. He had fought countless battles, slain numberless enemies. He was unbeatable…

‘No. I am the lightning. Sigmar’s storm manifest.’

A bolt arced down from the heavens and Vandus knew what he must do.

As the flesh hound lunged at him, Vandus smashed his vambrace into its snarling mouth. As it clamped down, he threw his arm out and the hound with it, smashing it into a welter of skulls.

But Khul was already on him, axe swinging as Vandus stepped back again. He felt heat at his shoulder and realised that he had been herded to within a few paces of the Gate of Wrath.

‘Your skull will be mine after all,’ the warlord growled.

The haft of Heldensen rang as Vandus desperately parried the blow. He lashed out, finding strength from anger, but Khul was swift and already within the Lord-Celestant’s guard.

‘You are nothing without your drake,’ Khul sneered, his unbreakable grip around Heldensen’s haft.

Vandus roared, unable to wrench the hammer free. He lunged instead, smashing his head against Khul’s face and splitting the skull mask in two. He saw a glaring, angry visage beneath.

With a sharp twist, Khul disarmed Vandus and threw the hammer aside.

‘I was wrong about you,’ he said, spitting blood and teeth. ‘You are still Vendell Blackfist, doomed to fall by my blade. Die now!’

I am the lightning. The words came back to Vandus, as did the image of the bolt striking down from above. Before Khul could end him and condemn his soul to torment, Vandus leapt from the killing blow to land crouched within a handspan of the Gate of Wrath.

As he rose up, Vandus reached out and gripped the edge of one of the pillars of the gate.

Khul was close, blood-crazed and frothing…

‘I am the lightning,’ whispered Vandus, as he closed his eyes. ‘I am Vandus Hammerhand.’

A crash of thunder sounded overhead.

‘Lord Sigmar, strike thy servant now!’

God-lightning seared from the turbulent sky, an arcing blast so powerful that it shook the earth.

Vandus saw light: a blinding, searing luminescence so bright it eclipsed all sense of being and self. Then he was gone.

Now…

Ionus unshielded his eyes to see the Gate of Wrath utterly destroyed. Nothing remained but steaming, molten rock.

All around it for a hundred paces or more, both Stormcasts and Bloodbound had been thrown off their feet. Tendrils of corposant writhed across their bodies as the storm bolt was slow to dissipate.

There was no sign of Vandus Hammerhand or Calanax. Sigmar had reclaimed them, and in so doing vanquished the realmgate to Khorne’s domain.

A great cheer rose up from the Stormcast Eternals.

‘Azyr! Azyr!’

Only Ionus did not raise his voice. Instead, he watched Khul as he beheld the ruination of his plans. The Red Pyramid collapsed, skulls tumbling from its flanks in an avalanche that spilled amongst the Bloodbound in a flood. In moments it was nothing but a swathe of shattered bone, destroyed, its power broken.

As the warlord bellowed his impotent wrath to the uncaring night, Ionus knew they had struck a telling blow, but the war was not over.

‘Not yet…’ he whispered, as the victorious Stormcasts swept down upon the remnants of the Goretide like a living tempest.

CHAPTER ONE

The death of a prince

The guilt Thostos Bladestorm felt for spending the last days of his mortal life away from home had never left him. Not through his first Reforging, nor through his second. No number of rebirths could purge such regret from a man’s soul. When the cause was lost to him, the guilt stayed, a distillate of pain. Forever it was his spur, his strength and his weakness.

One last time Thostos relived the moments of his first death as Prince Caeran, in light and pain, when he was reborn at the God-King’s behest.

This is how he remembered it.

Then…

Warm wind sang through the pass of Unnumbered Birds. Scent is the key to memory, and the smell of the place was the last thing that Thostos forgot. In later days, when many lifetimes had passed him by, he would catch a reminder of it and search his broken memories for a full recollection. Alas, he would always be frustrated.

The strongest above all was the sharp smell of the birds themselves. Many nests crowded the cliffs either side of the narrow road, their guano streaking the rocks. There were other, subtler smells beneath that rich stink. The wind ran over the plains to the mountains, all the way from the distant sea. Even in the high mountains there was saltiness upon the wind still. This too Thostos remembered, and the blood and the ash that had come to taint it.

On that last day, the mountains preserved the semblance of peace. There the land seemed as it always had, as wild and free as any place in Amcarsh before the coming of Chaos.

To return to the mountains from the hell of the lowlands lifted the heart, even that of Prince Caeran, who would be Thostos, for he was burdened with many worries. But on that day, he breathed free, clean air, and returned home in victory. Secured to the flank of his horse was a bloody sack. Within languished the head of Sur Jactyr, Great Lord of Chaos and Reaver of the Sixteen Cities. His sharpened teeth would never again bite into flesh, and his golden eyes would see no more atrocity wrought in his name. Silver thread bound the sack shut, keeping the dead lord’s evil from corrupting the one who carried it. It was a successful hunt, enough to make Caeran forget for a moment the horrors of the world.

He was accompanied by Tarm, his childhood friend. No matter what evil they faced together, always they came back side by side. As was Tarm’s habit, he goaded his prince for sport as they rode.

‘My father says to me that the duty of an heir is to remain at home and learn the ways of governance. And yet here you are riding out on the hunt.’

Caeran laughed, though there was annoyance in it. ‘And what would your father have me do, work the fields and build terraces?’

‘That he would,’ said Tarm.

The pass was narrow, little more than a gully, and their voices echoed from the sides. Sunlight cut down from blue skies that were still untouched by the bruises of Chaos. The shadows of crags divided the rocky landscape into patches of delicious heat and pleasing cool.

‘Ask your father how I can remain at home, when evil brings all good things low and every month sees another city razed to the ground? Ten years ago, my father said that we would be safe within our valley, that the Warding Hounds of Garma would keep us safe, that Chaos–’

‘Hssh!’ Tarm said.

Caeran dropped his voice. ‘What?’

Tarm’s eyes were fixed upon the sky. Caeran raised his own gaze.

‘I see no birds,’ said Tarm.

The skies were empty. There was no sign of any birds at all.

Without exchanging a word, the warriors spurred their horses into a gallop. Their steeds were born for the rough terrain of the mountains and picked their path without faltering, haring along the rough road as sure-footed as goats. Soon enough, they rounded the kink in the valley where it opened onto the Great Glen of the Wolf.

‘Smoke!’ called Tarm. He slowed and stood in his stirrups for a better view.

Caeran thundered past him.

‘Wait, Caeran!’ Tarm shouted. ‘Be careful!’

But Caeran did not heed him. His stomach churned with sickening dread, an utter conviction that the worst had happened, and that his life was over.

The mountainside curved away, the glen broadened, and Wolf Keep, seat of Guild-King Glothian’s power, came into view. The keep was set high on the mountain, backed onto a soaring crag so that it looked out over the wide grazing lands of the glen. The Woolguild’s isolation had been its salvation. The mountain walls that yielded such meagre crops barred the advance of Chaos, and Glothian had kept the clans of his guild safe; once from the great and terrible beasts of Amcarsh and later against the depredations of hell-spawned monsters.

That is until then.

Caeran galloped past a burning cottage. The corpses of the farmers were pegged outside its blackened walls, cruelly mutilated. Hayricks blazed. Smoke rose from every building in the valley, thick over the four villages and thickest over Wolf Keep.

Fire licked from the windows of his home, black fumes pouring from the roof. He did not need to ride any closer to be able to see what the pale bundles hanging from the walls were.

‘No!’ screamed Caeran. He spurred his horse harder, foam frothing at its mouth. The steed’s flanks were lathered with sweat, but he did not relent.

The sky rumbled. A thunderhead was building over the mountains, black and heavy as an anvil.

He came across the first warband minutes later, a motley collection of beastfolk and savage tribesmen. They sat in the ruins of a hamlet around a fire of broken timbers, gorging on the flesh of innocents. The beastfolk were drunk, butting bloodied horns with each other. The men laughed bitter, empty laughs. The humour of the desperate and the insane. Without thinking, Caeran drew his sword and rode at them.

The first man turned at the thunder of his approach, only to die with his skull split open. Another pair were barged aside by the weight of Caeran’s horse, weapons falling from limp fingers. Others flung themselves aside. A beastman lunged for his reins. Caeran reared his horse, its hooves crushing the head of the creature. A second beastman ran at him, head bowed to impale his horse upon sharp horns, but Caeran cut it down and it died with a gurgling bleat.

Caeran wheeled his horse round and lashed out at another of the children of Chaos, but the impetus of his charge was spent, and the creature parried his blow with a maul of bloody iron. His horse’s breath came raggedly, exhausted; the animal was close to blown. The men and beastmen were gathering around him, a circle of brutal, shouting faces that kept out of the reach of his sword.

A huge muscled creature with the head of a goat pushed its way forward and thrust its spear deep into the horse’s breast. With a scream the horse reared up and toppled over, and Caeran was thrown free. He rolled, and an axe buried itself into the ground where his head had been. He sprang to his feet, driving his blade up to the hilt in a beastman’s gut. It screamed in Caeran’s face as it died, and he snatched out his sword before the creature fell down. Its fellows hesitated; Caeran did not.

‘Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!’ he cried, and leapt among them, slaying all who came close. The sky was clouding over rapidly, pregnant with the promise of rain.

Then Tarm was there, bursting through the crowd on his horse and sending them down hard. He cut at the warband with his sword, slaying two and scattering the rest, then brought his horse to a staggering halt and held out his hand.

‘Get up behind me. There are hundreds coming!’

The beastmen and tribesmen lay dead or dying. One man pawed ineffectually at his ruined throat, attempting to stem the flood of blood. Caeran scanned the destruction, everywhere he looked revealing a new horror. He screwed his eyes shut at the sight of the torn corpses. Thunder sounded closer.

‘It’s going to rain,’ Caeran said.

‘Get up!’ shouted Tarm, looking behind his friend and beckoning again frantically. An awful, bleating roar brought Caeran out of his fugue.

Through the burning cottages of the hamlet strode a great beastlord, half as tall as Caeran again. In clumsy fingers it gripped an axe shaft as thick as Caeran’s thigh, the blunt head atop it dark with gore. It wore a mask of pale leather over its animal face, and a shallow helm covered its low skull. A dirty black and white crest rose from this between two pairs of horns. The first pair curved around its cheeks like a ram’s horns, while the second pair stood upright. These were sharp as scimitars, and dripped with blood. Crude mail studded with roundels and square plates protected its torso. Its hooves were shod with spiked iron, but its arms and the legs were unprotected, a sign of its confidence in its own might, perhaps. There were few who could hope to survive its ire.

‘Caeran!’ shouted Tarm.

‘No, no!’ said Caeran. ‘I will not run while our kinsfolk lie dead and defiled.’ He raised his sword in a double-handed grip, and prepared to meet the creature’s charge.

Tarm swore and charged past his friend, his horse leaping over the corpses of the fallen. His sword sang through the air, but the beastlord was swift. It stepped aside, punching Tarm’s steed with a huge fist. Hefting its axe, it swung hard at the reeling horse, a woodsman’s chop that half-severed the head. A tremendous spray of blood fountained from the horse’s neck and it fell sideways heavily, trapping Tarm beneath.

The beastlord raised its axe again, aiming for Tarm’s head. Caeran screamed and ran, swinging his sword with all his strength at the creature’s unprotected thigh. His blade bit deep, but the creature did not appear to feel the wound, and twisted its massive body to intercept the prince. A swipe from its arm caught him in the chest and knocked him back six feet to crash into a cart. He flipped over the back, landing in the offal of slaughtered farmers. Caeran scrambled to his feet, barely keeping his revulsion in check. His sword he held ready. The beastlord only smiled, thick lips parting around the flat, square teeth of a grazing animal stained pink with blood. It blew out a steaming huff of breath. Red eyes glowed with menace, and it laughed: a bleating corruption of human joy.

But the beast-thing was mistaken if it thought to kill another brave guildsman defending his home from the tide of Chaos. This was a prince before him, a mighty warrior sworn to protect his father’s people to the last, and he was wild with vengeance.

Lightning flashed, whiting out the valley. The beast lifted its axe and charged at Caeran. The prince waited for his moment, stepping aside and backward at the last possible second, and extended his sword to take the creature in the chest. The momentum of the beast forced the weapon’s point through its armour and deep into its chest just below the heart. Caeran’s sword was wrenched painfully from his hand as the beastlord stumbled past him, its axe biting into a splintered timber. It shook its head, and turned again, unaware that it was already dead. One step it came on, then another. The beastlord groggily raised its axe. Dark blood pumped from the wound. The creature never made the blow, but fell forward dead.

Caeran ran to Tarm. His friend was badly hurt. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth.

‘You killed it?’ he croaked.

‘It is dead,’ said Caeran. ‘If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead.’

‘As always,’ said Tarm. The blood coming from his mouth was pink and bubbled, his breath was short, and he struggled to speak. ‘But no more, my friend. Crushed by my own horse. Not the heroic end I had intended.’

‘I’ll get you out from under him,’ said Caeran, trying to reassure his companion, but he could see no way to move the horse pinning Tarm.

‘You’ll do no such thing. Get out of here! Get away now! If Wolf Keep has fallen, it will not be long until all of Amcarsh is overrun. Live as long as you can. Make them pay for their crimes.’

A fat drop of rain fell onto the back of Caeran’s hand. Then another, and another. They spattered all over Tarm’s face. He closed his eyes and smiled.

‘See, Caeran! There is some purity left. For once, the water is sweet.’

Caeran stood. Rain sheeted down. A blazing bolt of lightning cracked the sky. Thunder boomed. Shouts and the gruntings of beastmen came through the downpour. They approached him from all sides. He stood over the body of his friend, and shouted out a challenge.

‘If I am to die, let it be well!’

The foes of all that was good and right drew around, none daring to be the first. Caeran stared at them, smiling wildly. ‘Give me strength, great Sigmar!’ There was more lightning and another peal of thunder, deafening now. The storm was directly overhead.

‘Lend me your might! If you can still hear me, if you care still for the lives and deeds of mortal men, then grant me as much of your power as you might spare, so that I may be avenged upon the slayers of my folk, that I might kill them and kill them and never rest, not until every last drop of Chaos-ruined blood has been spilt and washed away from the soil of Amcarsh by clean rains. I do not ask to be saved. I do not plead for my life. I ask only for strength. I ask only to be avenged!’

He raised his bloodied sword to the sky, kissed the guard, and prepared to die.

The horde of men and twisted monsters charged as one. A blazing spear of light lanced down from the sky, pure and dazzling. It connected with the tip of Caeran’s sword, bathing the youth in a stark radiance that cut him into shapes of white and hard black shadow. The followers of Chaos were flung back by the blast, shrieking at the pain of the light.

When they recovered themselves, they stood in amazement. A depression was smote into the land, charcoal black and steaming. Around it, twists of grass smoked in the rain.

Of the prince, there was no sign.

CHAPTER TWO

To Chamon

Caeran of Wolf Keep was no more. He had been snatched from the jaws of death and made anew. In his stead stood Thostos Bladestorm, a Lord-Celestant of the Stormhosts of Azyr. The man had ceased to be, but from his unmaking a Stormcast Eternal had been forged. Stronger, taller, faster, imbued with a fragment of a god’s potency; that of Sigmar Heldenhammer, last of the old pantheon to stand in opposition to the four great powers.

That first time, Thostos’s memory did not die. During his remaking his mind was unmade and refashioned many times upon the anvil of Sigmar’s art. Yet he remembered the smell of blood, and the stink of smoke. He remembered white shapes dangling from the walls of his burning home. He remembered a dead friend, and he remembered his oath.

The need for vengeance coursed through his every vein as surely as the magic of Azyr.

‘Stand tall, Thostos Bladestorm, and face your benefactor!’

The Lord-Heraldor’s voice resonated throughout the Celestine Vault with the force of a trumpet fanfare, snatching Thostos back from the past. Vengeance. Yes. It was coming after centuries of waiting. It was his due. On the great ring of the Sigmarabulum the bells of war tolled.

Thostos Bladestorm rose from his knees and opened his eyes upon his master. Sigmar stood upon the balcony, the God-King, lord of the last free mortal realm. The Celestial Vindicators were gathered in glorious array, panoplied for war in armour of purest sigmarite coloured a rich turquoise. They stood in ranks in a vault of gold and smooth stone, topped by a dome of sapphire carved with the twin-tailed comet – Sigmar’s sigil.

The vaults were glorious, but Sigmar’s perfection made all appear dull and lustreless. Mightier than the Stormcast Eternals, this was the god who had answered Thostos’s prayers – the survivor of a ruined world and the near ruin of another.

Pure of feature, every line of Sigmar’s face radiated grace. His poise was beyond compare, and his armour shone brighter than the sun, with gold and sigmarite studded with sapphires. Long hair cascaded down his back, mingling with the gryphon feathers of his cloak. The aura of power around him was staggering, but there was no arrogance inherent to it.

Confidence, yes – a rectitude and surety of purpose that suffused all who came near him with righteousness. There was humility there, and patience. There was kindness and humour to temper his sternness, wisdom to rein in his belligerence. His anguish at the fates of those he left behind drove his will to conquer. He was the epitome of humanity, the very acme of what it meant to be of the race of man. However, he represented an ideal that Thostos and the others could aspire to, for each Stormcast Eternal knew that in untold ages past, in another world, it was said that Sigmar had been a man.

Only a man. Such a thing was incredible to Thostos, though he had faith that it was true. Thostos’s legs trembled at the sight of his lord. The urge to kneel again before this paragon was overwhelming and took all his might to resist. Sigmar had been only a man, he repeated this to himself over and over. Only a man, this living beacon of hope, this reminder that there were powers in the realms greater and better than all those of Chaos.

Behind Thostos the men of his Warrior Chamber remained kneeling. Two hundred and eighty of them, the Bladestorms of the Celestial Vindicators Stormhost.

Sigmar bestowed a proud smile upon Thostos as he joined those lords already called, and he thought that he might weep.

The Lord-Heraldor summoned the remainder of the leaders of the chambers, until eighteen Lord-Celestants stood with Thostos, their leader. Then their Lord-Castellants, Lord-Relictors and Knights-Azyros were called out, before all the rest from the temples of command were brought to assemble behind them. Two hundred demigods to lead thousands more. And Sigmar himself blessed them with his presence.

‘Celestial Vindicators!’ called Sigmar. His voice was gentle thunder. Thostos had never heard him shout, he hoped he never would. A voice like that would shatter stone if raised in anger. ‘To you is given a great and weighty task. This day your wait is over. Hundreds of lifetimes of men have some of you dwelt among us here in the heavens of Azyr. No more!’

Sigmar came down the stairs as he spoke. He walked along the line of lords, grim pride on his face. He stopped where Thostos stood, and placed an armoured hand upon his shoulder. ‘A wait that has been long and chafing for many of you.’ Sigmar passed on, trailing the electric redolence of summer storms in his wake. He went down the aisle between the brotherhoods that made up the Bladestorms. ‘You are my avengers! You are all, each one, warriors who cursed Chaos with your last breath, who called upon me for strength, not salvation. Strength!’

This last word boomed, although spoken at scarce greater a volume than the rest. Thostos shuddered, and remembered his own oath on that distant battleground.

‘And I answered,’ Sigmar continued. ‘I answered you, my lightnings bringing you here from defeat so that you might be remade and given that strength. That you might take that vengeance. I will not apologise for the ages you have waited through, nor the rage and frustration that built in you as your thirst for revenge went unslaked.’

He walked around the periphery of the room. The majority of the Stormhost remained where they were, in postures of obeisance. Whether they could see the God-King or not, they were aware of where he was at all times, his mere presence was tangible from afar.

‘There are many battles beginning, many campaigns in this war. Would it that I could bid all my sons farewell and wish them victory. I cannot. But for you, my vengeful Celestial Vindicators, I desired to come and tell you that your wait is over. The time of patience is done, and another time begins. The red time, the fire time, the time that the filth of Chaos will be driven away before the winds and rains of you, my avenging tempest!’

As one the Celestial Vindicators stood: the winged Prosecutors; Judicators armed with skybolt bows and other, more potent weapons; the Liberators with their great shields and the Retributors bearing their lightning hammers. A nimbus of power played over the host, sparking from their armour. The magic that made these men warriors that could not die; they would fall, and they would be remade anew. That was Sigmar’s promise to them.

They beat hands upon their breastplates, sigmarite clashing on sigmarite. Softly at first, a clatter that rippled across the room, evoking the shattering of hail upon roofs. Then a single word, the name, repeated over and again, spoken in round by rank after rank so that it sounded akin to a deluge washing over the earth. ‘Sigmar, Sigmar, Sigmar, Sigmar, Sigmar!’ they chanted, louder and louder until surely all of Azyrheim must stop and look up to the floating Sigmarabulum and wonder what occurred there in the sky.

‘To Chamon, to the Realm of Metal! Go forth and bring destruction upon your foe! Seek out the Silverway so that we might rain terror upon the servants of the Dark Gods in every realm. Seek out the duardin so that we might march with vengeful allies!’ cried Sigmar, and his voice was the thunder to the storm conjured by his men. Lightning crackled from his fingertips, lifting his hair and burning in his eyes. Raw power skittered all over the room. The comet in the ceiling blazed and a cold wind lifted up the cloaks of the Stormhost. ‘To Chamon!’

A loud boom shook the vault. Magic flared bright and just as quickly died away. Then the vault was empty of men, leaving the god alone. He looked around and marvelled at his own works.

The quest for vengeance had begun.

CHAPTER THREE

Ephryx the Ninth Disciple

In his bedchamber high in the central tower of the Eldritch Fortress, the sorcerer Ephryx, Ninth Disciple of the Ninth Tower, dreamt of war. He curled in on himself like an infant, a posture his body had never forgotten no matter how much change had been wreaked upon it. The antelope horns that crowned his head pressed into his silk pillows. His eyes twitched beneath thin eyelids veined green.

As Ephryx slept, his dream ceased to be a dream.

Ephryx was in another place. He stood upon a far-reaching and desolate plain. In the distance volcanoes vomited fire. To the south churned a poison sea. Close by, a city from the Age of Myth continued its long crumble into the dust, all save the very centre. There stood a monumental structure, a realmgate. Though caked in centuries of filth it was whole. Sleeping. Locked. The latent magic woven into its fabric sparkled in Ephryx’s witch-sight.

A squally wind blew up from nowhere, whipping dust into long sheets that reeked of sulphur, death and tar.

Aqshy. Something occurred in the Realm of Fire.

In his vision-sleep Ephryx beheld a mighty storm. The sky boiled. Black and purple clouds gathered themselves from nowhere, and mounted high into the heavens. The wind blew harder, scented now with coming rain, a fierce smell whose cleanliness burned in Ephryx’s nostrils.

Raindrops as large as sling bullets splattered into the earth, scattered forays from the cloud above. These first few rested momentarily upon the hard earth, coated in dust knocked free by their impacts, then were sucked away, consumed by the great thirst of the land. They appeared to Ephryx like soldiers, a feeble advance party, isolated and overwhelmed by their foe. He paid close attention to this detail. Many things of import had been revealed to him by less.

This vanguard of moisture was soon reinforced. As abruptly as if a bucket were upended, a torrent of rain poured from the sky. It ran down the dream-being of Ephryx, over thin, purple lips that were no longer entirely human, and collected in the corner of his mouth. Ephryx inadvertently tasted it upon his long tongue, and spat violently. The flavour of the rain was anathema to him; pure water, of a kind that existed virtually nowhere within the Mortal Realms any more.

Thunder rumbled. The clouds twisted about a vortex in the sky. The parched scent of the Realm of Fire was completely washed away, replaced with the nose-prickling aroma of rain on dry earth, and the tang of magic.

Lightning stabbed out at the top of the mighty gate three times. Another growl of thunder followed.

Ephryx threw his arm over his eyes as the sky exploded with light.

Lightning bolts came down as thick as trees in a forest, grounding themselves upon the cracked plain in searing battalions. Each blast left behind a glowing dome of energy, until these covered the plain. One by one they faded, exposing ranks of tall warriors clad in gold and wielding hammers. Each one was as mighty as a champion of Chaos, only these were no followers of the Four. They came to wage war upon this landscape of toxic soil and wicked flame.

The vision shimmered, Ephryx’s point of view shifted. Time stuttered and hopped, coming to rest some hours later. A great horde of the Blood God filled the horizon from end to end. They fell upon the storm warriors in outrage and flesh greed. The rulers of that place they might have been, but their charge was met by a wall of glittering gold and they died upon it. The storm-born warriors smote the followers of Khorne into the dust. A few of the glistening host fell, but not many, and those who did were snatched from battle by soaring pillars of energy that carried them back from whence they came.

Above the ruined city, winged warriors hurled hammers of blazing light at the closed realmgate. To this Ephryx paid especial interest. The frenzied fools of Khorne did not know the gate for what it was. They focused their unthinking attention upon the thin line of warriors barring the way, crazed by blood and battle. They allowed their foes to continue their bombardment, and so the bonds of the gate strained.

Another shift in time. Ephryx witnessed a great battle between a demigod mounted upon a draconian beast and a twisted creature goaded by a cruel lord. He watched them clash a moment, but did not see the outcome. A further change brought him news of a warrior-priest bearing a reliquary that was radiant with the magic of death. The priest manipulated these fell energies with skill, but he was weak in comparison to the mighty Ephryx. The Chaos sorcerer mocked him, but the priest could not hear his scorn.

The stuff of Chaos pushed its way into the realm. Daemons erupted from the bloody mire the ground had become. Battle went against the golden stormhost. Angels fell from the skies, but too late. A final lightning strike smashed into the gate. A peal of thunder announced the opening of the way. The realmgate’s coating of detritus flaked away to reveal figures of steel and ivory, and runes that burned with reawakened power. Reality snapped and quivered, then split open with a crash. A route long since closed gaped wide. Beyond the gate was a golden host. They poured forth with wrath in their hearts and fell upon the followers of the Blood God.

Now the sorcerer saw through the eyes of the Bloodsworn of Khorne, a member of a band called the Goretide. Korghos Khul was its master. Ephryx knew this and he knew the man’s last moment, the sight of a silver warhammer descending upon his head to obliterate all hate, all red thought, along with the tiny remnant of humanity that hid beneath sanguine rage.

Ephryx sat up in his bed with a gasp. Fine silks slid from his wiry body. His long-fingered hand went to his throat, then his head, probing for marks. Although he knew he could not possibly be harmed, the vision’s intensity was such he was half-convinced of his own death.

‘Sigmar!’ he whispered. ‘Sigmar has returned!’

Drums boomed outside, a ferocious martial beat.

Ephryx’s eyes widened.

Not drums, thunder.

The sorcerer rushed to the window of his chamber. All around his tower was his beloved Eldritch Fortress, his citadel and seat of his power that had been centuries in the making. His eyes were not for its walls and redoubts, though he often spent long hours admiring his craft, or for the city beyond, whose slide into ruin he enjoyed. He instead searched the blocky mountains. There! A stabbing finger of power blasted down from a heaven beyond that of Chamon. Clear, white lightning, unsullied by the magics of his master. Another crack and bang announced a second lightning strike, then a third. On the northern horizon clouds gathered as they had in his dream. But these first lightnings seared down from the clear, predawn sky.

He waited a moment, gripping the chill metal teeth framing the window. No further lightning blasts came. Thunder rumbled from the heavens. Dark clouds began to form out over the southern Vaulten range also, roiling like black ink poured into water. Storms advanced on the great valley of Anvrok from the north and south, framing the gigantic coils of the wyrm Argentine in the far western sky.

Ephryx recalled the drops of rain, so few and easily absorbed. The torrent that followed would not be stemmed.

‘Invasion! Strife! War! They are coming here!’

Ephryx hissed in dismay. Why had he not foreseen this? Why had great Tzeentch not warned him?

‘So close to my triumph, so close!’

He suspected ill motives on the part of his master. He would have known.

Tzeentch not knowing was impossible. Impossible!

Well, he would not be outmanoeuvred, no! Ephryx gritted pointed teeth and muttered guttural words of power. He passed his hand before his face. A nimbus of magic played around his horns, and he was gone from the room.

Ephryx rematerialised in the summit of his tall tower. He came fully clothed, cleansed and scented. His limbs were clad in robes of deep blue worked with arcane sigils of gold. His horns were painted in lacquer that shifted hue with his every movement. In his left hand he carried an onyx staff topped with an icon of brass. His right unconsciously twitched out magic. And so Ephryx came to his scrying chamber, a vast, lopsided room set into the eye of Tzeentch that crowned his fortress. There was but one window, the pupil of the eye set with amethyst that afforded views towards every point of the compass and wherever Ephryx willed. From that height his beautiful castle appeared small, laid out like a model artfully made in many metals. Ephryx could see every one of the eight points of the castle’s walls and the gate there. Little more than building blocks joined by thick lines from his vantage, made of steel and copper, gold and brass. They throbbed with sorcerous energy. Fields invisible to the mortal eye rolled and twisted in multiple colours around the fort, sent into fractal eddies by the thing hidden at the base of the tower, the great artefact he had constructed his domain around.

Ephryx watched the gentler play of the ether over the still, dark valley. There the Silver River glowed softly orange with inner heat in the last dark of the night. Along its dim shores, the shadows danced with the light of Argentine’s fire. The metal magic rising from the river twisted as it encountered an opposing force a hundred feet above the molten stream. Something perturbed the currents of energy; he had to hurry.

A platinum pedestal occupied the centre of the room, baroquely cast. Imps and cockatrices wrestled all over it, their writhings perpetually arrested, their moist eyes tracking the sorcerer around the room. Upon the pedestal was a bowl filled with liquid gold, and it was to this that Ephryx went.

The skies were light with the coming sun, but dawn had not yet broken. He looked towards the end of the vale and into the void to the east. Already the first rays shone from beneath the floating land. The great crucible high in the eastern sky was bathed in its light already, and shone like a second sun. The Argent Falls gleamed bright. The scales of Argentine sparked with orange notes, and the light of his fires were robbed of their brilliance.

Tainted light glanced off the thousands of copper skulls that covered the fortress and lit the grim, bladed facets of the eight great towers and gates. Shadows fell long upon the fortress, shortening as the sick star rose swiftly over the walls. Copper and adamant sparkled. Warmth chased off night’s chill. Then the sun shone through the lone window set in the lowermost portion of the tower. By crystals grown from madness, the light was redirected again into the keep entombed within the tower, then to a cairn hidden within the keep. Through one small gap left in a wall of lead blocks, a single ray of light was allowed to pierce and fall upon the artefact.

The effect was instant and potent.

The tower shuddered. A boiling sphere of magic burst from the stolen prize. The copper skulls drank deeply of the power, their hollow sockets glowing eerily. Ephryx waited in his tower for the bubble to pass through his scrying chamber. The magic arrived from below, passing first over his toes, then up his legs and into his trunk, invigorating his Chaos-twisted flesh and setting his blood racing. The gold in his scrying bowl bubbled, and Ephryx bent eagerly over it. The images presented at the moment of dawn were the clearest, the most truthful.

He was not the only one waiting for the rising sun. In answer to its appearance, light flashed in the sky. Dozens of lightning strikes, thicker than the others, came not from the clouds but through them, stabbing downward from a place that was not of this realm. They emanated from somewhere beyond the Celestial Swirl, that galaxy of lights and stars that turned high in the northern sky. The lightning was white, but Ephryx’s witch-sight showed him pulses of azure that accompanied each strike and sent the currents of Chamon into disarray.

The first bolt split the peak of a mountain to the north-east. Many more pounded into the valley at various points to the north of the Silver River. The first left behind an imposing figure in smooth armour surrounded by a small bodyguard of warriors upon the mountain peak. These surveyed the lands revealed to them, then spread broad wings of blazing energy and took to the heavens. The sky blackened above them, and they flew up into a downfall of rain. The other bolts struck domes of force from the ground, all around the dormant Bright Tor Gate.

As in Ephryx’s dream, the domes faded to nothing, revealing small armies, although these warriors wore armour of deep turquoise, not the gold of the warriors he had perceived in Aqshy. Then the image in the bowl wavered, and Ephryx drew back from the gold, the play of it illuminating the surprise on his face. His expression hardened. With pinched fingers he clicked out a brief rhythm with his nails upon the platinum of the bowl’s stand. He called upon the power of Tzeentch, steadying the image. None could best the arcane power of Ephryx. He willed the minds of these interlopers to open to him; their secrets would be his, their plans laid bare.

He permitted himself a small smile.

The minds of the strangers remained closed. Their images wavered harder.

The sorcerer’s smile evaporated quicker than a soul in a spirit forge. Ephryx looked out of the windows with a scowl. The dawn was passing over the fortress and the ruined city it squatted in. Its light now struck off the Vaulten Mountains, dancing from peak to peak of the Bright Tors, lighting the underside of the storm clouds beneath both. Then it slid down rocky bluffs and steep banks into the great valley of Anvrok to light the Silver River, overpowering the dull glow given off by the hot silver.

‘No, no! Show me their thoughts, their purpose!’ Ephryx made swift gestures over the liquid gold. The surface rippled, breaking the pictures into circular nonsenses. The bowl lost its focus, skipping from one party of the turquoise storm warriors to the next. ‘No, no, no, no! Show me, show me! I demand it! By the thousand thousand names of Tzeentch, be revealed!’

The sun ceased shining into the vault of the fortress. Day broke fully across the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok. The sphere of magic collapsed. The skulls that studded the walls of the fortress sighed, and the light in their eyes died.

‘No!’ Ephryx set his will upon the bowl. Every corner of the land, every nook and crevice, every tumbled cottage and fearful tribe scratching an existence from the rock – all was his to see when he chose. But when he turned his eye upon the storm warriors, he saw nothing.

Ephryx hissed like a cat and slapped his hand upon the pedestal. The gold stirred fitfully. He glared at it until his eyes watered.

A draught of spiced air stirred the wizard’s robes. A chuckle emanating from two throats broke the quiet of his sanctum.

His master had arrived.

Ephryx screwed his eyes shut. He muttered a prayer to Tzeentch and smoothed out his features. Composed, he turned to face the source of his power and of his pain.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Great Oracle

A tall being stood to the westward side of the chamber, spindle-limbed but corded with wiry muscle. A daemon of Chaos, a Lord of Change. It grasped a tall staff in both hands, upon which was bound a grimoire that murmured with a voice of its own. The staff’s finial was a metal fish of fearsome aspect. Of all the things about his mentor that he loathed, Ephryx hated this fish the most. It grimaced and pulled faces when it thought Ephryx could not see. It was, Ephryx felt, the summation of his master’s disdain for him.

The Lord of Change had broad wings. Feathers that were blue only some of the time rippled with arcane energies upon the being’s wings and thighs; otherwise, it was bald and dry-skinned. All these things were remarkable, although not so remarkable as the fact of its two avian heads.

The daemon leaned upon its staff and craned both heads forward on long wrinkled necks, the headdresses of each swaying with the movement. One face was creased with benign amusement, the other with disappointment.

The daemon was a being of one mind: one head saw only the past, the other the future. Ephryx noted with alarm that it was the future-seeing face that scowled.

‘The Ninth Disciple of the Ninth Tower. Have you proven unworthy at last?’ said the amused head.

‘Eight others in this place and time we have consumed. Eight towers we have toppled. Perhaps we should dine again?’ said the other to the first.

Ephryx bowed so low the tips of his horns tapped the mosaic floor. ‘Kairos Fateweaver, oracle of everything, mightiest of all the Lords of Change, I greet you.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the amused head.

‘Feeble wizard bows and scrapes, but there is little loyalty beneath his horns,’ said the other.

‘I have discovered something of great portent–’ began Ephryx, but Kairos would not let him finish.

‘Why do you, sorcerer…’ said the amused head.

‘…believe that what can be hidden from most masterful Tzeentch should be revealed to you?’ finished the annoyed one.

Kairos gestured at the molten gold, causing it to bubble and spit. He stepped forward, his staff tapping on the maddening patterns of the floor like the cane of a blind man. Tap-tap this way, tap-tap that way, probing for obstacles Ephryx could not perceive. Kairos stopped a few feet away from Ephryx, leaned upon his staff again and peered at him with two pairs of hard, button-black eyes. The eyes of a carrion bird, examining food not quite dead.

‘I have had no warning of this,’ said Ephryx. ‘As much as I cannot believe it, Tzeentch did not know of these lightning warriors.’

‘Ah, ah! The mortal is so cunning.’

‘So stupid,’ said the other head. ‘Has it not occurred to him that Tzeentch did not tell?’

The pages of Kairos’s book fluttered.

‘But he is right. Our lord is in a rage that his sight was turned elsewhere, the doings in the realm of Azyr hidden from his view.’

‘So Tzeentch was blinded.’ Ephryx frowned. ‘But you, O mighty Kairos, did you know?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Know what, small and insignificant weaver of spells?’ asked Kairos innocently. One head rose up and peered out of the window. The beak clacked. The attention of both heads returned to the wizard.

‘I do not think today is for the playing of games!’ implored Ephryx. ‘You are given the power to see that which Tzeentch might not. You are the guarantor of his perspicacity.’

‘Every day is a day for games,’ chided the first head. ‘When the game stops, time will end. There is only the game, nothing else.’

‘You knew, you did! After all I have done! You knew that this would happen. I am so close to achieving the translocation.’

Ephryx began to pace. Kairos’s heads swung heavily to follow him.

‘I foresaw,’ said one head. ‘I have seen into the Well of Eternity into which even Tzeentch might not glance.’

‘I did not foresee,’ said the other.

‘It is not for me to tell,’ said the first head.

‘It is not for me to know,’ said the second.

‘I can no more easily keep my mind closed to Tzeentch than you can keep your mind closed to me,’ said the first head. ‘What makes you think I knew?’

‘He knows only what I will tell him, and I did not tell him this,’ said the second.

‘You obfuscate!’ wheedled Ephryx. ‘Tell me, O master. If you are aware, it will affect our plans. My skulls are close to fully charged. I am so close to removing Chamon to the Realm of Chaos. Do you wish me to fail?’

‘Yes,’ said the second head.

‘No,’ said the first.

‘If you will not treat with me honestly, how can I serve you?’ asked Ephryx. Kairos brought out the moaning child in him. For that he would never forgive the Lord of Change.

‘It would have honesty!’ said the first head.

‘Truth from the lord of lies,’ said the second.

Both heads clicked their beaks in laughter.

Ephryx emitted an exasperated noise and turned back to his golden mirror.

‘Why be so irritable, wielder of small magics?’ asked Kairos amicably.

‘Great power, no power, useless, a master,’ muttered the other head.

‘You know better than to expect a straight answer from me. From anything. There are no simple answers, and no simple questions that could be framed to find them, even if they were to exist. Which they do not.’

‘But exist they do!’ croaked the other head. ‘Easy answers, easy questions. You behave as you did when first you came under my tutelage. Disappointing!’

‘Extremely so,’ said the first head sorrowfully.

‘I must know the intent of these warriors.’ Ephryx went back to the gold and stared into it. He saw nothing but the gleaming yellow of the metal. ‘If they come here for the artefact, or only for conquest.’

Kairos shrugged.

‘The secret is done. Why can I not see them now?’

‘None can, little wizard,’ said the first head.

‘None but he who sent them. Great magics shroud them still.’

‘And we do not wish to draw his attention here, not yet, so do not break the shroud. If you can break it,’ said the second head.

A thousand plans flickered through Ephryx’s mind, as swift and short-lived as mice. He could not scheme against the unknown.

‘I must know their purpose.’

Kairos stepped forward. He was so huge that two steps carried him across the chamber, his wings scraping the stonework of the ceiling. The daemon prodded Ephryx with a talon that was long and slate-grey, and as hard as slate too; it hurt Ephryx’s chest.

‘Think, little wizard! This is no great war party, but a scouting group. Foresight has made your mind lazy and dull. If you do not know, then extrapolate.’

‘Ruminate,’ said the second head.

‘Think!’

‘If you cannot, you are not fitting to serve our master,’ said the first head. ‘You are not fit to serve me!’

‘So the question is…’ said the second head.

‘…what have they come to scout?’ said the first.

‘That is not the question I had in mind,’ said the second head.

‘It will stand,’ said the first.

Ephryx looked at the floor. His mind penetrated the fabric of the tower. He looked all the way down, a thousand feet to the lead cairn where his prize was entombed. Within that, he did not look; the sight would blind him. ‘How could they know about the hammer? Tzeentch hid it and removed knowledge of it from all the realms.’

Kairos looked at his pupil expectantly, two pairs of beady eyes glittered with the light of dead stars. ‘Yes?’ he said encouragingly.

‘They don’t know, do they?’ asked Ephryx excitedly. ‘They don’t know at all!’ He pointed a finger at Kairos. ‘That’s why you’ve come, to make sure they don’t find out.’

‘Clever,’ said the first head.

‘Somewhat,’ said the second.

‘Then it begs the question, what are they here for?’

‘How long have you been master of this vale?’ asked Kairos.

‘A long time,’ said Ephryx.

‘And?’ prompted the other head.

‘I have never found the Silver Road, the great realmgate of the duardin. Is that what they seek? I had a vision, of a realmgate in Aqshy…’

‘War has erupted across many of the Mortal Realms. The Powers are in uproar. Everywhere the man-god strikes,’ said Kairos.

‘The Silverway leads everywhere. It would be of great use to them.’ Dismay clouded Ephryx’s features again. ‘They will search the valley. When they find it, they will come in great numbers and throw up fortresses of their own. Anvrok will become a marshalling yard for the wars of Azyr. They will surely be drawn to this fortress, and sooner rather than later. I cannot hide what I have. And I am so close. Why now?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Why am I to be tested so by the Great Changer when I am about to deliver him this prize?’

‘Ephryx delivers Tzeentch’s prize?’ asked the first head to the second. ‘Not correct.’

‘We. We both,’ said the second. Both nodded, then peered at the sorcerer.

‘Our prize,’ they said together. ‘Our plan. Our reward.’

‘This is news to us all, the work of a rival power. Sigmar of the world gone before.’ Kairos’s eyes closed, and his necks extended upward, heads shaking sinuously back and forth. ‘The godling believes he can oppose Chaos.’

‘Defy that which has already been victorious,’ said the first head.

‘His plans he hid, but his assaults he cannot. He will be challenged soon.’

‘I need more time!’ snarled Ephryx.

‘Ninety-nine more dawns are required to charge the fortress sufficiently to convey it through the Shardgate,’ warned Kairos. ‘Only then will the metal realm be ours to dispose of as we see fit.’

‘They cannot stop the Stormcast Eternals,’ added the second.

‘That is the name of Sigmar’s puppets?’ asked the first.

‘It is,’ said the second.

‘What if, what if…’ said Ephryx. He rubbed his chin and paced the floor. ‘What if it is not more time that I need, but more magic?’

‘A thought,’ said Kairos.

‘But is it a good one?’ asked his other head.

‘When the warriors of Sigmar were slain in Aqshy, they ascended on reversed lightning,’ said Ephryx. His mind was racing. ‘They are not men, these creatures. They are infused with magic.’

‘Good, good!’ said Kairos. ‘Little wizard thinks well. And what is your conclusion?’

‘I can trap their essence – use the power of Sigmar against him. With the power of the storm mine to command.’ Ephryx spread his fingers quickly. ‘It is done!’ He chuckled, a gurgling growl like that made by a frightened cat. ‘Oh, a most delicious irony! Sigmar seeks to take Chamon, but I will use his own weapons to take it from him!’

‘Your own warriors are not enough to stand against them. When they discover the nature of this fortress, they will come against you in great numbers,’ said Kairos. ‘Your magic is modest, and your army weak.’

‘You are right, of course,’ said Ephryx. ‘But I will have support, and the location of the Silver Road will buy it. I will call upon Lord Maerac and King Thrond. Their armies will keep these warriors at bay. They are bored, and desirous of new lands to conquer. The Silver Road offers them an infinity of nations to despoil. It does not matter if they win or lose, so long as they buy the time we need with their blood. Five hundred years it took for Chaos to subjugate this realm. Sigmar will not win it back in a day. When they come against me, these… Stormcast Eternals?’ he asked.

Kairos nodded.

‘They will be weakened. No threat. I will siphon off their magic and complete my… our plan.’

‘You are learning, mortal,’ said Kairos’s first head.

‘Fool,’ said the second.

‘Agreed,’ said the first. ‘But the fool learns.’

Ephryx opened his mouth to protest, but the greater daemon was suddenly gone, leaving nothing but a solitary blue feather drifting to the floor, and a harsh, psittacine smell.

The sorcerer waited a moment. He shut his eyes and opened his mind. Through its weirding sight he appraised the room, seeking any trace of the Lord of Change. This allowed him to see the world as it truly was, a warping, dancing confection of magical flame, bound by natural law into the shapes of matter and energy. But those laws had no jurisdiction over him, and such shapes he could easily unpick. Kairos had gone, off to bother another unfortunate on some other plane of reality.

Ephryx grinned to himself. He was no slave. Kairos grossly underestimated him. He walked towards the wall. A door rippled into existence, and he stepped through onto a delicate balcony that leapt into being in time to catch his footfalls. He looked out towards the valley where the foe gathered. Ephryx had told the daemon he would hold off the storm warriors until they were weakened, but he would do exactly the opposite. If he could lure the Stormcasts to his fort sooner rather than later, the prize he sought to bring before Tzeentch would be his alone to deliver. Let them bring their full strength against him – all the more magic for him to steal. The realm of Chamon would become a part of the Realm of Chaos forever, and he its undisputed king.

There was no need to be modest, thought Ephryx. He was exceedingly clever. He looked across all of Anvrok, Kantrok and Denvrok below. All of this – the sundered lands, the serpents Argentine and Vitryx, the crucible – he would bring before Tzeentch, a gift fit for a god. Then he would be elevated beyond the petty bounds of mortality, made a daemon himself. A gift worthy for one such as he.

Tzeentch would have a new favourite, and Kairos would find out just how weak Ephryx really was.

His fists clenched. The daemon showed him no respect, and for that it would suffer. Always it mocked him, prodded at him, its bored jibes threatening to turn to outright sadism. Yes, Ephryx had had quite enough of Kairos the Oracle.

And he had a plan to humble him.

First, he must call upon his own allies. He lifted one hand to his face and blew upon it. He uncurled his fingers. Upon his palm stood a perfect replica of Kairos, four inches tall. In this replica the eyes of only one head glinted with intelligence. The other head lolled, an idiot expression plastered across its face.

‘Thing,’ said Ephryx, naming the being.

‘Wise Ephryx,’ Thing said. ‘Why must I wear this form?’

‘Because it amuses me,’ said Ephryx.

‘It will amuse you no longer when the lord Kairos sees how you mock him.’

‘I enjoy a little thrill,’ said the sorcerer. ‘You are to fly to Lord Maerac of Manticorea. Bid him come here with all haste and all his host. Inform King Thrond of the Crucible to make ready. Tell him of the situation.’

‘Which is?’ asked the daemon.

Ephryx growled dangerously.

Thing held up borrowed hands. ‘Begging your forgiveness! If you let me free of my prison once in a while, lord, then I might know! But Thing has no freedom that is not decreed by his most gracious Ephryx, and I see nothing in my jar. Nothing!’ Thing clapped his hands over his face. His second head stared on stupidly.

‘Stop your wailing, Thing.’

Thing peeked through his fingers. ‘I must trouble you to explain.’

So the sorcerer explained. His dream, the arrival of the Stormcast Eternals. The problem of ninety-nine days, although not the exact problem, not the real problem, but some fiction Thing could betray to Maerac and Thrond.

‘I see. Is there more I can do for the great master?’ said Thing impertinently. ‘Perhaps to fetch for him refreshment, or a pretty potted fern? This chamber of yours is austere – it lacks a homely touch.’

‘Now it is you that mocks me, imp. And unlike Kairos, I am fully aware of your insolence.’ Fires sprang up from Ephryx’s hand around the daemonling.

‘Very well, very well!’ Thing squealed. ‘Sorry, so sorry.’

Ephryx snorted. The flames went out. Thing’s idiot head croaked.

‘Fly, Thing, and if you are swift, perhaps I might allow you an hour free from your jar.’

The imp nodded eagerly. ‘I am away, away!’ It spread its wings, the perfect imitations of Kairos’s own, and took flight. ‘Ow!’ chirruped Thing as its unwanted second head pecked at him. ‘Stop that!’ It veered sideways in flight as he slapped at it.

‘Away, Thing! Swiftly! There is no reward for tardiness,’ called Ephryx. Thing levelled out and flapped up and away, borne quickly on winds that blew through no earthly air.

‘A new game begins,’ said Ephryx, as he watched Thing ascend. He bit his lip with his needle teeth, bringing forth a bright jewel of coppery blood. He licked it away reflexively and chortled to himself, then went to gather his followers. Time to provoke a reaction from the invaders. Time to lure them in.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Silverway

Thostos Bladestorm strode along the edge of a valley, Liberator-Prime Perun Goldhammer following him. Tawny dust hazed the vista, but could not conceal the country’s strangeness entirely. To begin with, there was its fragmented nature. The Hanging Valleys of Anvrok was a region of floating landmasses set in an ocean of air. Some, such as this land of Anvrok itself, were as large as continents. Others were only as modest as counties. The smallest grouped in shoals or were isolated rock, bearing lonely spiny trees or rough patchings of scrub that hung in tangles over their sides.

To the west a vast crucible floated in the sky, as expansive as an ocean, filled with inexhaustible molten silver. The silver fell from the lip of the crucible in two streams, the Argent Falls. Where one fall hit Anvrok it became a sluggish river, cutting through the vale of the metal-rich land which defined this country.

Even more awesome than the crucible was the serpent, a twisting behemoth whose silver-scaled coils spiralled away, down and down through the Voids of Chamon, seemingly without end. Over the horizon its vast head gaped, multicoloured flames roaring from jaws whited by distance. The beast shimmered in the heat given off by the falls and flames, giving it an elusive quality. It should have been an illusion. The thing was titanic: it could not possibly be alive, but live it did. The soft roar of its fiery breath was a constant in this odd land. The flames stirred hot winds from the air that scoured the valley from end to end. When the sun passed, there would be no true night. Argentine’s breath would not allow darkness.

Yet this bizarre place had once been populous and wealthy. There were signs of habitation everywhere, all long ruined.

A flash from above drew Thostos’s attention upwards. A Prosecutor wheeled on perfect wings of energy high overhead.

‘This way, Lord-Celestant!’

The warrior-herald pointed towards a slit in the rock. It looked like nothing to Thostos, just a crack.

But the crack was an artifice, stone cleverly fashioned to conceal. This fake outcrop masked a shallow valley, into which Thostos and Perun passed. Much industry had taken place there. Dozens of mine entrances opened in cliff faces that had been created by tools, unnaturally flat-faced and regular. Spoil was heaped in conical piles. No one had disturbed the ground here for many ages. Several of the mines had collapsed. Ancillary buildings stood roofless, their windows empty. The dry air preserved strange machinery, rusted the same colour as the ochre soil. This went on for five miles; Thostos followed the Prosecutor as he flew to the north.

Whole mountains had been cracked and scraped clean of their ore, but despite the staggering scale of the works on show, there were always more natural riches. Thostos and Perun went from the valley into another, untouched by pick or shovel, where there were the hints of yet more ore veins. Rocks that glittered with argentite, galena and haematite. In places nuggets of native copper and gold poked through the dirt, or were strewn on the ground, ready to be picked up.

Such wealth was staggering. Thostos supposed it was indicative of the duardin character that they had chosen to strip each area clean before moving on to the next.

Thostos and Perun went around a brooding mountain of black rock very different to the others. The Prosecutor had stopped, and was swooping back and forth, pointing downwards. The Lord-Celestant and his aide scrambled down a slope, dislodging a tumble of scree.

At the bottom they found themselves suddenly on an unlikely road, well-paved and level. They followed this. Shortly, two rows of Celestial Vindicators came into sight lining the route, cloaks stirring in the metallic breeze.

At the end of the road, Lord-Castellant Eldroc of Thostos’s own Warrior Chamber waited at the brink of a cliff. His gryph-hound Redbeak lay at his feet. The eagle-headed beast’s tail lashed with impatience.

‘Eldroc has been no luckier than we,’ said Perun. ‘More empty valleys.’

‘This one is more important than most,’ said Thostos.

‘There is nothing to kill,’ growled Perun. ‘Where is the foe?’

‘There will be killing soon enough, my friend.’

‘Lord-Celestant.’ Eldroc clashed his right hand against his breastplate and dipped his head. ‘What news of the duardin?’

‘None,’ said Thostos. ‘Their holds and mines are all about this place. Most are despoiled, others appear to have been abandoned. All are deserted. Of the duardin themselves there is no sign. The heralds search far and wide for them, but this land is deserted.’

‘I have found the same,’ said Eldroc.

‘Nought but dusty valleys and broken towns. No sign of mortal life anywhere,’ sighed Thostos.

‘You hoped for better, Lord-Celestant? I hear other realms have fared worse under the yoke of Chaos,’ said Eldroc.

Thostos grumbled. ‘I always hope for better, Lord-Castellant, but I expect the worst.’

‘I have reports from the Fireblades and the Storm Masters that they have taken the Bright Tor Gate in the face of minimal resistance. You might wish to revise your expectations.’

‘They have at least had the chance to slay,’ said Perun.

‘Show me what you have discovered,’ said Thostos. ‘The rest of our chamber search the northern valleys. There are signs of beast-creatures there.’

‘If our brothers come upon the enemy, I wish to be at their side,’ said Perun.

‘Yes,’ said Eldroc. ‘I wish the same for myself.’

‘If you have found the Silverway, you will get your vengeance before me,’ said Perun.

‘Maybe, Liberator-Prime.’ Eldroc took up his halberd and warding lantern from the ground. ‘Redbeak! Come.’

Eldroc led Thostos and Perun to the top of a set of stairs carved into the cliff. A crack followed the stairs, allowing in daylight.

‘From the outside this crack appears to be a simple fault in the stone, the stairway is artfully concealed,’ said Eldroc. ‘The duardin were fond of hiding. Most settlements we have approached have grand entrances, but there are many more that are disguised in some way or another.’

‘The folk of Grungni ever were secretive,’ said Thostos. ‘Lord Sigmar warned us of that. It would help if they were not. How are we to bring them to our cause if they cannot be found?’

‘I do wonder why we have been given this task,’ said Eldroc. ‘We, the sons of vengeance, grubbing about in the dirt looking for folk that do not wish to be found. One would think a Stormhost with a less belligerent character might be better suited. I worry the God-King does not trust us.’

‘You question Sigmar already, Lord-Castellant?’ asked Perun.

‘Forgive my impatience.’

‘I feel it too. I will explain how I see his strategy,’ said Thostos, ‘The duardin respect might at arms as much as they do craft. They bear a grudge a long time, and will not let it lie until they feel they have been fairly recompensed. So who better to approach them than those who place revenge upon the Four Powers above all other things?’

Eldroc made a noise of agreement.

‘We are all untried in battle, we Stormcasts,’ continued Thostos. ‘If I were Sigmar, I might send my more restrained warriors in first so I might better judge their virtues. And I might hold back my most ferocious for a time when they were truly needed. Patience, brothers. We have waited for centuries for battle. What does a handful more hours matter? We will all get to blood our hammers soon enough. An eternity of war awaits us. It may come to pass that we yearn for peace before long.’

‘Never,’ said Perun firmly. ‘I will never yearn for peace again, not until Khorne himself is cast from his iron throne and his collection of skulls smashed to bone meal.’

‘Aye to that,’ said Eldroc.

The stairs opened to a level place, floored with sand. A cave, were it not for the gap high above that showed the brazen sky. But the way seemed to end in a cul-de-sac. A wall of rock greeted Thostos.

‘This is it?’

‘Yes, Lord-Celestant. Another trick for the eyes. Follow me.’

Eldroc approached the rear of the cave, his turquoise armour flashing as he stepped through a slash of sunlight. It appeared he had vanished. Thostos and Perun stopped in amazement until Eldroc’s arm appeared again and beckoned them. What looked like one sheet of stone was two overlapped with a passage between.

‘Another marvel made with simple stone,’ said Perun.

They followed Eldroc. Another chasm awaited. The convoluted sides matched one another, so it seemed like the stone had parted like a pair of lips. A sandy path wended its way along the bottom, finally opening out in a large, bell-shaped chamber. Forty Stormcasts guarded the way in. They clashed their hammers on their armour as their officers approached.

‘Let’s see it then,’ said Thostos.

Eldroc pointed to the left. Set into the back wall of the chamber, right into the side of the mountain, was a great portal. Thostos walked to the centre of the chamber so that he might see it more fully. The sun was at exactly the right angle to shine through the small light in the roof of the chamber and play across the huge carvings surrounding it.

The gate was monumental in size, three hundred feet high and one hundred across. Two enormous duardin herms made up the bottom half of each side of the frame. Their heads and backs were bowed with carved effort, long stone beards brushing the sand along the cliff face’s foot. They were guarded by friezes of lesser carvings, a row of figures who scowled out at the Stormcasts and pointed with accusing hands. Tall, geometrically patterned pillars carried upon the upturned hands of the herms made up the remainder of the height, and bore the weight of a long lintel artfully fashioned from a single massive piece of stone. An outer band deeply carved with repeating geometric designs made the outer edge. In the flat space of the middle of the frame ran an unbroken run of six-foot-tall runes bordered by perfectly chiselled flora and fauna, thinner against the geometric band and thick around the gaping mouth of the gateway. Thostos had seen none of the things depicted there in the Chaos-tainted wasteland of Anvrok; the world the carvings showed was long gone.

The mountain here was black rock shot through with glittering seams of galena, but the arch was a creamy colour, a different kind of stone. Thostos could see no join to mark the transition between the two sorts – it was as if they had been welded together. Perhaps it had been. The duardin had skills none could match. The gate runes glowed feebly in the sun of Chamon, lambent with quiet magic that hinted at past power.

Thostos removed his helmet. Underneath was a face framed by blond hair and a beard, square jawed and heavily featured beyond the norms of mortal men. His eyes alone seemed completely human, and only they had remained unchanged during his remaking. They were the same eyes that had once beheld Amcarsh in its dying days. But neither his eyes nor the sweat and dirt streaking his skin could hide the god-gifted power crackling within him.

‘The fabled Silverway of the duardin,’ Thostos pronounced. With his mask removed, his voice was warm and rich. ‘How disappointingly easy to find.’

A few of the men chuckled, pride and frustration both in the sound.

‘There was no resistance at all? It was just here, waiting for you in the mountainside?’

‘Retributor Eustos found it,’ said Eldroc. He held up a hand to indicate a warrior who bowed his head in recognition.

‘A blackbird alighted upon a mountain stone,’ said Eustos. ‘I had seen no other life in this place, and so it drew my eyes. When I looked at the bird, the stair was plain to see, though I would swear to Sigmar himself that there was nothing there before.’

‘Plain for you to see.’ Thostos took in the clean lines of the carving, unsoftened by time and unmarked by violence. ‘There is no taste of Chaos here at all. Even if the damned had not found it, I would have expected this place to be the lair of a beast. But there is no sign, past or present. It is as if it has been hidden for centuries. It is almost as if we were meant to find it.’

‘That is what Lord-Relictor Cryden suggests, in fact, my lord. That the duardin hid this place from the enemies of their god Grungni…’ began Eldroc.

‘But not from his allies,’ concluded Thostos. His sigmarite armour rattled quietly as he walked the length of the gate and back.

‘There is more, Lord-Celestant.’ Eldroc nodded to the men guarding the gate. One went to the far side of the chamber. It was so wide it took him a minute to run the distance. Once there he raised his hammer and tapped at the stone.

‘Are we to become miners, Eldroc?’ asked Thostos.

‘Watch,’ said Eldroc. He signalled the men by the gate. They placed their hands into the mouth cavities of two of the smaller figures in the frieze.

The ground rumbled. A low hum followed. The runes upon the gate burned brightly blue.

The rock chamber flickered. One moment the Stormcasts were within a giant cavern, the next they stood upon a platform set into the open mountainside. All around them were stout ruins. Where the far chamber wall had been, a wide road led down from the Silverway, passing over several landings and sweeping flights of stairs as it descended. Then the bare rocky slopes many hundreds of yards in all directions wavered and vanished. In their stead a duardin town followed the road down the mountain. To the left and right, a vista covering all the vale of Anvrok was open to the Stormcast Eternals. Warm sun basked Thostos’s face. The only element that remained unchanged was the hidden path by which he had come to the Silverway. It still came out of the stone by the gate, its entrance dark in the sun.

‘Now that is impressive,’ Thostos said, sweeping his gaze over the view. ‘Such art! I have never heard of an illusion so great in scope to hide a whole city, excepting Sigmar’s cloak about Azyr.’

‘The city is desolate, abandoned like all the rest,’ said Perun. ‘Disappointingly so.’

‘You have a point,’ conceded Thostos. The buildings had been hidden from prying eyes, but unlike the gate had suffered the effects of time and weather. Many were surrounded by skirts of detritus cracked by frost and the sun’s heat on the walls. Roofs had fallen in. Windows were eyeless holes that the wind blew mournfully through.

‘If the duardin intended us to find this, why can we not find them?’ asked Eldroc.

The men stared at the gate a moment.

‘Does it work?’ asked Thostos. ‘Is the way still open?’

Lord-Castellant Eldroc raised a hand. A herald of their chamber stepped from the knot of Stormcast Eternals at Eldroc’s back, his bearing proud, detached, his heavy helmet tucked under one arm. The mechanisms of his wings were folded, the feathers of light extinguished. He announced himself, his voice sonorous and clean and somewhat hollow behind the warmask, like the voices of all the reforged.

‘Prosecutor-Prime Martius the Swift, of the Skyblood Angelos Conclave.’

‘Speak, Martius,’ said Thostos.

‘I have returned to Sigmaron upon this road, my lord. It works exactly as our lord Sigmar said it should. Beyond the arch is a tunnel, fair made and well-dressed in stone. As one follows this, the cold of the utterdark gathers about the traveller, until all is black and freezing as the dark before time. Then there is a second arch, like the gate before us but twice as finely wrought. This entrance here is not the gate, but the path to the Silverway. Blackness and starlight wait beyond, but I trusted the word of our God-King and stepped out into the void, uttering six of the names of Azyr as I did so. And lo! A road of silver rose up beneath my feet, and stretched on, shining as with the light of the pure moons of Azyr. Five steps I took upon this endless road, finding myself in the Gardens of Celerity, nigh to the road leading to Sigmaron. The legends do not speak falsely.’

‘There was no way back through the realmgate that you exited?’

‘None. It closed behind me without trace. I was taken there, and left. I returned by Sigmar’s own hand.’

‘And there is nothing untowards upon the road?’

‘It is pure and unsullied. No trace of Chaos’s mark upon it.’

‘Then the key part of our crusade is concluded.’ Thostos laughed. In truth, he, Eldroc and the others of the Bladestorms wished for vengeance before success. ‘Sigmar will see this as a great triumph.’

‘Indeed he does,’ said Eldroc. ‘A part of the Stormhost has been ordered to return to Azyr.’

Thostos raised his eyebrows at his Lord-Castellant questioningly. ‘And?’

‘Not us, my lord. Our own Bladestorm is to remain here, as are the Fireblades and the Doombringers. The Harbingers of Vengeance are to remain on guard upon the Bright Tor Gate under Lord-Castellant Barahan. Others will set out to the west and south, and to Denvrok, to widen the search for the duardin.’

Thostos nodded, visibly relieved. ‘That is good. We shall have our vengeance yet.’

‘Maybe, maybe not, my lord,’ said Perun.

Thostos looked over the officers and champions of Eldroc’s cohort. All of them radiated frustration.

‘We are all Celestial Vindicators,’ he said, raising his voice so that all might hear him. ‘Here by dint of our great desire for vengeance. I see much impatience, a desire to close with the foe and smite him hard, to rend and destroy those foul traitors who turned their backs upon the gods and embraced the impure power of Chaos.’ His voice boomed from the cliff. ‘Fear not, my brothers, we shall have vengeance, each and every one of us, over and over again from now until the close of eternity ushers long night upon the Mortal Realms and all those that lie beyond them. Do not see the ease with which this gate was found as a disappointment, no! For by this road of the duardin our hammers might make their presence felt on a thousand times a thousand battlefields. Better we test our mettle later in many wars than in the single one. Do not despair, O Celestial Vindicators, we shall have the blood of ten thousand enemies in recompense for the lives of our families and the destruction of our nations.’

‘Well said, my lord,’ said Eldroc.

‘You do not appear satisfied, Lord-Castellant.’

‘I yearn to fight,’ admitted Eldroc.

Thostos clapped his hand upon the arm of his lieutenant. ‘As do I, Eldroc, as do I.’

‘Others will have their chance sooner than we, I think,’ said Eldroc. ‘I have the orders for the Bladestorms. I can guess their content.’

A scroll was brought out by Eldroc’s aide. Thostos read it quickly. When he was done he rolled it up again, whereupon it burst into flames and went to nothing.

‘We are to stay and guard the gate.’

Eldroc nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘I understand your desire to go out and fight, Lord-Castellant.’ Thostos looked upward to the pale sky, as if he might see Sigmar up there, staring back down at him. ‘This task of holding the Silverway I would entrust to none other but you, Eldroc,’ he said. ‘You are among the finest of all Lord-Castellants, a master of defensive warfare.’

‘Nevertheless, I do not know whether to be angry or relieved,’ said Eldroc. ‘The others will be sent on to realms where battle rages already.’ He rested his lantern upon the sand and gripped his halberd tightly. ‘Their chance at vengeance comes before ours.’

‘Or our fellows still present here might find nothing, and those sent home find themselves in reserve in the Golden City,’ said Thostos.

‘You don’t believe that, I think, Lord-Celestant.’

‘No,’ snorted Thostos. ‘Not really. But I also do not believe this ease will hold. This land appears empty, but has long been under the dominion of the master schemer. There are beastmen, and others will come once tidings of our arrival spread. Our presence will have been noted. Can the process of concealment be reversed?’

‘Yes, Lord-Celestant.’ Eldroc’s voice was heavy with disappointment. He raised his arm, and his warriors moved back to the gate’s guardian statues.

‘Stay your hand, Lord-Castellant,’ said Thostos. ‘Let us leave the Silverway open to view. Let it be a signal to the forces of Chaos that not all the works of the ancients were cast down, and that we come in open war to reclaim them. We are not skulking whelps. Let them see this and rage. The enemy will come against us soon enough. Of that I have no doubt.’

The posture of the Celestial Vindicators around the gate changed. They stood taller. Whispers passed among them, urgent with the anticipation of battle.

‘Then I await them with eagerness in my heart,’ said Eldroc. ‘I thank you, my lord.’

CHAPTER SIX

The calm before the storm

With the haunting call of trumpets, three chambers of Celestial Vindicators marched up through the revealed city of the duardin and into the tunnel of the Silverway.

They came up the road five abreast, the tramp of their feet and rattle of their armour echoing from the mountainsides and their songs soaring to the peaks.

The remainder of the Bladestorms came first, joining with Eldroc’s cohort, and stood aside to let their brothers by. Warrior after warrior marched on, their Celestants, Castellants, Vexillors and Relictors leading. Dracoths huffed and growled, reluctant to leave Chamon. There were ranks of bow-carrying Judicators, hammer-wielding Retributors, winged Prosecutors and grim Liberators, their wargear gleaming and standards waving.

Thostos saluted his brother commanders as they went past. Such was their presence that it seemed their passage would never end, a turquoise stream of thwarted avengers doomed to pass through the gate over and over.

But it did end. As the day darkened into night and the Alchemist’s Moon made itself known in the sky, the last of the departing warriors went into the tunnel. The sound of their march persisted long after the final few ranks had vanished into the dark, until the sound stopped suddenly.

‘They have passed onto the Silver Road and out of Chamon,’ said Eldroc.

‘A sight to move the heart, the warriors of Sigmar marching openly in Chamon,’ said Thostos. He took in his Warrior Chamber, standing in ranks, cloaks stirring in the warm wind. The entirety of the Bladestorms now guarded the Silverway. Most were arrayed before the entrance – all but fifty, who kept watch on the entrance to the canyon approach.

‘And yet Sigmar has us waiting here, in this wasteland,’ said Eldroc.

Redbeak woke from his slumber, and with head cocked he fixed a keen eye upon a spot in the sky over the desolate city. A star winked there in the evening, and came nearer. A moment later a winged figure became apparent, a Prosecutor messenger. He flew in and alighted before the gate.

‘Any news?’ asked Thostos.

‘Little, Lord-Celestant. We have found scattered signs of mortal settlement, and the refuse of beastherds. There is a great fortress to the south, in the ruins of the city Elixia. Otherwise, this land is empty of inhabitants.’

‘That is valuable news,’ said Thostos. ‘Tomorrow we shall send more scouts to look upon it. If it is a great redoubt of the enemy, there we will find our first chance at vengeance.’

The Prosecutor bowed his head.

‘What of the area hereabouts?’ asked Eldroc.

‘Nothing, my lord. Dead as it was before. Nothing comes or goes.’

‘And the duardin?’

‘The Knights-Azyros seek them still, and have gone into the higher peaks. The Fireblades Chamber have crossed the Silver River and make for the cliffs of the Vaulten Range. They have seen no further sign of habitation there, old or new. Lord-Celestant Cumulos of the Harbingers of Vengeance bid me inform you that his men have uncovered workings of the duardin near to the river. There are manufactories, but they are ruinous and devoid of life, and have been so for a long time. He and that portion of his brotherhood not with Barahan proceed westwards, towards the great silver sky wyrm, in the hope of some more recent sign of them.’

‘Then here was where they dwelt. This was their capital. It is as we feared,’ said Eldroc.

‘These mountains are riddled with their workings. This is no outlying region, but the centre of their country,’ said Thostos.

‘It appears so, my lord. Further out, the cities are those of men, not Grungni’s folk,’ said the herald.

‘Very well. Return to your patrolling, Prosecutor. Bring any news, any at all, as soon as you have it.’

‘Yes, Lord-Celestant.’ The Prosecutor leaped skywards, his wings bearing him up in a blaze of light. Eldroc envied him his freedom.

‘He flies, we wait,’ said Thostos, echoing Eldroc’s thoughts.

‘I am bound to the path of defender, my lord. Sigmar remade me to keep his fortresses and guard places such as this. I do his bidding gladly.’

‘And yet you still envy our Prosecutor brother,’ said Thostos.

Eldroc did not reply, but could not help looking south towards the location of the fortress. There was no sign of the enemy yet, and the night was deepening.

CHAPTER SEVEN

First blood

‘Fire! Blue fire comes!’ The shout echoing from the watch upon the clifftop was urgent and joyful. ‘The enemy shows himself!’ A Celestial Vindicator pointed southward, to where a flickering ball of blue light danced across the early morning sky.

‘To arms! To arms!’ shouted Thostos eagerly. ‘Finally, my brothers, we shall have the vengeance we so crave! To arms! To arms! Eldroc, hold the eastern end of the platform. I shall take the west.’

‘Aye, my lord,’ said Eldroc, and went to do his lord’s bidding, Redbeak screeching at his heels.

Horns blasted, calling the Stormcast Eternals to order. With a rattle of armour, they readied themselves in front of the duardin gate. A semicircle of Liberators stood shoulder to shoulder and locked their shields. In front of them went a line of Judicators, their skybolt bows crackling into life.

‘Ware! Ware!’ a shout came down from above. ‘The fire has gone!’

All eyes went to the horizon. Eldroc swept his gaze over the early morning sky.

Then it was upon them.

The ball of witchfire burst from nowhere opposite the realmgate, expanding from a sphere no larger than a shield to create a crackling wave fifty yards or more across. Blue flame tips flared magenta and orange, green and violet. Howling, laughing faces appeared in the fire, snatched away only to be replaced by more horrors. The glare of it was harsh, searing as lightning but loaded with dark magics. It hurt the eyes and the soul to look upon.

‘Judicators, loose!’ shouted Eldroc.

Lightning flared, pitting its purer light against the dark radiance of the fire. Methodically the Judicators sent volley after volley of stormbolts into the approaching firewall. But they clanged against the flames with the sound of struck metal. Their lightning went out, and they fell to the ground.

‘Loose!’ ordered Eldroc.

The Judicators’ aim was true. Not a bolt missed its mark, but every missile was stopped as surely as an axe blow is turned by sigmarite. The flames grew to encompass the breadth of the platform. The runes of the duardin gate spat sparks as they were caressed by unclean light. There was no heat from the flames, but they radiated a dull prickliness that set Eldroc’s teeth on edge. The energies contained within his body reacted, writhing across his war harness in a series of short, hopping sparks. Smoke that smelled of brimstone and flowers rose from the armour joints of the Stormcasts.

The fire drew closer until it was thirty yards from the Judicators. Eldroc held up his hand to shield his eyes. Behind the fire he discerned dark shapes. Silhouettes wavered in the flame, warriors joined into one long, spiked profile. They were as tall as his own Stormcast Eternals, decked in heavy plate armour, helms crowned with horns and strange crests. Cavalry rode in the centre upon massive horses. Infantry were to the flanks, carrying huge, cruel-bladed axes. There was something else, a large shape that hovered behind and above the warriors of Chaos, but the nature of that was obscured by the fire, which seemed to gather itself more thickly and fluidly there, protective of its secret.

‘Sound the horns! Order the cliff guard down to the gate!’ shouted Eldroc.

Silver horns blared, the purity of their notes dispelling some of the odd sensation projected by the fire.

The firewall dissipated, revealing the Chaos host behind: at least two hundred of them, armoured in blue and yellow, bright steel and bronze, vile decorations upon their plate. The Chaos warriors and Stormcasts were opposite sides of the same coin, both kinds energised by divine will, but whereas the Stormcasts had had their souls uplifted by Sigmar, here were men who had sacrificed theirs for power.

The ranks of Liberators fluidly parted, allowing the Judicators to retreat and take refuge behind them. They locked shields again at the exact moment the warriors of Tzeentch roared and charged.

The flanks came in first, smashing into the outer limbs of the Bladestorms’ own formation. At that moment, Eldroc lost sight of Thostos, and his view of the battle drew in.

The crash of the meeting lines was deafening, a sound out of the ages of myth when the gods themselves clashed weapon on weapon. The Stormcasts raised their shields, taking blows that would have cut an ogor in half. Hammers descended in reply, battering Chaos armour to shards and pulverising the flesh beneath. Both sides exhorted their divine masters to bring them victory. Prayers to the Lord of Change were matched by Sigmarite hymns of war, and the very air boiled where they met in contest.

As the fire went out, Eldroc saw the shape it had concealed. Upon a spinning disk of purest gold rode a tall man in dark robes with long, pointed horns. A gangrel sorcerer, a disciple of change. He plucked at the air with long fingers, dragging power from the stuff of creation and hurling it at the centre of the Bladestorms’ line. These flickering bolts of multicoloured magic transmuted themselves into spears of burning quicksilver as they flew. One burst through the Stormcasts to Eldroc’s left. With a peal of thunder, the warrior discorporated and a flash of light raced upwards, back to the Reforging chambers of the Sigmarabulum. The warriors of Chaos were mighty foes, and there were more of these departures. But the Bladestorms would not yield. With each death, the Liberators bunched tighter, allowing no gap in their shieldwall. Skybolts arced over the front ranks, blasting Chaos warriors from their feet. The Chaos infantry were fully invested in the fight, but as yet the knights of Chaos had not engaged. They stood ready, mutant horses snorting, but they remained unmoving.

‘Stand ready, my brothers!’ yelled Eldroc. The footmen were attempting to pin the Stormcasts’ flanks in place, pressuring them so that more Stormcasts were drawn from the centre while it was further weakened by the magic of their leader. To the west, the Lord-Castellant caught sight of Thostos embattled, but lost him in the press of warriors gathering there again. Eldroc judged that the knights were waiting until the line’s middle was sufficiently depleted so that they could burst it asunder with their charge.

If that were the foe’s plan, it was failing. The Stormcasts did not weaken. The line remained tight; no gap opened up.

The sorcerer hunched forward. He licked his lips with his long purple tongue and cast a wary glance to the narrow valley leading to the platform. There the others of the Bladestorms were mustering. Already they had abandoned their watch on the mountain way and thundered down the stairs to join their brothers. In moments they would be upon the Chaos flank. Running out of time, the sorcerer paused in his bombardment and raised a long finger. Red light burst from it. At this signal the cavalry reared up. Their mounts screeched with hellish voices and they plunged forward, lances dropping into position. The knights clashed into the centre of the Stormcast Eternal line. Few lance points found their way past the sigmarite armour, but the warriors of Azyr were bowed by the sheer impact of the mass of twisted horseflesh, steel and Chaos-swollen men coming at them. Armoured feet squealed on rock as they were forced backward.

Eldroc’s armour sparked with fury. He stepped outside a lance’s thrust, and welcomed his attackers.

‘Vengeance!’ he called. ‘Vengeance!’

With a terrible joy he sang his battlesong, and laid about him with his halberd, spearing one giant with the tip and throwing him from his horse. A snarl announced the attack of Redbeak. The gryph-hound leapt from Eldroc’s side and bore a second Chaos knight backwards off his mount. His halberd whistled overhead and Eldroc’s heart swelled. This was what he had been made for, this was his gift from Sigmar. In another time and another place there had been another man. The life of that man had been destroyed to the sound of evil laughter – his wife, his children, his family and his tribe, all slain with wanton cruelty. He had fought, aye, but he had been bested and taken to their torture tables. As his own life was about to end he had prayed to Sigmar. He had asked not for salvation, but that he be permitted revenge. As his blood mingled with his tears, he had shouted his hatred of Chaos. He had shouted to the skies for the strength to bring down the minions of the great powers as they had hewn down his tribe and trampled their flesh into the dirt.

A vain plea, but of utmost sincerity. His prayers had been answered. Flashes of memory, long dormant, flickered through his mind. Every crushing blow sparked a recollection of pain and dread. These nightmares from the past lent greater strength to his arm. Far from tiring, he became stronger, his need for vengeance impelling his arm as much as Sigmar’s powers. Hell-forged armour cracked and shattered. and the steel-clad heads of horses were cloven through. Many great champions of Tzeentch came against him, but none could stand before his wrath. He was vengeance incarnate. His song became a wordless cry of rage and he pressed on, heedless of the danger. The line of Liberators behind him forced themselves forward against the press of the foe, following their leader into the heart of the force. Gore splashed over them as Eldroc’s halberd did its deadly work. He hacked with the axe blade and stabbed with its spear tip, smashing apart dark armour and tainted flesh alike.

A massive brute of a man clad in brass fell to the ground and Eldroc drove the spike of his halberd through his stomach with a feral cry. He drew the weapon out and swung it in a blurring arc that had the enemy’s horses rearing in fear; one could not control his steed, and Eldroc decapitated him in a spray of gore. He roared at the sight.

A gap opened around him, as the minions of Tzeentch dared not chance their skill against his. Eldroc’s rage lifted. He panted hard. For the first time since his transformation he felt the ache of exertion trouble his muscles. He yearned to leap forward and slay, but as much as he desired to let his fury take him, he could not allow it. He must lead. Berserk rage was the way of Chaos; he was a servant of Order. With a shuddering breath he willed his heart to slow and climbed atop a dead steed. From there he surveyed the battle.

The remaining Bladestorms were coming to Lord Thostos’s aid through the defile from the mountainside, and their arrival pressed the Chaos warriors there hard. In return, the Chaos worshippers moved more of their number to bolster their efforts, so that only a small knot remained embattled to Eldroc’s left. The Stormcasts were moments away from being able to turn the line. Now the Chaos army risked losing its centre.

The sorcerer had come off his platform and was calling the powers of Chaos to aid him. Magic flowed into the armour of the dead, bringing the wargear unnatural life. Animated suits lurched forward, carrying the corpses of their wearers back into battle. On those still living, broken armour flowed together. The weapons of the sorcerer’s men glowed potently.

Eldroc laughed. ‘Are such magics intended to intimidate me, mage? See here the power of Sigmar Heldenhammer manifest!’ He held aloft his warding lantern, the seat of his power and symbol of his office. Brilliant light blazed forth. Where it lit upon the Celestial Vindicators’ sigmarite, dents popped out of scarred metal, and gashes in flesh knitted themselves shut. The Stormcasts were invigorated by the light of their God-King, and redoubled their attack. But where it touched upon the scions of Chaos they reeled back. Wounds closed by the sorcerer burst open once more, and the suits of armour brought to life fell back to the ground.

The charge of the Chaos knights had been broken. The last was brought down, his steed letting out a grating, reptilian whinny as it was tripped and pushed over. Both rider and steed were obscured by hammers rising and falling.

Only the sorcerer’s bodyguard remained in the centre of the enemy line, a grim company of wicked murderers dressed like kings and armed with a daemon’s plunder. Dangerous, but few in number.

The tide was turning. It was time to press the advantage.

‘Judicators, protect the flanks!’ yelled Eldroc. His battle shout pierced the tumult of battle. The irregular rain of stormbolts ceased and two distinct barrages set up. Two-thirds of the gleaming bolts fell on the greater numbers of Chaos warriors by the entrance to the mountain path, while the other third speared down onto the small knot by the eastern flank. The stormbolts there did swift work, breaking up the formation of the warriors and leaving them at the mercy of the Eternals’ hammers and swords.

‘Liberators, to me!’ Eldroc called. Without waiting for his men, he ran across the narrow gap and plunged into the sorcerer’s bodyguard. Halberds with gibbering faces flowing over molten surfaces rose to greet him, but he smashed them aside. Screaming his oath to Sigmar over and again, he hacked his way deep into the enemy’s ranks. A solid crash came behind him as the Liberators’ shieldwall impacted the foe. He was impetuous, carving a passage alone towards the sorcerer. He spun his weapon, whirling it round his head and turning his body about to maintain its momentum. Redbeak came at his side, ripping at those few who evaded Eldroc’s wrath.

With a final crash Eldroc put down his last foe. It took him a moment to realise he had burst right through the dread regiment. The sorcerer stood just a few yards from him. They locked eyes a moment, then the sorcerer turned and fled back towards his golden platform.

Redbeak leapt after him, but the sorcerer waved a hand at the gryph-hound, sending it spinning aside.

‘Judicators, bring down the curse caster!’ roared Eldroc.

The disc bobbed in the air, rotating at stately speed until the sorcerer approached, whereupon it stopped and sank low to the ground. With a single bound, the sorcerer jumped upon it. The disc’s revolutions restarted and quickened as it rose up, bearing the sorcerer over the heads of the combatants. A hail of stormbolts came at the sorcerer. None hit their target. A fresh wall of blue fire erupted around the disc, and the bolts clashed off it harmlessly. Shrinking rapidly in on itself, the ball of fire darted up and away, heading off over the duardin ruins and then to the south.

Eldroc noted its direction, but could spare little time in consideration of pursuit. The damned warriors, seeing their master gone, were fighting all the harder, and Thostos’s flank was being pushed back before their fury.

‘Slay them! Slay them all!’ called Eldroc. He and his men laid low the remainder of the wizard’s bodyguard, then turned to the mountain path entrance to fall upon the rear of the Chaos warriors fighting there.

Minutes later it was all over. Stormcast Eternals stood, hammers suddenly heavy in their hands, chests heaving. The broken bodies of Chaos slaves lay on the sand and rock of the platform floor. The statues of the duardin on either side of the arch looked on impassively. Eldroc let the haft of his halberd thump to the floor as Thostos came to join him.

‘Finally,’ he said. ‘Vengeance begins.’

‘And it is a beginning only. Did you see the way the sorcerer fled?’

‘To the south.’

‘Aye,’ said Thostos, and there was grim pleasure in his voice. ‘Towards the ruined city of Elixia. Towards the great fortress.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Glimmerlands

Once the battle at the platform was done, the wounded ministered to and the tally of those returned to Sigmaron calculated, Thostos elected to take fully two-thirds of the Bladestorms off the mountain by the stairs in pursuit of the horned sorcerer, leaving Eldroc to his duty as guardian of the Silverway.

As they descended, it became apparent that the ruins were even more expansive than they had originally thought. They marvelled that such a site could have been hidden from view for so long, for the tumbled buildings stretched down to the lowlands and there were many shafts and hewn caves visible in the rock of the mountain besides.

They left the ruins of the duardin behind and headed south, following the directions of Prosecutor scouts towards the other city and the fortress that filled its centre.

By the end of evening they had reached the edge of the Glimmerlands. Thostos ordered a halt, and his men set up camp within a ruin upon a low hill. Once a palace, its walls were cast down and towers broken, so that no portion stood taller than a man.

Thostos watched strange night fall over Anvrok for the fifth time. The sun went into the rippling fires of the great wyrm Argentine. A long shadow fell on the valley as the wyrm obscured the light, only for the sun to return a quarter of an hour later an exhausted red. The sun had fought its daily battle with the wyrm’s jaws and it had lost, as it did every day.

Argentine’s coils filled the western sky. Through the day its vast bulk was pale as the daytime moon, but night lent it solidity and it became ominous. Towards the lands of the deepest east, a haze of metallic dust tinted the air the colour of brass, purple beyond where night marshalled itself in the void, ready to march on Anvrok. From the west, a new light came to conquer the sun’s dominion. In the valley of Anvrok, the land danced already to the endless writhing of Argentine’s fire. Shadows leaped around rocks frantically, as if seeking to avoid being seen. The Silver River lost its sheen and glowed, the intense heat it harboured revealed by the gloaming. And so the battlefield was set, dark night against the Chaos-tinged fire of the wyrm.

Liberator-Prime Perun came to stand beside his lord. He rocked a loose stone in the wall. The mortar was dry dust and frittered away to nothing on the hot breeze. He grunted, hollow behind his helm, and reseated the stone. ‘Better than nothing, I suppose,’ he said.

Thostos made no indication he had heard. He did not take his eyes from the great wyrm. ‘I grew to manhood in Amcarsh, before the God-King took me to his side and made me anew. In that realm were creatures as tall as towers, and fiercer than the storm. Only in a few places fenced in by sea or mountain could we make our homes, so mighty were they. But I look at that wyrm in astonishment. I have never seen anything like it.’

Perun nodded. ‘It defies belief, Lord-Celestant. I see that and the crucible it warms. But I cannot credit it a rightwise part of this realm. It seems more a whim of Chaos than a thing of Order.’

‘But it is a thing of Order, or was.’ Thostos turned away from the dancing fires of the creature and looked Perun in the eyes. ‘I am told that it was a celestial dragon, a creature as noble as our dracoths, but turned to fell purpose by the great changer. It gives me hope.’

‘How so?’ Perun removed his helmet and shook out a mane of dreadlocks. His skin was dark brown, eyes a piercing green. A native of some desert land, overthrown like all the others.

‘Because if Lord Sigmar believes that we are mighty enough to challenge the likes of that serpent, perhaps rid it of its taint, then truly we can accomplish anything. We shall be victorious, Perun.’

At night the land changed. The mark of Chaos upon the Hanging Valleys became more evident. The Alchemist’s Moon clambered high up the ladders of heaven, its louring face crisscrossed with strange patterns. Weird fires sprang up from nowhere, pillars of multicoloured flame that twisted their way across the slopes with sinister purpose. Perhaps they sought to taunt the Bladestorms, but the Stormcasts of Sigmar paid these sprites no attention. They did not run from their camp nor loose shots, but watched carefully, hands close to their weapons. Odd noises sounded out in the dark, and the bleating calls of beast-folk echoed from the crags. But the creatures were craven, and none dared approach the camp of such mighty warriors.

The Celestial Vindicators were therefore disappointed until the following day, when they encountered their next resistance.

With a cry of pure fury, Thostos swept aside the Chaos knight’s sword with his runeblade and slammed his hammer into the warrior’s chest. Armour cracked under the weapon’s heavy head, pulverising the flesh underneath. Blood spurted from the rents in the metal. The knight slumped sideways drunkenly, and Thostos finished him with a blow to the chest that stove in his ribs. He whirled his sword around his head, reversing the point and driving it through the steel hide of the strange beast the knight rode. Despite its bizarre appearance, it had a heart, for it collapsed and died. ‘Sigmar!’ called Thostos, holding his hammer aloft. ‘Vengeance!’

All around him his men were slaughtering the Chaos warband. The Chaos warriors had approached confidently, almost eagerly, seeing the Stormcasts as worthy foes. Little did they realise how outmatched they were.

The clash of arms and shouts lessened, until all the warriors lay dead.

‘We have finished them, my lord. Victory!’ called Perun.

‘Victory! Victory!’ chanted the Bladestorms.

Thostos looked down at the man he had killed. The knight had been huge, granted great strength and size by his patron. The fashioning of his armour would have bankrupted a good-sized kingdom of the old realms, being set with precious stones and rare metals. Thostos cleaned his weapons with a thought, the magic of them boiling off the blood from hammerhead and sword edge. He sheathed his runeblade and bent down, reaching for the knight’s helmet with his free hand.

‘What are you doing, Lord-Celestant?’ asked Perun.

‘I would look upon this man that I have slain.’

The helm slid free. Unlike some they had slaughtered, the armour had not fused itself to the man’s flesh, and the face beneath was untouched by the warping power of Tzeentch. His eyes were closed, his face slack.

‘Look at him. In death there is no emotion, no wickedness. He seems to sleep, and his face could be that of any man.’

‘Aye, but it is not any man,’ said Perun. ‘He is a follower of Chaos, a traitor to all mortal kindreds. He bartered his soul away for power.’

‘He did,’ said Thostos. His gaze remained fixed upon the dead man’s face. ‘But I wonder how much choice he had in the matter. Did he take the road willingly, or was he forced down it at sword point, for fear of his family’s fate?’

‘We all had our choices, lord,’ said Perun angrily. ‘And we took a different way.’

‘Those were different times,’ said Thostos. ‘In those days men threw in their lot with the Dark Powers for gain, that is true. But to be born into this.’ He extended a hand and swept it around the barren mountainsides, the bare valley cloaked in thorny scrub. ‘What choice would he have?’

‘They die. We have our vengeance, that is what matters.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Thostos. He cast the helm aside. ‘But our anger might be better spared for the masters, and not the slaves.’

Already carrion birds were alighting upon the slain with a clatter of bronze feathers. Two spread their wings and darted their heads at one another. They hissed puffs of steam from pistons in their wings as they contested for the choicest scraps. A third hopped onto the chest of a fallen follower of Tzeentch and began nipping through the breastplate with a serrated beak of steel more akin to forge shears than the mouth of a living creature.

Thostos looked to the plateau in the west. The shapes of ruined buildings crazed the horizon. Behind them something massive shimmered, part obscured by distance and magic.

‘We draw close to the fortress,’ said Thostos. ‘The mightiest redoubt in this region. There we will find the lords of these lands, and we shall kill them.’

‘A worthy target for my hammer,’ said Perun.

As they proceeded west the sky cleared, and the land grew hotter the closer they drew to the city. The sun beat down on them as it crawled overhead, heating their sigmarite armour intolerably. The rocks and gritty soil of the region glinted with innumerable mineral fragments, a scintillation that was as disorienting as it was beautiful. The city wavered in the heat, parts of it vanishing in the haze so that it appeared the great tower at its heart floated on the air.

As they drew closer, the jagged shapes upon the cliff resolved themselves into a vast, eight-towered castle, far larger than they had anticipated. The fortress dominated the centre of Elixia, a plateau dense with metal ruins. Sharply angled walls of metal and stone rose high over the wreckage of the city, studded with long spikes and covered with thousands of glinting copper skulls. The castle’s heart was wholly of metal – an enormous tower, impossibly high. No mortal construction could have been made so tall.

Thostos raised his hand and the column of Bladestorms came to a halt.

‘This fortress is too great for us alone. Prosecutors!’

A group of winged warriors hurried to the head of the column. Thostos addressed them.

‘Fly with word to Lord-Celestant Cumulos, Lord-Celestant Vard and Lord-Castellant Barahan at the Bright Tor Gate. Tell them to send as many of our brothers as they can spare. After you have informed Eldroc, take the Silverway to Sigmaron. I will provide a message to our lord Sigmar, asking that he return the rest of the Celestial Vindicators to Anvrok. This realm will not be so easily won after all.’

CHAPTER NINE

Lord Maerac

From the balcony of his tower, Ephryx watched the Stormcast Eternals make camp. The bowl of gold showed him nothing useful at all, and he was forced to rely on a telescope. It was not as efficacious, of course, but through its crystal lenses he could at least count the men waiting on the plain. ‘Two hundred and seven,’ he said. He included in that number the winged figures looping around the fort at a safe distance.

‘And more on the way.’ Lord Maerac of Manticorea stood by the sorcerer, eating delicacies from a wide silver platter. He spat pips from his mouth over the side of the balcony and took up the leg of a fowl. With it he pointed to the northwest and the south west. ‘There, I count two more forces coming for you up the Silver River.’

Ephryx swung his telescope to the points Maerac indicated. Sure enough, heavy plumes of dust rose high into the orange sky. To make matters worse, a fresh storm gathered over the Bright Tor range. Thunder growled in the distance.

‘You say they arrive by lightning?’ said Maerac. ‘Oh my, you are in a difficult place, my friend.’ He laughed.

Ephryx looked up from his telescope. Maerac was a huge, broad-shouldered man, with a heavyset face beneath his bald scalp. The sorcerer wrinkled his nose and bared his teeth. Ephryx wisely hid his irritation from Kairos, but he had no qualms at all at displaying his anger to the likes of Maerac.

‘That may be, but it is they who are in a difficult place, not I.’

‘How so?’ asked Maerac. His tone made Ephryx’s skin crawl.

‘They have no idea of the might of this fortress.’

‘That’s why you need me,’ interjected Maerac.

‘And they have led us right to the Silverway!’ concluded Ephryx irritably.

‘Have they now?’ Maerac raised his eyebrows. ‘Is the Silverway outside your gates then, Mage Ephryx, because that is where our enemy appears to be.’

‘Do you doubt my word, lord? Look through this telescope and you will see the gate yourself. The illusion has been lowered.’ Ephryx swung the telescope around to point to the revealed duardin city, hazy with great distance, but visible if you knew where to look.

Maerac pointedly refused to take the telescope. ‘I always doubt your word, sorcerer. You are bent-minded. I’d no more trust a word you said than I would believe the whispered promises of Tzeentch himself. I see what you claim to be the Silverway all right, but I will not believe it to be so until you take me there and step through it with me.’

‘It is no illusion! It is as plain as the nose on your face!’

‘In that case, how very embarrassing that it was upon your doorstep all this time,’ said Maerac mildly. ‘When did you take up residence here again?’

‘You provide your service to me, and I will pay you as we discussed,’ said Ephryx.

‘Yes, I am sure I will, only to find that King Thrond is already on his way to the gate. That would make you clap, seeing us at open war.’

‘If he is, he will not break through until we have slain the Sigmarites upon the walls of this fortress. Do you really believe Thrond is mighty enough to better this army? You do not, otherwise you would go there yourself this moment. Do not play the fool with me, Maerac.’ Ephryx waved his hand. ‘I have no need to trick you. What do I care if you have the Silverway or not? It has never been my intention to leave this place. I remain only to perfect my fortress.’

‘They would tear it down if I were not here,’ said the lord. ‘Having seen this enemy, I should press you for greater payment. You are rich enough in gold and magic.’

‘You shall have the Silverway, be grateful of that. I shall be content with my buildings of flesh, steel and stone while you rampage across the eight realms.’

‘That I will. It has been too long since my warriors were tested. This moulding of worlds holds no interest for me,’ said Maerac. ‘It is tedious.’

‘Then it is for the good that our interests diverge,’ snapped Ephryx, ‘or we should forever be at each other’s throats.’

Maerac laughed. With his teeth he tore the flesh from the bird leg, exposing a bone made of a light, silvery metal. He leaned out of the window and tossed it upwards. There was a loud snap as something on the roof caught it. ‘Very good, Ephryx. But I cannot help but feel that you are hiding something from me.’

Ephryx affected to look guilty. ‘Nonsense.’

‘Go on, tell me. Let us while away the time until these warriors come to fight. Amuse me with your convoluted schemes.’

‘There is no scheme.’

Maerac slapped Ephryx on the back. ‘There is always a scheme, sorcerer.’

‘Oh, very well! For long years I have sought to perfect the defences of this fortress.’

Maerac smirked. ‘I know that.’

‘To which end I have transmuted the many skulls you have provided me into copper.’

‘I know this too. Did you think I was unaware what you did with them? You really do have a low opinion of me.’

‘You are better informed than you suggest!’ said Ephryx. ‘Into these skulls, a measure of the power of the sun and the ether are funnelled at daybreak.’

‘And all this I know too,’ said Maerac smugly. ‘And I know of the thing you keep below, this artefact of Order you parasite upon and pretend is not there. I know of the slave army you gathered to build this place, the ogors you blinded who fashioned a cairn of lead around the item. Why would you need to do that?’ he asked with mock thoughtfulness.

‘But you do not know what it is,’ said Ephryx. It was his turn to be superior.

‘I do not, I admit. None who have seen it kept their sight or sanity, and most have been dead for hundreds of years. However,’ he looked out at the warriors marshalling in the vale, ‘I can hazard a guess. I may be a dullard compared to you, Ephryx, or so you seem to so fondly think, but I am possessed of a modicum of wit.’

‘Well then!’ snarled the sorcerer. ‘Then you will know also that once this energy reaches a critical mass, this fortress will never fall.’

‘That I did not know either, but have long suspected,’ said Maerac. He popped a mewling blood grape into his mouth, and bit down with relish. ‘It is only because you show no interest in expanding your holdings that I allow you to pursue this aim, you realise.’

Oh, he is so satisfied with himself, thought Ephryx. I will see him choke upon his own tongue! Maerac was ignorant of the skulls’ true purpose. If he was aware of Ephryx’s plan to annex Chamon to the Realm of Chaos and gift the entire realm to Tzeentch, then Maerac would certainly not be here. As devoted to Tzeentch as Maerac insisted he was, he had little desire to take up residence in Tzeentch’s crystal labyrinth personally.

Ephryx’s agile mind considered that Maerac might in fact be bluffing, and that he knew what the artefact was. If that were so, the chances were high that Maerac had come here to assassinate him at his moment of triumph. Ephryx discounted the notion just as quickly as it had formed and revealed none of this through word or gesture or mien. He spoke conspiratorially instead, as if he were sharing his deepest secrets with the Lord of Manticorea.

‘These beings are all of magic. I could taste it when I fought them myself at the Silverway gate. I have seen them die, their bodies streaking away to wherever they came from when they fall. That I can exploit. We shall slaughter them, and I shall capture their essences in my vessels of copper. The Eldritch Fortress will become charged with their magic until no creature of any plane will be able to breach my defences, thus keeping all our lands safe, Lord Maerac. If I am successful, the gods themselves would not be able to cast down this castle.’

Maerac’s eyes narrowed. He shook a six-fingered fist at the sorcerer. ‘You are wrong there, Ephryx.’

Ephryx’s heart skipped a beat. Could it be now that this prince of dullards would cast aside his mask of idiocy and strike him down? Ephryx brought a spell to the forefront of his mind, ready to turn the lord’s brain to lead.

‘Really, my Lord Maerac. How so?’

‘It will be I that does the slaughtering while you cower in your keep. I will not allow you to forget that.’ Maerac stepped up to the edge of the balcony and climbed upon the balustrade. He balanced there a moment. ‘Remember, sorcerer, when you perfect your fortress of flesh, stone and steel, that you are able to only because I, Lord Maerac of Manticorea, permit it!’

Maerac leapt from the balustrade, his clothes snapping in the wind. A piercing shriek rippled the gold in Ephryx’s scrying bowl. A huge manticore leapt after its master with a crack of leathery wings. A moment later it laboured upwards with Maerac in the saddle.

‘A modicum of wit you say? Evidently not,’ whispered Ephryx nastily.

Clouds scudded across the sun, the forerunners of a storm. Ephryx shivered. War was coming to the Eldritch Fortress.

He went to prepare his magics.

CHAPTER TEN

Assault on the Eldritch Fortress

Elixia was before them, a labyrinth of dereliction, the Eldritch Fortress lurking in the centre. Eight tall towers were linked by a wall bristling with spikes and set with thousands of coppery skulls. From the centre rose an enormous keep, the top twisted into the blasphemous emblem of Tzeentch – a great eye, gleaming purple, set into blued steel and surrounded by curving tendrils of metal.

The Bladestorms came south along a road that led out of the Glimmerlands. Outlying districts of Elixia lay in ruination either side. The remains of fortifications edged the bluff, the majority of which Elixia occupied, but the extent of settlement outside the walls suggested to Thostos that Elixia had enjoyed a long period of peace before it fell.

The Bladestorms marched alone, the majority of the Fireblades and the Harbingers of Vengeance. They approached up the main highway from the west, their Lord-Celestants Cumulos and Harekuthos leading them. Further Warrior Chambers came from deeper within Anvrok, but would be a while in arriving. Thostos hoped he had enough men.

The Stormcast Eternals passed through the devastated gates of Elixia. The towers had wilted, the metal sagging from the effects of some great heat. Slicks of solidified metal still puddled the floor under coatings of dirt. The highway past the gates was increasingly choked with debris. The destruction was random. Entire buildings stood untouched next to piles of scrap creaking in the wind. Everywhere the transmuting effects of Tzeentch’s magic could be seen.

They passed a street where every building had been upended and set upon its roof, then another where the buildings had been miniaturised, and sat in the centre of a field of glass under whose clouded surface strange shapes swam. One street had been peeled up from its foundations, the materials fashioned into hideous and giant figures whose static postures silently changed when unobserved. There was a square full of statues of salt, whose lumpen nature could not hide the fact that they were citizens of the city transformed as they fled. Immobile faces screamed from walls. A fountain ran incongruously in a dry plaza, spurting out a mixture of quicksilver and blood. Hysterical voices sounded from empty halls.

The Stormcasts ignored it all. They had been made to fight Chaos, and Chaos held no fear for them. They spoke little as they entered the city, and were entirely silent as they penetrated deep within and approached the dread fortress. Their hands gripped weapons tightly, eager for vengeance. Wordlessly they reached the inner boulevard of the city and split, Thostos heading straight forward, the other Lord-Celestants heading right and left. The rumble of their footsteps was the only sound they made.

The Celestial Vindicators converged on the fortress. Thostos looked to the clouds racing overhead and prayed silently to Sigmar that he would intercede in time.

And then, suddenly, the city stopped.

‘Halt!’ Thostos called. A lone trumpet winded in the desolation, a lonely, sorrowful sound.

Before them was a wide space from which the buildings had been cleared, three bow shots across, a deadly, open ground that had no scrap of shelter to offer besiegers. Doubtless the metal there had been scavenged and had helped create the monstrous fort, but more than a simple razing had taken place. The surface was smooth, covered in rippled swirls. In the pattern were shadowy outlines suggestive of foundations. On the other side of this killing zone of pure metal was Thostos’s goal, the eastern gate of the fortress. It reared high, the foot of the wall blending with the ground as if grown from it. Spikes covering huge metal plates wrought with icons of Tzeentch and Chaos studded the walls, every angle reinforced with brass and steel. The walls came to a point, one of eight triangles, the east gate a massive gaping maw of bronze set into the base of the tower that rose from the angle of the walls. But it was the skulls that arrested the sight. Hundreds of thousands of them covered the surface of the fortifications. In the shadows cast by the clouds they appeared to shift their gaze, looking about them.

More trumpets sounded. Other brotherhoods emerged from the jagged line delimiting the city ruins from the killing space.

‘I see no one, Lord-Celestant,’ said Perun. ‘Atop the walls there is not a single defender. None moved to intercept us while we were vulnerable in the ruins. Perhaps it is deserted?’

Thostos scanned the parapet. He could see no sign of defenders himself. No sound came from within. Silk pennants on the battlements moved in the wind and the place was quiet enough so that their rippling was clearly audible.

‘They are there. They wait for us. We will smite them, but we must be wary, lest this is some trick of the Great Changer’s.’

‘And if it is, my lord?’

‘We will smite them anyway.’

Sunlight glinted from the fort’s metals one last time. A storm darkness fell. Black clouds gathered over the castle.

Thunder rumbled. Drops of rain plinked off Thostos’s armour.

‘Charge!’ he roared.

At the command of the Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm, the Stormcast Eternals ran from the shattered city that surrounded the castle with a mighty roar.

Thunder joined its voice to the blowing of trumpets and demands for vengeance. Hundreds of armoured feet made a rumble that outmatched the storm. Ruined buildings shook. Streets that had been silent for centuries echoed to the pounding of feet.

The first lightning strike smashed down.

‘Stand ready!’ shouted Thostos. ‘Form battle lines. Heraldors, call down our brothers!’

The first ranks of Liberators slammed their shields down a stone’s throw away from the walls, locking them to one another to make a metal fortress of their own. Judicators ranged themselves behind them, raising their bows in the shelter of the shieldwall. ‘Take aim!’ yelled Thostos.

On top of the wall, horned helmets appeared, in pairs and handfuls then by the dozen, until the whole rampart was a mass of Chaos warriors. But the Judicators did not shoot at them.

Cerulean skybolts slammed into gargoyles and the ensorcelled skulls of the castle. They exploded violently, erupting with flashes of trapped magic.

In response the warriors atop the walls began to cast down missiles, darts of black iron and balls of lead spiked with steel. The Liberators hunkered down and angled their shields higher.

Lightning blasted from the sky, pricking domes of force from the ground. When they blinked out, Stormcasts armed with thunderbolt crossbows stood in long lines. They immediately set to work. Titanic discharges of lightning erupted from their magical weapons, and were joined by celestial bolts raining from the sky. The city shook to the fury of the bombardment. The copper skulls on the walls exploded as they were hit or overloaded by the sheer power they attempted to absorb. A long section of parapet slid free from the wall top and crashed down, spilling the warriors atop it to skid across the metal surface of the castle plaza. Incredibly, a number survived, but they were quickly spotted by the Liberators, who smashed them down whether they fought or ran.

More thick columns of light hit the open ground, depositing warrior brotherhoods who joined the shieldwalls of the others. Soon there were thousands of Stormcast Eternals gouging at the Eldritch Fortress with destructive magics. The men of the Celestial Vindicators sang songs of vengeance and ruination, and their fervour added power to the barrage.

Rain pounded from the sky, rattling from armour and shield. Thostos raised his hammer and his sword, and roared out his joy.

‘You cannot stop the oncoming storm!’

‘This battle is not going according to your plan, sorcerer,’ growled Maerac. His manticore growled and shook its mane, agitated by the scent of blood.

‘Nonsense,’ said Ephryx distractedly. He was intent on the conflict below. ‘This fortress is more than capable of absorbing the worst they can muster. They will be the ones to suffer.’

No sooner had Ephryx spoken than a section of the ramparts was brought down, struck by a bolt of lightning that speared from the boiling black clouds over the fortress. Ephryx could not suppress a flinch as he looked into the maelstrom.

‘Is that so?’ bellowed Maerac. ‘It may soon become moot whether your fortress is up to the task or not. Such things stir the hearts of my warriors. Do you think they will stand idle as our foes attack without hindrance? It will not be long before they cannot stand by any longer, and sally out to meet the foe face to face.’ Maerac glared at the enemy warriors, so small far below. It was evident he was speaking of his own desire. ‘They are the chosen of Tzeentch, and would prove their superiority against a worthy foe.’

‘They would be foolish to do so,’ said Ephryx.

A series of monstrous booms shook the fortress. There were more of the Stormcasts arriving at every moment.

‘Do something, Ephryx! I cannot make promises for the actions of my men!’

Ephryx nodded. With a hurried wave he summoned his disc into existence beneath his feet, a twinkle of gold that bore him up into the air.

‘Very well! I shall unleash the defences of the Eldritch Fortress, though it is a waste of magic.’ He shot downwards, leaving Maerac to follow cursing in his wake.

Wind streamed over Ephryx as he leaned into the rain. His disc took him into position over the east gate, the focus of the enemy’s attack. He brought it to a halt, and held high his arms.

‘Come silver blades! Come silver hounds! Defend your master, defend your lord!’ In a tongue thick with blasphemous sounds he chanted, drawing upon the disturbances in the ether that roared all throughout the realm. Power burst from his hands.

Maerac flew around him in broad loops. ‘Hold!’ he shouted at his followers. ‘Stand your ground! Let the sorcerer do his work! Hold your positions, Tzeentch damn you! Hold!’

Ephryx was lost to the flood of magic. It burned through his body and soul. Such exquisite delight there was in power, which too rarely did he exercise himself. Too rarely did he remind himself why he had pledged himself to Tzeentch. Maerac’s voice became the annoying whine of an insect. A fitting voice for such an insignificant man, he thought. The eyes of Tzeentch were upon him, and they glimmered with approval.

With a hellish cry, Ephryx brought his hands together, and a new thunder joined the symphony of battle.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Second death

Thostos watched the sorcerer descend from his tower and work his spell. ‘Beware,’ he shouted. ‘Beware!’

All along the line, Lord-Relictors chanted out their own incantations. Glittering waves of magic pulsed over the Celestial Vindicators, healing and empowering them.

The walls of the castle twitched. Patches of decoration whirled in on themselves to be replaced by blank, featureless silver, and from this shining blades leapt. Trailing pink fire, they shot towards the shieldwall. The Liberators raised their shields in response, but the blades did not impact and came to an abrupt stop before them. In perfect step with one another, as if they were wielded by a line of warriors, the swords hacked at the shields. Blades sliced down with supernatural might, rending sigmarite in two, forcing the warriors to discard their protection, which drew additional weapons to them from the magically charged air.

The line of Liberators disrupted, the swords broke formation, picked out a target each and duelled with them. Sigmarite blade rang on magical weapons, the blades which came in greater numbers. Along the front, Liberators began to fall, their ascension marked by skyward-leaping energies. But they did not return to Azyr. Shouts of horror went up along the line as the Stormcasts saw their comrades’ essence drawn off course and sucked into the copper skulls of the fort.

A terrible howling came from the city then. Thostos saw silver-skinned hounds pounding down narrow alleyways, eyes afire with forge flame. Molten metal streamed from their jaws like drool.

They galloped across the metal plaza, claws skidding on the smooth surfaces. They plunged into the lines of Judicators, their dagger teeth closing around helmets. Men wrestled with the beasts, their bodies vanishing in flashes only to be taken into the skulls of the castle. In the wake of the hounds staggered ancient suits of armour, woken by magic, their dull blades clutched in empty gauntlets.

Cries of mirth and exultation came from the top of the walls as the sorcerous things attacked, but once their element of surprise was exhausted, they died quickly. Judicators shot the blades down with unerring skill, and the shieldwall reformed. Reserves of Liberators turned about and met the hounds. Hammers and blades fell on them, cutting through gleaming hides to bring forth floods of silver viscera. Thostos felled two himself, smashing the head cleanly from one with a hammer strike. Bright metallic blood spattered his body and he screamed his anger, the same words over and over again.

‘Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance!’

He broke the hip of the last hound, and it yelped as pitifully as any mortal cur. A reverse thrust stopped the noise.

Then Thostos was into the creaking army of animate armour. Empty suits exploded under his hammer, the bones of their long-dead occupants shattering into dust. He chanted the names of his mother, father and sisters – words from another life and time. His blood surged as he said each.

He and his men destroyed the last of the armour, and the castle shuddered under the bombardment. For every skull that glowed with stolen power, another melted or fell free.

‘Is that the best you can do?’ Thostos shouted, and raised his weapons again. ‘Sigmar! Vengeance! Sigmar!’

His men followed his example. ‘Sigmar! Vengeance! Sigmar!’

And then the gates creaked open, slamming hard against the wall, and the forces of hell-twisted Anvrok poured out to face the army of Sigmar in open battle. Heavily armoured warriors screamed the names of Tzeentch as they crashed into the battle line. The Celestial Vindicators shouted back.

‘Sigmar! Vengeance! Sigmar!’

Thostos ran back to the line of battle, silver blood and rain streaming from his armour. The lead warriors of Chaos used long, hooked halberds to yank away the shields of the Celestial Vindicators. The shieldwall wavered, then broke apart, the warriors in it overcome by the furious need for revenge. The battle line became a series of individual combats, and everywhere the slaves of Chaos were being bested. Fearless men all, heartless tyrants, were shocked by the fury of their foe. None such as the Stormcasts had ever been seen in Chamon.

A dark shadow swept over the fight. A manticore flew overhead: its body that of a lion, tawny and powerful. A snarling face set with dimly intelligent eyes craned and snapped from a huge scarlet mane.

Thostos watched it, momentarily transfixed. Not since his days in Amcarsh had he seen such a creature, when Chaos magic had changed the beasts of the land and made them savage, and its ilk had become common. The champion riding the manticore came shrieking through the air on his mount, swooping upon Prosecutors like a hawk and dashing their broken bodies upon the ground. His beast reared, all four claws out to slash and rend, and others fell. ‘Form up!’ he was screaming. ‘Make line! Make line!’

The wind from the manticore’s flight buffeted Thostos as it swooped low. The heavy paws of the monster struck a furrow through the Celestial Vindicators, killing some and scattering many more. Stormbolts chased the flying creature of Chaos. One struck home, causing the beast to howl in rage, but the lord was a skilful rider, and he swept his beast from side to side, dodging all the fire but that single bolt.

Thostos barged his way to the front. As commanded, the Chaos warriors were reforming their own lines, and now the Celestial Vindicators found themselves in isolated groups against a well-organised foe.

‘Match them. Match them! Shieldwall to shieldwall!’ Thostos cried. ‘Shieldwall, then for the gate!’

The Celestial Vindicators locked shields for the third time with supreme discipline, and marched in unison, but a wall of fire sprang up in front of the Chaos warriors, and the Tzeentchian soldiery attacked without fear of reprisal. The flickering pink and golden flames turned hammer and sword, but their own blades stabbed out without hindrance. The manticore swooped overhead again, the sword of its rider taking heads to the left and right. He laughed as he slew. The energies of slain Stormcasts shot upwards, only to be sucked into the castle. Stormbolts burst apart on the firewall, and the Chaos warriors killed and killed.

‘Back, back! Retreat twenty paces. Move!’ called Thostos.

Flawlessly, the Stormcast Eternals went backwards, shields still to their fore, opening a space between themselves and the Chaos warriors. The Tzeentchian host paused for a moment. It was enough.

‘Judicators, aim for the ground!’ shouted Thostos.

As soon as he had spoken, a rain of hissing bolts rose up and fell down. Half fizzed out or exploded upon the magical shield protecting the warriors, while the rest slammed into the metal ground before them. A crackling storm of energy arced across the front of the Chaos warriors’ company, creeping under the fire shield and coursing through the metal-clad warriors behind. They jerked and danced, before collapsing dead and smoking.

The fires guttered out. The laughter of the manticore’s rider turned to screams of anger, and the Stormcast Eternals charged back into their enemy, striking down the few who had survived.

The gates swung shut, but Thostos saw his opening. The walls for a hundred yards either side of the gate had been cleared of warriors. Thostos grinned. The problem with studding a castle wall with skulls, he thought, is that it makes it very easy to climb.

‘To the walls,’ he cried. ‘To the walls!’

Thostos and his followers made a quick ascent, fingers digging into the soft copper of the skulls adorning the walls. Below, more Stormcast Eternals hacked at the walls directly, caving in the skulls that had consumed their comrades, burying their swords into them or ripping them from the walls. Each one destroyed burst with a flash of released magic.

All along the defences the same thing was happening. Thunderbolt crossbows burned whole stretches of the wall bare. Judicators and Prosecutors covered their comrades as they hacked at the fabric of the fortress. Where a skull was ruptured that imprisoned the essence of a Stormcast Eternal, the energy roared upwards, booming with the joy of release.

Thostos hauled himself up the last few feet of the wall, the power invested in his limbs by Sigmar allowing him to climb quickly even in his heavy armour. He vaulted over the crenellations, drawing his weapons again as he landed. Chaos warriors were running along the wallwalk, but too late to stop him. His men were already over, and the clamour of battle erupted along a section of the wall.

‘Force them back!’ he roared. ‘Make room for our brothers!’ Thostos growled with the fierce joy of vengeance. He broke a savage’s jaw with the hilt of his sword and kicked another over the battlements.

Shouts, grunts and the clang of metal. He revelled in it, in the blood, in the struggle and the burn in his muscles. A flash transmuted a Stormcast next to him to a guttering puddle of thick liquid. Two more stopped dead, frozen in place, then melted like hot wax. Another turned into a crystal statue in a puff of purple smoke. Transformed mid run, he toppled from the battlement and shattered on the flagstones of the bailey. Flashes of departing magic struggled for the sky, but the fortress was still consuming the essence of the Bladestorms. Thostos smashed down another warrior, and searched for his quarry.

The sorcerer floated ten yards out from the wall on his golden disc; a tall, gaunt man with long horns. He was much altered from a man’s usual form, a long-serving servant of Chaos. He was chanting wildly, hurling magic that killed Thostos’s warriors. ‘Bring him down!’ he shouted. ‘Kill the sorcerer!’

A group of Prosecutors heard his order and swooped upward over the wall. They circled past the sorcerer, pelting him with their celestial hammers. The sorcerer knocked half of the hammers from the sky with a sweep of his staff, but the Prosecutors’ aim was good, and their own magic powerful. Three bolts of energy hammered into his golden disc, causing it to slew around and slam into the wall walk. The disc sparked and died, and the sorcerer was sent sprawling.

Dozens of Liberators and Judicators were now on the wall. ‘Kill him! Kill the sorcerer and we win the battle!’ Thostos bellowed. A trio of Judicators raised their bows, but the sorcerer knocked their missiles aside with blurred swipes of his staff. The men jerkily rose into the air, raking at their throats. The sorcerer closed his fist and they went limp, and he threw them down.

‘I will finish this myself,’ growled Thostos. ‘With me!’

The sorcerer was only yards away. Thostos howled with righteous fury as he closed on him. A look of dismay crossed the twisted daemon-worshipper’s face, one that turned swiftly to hatred. He made a series of complicated passes in the air very quickly. A bang sounded from the courtyard, a rush of displaced air. An unearthly roar wounded Thostos’s ears, a hideous, mewling howl that should never be heard in the mortal world. His men cried out and stumbled, but he went on, hammer ready to deliver the final blow.

The battlement transformed into a flood of boiling gold beneath his feet, and he fell, half a dozen of his men plummeting into the courtyard with him. He struggled up, ignoring the burn of the molten metal as it seeped through the gaps in his armour. All around his feet were flapping, cog-scaled fish, gasping for gold and dying as their clockwork ran out.

A rich perfume hung on the air, and a troubling shimmer distorted all sight. From the heart of this haze reared a creature whose very appearance was anathema to sanity. It shifted and changed constantly, seeming not to be wholly of one world or realm – the impression Thostos had was of a house-sized creature steeped in madness and pain. From its back erupted an array of crystalline bones in the shape of the blasphemous wheel of Chaos. At the centre turned a weeping hole in space, a gateway to the realm of the four powers.

One of his men looked into it and screamed. Blue flames jetted from the joints in his armour and he imploded with a bang.

‘Avert your eyes!’ Thostos shouted. But it was no use. Writhing bolts of plasma erupted from the portal, screaming around the beast like the shades of the tormented dead. They shrieked through the air, plunging into the Stormcasts. All around Thostos his warriors were transformed by wild magic. One split down the middle into two identical, half-sized replicas of himself, one black, one white, who immediately started fighting each other. Another turned into a cloud of moths that burst apart and scattered to the four winds. A third became a porcelain vase that fell to the ground with a dull clunk.

Thostos could barely contain the horror the thing evoked in him. The magic in his body could feel the tug of the vortex of wild energy that roared around it, as if it would tear out his soul.

Lord Sigmar, hear my prayer, he thought. You answered me once before. I ask you again, lend me strength.

He raised his sword and hammer for what was sure to be the final time.

‘Vengeance,’ he hissed. He charged.

A spasming tendril of energy caressed his helm as he closed upon the creature. A spike of pain ripped through him, down every nerve ending. He dropped his weapons and staggered back in horror. Something was happening to him, some fundamental and terrifying change. He howled in pain, and went down onto one knee. He closed his eyes and awaited his death. He had failed.

The pain stopped. He still lived. But he was not the same. His body, his flesh. It felt different, heavier, harder.

His gauntlet dropped from his arm. He raised his hand before his face. Metal gleamed in place of skin. Flesh and blood had been transformed into living sigmarite! Another bolt of change slammed into him, and did not perturb him. He laughed, a triumphant, disbelieving bark of mirth. He stood, stepped forward calmly, and plucked up his weapons from the ground. The beast whuffled and whooped, multiple discordant animal voices blending into a hellish gurgle of frustration.

Magic rained down upon Thostos as he strode confidently at the monster, all of its sorceries running without harm from his transformed body. The creature reared up, tentacles spearing forth from its mouth. Thostos slashed them with his sword, severing them and stepping through as they turned to shreds of multicoloured magic. He leapt up, swinging his hammer over his head and down, burying it in the small head hidden behind the nest of tentacles. The creature’s skull gave in with an audible crack and, with a sigh that seemed to be of relief to the Lord-Celestant, the beast collapsed to the floor.

The gateway upon the beast’s back blinked, and winked out. The creature heaved one last breath and died, its flesh shrivelling in on itself, becoming black ash.

Thostos turned back to where the sorcerer stood and raised his hammer in a gleaming metal hand.

Ephryx ran back and forth on the wall. His perfect kingdom, laboured over so long and so lovingly, was being smashed to pieces around him. Blazing jags of lightning burned down from the sky, slamming into the walls. He flung up his arms as celestial energy played about the northeast tower, exploding in an outwards fountain of molten copper. The warriors of the God-King hacked and smashed at his magical receptacles, spilling his carefully husbanded power back into the ether. Shooting bolts raced upwards as the essences of Stormcasts were set free to ride the storm.

‘No! No!’ screamed Ephryx in anguish. The warriors on the walls had been overwhelmed, and the lackeys of Sigmar were coming through the part of the wall transformed by the mutalith. They were pouring into the courtyard, destroying his life’s work without a thought for his efforts.

A billow of rain-filled air battered him in the face as Lord Maerac alighted on the parapet.

‘See, sorcerer! This is true Chaos! Not your pedantic constructions. The fortress is lost! Your own pet has let them in!’ Maerac was laughing, a hard mix of despair, anger, and glee.

‘Coward!’ screamed Ephryx. ‘I will not abandon my work!’

He turned upon the men on the walls and the metal plaza outside, sending gales of billowing fire into the ranks of his foes, transmuting Stormcast Eternals into all manner of hideous forms. A volley of bolts arced towards him. He waved a hand and they fizzed into nothingness even as his other throttled the Judicators that had fired them.

‘It is lost!’ repeated Maerac. ‘Flee.’

A terrible howl drew Ephryx’s attention to the courtyard. The mutalith slumped to the floor. Its vanquisher turned and raised his hammer at the mage in defiant challenge.

Ephryx fixed Maerac with a doleful stare.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Maerac. ‘No, Ephryx!’ he said warningly. ‘Do not call upon such powers!’

The sorcerer raised his hands, all the while glaring at the lord defiantly. Cursing, Maerac urged his mount into the storm-wracked sky.

Ephryx chanted an arcane phrase three times. Attackers were approaching from the other side of the breached wall. A jagged bolt of lightning slammed into the fort’s central tower. The artefact within heard and responded, a secret signal only Ephryx could detect. The calling of the hammer to its master set his teeth hurting, but he would not stop and chanted the phrase over and over again.

Reality screamed. Ephryx channelled as much power as he dared, his soul chilling as he handled the dark energy.

The last syllables left his lips, and he nearly choked upon them. Angrily he drew upon the reservoirs of energy trapped in his fortress, enraged that they must be expended.

A circle of blackness expanded from the sorcerer, slaying every thing that it touched. Chaos warrior and Stormcast Eternal collapsed as the fortress discharged curling arcs of night-purple doom. The skulls clawed at the lives of the Stormcasts killed, but there were so many slain that the castle could not consume them all, and their essences raced home. The earth rebelled at this black work, shuddering in pain. His tower swayed, its walls cracking and revealing the golden light of the artefact within, but it was not enough to hold back the darkness Ephryx had unleashed. For a split second the sorcerer stared into the realms of death. Something ancient and dark gazed back at him with contempt.

The light returned. Ephryx sank to knees, dizzy. All around him were the dead. The Stormcast Eternals had disappeared, carried off by their lord. The ground was carpeted by the bodies of his men and Maerac’s followers.

A dry chuckle sounded behind him. Wearily, Ephryx raised his head.

‘Master,’ he said.

‘A clever gambit, mortal,’ said Kairos.

‘It was idiotic,’ said the second head, arching close to the sorcerer. It tilted to one side, its eye filling Ephryx’s vision.

‘A good play,’ disagreed the other. ‘Why would I want a dull follower?’

‘Perhaps I would,’ argued the second head.

The heads spoke together, the menace in Kairos’s words unmistakeable. ‘Now you have had your turn. Let us bring this to a close together.’

‘Yes, together,’ said one head.

‘That is what we always intended, no?’ asked the other.

‘Y-y-yes!’ said Ephryx. ‘Of course my lord! Why, I only intended to… There was no time… I had to act quickly, I…’

Kairos leaned heavily on his staff. ‘Tut tut tut,’ said the first head.

‘Do shut up, Ephryx,’ said the second.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Reforged

Memories bubbled and slipped from Thostos, a fleeting impression of darkness and snatching hands tearing at his spirit. He was moving fast and lost in the light. The pain was so great it overcame the universe. An ocean of agony, deeper than time. He could not recall his name. He remembered… Where? A land of giant beasts, a castle in a country considered civilised. A kind father, a good life.

He remembered its end. Blood and death and pain for those he loved.

He smelled the ruin of it, thick and cloying, and he gasped. No air came into his lungs, only energy, raw and crackling. He had no lungs. Something convulsed. There was no body. Was it his soul?

Caeran. Was that his name?

Something twitched in the stormlight, a zygote that split and divided rapidly.

A woman’s face. His mother? An aunt? He did not recognise them, but the sight of them brought the need for vengeance.

A man’s face, crowned with a circle of red gold. Dead. Consumed. He raged at the thought, and the need for revenge gripped him more tightly. In the wash of light, delicate bones rapidly thickened, became a hand bare of flesh, a hand that clenched. He felt muscles grow, the strands of their fibres wrapping around one another. More bones erupted from the stuff of magic, caging organs that inflated wetly. A skull crept over a newly sprouted brain.

The pain worsened.

There was another castle, where he had another name. A land of metal. A horned man.

So much pain! He thrashed, trailing streamers of raw nerves that sparked excruciatingly.

The process quickened, but in truth the duration could have been months or seconds. Thostos had no frame of reference for time, only the pain. All he knew was that the sequence of growth increased in pace. Skin, hair, teeth, nails. Or something like them, something that had their semblance, but that lacked their solidity.

Agony seized his skull as a new face grew over it, twin pits of pain where fresh eyes budded.

He could not bear it.

Time ceased. He was elsewhere. A castle of stone, hung with dreadful fruits. A castle of metal, bursting under the strain of stolen magic.

A castle that hid a great prize…

‘Thostos!’

His God-King called to him.

‘Thostos!’

His king.

‘Thostos Bladestorm!’

Thostos, was that his name? Yes. The name given to him by the God-King, the lord of light. Sigmar’s gift, a new name for a new life. Had there been another?

A man, a woman. A burning castle. Vengeance. Memories of that time slipped away, became blurred, and were lost to him forever.

He was Thostos. Thostos Bladestorm of the Celestial Vindicators. There was no other, not any longer. Guilt persisted, a leftover of another world, cool and unyielding as a diamond, that was all he had left.

Never again would he fail.

Another light replaced the first, softer, soul-cleansing. It rinsed him through and through, and he let out a sharp breath as the last vestiges of his pain slipped from him.

‘Stand, Thostos Bladestorm!’ Words of gentle thunder. The memory of the pain was wiped away.

The light dimmed, resolving itself into the shape of a great man, a god. Sigmar Heldenhammer, seated in the throne of Azyr. Thostos knew his face better than he knew his own. Tall and regal, majesty manifest, a man clad in the light of godhood. Thostos blinked. He held up his hand in wonder to eyes that smarted in their newness. His hand, armoured in its celestial turquoise, whole and unharmed.

‘We shall kneel no more,’ said Sigmar. He gestured, encouraging Thostos to rise.

The Lord-Celestant of the Bladestorms stood on legs that felt insubstantial, as if his armour were all that gave them shape. There was strength there; he did not shake or fall, but it did not feel like it was his. It was loaned to him from elsewhere. Or stolen.

‘Your Reforging is complete,’ said Sigmar.

Thostos recognised where he was: in the throne room of Sigmar, a hall suited to the God-King’s majesty. Others stood behind Thostos, lesser beings than Sigmar though great in their way, the Lord-Celestants of a dozen stormhosts.

How had he come to be there? He had no memory of entering this room, or of kneeling. He remembered… he remembered metal…

‘Now tell me of Chamon,’ prompted the God-King.

There was an eagerness to Sigmar. He was triumphant. What did he expect Thostos to say? What had he done?

Thostos swallowed. His throat felt different. His limbs buzzed with magic. What had happened to him?

‘There was…’ he began. His words sounded hollow in his ears. ‘There was a fortress of magic. We breached its walls, only to die in a burst of unlight that was fought by a greater light.’

Sigmar leaned forward. ‘Speak to me of this greater light.’

There was more, there was… death. Dark lands, a covetous presence thwarted. He had died. There was a chill in his heart that had not been there before. He had lost something. He remembered clawing, skeletal hands and shuddered.

‘Golden,’ said Thostos. He had to force the word out, like it was a part of himself that had to be chipped painfully free. ‘Not the bastard energy of Chaos. Violent, but pure.’

Sigmar tensed. The air of triumph intensified. He nodded, and though he looked at Thostos he saw into another time and place. ‘I remember it well,’ he said eventually.

He turned abruptly. ‘Lord Vandus!’

One of the others stepped forward. Thostos knew him. His memories of this place he retained, faded but clear, like tapestries whose colours have bled away with age. Hammerhand. Vandus Hammerhand. That was him, a fellow Lord-Celestant, and, and a… friend?

The Hammerhand stepped up to Thostos’s side.

‘Prepare thy warriors,’ commanded Sigmar. ‘That light is mine.’ He sank back into his throne and gripped the metal gryphons that made up each arm of his seat. ‘We have found Ghal Maraz.’

Thostos had done that. He remembered, as Sigmar spoke on.

Sigmar finished. The crowd of warriors roared. Some chanted his name. But he could not think.

He had found Sigmar’s greatest weapon, but in doing so he had lost himself.

PROLOGUE

The storm arrives

Virulent green mist rose from the damp soil of the Ghyrtract Fen, choking the air and all but blinding those who toiled within its reach. Lord Grelch, master of the Ghyrtribe, scooped an errant tendril of mist towards his disease-ravaged face with bloated paws, inhaling it. It burned pleasingly as it seeped into his lungs and blistered mouth. He gave a sigh of deep satisfaction.

‘Tastes like death,’ he murmured, to no one in particular.

Grelch sat midway up a slabbed pile of stone steps, which climbed upwards to the edge of a steep cliff. The steps ended at an arch shrouded in clinging vines, its capstones cracked and shot through with roots thicker around than his thigh. He shifted the long-hafted plague-axe lying across his lap and turned to eye the archway suspiciously. He had fought long and hard to lay claim to this patch of forest and the archway, but even now he wasn’t entirely sure why. Stories clustered fast and thick about those stones like flies.

The Grandfather’s eye was upon this place though – his great hand had stirred the nearby Rotwater Swamp, casting a dense and foetid fog across the fen, and this part of it in particular. The sky was as black as the boils on his backside, and the once-green leaves of the now-withered trees were covered in sticky, dripping moisture that was not dew. Fertile soil had been reduced to damp sludge by the tread of his warriors, and the waters of the rivers had grown stagnant and pleasingly foul. The men of the Ghyrtribe had long ago given themselves over to the tender mercies of Grandfather Nurgle, and they carried his blessings with them wherever they went. They warped the land about them into more pleasing shapes, reminiscent of the Grandfather’s garden.

Smacking his lips, he gazed down from his perch and watched as his slaves wriggled through the muck and mist, dragging heavy stones towards the points their overseers indicated with lash and blade. The stones were covered in carvings dedicated to the glory of Grandfather Nurgle. Each one was a prayer given physical form, and together they would form a silent chorus calling to the Grandfather in his garden, calling him and his children to the Greenglades. Grelch sighed in satisfaction. From where he sat, the slaves looked like maggots wriggling in spoiled meat.

‘Speaking of which,’ Grelch grunted, inspecting the mottled flesh of his forearm. The cut he’d received a few days earlier had sprouted squirming white shapes, which nibbled enthusiastically at his rotten flesh. He smiled indulgently.

‘Eat hearty, little ones. Soon you’ll be proper flies, and no mistake,’ he crooned as he playfully stirred the maggots with a finger. The wound ached, but it was a small price to pay. Grandfather Nurgle never gave a man more blessings than he could bear, sure as sure, and Grelch was happy to serve in even this smallest of ways. He sat back, feeling cheerful. Yes, he was happy to serve. And why not? After all, it was an honour to be here.

The ragged banners of the blessed and flyblown jutted from every horizon, even as noisome fogs and vast clouds of insects swarmed across the land. The drone of a billion flies accompanied the efforts of Grandfather’s own – the Glottkin, Torglug the Despised, Gutrot Spume, and the mangy Beastlord Gluhak, amongst others – as they strove to bring the bilious blessings of the garden to Ghyran. That wasn’t even taking into account the scuttling servants of the Horned Rat, where they crouched in the Rotwater Blight.

And Grelch as well, most powerful of those born here, in these filthy climes, Grelch thought.

Let the others, like that nitwit Kraderblob or brutes like Torglug and Gutrot Spume, scramble about in the filthy Greenglades, hunting the witch Alarielle and getting themselves ambushed by Nurgle alone knew what. Grandfather had sent three captains to find her, for without her there could be no lasting victory for Nurgle.

He flexed his wounded arm, and remembered the talon-like branch, whipping forward faster than his rheumy eyes could follow to lay open his flesh to the pitted bone. It hadn’t hurt; his sense of pain had been one of his first offerings to the Grandfather. He remembered too the fierce green hatred burning in the eyes of the monstrous bark-creature as it had smashed him back on his heels, before he’d driven the rusty edge of his axe into its creaking maw. They’d used what was left of it and its fellows for kindling the witchfires that now burned about Ghyrtract Fen, providing an eerie light for the slaves to work by.

Let’s see Spume do that, the kraken-bellied oaf, Grelch thought.

A baleful drone suddenly echoed through the trees, causing the foetid air to quiver like a frightened animal. Grelch’s eyes popped open and he turned, all thoughts of gardens forgotten. It was the Dirgehorn, originally hewn from the skull of the great plague-beast Brondtos by Beastlord Gluhak, the Crusted Blade – a feat it never stopped barking about. The Dirgehorn had been hollowed out and consecrated to Grandfather, and now sat atop Profane Tor. Its whining call, sluggish and flat, could be heard even in the Grandfather’s garden.

Someone somewhere in the vast woodlands that stretched from the Shimmertarn to Ghyrtract Fen had found some sign of the radiant queen, Alarielle. Like hounds on the scent, the other disparate warbands, searching for places such as this archway, would follow the winding echo of the Dirgehorn to wherever it led.

At the same moment, the sky darkened, grey turning to black. The snap of whips slowed and fell silent as slaves and slavers alike found their eyes drawn upwards to the roiling clouds. Grelch felt his stomach lurch, and not in the usual pleasing fashion. A moment later, the air was split by a sound greater even than the Dirgehorn – a crack of thunder which reverberated through the trees, and even his bones, deafening him.

He slapped his hands to his ears, teeth gritted against the pain of it. Instinctively he cast his gaze up and saw the black sky rupture, torn apart by fangs of crackling azure light. Bolts of twin-tailed lightning struck the ground again and again, splitting the air and searing the fog away. The ground bucked and heaved, and his warriors and slaves were tossed about like sparks from an anvil as the hammer struck. Trees burst into flame and sluggish rivulets of mud were burned dry. The air tasted of iron and clean winds, and Grelch gagged at the stink of it.

As the smoke cleared, he saw rank upon rank of armoured warriors standing where each sky-borne bolt had struck. Crackling chains of lightning crawled across their masks and the heads of the great warhammers they carried. It danced along the rims of their shields and illuminated the awful sigils which marked their armour.

He felt as if something fearful had come, fiercer even than the bark-beasts, and he shoved himself to his feet, snatching up his helm from where it sat on the steps beside him. His heart thudded in his chest as he began to descend. Few dared defy the Ghyrtribe since he’d earned Grandfather’s favour, and fewer still had ever mustered the courage to attack them head on. Whoever they were, they would be good sport, if nothing else.

‘And they’re all ours, my warriors,’ he roared. ‘To battle!’

His warriors roared in reply and hurled themselves towards the interlopers, scattering untrampled slaves aside. His chosen warriors, his sons and cousins and brothers, putrid blightkings all, led the way towards the centre of the invaders’ battle line. Grelch’s heart swelled as the battle was joined. This was the way it was supposed to be. The newcomers had numbers on their side, but his warriors were swollen with the strength of Nurgle.

He’d led his folk into the garden and pledged a glopsome oath to Grandfather Nurgle, offering service and souls in return for protection and power. And he’d fought to earn those protections, fought hard or harder than his rivals, performing deeds of valour. It was Grelch who had tamed the toad-dragon Ga’Blorrgh, and Grelch who had poisoned the Sweetwater.

You did indeed, my servant, something burbled in his head.

The voice was like an itch at the back of his skull. Painful, but welcome, it gurgled and slopped across the surface of his thoughts. As if they too heard it, the maggots in his arm suddenly stiffened and began to move in strange ways, causing his flesh to ripple and pulse. Grelch stopped and looked up, towards his prize. There was an oily sheen in the air at the top of the steps, and he could hear faint buzzing as of thousands of flies.

‘Master,’ he whispered. ‘Are you near?’

The din of the battle below seemed to fade as the voice of his master filled his skull. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his warriors coming to grips with the closest of the newcomers. Fat-bellied blightkings hacked at gleaming shields with notched axes, only to reel back as lightning-wreathed hammers struck them in return. But though they stumbled, his chosen refused to fall. Their seared flesh congealed and repaired itself, as Grandfather willed, and they lurched back into the fight.

Near, yet still sadly far, my servant, his master replied. My rotguard and I come as fast as the winds of plague can carry me, but you must open the door and let me in. Hurry, Grelch… I would wallow in the murk of the Ghyrtract Fen, taste the sweet heart of the Greenglades, and wade in the Shimmertarn. Hurry, my servant. Pile the stones and spill the blood… Open the gates to Grandfather’s garden…

The voice faded and Grelch let out a shaky breath. The clangour of battle grew loud once more: the air filling with screams and the rattle of weapons. The voice of his master, his mentor, was proof enough of Grandfather’s favour. Why else would such an enormity as his master deign to speak with him, and so kindly?

‘Don’t worry, master, there’s plenty of blood to go around,’ he said, out loud. He looked out over the Fen, and saw the silver ranks of newcomers stalk forward with ground-shaking strides, their wide shields locked rim to rim. They resembled nothing so much as a gleaming wall, and he felt a hint of unease as they drew closer to the slope and the steps. But their march slowed as his chosen warriors interposed themselves once more, crying out the name of Grandfather Nurgle as they sought to break the shieldwall. Once his warriors had finished off these shiny-skinned interlopers, he’d have them gutted and squeezed to fertilise the stones and open the garden gate.

He closed his eyes, revelling in the thought of it. Long had he yearned to see Grandfather’s garden again, in all its pestilential splendour. Now, at last, his chance had come round. A little blood, a little death, and it would be done.

However, his good humour evaporated quickly as he plodded down the steps, axe in hand. His chosen warriors had never before been bested in battle, yet these newcomers smashed them aside more quickly than he’d thought possible. Warriors bloated with the blessings of the Plaguefather were driven to their knees by hammer strikes that crushed armour and tore flesh as easily as any axe or sword. Every blow was accompanied by a snarl of lightning and the thud of a smoking body as it struck the ground.

As Grelch made his way down the last few steps, he saw that his men had become disorganised, save for a few chieftains around whom the cannier warriors rallied. The rest charged in knots and dribbles, alone or in small packs, and were ground under by the silver-armoured retinues of the newcomers. The latter had formed themselves into an impenetrable shieldwall, rim to rim and edge to edge. Shields dipped and hammers shot out to strike and return as the shields rose once more with a discipline completely alien to Grelch’s experience. The silver warriors moved as one, clearing themselves a bloody path towards the stone steps and the arch, and right towards him. He raised his axe in welcome and lumbered to meet them.

Some of his followers rose, even after they had been battered bloody or hacked apart, as the great rents in their obese frames scabbed over and their severed limbs re-grew. But that wasn’t enough, and soon they fell a second time. The weapons of the enemy were too deadly, even for those in whose veins the blessings of Nurgle ran.

Grelch moved more quickly now, lumbering towards the forefront of the battle. If he could rally his troops, they might still stand a chance. However, that hope dwindled as he saw the last of his chieftains fall to a great mauling blow from one of those deadly hammers, crushing its horned helm into an unrecognizable mass. The few warriors who remained launched themselves at the enemy, despite his commands, only to be swatted down as if they were of no more importance than flies.

Not a single man of the Ghyrtribe remained standing. Even his fattest warriors lay broken and unmoving on the muddy ground. It had happened so quickly. Behind the ranks of locked shields, he saw warriors wielding two-handed hammers begin to smash down the half-built idols and altar stones. He cried out. Helms turned, and he caught sight of his reflection in their mirror-bright features. The men moved towards him in a tight semicircle, shields at the ready. Though the lightning had faded, its glow yet remained. Grelch could not bear to look at them directly, and was forced to raise an arm over his face. They shone with a light and a heat that seemed to burn the very core of him.

As he did so, the maggots in his flesh shrivelled one by one and fell away from him, and he experienced a wave of fear – an emotion he had not felt in years – wash over him. Were these men the reason that the Dirgehorn had sounded? Were Kraderblob and the other servants of Nurgle now locked in combat with more of these pitiless invaders? What sort of beings were these who could kill so cruelly and swiftly? What sort of beings arrived in a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning?

Enemies, sweet Grelch, and far beyond you, the voice of his master rumbled.

Grelch felt the sadness those words carried. He would join his maggots soon and join his warriors, broken and dead in the mire.

Dead, yes, but not forgotten, my best, brightest bubo, his master gurgled. Grandfather watches you, Grelch. Show him how brave you are, my servant. Open the way for me, and join Grandfather in the eternal garden, where all is green and growing and life waxes fat. He waits for you, waits to take you in his arms… Hurry, Grelch. Hurry!

Grelch felt his fears evaporate as the words of his master, his mentor, filled his skull to bursting.Then he bounded ponderously down the slick stones with axe in hand. Grelch sensed, without knowing how, that only a bit more effort was required. He would show Grandfather how brave he was, and he would dwell in the garden in wonder and glory forevermore. That was all he wanted; all he had ever wanted.

‘I do not know you, murderers, but you will know me,’ he rasped. ‘I am Grelch, lord of the Ghyrtribe, and master of the Ghyrtract Fen. When you go back to whatever place spawned you, tell them it was I who sent you. Tell them that Grandfather Nurgle sends his greetings, sure as sure.’

He lifted his plague-axe in both hands and held it across his body, taking comfort in the weapon’s weight, stepping towards the silvery ranks of the enemy. ‘Come on then. Send me to the garden, if you can,’ he spat. Only a little more blood, he thought. Hadn’t intended it to be mine, but, well, you can’t have everything. Grandfather never asked more than a man could give.

One of the warriors stepped forward. He was tall, taller almost than Grelch, though he lacked the latter’s sheer bulk. His baroque armour shimmered strangely in the light of the witchfires, and he raised the hammer he carried in what Grelch thought must be a salute. In his other hand he carried a sword, its blade etched with sigils that burned Grelch’s eyes. Grelch spat at the warrior’s feet.

‘Tell me your name,’ he demanded. ‘Grandfather likes to know the names of the souls I send him.’

The warrior cocked his head, blue eyes alert behind the unmoving, too-perfect features of his mask. He lowered his weapon.

‘Gardus,’ he said. His voice was like a clear peal from a great bell. It struck Grelch’s belly like a fist, and climbed his spine into his brain where it reverberated, much as the thunder had earlier. Grelch shook his head to clear it.

Grandfather, give me strength, he thought.

‘Gardus,’ he said, chewing over the syllables. ‘Well, Gardus, a pleasure to meet you.’ Then, with a roar, Grelch swung his axe up and around, and launched himself at the warrior.

The Grandfather’s garden awaited.

Chapter One

Before the Gates of Dawn

Gardus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights, looked down at the bloated body at his feet, then at the patina of sour bile clinging to his hammer. The plague warrior had fought bravely for being outmatched. He had hurled himself knowingly into death without hesitation or fear. Gardus wondered how such a debased creature could possess such courage. Then, would I have done any less? he wondered. He swept his hammer out, dislodging the muck which clung to it and banishing the thought in the same motion.

‘Who are the victorious?’ he called out, raising hammer and sigmarite runeblade. His voice boomed out across the clearing, reaching every ear. Some called him the Steel Soul, though he could not say where the name had come from. Regardless of its origins, his Warrior Chamber had taken the name for their own, and they bore it with honour.

‘Only the faithful,’ his warriors roared in reply.

Gardus gazed with no small amount of pride at those who had followed him into battle as they raised their voices in triumph. Liberators, Prosecutors, Judicators and Retributors, all clad in star-forged sigmarite, and bearing weapons crafted from the samen material. Their panoply of war gleamed silver where it was not rich gold. Their shoulder guards were of deepest regal blue, such as the heavens themselves, as were their heavy shields. The weapons they carried shimmered with holy fire.

They were all heroes. Their valour proven in battles all but forgotten in the haze of their Reforging. The Hallowed Knights were the fourth Stormhost to be founded, and the ranks of their Warrior Chambers were filled with the faithful of the Mortal Realms. Their only commonality was that each had called upon Sigmar’s name in battle, and been heard, and that each had shed his mortal flesh in the name of a righteous cause.

Gardus himself could but dimly recall who he had been before he had been made anew in Sigmar’s eternal forge. His old identity had been torn away by celestial lightning and replaced by something new and greater. The memories of that time surfaced only rarely, though he thought – he hoped – he was the same man he had been then. The same man whom Sigmar had deemed worthy to give a portion of his power to. Of the time before his Reforging, he remembered only fear, battle, pain and blood and, finally, the lightning which had brought him to Sigmaron amongst the stars.

He could not truly recall the cause he had died for, or the names of those who had fought beside him, in that final battle.

But I remember you nonetheless, my friends, he thought. I remember your faces, and how you died. I remember that we fought in Sigmar’s name, against the same evil I face today. I remember, and I will honour you the only way left to me – with sword and celestial fire. He lifted his runeblade and gazed at the sigils etched into its gleaming length. They seemed to glimmer with heat, the repressed fury of a storm. Sigmar himself had blessed the blade, after Gardus had forged it. I will not fail you, he thought, though whether he was speaking to Sigmar or the faded ghost-memories of half-forgotten comrades-in-arms, he could not say.

He looked around, taking stock of the battlefield. What he saw was not pleasant. The churned mud was full of monsters – most dead, some dying – their vile flesh no longer regenerating as it had during the initial moments of battle, twisted shapes whose abominable features were mirrored in the very land itself. Sickened, he smashed aside a looming icon dedicated to the Ruinous Powers. There were hundreds stabbed into the earth throughout the clearing, and they caused his stomach to twist in an instinctual revulsion. A trace of the man he had been, he suspected. Everywhere Gardus looked, disease blossomed.

The very air stank of it, and the nearby waters ran with pox. The ground was covered in a carpet of maggots – and other, unrecognizable, scavenger beasts – as well as a glistening putrescence. The sickly trees fed upon this rich loam of decaying matter, sprouting unnatural growths that resembled struggling insects or wailing faces. Thick creepers, covered in unhealthy looking cilia, sought to strangle what little normal-looking plantlife remained. Even the rocks were covered in pus-filled boils. Gardus was at once repelled and fascinated by it; he had never seen its like before.

He looked around at the crumpled and fly-ridden bodies of the plague-worshippers, and then at the idols, altar stones and obelisks that they had been in the process of erecting when the Steel Souls had arrived. The enemy might have been defeated, but there were still his works to cast down. Every dark monument would be toppled or broken up by the time they were done here. But somehow, he knew that this place would never be entirely free of the contagion that afflicted it.

Even so, that was no reason to tarry.

‘Feros, how goes it?’ he called out to his Retributor-Prime. Called the Heavy Hand by some, Feros had earned his rank at the Battle of the Celestine Glaciers, where a blow from his hammer had sheared loose the rim of one of the eponymous glaciers, sending the warriors of the Ruinous Powers tumbling into the icy depths. Like his fellow Retributors, Feros was the wrath of the heavens made brooding flesh. He smelled of lightning and rain, and his heavy, ornate armour was marked with the lightning bolt of Sigmar.

‘The cleansing of this mire proceeds apace, Steel Soul. My warriors will soon have reduced every standing stone in this fen to dust,’ Feros rumbled, his two-handed lightning hammer slamming down on a monstrous effigy and reducing it to shards.

‘Good. Tegrus,’ Gardus said, calling out to another of his subordinates. The Prosecutor-Prime dropped from the air a moment later to crouch before him with head bowed. Wings edged in the purest gold with feathers of lightning snapped out and folded back behind him with a lingering crackle.

‘Speak, and I obey, Lord-Celestant,’ Tegrus of the Sainted Eye said. His voice, slipping from the mouth-slit of his silver mask, quavered in the air like the peal of bell. During the cleansing of Azyr it was Tegrus who had scouted out the Chaos warbands infesting the Nihiliad Mountains, raining blazing arrows down upon them in order to expose their positions to Sigmar’s armies.

‘Take your Prosecutors to the skies above the edges of the fen, and watch for any sign of the enemy. They are thick as fleas in this region, and I would be ready for them when they come. And make no mistake, they will come.’

‘Perfect,’ Tegrus said, spreading his wings. ‘Makes it easier to crush them, if we don’t have to go chasing after them first.’ He took to the air a moment later, hurtling skyward, joined by his winged retinue.

‘Such exuberance may be his undoing,’ a voice said.

Gardus turned to see Solus, the Judicator-Prime, striding towards him, one hand resting on the storm gladius sheathed on his hip and the bulky shape of his boltstorm crossbow over one shoulder. Solus had no war-name, and to his credit, did not seem to desire one. He was the steadiest of Gardus’s subordinates, with a cool mind and a calm hand, regardless of the situation.

‘Only if you were not here to watch over us, Solus.’

‘As you say, Lord-Celestant. I and my Judicators shall see to it that no enemy shall catch our Warrior Chamber unawares,’ Solus said. ‘No allies either, more is the pity.’

Gardus nodded, knowing who Solus referred to. They had come here to wage war, but also to rebuild an old alliance. Only the former was his concern, and by extension that of his men. Others were occupied searching for the mysterious queen of this realm. It was Gardus’s task to ensure that they had good news to tell her when they found her.

‘Our purpose remains the same, regardless. We cleanse this place and hold it until we are ordered to do otherwise. That is what Sigmar has asked of us, and that is what we shall do,’ Gardus said. ‘Once Feros has finished shattering these stones and we have taken control of the realmgate, Lord-Castellant Grymn, Lord-Relictor Morbus and the others will be free to join us here. Perhaps once that occurs, the folk of the Jade Kingdoms – human and otherwise – will rise to join us. Until then–’

‘Until then, we are to fight their battles for them and die on their behalf?’

Gardus turned to meet the gaze of his Liberator-Prime. ‘Aetius,’ he replied.

‘I do not like this place,’ Aetius Shieldborn said, softly. ‘There is poison in the air, and the ground shudders like a sick animal.’ Aetius was as brave as a gryph-hound, but forever casting a stern eye on his fellows and the world around him. He nodded tersely to Solus, as the latter moved off to see to his task.

‘That is why we are here,’ Gardus said gently. ‘If we fail, this great forest realm might become a sour canker in the flesh of the Jade Kingdoms, a seeping malignance which no fire can cleanse and no magic can exorcise.’ He tapped Aetius’s pauldron with his hammer. ‘Much is demanded…’

‘…of those to whom much has been given,’ Aetius finished, bowing his head. He looked away and asked, ‘What of us, then, Lord-Celestant? What is our task now that the enemy has been broken?’

‘Watch for the foe while Feros and his Retributors finish seeing to these abominable stones. Help where you are needed. The quicker we are finished, the better. Whatever they sought to build here, we must utterly destroy, Aetius,’ Gardus said. ‘Only then can we take the Gates of Dawn for ourselves, and then the Lord-Castellant and the rest of our brothers will be able to march forth from the Gates of Azyr and join us here.’

‘It will be done.’ Aetius saluted crisply, raising his hammer to his brow. Then he turned and began to bellow orders. Stormcast Eternals hastened to obey. Gardus watched the other man go about his duties and shook his head. He knew the source of Aetius’s irritation, or at least suspected he did.

The Hallowed Knights had not been chosen for the spearhead – that honour had gone to the Hammers of Sigmar, as was fitting. Nonetheless, the waiting had been its own burden, and not just for his subordinates. The longer it had continued, the more uncertain Gardus had grown, wondering if their training and discipline would be enough for the conflicts to come. He had been reborn to battle, but it had been so long since he had last tested steel against steel and strength against strength anywhere other than the training fields of Sigmaron.

I wonder what Grymn would say, if he knew, he thought. Gardus had never known the Lord-Castellant of the Steel Souls to show hesitation or doubt. The man was a rock, capable of weathering any storm. Of all those in their Warrior Chamber he alone could match the Lord-Celestant blow for blow, but he was not one to seek reassurance from. Neither could Gardus admit his concerns to his fellow Lord-Celestants, as they readied their own Warrior Chambers for combat.

Gardus had shared his uncertainties with only one other – Zephacleas, Lord-Celestant of the Astral Templars. Gardus smiled as he thought of the other Stormcast commander. Zephacleas had been a big man, even before his Reforging. After it, he had become a veritable giant, standing head and shoulders over Gardus. Clad in armour as dark as Gardus’s was bright, Zephacleas had seen to the heart of the latter’s uncertainties, speaking words of encouragement as they stood together, looking out at the stars in those final hours before he had been called to battle. And true to Zephacleas’s assertions, his doubts were all but dispelled now. They had met the enemy, and they had been victorious.

He recalled those first few moments after their arrival, his mind and body invigorated by the celestial lightning that had carried him from Azyr, as well as the fierce joy that had surged within him as he saw the corrupted warriors charging towards him. The Hallowed Knights had fought like warriors born, executing his orders or countering unforeseen threats on their own with a skill far beyond that of any mortal servant of the Dark Gods.

And now, the Gates of Dawn were theirs.

Gardus turned and let his gaze ascend towards the arched realmgate, high up the stone steps that climbed the craggy hillside. It did not look as he imagined it. He had thought that such an artefact would be a massive portal, swirling with powerful energies. Instead, it was an innocuous ruin, covered in creeper vines and sagging slightly, like an old man bent by age. Was this truly a gateway to Aqshy, the Realm of Fire?

He shook his head. It didn’t matter. He had been sent to claim it in Sigmar’s name, and that was what he had done. From behind him came the sound of cracking stone and the shouts of his warriors at work. There was a friendly rivalry between the different hosts of his Warrior Chamber, seeking to outdo one another on and off the battlefield. Some of his peers frowned on such boisterousness outside of Sigmaron, but Gardus knew that laughter was like sigmarite for the soul.

And in any event, it’s a celebration, he thought. Our first battle, our first victory. He looked up, wondering if Sigmar was watching them. We will not fail you, my lord.

A tall obelisk, larger than any three of his men, toppled over after a concentrated effort by Feros and Aetius, eliciting cheers. As their voices rose, a new sound intruded – a droning hum that pierced the jubilant mood of the Stormcast Eternals and swept it away as it grew louder and louder. Men looked around, trying to find the source of the noise. Gardus, closer than the others to the Gates of Dawn, found it first and felt the taste of victory turn to ashes on his tongue.

He felt a chill creep along his spine as he turned to look at the realmgate. His limbs felt leaden and the air grew thick and close. A miasmic fog had risen up from the ground, clinging now to his legs and the edges of his warcloak. A vile stench filled his nose, and he gagged as the sound grew louder, spreading, becoming something else. Something worse.

Laughter.

‘Oh no, no, no, my friends. This will simply not do. The game has barely begun, and already you celebrate victory? No, this will not do at all,’ a hideous phlegm-roughened voice chortled. It echoed from everywhere and nowhere, slithering across the minds and ears of every man present. It rose from the mud, and pulsed from the festering vines that clung to everything. Gardus raised his hammer and his men fell instantly into formation, shields raised, weapons ready. Something was coming and they needed to be ready to meet it.

He caught Feros’s eye, and the Retributor-Prime nodded grimly. Tegrus’s Prosecutors hovered overhead, their weapons ready, and Solus’s Judicators had formed up in their firing retinues just behind Aetius and the other Liberators. Eyes sought his, and he stepped forward so all could see him.

‘Hold position,’ he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. Whatever was coming, whatever had spoken, was unlike anything he had ever encountered before. Its words had squeezed his heart, and nearly stripped his courage from him. If he’d been a normal man, he might have broken in that moment, but he was a Stormcast Eternal – fear had no power over him.

Above him, the Gates of Dawn began to shudder, shedding vegetation and dust, as the ancient stones ground against one another. Something indefinable bubbled beyond the frame of the arch, and a stinking chill rippled through the suddenly cloying air.

‘Grelch was loyal and dutiful, and his blood serves as well or better than that of any puling slave,’ the horrid, burbling voice continued. ‘Blood is the key and it has turned the lock. Knock knock, little storm clouds, let me in.’ A black void eddied and frothed beyond the arch, like a ragged wound torn into the very air, and Gardus’s ears echoed with the buzzing of innumerable flies as a chill rippled through the air. The gate began to shudder and twist, as if the very stones were in agony.

And then, before Gardus’s horrified eyes, two immense rotting hands reached out from within the arch. They caught either side of it, and within moments, something abominable began to squeeze its impossible bulk through the Gates of Dawn. Broken, rotting fangs clashed in a bulbous jaw as the monstrous daemon began to chortle with glee. The archway rocked alarmingly as the thing pried itself free and lurched through the realmgate. Those Stormcast closest to the gate rushed forward, as if they might reach the summit in time, but falling rubble from the contorting gate smashed them aside. Those who avoided the debris were caught in the flood of acidic froth that spilled from the now-warped gate. Gardus bellowed for the remainder to fall back.

‘Greetings, whelps of a tiny god,’ the greater daemon of Nurgle – for such Gardus knew it must be – thundered cheerfully. It slapped its grossly distended belly and leaned forward on crooked legs. ‘Allow me to introduce myself… I am Bolathrax. Your souls are mine.’

Chapter Two

Beyond the Gates of Azyr

Zephacleas, Lord-Celestant of the Astral Templars, sat, eyes closed, and listened to the crackle of the storms that raged over the aetherdomes that ran along the great platform of the Sigmarabulum. He thought he could hear the agonized screams of the fallen in each crash of thunder or snap of lightning as their spirits underwent the process of Reforging. Victory at any price, he thought, with a grim smile.

He opened his eyes and leaned forward, head tilted so that the light of the broken world bathed his battered features. Zephacleas gazed up at the great sphere that hung in the heavens above the fabricated ring. It was but a fragment of the world-that-had-been, yet still its iron core was as large as any moon. It gleamed with a strange iridescence, casting long shadows across the vast forges, laboratories, armouries and soul mills of the fabricating ring.

Beautiful, in its own way, Zephacleas thought. Even so, he wished he were elsewhere. His brother Stormcasts were at war in the Mortal Realms, fighting to throw back the servants of the Ruinous Powers. But of the Stormhosts chosen to assail Ghyran, the Astral Templars had been held back in reserve. Soon, though, they would be called forth to wreak Sigmar’s vengeance on the Ruinous Powers and all of their twisted followers.

Zephacleas looked forward to it. He had a taste for war and longed for the clangour of battle. It had awoken old memories in him, and stirred the ashes of the man he had once been, before Sigmar had brought him to Azyr. The same had been true of them all, he thought, from the mighty Vandus Hammerhand to the quiet Gardus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights.

Gardus, he thought, with a smile. He shook his head. The Steel Soul was the best of them. In him was a devotion to duty that far outstripped that of any other Stormcasts save perhaps that of Ionus Cryptborn himself. He wished him glory wherever Sigmar had chosen to send him.

Gardus had been left out of the assault on Aqshy, much to his disappointment. The Hallowed Knights had yet to be blooded, and when their Warrior Chambers had been selected to take part in the assault on the Jade Kingdoms, Zephacleas had seen the uncertainty in Gardus’s eyes. As if he and his men would not live up to Sigmar’s trust.

It was an uncertainty that he himself had felt before his first taste of battle. He remembered the moment that silence had fallen across Sigmaron the day the war had begun. The clanging, grinding din that had been so much a part of the daily fabric had stilled, as the great forges and mills had ceased all labour. It had been as though they were holding their breath, waiting for some long and hoped-for moment. And then, into that grim silence, had come a sound. A lone bell tolled. It was a doleful, soul-aching sound, and it had carried the length of every great avenue and into every barracks and vault, reaching every straining ear in the Celestial City. The mournful toll had echoed off each of the vast pillared structures and swelled to fill the empty plazas until it too at last faded into silence.

Then had come the booming clap of thunder that signalled the opening of the Gates of Azyr and the beginning of the war. Zephacleas had is first texperience of real fighting – not merely training in the gladitorium or orruk hunting in the wilds of Azyrheim – in the assault upon the Brimstone Peninsula after the Hammers of Sigmar had taken the Igneous Delta. He found that he had a taste for it.

Zephacleas flexed his hands, clad in their gauntlets of sigmarite. With hammer and sword, he had cut down Chaos-twisted Aqshian tribesmen and lumbering khorgoraths alongside the Stormhosts of his brethren. He and his Warrior Chamber had fought their way across the Brimstone Peninsula before returning to the celestine vaults so his warriors could heal. There, Zephacleas attended a war council with the other chamber leaders of the Stormhosts and learned how the cloying presence of Chaos had twisted many of the realmgates. His fellows had spoken of sentient flames that burned on the Bridge of Fire and the streams of contagion that burst forth from the archway to the five gates of Ghyran. It was as if the very fabric of reality itself were under assault. The Ruinous Powers waged war on the Mortal Realms.

To Zephacleas, all of this was merely proof that Sigmar had been right to cast the Stormhosts into battle when he had. Battle had been joined and would only end in victory or death.

‘As it should be,’ he said out loud. The Stormcasts had been forged for war, and were ready for whatever awaited them beyond the Gates of Azyr.

The sound of his voice was swallowed by the vastness before him. Stars pinwheeled about the fraying edges of swirling nebulas and shimmering galactic coronas – it was a sea of colour and light, but eerily silent and stretching into an impossible infinity.

He’d never truly understood Gardus’s fascination with the precipice of the Sigmarabulum, and what lay beyond, but he had to admit that the sight was soothing in its way. He laughed. Soothing, yes, and also invigorating. Here was the sum totality of existence, wrought upon celestial canvas and laid out for his eyes. There was a chill beauty to it, but also a ferocity – the stars lived and fought and died even as men. Brief flickers of light against the dark, soon forgotten, but always replaced.

And if that does not describe the Stormcast, I do not know what does, he thought.

No, Zephacleas. Never forgotten. Never that, a voice rumbled in his mind. It was a warm voice, but powerful, like a summer storm. Nonetheless, Zephacleas found himself bowing beneath its weight.

‘My lord Sigmar – is it time?’ he asked, fighting to hide the eagerness in his voice. The question was moot. Sigmar would not have deigned to speak with him unless the need was great. ‘Are we to be cast once more into battle?’

Yes, Zephacleas. The Astral Templars are needed.

Sigmar’s voice echoed through his skull like the peal of a bell, shaking him down to his marrow. The God-King spoke with the voice of the heavens themselves, and in his words could be heard the roar of comets, the hum of nebulae, and the endless echo of the black between the stars.

‘Where, my lord, the Greenglades? The City of Branches?’ he asked, wondering which of his brother Stormcasts was in need of aid. Where in the Jade Kingdoms would Sigmar cast his thunderbolt? Wherever it was, it was long past time, Zephacleas thought. He’d had enough of quiet contemplation. Now he wanted a fight.

The Ghyrtract Fen. The Hallowed Knights are beset by an enemy far beyond them.

An image filled Zephacleas’s mind – he saw figures in shining armour confronted by something massive and foul, the sight of which filled him with an icy dread. This was no brute monster or champion, swollen by the power of its fell god, but a shard of a god itself. A creature beyond any single Stormcast, Lord-Celestant or not.

‘I am on my way, my lord. The Astral Templars shall not fail you,’ Zephacleas said, pushing himself to his feet. He rose smoothly, despite the weight of his armour. Helmet under his arm, and hammer in hand, he turned back towards the magnificent halls of Sigmaron. He could smell death in the air, but whose he could not say.

Hold on my friend. I am coming.

Chapter Three

Where strides Bolathrax

Gardus knew what the beast was the moment it revealed its full bulk, though he’d never seen one before. Great Unclean One, he thought. Sigmar guide me, and lend me strength. ‘Steady,’ he said, glancing to either side. A murmur of uncertainty swept the ranks of the retinue behind him. It fell to him to see that it went no farther. ‘Hold your positions.’

The greater daemon of Nurgle was an imposing sight, perched atop the stone steps. Rippling folds of fat marked its wide frame, and its flesh was by turns stretched tight or else torn and oozing, exposing the foulness within. Swollen entrails spilled from these ragged canyons, dripping bile and tarry blood upon the stones. Immense pustules flowered at its joints, and boils shiny with poison decorated its leering countenance and flabby chest like gaudy jewellery. Its sloping head was little more than a lump upon its shoulders, and two great antlers of stained and stinking bone rose from the sides of its skull. Tatters of spoiled meat hung from the horns, flapping like obscene battle standards as the creature swayed and laughed. It wore a rust-pitted pauldron and spaulder on one arm, as well as a ragged hauberk of grimy mail, which gaped over its belly, and it clutched a gigantic, filth-encrusted chain-headed flail in one hand.

‘Form up,’ Gardus boomed, fighting back a wave of nausea. The thing was every foul thought given form, and he felt sick just being in its vicinity. A nearby Liberator staggered, vomit spewing from the mouthpiece of his mask. Gardus caught him and helped him stand.

‘Easy,’ he murmured. The man began to speak, to try and explain himself, but Gardus silenced him with a shake of his head. ‘There is no shame in it,’ he said softly. ‘Take your place in line, Stormcast.’ He turned as the reverberations of the word shivered out into a hum. A black cloud rose from the tree line – flies, he realised. More of them spilled out of the archway, and even erupted from the diseased flesh of the daemon.

‘By the realm celestial,’ he muttered, as the clouds of flies wove together, coalescing about the Great Unclean One’s antlered head. ‘Form up, on me,’ he roared out, striking his weapons together. Lightning snarled at the point of impact. ‘Fall back and form up. Hold the line, whatever else comes through that stinking portal.’

Around him, the Steel Souls hastened to obey, pulling back from the corrupted stone idols and the archway. Gardus grunted in satisfaction as he heard his command repeated up and down the line of retinues by his subordinates. Feros and the others could be counted on to do as he ordered, without hesitation.

‘Form up, form up… so disciplined,’ the daemon rumbled. ‘Like a row of children’s toys, lined up neatly for Bolathrax’s amusement, ready to play.’ The great horned head tilted, and the bulging eyes fixed on Gardus. ‘But this is not a game you can win, whelp. If I were you, I would run home and tell my god that this place belongs to another.’

The daemon’s eyes burned into his own. For a moment, he felt a terrible heat, as if he’d been struck by a fever. Then came a terrible tugging sensation, as if long fingers were stirring through his thoughts, and plucking out those of interest. He saw the rows of cots, upon which moss-lepers and flux sufferers lay in agony. He felt weak, and heard the screams as the invaders crested the wall and entered Demesnus Harbour… he almost stumbled where he stood, but the strange sensations faded almost as quickly as they’d come. Bolathrax grunted.

‘Tough mite, strong… stronger than I expected. The quality of your essence has much improved since last we met.’

‘We have never met, beast,’ Gardus said. He knew, even as he spoke, that he shouldn’t bandy words with the daemon. It was a lie made flesh. But something, some nagging urge, compelled him on. ‘I think I would remember one as ugly as you.’

His words echoed across the clearing, and Bolathrax leaned forward, eyes narrowed. A slow smile crept across the daemon’s blubbery face as the ranks of Hallowed Knights began to ring with the sound of hammers striking shields. The slow, steady rhythm drowned out the humming buzz of the daemon’s arrival, and for a moment, Gardus thought that the noise alone might drive the creature back into whatever hell had spawned it. But instead, it shook its head like a disappointed parent.

‘So be it,’ Bolathrax said. The daemon raised one fat paw and spoke a single, deplorable word. Gardus felt his teeth rattle in his jaw from the force of the word. The gathering clouds of flies suddenly spilled towards the Stormcast lines.

‘Shields up,’ Gardus roared, setting his feet as the deluge of insects drew close. Only now they weren’t just insects, but other things. Long limbed, bloat-bellied shapes appeared in the cloud, loping towards them, dragging rust-pitted blades behind them. Plaguebearers, Gardus thought. Similarly with Bolathrax, he had never seen them before, but he knew them all the same. He recognised them in the pit of his stomach and at the base of his mind, as one mortal enemy knows another. One-eyed, their rotten entrails leaking out, the plaguebearers radiated the same wrongness as Bolathrax himself, though to a lesser degree… as if they did not belong in the world.

More of them emerged from the cloud of flies. They were on all sides of the Hallowed Knights, and their numbers increased with every moment. So quickly had they formed that the Stormcast Eternals were surrounded within moments, their retinues hemmed in on all sides. The daemons droned monotonously as they advanced, as if in mimicry of the flies that had given birth to them.

‘Form up around me,’ Gardus bellowed. ‘Fall back, circle formation, but keep the line. Make them pay for every step, my brothers.’

Was this how I fell, before? The thought reverberated through his head, like the droning of the daemons. Before Sigmaron, before his Reforging, was this what he had faced? Was this how he had died? He forced the thought aside, trying to focus on the threat before him, rather than one long past, skinstealers rushed at him, spears wet with the blood of his acolytes. Reaching out for one of the four-foot iron candlesticks, he caught it up and his hammer snapped out to pulp a plaguebearer’s skull. He parried a disease-forged blade with his own sword, shattering the daemon weapon. Aetius had moved up beside him, shield raised to cover Gardus’s flank. He stepped forward and swung his hammer out in a wide arc, sending daemons reeling.

‘Who will be triumphant?’ Gardus shouted, trying to ignore the persistent hum of flies and forgotten voices.

‘Only the faithful,’ came the response from the throat of every member of his Warrior Chamber. The cry rose above the din of battle, above the sound of hammers cracking bones and the drone of daemons. Gardus smashed a plaguebearer from its feet, splitting its leering features, the candlestick heavy in his hand as he caught up its twin and stepped out of the hospice.

‘If we should fall, who will be reborn again?’ he shouted, shaking his head to clear it.

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Only the faithful,’ Gardus said hoarsely, as he blocked a blow that would have split Aetius’s head. He chopped the daemon down and cast a quick glance over the battlefield. The Hallowed Knights were fighting as warriors born, but the foe’s numbers were limitless. They needed to counter that advantage. We need room to manoeuvre, he thought. Gardus looked up, and swept his runeblade out, signalling to Tegrus. The Prosecutors dropped from the sky, hurling their celestial hammers. The weapons struck, slamming home into the ranks of the enemy with meteoric force. Dirt, mud and broken bodies were hurled into the air with each impact. For a moment, the enemy’s relentless advance stalled.

Gardus seized his chance.

‘Aetius, lock shields!’ he roared. ‘Feros, to me!’

Aetius barked an order, and several retinues of Liberators slammed their shields together, forming a solid wall of gleaming sigmarite. As Gardus had hoped, Solus and his Judicators recognized what was required of them, and they retreated swiftly, collapsing their ranks behind the defensive perimeter provided by the shields of their brethren. Feros and his Retributors moved through the retreating ranks of Liberators and Judicators, their great two-handed lightning hammers clearing away those daemons closest to the Hallowed Knights’ lines. Feros laughed as a blow from his hammer reduced a loping daemon to ash.

‘Sigmar be praised for this bounty,’ the Retributor-Prime bellowed. ‘Enemies to smite, and time enough to enjoy it.’

He stepped forward and drove his hammer into the ground. Lightning erupted from the black earth, catching plaguebearers in its crackling embrace. The daemons jittered and burned. Between them, the Prosecutors and Retributors were keeping the enemy at bay, but Gardus knew that it was only a temporary reprieve.

‘Aetius, shieldwall,’ Gardus said, signalling the Liberator-Prime. Aetius raised his hammer, and the front rank of the shieldwall knelt, planting the bottoms of their shields on the ground. The second rank moved in behind them, slamming their shields atop those of the front rank. Those Liberators not a part of the shieldwall moved forward to join Aetius and Gardus as the first line of defence against the enemy. They broke away, forming themselves up into groups of five or six warriors, and took up positions between the Retributors.

Soon Solus’s Judicators were firing from behind the wall of shields, as Gardus and the others tried to hold the plague-ranks back. Thunder rumbled and lightning snarled as Solus and his warriors peppered the enemy. Soon the air was full of smoke and noise, but the daemons continued their droning advance, taking no notice of the punishment inflicted upon them. More and more of them flowed out of the Gates of Dawn to join their vile kin in an unceasing assault upon Gardus’s Warrior Chamber. They strode over the charred and broken bodies of their fellows, clambering over heaps of daemonic corpses in order to reach the Hallowed Knights.

Gardus and Aetius fought back to back.

‘We’ll be overwhelmed if this keeps up, my lord,’ Aetius said, knocking a plaguebearer back with a swat from his shield. As the daemon staggered, he ripped his sword through its midsection, like a woodcutter hewing at a tree. The daemon fell in two squirming halves.

‘While one of us yet stands, hope is not lost,’ Gardus said. He took in the battle at a glance, seeing the Retributors, like lone islands in a sea of filth, and the Liberators, fighting back to back in small retinues. None of them were doing much to blunt the advance, despite the toll they were extracting from the enemy. Plaguebearers hacked at the shieldwall, occasionally pulling down a Liberator and dragging him out and away from his fellows to be butchered. Gardus felt his heart tighten with every death, a strange sense of having lived through this before, as he watched his flock fall to the spears of the skinstealers. He shook off the errant thought. These enemies were not skinstealers, whoever they were. He heard Bolathrax’s laughter slither over the battlefield, and looked up to see the Great Unclean One squat down on his flabby haunches and lean forward, the very picture of an eager spectator.

‘Yes, fight hard,’ Bolathrax called out. ‘It will not matter in the end. The tallyman will collect his due, no matter how well you swing your little hammers.’

Gardus longed to smash the smirk from the creature’s face. Anger boiled up in him, and as he fought, he saw half-remembered faces superimposed over the sigmarite masks his warriors wore. He heard voices he did not recognize, and the green horrors of the Ghyrtract Fen wavered and seemed to give way to another place, another time. He saw blood spatter white sheets as the skinstealers howled and tried to shake it off, to banish the clutching fragments of memory, but the hospice was burning and they refused to release him. He slashed at a plaguebearer and the grimacing warrior, clad in crimson and brass armour stumbled back, his scarred skull crushed by the iron candlestick in Garradan’s hand.

‘Sigmar,’ Gardus roared. More warriors closed in on him, savage, saw-toothed axes raised and he whirled, runeblade licking out to lop off arms and shatter plague-swords. Those swords, he knew, were stained with the blood of his flock, and it drove him to fury. A plague-sword struck him, causing him to stumble and he felt the spear as it dug through his robes and pierced his vitals, and he fell to one knee. ‘Sigmar, give me strength!’

‘My lord… Gardus,’ someone shouted. He hesitated. Who is Gardus? My name is Garradan, he thought as a heavy body struck him and knocked him sprawling. Jolted from his memories, he rolled over and saw Aetius stagger as a plague-blade slid under his guard and tore through his belly. Gardus froze in shock, but only for a moment. As Aetius sank down, he surged to his feet, blade in hand. His runeblade sang out, and the plaguebearer lost its hand. It stepped back, its single eye widening in shock. That expression quickly vanished in a spray of pus and bile as Gardus’s hammer slammed down on its skull.

Gardus shook his head, clearing it of lingering memories. He’d lost focus, letting his anger overwhelm his discipline. He could not afford such lapses, not now. Aetius was hunched over, his hands clasped to his belly.

‘Aetius, can you stand?’ he asked.

Aetius grunted and, with Gardus’s help, rose to his feet. Blood dripped from between his fingers as he threw an arm over Gardus’s shoulders and sagged against the Lord-Celestant. Gardus uprooted his blade and, with one arm around Aetius’s waist, he hacked them a path back towards the shieldwall. As he handed Aetius over to a pair of Liberators, he turned back towards the Gates of Dawn.

The Great Unclean One wove his hands in obscene gestures. With every pass of the greater daemon’s hands, the archway flexed like a thing in pain, and an ugly light seeped out from between the aged stones. The insect-drone in the air had grown louder, and it was accompanied by a new sound – the stomp of great feet, growing closer.

‘I did try and warn you, you can’t say I didn’t,’ Bolathrax croaked, as the archway shuddered down to its keystones. ‘I gave you a chance, little pustlings, but you spat upon my kind offer.’

The daemon glanced slyly in Gardus’s direction, somehow finding him amidst the confusion of battle. Behind the daemon, the stones of the archway seemed to tremble with the reverberations of whatever monstrosity approached. ‘Though, I expected no better from the spawn of Sigmar.’

As the name of his god left the beast’s blubbery lips, Gardus hesitated. Bolathrax’s smile widened, sensing the reaction his words had caused. ‘Yes, I know who you serve. I recognize that sign, on your armour. And I do not fear him, pustule. I withstood his wrath before, and I will withstand it now. I have outlived many gods. Bolathrax was there at the Battle of Black Skies, when the Great Necromancer fell. Bolathrax corrupted the Skyoak and broke the champions of mankind in the Allpoints War. And it was Bolathrax who cracked the City of Branches and made Alarielle weep tears of jade.’

With every boast, the Great Unclean One slapped his rubbery chest.

‘Bolathrax, pustule! Bolathrax, blessed above all of Grandfather Nurgle’s children. Bolathrax, greatest of all those who dwell in the garden.’

Bolathrax extended one wide paw, as if in command, and roared out, ‘Heed me, my sons. Come forth, brothers in bile, come forth my rotguard!’

Chapter Four

In the halls of Azyr

Zephacleas moved quickly through the celestine vaults. Gardus was his friend – in many ways, his only friend – and the thought that he might be in danger was not a pleasant one. Stormcasts could not die, as such, but the Reforging process was not easy. Those who fell and returned were… different. No one could say how or why, but they were, and that thought lent speed to Zephacleas’s stride. He did not want Gardus to change, to be something other than the man he was now. He did not want him to endure the agonies of rebirth a second time.

I do not want to lose my friend, he thought. As he passed the Forbidden Vaults, he averted his eyes, as tradition and prudence demanded. He was not the only Stormcast moving through the halls. The turquoise war-plate of the Celestial Vindicators was in evidence, as well as the golden armour of the Hammers of Sigmar. The great mourning bell was ringing steadily, its despairing song echoing everywhere as he made his way to where his Warrior Chamber waited.

He caught the arm of one of the Celestial Vindicators. ‘What news, brother? How goes the war for the realmgates of Chamon? What of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok, of Thostos Bladestorm and Lord-Castellant Eldroc?’

The other Stormcast pulled his arm free of Zephacleas’s grip. The Celestial Vindicators were not known for their even temperament, and Zephacleas stepped back, hands raised.

‘Peace, brother, I am merely curious.’

‘The battle goes well,’ the other Stormcast rumbled. ‘The Silverway is ours. Chamon will follow.’ He cocked his head. ‘What of Ghyran? Have you heard?’

‘Badly,’ Zephacleas said, tersely. ‘I go now, to see that it fares better. Sigmar be with you, brother,’ he added, extending his hand. They clasped forearms, and turned to go their separate ways. Before Zephacleas had made more than a few steps, however, a voice called out to him, stopping him in his tracks.

‘Hold, Beast-Bane,’ a rough voice said. ‘I would have words with you.’

Zephacleas stopped, more out of curiosity than any respect for the speaker’s authority. He’d earned his war-name in the wilds of Azyrheim, hunting the monstrous beasts that still lurked in the high crags and deep canyons of the mountains of the Celestial Realm. He’d fought the Black Bull of Nordrath and harried the beast-packs of the Antarktos Ridge to extinction, slaughtering the white-furred goat-headed servants of Chaos to the last ungor. He turned.

‘Hail and well met, Lord-Castellant. Shouldn’t you be with the remainder of your Warrior Chamber, waiting for the order to march?’

‘Who are you to say where I should or should not be?’ Lorrus Grymn, Lord-Castellant of the Steel Souls, said.

Squat and built like a low wall, he was accompanied by two other silver-armoured figures. One was Morbus, Lord-Relictor of Gardus’s Warrior Chamber. Zephacleas thought he recognized the other as Machus, one of Grymn’s paladins and Decimator-Prime. The double-bladed axe he carried was a wicked-looking thing, its edges polished to a blinding gleam. His eyes were unreadable, and his expression was hidden behind his featureless war-helm, but Zephacleas suspected that he was as worried as his superior must be, to accost the Lord-Celestant of another Warrior Chamber.

Zephacleas held up his hands. ‘My apologies…’ he began.

Grymn cut him off with an impatient gesture.

‘You are forgiven. Sigmar calls for you to lend aid to the Steel Soul,’ Grymn said, eyeing the Lord-Celestant critically.

‘He has,’ Zephacleas said. The gryph-hound at the Lord-Castellant’s side growled low in its feathered throat, as if it disapproved of his levity. Zephacleas fixed the animal with a cautious look. It was a heavy-bodied creature, with the limbs and torso of a great hunting hound and the head of a bird of prey. It could have the throat out of an unarmoured man in a matter of moments, and could give even a Stormcast a few uncomfortable minutes, if it was of a mind. This one was looking at him as if he were a bit of meat on the end of a stick. But then, so was Grymn, having a reputation for ferocity in word as well as deed. More than one Stormcast had been reduced to spluttering anger by the Lord-Castellant’s words.

Grymn patted the creature’s head. ‘Easy, Tallon,’ he murmured. He looked at Zephacleas. ‘Gardus is a great fighter, a warrior without peer, but… he is untempered.’

‘Yes,’ Zephacleas said. ‘As are you. As was I, once.’

‘It is more than that,’ Grymn said insistently. ‘Morbus has seen it, in his dreams.’

‘He is in danger,’ Morbus said. The Lord-Relictor was an imposing figure, his weapons and armour replete with icons of faith. It fell to him to keep the souls of the Hallowed Knights in his Warrior Chamber from the gloom of the underworld, and Morbus, like Ionus Cryptborn, or even the Astral Templars’ own Seker Gravewalker, was too close to that fell realm for Zephacleas’s comfort. ‘Dark forces gather about him, Lord-Celestant.’

‘I am well aware, Lord-Relictor.’ Zephacleas gestured for Morbus to move aside. Morbus hesitated, his burning gaze turning to Grymn. Impatient now, Zephacleas made to push past. Every moment he delayed was a moment wasted in aiding Gardus.

Grymn quickly stepped forward, blocking him. His sour face was twisted in an expression so unpleasant that Zephacleas thought at first that he had been done some injury. He appeared to be struggling with his words.

‘Say what you wish to say, Lord-Castellant. Some of us have battles to fight,’ Zephacleas said.

‘I would have you see that he comes to no harm, Lord-Celestant,’ Grymn said. ‘Whatever else happens, keep him safe.’

Zephacleas blinked. ‘What?’

‘Gardus,’ Grymn said. ‘See that he comes to no harm, Astral Templar. Or you shall answer to us.’ As he spoke, he poked a finger into Zephacleas’s chest, eliciting a dull sound as sigmarite struck sigmarite. Zephacleas smiled.

‘You truly fear for him.’

‘You will say nothing of this, you great oaf,’ Grymn growled, as Zephacleas pushed past him. ‘Concentrate on keeping him alive, rather than making mockery of us.’

‘As if I would do anything else,’ Zephacleas said. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder: Grymn stared at the floor, hands flexing uselessly, Morbus stared at Zephacleas, his expression indecipherable, and Machus leaned on his axe, head bowed.

Ah, my friend, any remaining doubts you might still have would vanish in an instant, if you could but see the way they worry for you, thought Zephacleas. A Lord-Celestant was not simply a leader; he was the heart and soul of his Warrior Chamber, and on his shoulders rode all of the hopes and courage of his warriors.

‘Lord-Castellant,’ Zephacleas said, loudly.

Grymn’s head shot up, and he fixed the Lord-Celestant with a glare. More softly, Zephacleas said, ‘I will see him safe, Lord-Castellant. Else my soul join his in Sigmar’s forges.’

Chapter Five

The coming of the rotguard

The archway gaped like a wound pulled wide, and obese shapes shoved and fought their way free of the darkness beyond. Gardus heard the rattle of armour, and the grunting rumble of monstrous voices. Whatever was coming was big.

‘Too late,’ Bolathrax roared, as he slapped his hands together mockingly. ‘Too late, little pustules. Bolathrax’s beloved sons have come – the rotguard march again!’

The archway throbbed as a noxious gas erupted from the dark beyond the stones, and then, one by one, the rotguard stepped into the Realm of Life. Seven Great Unclean Ones, each as big as Bolathrax, and all equally horrible. Each one was armed and armoured in a similar way to their lord and master. They took up positions on the steps, as if awaiting further orders.

‘Sigmar’s hammer,’ Aetius muttered, as two Liberators took his weight and began to pull him to safety, behind the shieldwall. ‘Seven of them.’ The very air seemed to tremble in anticipation of whatever nightmare was preparing to claw its way free of the Gates of Dawn.

‘One was trouble enough,’ Solus said, as he joined them at the break in the shieldwall. The Judicator-Prime sounded tired, and his armour was marked and scored where enemy blades had reached him, despite the shields of the Liberators. ‘We must regroup, Steel Soul.’

‘We can beat them,’ Gardus said. Had he said that before, when Sigmar’s gaze had first fallen on him? He shook his head. He could not afford to become lost in memory again. ‘We must. We will not fail here. We will not.’ He raised his runeblade. ‘Retributors, Prosecutors, to me,’ he roared. He glanced at Solus. ‘Hold the line. Do not let it buckle.’

The Judicator-Prime nodded tersely, and Gardus turned away. As he moved forward, Feros fell in beside him, his armour befouled and covered in daemonic grime.

‘Are we making for the big daemon?’ the Retributor-Prime growled. At Gardus’s nod, he gave a bark of laughter, raising his hammer like a standard.

The other Retributors began to fight their way towards their commander. Overhead, Tegrus and his Prosecutors cut through the air on wings of lightning, clearing a path for Gardus and the others. As the mystical hammers tore explosive furrows in the ground and sent plaguebearers tumbling through the air, Gardus led Feros and his Retributors towards the Gates of Dawn at a run.

If they could interrupt whatever ritual the greater daemon was enacting, they might stand a chance of throwing the enemy back. Gardus bulled aside any daemon foolish enough to attempt to block his path, battering them down with hammer and blade. Lightning sparked and crackled from the hammers of the Retributors as they moved with him, scything daemons from their feet with wide, sweeping blows. From the corner of his eye, he saw Feros knock a plaguebearer with his shoulder, before crushing its skull with his boot. The Prosecutors swooped past, almost at eye-level, and cut through the enemy ranks.

They had almost reached the stone steps when the first Retributor fell, pulled down by a trio of plaguebearers. Azure energy burst from the downed warrior’s armour and a bolt of brilliant light speared upwards, piercing the dark clouds. Another for Reforging, Gardus thought grimly.

The Stormcasts had carved a wide path through the daemonic ranks, but now their lack of numbers was beginning to show. The daemons came at them without subtlety, form of discipline or sense of self-preservation, but they were limitless. For every one that fell, two more stepped up to take its place. Plague-swords sought Gardus’s belly and he was forced to slow his charge as daemons bounded down the steps towards him. ‘Keep going,’ he roared, as Feros slowed to help him. ‘We must stop the beast.’

He looked up, searching for Tegrus, and saw the Prosecutors soaring upwards, shrouded in a cloud of stinging flies. As he watched, the flies swirling about one of the winged warriors congealed into a plaguebearer. The sudden weight of the daemon, combined with the sword it slid through a gap in the Prosecutor’s armour, served to send the latter plummeting to the ground. Daemon and Stormcast struck together, and lay in a broken tangle. Tegrus and the others were soon similarly afflicted, and celestial hammers crashed against plague-swords in a desperate mid-air duel.

Gardus caught a descending blade on his crossed weapons and shattered it with a single motion. The daemon lunged at him, digging for his throat with the stump of its sword. He fell back and twisted around, catching the blow on his pauldron, smashing the daemon to the ground as it staggered past. Whirling back, slashing out with his runeblade as he did so, he cut through the swollen guts of another plaguebearer. It folded over his blade and caught at his forearm with blackened fingers. Its single eye rolled wildly in its leaking socket as its weight dragged him off-balance. Gardus cursed, and tried to jerk his arm free, but to no avail.

Another daemon leapt onto his back. It clawed at the clasps of his helmet, nearly yanking his head from his shoulders in its frenzy. Blades struck his cuirass, drawing oily sparks. Rotting hands wrapped themselves around his free arm, and he found himself pinned, unable to bring either of his weapons to bear. The foul miasma of his opponents began to fill his nose and mouth, and the droning of flies threatened to deafen him.

Gardus stumbled forward suddenly as the plaguebearer clinging to his back was sent flying from its perch in a flash of lightning. A second blow freed his arm, and he turned to bring his hammer down on the creature that clung to his sword arm. Feros moved up beside him, spinning his hammer about and driving it into the belly of a daemon hard enough to send it bouncing up the stone steps. Gardus gave the Retributor-Prime a weary nod of thanks and looked up towards the Gates of Dawn.

The seven monstrous Great Unclean Ones were ponderously descending the stone steps of the gates. The first in line gave a rumbling laugh and threw itself down, its bloated body rolling down the stone steps like a gelatinous boulder, leaving splotches of bile and pus to mark its descent. Gardus and Feros retreated as the creature struck a landing and flung itself to the ground without grace. It smashed into a fallen tree and shattered it. Gardus turned aside as a rain of splinters pelted his armour.

When he turned back, the greater daemon was up and swinging its flail in a vicious circle. A Prosecutor was knocked from the air, falling at the beast’s feet in a heap of ruptured armour and broken limbs. Feros and his Retributors charged towards the daemon. It brought its flail down, driving one Retributor to his knees. Feros drove his hammer into its side, rocking it. Lightning crawled across its form, but it didn’t seem to notice. It backhanded Feros, slamming him into the steps, even as it raised one wide foot over the Retributor it had downed. The foot came down with finality, crushing armour and pulping the warrior inside. Light flashed, and the daemon stumbled back with a shriek as the holy radiance of the warrior’s passing burned its unseemly flesh.

Gardus caught the edge of his armoured warcloak and swirled it up and out, unleashing the magics bound within. Sorcerous hammers shot forth from its folds, each one burning with the azure light of the heavens. The hammers slammed into the rotguard, denting its armour and tearing its thin flesh, driving the daemon back a half-step.

Before the greater daemon could recover, Feros and his warriors were upon it, lightning hammers striking again and again. Nearby daemons turned away with shrieks and howls, unable to bear the glare of the forces unleashed. The air throbbed with the fury of the Retributors’ assault, and he heard a bellicose howl as the rotguard succumbed. It reeled away from the fury of the Stormcast, but Feros gave the daemon no respite, harrying it. His hammer smashed into it again and again, shattering armour and unnatural bone with every blow. Then, as the greater daemon lurched backwards, pus leaking from its wounds, Feros caught it a massive two-handed blow on the side of the neck, sending its head bouncing away.

The daemon collapsed in on itself like a deflated midden heap. Feros turned to Gardus and lifted his hammer in triumph, but before he could speak, the rest of the rotguard lobbed themselves into battle. Their arrival caused the marshy ground to shudder, and it scattered the Retributors. Feros whirled, hammer raised to defend himself, but his moment of distraction cost him. Before Gardus could shout a warning, the other Stormcasts was rocked from his feet by a blow from the beast he thought he had defeated. The wounded rotguard, flesh steaming, slugged Feros and sent him flying. A second blow, from the flail of another of the rotguard, caught him as he flew through the air and sent him tumbling back to the ground. He landed heavily, and did not move again. The remaining Retributors fell back in disarray as two more of their number returned to Sigmar’s forge in bursts of searing light, courtesy of the greater daemons.

‘Fall back,’ Gardus shouted, sheathing his sword as the rotguard began their ponderous advance. The Retributors hesitated. The source of their concern was obvious; it went against everything a Stormcast was taught in leaving one of their own behind. ‘Go,’ he yelled again. ‘I will see to Feros.’

Even as he spoke, Gardus darted forward, calling out to Tegrus as he ran. ‘Keep them back, if you can,’ he shouted, ducking low as a monstrous flail swooped over his head. He darted past as the rotguard stumbled, off-balance, and continued running as the daemon was knocked sprawling by the hammer-strikes of the Prosecutors. As he charged through the gauntlet of greater daemons, he did not break his stride towards the limp form of Feros. A flail cut across his path, as its wielder sought to trip him up. Gardus leapt over the chain, hit the ground in a rattle of armour and rolled to his feet, standing over the prone form of the Retributor-Prime. As he rose, he caught the edge of his cloak and swirled it over himself and Feros. A deluge of sorcerous hammers filled the air, driving the rotguard back.

Gardus dropped to one knee to heft Feros’s bulk over his shoulder. A flail slammed down, spraying him with muck and tearing his warcloak. He shot to his feet and spun about awkwardly, bashing aside the screeching skull-heads of the daemon-weapon as its owner swung it towards him again. He was rocked back on his heels by the force of the blow. Gardus looked up. Three leering faces, each as wide as a man, stared down at him. The greater daemons closed in with gross chortles.

Tegrus plummeted downwards, his crackling wings carving blazing trails through the flesh of the rotguard as the ground erupted in holy fire. Celestial Hammers tore the ground, blinding the looming daemons.

‘Your hand, Gardus!’ Tegrus yelled, extending his own.

Gardus switched his hammer to his other hand and and reached up. A moment later, he was wrenched from his feet as Tegrus caught his arm and yanked him and Feros out of danger. The other Prosecutors followed, distracting the rotguard. They spread out around Tegrus in a wide formation as they swooped back towards the shieldwall, hurling their hammers at the surging ranks of the plaguebearers below and smashing a path for the remaining Retributors.

Tegrus released Gardus as they reached the line of Liberators, and the Lord-Celestant dropped to the ground, absorbing the impact easily. Still carrying Feros, he hurried into the protective confines of the Liberators’ disciplined ranks, followed a few seconds later by the Retributors.

Feros grunted as Gardus set him down. One eye cracked open. ‘Should have left me… Steel Soul,’ he wheezed.

‘You should know me better than that,’ Gardus said tersely as he scanned the shieldwall. Bloody lanes had been hacked into the outer ranks as the plaguebearers continued to advance, as unstoppable and inexorable as death itself. The sound of their phlegm-thickened voices, droning in that same hateful monotone, crowded out all other sound.

The Hallowed Knights were hemmed in, their numbers dwindling before the onslaught. More and more bursts of radiant light speared upwards, attesting to this grim fact. He caught sight of Solus and called to him, ‘We need to pull back – reform the line.’

Soon, he knew, there would be nowhere to pull back to. But they would hold the line until the last of them had fallen. They were Stormcast, and they would die as such.

Solus nodded and began to shout orders, as he fired his crossbow. Slowly, steadily, the Hallowed Knights began to give ground. The ranks of Liberators made up the shieldwall, stepping backwards into an ever-tightening circle as the Judicators continued to fire. Gardus looked down at Feros. ‘Can you stand?’

‘No,’ Feros said, softly. He looked up at Gardus, his features twisted in pain. ‘It’s my back, and my legs. They crushed them with those blasted flails of theirs. Can barely lift my arms. Leave me.’

‘No,’ Gardus said, shaking his head. They would have to make their stand there.

‘Then send me back to Azyr yourself, Steel Soul.’ Feros gritted his teeth as a wave of pain swept through him. ‘I do not fear Reforging. Let me rise, to serve again when I am worthy.’ He caught Gardus’s forearm in a feeble grip. Gardus looked down at his friend, and saw the leper gasping on his cot, his afflicted body convulsing in agony. Great boils erupted on his body, spilling scalding pus over his already tortured flesh. ‘Please,’ he wheezed, ‘Please, help…’ stood, raising his hammer.

‘I am sorry,’ Gardus whispered.

Feros gave a bloody grin. ‘I’m not. It was a good fight, Steel Soul. But my part in it is done.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Send me home.’

The hammer came down. Thunder rolled.

Gardus turned to see to the retreat, his heart heavy in his chest. Every man he could see was bleeding, his armour battered and filthy. Step by step, they were driven back. The enemy fell about the battle line of sigmarite. Yet the odds never slackened as more daemons formed out of the fly and fume-filled air marched out of the Gates of Dawn at Bolathrax’s bellowed command.

‘We are hard-pressed,’ Aetius said, as he joined Gardus. The Liberator-Prime held one hand firmly to his side, his breath coming in harsh rasps. Still he held his hammer at the ready. ‘They are without number.’

‘Then we can take comfort in knowing that we held faith until the last of us fell, Aetius,’ Gardus said. ‘Who will fight until the last?’ he shouted.

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply from his exhausted warriors. Lights burned upwards, as Liberators and Judicators fell. Tegrus and his Prosecutors had dropped to the ground, unable to remain in the fly-choked air. The shieldwall shrank another step.

‘Who will stand, when all is lost?’

‘Only the faithful!’ The reply was louder now. Plague-swords smashed down on raised shields. More flashes of light pierced the dark above, as warriors fell.

‘Who will be remembered?’ he roared, striving to drown out the drone of the fly-blown legions. He drew his runeblade and clashed it against his hammer.

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Only the faithful!’ Gardus cried, clashing his weapons again. As he did so, the sky was split by a crash of thunder. Lightning flashed.

Sigmar had answered their prayers.

Chapter Six

Into the fray

Zephacleas roared in primal joy as he rode the lightning to the ground. It spread through him, body and soul, boiling his blood in his veins, and filling him with Sigmar’s divine power. He felt strong, capable of fighting any foe, no matter how monstrous, without the need for rest or sleep. There was no sensation quite like it.

The celestine vaults of Sigmaron had vanished, to be replaced by the muck and mire of the Ghyrtract Fen. He rose from his kneeling position, his armour still crawling with Sigmar’s lightning, and swung his weapons at the first enemy to hand. The plaguebearer turned, eye widening in shock as Zephacleas’s hammer tore its head from its shoulders.

‘No time for speeches,’ he roared, as the retinues of the Astral Templars shook off the storm and set themselves to battle. ‘We have yet to meet a foe we cannot break on the field, and I don’t intend to do so today. Forward!’

His men gave vent to a communal bellow of agreement, and the Liberator, Decimator and Retributor hosts fell into a spearhead formation, as he’d taught them. Such a formation had served them well in the Gnarlwood, when they had earned the right to carry Sigmar’s sigil on their shields and, later, in Aqshy as well. They advanced, splitting into three columns. Shields raised, hammers ready, the Liberators bulled forward, charging through the thick mists that rose from the fen.

Zephacleas took the vanguard, as was his right as Lord-Celestant, and he and his Warrior Chamber moved to meet the enemy, who now recognized the sudden arrival of the Astral Templars for what it was. Behind them, Seker Gravewalker croaked out orders to the Judicators and Prosecutors, directing them in their defence of the spearhead’s flanks. Judicators took up positions near the monstrous standing stones that dotted the mire, and Prosecutors swept by on wings of bristling light.

Zephacleas felt no hesitation in leaving the Lord-Relictor in charge of such a task – indeed, he trusted no one else to accomplish it. Gravewalker would keep the Astral Templars in the fight, no matter how fierce the struggle became. He had come from a wild land of high crags and wind-torn veldts and was as implacable as the storm itself.

He swept his weapons out in opposite directions, smashing two daemons from their feet. Bringing his hammer and sword around to cut down a third, he led his warriors into the massed ranks of the plague-horde.

The plan, such as it was, was simple enough. The enemy surrounded Gardus, all attentions bent to overwhelming the Hallowed Knights. Thus, the Astral Templars were free to strike a telling blow. The plague host would be forced to divide its attentions, and Zephacleas intended to make them pay for it.

He chopped a plaguebearer in half. As the daemon fell to pieces, strange shapes sprouted from the ichor in its veins. Tiny, fat shapes bobbed in the flowing bile, then bounded towards Zephacleas, giggling shrilly. He growled in disgust and stamped on the nurglings as they tried to climb his greaves. More of them scuttled across the battlefield, weaving through the feet of his men, distracting them at inopportune moments or swarming them under like ravenous insects.

‘Gravewalker, burn them,’ he shouted. A moment later, the sky was ripped wide by lightning. Bolts of crackling incandescence surged down, gouging the earth and tearing gaping wounds in the ranks of the enemy. Plaguebearers shivered in the throes of the storm, burning up from the inside out as the lightning danced across their rusty armour and the points of their swords. Those that did not simply burst from the lightning’s cleansing touch were reduced to living torches, which flailed about blindly before collapsing into ashes. He raised his sword in a salute as the Lord-Relictor turned his attentions elsewhere.

He could see now why Sigmar had chosen to send them here – not just because Gardus was in danger, but because the realmgate had become corrupted. It led nowhere good, and, like a suppurating wound, it would only get worse. The stones rose from the ground, seeming to vibrate in rhythm with the omnipresent drone of the flies. They spiralled through the stinking miasma and across the blasphemous icons that dotted the field, glowing in a sickly fashion. Strange shadows stretched through the air and crawled across every flat surface. The wind was thick with garbled whispers, made by no human tongue.

Even the air itself had gone sour as he moved forward. This land was dying, he suspected. It was rotting on the vine, and unless they could cauterize the infection here, it would only grow worse and perhaps spread to others parts of Ghyran.

Zephacleas could see the realmgate now, rising into the air above the battlefield, its stony proportions limned in flickering witchfire. A Great Unclean One squatted at the landing before the great archway, gesticulating and roaring the abominable words to some terrible sorcerous working. Below the greater daemon, several of its kind sat hunched on the steps at intervals – these were clearly an honour guard of some sort, and Zephacleas longed to test his skill against one of the hulking creatures. He had to reach the Hallowed Knights and break the ever-swelling cordon of rotting flesh which surrounded them. Only then could their two hosts secure the Gates of Dawn, as Sigmar had commanded.

An unceasing tide of daemons flowed through the arch and spilled down the steps, without regard for life or limb, many falling from the stones, pushed by overeager companions to splatter on the ground below. But there were always more to replace them, and worse things besides. The power of Nurgle grew with every expulsion of foulness from the realmgate, as daemonic beasts, nurglings and other monstrosities joined the plaguebearers in battle.

Plague drones buzzed through the fly-filled skies, the rot-fly riders urging their monstrous steeds into aerial battle with the newly arrived Astral Templars’ Prosecutors. Blood, and worse, rained down on Zephacleas and his men as they fought their way towards the Hallowed Knights – several of his Stormcasts hesitated.

‘Keep moving,’ he shouted as he elbowed a plaguebearer out of his path. His hammer came down, crushing another. Ahead, he could see the gleam of silver armour, and urged his men to greater speed as explosions of light hurtled upwards. There were too many of them, he knew. How many of the Hallowed Knights still stood?

Hold on my friend – just a few moments longer… hold on!

Chapter Seven

Salvation from the sky

Salvation.

The bolts from blackened skies meant salvation for Gardus and his remaining warriors. Sigmar had answered their prayers. Annihilation had seemed inevitable. Now, however, as more lightning strikes speared down, illuminating the cloying darkness of the Fen, the hordes pressing against his dwindling forces lessened. The daemons turned to face the new threat.

Gardus signalled for Tegrus and his small group of Prosecutors to take wing. ‘Clear a corridor in that sea of filth. I would meet our allies face to face,’ he said, as the winged warriors took flight.

Whatever host the other Stormcasts belonged to, he was glad to see them, though he wondered if they had arrived too late. Only a few of Solus’s Judicators still stood, and Aetius’s Liberators were equally hard-pressed – the once impenetrable shieldwall had shattered into a number of smaller retinues, all of which were in danger of being overwhelmed. The few remaining Retributors stood clustered about Gardus, hammers ready despite aching arms. Even so, their duty was clear, and if they had any hope of reaching the Gates of Dawn, now was the time. ‘We cannot waste this opportunity. Aetius, Solus, we must take back the initiative from our foes,’ he said. ‘You know what to do. I will take the lead.’

‘Where you go, we follow,’ Aetius said. He stumbled, but stayed on his feet. Solus caught his arm. The Judicator-Prime had drawn his gladius, the blade wet with daemonic ichor, and gestured towards the realmgate.

‘Though perhaps not very far – look!’

Gardus turned and saw that Bolathrax had at last noticed the new arrivals. The daemon’s sneering features had taken on a look of uncertainty, as if he had not factored such an occurrence into his plans. Any hope Gardus felt at that realization died as Bolathrax roared out a command and, as one, the six remaining rotguard lumbered into battle, flails whirling viciously. The skull-headed weapons wreaked havoc as the daemons staved in the thinned ranks of the Hallowed Knights. Liberators were smashed from one realm and sent to the next by great, thundering blows, tossing silver-clad bodies high into the air. Shields did little against the crushing strength of the greater daemons, shattering the swords or hammers which were interposed.

Unstoppable, Gardus thought, they’re unstoppable. He pushed the thought away. Nothing was unstoppable. Bigger and stronger maybe, but not unstoppable. ‘To me,’ he shouted, swinging his hammer towards the creatures. ‘Hallowed Knights, to me!’ He looked up, and caught Tegrus’s eye. The Prosecutor banked smoothly, altering direction with unearthly grace. His warriors followed suit, and the Prosecutors shot towards the rotguard. Gardus followed them at a run, his warriors flowing after him as he led the counterattack. Slowly, but surely, they fought their way through plaguebearers and nurglings.

‘We are here, Lord-Celestant,’ Solus said, as his gladius took off a plaguebearer’s swordhand at the wrist. He punched the befuddled creature off its feet, as it stared dumbly at its stump. He and Aetius moved on either side of Gardus, protecting his flanks.

‘We must…’ Gardus began. His voice trailed off as several of the vile behemoths halted their onslaught to vomit forth streams of corruption, washing toxic filth over the closest Hallowed Knights. One of the beasts turned with a querulous grunt as it noticed Gardus’s counterattack. Knowing what was coming, Gardus quickly raised his hammer and held it parallel to the ground. ‘Shields up,’ he commanded. As one, the Liberator brotherhoods behind him raised their shields over their heads, in order to protect themselves and the Judicators from the Great Unclean One’s vomit. Aetius stepped forward, raising his shield over himself and Gardus as the acidic bile splashed over them. It sizzled where it struck the sigmarite. The smell was horrendous, and nurglings sprouted where the bile struck the ground. The giggling creatures got under their feet and clung to their ankles.

‘Foul mites,’ Aetius snarled, stamping on the creatures.

‘Ignore them,’ Gardus said. ‘Tegrus!’ he shouted. ‘Bring that creature to its knees, O Sainted Eye.’

Gardus extended his runeblade towards the rotguard that had vomited on them, and the Prosecutors hurtled forward. Celestial Hammers struck the greater daemon from every direction, filling the air with the stink of burned flesh. The rotguard dropped its flail and howled in anger and pain. Trying to catch its quick-moving attackers, the daemon swiped blindly at the Prosecutors. Tegrus sped down, diving like a bird of prey, and landed atop the creature’s helm, his hammers cracking down simultaneously with a sound like thunder to punch a crater in the beast’s armour. The greater daemon staggered, sinking to one knee with a dolorous moan as Tegrus pushed himself back into the air with a single snap of his holy wings.

‘Forward,’ Gardus growled.

Liberators and Retributors moved forward, and soon lightning-wreathed hammers and blades forged in celestial fires were taking a toll on the rotguard’s necrotic flesh. The greater daemon swiped and tore at the Stormcast, but to no avail. Slowly it was brought down to one knee.

‘Shields up,’ Gardus said, as he strode forward.

Four Liberators formed up in front of him, two kneeling, and two standing. All four raised their shields over their heads at an angle. Gardus took a running leap. Swiftly, he charged up the incline provided by the shields, his hammer held in both hands.

The rotguard sagged forward, its oily flesh torn by wounds and steam and smoke rising from it. Gardus sprang into the air above it, his hammer raised. The creature twisted, goggling up at him as he dropped towards it. Sigmar, guide my hand, for I strike in your name, Gardus prayed in the moment before impact.

He struck with a sound like thunder, his warhammer splitting the Great Unclean One’s head like an overripe fruit. Gardus crashed down, landing in a crouch, as the headless body of the daemon fell over. A tarry liquid spilled out of its ruptured neck and crept across the ground around his feet. His men cheered as he stood, swiping his hand out.

‘Who will succeed?’ he asked. A plaguebearer leapt over the broken husk of the rotguard and slashed at his head. As Gardus defended himself, he saw more plaguebearers climbing over the body, and leaping to the attack.

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply, as his men fought back. Gardus backhanded his opponent and looked out over the battlefield. His remaining retinues had engaged the other rotguard to limited success. He’d lost sight of Solus and Aetius, separated in the melee. Tegrus spun through the air above, arrowing towards another of the rotguard with his Prosecutors. Daemons closed in from all sides of Gardus, intent on swarming him under, as they had so many of his warriors.

‘Only the faithful,’ he roared, lopping off a plaguebearer’s arm as it tried to drive its sword into his side. ‘Fight, my brothers. Fight and show Sigmar that the faithful yet stand. Show him that whatever else, the faithful yet remain! The faithful still fight in his name. Only the faithful!’

‘Only the faithful!’ a new voice roared, over the clamour of battle. Gardus turned and saw a flash of amethyst as a blade cleaved a daemon in two. All at once, he knew who had come to their aid.

‘Ho, Gardus,’ Zephacleas said. ‘I see you saved some for me! Always the thoughtful one you are, Steel Soul.’

Laughing, Gardus’s fellow Lord-Celestant backhanded a plaguebearer with his hammer, dropping the daemon in mid-lunge. As it tried to squirm to its feet, he drove his blade down into its belly and pinned it to the ground. The daemon stiffened, shrieked and fell silent as Zephacleas ripped his blade free and joined Gardus. The two fought back to back for a moment, as around them a small detachment of Astral Templars bolstered the dwindling ranks of the Hallowed Knights.

‘Good to see you, my friend,’ Gardus said, as he turned a blow aside with his hammer. ‘Your arrival is timely, to say the least.’

Zephacleas laughed and hacked a plaguebearer’s arm off as its sword skidded across his cuirass, leaving an oily scratch. One of the rotguard waddled towards them, weapon sweeping out to scatter plaguebearers and Stormcasts alike, in order to clear itself a path. Zephacleas struck his weapons together, urging the brute on.

‘It’s already coming this way,’ Gardus said, pointedly.

Zephacleas grinned and readied himself to meet the rotguard’s charge. The rotguard’s flail tore a furrow in the ground, spattering the Lord-Celestant’s armour with muck. Zephacleas’s own blade bit into one the daemon’s tree-trunk legs, releasing a flood of pus and maggots. The rotguard shrieked and uprooted the skull-headed flail. In the same motion, it slashed out, trying to hook its opponent. Zephacleas crossed his weapons and caught the blow, but was driven back by the force of it.

Gardus took advantage of the greater daemon’s distraction, driving his own hammer into one of its knees. Unnatural bone crunched and the great bulk wobbled, suddenly off-balance. The Great Unclean One wailed and lashed out with its hand, knocking Gardus backwards. It had dropped its flail in its attempt to stay upright, and as it groped for the weapon, Zephacleas sprang onto its back and scaled the folds of blubber and boils to reach the daemon’s head. He caught hold of one antler and brought his sword down on the crown of the beast’s sloping skull – a speed born of no small amount of desperation, Gardus suspected.

The rotguard slumped forward, clawing at the ground. It hauled itself towards Gardus, looming over him like a tidal wave of filth and decay. Zephacleas had managed to hold on for the ride, continuing to hew brutally at the daemon’s cranium as it dragged itself towards Gardus.

‘It’s like trying to chop through mud,’ he snarled.

Gardus rose to his feet and met the fell creature’s last lunge. It slammed into him with a sound like a cleaver striking meat and all of the air was driven from his lungs. He was knocked into the ground, the beast’s weight settling on him as its wide paws fumbled for his helmet, as if intending to twist his head from his shoulders. He lashed out with his hammer, snapping its fingers. The rotguard reared back and Gardus followed, lunging to his feet. His hammer smashed upwards, into the bottom of the daemon’s jaw, even as Zephacleas drove his sword down one final time. The two weapons met in the mulch of the daemon’s skull, and there was a crack of thunder. Gardus was flung to the ground. Zephacleas joined him a moment later.

The rotguard’s headless bulk swayed above them for a moment, and then collapsed between them. A tide of squabbling nurglings spilled out of the daemon’s ruptured neck and Gardus squashed a number of them as he forced himself to his feet. He reached out and caught hold of Zephacleas’s forearm, hauling the other Stormcast up.

‘Your warriors – their advance has stalled,’ Gardus said. He gestured towards the ranks of the Astral Templars with his still-smoking hammer. The fury of their initial charge had carried them far into the ranks of the enemy, but not far enough. Now they too were being cut off and surrounded by the plague legions.

‘So I see,’ Zephacleas said, grudgingly. ‘Not enough of us, and more of them with every passing moment. If you’ve got any ideas, now is the time for them.’ He looked at Gardus.

Gardus shook his head. He was tired. More tired than he could ever remember having been. It wasn’t simply the relentless pace of the battle, but as if the land itself were sapping his strength. It had been corrupted by the touch of Nurgle, and was becoming something other, an anathema to all that was pure. Even the strength bestowed upon him by Sigmar had its limits, and he was fast approaching them, as were his men.

Nonetheless, they would persevere. Much was demanded of those to whom much had been given… Those were the words by which the Hallowed Knights lived, fought and died. They, and all Stormcast Eternals, owed a debt to the one who had forged them into a force capable of wresting the Mortal Realms from the Ruinous Powers. And Gardus would not be the first to fail in that regard. Not now, not ever, even unto the day of his Reforging.

He quickly surveyed the field, taking in the ebb and flow of the battle in the blink of an eye. Droning ranks of plaguebearers and tumbling tides of nurglings flooded the field, pressing so close to the warriors of the Hallowed Knights and the Astral Templars that the latter could only bring the most basic tactics to bear. Many of his Stormcasts were still locked in combat with the remaining rotguard, unable to bring down the behemoths. He recalled a training bout he had witnessed on the practice fields of Sigmaron… two warriors, on a dais no wider across than his shoulders, punching and kicking until one man fell. A test of endurance, rather than skill. That was what this was. Unfortunately, if there was one thing the servants of Nurgle were known for, it was endurance.

Gardus looked up, towards the Gates of Dawn. Bolathrax still stood in the archway, chanting words of foul summoning, drawing more and more flies out of the pulsing void beyond the stones. As before, at the obese monster’s command, the flies swarmed down and congealed into staggering, cyclopean plaguebearers, who lurched forward into battle. ‘Unless we seal that gate, we’ll drown in a tide of rotting flesh,’ Gardus said. ‘My warriors are too few, and yours are doing all they can to hold their own.’

‘There’s no sign that any more help is coming, either from our own realm, or this one,’ Zephacleas grunted. A plaguebearer bounded towards them, jaw sagging loosely, and pushed Gardus aside as it hacked at them. Zephacleas whipped his sword up and around in a tight pattern, chopping through the daemon in three places. It fell and did not move again. ‘The question is, what do we do about it?’

‘What we must,’ Gardus said. ‘We came to take that gate in Sigmar’s name, and I intend to do just that.’ He started forward, but Zephacleas caught his arm.

‘You can’t do it alone. We’ll rally the others, make a concentrated push,’ he said.

Gardus shook him off. ‘There’s no time for that. Every moment we waste sees the enemy renewed and his number redoubled. I– Look out!’ He swung his hammer around and bashed Zephacleas off his feet, knocking the other Stormcast aside, even as the rotguard’s flail swung down through the space that the Lord-Celestant had been occupying.

The Astral Templar rolled to his feet, chopping through the haft of the daemon’s weapon, even as it tried to draw it back. He backed towards Gardus as the greater daemon tossed the broken weapon aside, and made to pull the heavy blade which hung from a tattered sheath strapped to its gut.

Zephacleas glanced over his shoulder and jerked his head towards Bolathrax. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’ he said. ‘I’ll handle this one. The other one is all yours.’

Gardus nodded, turned and began to run. Shield held before him, he crashed into the masses of plaguebearers, hurling daemons aside or else trampling them underfoot. He was determined that nothing and no one would stop him.

He would reach the Gates of Dawn or die trying.

Chapter Eight

Swarm of contagion

Zephacleas stepped back as the Great Unclean One chopped at him with a wedge-shaped blade that was more rust than iron. The Lord-Celestant slid aside, avoiding the blow. The jagged length of metal slammed down, tearing the murk of the fen. The daemon wrenched its blade free and slashed at him, moving quicker than a beast so bulky ought to. Zephacleas turned the blow aside with his hammer and his arm went numb to the elbow. Behind the creature, he could see a group of his warriors, led by Seker Gravewalker, fighting their way towards him. A plan began to form.

He backed away, teeth bared beneath the expressionless mask of his war-helm, and spread his arms. The greater daemon waddled after him, its sword weaving before it like the tongue of a serpent.

‘Come on then. Come and get me,’ he called.

The daemon-sword tore towards him, and he slammed his weapons together, catching the square tip of the blade. For a moment, the tableau held. Then, little by little, Zephacleas was forced back. The greater daemon lurched forward, its greater weight pushing against him, and loomed over him like a farmer struggling with a stubborn root. It exhaled a stinking mist through its gritted, rotting fangs.

‘Aye,’ Zephacleas grunted. ‘I’m not moving…’ His wrists and shoulders began to ache as he struggled to hold his enemy’s blade at bay. ‘Not yet.’

Flies buzzed around his face, darting for his eyes through the slits in his helm. He saw movement behind the daemon and grinned. ‘Now, Gravewalker!’

Lightning seared down to strike the rotguard. Crackling tendrils crawled across its flabby body and squirmed beneath its armour, setting the daemon alight. Its sword fell from its burning fingers to thump into the mud at Zephacleas’s feet. Smoke rose from the daemon as it sank down and toppled forward, consumed by fire. Zephacleas lifted his helm and spat on it.

‘Smells like a burning midden heap,’ he growled.

‘It is,’ Gravewalker growled.

The Lord-Relictor was, like all of his kind, a fearsome sight – clad in heavy, ornate armour, marked with sigils of power. The ragged hide of a fire wyrm flapped from one shoulder plate, while its skull was set into Gravewalker’s reliquary standard. The standard’s adornments of gilded bone shimmered in the glow of the lightning that crackled about the head of the warhammer he carried in his other hand. His armour was marked by battle, and his weapon was crusted with filth as he swept it out to smash a tottering column of nurglings into its component parts.

A winged shape dropped from the sky to land amongst the plaguebearers. Zephacleas recognized the Prosecutor-Prime of the Hallowed Knights. His shimmering armour was now dulled by dust and grime, and the once-proud crest of his helm had been reduced to a few tattered feathers. His wings spread with savage speed, the crackling feathers slicing through daemonic matter with ease. Any remaining daemons soon fell to the Prosecutor-Prime’s hammers. He moved with such lethal grace that even Zephacleas was hard-pressed to follow.

As the last body fell, mangled and smoking, Tegrus stepped forward, eyes blazing.

‘Where is Gardus?’ he demanded. ‘Where is the Steel Soul? I should be at his side.’

‘Making for the Gates of Dawn, which is what we should all be doing,’ Zephacleas said.

Around them, the battle had reached new levels of ferocity. Astral Templars and Hallowed Knights fought side by side, integrating their battle tactics with an instinctive ease. Slowly, the two hosts became one, and the isolated retinues of the Hallowed Knights swelled as Astral Templars joined them, taking over for their wounded and exhausted brethren.

But it wasn’t enough.

One of the remaining rotguard had taken the offensive. Plaguebearers loped in its wake as the greater daemon crashed through a retinue, scattering Stormcasts with every blow from its flail. The remaining brute was lurching back towards the Gates of Dawn, as if in pursuit of Gardus. Which it could very well be, Zephacleas thought. Gardus was a warrior without peer, but even the Steel Soul couldn’t fight two greater daemons by himself.

‘We have to clear a path and smash our way through. Gardus needs…’ Zephacleas trailed off as a new sound pierced the mist-laden air. A sound like a million scratching claws, scraping across the flesh of the world. The mist rising from the fen stirred, as if something moved beneath it. Then the ground erupted, and reality tore with a sound like a million screams, suddenly silenced. Furry shapes, clad in rotting robes, boiled into sight, rising from beneath the fen, from somewhere else, and launched themselves at the Stormcasts with a hideous chittering war cry. One of the creatures lunged for Tegrus, who flattened it with his hammer.

It resembled a rat, clad in a sickly green tattered, hooded habit, such as a holy man might wear. Foul sores and bony growths wracked the creature’s stunted body.

‘Skaven,’ Zephacleas hissed. ‘Where in the name of Sigmar did they come from?’

A large shape, bigger than any skaven or mutant beast and more nimble, sprang over the heads of its followers and bisected an unwary Liberator, tearing the Stormcast apart with the aid of two wickedly curved blades. Zephacleas had fought the skaven before, and he recognized the horned, hairy beast for what it was – the skaven were as much the servants of the Ruinous Powers as any blood-worshipper or rot-lover, and they had their own daemonic patrons to prove it. Verminlord, he thought, watching as the beast killed another Stormcast. That was what they were called, though he’d never seen one in the flesh.

He barrelled towards it with a roar, followed closely by Tegrus and Gravewalker. His hammer whistled through the air and crushed a squealing ratman as the verminlord leapt straight up to avoid the blow. Zephacleas twisted as the creature came down behind him. Its blades tore through his cloak and scraped his armour as he slashed blindly at it with his sword. It chittered mockingly as it dodged his blows and struck sparks off his armour in return. Its cloven feet crunched into his back, knocking him onto his face as it flipped backwards and landed in a crouch. Zephacleas rolled onto his back as it leapt for him again, but a hurled hammer caught it in the side and sent it rolling away.

Tegrus swooped towards it, snatching up his hammer as he flew past. Gravewalker helped Zephacleas to his feet. ‘Are you hurt, Lord-Celestant?’

‘Only my pride. That beast is mine, Tegrus!’ he bellowed, shaking a fist at the Prosecutor-Prime. Whether the other Stormcast heard him, he couldn’t say, for the Prosecutor was forced to bank and rise upwards as the verminlord retreated to safety amongst the heaving ranks of its followers.

‘Kill-kill for Vermalanx!’ the verminlord shrieked as it sprang to the top of one of the few remaining standing stones that occupied the soupy ground before the Gates of Dawn. ‘Kill the storm-things!’ it shrilled, snapping its yellowing fangs in a show of fury. It gesticulated, urging its followers forward, and they went in scuttling waves, darting between the slower plaguebearers and leaping over the frolicking nurglings to get to the Stormcast.

As the ranks of ratmen went on the attack, squealing bands of skaven slaves scrambled up from the hole the others had emerged from, dragging the rickety shapes of catapults and other, more esoteric, war-engines. These weapons were turned on the Stormcast, and the sky was soon marked by poison contrails and whistling chunks of glowing green rock.

‘We must destroy those weapons,’ Gravewalker said, swatting a frothing ratman in mid-leap. ‘They will pick us apart otherwise.’

He and Zephacleas fought back to back for a moment. The Lord-Celestant saw Tegrus flare his wings and the crackling feathers sliced a ratman in two.

‘Aye, and I know just the Stormcast to see to it. Ho, winged one, make yourself useful… Take out those catapults,’ Zephacleas shouted.

He did not see whether his command was obeyed, for a knot of skaven came at him in a rush, and he was forced to defend himself. He heard men scream and die, and the dull roar of their spirits ascending back to Azyr, bound for Reforging. The black clouds above were struck through with hundreds of pinholes made by these flashes of bright light. How many warriors had already returned to the cosmic forges?

Too many, he thought, as he spitted a skaven on his sword. He turned towards the Gates of Dawn and saw the tiny form of Gardus locked in combat with the bloated nightmare at the top. Hurry, my friend, he thought, before this all becomes for naught – hurry, Gardus. Hurry!

Chapter Nine

Duel at the Gates of Dawn

Gardus’s lungs burned as he climbed, and his legs soon ached, but he refused to slow. He could hear the rumble of one of the greater daemon’s bodyguards pursuing him, but he couldn’t afford to stop and confront the creature. The Gates of Dawn had to be closed, one way or another. If he could destroy the realmgate, the battle would be won.

As he reached the uppermost landing, the archway began to tremble, the stones grinding against one another. Bolathrax flung his hands out in a throwing motion, and the darkness beyond the arch suddenly congealed and burst. A dozen monstrous flies – each one larger than a man, and bearing a plaguebearer on its back – exploded out from the archway and shot towards the battle, followed by thousands of their smaller kin.

Gardus stared in shock as the plague drones flew past him. He turned to look at the Gates of Dawn. It had become tainted, he knew – it was now nothing more than a blasphemous canker in the skin of reality, leading to Chaos itself. His heart shuddered in his chest as he stared into the swirling darkness. It pulsed with an unholy rhythm, like a thing alive. I have to destroy it, he thought, hesitation turning to determination.

‘Look who it is,’ Bolathrax said, as he turned to look down at Gardus. ‘Come alone, little boil? I suppose your friends are rather busy, eh?’ The Great Unclean One laughed.

‘One of me is more than enough to handle the likes of you,’ Gardus said, whipping his hammer out and around.

The head punched into Bolathrax’s belly, tearing the sagging flesh. Gardus struck again and again, making great wounds in the daemon’s body. Bolathrax sagged back, mouth open in a mocking leer.

‘Oh, I don’t think so, dear me, no,’ the Great Unclean One rumbled. ‘I simply cannot abide baseless bravado in one so infinitesimal.’ The creature lashed out with his chained flail, shattering stone, and the force of the impact nearly knocked Gardus from the top of the steps. ‘You are nothing, mortal. A momentary distraction, a gaseous emission, passed and just as soon forgotten,’ Bolathrax continued. ‘Just like that frail wretch you call a god. God? Pah! I have met gods and warred with them in Grandfather’s name. Your lightning-hurler is no god. Merely an old wound, yet to properly heal.’ The flail slammed down again, sending a fusillade of stone fragments bouncing off Gardus’s armour. ‘We shall deal with him directly, have no fear. The Age of Chaos has only just begun, and it shall last unto eternity.’

Gardus ducked aside as the flail rose for another blow and struck at the hand holding it. Twisted bone cracked and Bolathrax jerked his arm back, opening himself up. Gardus struck again, and foul juices burst from the resulting wound to slop upon the stones. He nearly slipped in the excrescence and fought to maintain his footing. Disgusted, he watched as nurglings sprouted from the spilled blood and began to caper and dance as he and Bolathrax swung and parried, jabbed and blocked beneath the arch.

‘That… hurt,’ Bolathrax hissed, clutching his wounded limb. With a bone-rattling roar, he drew a rusty blade from its rotting sheath on his hip and hacked at Gardus. ‘You hurt me, pustule!’

As they fought, Gardus caught sight of the battle still raging below. From this height, he could just make out his fellow Stormcast, fighting for their lives, even as he fought for his. He saw the writhing ranks of skaven as they scurried forward, and his Prosecutors locked in battle with the plague drones.

The filthy standards of the plaguebearers waved above their ranks as they pressed the Stormcast, and he could hear the clangour of the skaven war-bells. Then bursts of light, rose in the sky, and his eyes were drawn upwards to the black clouds and beyond.

Bolathrax’s blade slashed out, carving a gouge in Gardus’s shoulder plate and nearly knocking him from his feet. The Great Unclean One lurched forward, blade whipping back with deceptive speed, driving Gardus back across the pus-slick stones. Each blow the daemon landed seemed stronger than the last.

He caught another ringing blow on his hammer, and rolled with it, allowing it to carry him out of the daemon’s reach. As he scrambled to his feet, he backed towards the archway. Gardus had allowed Bolathrax to harry him, so that the daemon wouldn’t realise his true purpose. Now, the time for manoeuvring was done.

‘Determined little flea aren’t you?’ Bolathrax said, pursuing him.

‘Much is demanded of those to whom much is given,’ Gardus said, breathing heavily. He could feel blood trickling down beneath his armour, and his limbs trembled with growing fatigue. The Stormcasts were stronger than mortal men, but even they could tire, especially when facing a creature such as this that knew neither weakness nor hesitation.

‘A worthy sentiment,’ the daemon burbled, lifting its blade. ‘A shame it came from the lips of such frail flesh.’

The blade licked out, drawing sparks from Gardus’s sword. The force of the blow nearly ripped it from his hand. Gardus stumbled back.

‘You are weak, as weak as the godling you serve,’ Bolathrax said. ‘You thought to challenge Grandfather in his garden? For shame.’ The daemon shook its blubbery head in mock-disappointment as it hewed at him. He twisted aside, narrowly avoiding the blow. The sword smashed down and lodged in the stones, giving him a moment’s respite.

The garden, Gardus thought. He glanced towards the archway, and the noisome void beyond. He knew what must be done. Death was a certainty, but failure… Gardus smiled, and spared a glance for the clouds above. Somewhere past them, the wheel of stars would continue to turn. He felt at peace, all doubt and fear gone. Sigmar had commanded him to deny the realmgate to the enemy, and so he would. He met Bolathrax’s gaze, and said, ‘Who will be triumphant?’

Bolathrax hesitated, hideous features twisting into a quizzical expression.

‘Only the faithful,’ Gardus said. Then, he spun, quicker than the daemon could follow, and launched himself through the Gates of Dawn, his hammer raised high.

Chapter Ten

The march of the wargroves

Zephacleas chopped down on a plaguebearer’s horned skull, and looked up as Bolathrax bellowed in rage and what might have been fear. He saw Gardus lunge for the shimmering aperture. Instinctively he flung out a hand as if to catch hold of the other Stormcast and pull him back from the precipice. ‘Gardus – No!’ he shouted, but too late. Even as the words left his mouth, Gardus vanished.

Bolathrax threw back its horned head and howled. Then, with a single, awkward motion, the Great Unclean One flung itself after the Lord-Celestant of the Steel Souls in pursuit. It smashed into the Gates of Dawn, squeezing through the archway with a convulsive heave. As the greater daemon passed through, the archway shuddered and swayed on its keystones and then, with a thunderous roar, it crumbled into a pile of broken stone. As the stones fell, the binding magics of the Gates of Dawn were released, resulting in an explosion of eldritch force. Those daemons closest to the portal were incinerated by the wave of destructive magics that escaped. Still there were many, many more, and they attacked the remaining Stormcasts with renewed ferocity.

‘He has done it,’ Gravewalker said. ‘The gate is closed. They will receive no more reinforcements.’ Lightning speared down at his gesture, obliterating a knot of plaguebearers.

Zephacleas gave a great cry and smashed a charging daemon aside with his hammer. ‘Aye, he’s done it,’ he said hollowly. All across the battlefield, the few Stormcast Eternals still standing redoubled their own efforts. Weariness and wounds were forgotten as Hallowed Knight and Astral Templar alike plunged recklessly into the ranks of the foe – all thought of discipline lost in a tide of grief and rage.

Gardus had been respected, loved by his men and those who had known him, and Zephacleas had neither the heart nor the inclination to restrain them. Indeed, he joined them fully, bellowing oaths and curses in equal measure, fighting with a wild abandon.

‘If this be our dying day, let’s make it one to remember,’ he roared.

He hooked a plaguebearer’s horn with his hammer and dragged it forward, so that the sigmarite of his helm crunched against its rotting skull. The daemon reeled and Zephacleas chopped it down, splitting the dazed creature from shoulder to groin with one blow.

‘Fight, for Gardus! For Sigmar! And for the Realm Celestial!’

‘Very stirring,’ Gravewalker said. ‘You might have a future as Lord-Celestant yet, Zephacleas.’

The Lord-Relictor had planted his standard and stood before it, swinging his hammer in quick, precise strikes. Frothing skaven fell with every blow.

‘Cease prattling and fight, Gravewalker,’ Zephacleas snarled. A skaven lunged for him, its pox-ridden blade shattering as it struck his side. He drove his elbow into its skull and pinned it to the ground with his foot. His hammer put an end to its struggles. More skaven pressed in, clambering up the locked shields of his Stormcast, their blades digging for eye-slits and their bludgeons crashing down on war-helms.

Gravewalker extended his free hand towards the Liberators before him and began to murmur harshly. A soft blue glow suffused his dark gauntlet and then spread to encompass the Liberators, who straightened as if his words had purged them of all exhaustion and ills.

Zephacleas pulverised a skaven in mid-leap, and turned to block a daemon’s blade as it dug for his vitals. Caught between rabid vermin and daemons, he thought, shoving a plaguebearer back. It wasn’t exactly the way he had imagined he would meet his end.

He looked around, hunting for the verminlord. If he was bound for Reforging, he wanted a fine memory to carry with him into the fire. He caught sight of the creature, perched on one of the obscene obelisks scattered about the fen. It exhorted its followers shrilly, tail lashing in frustration as the remaining Stormcasts refused to break beneath the unceasing onslaught of the plague legions. The Lord-Celestant smiled and clashed his weapons together. He was determined to come to grips with the rat-daemon.

Before he could take a single step, however, the noisome air was split by the winding call of a hunting horn. Then another, and another, until the surrounding woodland rang with the sound of them. The skaven ranks began to boil with panic as something struck their flank. Zephacleas pulverised a robed ratman, and tried to catch a glimpse of the newcomers. There had been no lightning, no thunder – this was not Sigmar’s doing, he knew.

Zephacleas took advantage of the distraction to charge towards the verminlord. Whoever they were, the newcomers’ sudden arrival had given the Stormcasts a chance of survival and he intended to make the most of it. As he ran, he heard the sound of wood cracking and popping as a plague-claw catapult was torn apart. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw ratmen flung into the air or snatched from sight.

The verminlord hissed in consternation as it cut its eyes towards the dissolving flank of its forces. Zephacleas reached it a step later and drove his hammer into the menhir it was crouched upon, cracking and toppling it over. Screaming, the verminlord leapt from the falling rock, trailing wisps of stinking smoke, and the curved blades in its paws scythed towards the Lord-Celestant.

But Zephacleas swung his sword up and blocked the downward stroke of the curved blades. Before the full weight of the falling rat-daemon could crash into him, he rammed the head of his hammer into its belly, doubling it over and shoving it backwards. The giant beast chopped at him with its blades, scoring his armour again and again as the Lord-Celestant’s momentum carried them into the fallen stone. They staggered back and fell. He landed atop the verminlord and swiftly drove his forearm into its hairy throat, keeping it from biting him. It flung him off, and he landed in a rattle of sigmarite.

Quick as hate, the rat-daemon was on him, blades flashing down towards the joints of his armour. With desperate speed he squirmed backwards through the muck of the fen, blocking the blows as he went. Sigmar, he’s a fast one, he thought. The rat-daemon leaned in and struck, its curved blade screeching off his war-helm in a shower of greasy sparks. Zephacleas drove his feet up into its gut and sent it flying over his head. It slammed down a few feet away, its fleshless snout digging a trench in the mire.

Zephacleas rolled to his feet, hammer in hand, narrowly avoiding a flailing kick from the verminlord. It scrambled around on all fours, body contorted in a bestial fashion. Its tail lashed out, and the bladed tip tore the weapon from his hands with stinging force. He flung himself aside as the rat-daemon pounced. Sweat coated his face, and his breath rasped in his lungs as he rose to one knee and clawed for the hilt of his runeblade. He jerked back instinctively as the verminlord’s bladed tail skittered off his helm, nearly blinding him. Quickly he reached out and caught the ropy length of the tail as it curled back around. In the same motion, he drew his blade and chopped down, severing the twisting, squirming appendage. The rat-daemon squealed in agony and rage.

Zephacleas flung the still-writhing lump of flesh aside, but the verminlord hissed and charged with arms wide. The creature’s blades tore one of Zephacleas’s pauldrons loose as he lunged forward. Frantically he twisted, bringing his sword through its chest and out of the rat-daemon’s back in a gout of brackish blood and foul-smelling steam. Its weight carried it past him and he ripped his weapon free as it fell, body already beginning to dissolve into clumps of mouldering hair and rotting meat. Hairless, blind rats squirmed out of the sagging mass and scampered away, squealing obscenely.

Zephacleas had little time to see to the vermin. The remaining skaven were fleeing with high-pitched squeals of panic, clawing at one another in their haste to escape the enemy. The daemonic legions, however, showed no indication that they were at all concerned by the rout of their allies. Plaguebearers lurched towards the thin line of Astral Templars and Hallowed Knights, as nurglings burbled ahead of them in a cackling wave. He tensed and readied himself to meet their charge, only to be knocked to one knee. The ground suddenly erupted in thrashing tendrils of bark and vine, obliterating daemons on all sides.

They were not alone in their fate.

All around him, great roots burst from the ailing soil as quick as bolts from a Judicator’s crossbow. The roots rent and throttled daemons wherever they found them, and those creatures that escaped their deadly grasp were torn apart or stamped flat by the vast talons and crashing feet of the thing storming towards them with earth-shaking strides. To Zephacleas it resembled a tree, but one imbued with hateful purpose and ferocity far beyond any creature of common flesh. It towered over the foe, and pummelled them with heavy fists as it stomped past him.

Treelord, he thought, in horrified wonder. He had never seen such a being, but he had heard the tales – all Stormcasts had: stories of marching forests, and the wrath of the deep woods on any who dared threaten the realms of the mistress of the Sylvaneth.

Behind the bark-born giant came a clattering warglade of Sylvaneth dryads, crooning an eerie song of slaughter. With whipping, vicious talons they stabbed and strangled any daemons that had survived the treelord’s initial charge. The Lord-Celestant stepped back as a sharp-limbed dryad bounded past him to pounce upon a plaguebearer. He stepped forward, hammer raised, to help the treekin and the dryad whirled with a hiss.

He lowered his weapon and took a step back. The dryad turned back to its prey and stabbed branch-like fingers into the daemon’s one bleary eye. The plaguebearer bucked and kicked as the dryad peeled its skull apart.

After a moment, the dryad rose, hissed at Zephacleas again, and then loped away. He watched it go, uncertain as to whether it was advisable to follow. Had Sigmar’s messengers found Alarielle? Or were these treekin acting on their own savage initiative?

A moment later, his question was answered. The last daemon fell, pulled apart by two squabbling dryads. The treelord shoved the two creatures aside and moved ponderously towards the remaining Stormcast. Zephacleas rejoined the others; Gravewalker and the Judicator-Prime of the Hallowed Knights followed him.

‘Solus,’ Zephacleas murmured. ‘Good to see you still breathing.’

‘For now, at any rate,’ Solus said, wiping pestilential muck from the blade of his gladius. His once-pristine armour was caked in mud and grime. ‘Gardus?’

‘Gone,’ Zephacleas said.

Solus nodded, knowing well enough what that meant. ‘Most of us are,’ he said softly.

Zephacleas tossed a quick glance behind him. There were fewer than three dozen warriors between their hosts who could stand unassisted. The Hallowed Knights and the Astral Templars had paid a heavy toll to take the Ghyrtract Fen. ‘The rest of us might soon be joining them,’ Solus continued, jerking his chin towards the approaching treelord.

‘Well, only one way to find out,’ Zephacleas said. He looked at Gravewalker. ‘You know what to do. If they decide we’re not allies, call down the lightning until there isn’t a tree left standing.’

‘And then what?’ Gravewalker asked, leaning against his standard.

‘Whatever you see fit – I’ll be back in the forges by then,’ Zephacleas shot back, over his shoulder, as he strode to meet the treelord. He turned to face the immense being, and studied it closely, looking for any hint of its intentions.

I wish it was you standing here my friend, rather than me, he thought, glancing at the remains of the realmgate. Gardus would have known what to do, that much he was sure of.

He swung his hammer up onto his shoulder and sheathed his sword as the treelord came to a creaking halt before him. The ancient being stared down at him for a long moment, its green eyes glowing strangely. Zephacleas felt a chill as he met its gaze. There was a power there, unlike anything he had yet encountered. Behind it, dryads prowled and hissed, clattering leafy claws. He had never seen such creatures before, and the way they moved set his teeth on edge. They watched him with what he took to be wariness, and suspected that if he said the wrong thing, the dryads would leap on him and seek to tear him limb from limb.

Zephacleas cleared his throat and hesitated. What was the proper way to address a walking tree? How did one talk to a creature like this? Would it even understand him? ‘We… thank you, forest-lord.’

The treelord stared down at him for long moments. ‘Weee… haaave… cooome,’ it said, speaking slowly, as if human speech were difficult for it. Its voice sounded like branches creaking in a wind storm. ‘Weee… have… come… to… aid… thee,’ it continued.

‘And we thank thee, mighty one. Your arrival was timely, and much appreciated,’ Zephacleas said. The creature’s voice reverberated through him, and he was suddenly glad that he didn’t have to fight this being. He had no doubt he would be victorious, but it would be a close thing.

The treelord was silent for a time. Then, with a rustling groan, it said, ‘Aaaazyr… There… is… a… way… baaack… to… Azyr.’ It turned slightly, following his glance towards the realmgate. A sound like leaves swirling in the wind emerged from the treekin’s bark-covered jaws. ‘Not… thaaat… way.’ It turned away. ‘Weee… will… show… you.’

Slowly, with great earth-shaking strides, the treelord began to depart. Dryads clustered about it like adoring courtiers. Zephacleas shook his head. A being of few words, he thought. He looked at the smashed and mangled remains of the skaven. Then, who needs words?

‘Thank you,’ he called after the treelord. Turning, he spoke to his brothers. ‘Seker, take Solus and two others – see what our… allies have to show us.’ He still wasn’t certain whether the sudden arrival of the warglades meant that Sigmar’s emissaries had been successful in their task, or that the creatures had come on their own initiative, but it hardly mattered. If they knew of a functioning realmgate, one that could provide a route to Azyr, then it would be the height of foolishness to ignore it. They needed reinforcements badly, and the Hallowed Knights needed their Lord-Castellant now that their Lord-Celestant had fallen.

Zephacleas looked towards the shattered realmgate. Dust and smoke still rose from the fallen stones, marking the final resting place of the Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights. He could not say whether a soul could find its way back to Azyr from within the Realm of Chaos. Somehow, he didn’t think so, else what was all of this for? Why bother to wage war, if the Ruinous Powers could be defeated so easily? Gardus would not reappear in the celestine vaults of far off Sigmaron, hale and hearty.

Grymn will not forgive me, he thought. The Lord-Castellant had asked him to keep Gardus safe, and he had failed. It would not matter that Gardus had chosen his fate as a warrior.

Zephacleas sighed and bowed his head. I am sorry, my friend, he thought.

He slowly sank to one knee, planting his hammer and sword in the earth before him. All around him the remaining Stormcasts followed suit, bowing in silence – Hallowed Knights and Astral Templars alike, offering prayers for Gardus, the Steel Soul.

Zephacleas closed his eyes.

Go in peace, Gardus. Fight well. Wherever you are now, I hope that your faith has not deserted you.

EPILOGUE

Only the faithful

Gardus ran.

His breath burned in his lungs. His heart pounded feverishly. Every step was a titanic struggle, and his limbs felt like weights of pure sigmarite. The weapons in his hands were heavier than he had ever known them to be, but he dared not drop them. Not here.

He ran, pushing himself through thigh-deep muck, and sucking ordure. He knew that, were it not for his faith, he would have been dead a hundred times over.

‘Only the faithful,’ he gasped ‘Only the faithful.’ The words escaped his cracked and bleeding lips over and over again, a mantra against madness, a reminder of who he was. The words kept his limbs moving and his abused lungs snatching in the foul air.

He heard a thunderous splash behind him, but did not dare look back. He would have seen nothing, he knew, save the miasmic haze that cloaked this place. In a way, he was thankful for it – no mortal could gaze upon the loathsome horrors of Nurgle’s garden and emerge sane.

Then, perhaps you are already mad, he thought, and choked on a wild laugh. If he started laughing, he would not stop. Around him, he heard the tinny giggles of nurglings and worse things, as they watched him go by. So far, none had sought to bar his path, and why would they? There was no escape from the garden, and he was already marked by one greater than they. ‘Only the faithful,’ he hissed. ‘Only the faithful. Only the faithful.’

Another splash, closer this time. He felt the muck tremble beneath his feet as his pursuer drew close.

‘Why do you run, little pustule?’ Bolathrax’s deep voice rumbled from the haze somewhere behind him, thick with foul mirth. ‘Can we not promenade the Grandfather’s glopsome gardens together, Gardus?’

He bent his head and forged on, trying to ignore the voice, the stink of this place, all of it, save what lay directly ahead of him. ‘Only the faithful,’ he breathed.

‘There is so much to see, Gardus… so much to learn at Grandfather’s knee, if you but have the wit to listen,’ Bolathrax boomed. ‘Slow your feet, stay awhile…’

His voice faded, and Gardus wondered whether the creature had any more sense of where it was going than he did. Then, perhaps it didn’t care. To Bolathrax, he was but an afternoon’s pleasant diversion.

Gardus thought again of stopping, turning, facing the daemon as a true Stormcast, hammer in hand, but he knew that was simply another sort of madness. He had faced the creature and been found wanting. Here, in the very seat of Nurgle’s power, he stood no chance at all. All he could do was run.

So Gardus ran.

Prologue

In the Garden of Nurgle

Gardus ran.

He did not run alone. Ghosts kept pace, maybe a hundred or more: souls trapped in Nurgle’s garden or perhaps memories given a twisted half-life by Gardus’ will and the madness of this place. They ran with him, or stumbled in his wake, no more substantial than the stinking murk that rose from the ground beneath his feet.

Some were familiar, most were not. Nonetheless, they all clung to him with whispy fingers, shapes thinning and fading as he struggled out of their clutches. Men and women and children, all victims of plague and illness, all caught in the garden, unable to escape. He wanted to call to them, to comfort them, but he could not. He was helpless here, able only to run, to flee that which followed.

Help us…

Garradan, help me…

Healer, where are you…

Healer…

Garradan…

‘Gardus, why do you run?’ echoed the hateful, burbling voice of his pursuer.

The ghosts momentarily scattered, only to return all the more insistently as Gardus stumbled and sank to one knee in the mire. He thought again of turning to face the daemon as a true Stormcast, hammer in hand. But something told him to keep running. A voice… a whisper of song… some compulsion to which he could not give name drove him on.

And so he ran, through the very seat of Nurgle’s power. Signs of it were everywhere he looked. Strange, unnatural plants loomed on all sides, their fleshy leaves dripping with mucus and their pale blossoms weeping pus. He could hear heavy forms floundering in the murk, but could not see them. He could barely see his own hand in front of his face. His lungs burned with foulness and his armour was crusted with grime and mould. Whenever he stopped for breath or fell, the mould began to grow, creeping across his silver sigmarite. It was as if the garden were seeking to take him into itself, to make him part of it.

He had seen what such a fate meant – had seen the twisted, moss covered boles with silently screaming faces, and trees bent in agonised, almost human postures – and had no wish to experience it himself. Only the faithful, he thought, as he pushed himself to his feet.

‘Still repeating that phrase, as if that’ll help you,’ came the rumbling taunt. ‘Your thoughts hang heavy on the perfumed air of the Grandfather’s garden. It disturbs the flies, Gardus – or should I call you Garradan?’

So far, Bolathrax had kept itself at a distance, seemingly more interested in the chase than the kill. That was the sole reason he still lived, Gardus knew. The garden of Nurgle was populated by more than the stinging flies that crawled across his armour. Great beasts, brawling daemons and cackling, pestilential sprites had all shown themselves at one point or another. Most crept out of the dripping undergrowth to watch his flight. Others tried to stop him, but were warded off by a roar from Bolathrax or else fell to Gardus’ hammer and sword. The deaths of these creatures were greeted by a rumbling from the poisonous clouds above.

He ignored those clouds now, after the first time, when he’d looked up and they’d briefly cleared to reveal a grin as wide as the sky itself and two pus-cream eyes as big as moons. This was Nurgle’s realm, and nothing happened here that the God of Decay did not see and approve of. Gardus did not look up now, or to the side. He kept his gaze to the fore and ploughed on, trying to ignore the exhaustion that clawed at his mind.

‘Tired, aren’t you, Garradan?’ Bolathrax gloated. ‘But not as tired as you were that final night in Demesnus Harbour, eh? When the skinstealers at last crested the walls and the hospice of Grand Lazzar came under attack, you had been awake for three days, tending the wounded and dying. Was that why you picked up those candlesticks as they butchered your patients? White robes gone red, Garradan… That’s what you dream of.’

The ghosts redoubled their efforts to gain his attention as Bolathrax spoke. He saw the faces of lepers and wounded soldiers, of starvelings and nobles alike, mingling with the howling, scarred features of skinstealers. He brought his hands up.

Garradan… help me…

So sick…

Help us teacher…

Burning up…

Can’t move…

Help us…

Garradan…

Garradan…

Gardus stumbled on, driven by a resolve as hard as steel. Sigmar would sustain him. He was faithful.

He swept his arms out, trying to drive the ghosts away, but it was no use. He could see faces in the surface of the waters he waded through, and in the murk before him. All of them cursing him, begging him for help, screaming his name. The ground trembled beneath his feet as Bolathrax continued to follow and to chortle grotesquely.

‘Where are you going, Garradan? The garden is boundless and you will never breach its walls. Stop, give in, and Bolathrax will be merciful…’

‘Only the faithful,’ Gardus said, driving himself forward. He was not Garradan the healer, not anymore; he was Gardus, the Stormcast Eternal. He was no mere mortal, he was Sigmar’s lightning made flesh. And he would not stop. ‘Only the faithful… Only the faithful…’

The words were less a prayer now than a mantra, a chant to keep him sane in this mad garden of horrors. He scraped the thick shroud of mould off his helm, clearing his vision, and blinked in shock as a brilliant glimmer of light flickered through the haze ahead.

‘What?’ he croaked. A trick? A trap? Or something else? He heard a rumble from above and risked a look. The mouth in the clouds was no longer leering, but instead… frowning. Hope blossomed in his chest and he took a trembling step forwards. It was so beautiful. He took another step. His breath caught in his throat.

Wherever that glow originated from, it could not be of this hideous realm. The song in his head, the whisper of sound that pulled him on, swelled to a crescendo as Gardus ploughed on. At last, he knew where he was going. Weapons in hand, he pressed forward, wading towards the swelling, lambent light…

Chapter One

To silence the dirge

The sound of the Dirgehorn hung over everything.

Here, so close to the source, it was almost a physical pressure, beating upon the minds and souls of the Stormcast Eternals who fought their way through the crooked, fungus-slick trees and overgrown fen of Rotwater Blight.

The call of the Dirgehorn was in everything, reverberating from every stone and stump, quavering in the fly-blown air like an unending groan. The hideous sound of it rolled on and on, each note slithering into the next. It was a wave of pure discord, sluggish and flat, carrying with it despondency and gloom. It was a constant drone that shivered along on the wings of flies and miasmic breezes, withering trees and cracking rocks. Where it passed, green leaves turned black and the very stones sprouted quivering boils and buboes.

The sylvaneth had been put to flight by its mournful note, clutching at their heads with palsied fingers as their bark-like flesh grew cracked and pale. Those who had made Rotwater Blight their home fled deeper into the forests to escape it, and the land echoed with the sounds of their flight. Dryads shrieked and wailed as they staggered through the swampy forest, adding to the already horrid din, and squealing forest spites filled the air, flickering like fireflies as they hurtled away from the maddening pulse.

But while the treekin fled, the Stormcasts plunged into the teeth of that droning sound, determined to silence it or perish in the attempt. Retinue after retinue, brotherhood by brotherhood, they slogged on, through stinking mire and dying glade, pitting lightning-forged hearts and souls against the blaring call of Nurgle. Liberators and Retributors marched in ordered phalanxes along the mould-spotted trails and were guided by winged Prosecutors, who braved the fly-choked air to steer their kin to firmer ground. The Decimators’ weapons glowed with cold fire as they carved a path towards the Dirgehorn’s call, hacking through thick vines that sprayed viscous sap and clutching branches that writhed like serpents as they fell.

The Steel Souls, a Warrior Chamber of the Hallowed Knights, led the way. Their panoply of war gleamed silver and rich gold, while their shoulder guards and heavy shields were of deepest regal blue. The Steel Souls were not alone in their march – others shared their burden. Warrior Chambers from the Astral Templars and the Guardians of the Firmament both fought their way through Rotwater Blight alongside the Hallowed Knights, their Decimators joining those of the Steel Souls at the point of the spear.

The Stormcasts had borne the wailing call of the artefact known at the Dirgehorn for many miles and days of marching, braving horrors undreamt of. They had struggled through belching quagmires and hillocks of dead insects. The bubbling morass of the Greenglow Lake stretched to the west of the armoured host, splitting the land like an open wound. To the east, the thick forests of the Blight rose wild and forbidding. The sky overhead was the colour of an infected wound, and a choking wind blew from the east.

Everywhere Lord-Castellant Lorrus Grymn of the Hallowed Knights looked, it was as if the land was dying. He strode alongside the column, accompanied by the furry, feathered shape of his loyal gryph-hound, Tallon. His heavy halberd lay across one broad shoulder, and he kept a firm grip on its haft, ready to swing it into position at a moment’s notice. He held his warding lantern high, casting its light across the ranks of warriors as they marched. The fortifying glow burned off the layers of filth that caked the armour of his brethren, returning it to a glorious lustre, as was fitting.

The Hallowed Knights had been the fourth Stormhost to be founded, the ranks of their Warrior Chambers filled with the faithful of the Mortal Realms. Their only commonality was that each had called upon Sigmar’s name in battle and had been heard, and that each had shed his mortal flesh in the name of a righteous cause. The Steel Souls were the best of them, tried and tested and found worthy in the fires of war. But not without cost, Grymn thought.

Yes, the Steel Souls had paid a heavy price. Lord-Celestant Gardus, the one who had given them their name, was gone, lost through the realmgate known as the Gates of Dawn, leaving his warriors bereft of his leadership. It had been Gardus who had led the first strike into the wilds of Ghyran so that a permanent path to Azyr might be opened. It had been Gardus who had been sent to ensure that Grymn and the rest of his Warrior Chamber might descend upon the Jade Kingdoms to reinforce their brothers. It was not to be, however.

Despite the aid of the Astral Templars, and the last minute intervention of the warglades of the mysterious sylvaneth, Gardus had been forced to destroy the realmgate and had perished in the act. Damn you, Gardus, Grymn thought, not for the first time. It was even as the Lord-Relictor of the Steel Souls, Morbus Stormwarden, had said. The sage had seen Gardus’ fall in his dreams and had come to Grymn with his concerns. But too late.

And now Gardus was gone. The best of them. The one who had been, up to this point, Grymn’s only equal on or off the field – a man with whom he had been proud to stand shoulder to shoulder against the foes of Sigmar.

The Steel Soul had not died as a Stormcast ought and returned to the great forges of Sigmaron, there to be remade by the hands of the God-King himself. Instead, Gardus had thrown himself into the Realm of Chaos, locked in combat with a greater daemon. No soul returned from those hell-realms.

Not even one made of steel, Grymn thought. Angry now, he turned his thoughts to the present. They had a duty to fulfil and they would meet it no matter the cost. The Dirgehorn would be silenced. Of this Grymn was confident. But he knew that while the artefact had sorely afflicted the inhabitants of these wooded realms, it was not the sole cause of their pain.

Flies droned and swamp-sludge bubbled as rotted boughs creaked in the unnatural pall that marked the places where Nurgle’s influence had eclipsed that of the Realm of Life’s rightful ruler. Chain-throttled oaks moaned wordlessly about them and forest spirits struggled helplessly in the mires of Nurgle’s making. The Stormcasts who fought across the ever-shifting landscape of Ghyran were doing what they could to free the Jade Kingdoms from the clutches of the Plague Lord, but they could not do it alone. Sigmar had sent representatives to find the Lady Alarielle, in her seclusion, and re-establish old ties, but as far as Grymn knew they had all returned to Azyr empty-handed.

Alarielle had, like Sigmar himself, existed for untold aeons, and there were murals in Sigmaron dedicated to her. The largest and greatest of these showed Sigmar waking the Radiant Queen from her centuries of slumber, and the two throwing back the forces of darkness together. Once, she had been the God-King’s ally. Once… but not for many years, since the powers of ruin had swept through the Mortal Realms and the great celestine Gates of Azyr had slammed shut, sealing the Realm of Heavens off from the rest of the Eight Realms. Now those gates were open once more, and Sigmar had stretched forth his hand to old and new allies alike, so that together they might throw off the chains of monstrous tyranny.

A good dream, if as yet unproven, Grymn thought.

‘Lord-Castellant!’

Grymn looked up as the silver swooping form of Tegrus of the Sainted Eye, Prosecutor-Prime of the Steel Souls, gestured towards the shore of the lake. Grymn cursed as he saw several Stormcasts stumble towards the dark waters.

‘Tallon – go!’ he said urgently as he hurried towards the warriors. The gryph-hound chirped and bounded away. The animal slid between the Stormcasts, snapping and shrieking, stopping them in their tracks long enough for Grymn to reach them. ‘Back, you fools, get away from the water,’ he roared.

As he caught hold of a stumbling Stormcast’s shoulder and pulled the warrior back, the still waters of the lake erupted in a storm of lashing, mouth-studded tendrils. Several of the Stormcasts were snatched up before they even had time to cry out. Tallon flung himself upon one tendril, severing it with his beak and freeing the warrior it held.

‘Back,’ Grymn roared again, hooking his lantern on the blade of his halberd and extending it out over the water. The light of the warding lantern shone across the frothing lake, and the tendrils retreated as if burned. In the darkness, something wailed like a damned soul, and Grymn heard heavy bodies flopping and thrashing.

‘Tegrus,’ Grymn called out to the Prosecutor swooping overhead. ‘Drive these beasts back into the depths!’

Overhead, Tegrus led his winged warriors out over the water. They hurled their celestial hammers at the vast shapes that dwelled beneath the murk. The monsters plunged deeper into the waters to avoid the barrage, leaving behind only a sour smell and the shooting blue light of those warriors they had managed to drown before Grymn had stymied them.

‘Away,’ he snarled, gesturing back towards the path. ‘Get back. Move!’

Grymn turned his attentions to the warrior he’d saved. The Liberator stumbled against him as they moved away from the water, half-torpid, weapon and shield dangling from his grip. He was an Astral Templar, clad in amethyst and gold.

‘Awaken,’ Grymn said, shaking the Liberator. The warrior slumped, and Grymn grunted as he caught him. ‘Awaken, I say – do not give in. Heed me!’ He set his halberd so that the light of his lantern caught the warrior full. As the light bathed him, the Liberator struggled upright, gaining strength from the healing glow of the warding lantern.

‘I just… I just wanted to clean this filth from my war-plate,’ the Stormcast said, his voice slurred. ‘To wash myself clean of the taint of this place. To drink…’

‘Yes, brother, there is no shame in that,’ Grymn said urgently. ‘But this place devours warriors as surely as any beast. You must keep to the road. Stay in the light.’

Some among the Stormhost were beginning to succumb to the waking nightmare of this realm, their spirits sapped by the relentless blare of the Dirgehorn and the miasma that clung to the land around them. Their war mantras were drowned out by the growing cacophony of the horn, denying them succour, and every day saw more warriors sent back to Azyr in a blaze of blue light. Rotwater Blight was as much their enemy as the servants of Nurgle.

‘I can… I can hear it, Lord-Castellant,’ the Liberator said. ‘It’s… burrowing into my mind… my soul.’ He reached up as if to tear his helmet off, and fumbled with his weapon and shield, nearly dropping them. ‘It’s echoing in my head!’

Grymn seized the warrior’s hands.

‘Stop,’ he snarled, shouting to be heard over the shriek of the Dirgehorn. ‘You are Stormcast. Remember what that means, brother.’

‘I have him, Lord-Castellant,’ a voice said.

Grymn looked up and saw the heavy shape of the Lord-Celestant of the Astral Templars. Zephacleas had been a big man, even before his Reforging, and he loomed over Grymn now, his amethyst armour scorched in places and scored with the marks of claws and fangs. Now he caught the Liberator by the shoulders.

‘Arcos, isn’t it? You stood with me at the Lake of Screaming Reeds, when that toad dragon hurled itself at the shieldwall of our brothers. I nearly broke my blade on its blubbery hide and you were there, shielding me from its vile spew. And at the Grove of Blighted Lanterns, did you not raise your hammer in defence of your brothers, as the jabberslythes screamed? Stand tall, Arcos. We are the Beast-Bane, slayers of the Black Bull of Nordrath, and we shall not allow a mere winding tune to break us.’

The warrior nodded wearily and allowed his Lord-Celestant to urge him back towards his brethren. Zephacleas watched him go, and then turned to Grymn.

‘Death is a high price, but not without its allure,’ the Lord-Celestant said, watching the lake.

‘Is your resolve so fragile, Beast-Bane?’ Grymn asked harshly.

‘No, but this hellish landscape has worn us down, Grymn. For some among our warriors, to return in failure is beginning to seem preferable to slogging through this foulness for even a single hour more,’ Zephacleas growled. ‘Even the air attacks us.’ He clutched at his head for a moment. ‘And that blasted wail never ends! It gnaws at us every moment, digging into us. I can’t even hear myself think.’

‘We must press on. We are close,’ Grymn said. ‘The horn grows louder, and we are assailed more frequently. We are close, Zephacleas. And only the faithful shall prevail.’ He thumped the other Stormcast on the shoulder. ‘Much is demanded…’

‘…of those to whom much has been given,’ Zephacleas finished. ‘Gardus says – said – that often.’ He shook his head. ‘I wish that he were here.’

‘As do I,’ Grymn said. ‘But we must–’ A cry from above interrupted him. He looked up, saw the Prosecutors circling a high, sloping hill that overlooked the lake and said, ‘Tegrus has found something.’

‘The enemy?’ Zephacleas asked.

‘Better, I think,’ Grymn said. ‘Come, we must alert the others.’

Chapter Two

The land itself

In the light cast by his lantern, Grymn looked out over the cluster of bubbling springs surrounded by lush green vegetation and took a deep breath.

‘The air is cleaner here,’ he said. The Prosecutors had led them up the hill and to the crest, where amidst the crags they had discovered this quiet oasis. Grymn, determined to investigate before he risked his warriors, had led his vanguard in.

‘It could be a trick,’ Zephacleas said.

‘It is a trick,’ Ultrades of the Broken Spear said. Like Grymn, the Lord-Celestant of the Guardians of the Firmament was stoicism given form – a warrior of iron will and determination, who had earned his name by killing an enemy warlord with a broken spear blade torn from the Stormcast’s own bloody side. ‘Another ploy of the enemy. They could not bring us down by force, and so they seek to gull us with a safe haven in a landscape of horrors.’ He shook his head. ‘We should press on.’

‘Our warriors require rest,’ Grymn said, glancing back at the vanguard of Decimators and Retributors who had followed them to the hill’s summit. The bulk of the Stormhost still waited on the slopes below, grateful for the pause. All save Tegrus and his retinue of Prosecutors, who had flown on to see what could be seen of the trail ahead.

While Stormcasts had incredible endurance, Zephacleas had been right – they were all worn down. The Rotwater Blight had sapped even the hardiest of them of their strength. Grymn had been able to keep the worst of it from his Warrior Chamber thanks to the light of his lantern, but even they skirted the edges of exhaustion. The other Warrior Chambers had lost brothers to the mire and sucking loam, as well as the myriad dangers that lurked on the fringes of their path.

‘We need rest,’ he said again. ‘And this place could provide it,’ he added. He lifted his hand. ‘Listen…’

‘I hear nothing,’ Ultrades said.

‘Exactly,’ Grymn said. ‘The drone of the Dirgehorn has receded. Listen!’

‘He’s right,’ Zephacleas said, as he looked around. ‘I can barely hear it.’ He laughed. ‘I almost forgot what my own voice sounded like.’

‘And more, there’s fresh water – no flies, no steaming clumps of filth or poison,’ Grymn said, as he started towards the closest spring. Ultrades caught his arm.

‘What are you doing?’

‘One of us must test it. We have been without pure water for days. If this is truly a trap, better to lose one than many. I am Lord-Castellant of the Steel Souls. It was given to me to be the shield for my brothers, and so it falls to me,’ Grymn said. He pulled himself free of Ultrades’ grip, and took off his crested helm of office. ‘Do not fear, my brother. I have faith and Sigmar watches over me, even here.’

‘As he watches over us all,’ Zephacleas said.

Grymn turned and went to the closest spring, where he dropped to one knee, leaned his halberd against his shoulder and made to scoop out a handful of the clear water bubbling there. He hesitated, considering Ultrades’ suspicions as well as his own. Then he plunged his fingers into the water and brought a handful of spring water to his mouth. At his side, Tallon watched intently. The gryph-hound cocked his head, and clicked his beak interrogatively.

‘Easy,’ Grymn murmured, ruffling the beast’s neck feathers. He took a drink, closing his eyes as the cool water rushed down his throat. After a moment, he cracked one eye and looked at Tallon. ‘Well, the water’s clean, all right.’

He drank again, relishing the taste of it. He felt as if a warm, golden light were filling him, and his fatigue sloughed away, as if it had never been. Tallon ducked his head and began to lap at the water with eager chirrups as Grymn turned to the others. For the first time since his Reforging, a broad smile split his face. Zephacleas stepped back.

‘By Sigmar, it’s poisoned him,’ he said.

‘I’m smiling, you slack-jawed oaf,’ Grymn laughed. He waved a hand at those Prosecutors hovering above, signalling them to alert the rest of the Stormhost that it was safe to climb to the summit. ‘Get in here and drink, all of you. It looks as if we’ve found the only pure water in this land.’ He paused, and added, ‘Better than pure.’ He examined his gauntlet and the crystal-clear droplets glittering on his palm. ‘It seems our allies have not deserted us. And perhaps this land is not entirely lost, after all.’

He closed his hand, and looked to the north, where another hill rose sharp and foul from the forest that clung to its slopes, like a cankerous tooth. That was where his scouts had marked the sound of the Dirgehorn as emanating from. That would be where they would meet the enemy, and set it to flight once more.

You started this fight, Gardus, and now I shall finish it. The steel in your soul is now in ours, and we shall not fail, he thought.

He turned around and watched as the Stormcasts knelt to drink, or to splash the clear waters across their filth-stained armour. He could hear the newfound hope in their voices, and the bitter outrage. They had been tested in the Blight, and it had not been easy., but they had persevered. The Hallowed Knights shall not falter, he thought, as he set his helm back over his head. I shall see to that, if nothing else.

‘Their faith has been renewed.’

‘Aye, Morbus. That it has. It has been sorely tested, these past few weeks. With Gardus gone…’ Grymn looked at the Lord-Relictor. Morbus Stormwarden was an imposing figure, his weapons and armour replete with icons of faith, death and the storm. It fell to him to keep the souls of his fellow Hallowed Knights from the gloom of the underworld, should such a fate loom close.

‘Gardus is gone,’ Morbus agreed. ‘But we yet stand, to carry on in his name.’ He touched one of the icons on his chest-plate. ‘When I saw… what I saw, I never truly imagined that it would come to pass.’ Morbus had seen Gardus’ demise in a dream, and though both he and the Lord-Castellant had sought to warn their Lord-Celestant, they had been too late. ‘I never truly thought that the Steel Soul could fall.’

‘Nor did I,’ Grymn said. Why did you have to do it, he thought. But he knew the answer well enough. Gardus was the sword, and Grymn the shield. It was the sword’s way, to thrust itself into the enemy’s heart, even if it shattered in doing so. ‘If only…’

‘We did not know,’ Morbus said, watching over the Stormcasts solemnly. ‘A vague premonition of doom is of little importance in times like these, when all of reality shudders beneath the weight of war. And Gardus was… Gardus.’

‘That he was, my friend,’ Grymn said. ‘And we are left to carry on.’ He cocked his head. ‘Tegrus,’ he called out, as he glimpsed a familiar silver-clad shape circling above.

The Prosecutor-Prime swooped low over them. ‘We are close, Lord-Castellant. No more than a few hours’ march,’ Tegrus said, anticipating his question.

‘And the enemy?’

‘Beastmen,’ Tegrus said, dropping to the ground before them. ‘From what we could see through the trees, we are outnumbered. A dozen of them for every one of us – ungor and gors, some in armour. Bullgors as well.’

‘They gather in strength,’ Morbus said, leaning against his reliquary staff.

‘More enemies means more glory,’ Grymn said. He stroked Tallon’s narrow skull. ‘What of the Dirgehorn?’

‘At the summit of the tor, I believe. Although even I couldn’t get close enough to see for sure. They’re clustered up there as thick as fleas, and they sent a hail of arrows my way,’ Tegrus said, gesturing with one of his hammers. ‘We shall have to fight our way up.’ He looked at Grymn. ‘It will be bloody.’

‘Good. I am in the mood for it,’ Grymn said.

‘As am I,’ Tegrus said grimly. ‘Would that Gardus were here to share in this battle.’ He crossed his hammers and bent his head. Grymn and Morbus bowed their heads as well.

‘Would that he was. But he is not, and so we must fight in his name. We will teach the enemy that the Steel Soul is not so easily broken. We will teach them, Tegrus.’

‘So we shall, Lord-Castellant,’ Tegrus said, rising into the air with a snap of his wings.

Morbus watched him go, and said, ‘What next, Lorrus?’

‘We are owed a debt of pain, Morbus. I intend to collect it.’ Grymn lifted his lantern high, so that its light was reflected from the sigmarite that armoured his warriors, and threw back the shadows. ‘Who are we?’ he asked, his voice carrying to every ear. ‘Who are we?’ he said again, thumping the ground with the haft of his halberd. ‘We are the tempest-borne, the warriors of lightning, and the sons of Sigmar himself. We are Stormcasts. Who will be triumphant?’

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply, from hundreds of throats.

‘They almost made us forget that, in these days and weeks of horror. They have drowned us in filth, but we still stand, brothers.’ He thumped the ground again. ‘We are Stormcasts! Who will stand, when all others fall?’ Grymn cried.

‘Only the faithful!’ the Hallowed Knights roared. Astral Templars and Guardians of the Firmament added their voices to the cry.

‘They thought to defeat us with noise, with ambushes. They thought to make us despair. These are the tools of a coward,’ Grymn said. ‘Who knows no despair, save in failure?’

‘Only the faithful,’ the Stormcasts cried as one.

Grymn swung his halberd up and pointed north.

‘Listen, brothers. Hear the wailing of their horn and know that it is the scream of a frightened beast. They thought to make us fear, brothers… Let us return the favour.’

Chapter Three

The blighted glade

Light. All around him, light and something else… the voice, the song, swelling in his head, drowning out all thought. Gardus staggered on, limbs heavy with the weight of ghosts, and the light grew brighter, until he thought it might blind him.

In the light, in the song, he heard and saw things… the future? The past? Images of islands in the sky, and a heaving foulness thrashing in once-clear waters. Of great roots stretching towards the pale sun as rats gnawed at them. Of a valley, reflected. And, finally, a face composed of branches and leaves, of spider-silk and moonlight… a woman, with eyes like flickering green suns, not human, but a queen. She spoke in a voice like distant thunder. At first her words made no sense, but then, like turbulent waters grown still, everything was clear.

Yes, he thought. Yes, I know what I must do. Then, all at once, both light and song were gone, and he heard stone scrape beneath his feet and felt acrid air burn his lungs. His armour was covered in filth and his cloak was slime-slicked, but he was free. Coughing, he staggered and wearily sank down to one knee. His stomach roiled and he toppled forwards, vomit spewing from the mouth-slit of his war-helm. His stomach heaved as he purged himself of the sour taste of Nurgle’s garden. Free, he thought.

Once his stomach was empty, he used his hammer and sword to shove himself to his feet. He could hear fighting in the distance. He could smell fire and war, and knew that he had returned to the Mortal Realms. Gardus looked around. He stood upon the cracked stone dais of a realmgate. It flickered luridly behind him, the tall, fungus-covered archway still aglow with the now-fading energies of its activation. The realmgate occupied the centre of a clearing, surrounded by trees on all sides. The ground below the lip of the dais was hidden by an eerie green mist. It stank of rotting meat and worse, though not as badly as Nurgle’s garden.

The trees around him had been infested with grotesque fungi, and they dripped slime and mould. Foul, fleshy blossoms clustered in hollow trunks, and a throbbing canopy of moist, spore-ridden tendrils spread across the upper reaches of the forest, blocking out the weak sunlight. Where the mist was thin, Gardus could see bubbling mounds of black ooze that rose from the forest floor like boils on the flesh of the afflicted. Somewhere amidst the trees, he heard the frantic clanging of gongs and a squealing, as if from the throats of giant rats.

‘Only the faithful,’ he said hoarsely, his throat scraped raw. He stepped down off the dais, weapons in hand, and began to follow the noise of battle. Though the song had fallen silent, still its melody remained in him, and he knew what he must do. Ghyran suffered a blight, and it was up to him to help cleanse it. Whatever afflicted this glade would be first.

Gardus picked up speed, the ache in his muscles and the burning in his lungs forgotten as he followed the screams of the dying and the splintering of wood. A discordant blaring of horns sounded from the southern edge of the clearing, sending a tremor of disgust through his soul. He had heard that sound before, in Nurgle’s realm. He swept out his hammer, smashing a toppled branch thick with maggoty fungus from his path. The servants of Nurgle were close, and Gardus would see them pay for all that he had endured. He struck a rotting, fallen tree with his shoulder, reducing it to a cloud of splinters. Then he was half-staggering into the midst of a battle, surrounded by noise and slaughter.

Heaps of dead skaven lay everywhere, and mingled amongst them were the shattered bodies of sylvaneth dryads. Hordes of ratmen clad in filthy robes scuttled through the trees towards the retreating dryad-groves. Nearby, a fallen treelord groaned and collapsed into a pile of rotting wood and rancid sap as a skaven, larger than the others, struck him with a smoking censer-ball. Gardus took a half-step forward, but as the treelord’s dying groan swept through the clearing, he saw hulking warriors force themselves between the fungus-riddled trees on the glade’s southern edge. The bloated blightkings charged towards the dryads with glottal war cries. Axes and scythes hacked down treekin and spilled ruddy sap into the muck.

Already in disarray, the treekin recoiled in obvious panic. More dryads fell to the skaven; frenzied plague monks stabbed rusted blades into supple bark, tearing festering wounds in their foes. The blightkings added to the tally of the fallen with single-minded brutality.

Gardus plunged towards them, ploughing through a swarm of ratmen who, having noticed his arrival, sought to drag him down. The skaven came at him in a scrabbling rush. Gardus killed the first to reach him with a blow from his hammer, and decapitated the second. Soon, however, he was surrounded by hairy forms. Rusty blades scraped against his armour, digging for a vital spot. He swept out his arms, flinging broken bodies through the air. With the last of the ratmen twitching out their death-agonies in the mud, he moved towards the servants of Nurgle, intent on lending aid to the sylvaneth.

As he ran, Gardus saw a single branchwraith, gnarled and weathered by age and war, tear one of the swollen warriors messily in two with a flurry of lashing vines. Even as the halves of the body slopped to the ground, the branchwraith hunched forward and thrust her clawed hands into the earth. A green shimmer blazed about her inhuman form, growing brighter and brighter, until she suddenly tore her claws free and dragged them upwards. A tangle of roots and vines came with them, and the ground ruptured as thorny tendrils burst from the murk to ensnare the blightkings.

But the brutes could not be stopped. They stomped and hacked at the lashing tendrils, fighting their way towards the branchwraith and her retinue. Gardus roared in fury as he pounded towards the blightkings, and one of the warriors hesitated and turned towards him, pox-marked blade raised. Gardus didn’t slow.

‘Who will be victorious?’ he bellowed, as he brought his hammer down on the blightking’s skull. Such was the force of his blow that he ripped the warrior’s head from its blubbery neck. ‘Only the faithful,’ he continued, whipsawing around and slashing his sword across the throat of a second foe. He kicked the dying blightking aside. ‘Only the faithful!’

Divine lightning crackled across him as he clashed his weapons. ‘Turn, plague-dogs, turn,’ he roared. ‘Turn and face me!’

His blade smashed down, cleaving a blightking from skull to sternum. Gardus tore the blade free in a snarl of lightning, and spun to cut the legs out from under another of the pox-warriors. He drove his boot into the fallen blightking’s skull hard enough to crumple the rusty helm the warrior wore. Smoke rose as the white fires that crawled across the Stormcast burned away the daemonic slurry that befouled his armour.

As he fought, he caught glimpses of the battle swirling about him. He saw dryads tear through skaven ranks and a massive treelord overturn a bubbling, poison-spewing plague furnace with a roar, crushing those plague monks unlucky enough to be close by. He spilled the rotten guts of another opponent, preventing the warrior from smashing the skull of a wounded dryad. The remaining blightkings forgot about the branchwraith and her followers as Gardus continued his rampage. The bloated warriors hurled themselves at him in growing desperation. Axes scored his armour but he refused to fall. He swung and slashed, chopped and crushed, littering the ground with the dead. He reared back and kicked a blightking in the chest, sending the brute staggering into the talons of the branchwraith, who caught the warrior’s head with her vines and crushed it, helm and all.

Gardus met her inhuman gaze. For a moment, Stormcast and sylvaneth stared at one another. Then the branchwraith threw back her head and shrieked, vines lashing. Her dryads echoed her cry and plunged past Gardus, hurling themselves back into the fray to aid their kin. Gardus followed them, his weapons slick with bile and spoiled blood.

Together, Stormcast and sylvaneth fought against the enemies of Life itself. Squealing skaven and groaning blightkings met them in the centre of the clearing, and Gardus roared out the battle-cry of the Hallowed Knights until his voice became a strained rasp. He left a trail of the dead and dying behind him as he fought to keep pace with the branchwraith and her sisters. The white fire thatwreathed him burned brighter and brighter as he pushed himself past the point of exhaustion. Despite the pain of his wounds and the fatigue that poisoned his muscles and numbed his mind, Gardus was determined to see the glade cleansed of its affliction.

As he fought, he saw the branchwraith stride through the swirling ashes thrown up by the plague furnace’s destruction to confront a shrieking skaven. The skaven, swathed in foul robes, its hairy flesh puckered with scars and buboes, chattered a challenge. Gardus made to step forwards, but the branchwraith threw an arm across his chest, stopping him.

‘No,’ she said, in a voice like branches crackling on a fire. ‘Our sap runs hot, son of Sigmar. But Thellembhol’s runs hotter still.’

Gardus looked past the skaven, and saw an immense shape loom out of the smoke. The treelord that had upset the plague furnace rose up over the foul creature. The skaven whirled about, claws raised, eyes glowing as verminous lips writhed in the beginnings of a croaked incantation. Thellembhol raised one massive foot and slammed it down, stamping the life from it.

Gardus looked around; the battle was over. If any of the skaven had survived the wrath of the dryads, they had fled. The blightkings were all dead, their bodies dissolving into rancid sludge. His limbs felt heavy, and the fires which had seared his armour clean began to gutter and fade. He staggered and sank to one knee. Thick vines caught him before he fell, their thorns clattering almost gently against the plates of his armour.

‘You are tired almost unto death, son of Sigmar,’ the branchwraith said, looking down at him, her inhuman features twisted into an expression of what he thought was concern. ‘Know that you have the thanks of the sylvaneth and the Lady of Vines, war-hand of the Radiant Queen.’

‘Lady,’ Gardus said, as he pushed himself up, ‘I have waded through a sea of horrors to return to this realm… I must get back to my brothers. I – I must tell them of what I have seen. I have seen the Hidden Vale, and Alarielle. I can lead them…’

He trailed off as he suddenly recalled to whom he spoke. The Lady of Vines had stiffened at his words, and he felt the treelord approach, a rumbling growl slipping from its bark-maw.

‘Fear you to tell your tale, son of Sigmar?’ the Lady of Vines hissed. ‘You have learned a dangerous truth, it seems.’ The vines about him tightened, and he tensed, ready to fight his way free. Then, with a rattling sigh, the branchwraith released him. ‘Then, perhaps your coming shall bestir my mother from the darkling dreams which do assail her. Be not afraid, son of Sigmar – we shall take you to your brothers.’

Gardus sagged, relief flooding him. Then, with reserves of strength he did not know he possessed, he pulled himself upright. He met the branchwraith’s flickering gaze and nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Lead on, O Lady of Vines… and I shall follow.’

Chapter Four

Blare of the Dirgehorn

‘Forwards!’ Grymn roared, as he raised his halberd high, casting the light of his warding lantern across the blasted expanse of Profane Tor. Thunder snarled overhead, and a cerulean rain pounded down on faithful and foul alike. Strobing lightning revealed a gore-streaked tableau. ‘Forwards, for Sigmar… for Azyr… and for the Steel Soul,’ Grymn bellowed, fighting to drown out the drone of the monstrous Dirgehorn.

The Steel Souls had battled their way to the top of the tor through herds of slavering beastmen and the wailing of the horn. Somewhere in the clearing below, Zephacleas and Ultrades were bellowing orders to their respective warriors as they fought to give the Hallowed Knights time to silence that diabolical moan.

The Dirgehorn sat curled about the trunk of a great hag tree, amongst piled weapons and trophy skulls. The tree was a towering nightmare, looming over the tor, its branches stretching everywhere. It stank of rot and death, and noose-throttled corpses and spiked cages dangled from its crooked branches, twisting in an unnatural dance to the Dirgehorn’s song. A beastlord of immense size, with a crown of curved horns, put its slobbering jaws to the mouthpiece and blew again and again, as if to urge its warriors on to greater feats of madness.

Lightning streaked across the sky as the Stormcasts forced themselves forwards at Grymn’s command. With every echoing whine of the daemonic horn, skin blackened and metal tarnished, and men were forced to fight to prevent being bowled over by the sheer, abominable force of it. Beastmen swarmed across the tor from all sides, leaping over the great roots of the hag tree and flinging themselves onto the invaders.

‘Fight, Stormcasts,’ Grymn snarled. ‘Only the faithful shall be victorious. Only the faithful shall see the spires of Sigmaron again. Fight. Fight! Fight!’

With every flash of lightning, Grymn could see silver-clad Hallowed Knights doing just that as they battled the servants of the Ruinous Powers. Liberators locked shields with frothing, goat-headed gors; Judicators launched volley after volley at the gigantic beasts prowling the misted eaves of the tor; wailing bray-shamans cast curse after curse upon the heads of the Stormcasts; and armoured champions of Chaos hacked a path through the ranks of their foes.

It was the latter that occupied Grymn’s attentions, and he smashed his way towards the bloated warriors, followed closely by Tallon. A two-headed beastman lunged into his path and he drove the end of his halberd through the creature’s gut. As it bent over, he brought the blade of his weapon down on the stretch of flesh between its necks. Black blood gushed and a pair of agonized screams rose up from the creature’s twin throats. Grymn ripped his halberd free and shoved the dying creature out of his path. A second beastman charged towards him, axe held over its horned head, but Tallon pounced on it. It fell with a strangled bleat as the gryph-hound’s beak tore out its throat in a welter of gore.

Grymn reached the obese Chaos champions a moment later. They were an unpleasant sight, even when considered beside their own diseased kind – the split-bellied axemen wore rusty, brine-crusted armour, and they had patches of pallid flesh that bulged around the straps and plates. At their head was a monstrous warrior with a horribly distorted body. Fully half of it was rent asunder and from the gaping wound emerged the snapping beak and twisting tentacles of some vile sea-beast.

Grymn knew instinctively that this was their leader. He set his feet and swung his halberd out, letting the haft slide through his hands as he did so in order to gain reach. The blade smashed into the marred flesh that marked the champion’s mutated side, and Grymn was rewarded by a spurt of inky blood.

The champion wheeled, smacking his halberd aside. The force of the blow almost tore the weapon from Grymn’s hands, but he recovered quickly.

‘Foul play, shiny-skin,’ the betentacled champion roared as he drove Grymn back with a sweep of his great axe. ‘Only fair to introduce yourself first. I am Gutrot Spume, Lord of Tentacles, Master of the Rotwater, and various and sundry other titles of importance. Who are you?’

‘Your death, abomination,’ Grymn said.

‘Ha! Heard that before, aye,’ Spume cackled. ‘You aren’t the first, and won’t be the last. Come on then, if you’re of a mind.’

The champion spun his axe in his human hand, and chopped out at Grymn, almost quicker than the latter’s eye could follow. Grymn jerked to the side, avoiding the bite of the immense blade, and thrust his halberd out like a spear. The spike at its tip slammed into Spume’s shoulder-guard, rocking the champion on his wide feet.

‘That’s the spirit, shiny-skin,’ Spume said, as three of his tentacles snagged the haft of the halberd and held it in place as Grymn tried to pull it free.

‘Tallon,’ Grymn barked. The gryph-hound lunged, his iron-hard beak snapping shut on the sinewy appendages and tearing them apart. Spume staggered back with a bellow, slashing out at the gryph-hound, and the animal bounded away. Grymn spun the halberd between his hands and swung it out. Spume blocked the blow, and for a moment Grymn’s world narrowed to the clash of blades as they traded blows back and forth. Their duel was not a graceful one; instead, it was a thing of strength and sheer bloody-mindedness – two things that Grymn had in abundance, and that marked him for leadership, alongside the Steel Soul.

Damn you, Gardus, he thought. Sigmar had made Gardus his sword, and Grymn his shield. But now he’s gone, and I must be both. The thought drove him, as always, to fight all the harder. Gardus had been his greatest rival, the one whom he tested himself against. But now Gardus was gone, and only Grymn was left.

As lightning flashed, he could see that he and his opponent were not alone in their struggle. He saw a slavering bullgor tear away a fallen Stormcast’s armour, only to howl in thwarted rage as the dying warrior evaporated in a burst of blue. He saw lightning hammers blast through barrel chests and storm axes lay open spines. As he parried a blow from Spume, he saw Tegrus swoop low in the corner of his vision and smash the head from a blightking’s shoulders.

Spume’s laughter faded as they duelled back and forth through the rain. The battle swirled about them, men and beasts rising and falling in untold numbers, but they remained locked in combat, neither warrior able to best the other.

Grymn parried a sweep of his opponent’s axe and replied in kind.

He roared in anger and chopped down on Spume’s head. His blade glanced off the champion’s featureless helm. Spume staggered. Grymn saw an opening and took it. He spun his halberd about and stabbed it forward, catching the champion in the gaping beak-maw that had replaced his armpit.

The maw closed on the sigmarite head of Grymn’s halberd, and the yellowed fangs cracked and shattered. The abnormal growth shuddered, and Spume’s tentacles stiffened and drooped, forcing him to drop his axe. As he fell back, Grymn saw his paladins, led by Machus, his Decimator-Prime, chop down the last of Spume’s warriors. Before he could call out to them, Spume lunged for him, tentacles flailing.

The axe-wielding Machus beheaded the last of his opponents and kicked the body aside.

‘Lord-Castellant, I am coming,’ Machus said, hacking down a beast that leapt into his path.

‘Machus, take out that damnable horn,’ Grymn shouted, as he forced Spume back. The Decimator-Prime chopped through a second bloat-bellied beast and hesitated. Grymn cursed. ‘Forget about me, fool – destroy that horn!’ he roared, crunching the sigmarite-bound haft of his halberd into his opponent’s bloated throat.

‘Should have let him aid ye, shiny-skin,’ Spume croaked, as he grabbed Grymn’s throat with his human hand. With a grunt, he hurled Grymn backwards across the clearing. The Stormcast slammed hard into a moss-encrusted menhir and fell, wracked with pain. His vision blurred as rainwater ran into his eyes through the slits of his helm, and he slipped and fell as he tried to push himself to his feet. Things grated inside him and he coughed blood. He stretched out his hand, trying to reach his halberd where it had fallen. Damn you, Gardus, he thought. You were always too reckless. Why did you have to die? It should be you leading this attack. You were the sword. I am the shield.

‘Now I’ll be for chopping your head off and nailing it to my mast,’ Spume wheezed as he staggered towards Grymn. He had recovered his axe and dragged it behind him. ‘It’ll be Gutrot Spume who’s the wormy apple of Nurgle’s eye, and not some jumped up Ghyranite who got a bath in the Pit of Filth and decided to turn coat…’

His muttering broke off abruptly into a scream as Tallon caught hold of one of his trailing tendrils and dug in with his paws, yanking Spume off-balance.

The champion whirled, the gryph-hound leapt, and they both fell over. As they struggled, Grymn saw Machus hurl his great double-bladed axe towards the repugnant horn and its bestial wielder. The weapon slammed into the beastlord and pitched him backwards into the instrument, hard enough to crack the twisted curve of bone. The horn split along its length and the artefact’s great drone rose to an agonised scream. The magical energies of the horn roiled out of control, consuming the beastlord’s twitching body before exploding with an earth-shaking rumble, taking the hag tree with it. A thousand sharp daggers of oak and bone filled the air, eviscerating every warrior nearby not blessed enough to be clad in holy sigmarite.

As the smoke cleared, and his senses with it, Grymn saw Tallon trotting towards him, a writhing tendril clasped tight in his beak.

‘Good hound,’ he said as he got to his feet. He grunted in pain as he retrieved his halberd and lantern. Spume was gone. Whether he was dead or had fled, Grymn couldn’t say, and didn’t much care. He looked about. Beastmen lay broken and bloody all around. Machus strode towards him through the smoke, his axe in hand. ‘Do you yet live, Lord-Castellant?’ he called.

‘No, I’m a ghost,’ Grymn spat, shaking his head. ‘Of course I live. And next time I tell you to do something – do it!’

Machus bowed his head. Despite his chastisement, Grymn could tell the Decimator-Prime was relieved. He shook his head.

‘Rally the others, Decimator-Prime,’ he growled. ‘There’s red work yet to be done.’

‘Aye, Lord-Castellant,’ Machus said, hastening to obey.

Grymn watched him go, and turned to see Morbus making his way towards him, accompanied by a number of others. Zephacleas and Ultrades walked with the Lord-Relictor as he stalked through the wreckage of battle, his reliquary staff glowing softly with a silver light.

‘We must redress our lines,’ Grymn said. ‘The enemy have been beaten here, but they will return in strength. We must find a proper defensive position, as well as another realmgate.’

‘Wait – look,’ Zephacleas said, pointing towards the slopes below the tor. ‘Look!’

Grymn caught sight of a glow moving through the smog-shrouded reaches below. It grew in intensity as it wound through the trees and the shattered remnants of the cursed menhirs, and Grymn became aware of the sound of creaking wood and rustling leaves.

‘Sylvaneth,’ Morbus murmured. Grymn knew he was correct. He had glimpsed the treekin often enough since arriving, and knew the sound of them well. Like a forest caught in a windstorm, the march of a warglade was an eerie chorus of creaks and groans.

‘Yes, but are they coming as allies… or enemies?’ Grymn said. Tallon growled softly and snapped his beak. The gryph-hound sensed his master’s unease, and Grymn reached down to stroke the animal’s feathered ruff. ‘Easy, my lad. Easy…’

‘We should take up a defensive position,’ Ultrades said, one hand on the hilt of his runeblade.

Grymn shook his head.

‘Too late for that,’ he said. ‘They’re all around us. Can’t you hear them?’

‘All I hear are the trees creaking in the wind,’ Ultrades said. Grymn snorted.

‘There is no wind,’ he said. He turned his attentions back to the light, and realised that he could make out figures within it. The tall, unnatural shapes of dryads stalked forward, carrying something – a throne of tangled branches and stiff vines – on their shoulders. The glow emanated not from the treekin, but instead from the figure slumped on the throne. A figure that was not unfamiliar…

‘Gardus…’ Zephacleas whispered.

Grymn started.

‘Gardus,’ he said, in disbelief. He took a step. Then another. ‘Gardus,’ he said again, unable to believe his eyes. A slow, flat smile spread across his face as he descended to meet his Lord-Celestant.

‘You have no idea how glad I am to see you.’

Chapter Five

The Despised One

Torglug the Despised One looked out over the Glade of Horned Growths and heaved a sigh. ‘The rats are failing. Gluhak is failing. Spume is failing. Only Torglug stands, Grandfather…’ Down below, fungus-riddled trees shed their bark as the rot-fog of the skaven faded. The master of the Brotherhood of the Red Boil, the plague-priest Kratsik, was dead, squashed flat by a vengeful treelord. Something maybe to be thanking them for, Torglug thought, as he leaned on the haft of his axe and stared out at all of the nauseating green. He didn’t care for the skaven. They were too tricksy by half, and always seeking an advantage over their betters.

‘Not Torglug alone,’ a harsh voice hissed. The Despised One didn’t turn.

‘You are still living, then, Vermalanx? I was thinking you are dead at the Ghyrtract Fen,’ Torglug said. The blight-flies had brought word that one of the lightning-men had killed the rat-daemon at the Gates of Dawn, when boisterous Bolathrax had underestimated the hardiness of their enemies with predictable results.

‘I am harder to kill than that, Woodsman,’ the verminlord said, as he crouched atop the shattered standing stone behind the Chaos champion. The rat-daemon used the name by which he was known in Nurgle’s Manse. The daemons there called him Ironhood the Woodsman, for he had hacked down life-trees by the hundreds, in order to better fuel the blessed decay spreading from the open gates of Grandfather’s garden.

‘Your servants are not saying the same,’ Torglug said. Even as the lightning-men had silenced the Dirgehorn, the treekin, led by the pestiferous Lady of Vines, had launched a long-anticipated assault on the Glade of Horned Growths. Now the lightning-men were readying themselves to march anew, though just where he couldn’t say.

‘My servants are a fecund folk. You have no need to worry on their account,’ Vermalanx hissed. ‘And in any event, enough of them remain to see to Nurgle’s needs in this bitter place. Your own blightkings suffered below as well. Look to them, rather than mine.’

‘My warriors are being very hardy, rat-king, hardier than your vermin,’ Torglug said. He hefted his axe and set it on one wide shoulder as he turned to face the verminlord. The rat-daemon was larger than the Despised One, a thing of rangy muscle and mangy hair. It clung to the stone, fleshless head cocked, and eye sockets glowing with a sickly light. Its tail lashed at the implied insult. ‘And hardier especially than your drowned men, Spume,’ Torglug continued, looking past the stone and its occupier.

Vermalanx hissed and turned. Several figures made their way through the ring of broken stones and heaps of piled bodies. Gutrot Spume, tentacles coiling in agitation, spat a salty oath at Torglug’s words.

‘At least my blightkings fought an army – yours fell to a lone warrior,’ Spume growled. He swung his axe out and shattered a nearby stone.

‘One not even Bolathrax could bring low,’ said the sorcerer Slaugoth. His jowls wobbled in amusement. ‘I should have liked to have seen that great bowl of jelly waddling after our silver-skinned friend. Old Bolathrax has never been run so hard in his life, I’ll warrant.’ The master of the Rotfane chuckled at the thought.

‘You are finding this funny, Maggotfang?’ Torglug demanded, turning his bleary-eyed glare on the sorcerer. He threw out a hand. ‘They are ruining things, these newcomers. How soon until they are coming for your Rotfane? Or the world pimple?’

The lightning-men had come far, or so buzzing blightfly and scurrying pox-rat had claimed. They had fought their way through the quagmires of Rotwater Blight from the Ghyrtract Fen. They had slain fat old Ga’Blorrgh the toad dragon at the Lake of Screaming Reeds. They had survived the horrors of the Grove of Blighted Lanterns and the Greenglow Lake, before they had shattered the Dirgehorn atop Profane Tor.

And now, the vile treekin had been roused to war. It was as if the Realm of Life were preparing itself for a final battle. Foolishness… arrogance, Torglug thought. Why do they fight? Can they not see that the Grandfather only wishes to take care of them? To take away their pain, their uncertainty. He shook his head. He had fought, as they fought, once upon a time. He did not like to think of that time, for it shamed him to remember how he had resisted Grandfather’s kindness. He had been ungrateful. Rude, even. His grip on his axe tightened, and the ancient wood creaked, as if in pain.

But the Grandfather had opened his eyes and made him see that the world was not as he had believed. And with each day that followed, Torglug tried to earn the kindness and patience that the Grandfather had shown him. His axe had reaped glory for his new patron. He had poisoned the lifewells he had once fought so hard to defend, and brought the blessings of pestilence to his people, in their ignorance. And soon, his past transgressions were but a thing to be chuckled over by both disciple and divinity.

He knew, deep in the core of him, that the lightning-men represented something dangerous. Something that even the Grandfather feared, in his way. A power long forgotten, rising anew. Drums sounded in the deep realms, the skies boiled with strange lightning, and the whole of creation seemed to be holding its breath. None of the others seemed to understand, which only made it all the more infuriating.

‘Be at ease, Despised One, we’re all children of the garden,’ Morbidex Twiceborn gurgled, stroking the mottled hide of his pox-maggoth. The Twiceborn resembled nothing so much as an overlarge nurgling, squeezed into rusty armour. He grinned toothily into the face of Torglug’s annoyance. ‘Some days, you just have to laugh.’

‘And some days are for being serious, Twiceborn,’ Torglug growled. His axe dropped from his shoulder and embedded itself in the soft loam at his feet. Morbidex’s maggoth shifted uneasily, and the big beast gave a grunt of warning. Torglug glanced warily at it. The maggoth was like some unholy combination of ape, plaguebearer and giant, with a temperament to put all three to shame. ‘You are silencing that beast, or else…’ Torglug said.

‘Easy, Tripletongue,’ Morbidex murmured. He patted the monster’s fang-studded muzzle. ‘He didn’t mean it, my sweet.’ He looked at Torglug. ‘Did he?’

Torglug grunted and placed his axe back on his shoulder. ‘Now is not the time for laughing. You are thinking maybe the Glottkin will be so amused?’

‘And who are you to speak for us then, Woodsman?’ Otto Glott said, spinning his scythe like a child’s toy as he stepped out from the trees, trailed by his brothers. Ethrac leaned on his staff, his robes stiff with grime and his face hidden beneath a cowl. Ghurk shoved a tree over as he followed Otto and Ethrac, his enormous lumpen features slack with disinterest. ‘Think you’re the wormy apple of Grandfather’s eye now, Despised One? You haven’t found the Hidden Vale any more than we have, so don’t go getting ideas above your station.’

Torglug glared at Otto, but said nothing. He did not like the brothers, but he knew better than to challenge them openly. Otto scratched his chin and grinned. Then he gave a satisfied sniff and gestured to his brother, Ethrac. ‘Now that we’re all here, any ideas what Sigmar’s whelps might be looking for, second-most-beloved sibling?’

‘Same thing we are, brother from my mother,’ Ethrac said with a shrug. Torglug grimaced beneath his helm. The Hidden Vale, he thought. The secret bower where the so-called Radiant Queen, Alarielle, had hidden herself away when Grandfather’s grip on her kingdoms had become too much for her frail soul to bear. He, the Glottkin, Slaugoth and a host of others had spent centuries searching for it, even as they warred with the ferocious treekin and the few remaining free tribes of Ghyran. It had become something of a game for them, all except Torglug. He knew Grandfather’s mind better than any, and he knew how serious a matter Alarielle’s capture was, whatever the Glotts thought.

‘Yes, kinsman-mine,’ Otto countered, brushing flies from his open gut. ‘Even Ghurk knows that and he can’t count to one, bless him.’ He reached up to pat the muscular arm of the third Glott brother, who loomed behind him. ‘But since we don’t know where that is, it might behove us to learn, don’t you think?’

‘I am open to suggestions, Otto,’ Ethrac said. He looked at Torglug. ‘What about you, Ghyranite? What sort of ideas are percolating in that sour brain of yours?’

Torglug hesitated. Then, with a grunt, he gestured to Vermalanx.

‘The rats,’ he said. ‘Let them be earning their keep.’

Vermalanx hissed, startled. Then, slowly he nodded.

‘Yes-yes, my folk can do that. I know just the rat,’ the verminlord murmured. If bare bone could take on a cunning expression, Vermalanx had one. The rat meant treachery. They couldn’t help it. It was in whatever passed for their blood. Torglug extended his axe, so that the edge just brushed the verminlord’s chin.

‘You are thinking carefully,’ Torglug said, his voice deceptively mild.

‘Now now, Torglug, no need to threaten our furry ally,’ Otto said, stepping forward, his scythe held lengthwise across his shoulders. ‘I’m sure he’ll do just what we ask, won’t you, my fine, bare-tailed friend?’

Vermalanx hesitated. Then he nodded. ‘Of course, yes-yes. We all serve the Great Corrupter, do we not?’

Torglug lowered his axe. Despite his suggestion, he didn’t trust the rat-daemon to do anything but seek its own advantage. He didn’t trust any of them, in fact. They were all competing for the Grandfather’s affections, in their own way.

But only one of them was truly worthy.

And soon, Torglug thought, I will prove it.

Chapter Six

A soul returned

Tegrus of the Sainted Eye, Prosecutor-Prime of the Hallowed Knights, stood at the top of Profane Tor and looked down into the clearing at his newly-returned Lord-Celestant and the host of Stormcasts who surrounded him.

‘How can this be?’ he murmured. He wondered still if it were an illusion. It would not be the first such shade that had appeared to lure unlucky Stormcasts to their doom. And surely this was not truly Gardus sitting upon the dryad-borne throne like some Ghyranite saint of old. ‘Aetius, Solus… are you seeing this?’ he asked his companions.

‘Hard not to, given the clamour,’ Solus said. The Judicator-Prime of the Hallowed Knights was a man of few words, who had an internal serenity that Tegrus could scarcely fathom. He sat on the bole of a toppled tree and ran a cloth across the gleaming blade of his gladius. His boltstorm crossbow sat at his feet. He and Aetius had, along with Tegrus, volunteered to oversee the retinues engaged in destroying the foul icons and symbols that littered the top of the tor. None of it could be left standing, and the air rang with the sounds of the Retributors’ hammers and the Decimators’ axes as they smashed idols and chopped apart the crude gibbets that had once hung from the hag tree.

‘It cannot be him – it must be a trick,’ Aetius said. The Liberator-Prime was not a man to whom trust came easily. ‘No one, Stormcast or otherwise, returns from the Realm of Chaos.’ He tightened his grip on his hammer.

‘But it is,’ Tegrus said. ‘Grymn and Morbus are down there already, with Zephacleas and Ultrades.’ He looked at his fellow Stormcasts. ‘We should be down there as well.’

Ever since Gardus’ disappearance in the final moments of the battle for the Gates of Dawn, Tegrus had wondered if there was anything he could have done differently to have prevented what happened, and had come to no good conclusion. Nonetheless, he had been unable to shake the sense of his own failure. He had not been fast enough, observant enough… Somehow, somewhere, he had failed his Lord-Celestant. But now Gardus had returned and Tegrus felt angry, confused… joyful.

‘After you,’ Solus said. He extended his gladius and peered down the length of the blade. ‘If it’s him, and not some trick of the light, he’ll find us in his own time.’ He looked at Tegrus. ‘But then, you’ve never been the patient sort, Tegrus.’

Tegrus laughed. ‘No.’ He looked at the Liberator-Prime. ‘Aetius?’

‘Someone must stand sentry,’ Aetius said, gesturing to the still-smoking remains of the Dirgehorn. ‘Gardus or no, I’ll not shirk my duty.’ He hesitated, and then added, ‘But Solus is right. You are not so bound.’

He looked at Tegrus, and the Prosecutor-Prime could see the unspoken plea in the other man’s eyes. Aetius rarely saw eye to eye with his fellow commanders in the Warrior Chamber, but he was their brother nonetheless, bound by oaths and bearing the same Reforging scars on his flesh. And he too had known Gardus, and flourished under the ever-patient Lord-Celestant’s command.

‘You’re right,’ Tegrus said, clapping Aetius on the shoulder. Then, with a snap of his great wings, he was hurtling out over the tor. As he left the ground far behind, he was tempted, as always, to simply keep flying. To rise and swoop forever, lost amongst the untold glories of the heavens. But the green skies of Ghyran were not the blue horizons of Azyr, and there was no peace to be found in these clouds. Blight-flies and worse things choked the air even now. Where the servants of the Ruinous Powers went, the world sickened and changed.

Tegrus had seen it often enough, and as a result, was always ready to cast down the worshippers of the Dark Gods wherever they were found. But in order to smite the foe, one first had to find him – a skill which Tegrus had honed in the Nihiliad Mountains during the cleansing of Azyr. He had rained blazing arrows down upon the Chaos warbands that had infested the crags, and exposed their positions to Sigmar’s armies. Those had been good days. He had learned his true purpose there, swooping through rumbling thunderclouds to bring fire and fear to the enemies of the Celestial Realm.

Indeed, he had been so good at it that Sigmar himself had offered Tegrus a place as one of his trusted hunter-assassins. A high honour for any Stormcast, but Tegrus had refused it – his place was with his Warrior Chamber.

He swooped low over the crowd of Stormcasts gathered about the foot of the tor, huddled in the cleansing light of Lorrus Grymn’s lantern. With a snap of his wings he dropped from the air to land in a crouch before the newly returned Lord-Celestant. As he stood, other Stormcasts backed away.

‘Is it you, my lord?’ Tegrus asked as he stepped forward.

Gardus turned towards him and Tegrus felt his heart swell as he examined the face of the man before him. Gardus held his helm beneath his arm, as if to reassure his fellows of his identity.

Then, is that not what Gardus would do? Would he not reassure us, and speak kindly to us?

Some maintained that Gardus was too soft-hearted to lead, but Tegrus knew the truth of it – Sigmar had zealots aplenty, but the Stormcast Eternals must be more than swords… they must be heroes. And that Gardus surely was.

‘If it was not, I expect you would be the first to divine it, my friend,’ Gardus said. He extended his hand. Tegrus hesitated, then clasped his Lord-Celestant’s forearm in a warrior’s greeting. Gardus pulled him forward into a brief embrace before releasing him. Tegrus peered into Gardus’ eyes.

‘Where did you go, Steel Soul?’ he asked. ‘What did you see?’

‘The Gardens of Nurgle, my friend, and horrors without end,’ Gardus said softly. ‘I ran for weeks, pursued by things too foul to name…’

‘Weeks… but you’ve only been gone a few days,’ Tegrus said.

Gardus closed his eyes, and his body tensed, like that of an animal fearing the lash. The last vestiges of Tegrus’ bitterness fled as he saw the pain in Gardus’ face.

What happened to you, my friend? he wondered. He made to speak, but Grymn cut him short.

‘If you’re through getting reacquainted, Tegrus, we were discussing matters of import,’ the Lord-Castellant growled. Tegrus glanced at Grymn, a retort on his lips, but kept his mouth shut. Grymn had a sharp tongue, but he had led the Hallowed Knights safely through the innumerable terrors of Rotwater Blight. Tegrus remembered Grymn’s quiet words of reassurance as the drone of the Dirgehorn ate away at their courage and sanity. The Lord-Castellant had been a rock, immoveable and unstoppable.

Grymn met his gaze and nodded tersely. Tegrus stepped back. Grymn looked at Gardus. ‘You spoke of the Hidden Vale, Lord-Celestant…’ he urged.

Tegrus blinked. The Hidden Vale… no wonder Grymn was short-tempered. Other Stormcasts had been dispatched to bring Sigmar’s offer of alliance to Alarielle, the Radiant Queen and Mistress of Ghyran, but they had all failed to discover her hiding place. Some had hoped that the appearance of the sylvaneth warglades in the final moments of the battle for the Gates of Dawn had signalled some awareness on her part, but others, like Tegrus, had suspected that the treekin had acted on their own initiative. He glanced around, seeking out the mysterious creatures that had escorted Gardus back to them, and was not surprised to find them already gone. The sylvaneth went where they willed, and no man or beast could stop them.

If Gardus had somehow found a way to the Hidden Vale, they could bring Sigmar’s words to Alarielle. They might even be able to encourage her to rouse herself to fight alongside the Stormcasts in defence of the Jade Kingdoms.

Tegrus turned his attentions back to the words of his Lord-Celestant. Gardus’ face had a haunted look, and he was silent for several moments, as if trying to marshal his thoughts. Then, slowly, he began to speak.

‘We must first find the Oak of Ages Past,’ Gardus said, speaking carefully, as might one who was trying to convey something he only barely understood. ‘Celestial driftwood, cast through the void of time, which came to rest in the misty swamps of this realm. A stream of immaculate water, cleaner than any in the Mortal Realms, gushes forth from its ancient trunk. It is a river, bestowing life-giving energy to every part of this realm.’ His voice faded, and he stood silent, as if lost in thought.

‘Gardus,’ Grymn said, harshly. Tegrus glared at the Lord-Castellant and put his hand on Gardus’ shoulder. There was no telling what horrors the Steel Soul had experienced in his sojourn through Nurgle’s garden. Gardus looked at the Prosecutor-Prime and nodded his thanks. He cleared his throat and continued his tale.

‘While I was… elsewhere, I learned that this river – the River Vitalis – has become corrupted. Waters that once carried life now carry only the seeds of death.’

‘A plague?’ Grymn asked. They had seen similar pestilences far too often since arriving in the Realm of Life. Nurgle’s influence had corrupted the very air itself.

‘A daemon,’ Gardus said. ‘A Great Unclean One, like the beast I… fought at the Gates of Dawn.’ He shook his head. ‘The servants of Nurgle call it Pupa Grotesse, but that is not its true name.’ He spoke with an iron certainty. ‘I know its name. And we must break its hold over the watercourse, if we are to have any hope of finding the Hidden Vale and its mistress.’

He lifted his head. ‘We must fight our way to the mouth of the River Vitalis, and destroy the daemon that festers at its heart.’ He looked around, catching the eyes of every man present.

Tegrus raised his hammer. ‘If you so command, Steel Soul, then that is what we shall do.’ Grymn had led them well, and he was the reason they had survived to reach this point, but Gardus was their true leader.

Grymn grunted and shook his head. ‘Lead on, then, Steel Soul. Lead on.’

Chapter Seven

Ambush on the fen road

‘Oh, my boils and scabs,’ Morbidex Twiceborn said as he cut a coiling forest spite out of the air with his scythe. ‘Look at them all, marching in lockstep, so pretty in their shiny armour. What do you think, Tripletongue? Think they’d taste of starlight, my pet?’ he asked the burly pox-maggoth he rode. Tripletongue roared and stamped in reply.

The arrayed ranks of Stormcast Eternals – or so they were said to call themselves – marched towards Morbidex’s forces through the field of high cairnstones, driving forward in a stoic rhythm. The nurglings that made up his army, for their part, either hadn’t noticed the newcomers or else didn’t care. They were too busy fighting the horde of forest spites.

And it was such a wonderful ambush as well. Took me weeks to get the little fellows to understand what that word meant, Morbidex thought as he snatched a glittering spite out of the air and stuffed it in his mouth. But the spites had ruined it when they’d provoked the nurglings from concealment and put paid to all of Morbidex’s hard effort and planning.

Brightly hued and peculiar, the diminutive arboreal spirits had forms ranging from horned serpents to enormous dragonflies that glowed with an inner light, and they fought savagely against the fat-bellied nurglings. They slashed, clawed and bit at one another in the mire along the wide sprawl of moss-covered cairnstones that served as Rotwater Blight’s only true road, making a loud mess of things.

The forest spites might have had the upper hand despite being outnumbered if Morbidex had not joined the fray. Granted, his attack had been made more out of boredom and annoyance than any concern for his nurglings. The fat little daemons could take care of themselves, and they regarded war as play.

And who am I to ruin their fun, eh? Morbidex thought, as he drove his knees into the sides of Tripletongue’s skull, turning the beast towards the newcomers. Besides which, we’ve accomplished what we set out to do… Our foes’ eyes are on us, even as Grandfather wanted…

‘Hup, Tripletongue,’ Morbidex said. ‘Up my beauty, up and at them!’

The eyeless maggoth gave vent to a burbling warble as it knuckled towards the approaching invaders, scattering spites and nurglings alike. Lightning-men, Torglug calls ’em, Morbidex thought, as he hunched forward in his saddle and swung his scythe back. Fools, is what I think. ‘Think they can just roll over Nurgle’s own children, don’t they? Let’s show them what we think of such foolishness,’ the maggoth-rider roared, as he swung his scythe out in a savage blow towards the vanguard of the newcomers. One of the silver-armoured Stormcasts was torn from his feet by the force of the blow and sent flying. Tripletongue struck out with simian fists, battering others flat, or else rending them crown to gullet.

The nurglings followed, swarming over the warriors. Morbidex bellowed encouragement to his little friends, and smiled in pride every time a Stormcast went down, blanketed by squirming, bloated little bodies. ‘Good! Keep it up, my little friends – Grandfather smiles on us all,’ he shouted. I bet old Bloab and the Daemonspew wish they were here, he thought. His fellow maggoth lords were as much lovers of a good brawl as Morbidex himself; one reason among many that he found them such good company.

But the best company were his diminutive followers – the nurglings who had been his closest companions since the day he’d climbed Pox Peak, looking for a way into the Grandfather’s garden. Aye, that was a good day – the best day, he thought, smiling widely. Since his slimy rebirth he had become more powerful than ever. ‘And sitting atop you, my beastly beauty, I’m unbeatable,’ he said, patting Tripletongue’s head. The maggoth gave a gurgle of pleasure at the gesture. Morbidex laughed and swung his scythe out, catching a Stormcast in the back and wrenching the armoured warrior into the air with ease.

He eyed his struggling prey for a moment before slinging him over his shoulder. Take a lot of killing, these fellows, he thought, as Tripletongue smashed into another phalanx. These ones were the colour of overripe fruit, rather than gold or silver, but they fought just as hard. How many of you are there? And how many flavours do you come in, he thought, as he saw a host of winged warriors hurtle towards him.

Tripletongue was surrounded, but Morbidex wasn’t unduly concerned. Getting their attention had been the whole point of his little display. The Stormcasts had been making a nuisance of themselves since they’d shattered the Dirgehorn and killed old Gluhak.

In the days since the Dirgehorn had fallen silent, the silver-armoured invaders had clashed again and again with Grandfather’s children – from running battles with the skaven to the siege of jolly Slaugoth’s Rotfane, even as Torglug had predicted. They’d erased the avian defenders of the Vulturine Geysers, and sent Gutrot Spume’s Drowned Men into flight at the battle of Canker Cascade. Slaugoth and Spume were fit to be tied. Their stock with the Glottkin had fallen sharply in the aftermath of their defeats and new favourites had been chosen. So this matter had fallen to him. Good old reliable Morbidex. He’d been tasked with pulling the Stormcasts into the swamp, and keeping them distracted long enough for…

Ha! he thought, as the festering swamp on the other side of the Stormcast column began to boil. That’s it… keep looking at me, my fancy friends. Eyes on ol’ Morbidex. Pay no attention to the fellows rising out of the mud.

Rising from the muck, brackish water sluicing from their twisted frames, came the tallymen of Nurgle. The plaguebearers uttered a monotonous drone, counting the diseases abroad in the swamp as they strode towards their unsuspecting enemies. In their lead was an old friend – the creature known as Wrech Gab’larr, Herald of Nurgle. He glared at the Stormcasts with malign intent, and whipped one warty hand forward. Plaguebearers loped past him to slam their plagueswords into the backs of the Stormcast Eternals. Wrech’s expression became one of befuddlement when the silver armour remained unmarked where a blow wasn’t immediately fatal. Stormcasts who didn’t immediately discorporate in a blur of azure energy whirled with a fierce precision to lay their attackers low. Wrech bellowed in frustration as his carefully prepared afflictions failed to take root.

I could have told you that wouldn’t work, Morbidex thought, as he ducked a blow from one of the winged Stormcasts. These warriors, wherever they were from, were singularly resistant to the plagues and diseases born in Grandfather’s laboratories and gardens. The stuff of them burned too hot for sickness to take hold, Morbidex suspected. Wrech roared and hacked a gap in the Stormcast lines. He and his plaguebearers stormed into the midst of the enemy, determined to bury their blades in Stormcast flesh.

‘Ha! That’s the way, Wrech,’ Morbidex shouted. ‘That’s the way to do it, O Herald of Fresh Woes… Smash these shiny upstarts.’ He hefted his scythe and lashed out at one of the winged warriors, who swooped around him like so many stinging insects. He cut the Stormcast from the sky, and cursed as the warrior dissolved into azure light. ‘I hate it when they do that,’ he snarled.

‘Not as much as we do, I’d wager, brute,’ a voice tolled. Morbidex twisted in his saddle, searching for the voice’s owner. His eyes widened as he caught sight of the winged shape diving towards him on wings of crackling flame.

‘Oh buboes,’ Morbidex said, moments before the warrior swooped past him. The Stormcast lashed out with a hammer as he hurtled past and caught Morbidex in the face with a thunderous boom. The force of the blow catapulted the Twiceborn from his saddle. He hit the marshy ground with a splash. Every bone in his face felt as if it had been splintered, and he groaned as he rolled over. Tripletongue shrieked and reared up, pawing blindly at the swarm of winged killers. Without Morbidex’s guidance, the beast was reacting on instinct.

Morbidex pushed himself awkwardly to his feet. He’d lost his scythe in the fall and he stumbled back as the warrior who’d struck him landed nearby. Lightning crackled across the Stormcast’s limbs. Eyes the colour of the unclouded sky stared at Morbidex from behind the too perfect features of a silver mask. He held two hammers, the heads of which were wreathed in energy. Morbidex flexed his thick fingers.

‘Well… come on then, silver-back,’ he gurgled, setting his feet. ‘You caught me by surprise once, but you’ll not do so twice, or my name isn’t Morbidex Twiceborn…’

The warrior shot forward, quicker than Morbidex’s eyes could follow. One hammer crashed into his chest, and a blow from the second snapped his head to the side. Morbidex fell onto his back, wheezing for breath.

‘Ow. Fine. Fine. Best… best two out of three,’ he groaned, as he rolled onto his belly. He shook his head, trying to clear it. The Stormcast dived forward again, intent on finishing the job. Morbidex twisted aside, and clamped a hand down on the back of the warrior’s crested helm. With a roar, he cut short the Stormcast’s flight, and flung him down. Morbidex stomped down, but his opponent rolled aside. One wing snapped out, and the crackling feathers gave Morbidex’s belly a searing kiss. He staggered back, hands clamped to his burned and ruptured gut.

The Stormcast pushed himself to his feet. Morbidex grinned at him.

‘Didn’t like that, did you? Faster than I look, aren’t I?’ he chortled. He looked down at his wound, and gingerly took his hands away. Bloated entrails pressed against the blackened flesh, and he gave a grunt of consternation. ‘I’m going to twist your head off for that one, friend.’

The Stormcast sprang forward, and his hammers snapped out. Morbidex caught one on his palm, but the second smashed into his shoulder. He roared and slugged his foe, denting his silvery helm. A wing flared out and blinded Morbidex. He clawed at his eyes, cursing virulently. Hammer-blows rained down, striking his head, shoulders, arms and back.

Morbidex sank to one knee, ears ringing. He’d never been hit so hard, or so fast. The Stormcast was fast, faster than any creature that Morbidex had ever had the pleasure of fighting. But speed wasn’t the sole route to victory. Morbidex dug his hand into the muck as he bent forward, and, with a wild howl, hurled a gobbet of mud into the Stormcast’s face. The warrior avoided the improvised missile, as Morbidex had known he would, and stepped within reach of his opponent.

The maggoth lord gave a shout and lunged, arms spread wide. The Stormcast pivoted, hammers raised, but this time Morbidex was ready. He caught the warrior’s wrists and prevented the blows from landing. The two strained against one another, their feet sliding back and forth through the muck. Morbidex grinned down at his opponent. ‘I’ve introduced myself, it’s only polite you do the same,’ he said.

‘My name is Tegrus, monster. Treasure it – it’s the last name you’ll ever hear,’ the Stormcast growled.

Morbidex laughed. He was still laughing when Tegrus abruptly fell backwards and pulled the maggoth lord off his feet. He bellowed in shock as Tegrus’ boots slammed into his wounded belly. Morbidex rolled onto his back, but too slowly. Tegrus dropped towards him, hammers raised, and the maggoth lord squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the impact.

However, rather than the pain he’d been expecting, he felt a wash of hot, foul air and heard a familiar guttural roar. He cracked an eye open, and saw Tegrus flying backwards. A shadow fell over him, and he looked up, a smile spreading across his wide, green face.

‘Ah, Tripletongue my beauty, just in time,’ he rumbled, as the maggoth bent towards him, its teeth clicking in concern. It snuffled worriedly at him as he got to his feet, and he patted its scaly skull. ‘Who’s a sweet brute, eh?’ Morbidex said, as he hauled himself back into the saddle.

As Tripletongue rose to its full height, Morbidex took in the battlefield at a glance. What he saw wasn’t good. Wrech’s ambush had gone sour and the Stormcasts were counter-attacking, led by a figure who blazed with holy light. Morbidex shaded his eyes and peered at the figure. That’s the one old Bolathrax was after, he thought, doubtfully. As he watched, nurgling swarms were crushed underfoot, hammers fell, horned heads burst and Nurgle’s tallymen reeled.

Wrech bellowed a command and the remaining plaguebearers belly-flopped into the swamp, digging into the muck and disappearing from sight.

‘Well, that tears it,’ Morbidex murmured as he sat up in his saddle. He slapped Tripletongue on the head. ‘Time to go, my lad.’ The maggoth rumbled assent and turned, smashing a tree out of its path as it dived deeper into the swamp, moving as quickly as its thick legs could carry him.

No sense remaining to fight all on his lonesome. Grandfather didn’t favour fools, despite his sentimentality. He hunched forward in his saddle, urging his mount to greater speed. Have to fall back, get to the Gelid Gush and make a final stand, Morbidex thought. That was where they were going. It was the only place of value in the immediate vicinity.

He twitched his head abruptly, trying to dislodge the flies that were gathering about his face. Wait – flies? His eyes widened as the flies suddenly rose from his flesh, and swirled about in a cloud, coalescing into a familiar face.

‘Going somewhere, Twiceborn?’ Ethrac Glott asked, in a voice made from the droning of a hundred flies. ‘I could have sworn we asked you to handle these invaders…’

‘Our ambush was ambushed,’ Morbidex said, unapologetically. ‘Forest spites got the nurglings all riled up. The Stormcasts interrupted a very satisfying drubbing, if you want my opinion.’

‘Did I ask for it?’

‘Well… no.’

‘Then what makes you think I would?’

‘A sense of unbridled optimism,’ Morbidex said. He glanced over his shoulder, but saw nothing. No pursuit appeared to be forthcoming. ‘What now, Glott?’

‘Bloab Rotspawned and Orghotts Daemonspew are making for the Gelid Gush. Join them, Twiceborn…’ Ethrac hissed. ‘It is time for Grandfather Nurgle’s children to go to war.’

Chapter Eight

The ruins of Arborea

Lord-Celestant Gardus pushed through the veil of vines, and gazed at the faded glory of the fallen city of Arborea. The treetop city was a thing of flowing curves and soft angles, of great stones held aloft by the thick branches and boles of an immense elder tree, perhaps grown from a seed of the Oak of Ages Past itself. The latter was visible in the distance, its broken shape jutting across the pale green sky. He could just make out the pale swathe of foulness that was their destination on the horizon.

He repressed a shudder as he stared at that foulness.

Help us, Garradan… help us, the ghosts murmured in the back of his head. They had been whispering to him since he had reeled out of that mad garden and back into the Mortal Realms, aflame with white fire. They had clung to him, like the tatters of his warcloak, as he had waded into the fray between the sylvaneth and the skaven in the Glade of Horned Growths. He had instinctively sought out his foes, and ruined any who sought to bar his path, seeing not ratkin but the barbarians who had murdered the man he had been, in another time, another place.

Help us… Garradan, help us…

‘Quiet.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the voices back into the cage of his memories. When they had at last fallen silent he strode forward, following the scampering forms of the forest spites the Stormcasts had rescued from Nurgle’s followers a few days before. The colourful spirits swirled about him for a moment, clicking and murmuring in their strange tongue, before they faded, like reflections on water. Where they went, he could not say, and did not like to guess.

‘Thank you,’ he called out. The spites had led their Stormcast allies to Arborea by secret paths only they knew, and Gardus was grateful to them. It had been the first time in many days that the Stormcasts had been able to travel without fear of attack or ambush, and such a respite had been much needed, though it would be brief. Even Sigmar’s chosen warriors required rest, and Rotwater Blight had more dangers than just those that came armed with swords and axes. The servants of the Ruinous Powers were many and varied, and the Hallowed Knights and their allies had fought for every patch of ground between Profane Tor and here.

He looked about in wonder. What stories were in these stones, he wondered, tracing the faded features of a vine-shrouded statue as he looked around the vast plaza he had wandered into. What folk had built this city? What had happened to them? Where were they now?

He closed his eyes, suddenly recalling the guttural laughter of the daemon Bolathrax and the nightmare pursuit through the Garden of Nurgle. He knew what happened to the people of Arborea as surely as he knew what had happened to his own folk, before Sigmar had claimed him.

Garradan… help us…

Weathered stone and withered vine crumbled beneath his fingers. Gardus opened his eyes and took his hand away from the statue.

‘No more,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Never again.’

‘Gardus,’ a harsh voice said from behind him. He turned, and saw Lord-Castellant Grymn stalking towards him, his gryph-hound padding at his side, his lantern glowing with a soft, warming light. ‘Are you ill?’

Gardus smiled thinly. ‘You sound almost concerned.’

‘I would not have asked if I wasn’t,’ Grymn said. ‘You have… been through much.’

Gardus said nothing for a moment as he marshalled his thoughts. He wanted to tell Grymn what he had seen in Nurgle’s grim garden. Even now, safely returned to the Mortal Realms, he could not cleanse himself of the stink of that place. It ate away at him, mind, body and soul. His armour was clean, but sometimes he could not help but see filth, a slow, creeping mould, insidious and inexorable. Idly, he scraped at his chest. ‘I am fine, Lorrus.’

As they had traversed Rotwater Blight, Gardus had sent his Prosecutors winging ahead to scout out the lay of the land. They had brought back word of the great, hollow trunk of the Oak of Ages Past, rising up from the horizon, and Arborea smouldering in its shadow.

Too, Tegrus had spied a number of strange, floating islands, their snow-capped peaks crowned by ugly green clouds.

Gardus shook his head.

‘Tegrus,’ he called out to one of the winged shapes flying through the upper reaches of the city above. ‘Is this the place?’

‘This is the city I saw, my lord,’ Tegrus said as he dropped to the ground. His wings blazed once, stirring dust and pollen, and then folded behind his back. ‘We sit in the very shadow of the Oak of Ages Past.’ He extended his hammer to the northeast. ‘And there, the river’s source. We’re close, Gardus.’

Lord-Castellant Grymn grunted. ‘It seems those forest spites did not play us false.’

‘Why would they?’ Gardus asked. ‘It is in their best interests to aid us.’ He looked at Grymn. ‘Or do you still not trust them, Lorrus?’

‘I trust nothing in this realm,’ Grymn said, one eyebrow raised. ‘Nor should you, Gardus. We are strangers here, however much blood we’ve shed. The sylvaneth are allies of moment, nothing more. Who knows what goes through the heads of creatures like that?’

‘I know,’ Gardus said, softly. ‘They could have killed me, Lorrus. Instead, they brought me back. They told me of this city, and the islands in the sky. We are their best hope for awakening Alarielle to the danger she is in. The talons of the Plague God seek her heart, and they close about her, even now. We must get to her first, to put ourselves between her and her enemies. That is why we are here, my friend.’

‘Yes, to take control of the realmgates in Sigmar’s name,’ Grymn said. ‘Why must we…’ He fell silent and turned away.

Gardus called after him, but the Lord-Castellant walked away, bellowing orders to a phalanx of nearby Liberators.

‘As pleasant as ever,’ Tegrus murmured.

‘He is worried. We are all worried. It has been a hard path to walk, and we have shed much blood in the name of something I saw in a mad realm,’ Gardus said. They had done much good along the way. Or so he hoped. They had torn down the vile redoubts of Nurgle’s champions, and slain many a corrupted warrior on their trek across the Blight. But they had not been able to continue to follow the river. To tarry too long in the vicinity of such a corrupted body of water was dangerous, even to Stormcast Eternals. They’d had to find a safer way to the river’s source – and a quicker one. When the forest spites had offered to lead them by hidden paths to Arborea, Gardus had quickly accepted, despite Grymn’s misgivings.

He looked up at the trunk of the immense elder tree which stretched far above the city, piercing the very clouds themselves. ‘Are they up there, then?’ he asked Tegrus. ‘The floating islands you saw?’

‘Aye, far above,’ Tegrus said. ‘It’ll be quite the climb for those of you without wings.’

Gardus laughed. ‘We’ve climbed worse… Remember the Star-Heights of Azyr? At least this time we won’t have enemies hurling fire and spears down on us as we climb.’

‘As far as we know,’ Tegrus said. He looked up. ‘I will take my Prosecutors and make sure your route is a safe one. Do not doubt yourself, Steel Soul. We believe in you. All of us.’ Then, without waiting for a reply, he leapt into the air and was gone, speeding towards the dark clouds above. Gardus watched Tegrus go until he lost sight of him. He turned, as someone placed a hand on his shoulder.

‘Morbus,’ he said, recognizing the chill of the other Stormcast’s presence.

‘Grymn is worried,’ the Lord-Relictor intoned.

‘As are you, I expect,’ Gardus said.

‘No,’ Morbus said. ‘I do not worry, Gardus. I merely observe.’

‘Maybe he’s right to be worried,’ Gardus said, looking up at the tree.

Morbus laughed softly. ‘Grymn is stone. He is sigmarite – hard and unyielding. He will break before he bends, and calls it strength. But you…’

‘Bend,’ Gardus supplied.

Morbus nodded. ‘Yes. You bend. You adapt, you persevere. That is why Sigmar chose you as his sword, Gardus. You do what must be done, rather than what you have been ordered to do.’

‘So would Grymn, if he had seen–’ Gardus began.

Morbus cut him off with a sharp gesture. ‘Grymn would never have come out of Nurgle’s garden alive. He would have fought, and died.’ The Lord-Relictor hesitated. ‘Nonetheless, sometimes he is right. I have… seen things, Gardus. I have seen death and damnation, and I would not see it come to pass.’

‘Whose death?’ Gardus asked, mouth suddenly dry. ‘Whose damnation?’

Morbus was silent. Gardus looked away. He shook himself. Only the faithful, he thought.

‘We must climb, Morbus,’ he said. ‘We have a way to go, and little time.’ He looked at the Lord-Relictor. ‘Gather the others – my fellow Lord-Celestants included. We must reach the sky-islands floating above.’

‘And then what?’ Morbus said.

Gardus hesitated. Then, ‘I will know when I get up there.’ He clenched his fists. He could sense Morbus’ concern. Before the other Stormcast could speak, he continued on, his words coming in a rush. ‘I am being driven by something I cannot define, Morbus. A vague certainty compels me – fragments of knowledge, stolen as I fled through ruined worlds, snatches of things seen at a remove of centuries – the whispers of the sylvaneth, as they bore me to safety.’ He shook his head. ‘They, and perhaps even Ghyran itself, want Alarielle found, Lord-Relictor. They want her to know, to see what has become of the world she has shrunk from. Once she sees… she will fight. Ghyran will fight. The Jade Kingdoms will rise. And all of this will not have been for nothing.’ He looked at Morbus. ‘But we must find her first.’

Morbus was silent for a moment. Then he nodded.

‘We must climb,’ he said.

Chapter Nine

The floating islands

Lorrus Grymn slammed the edge of his halberd into the bark of the titanic tree. Tallon chirped from his perch. The gryph-hound lay across the Lord-Castellant’s chest, held fast by hope and a sling made from Grymn’s cloak.

‘Easy boy, almost there,’ Grymn muttered as Tallon’s beak rubbed against the underside of his war-helm. The animal was worried, as he should be. Though they had the heads of eagles, gryph-hounds lacked the bird’s wings, or ease with heights. ‘Almost… there, my friend.’ He dug his fingers into the ridges of the bark, and tore his halberd free. ‘Almost there.’

This is the sheerest folly, he thought, as he paused for breath. He chanced a look back at the way he’d come. Below him, figures in silver, amethyst and gold swarmed up the trunk of the vast tree like insects. Further below them, the crumbled city of Arborea was but a series of pale indentations in the all-pervasive mist. It had taken them hours to climb to the uppermost boughs of the great tree, moving so slowly that Grymn feared the war for the Jade Kingdoms would be over before they reached the top.

One missed step, one loosed hold, would be fatal. Already several Stormcasts had perished, falling to their deaths far below as the great tree swayed and shifted on its roots. He twisted his head upwards. Gardus clung to the topmost bough of the tree, staring out over the horizon, as if lost in thought.

He’d hoped Gardus’ return meant that things would proceed as Sigmar had decreed. Instead, they had travelled halfway across Rotwater Blight to fight battles they were not prepared for, all in the name of a vision that Gardus had experienced while lost in a daemon-realm. Grymn shook his head.

When Morbus had first told him of his dreams, he’d wanted to act, to save Gardus from the fate that awaited him. Gardus was a brother Stormcast, chosen by Sigmar and worthy of Grymn’s concern. But this venture seemed doomed to failure. Others had searched for the Radiant Queen, but had found no sign of her. If Sigmar’s own hunters had turned up no sign of their quarry, who could hope to find her?

‘Only the faithful.’

Grymn looked up. Gardus’ voice was soft, but it carried far. It was no parade ground bellow, but rather the quiet rumble of a dracoth. Gardus was not looking at him. Instead, the Lord-Celestant tensed and then, before Grymn could stop him, he flung himself into the mist that obscured the air around them. Grymn hesitated. He’d known this was coming. It was the only way to reach the floating islands that Tegrus said were hovering somewhere out there. He heard a scrape of metal and saw Lord-Relictor Morbus do the same, reliquary staff in hand. He watched the other Stormcasts vanish, and gritted his teeth. What sort of madman flings himself blindly into the void? he thought, angrily.

Tallon chirruped, and Grymn looked down at the gryph-hound. He smiled thinly. ‘Yes, I know… only the faithful.’ Then, wrapping one arm protectively about the animal, he shoved himself away from the trunk of the leviathan tree, and plummeted into the swirling mist. A second of weightlessness stretched out before ending abruptly in a soft landing on the loam of the floating isle. He felt rocks and roots crumble beneath his weight, and Tallon gave a startled screech as Grymn began to slide down an incline of spongy vegetation.

He twisted about, and saw, through the thinning mist, a jagged precipice. Grymn cursed and tried to hook his halberd into something solid, but to no avail. His stomach lurched.

‘Gardus!’ he shouted, and his slide was brought to an abrupt halt as an iron grip caught hold of the haft of his halberd. Grymn looked up into the eyes of the Lord-Celestant. Gardus, hammer hooked in the loam of the island, dragged Grymn back up with his free hand.

‘Have no fear, Lorrus. I will not let you fall,’ Gardus said.

Grymn said nothing as he caught hold of a thick net of roots and began to push himself up towards his fellow Stormcast. Morbus appeared above him and reached out a hand. Grymn took the Lord-Relictor’s aid gladly, and soon found himself kneeling on relatively solid ground. He looked about, heart thudding in his chest. More Stormcasts appeared, dropping through the mist to fall onto the island’s mossy scree. From the look of it, almost all of their warriors had made it. He could see Zephacleas and Ultrades and their men as well.

‘Tegrus wasn’t playing the fool after all,’ he said, fighting to keep all sign of the fear he’d felt out of his voice.

‘No, he wasn’t,’ Gardus said. He spread his arms. ‘Behold – the lost island of Talbion!’

Grymn looked at Morbus, who nodded tersely. Grymn rose to his feet and let Tallon out of his sling.

‘Well, now what, Lord-Celestant?’ he said. ‘We’re here… wherever here is.’

‘Talbion,’ Gardus repeated.

How did he know its name? Grymn wondered. Obviously, he’d learned it wherever he’d learned of its existence, but it was nonetheless disconcerting – Gardus knew things no other Stormcast did.

‘It might as well be the Brimstone Peninsula for all that that name means to me, Gardus. My question stands… what now?’ Grymn asked.

Overhead, the grey-green fog clouds that plagued the floating isles rumbled angrily and an unclean rain began to fall. Grymn grunted in disgust as the oily water pelted his armour and the mist seemed to condense about them, like the coils of an agitated serpent.

Zephacleas and Ultrades trotted towards them. The Lord-Celestant of the Astral Templars swiped at the mist. ‘Nothing like a good climb. Don’t care for this mist, though. Smells like those beasts we fought at the Vulturine Geysers.’

‘It is the work of the Ruinous Powers,’ Ultrades said.

‘This island, much like the realm of Ghyran itself, is a prisoner of Nurgle,’ Gardus said. ‘This cursed pox-mist is holding the island in place. We must somehow disperse it, and in doing so, free the island and then Ghyran itself.’ He looked at the Lord-Relictor and gestured with his hammer. ‘Morbus, call down the lightning.’

Morbus inclined his head and lifted his reliquary. He began to chant, his hollow tones rising above the patter of the rain. Azure lightning began to crackle within the depths of the reliquary, and it spread to the mist, flashing through it. It grew in strength, until it was blinding in its ferocity. The mist and smog writhed in the grip of the energy, like a serpent in the claws of a bird of prey. Morbus’ voice rose in pitch, his harsh tones lashing out with the savagery of the storm itself. Grymn could feel the power of the Lord-Relictor as it thrummed through the air and waged war on the very elements themselves.

Morbus rarely stirred himself to such heights, but when he did, it was a sight to behold. Grymn watched in awe as the mist began to burn away, seared to nothing by the fury of Morbus’ storm. He felt the ground beneath his feet shudder, as if in gratitude. Grymn looked up, and met Gardus’ solemn gaze.

‘Do you feel it, Lorrus? The island quakes, grateful to its bedrock. This is the realm of Ghyran, and even the stones themselves bristle with the stuff of life,’ he said.

The rain, once filthy, became as clean and pure as the summer storms of Azyr itself. Gardus lifted his arms and tilted his head back.

‘We have freed you, great island! Now bear us east, to the river’s mouth!’ Gardus’ voice echoed from the low peaks of the floating island.

Silence stretched out for several long moments. Not a single soul in the gathered Stormhosts dared speak. Then, with a rumble, the island began to shudder beneath their feet. Grymn looked about and saw the clouds in the sky moving. No, not the clouds… the island itself. The airborne mountain had begun to slide eastward through the pale emerald skies of Ghyran.

Grymn shook his head, incredulous. ‘How?’ he asked.

Gardus said nothing for a moment. Grymn wondered if the Lord-Celestant was as surprised as he was. Then Gardus lifted his hammer and roared, ‘Who will be victorious?’

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Only the faithful!’

Chapter Ten

The bursting of the world pimple

‘Well… there’s something you don’t see every day,’ Morbidex Twiceborn said, looking up at the island as it hove to through the clouds far above. Its shadow stretched across the heartlands of Rotwater Blight. Tripletongue grunted, and Morbidex patted the maggoth’s head.

Morbidex and his fellow maggoth lords had been stationed here to prevent the Stormcasts from advancing on the source of the Gelid Gush, as well as the roots of the Oak of Ages Past. Torglug, Spume and the others were positioned at the other various crossings and headwaters; every conceivable route to Pupa Grotesse and his bathwaters was guarded by the Grandfather’s own, on the orders of the Glottkin.

Morbidex glanced over his shoulder, back towards the distant shape of the Great Unclean One. Pupa Grotesse was larger than any other examples of his kind that Morbidex had ever had the pleasure of knowing. He was a mountain of jolly filth, though even he was made to look small next to the immense roots of the Oak of Ages Past.

‘Ever seen the like, Bloab?’ he called out to his fellow maggoth lord. Bloab Rotspawned shook his hooded head, causing the swarm of insects that accompanied him everywhere to flutter about in agitation. He was a bulky lump whose flesh, where it was not hidden by his black armour, was covered in insect bites and raised pustules, and his tattered robes were stained with strange ichor and covered in squirming maggots.

‘A new one on me, Morbidex,’ Bloab droned. ‘Even Bilespurter izz in awe, eh?’ He scratched the mottled flesh of his maggoth. Bilespurter gave a warbling snort in reply. Bloab turned towards Orghotts Daemonspew, the third of the maggoth riders present at the edge of the Gelid Gush, where the world pimples bulged obscenely. ‘What zzay you, Orghotts?’

‘What is there to say, companions-mine? ’tis an island, and she floats,’ Orghotts rumbled, through malformed lips. His maggoth shifted impatiently, and he gave its scaly skull a thump with the flat of one of the two large Rotaxes he carried. ‘Be still, Whippermaw. Thy hunger will soon be sated.’ He sat back in his saddle, his armour creaking. ‘I do wonder at it, aye.’ He stroked the great horn of daemon-bone that sprouted from the side of his face, jaw to crown. ‘Think it be our enemies, Twiceborn?’

‘The Glotts certainly must, otherwise Ghurk wouldn’t be ambling towards us with all the grace of an avalanche,’ Morbidex said, pointing towards the massive shape of Ghurk Glott, knuckling his way across the mire towards them, his siblings perched securely on his immense shoulders. Ghurk splashed through the shallow waters with an excited bellow, shouldering aside a mossy cairn in his haste.

‘What ho, Glottkin? Come to deliver us victory?’ Morbidex shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. ‘Do the silver-skins draw close? Is it to be battle at last? Tripletongue is hungry.’

‘Not here, not yet,’ Otto Glott replied loudly. ‘Not if Ethrac is right.’

‘Of course I’m right, brother-mine. The evidence hangs above us. They’re not stopping here,’ Ethrac said, as Ghurk loped past them, scattering maggoths and nurglings alike in his haste. ‘They bypassed Torglug’s forces, at river’s crossing, and Slaugoth’s host as well.’ The sorcerer pointed towards the island, sliding through the sky above. ‘Somehow, they freed one of the cursed sky-mountains of Talbion from the Grandfather’s pox-clouds and convinced it to float towards the source-waters of the Gelid Gush.’

Morbidex and his companions turned their maggoths about and set the beasts into motion in Ghurk’s wake. The maggoths had to gallop to keep up with the biggest Glott sibling. Morbidex leaned forward in his saddle. ‘Where are the others? What should we do?’

‘We’re already doing it,’ Ethrac snapped. He stamped on Ghurk’s head. ‘Keep an even keel, brother. I’m engaged in delicate sorceries here.’

Ethrac had a brazier standing before him, attached to Ghurk’s harness. It smoked and spat as he chanted over its open flame, wringing his hands in an ornate fashion. The smoke tensed like a thing alive as Ethrac’s voice rose in pitch, and before Morbidex’s astonished eyes it split like the petals of a gaseous flower, and a horde of insectile daemons, ridden by plaguebearers, spilled upwards into existence. They were without number, and far too large to have truly emerged from the brazier’s open mouth. The plague drones rose in a buzzing cloud, gossamer wings throbbing with an irregular rhythm.

‘Go, my pretties,’ Ethrac wailed, thrusting a finger towards the distant form of the flying mountain. ‘Rain down pox and peril, and make them rue the day they ever tested Grandfather’s patience!’ At his command, the twisting cloud of daemons tumbled upwards like a swarm of outsized hornets and swept across the sky towards the island. Morbidex gave a cheer.

‘Ha! Look at them go,’ he roared. He leaned over Tripletongue’s head and said, ‘Would that you had wings, Tripletongue, and we could join them.’ He straightened and looked at Ethrac, who had slumped back into Otto’s arms, exhausted by his magics. It was no easy thing to call forth the Grandfather’s aerial guard so far from a realmgate or other pestilential portal. The very air of Ghyran resisted such magics – even now, with Grandfather’s claws hooked deep in the soil. ‘What now? As much confidence as I have in your sorcery, I don’t think the plague drones can bring that rock down by themselves.’

‘Be at ease, Twiceborn. The Glotts have a plan, yes we do,’ Otto said. He extended his scythe towards one of the great boils of earth and mud rising from the face of Rotwater Blight. ‘We’ll see how well that island stays afloat with geysers of Grandfather’s own pus dappling its belly.’

Well, Morbidex thought, grinning in pleasure. Can’t say I haven’t thought of doing something similar, since I first laid eyes on them. The world pimples were a sign of the Grandfather’s interest in the Realm of Life, and a mark of how deep his influence truly went. The blessed muck and filth of the garden had spread to Ghyran, fertilizing the weak land and giving it some pomp and girth. The world pimples had formed soon after Pupa Grotesse had wedged his bulk into the river, bursting out of the ripe soil and spreading across the Blight. Every few decades, one of the Pimples would burst, unable to contain the pressure building up within it, filling the air with the familiar scents of Nurgle’s garden.

Ghurk and the maggoths loped towards the largest of the world pimples, followed by Morbidex’s nurglings, who could sense a good time when one was in the offing. Morbidex extended his scythe down past Tripletongue’s knees so that the quickest of his tiny charges could catch hold of the blade and swing themselves up onto the maggoth’s flanks.

Despite the speed of the great beasts, it still took some time to reach their destination. Morbidex sat back and let the rhythm of Tripletongue’s barrelling gait put him at ease. Bloab did much the same, the fat sorcerer sitting, head bowed, looking for all the world as if he were asleep. Orghotts, however, incited Whippermaw to greater and greater speeds, rapping the maggoth’s flanks with the flat of his axes. Never any patience, that one, Morbidex thought, watching his old ally bellow curses and snatches from ancient songs.

On they rode, across the mires and fens of Rotwater Blight. And above them all, the island crept closer and closer, until its shadow all but swallowed them up. Morbidex could feel the ancient power flowing through the airborne mass of soil and rock; it was unlike anything in the Grandfather’s garden, but somehow familiar all the same. It was the power of life unrestrained, life without limit or end, and admirable in its own way. Aye, it’ll be a shame to see you gone, but Grandfather bids it, Morbidex thought.

The world would be better when such things knew their place, in any event. Ghyran had yet to be tamed. That was why the Glotts were so determined to find the so-called Radiant Queen. It was Alarielle who was somehow stymieing Nurgle’s advances in this realm, Alarielle whose subtle song raised forests to walk and cleansed that which had been fairly befouled. And it was Alarielle whom Nurgle wanted. It was said, by those who would know, that there was a cage of crystalline pus, hardened in the heat of Nurgle’s cauldron, somewhere in the garden, waiting for its prisoner. When the Radiant Queen was at last his, these knowledgeable sorts said, Grandfather would cage her, and hang her from his bower, and listen to her beautiful song into eternity.

Who says the gods don’t understand romance, Morbidex thought, as he brought Tripletongue to a halt in a cloud of dust. The largest of the world pimples was a truly mountainous boil of dripping earth, topped by a cloudy bubble of beautiful vileness. It was magnificent.

‘Too bad,’ Morbidex murmured.

‘What was that, Twiceborn?’ Otto asked, peering down at him. The oldest of the Glotts was a bulky warrior, as big as Morbidex, and his lumpen frame was fair to bursting with the favour of Nurgle. He carried a scythe, like Morbidex, though his was wreathed with even more baleful enchantments.

‘I said it’s a shame,’ Morbidex said, reclining in his saddle. He scratched the chin of a nurgling. ‘Think of how big it might get…’

‘We all must make sacrifices to keep pests out of the garden,’ Otto said. He smacked Ghurk on the head with the butt of his scythe. ‘Hup, Ghurk. Give it a squeeze.’

Ghurk made a sound of assent and reached out with his giant tentacle. The tendril slithered about the cusp of the world pimple and contracted with a sound like grinding rocks.

‘Hurry, Ghurk,’ Otto said, as he hunched forward. ‘Hurry! They are almost past us!’

Morbidex looked up, and saw the island pass overhead. Soil and rocks fell from its vast belly, to smash into the mire below. Water exploded upwards as a chunk of rock hammered down nearby, and Tripletongue gave a bleat of surprise. Morbidex leaned forward and dug his fingers into the maggoth’s hide.

‘Easy, you fearful brute, it’s just a bit of soil, think nothing of it,’ he grated, even as he cocked an eye towards the hovering landmass.

‘Mayhap we should seek safer ground,’ Orghotts said, looking around warily. More stones fell, plopping into the water with ground-shaking finality. Bodies fell with them too, some clad in silver, others dripping with Nurgle’s blessings. Ethrac’s daemons had met the enemy, and the air was rent by the sounds of battle as winged Stormcasts clashed with plague drones. Morbidex watched, momentarily distracted by the aerial war. He’d never seen the like, at least not in the Mortal Realms. Where the Grandfather’s garden abutted the killing fields of Khorne or the colorful palaces of Tzeentch’s realm, such conflicts were commonplace. But those things were but grand duels, exaggerated and only mockingly serious.

This, however, was true war, and part of him longed to be up there amidst it. He glanced around and saw that his fellow maggoth lords were as rapt as he was, watching the sky-borne battle. Then Ghurk roared, and with a sound like splitting rock, the world pimple ruptured.

Chapter Eleven

Battle in the sky

‘Only the faithful,’ Tegrus shouted as he folded his wings and arrowed towards the plague drone. Hammer crashed against plaguesword as he swept past. Prosecutors from three Stormhosts had launched themselves aloft to engage the daemon-flyers, as the latter swarmed the island, seeking to attack those who stood upon it.

As he swooped through the air, back towards his quarry, Tegrus could see the grey-green reaches of Rotwater Blight spreading out far below him. There too was the shattered husk of the Oak of Ages Past, larger than a range of foothills and rising up as if to catch hold of the sky. From its end flowed a ribbon of pure crystal water, turning midstream to a flow of putrid slop. There, squatting amidst that filth, was the being they had come to find, the Great Unclean One that Gardus had spoken of.

You were right, Steel Soul, he thought, as he rolled through the air.

One of his hammers snapped out to catch a plaguebearer in the head. His blow sent the daemon tumbling from its buzzing mount. The fly contorted with malign urgency, its hairy legs crashing against Tegrus’ armour as it sought to crush him. The acrid stench of it washed over him, choking him. With a strangled shout, he drove his hammers into its pulsing thorax, rupturing the shiny carapace and covering himself in a pungent tide of squirming maggots. The fly plummeted from the air, following its rider to the ground far below. Tegrus grimaced and pressed his hammer to his chest, burning away the creatures that clung to the sigmarite.

He looked around, taking in the aerial battle going on around him. When the daemons had appeared, every Prosecutor capable of flight had thrown themselves into the air. Tegrus himself had been eager for the fray. It had been too long since the battle at the cairns. His quarry, the bloated beast-rider calling himself Morbidex, had escaped Sigmar’s justice, fleeing deeper into the swamp. Though Tegrus had pursued him, his foe had escaped. The thought of the beast-rider’s gurning face still sent a pulse of anger through him. Such a creature, steeped as it was in the stuff of Chaos, could not be allowed to live, but Gardus had commanded him to leave it be, fearing, perhaps, that his Prosecutor-Prime was being led into an ambush.

In his heart, he knew the Lord-Celestant was right. Nonetheless, he was frustrated. And when the plague drones had shown up, he had seen them as an opportunity to work out some of those frustrations. So he fought, waging war in the manner to which he had become accustomed. It had taken some getting used to, in those early days after he’d been raised up to the ranks of the Stormcasts, reforged from the simple hunter he had been and made into one of Sigmar’s avenging warriors. Rarely did he think of those bygone days. He knew some of his fellow Stormcasts dreamed of their old lives, or were tormented by memories they did not recognize. But for him, the past was the past; it was as banished as the daemon whose head he’d just split.

More plague drones hummed towards him, swooping and diving. Tegrus turned and gave a flap of his wings, pushing himself back towards the island. He led his pursuers low over the ranks of the Stormcasts, and the bows of the Judicators sang.

Tegrus heard a dim rumble from somewhere far below. He swooped out over the rim of the island and his eyes widened as he saw the geyser of boiling pus rising from the mire below. Alarmed, he turned, wings flapping, knowing even as he flew that he would not be able to warn the others in time. He didn’t know what it was, but it was nothing good. The pus splashed against the underside of the island with a roar, causing the great mountain to quake down to its roots. It pitched to the side, like a vessel caught in the grip of a storm, and where the pus struck, it clung, a greenish vapour issuing forth in great, blistering gouts.

The island fought to stay aloft, sagging and rising, but Tegrus could see that it was doomed to fail. Whatever magic, life-force or animating spirit kept it afloat, it was still weak from the vile rains that Lord-Relictor Morbus’ magic had dispatched. The jet of burning pus was eating away at its roots and hollows, carving great wounds in its belly and sides. The mountain began to shudder. Tegrus flew over the heads of Gardus and the others, shouting, ‘It’s coming apart. If you value your lives – hold on!’

Stormcasts leapt to obey, anchoring themselves the best they could as the shuddering grew in strength, until whole sections of the rocky slopes gave way and slid down, tumbling into the void below. Several Stormcasts were caught by the falling rocks and carried to their deaths. Others raised their shields, or called out Sigmar’s name, as if by his hand they might gain the strength to survive the next few moments.

‘Steady,’ Gardus roared. The Lord-Celestant stabbed his sword into the ground to anchor himself, and the others did the same. Even so, dozens of Stormcasts were thrown from their perches, or ripped upwards by the force of the island’s descent. Tegrus and the Prosecutors not still engaged in battle with the plague drones soared upwards, fighting the storm, trying to save any that they could. Their wings crackled as they forced themselves up against the drag of the island’s passage. Their wings had been forged by Sigmar himself, each feather a scintilla of the God-King’s holy lightning, and they flashed brightly as they beat. Tegrus narrowed his eyes, fighting to see through the wind and the vast contrail of foul steam spilling from the wounded island.

A glint of silver caught his eye and he bent towards it, rolling through the air. His wings tore through the cloud of steam and he saw a number of Liberators falling upwards. As Tegrus neared them, one came apart in a flash of blue light, returning to Sigmaron to be reforged. Tegrus put on speed, trying to reach the other two before they met a similar fate.

Tegrus caught one of the Liberators by the hand even as the second hurtled out of reach, disappearing into the clouds. There was a flash of blue. I’m sorry, brother, he thought as he banked and turned back towards the island. Other Prosecutors sailed upwards, continuing in their efforts. ‘Hold fast, brother,’ he said to the Stormcast whose wrist he held. ‘I will get you down in one piece, if I’m able.’

The Liberator’s reply was lost in the howl of the wind. Tegrus aimed himself towards the island, hoping that it would hold together long enough to land more or less safely. The mountain drifted lower and lower, losing pieces of itself all the while, as the acidic pus ate away at it from roots to crags. A dull groan, as of a living thing in agony, rose from it as it sank towards the shallows of the River Vitalis.

Tegrus rose upwards as the island struck the ground with a thunderous roar. Entire mobs of plague daemons were crushed beneath it as it fell, and more were similarly obliterated as the island collapsed in on itself. A tsunami of infected water surged back along the course of the river, escaping the banks and washing over the massive shape of the Great Unclean One squatting at the river’s heart. Tegrus stared in horror at the monstrosity. The creature was far larger than the beast that had attacked them in the Ghyrtract Fen, as if swollen by the stolen vitality of the river. The greater daemon roared in outrage as the dust thrown up by the island’s fall began to clear, and yanked a rusted flail from the water.

Pupa Grotesse forced himself to his feet with a second, rolling bellow and slashed out with the flail, smashing at the river. Turgid, brown-frothed waves smacked into the remains of the island, washing over it and clearing the dust and steam. Tegrus dropped from the air, depositing his burden. The Liberator looked at him.

‘Olanus,’ he said, raising the hammer he’d somehow managed to retain in salute.

‘Tegrus,’ Tegrus said, returning the warrior’s salute. He looked around. He saw no other Stormcasts – he couldn’t even see his Prosecutors, thanks to the haze thrown up by the island’s descent. Talbion crumbled behind them, dying if not already dead. Tegrus felt something that might have been sadness as he watched the mass of rock and earth split and dissolve in the flowing waters of the river. There had been something – some spirit, some soul – in it that was, while not human, still a life to be mourned.

We will not see your like again, he thought, as he turned back to face the distant shape of the Great Unclean One.

It was enormous, almost a mountain in its own right, if a mountain could walk. Where its shadow fell, the water frothed and was made foul, and its motion set the river to churning. ‘That is the beast Gardus spoke of,’ Olanus said.

‘Aye, it is,’ Tegrus replied. He said it calmly, masking the worry he felt. Perhaps the others were simply trapped – he had seen no telltale flash of azure, signalling the demise of his fellows. Either way, they were not in evidence.

Tegrus made ready to thrust himself into the air once more. If he could get above the beast, he might be able to distract it long enough for Olanus to get in close. He turned to say as much to his fellow Stormcast, when Olanus suddenly gave a grunt of pain and stumbled.

Tegrus spun, and saw a plaguebearer rising from the water behind the Liberator. Some of the daemons had survived the island’s fall, after all. This one had found a gap in Olanus’ armour, and it wrenched its sword free with a ghastly grin as blue light erupted from the eye and mouth slits of the dying Liberator’s helm. Tegrus moved to strike the beast down, but a splash from behind alerted him to his own danger. More of the daemons burst from the foetid waters and launched themselves at him, rusty blades drawing sparks from his hammers as he interposed them. More plaguebearers rose around him, erupting from the water like aggressive flotsam.

He fought desperately, trying to hold them at bay. His wings snapped out, swift as sword-strikes, their crackling feathers burning open loathsome guts as his hammers shattered diseased blades and plague-ridden bones alike, but there were too many of them. Rotting hands caught his limbs and he was yanked off-balance. He fell onto his back in the water, frantically parrying the weapons that sought his belly and head. Plaguebearers flung themselves on him, weighing him down, scrabbling at his armour, seeking to pry open the gaps so that their fellows could finish him off. Tegrus screamed in futile rage as his forearms were pinned beneath the water and a flabby, peeling foot crashed onto his chest, holding him down.

The plaguebearer that stood on him raised its sword in two hands for a killing thrust. It leered down at him, single eye burning with malign pleasure as it considered his plight. Tegrus thrashed, but was unable to tear himself free.

Suddenly, his would-be killer’s skull burst like an overripe fruit. A sword flashed, lopping off limbs and chopping through heads, and then Tegrus was free. He looked up as Gardus sheathed his sword and extended his free hand.

‘Up, Tegrus… I need you in the sky, Prosecutor.’

‘Gladly, Lord-Celestant. I confess, I am not at my best on the ground,’ Tegrus said, as Gardus pulled him to his feet.

Gardus nodded.

‘So I noticed.’ He stepped back and raised his hammer. Beyond him, Tegrus saw silver-clad shapes emerge from the murk thrown up by the death-throes of the island. Grymn, Morbus and others, including Astral Templars and Guardians of the Firmament, strode through the swirling waters, weapons in hand. Gardus, hammer held over his head, shouted, ‘Who will be triumphant?’

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply. Tegrus added his voice to the rest, glorying in the thought of the battle to come. Gardus was with them. They had survived every horror the enemy could throw at them, and now they stood on the cusp of victory.

Pupa Grotesse roared in fury, and slammed his flail down again and again. Every time the weapon crashed down, the water erupted in flopping, splashing shapes – slug-like monstrosities, with gnashing teeth and flailing limbs, which bounded through the river towards the Stormcasts with unseemly speed. Gardus faced the oncoming horde, and drew his runeblade with his free hand.

‘Who stands with me?’ he called.

‘Only the faithful,’ Tegrus and the others responded, their voices rising into a communal roar as they clashed weapons and struck shields in a fierce display.

‘Only the faithful,’ Gardus shouted.

And then the enemy was upon them, and there was no more time for words.

Chapter Twelve

The naming of the beast

‘Forward – for Sigmar, for Ghyran, and the Celestial Realm,’ Gardus called out. He crushed the skull of one of the beasts of Nurgle as it tried to flatten him beneath its weight. The great beasts had crashed into the Stormcasts’ vanguard like eager children, shrugging off stab wounds and hammer blows with gurgling aplomb. They bellied and crushed their way through the ranks of the Hallowed Knights, warbling as they surged through the water. They had been joined by plaguebearers, who rose from the befouled river and launched themselves at the distracted Stormcasts. But it was the beasts of Nurgle who were the true danger here, large and tough as they were.

Only the Retributors had proven capable of felling the creatures, and with each swing of their hammers they had reduced the daemons to gobbets of wet ash. Zephacleas led the Retributors of all three Stormhosts forward, his armour dappled with gore as he fought his way to the front. Gardus’ fellow Lord-Celestant was a man of few words, but possessed an almost limitless capacity for violence, and was in his own way almost as eager for battle as the beasts he fought.

In contrast to the savagery of Zephacleas and his amethyst-armoured warriors, Ultrades and his Guardians of the Firmament were of a more stolid philosophy. They fought with a stoicism second only to that of the Hallowed Knights themselves, their circular phalanxes grinding forwards like millstones to crush the unruly mobs of daemons between them. Shields slammed forward to trap plaguebearers and yelping beasts, as Prosecutors dove down to smash them flat with all the precision of the arrows fired from the bows of the Judicators advancing behind the Liberators.

He saw a Liberator driven beneath the water by a flailing creature. Before he could reach the unfortunate warrior’s side, blue light exploded upwards from the water, signalling another hero’s soul sent back to Sigmar’s forges. He killed the daemon as it turned towards him, and then whirled, bisecting a plaguebearer as it leapt into the air, sword raised over its head.

Too many of them, Gardus thought. Everywhere he looked, daemons leapt and capered. It was like the Ghyrtract Fen all over again, only this time, there was no realmgate to close. He looked at the Great Unclean One. It was no Bolathrax. Though such creatures bore a resemblance to one another, they were as much individuals as any Stormcast. He’d learned that much in his time in Nurgle’s garden, and more besides.

It had been Bolathrax who had first spoken the name of Pupa Grotesse, as he pursued Gardus. The daemon had bellowed of the canker afflicting the Oak of Ages Past, of the champions arrayed against the Stormcasts, of the Rotfane, the Profane Tor, and the Gelid Gush, and more than that. Bolathrax had been overly loquacious, in the way of those who think words alone can break a spirit.

But Gardus’ spirit was not broken. He would do what no other champion of Sigmar had been able to do and bring the God-King’s words to the Radiant Queen, thus removing the mark that Nurgle’s garden had left on his soul. And maybe he would silence the ghosts which yet clung to him in doing so.

Garradan… help us…

‘Only the faithful,’ he croaked. He could see their faces everywhere, rising from the sludge in the spray of daemonic bile. Victims of plagues long past: men, women and children he had not been able to save. Nurgle had been his enemy for longer than he had ever suspected. The ghosts crowded around him, clutching at him, begging him for aid that he could not give. Anger lent him new strength.

‘Only the faithful,’ he snarled, shattering a daemon blade and chopping into its wielder’s chest.

A second blade glanced from his shoulderplate and he spun. Gardus bashed the plaguebearer from its feet with a swipe of his hammer. Before it could even attempt to rise, a halberd flashed, removing its head from its shoulders. Grymn tore his weapon free of the daemon’s remains as it sank below the swirling waters and said, ‘The big one is our true foe.’

‘Agreed, Lorrus,’ Gardus said. ‘But there’s an army between him and us.’ He crossed his weapons and caught a descending plaguesword at their crux. The plaguebearer groaned and Gardus kicked it in its bulging belly, knocking it backwards. As it fell, Grymn’s gryph-hound shot forward and leapt upon it, savaging it mercilessly. He ignored the daemon’s squeals and turned back to Grymn. ‘We’ll have to carve ourselves a–’

‘A path? It seems Ultrades beat us to it,’ Grymn said, gesturing with his halberd. ‘Look!’

Gardus did, and felt his heart stutter in his chest, as his fellow Lord-Celestant led a wedge of Stormcasts through a gap in the enemy ranks, straight towards the greater daemon. Their charge slowed as they reached the thick slop emanating from the daemon’s flabby haunches, where filth and water had mingled to form a tarry barrier. Ultrades tore his men a path and a phalanx of Liberators lurched forward, shields raised.

Pupa Grotesse glared down at the interlopers and bellowed in rage. A boulder-like fist descended from on high and Stormcasts were crushed, their bloody forms swiftly discorporating. The massive flail whirled and whole retinues were hurled back like broken dolls. Only Ultrades and his Decimators made it past these obstacles, but their blows rebounded harmlessly from the Great Unclean One’s elephantine hide. Pupa Grotesse roared in fury and swiped out one long arm to send shattered bodies flying. Many vanished in explosions of blue light, while others sank without a trace in the noxious waters.

Ultrades himself was nearly felled, driven to one knee in the water by a blow from Pupa Grotesse’s flail. He strained against the weight of the weapon, even as he was driven deeper and deeper into the filthy waters. Ultrades was strong – all Stormcasts were – but even he was no match for such a creature. Nonetheless, he was keeping the beast occupied, which meant they had a chance, however slim. We have to move quickly, Gardus thought, and looked at Grymn. ‘Hold here, rally our brothers, keep them away from that beast.’ He turned. ‘Morbus – to me!’

A burst of lightning danced across the water, frying a plague-beast in mid-bound. Lord-Relictor Morbus stepped through the swirling cloud of ashes.

‘I am here, Lord-Celestant. Proceed, and I shall follow,’ he rasped. Gardus nodded sharply, and began to bludgeon his way towards the greater daemon.

He lashed out with sword and hammer as he moved. Both weapons crackled with white fire as he slew plaguebearer and beast of Nurgle alike when they dared interpose themselves. Morbus followed close behind, lightning snarling from his reliquary to streak across the waters towards their foe. The crackling bolt slammed home, and the Great Unclean One reeled with an agonized roar. Smoke boiled from his gaping pores as he stretched out his long arm towards Morbus, who drew the beast’s attention away from his Lord-Celestant with a second bolt of lightning, as accurately aimed as the first. Sigmar bless you, Morbus – as ever, you know what I require before I ask, Gardus thought, as he charged beneath the sweep of the daemon’s flail. The daemon turned away from Ultrades, who sank back into the water, exhausted.

Morbus lashed out with his hammer, shattering one of the creature’s fingers. Pupa Grotesse roared out unintelligible curses and, ignoring his wounded digit, plucked Morbus from the water. He raised the struggling Lord-Relictor up and examined him, as Morbus struggled futilely in his grip. He said something in a rumbling, glottal voice that was too deep to be understood by human ears, and lifted Morbus higher. The Great Unclean One’s grotesque jaw distended, gaping wider than seemed entirely possible, even for such a massive being.

Gardus put on a burst of speed and ran up a stump of rotten driftwood. As he moved, he summoned a word from the pits of his memory – no, not a word, rather, a name. A name spoken by Bolathrax, in his heedless gloating. The true name of the being that called itself Pupa Grotesse – and to a daemon, its true name might as well be a blade aimed at its black heart. Gardus leapt, sword raised, and screamed the name, spitting the deranged syllables as if they were bolts from a crossbow. The name quavered on the stinking air, and the Great Unclean One turned, eyes wide, Morbus all but forgotten.

Gardus brought his sword down, chopping through the daemon’s thick wrist, freeing the Lord-Relictor in a geyser of foulness. The daemon shrieked and reeled, clutching at his wounded limb. Stormcast and daemon-hand crashed into the water, and Morbus swiftly bulled his way free of the spasmodically twitching hand.

‘Morbus – now!’ Gardus cried as he landed.

Morbus rose, reliquary in both hands, and began to chant. He called out to the tempest, and the tempest answered. Crackling bolts split the skies, swathing Grotesse in sacred lightning. Gardus watched as bolt after bolt struck the staggering monstrosity, even as the daemons around him turned away, eyes seared by the light of Sigmar’s wrath. Pupa Grotesse’s flesh began to smoulder and turn black. Steaming cracks appeared in his body, and the daemon abruptly stiffened, mouth wide in a scream that never came.

There was a deafening bang, and the daemon exploded like a sack of rotting offal left too long in the hot sun. The effect was immediate. The filth and sludge that marked the waters began to clear, turning to ash and crumbling away beneath newly crystalline waters. The clean waters ate at the remaining daemons like acid, dissolving them even as they fought, or tried to flee.

Gardus dipped his hand into the waters as they surged around him, and felt his weaknesses and hurts fade away.

‘It is like the rivers of home,’ Ultrades said in wonder, as Morbus helped him to his feet. He looked at Gardus. ‘Did you know that this would happen?’

‘I had hoped,’ Gardus said. He watched as the last of the daemons were dispatched, and turned, staring out over the river. In the sound of its waters, he thought he could hear a woman’s voice, singing an unfamiliar song. Hesitantly, he placed his palms over the water, trying to feel something, anything that might tell him that he wasn’t simply hearing things. As he peered down, he thought he could see something in the reflection on the water. He looked up as a shadow passed over it. ‘Tegrus, can you see anything?’ he called out as the Prosecutor-Prime swooped overhead.

‘Aye, though it might simply be a trick of the light,’ Tegrus called down, as he circled around. ‘There is an emerald light, where the river’s bed should be.’

Gardus looked at Morbus. ‘Morbus, do you–’

‘He feels it,’ Grymn said, splashing towards them, accompanied by his gryph-hound and Zephacleas. ‘We all do, Gardus. Every one of us.’

The Lord-Castellant looked at him warily. ‘What is it? Who is she? Who is singing?’

Gardus shook his head. ‘You know as well as I, Lorrus. She is the one we have come to find.’ He motioned to the vast shape of the Oak of Ages Past, and the clear, shining waters that now spilled from the cleft in its trunk. ‘There is a reason the enemy had no more luck finding her than we did. She was hiding beneath their very noses, in a place they thought already conquered. She is here,’ he said, voice rising. ‘The gate to Athelwyrd is here. We have found the Hidden Vale.’

Chapter Thirteen

Nurgle’s deluge

Torglug shook his head, trying to clear the flies from his ears, as the skaven grey seer chattered obsequiously up at the Glottkin. The creature had summoned them to the banks of the Gelid Gush. At Torglug’s suggestion, the ratkin had been placed on the invaders’ trail, and had pursued the enemy across Rotwater Blight. Their skulking spies had scurried in the wake of every battle, keeping track of the foe’s movements. And now, at last, it seemed the time had come to run their quarry to ground. ‘Storm-things pass into the river,’ the grey seer chittered, gesticulating towards the water. ‘The water… it is the portal!’

As it spoke, there came a sound like a hundred rats gnawing a hundred stones, and the verminlord Vermalanx dropped into reality. The rat-daemon shrieked at his charge, snapping long fangs in obvious agitation. The grey seer shied away from this display, and Torglug wondered what contest was being waged between master and servant. The rats aped men in that way more than any other, always seeking the advantage even over their own kind. The rat-daemon was clearly enraged, and Torglug suspected that the grey seer had been ordered to report the whereabouts of Athelwyrd to Vermalanx first.

Whatever the reason for it, the verminlord’s anger was like the sweetest bile to Torglug, and he extended his axe between the rat-daemon and his servant.

‘You are ceasing this unseemly display, vermin,’ he rasped. ‘We are being allies in this endeavour, and we will be needing every one of us to take the Hidden Vale and its mistress.’

‘If this treacherous rat isn’t simply lying,’ Vermalanx hissed, glaring at the cowering grey seer. ‘If this place is indeed beneath the river.’

‘It would make a certain sense,’ Otto Glott said, twirling his scythe. Idly he swatted at the flies that clustered about the crusted wounds in his belly. ‘Why else would they come here, into the very heart of Grandfather’s blight?’ He looked at Torglug and inclined his head. ‘A good plan, this, letting the rats skulk and spy.’

‘I am pleased you are satisfied, Master Glott,’ Torglug rumbled. He shook his head and looked at the now-pristine river, sparkling in the setting sun. ‘It is under us the whole time,’ he murmured, leaning on his axe. ‘We are running around, and here it is. How she must be laughing.’ He looked aside, at the portly shape of the sorcerer, Slaugoth, who stood nearby, wrapped in his ragged cloak, leaning on his boil-covered staff. ‘Why did we not look here, jolly one? Why was it the rats who are finding it first?’

‘We assumed nothing would survive in such close proximity to Pupa Grotesse, that’s why,’ Gutrot Spume interjected before the sorcerer could reply, his tentacles coiling and clenching about the haft of his axe. The champion stood on the other side of Slaugoth, glaring at the river as if it had offended him. ‘More fool us, I’d say.’

‘Quiet,’ Torglug snapped, irritated by Spume’s presence. The other champion had grown increasingly infuriating since the fall of Profane Tor. Spume seemed to regard the continued assaults of the lightning-men as a personal affront, rather than as the danger it truly was. But Torglug knew better… The Stormcasts were anything but weak to get as far as they had. They had humbled Spume, Slaugoth and the maggoth lords alike, and crushed every obstacle that the Grandfather had placed in their path. Normal men they were not.

There were vast things afoot, in the spaces between moments. Torglug could feel them, deep in his blighted marrow. The Grandfather stirred uneasily on his throne, and the world shuddered, as if slowly coming awake after a long sleep. He looked up at the sky, peering at the greenish clouds, wondering what force lurked above, watching. What power had sent them, these Stormcasts? And why now? He looked at the Glotts, considering.

They were not worthy, those three. Ghurk, perhaps, but Otto and Ethrac were fools, and lazy ones at that. Industry was a dirty word to them. They knew nothing of effort, and their only loyalty was to one another. It was not they who had poisoned the lifewells, or conquered the tribes of the Ghyranic highlands. It was not the Glotts who had tamed the ogors of the Graven Peaks or decimated the sacred groves of Thyrr. Yet they reaped the Grandfather’s rewards while better men were left to sit and simmer, forgotten. Torglug’s grip on his axe tightened, and he wondered what might happen in the hours to come.

‘Deep in thought, Woodsman,’ Slaugoth murmured, startling him. The sorcerer peered at him, yellow eyes narrowed in speculation, as if he could read Torglug’s thoughts. ‘What are you thinking, Despised One?’

‘Nothing of import,’ Torglug said.

‘They say that you were once a man of this realm, Ironhood,’ Slaugoth pressed. ‘I myself come from more distant climes, though I find the air here quite congenial.’ He smiled widely. ‘They say that the Grandfather himself tutored you in the ways of pox and plague while you rotted in a pit. It must have been something to see, especially for a barbarian from the wilds of Ghyran,’ the sorcerer said slyly.

‘The Grandfather is blessing me,’ Torglug said. He looked at Slaugoth. ‘Why are you asking?’ He leaned closer to the sorcerer. ‘Are you thinking Torglug is worried?’

‘Not worried. Plotting, perhaps, as we all are, in our own ways,’ Slaugoth said. He smiled, as if amused. ‘We all had our designs on the glory to be had from this moment, all save that fat fool, Morbidex. We all wished to stand here alone, beneath Grandfather’s benign gaze, to claim the maggoth’s share of the credit. And instead…’

‘The Glotts,’ Spume growled. ‘The Brothers Three.’ He shook his head, and the kraken mouth in his side snapped angrily. ‘Sneaks and rogues, so they are. No better than the skaven.’ Spume grunted and looked at Torglug. ‘We’re for it now, Woodsman. We’re under their maggoty thumbs and I’ll be barnacled if they don’t claim this was all part of some blasted plan.’

‘Grandfather will be knowing the truth,’ Torglug said confidently. He lifted his axe and held it parallel to the ground. ‘Now what are we to do?’ he called out, to the Glotts.

‘Simplicity itself, Woodsman,’ Otto said, planting his scythe. ‘We go for a swim.’ He looked at his brother, Ethrac. ‘Ethrac, oh second-favoured sibling. That river is too pure by half. Summon Grandfather’s Deluge so we can flood this place for good.’

‘A meritorious idea, brother from my mother’s womb,’ Ethrac said. ‘Gates can be forced open as well as unlocked. Slaugoth! Attend me, O portly one.’ Ethrac snapped his fingers at Slaugoth, whose head bobbed in agreement.

‘Commendable thought, Master Glott. I most heartily agree,’ the sorcerer murmured, scratching his chins. ‘We could fill that entire vale with noisome fluid, and thus claim it forever in the name of Grandfather’s infinite putrescence.’ He made a pudgy fist. ‘Serve those silver-skinned pests right for the drubbing they gave me. They tore down my sludge-walled keep without so much as a by your leave, and washed away my lovely, filthy rains with their god-blasted tempest. Aye, let us wake the Deluge, and drown ’em all.’

‘More than that, I think,’ Ethrac said. ‘Oh, we’ll flood it good, but we’ll take its mistress captive, and haul her in chains of fungus and mouldy bone to Grandfather. The Radiant Queen has hidden from us for far too long, my friends… She will hide no longer. Tonight, Alarielle is ours, and she will be in a cage in the Grandfather’s garden, and Ghyran ours, by the first rays of morning.’ He clapped his hands together in satisfaction.

‘Oh yes, yes, yes and yes again,’ Otto roared. ‘Ha! Yes, that’ll do – Ghurk, give the signal. Loud as you like, my lad. Call ’em all, every drone and nurgling, every maggoth and beast. Bring them all here, double-quick. We’re going in.’

Torglug winced as Ghurk rose to his full height and threw back his misshapen head to unleash a deafening howl. The grey seer cowered, hairy hand-paws pressed over its ears. Spume stuffed tentacles in his rotted ear canals. Slaugoth hunkered down and turned away, body clenched against the sound. The howl stretched up and out, riding the breeze across the vast wilderness of Rotwater Blight.

And in the middle distance, as the echoes of the howl faded, war horns answered Ghurk’s call by the score.

Chapter Fourteen

Secrets of Athelwyrd

Grymn pushed himself to his feet with his halberd, Tallon by his side, chirruping nervously. They were atop a lichen-clad slope of rock. Above their heads stretched the undulating shape of the River Vitalis, strange glimmerings of light playing across its underside. Other Stormcasts were rising to their feet around him, shaking off the effects of the transition to this hidden bower.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Gardus said, sitting nearby, his hammer across his knees. He was gazing out over the slope, across the vale which stretched out beneath them as far as the eye could see. It was breathtaking, Grymn had to admit. Alarielle’s Hidden Vale was so large that it had its own mountain ranges, stretching off into cloudy distances. Each of these was draped in evergreen forests and hung with glittering waterfalls so pure that they hurt the eye to even look upon them. ‘All of Ghyran, I am told, once looked as this does,’ Gardus continued, softly. He extended a hand. ‘See how the trees glow, Lorrus… have you ever seen the like? They are as bright as the stars themselves.’

Grymn said nothing. Instead, he noted the arboreal citadels that sprouted from the entwined trunks of those distant trees, and silently calculated their size. They must be massive. But who resides there? The thought was not a pleasant one. He was not beguiled by the gossamer floating through the warm air, or the brightly hued fan-tail birds that swooped above through the coloured mist. If this was a paradise, it was not one meant for men. He turned and saw that the closest Stormcasts were, like Gardus, enraptured by the strange beauty spread out before them.

He slammed the butt of his halberd down on the rock, once, twice, three times. Every eye turned towards him. ‘On your feet,’ he growled. ‘Did we come all this way to look at the flowers then? Did we fight our way through forest and swamp so you could gaze at the greenery? Up, up! Up, or I’ll have Tallon on you – up,’ he roared. ‘We still have a queen to find, or did you forget? Up I say.’ He turned towards Gardus. ‘And you as well, Steel Soul. Up, Lord-Celestant. There is an example to be set,’ he said, as he reached out a hand and hauled Gardus to his feet.

‘I see something,’ Tegrus shouted from above. The Prosecutor-Prime swooped low over them, in a wide circle. ‘I see a grove, down the slope… lined with standing stones of some kind. Not like those we saw in the Ghyrtract Fen.’

Gardus looked in the direction that Tegrus indicated, and then said, ‘Lead on, O Sainted Eye. That is as good a place as any to meet our hosts, if they are willing.’

Grymn formed the Steel Souls into a marching column. He left the others to their respective Lord-Celestants. Zephacleas’ warriors split into bands and ranged out alongside the column of marching Stormcasts, warily watching the trees that covered the lower part of the slope, while Ultrades’ retinues followed the Hallowed Knights. Above them, Tegrus and the other Prosecutors drifted lazily through the air, keen eyes seeking any sign of danger.

The Stormhosts wound down the slope and through the trees that separated them from the grove Tegrus had seen. Gardus led the way, Grymn and Morbus close behind. Grymn felt eyes on them the entire way, and every bird, insect and beast fell silent at their approach. The Stormcasts began to grow uneasy, and more than once Grymn was forced to fall out of line and berate a warrior for hesitating in the face of the vast silence that had enveloped them. After the fifth such incident, as he rejoined Gardus and the Lord-Relictor, he said, ‘This place… It’s waiting for something.’

‘It is not a place,’ Morbus intoned. ‘Not truly. It is Alarielle’s will made manifest, and we are intruders here. She is drawing back from our approach like a frightened beast.’

‘It is not us she fears,’ Gardus said. He stared straight ahead as he moved, as if all of his attentions were fixed on a point beyond the sight of those who travelled with him. Grymn shivered softly, for as Gardus spoke, the trees seemed to rustle in agreement. ‘Alarielle is not simply queen of the Realm of Life. She is life itself, inextricable and inseparable. Nurgle’s advances upon her realm have wounded her most grievously, in mind and soul.’ He shook his head. ‘Or so the sylvaneth whispered to me, as they bore me from the Glade of Horned Growths. Since the Dark Gods invaded this realm, she has become withdrawn and cold, even from her most loyal servants.’

‘Has she sealed herself away here, while her realm crumbles in anarchy and destruction?’ Grymn asked, incredulous.

‘Did Sigmar not seal the Gates of Azyr?’ Gardus said softly. ‘The Mortal Realms burned, as Azyr prospered. We were each of us plucked from places where we might have done good, might have helped those who counted on us, to be reforged on Sigmar’s anvil.’ He met Grymn’s disbelieving gaze and continued, ‘I learned more than true names and hiding places while in Nurgle’s garden, Lorrus. The Ruinous Powers weave lies with truth.’ He looked away, and half-raised his hand, as if to clutch at his head. He looked up, abruptly, and said, ‘We are here.’

Grymn saw the grove. It was lined with spiral-etched menhirs, and sunlight marked its centre. Gardus stared at it, as if uncertain of what to do next. Grymn looked at him. ‘What is it?’

Gardus didn’t meet his gaze. ‘Something is wrong,’ he said.

Grymn looked at Morbus, who shook his head. ‘Well, if it is a trap, one of us had best spring it so that we might move on,’ Grymn said. He started forward, lantern raised and halberd over his shoulder.

Tallon made to follow him, but he shooed the gryph-hound back. ‘No, my friend,’ he said. ‘Stay – guard.’ He indicated Gardus. Tallon whined softly, but did as the Lord-Castellant bade.

Grymn looked at Gardus. ‘Not going to stop me?’

‘Could I?’ Gardus said.

Grymn laughed. ‘Sigmar made you the sword and me the shield – and it is the shield’s task to ward blows,’ he said and turned back to the glade. Without hesitation, he stepped between two menhirs. He strode towards the centre of the glade. When he reached it, he turned in a slow circle, peering at the marks on the stones. ‘Warriors of the sylvaneth,’ he called, ‘we are here.’

A soft slithering sound filled the air. He froze, listening. A heartbeat later a thicket of iron-thorns shot up from the soft earth to ensnare him, tearing armour and flesh alike. Grymn bellowed in pain as he was hurled to the ground in a bloody heap.

Outside of the ring of stones, sylvaneth dryads burst from the trees with eerie shrieks to fall upon the Stormcast Eternals. Warriors died in blazes of blue light, and Grymn cursed as he tried to pull himself to his feet. A talon of bark and thorn tore through his midsection, and he found himself wrenched into the air. He clutched at the talon with blood-slick fingers, fighting to free himself despite the agony. He turned his head, and saw a lithe figure of vines and wood untwine itself from about the trunk of an elder oak. With a hiss, the creature tore its hand free of him, and let him fall to the ground. It stepped towards him, as he tried to crawl reach for his fallen halberd. He heard Tallon screeching in rage, and men screaming.

Through blurring vision, he saw Gardus racing towards him, and heard the Lord-Celestant shouting. He saw the creature that had stabbed him unleash strangling vines upon Tegrus and his Prosecutors as they swooped to the attack. Pain thrummed through him, and his limbs felt like lead. His hand flopped to the blood-soaked soil, a mere fingerbreadth from his halberd. He fought to reach out, to grab it, to no avail.

A trap, he thought blearily.

And then Lorrus Grymn knew no more.

Chapter Fifteen

The coming of the Glottkin

‘Shields!’ Gardus roared. ‘Use your shields. No blades. These are not our enemies.’ He charged towards the creature that had wounded Grymn, bulling aside the shrieking dryads that tried to intercept him. Grymn’s gryph-hound loped at his side. Why is this happening? he thought. The being crouched over Grymn was the Lady of Vines. He recognized the branchwraith from the Glade of Horned Growths; it was she who had saved him from his wounds, and whispered answers to his questions. It was she who had seen to his return to his Stormhost.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he called out.

Behind him, he heard the sound of his Stormcasts striving to defend themselves from the sylvaneth pouring out of the forest on all sides. As the men died and the sky was filled with blue light, he bolted into the ring of menhirs.

The branchwraith shrieked and lashed out at Tegrus and his Prosecutors as they dived at her, trying to draw her away from the limp form of the Lord-Castellant. As Gardus drew close, she spun and lashed out at him with a thorny tendril. Tallon leapt, catching hold of the vine in his beak before it could reach Gardus. The gryph-hound held on, even as the branchwraith swung him through the air, trying to dislodge him.

Gardus caught another vine as it slashed at him, and wrapped it around his forearm. ‘Lady, heed me,’ he cried, trying to catch the creature’s attention. ‘Why are you doing this? How have we offended you? Why has it come to this?’

The creature’s blazing green eyes met his, and the Lady of Vines stretched out a gnarled hand and pointed, trembling with rage, towards the other side of the vale. Gardus turned, his heart sinking, as he heard the blare of grotesque horns and the thud of war drums. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘Oh no…’

Pouring down the opposite valley wall was a wave of feculent fluid, and knee-deep in it were horde upon horde of Chaos worshippers, of every size and description. It was as if every follower of Nurgle in Ghyran had come to this place in answer to some powerful call – there were goat-headed beastmen, scurrying skaven and fat-bellied daemons, and at their head a lumpen giant, upon whose shoulders sat two gesticulating champions of the plague god. As Gardus watched in growing horror, the vanguard of the plague-legion smashed headlong into the dryads spilling from the trees.

‘We led them here,’ Gardus said hollowly. It was the only way the lost and the damned could have found their way to this place. He turned back to the Lady of Vines, but no words came to his lips as he looked up into the grief-twisted features of the branchwraith.

‘Yes, son of Azyr.’

Gardus turned as all about the menhir glade the trees shook down to their roots. As one, the dryads sank to their knees and the air grew still and heavy. Every loose leaf, twig, and branch in the glade was caught up in a whirlwind that carried them towards the trees and as they moved, Gardus thought he saw a shape coalescing within them. Not human, not quite, but something else… something older, and at once as vast as the Hidden Vale and as small as the flowers that sprouted in its wake. As the whirlwind struck them and dissipated, the trees twisted towards one another, entwining their branches together, weaving twig and leaf to form a female face – a face Gardus recognized, though he had never seen it before, save in murals and bas-reliefs.

‘Alarielle,’ he whispered.

Burning jade eyes met his own, and a voice as powerful as a summer storm, as piercing as the whisper of a thousand winds, spoke.

‘You have led the enemy to my sanctuary, Gardus of Azyr. Whatever your reasons, I have awakened from my dreams of more pleasant times. Athelwyrd is invaded. This day the armies of Azyr and Ghyran must fight together, or we will surely die apart,’ the Radiant Queen said, her words carried by creaking branches and rustling leaves. ‘Whatever I once desired, now only sad necessity remains – fight, my children. Fight, sons of the storm. Fight…’

Her voice rose to a keening wail, shaking the menhirs and causing Gardus to clutch at his ears. As the trees returned to their previous positions and the echoes of her voice faded, a wash of emerald light flooded the glade.

Grymn groaned as the Lady of Vines stepped back. Gardus looked down and saw, to his amazement, that the other man’s wounds had been healed. Grymn looked up at him.

‘I’m not dead,’ he said, as he grabbed his halberd and levered himself up. The Lady of Vines strode past them, stalking towards the battle, her thorny tendrils lashing in fury.

‘Not yet,’ Gardus said. ‘But the day is not yet done.’ He gestured to the Nurgle army. More had arrived in the moments since Alarielle’s words. As the deluge of filth spilled into the Hidden Vale, the dire fug that followed the plague-worshippers swept along the valley floor, corrupting vast swathes of lush vegetation. Pox-afflicted skaven scurried through the dying undergrowth, the smoking censers they whirled above their cowled heads only adding to the foulness in the air. When dryads moved to bar their path, they were smashed to smoking flinders.

As he and Grymn headed to join their men, Gardus heard Morbus chanting. The Lord-Relictor’s voice rose up, and the cloudscape of Athelwyrd seemed to respond as he invoked the energies of the tempest. The gathering storm fought against the noxious plague-clouds, and each ebbed and swelled in turn. The boom of thunder echoed down the valley, shaking the combatants to their bones and causing the great trees that covered the slopes to tremble down to their very roots.

‘Gather as many men as you can. Form a shieldwall around the glade,’ Gardus said, as he backhanded a squealing skaven with his hammer. ‘You must be the rock that this foul sea cannot wear down.’

‘What about you?’ Grymn said, chopping down on a plaguebearer. He spun his weapon in a circle, cutting down a second daemon.

‘I intend to take the battle to the enemy,’ Gardus said. He drove his sword through a snarling beastman’s gut. More of the goat-headed creatures charged towards him as the sickly rainclouds overhead thickened and fat, black raindrops began to fall. Gardus swung his hammer in a wide arc, splintering bones and crushing skulls. He heard Grymn bellowing orders behind him, and he smiled grimly. Stand fast, my friend. Be the shield, and I shall be the sword. He moved forward at a trot, dispatching any creature that sought to bar his path.

Across the vale, warriors clashed. Wooden-clawed dryads slaughtered skaven and beastmen alike as looming treelords strode into battle with earthshaking strides. Hallowed Knights, Astral Templars and Guardians of the Firmament fought back to back against the innumerable hordes surrounding them. Gardus smashed the skull of a plaguebearer and caught sight of Zephacleas standing over the body of a fallen treelord, defending the sylvaneth against its attackers. He saw Ultrades and his paladins fighting their way towards Morbus, who drew lightning down from the boiling skies and sent it crackling into the massed ranks of plaguebearers which stumbled towards him.

‘Only the faithful,’ Gardus shouted, forcing his voice to carry over the clangour of battle. His men responded in kind, and Gardus fought all the harder. He would not fail. ‘Only the faithful,’ he cried again, crushing cyclopean heads with every swing of his hammer. White flames crackled across his weapons and armour as he stormed through the bloody melee, gathering his warriors about him. ‘Fight, brothers! Fight in Sigmar’s name! Fight–’

‘Gardus,’ a horribly familiar voice thundered, interrupting him. He whirled, smashing aside an armoured warrior. No, he thought, filled with a sudden loathing.

‘Gardus,’ the voice called again, and Gardus looked up as something immense rolled down into the valley like a giant boulder, scattering daemons and Stormcasts alike as it hurtled across the field through the driving rain. When it stopped, the shape rose to its full, towering height, a flail made from the skulls of giants whirling about its antlered head.

‘I know you are here. Did you think you could escape Bolathrax?’ the greater daemon roared, smashing Stormcasts aside. ‘Where are you, Gardus? Where are you, Garradan? Face me, unless you plan to flee again.’ Bolathrax paused, eyes widening as he caught sight of Gardus. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he burbled and started towards the Lord-Celestant, flail whirling and plaguesword drawn.

Gardus stared at the Great Unclean One. He snapped out of it a moment before the greater daemon struck the ground perilously close to him. He was knocked sprawling by the impact. Gardus rolled aside as the weapon slammed down again. ‘Stop squirming,’ Bolathrax gurgled as he waddled in pursuit. ‘You led the Grandfather’s legions here, and I’m obliged to make your death quick.’

Gardus flung himself aside. He crashed into a fallen oak, and hauled himself over it. Between the rain and the confusion of battle, the daemon lost sight of him, and he had a moment to catch his breath. Quickly he took stock of the battle. He saw with some relief that Grymn had managed to organize a shieldwall, and that Morbus and the others were fighting their way towards it.

Hold fast, brothers, he thought. We might still be able to preserve this place…

Bolathrax’s flail crashed down, shattering the oak. The force of the blow sent Gardus sliding through the muck.

‘Found you,’ Bolathrax roared gleefully.

Gardus rolled to his feet, and lunged. Hammer and blade both found their mark and bounced off the daemon’s rubbery flesh. Bolathrax laughed and thrust his blade down. The Stormcast stepped aside, and the great sword slammed into the muck. He spun, set his foot onto the flat of the rusty sword and ran up its length. Bolathrax gaped as the Lord-Celestant leapt towards him. The daemon jerked his head back, but too late, and Gardus’ sword pierced the creature’s bulging eye.

Bolathrax shrieked and swiped his flail about his head blindly. Gardus was caught by the pox-hardened skulls and sent flying. He smashed into a standing stone and flopped into the muck, weapons lost, body a mass of pain. As he tried to push himself up, one of Bolathrax’s splayed feet came down on his back. Gardus cried out, as his spine cracked and a tidal wave of agony washed through him. The skull flail came down a moment later, and one of his legs was reduced to a red ruin, pulverised by the blow.

‘No more running, Garradan,’ Bolathrax grunted, as he looked down at Gardus. ‘Pain is but a door to experience, as the Grandfather says. It does wonders for the soul. Just ask Torglug the Despised. We made a man of him. I wonder what we shall make of you, when you have suffered enough, eh?’ The Great Unclean One reached down and snatched Gardus up by his remaining ankle. Gardus couldn’t breathe. He clutched weakly at the air, reaching for weapons that were not there.

The ghosts had gathered beneath him, and were staring up with mournful gazes. They did not speak, but they did not need to. Gardus coughed, and felt his shattered ribs dig into the soft places within him.

‘I shall put you somewhere safe, until you are ready to be reborn,’ Bolathrax chortled, as he reached down and lifted his belly folds wide, exposing the swirling vortex within him. ‘What do you say to that, eh?’

Gardus stared at the vortex – a black maw of horror, as deep and as dark as the spaces between the stars. His mouth was dry, but he forced the words out regardless.

‘Only the faithful,’ he croaked. Bolathrax began to laugh.

Gardus closed his eyes.

Chapter Sixteen

The Sainted Eye

Tegrus hurtled through the smog-choked air, his hammers catching a bullgor across the skull with a thunderous crack. The beastman toppled over as Tegrus swooped past on wings of light. He rolled through the air, aiming himself towards the beastmen skidding down the scree of the valley wall. The creatures were charging towards the forest of glowing trees from which the arboreal citadels rose, axes raised.

‘Lord-Castellant,’ he cried, searching for Grymn. ‘We must…’ He trailed off as he saw the shieldwall of the Hallowed Knights momentarily buckle beneath the weight of the enemy, before it stiffened once more. He saw the Lord-Castellant amidst his brethren, exhorting them to greater effort as plaguebearers swarmed them. There would be no help from that quarter. Up to me, then, he thought.

Tegrus folded his arms to his sides and sped across the valley, leaving dust and deafened foes in his wake. His retinue of Prosecutors followed, though none were able to match his speed. But even he was too slow. Sap sprayed like blood as the bestigors and bullgors hacked away at the ancient forest. Tegrus dropped into their midst a moment later, crushing a bestigor’s head as he landed. He whirled, catching another in its mouth, silencing it mid-roar.

He saw one of his Prosecutors pulled from the air by a bullgor and broken over the monster’s knee. Another was brought low by a bestigor axe, and hacked to pieces as he writhed in the muck.

‘No!’ Tegrus snarled, as he brought his hammers down on another beastman, smashing the squalling creature to the ground. He saw a horde of skaven clad in rotting robes scuttling between the legs of the larger beastmen. They too began to hack and slash at the ancient trees.

‘Keep them back,’ he cried, before he realised that he was alone. The last of his warriors had fallen, throttled by a bullgor. The creature joined the Stormcast it had killed a moment later as Tegrus sent his hammer ploughing into its bestial skull.

More and more of the creatures pelted past him, heading for the trees. It was like trying to fight the tide. For every one he killed, it seemed two more slipped through. As he drove his hammer into the gut of a bestigor, crushing the creature’s ribs, he heard an ethereal screech. It sawed through his skull, causing his teeth to twitch in his jaw and his head to ache. All around him, beastmen stumbled, clutching at their heads. Whatever he’d felt, they had felt it worse. He reacted swiftly, lashing out with his hammers, shattering kneecaps and spines. He flung himself into the air as a light grew amidst the carnage. Beastmen staggered away as the light blossomed into the shape of a woman. No, Tegrus realised; not a woman.

Alarielle, the Radiant Queen herself had at last joined the battle. She was a thing of light and mist, of leaves and splintered wood, her shape at once that of a woman and something greater and more terrible. She was air and water, fire and earth. She was the summer rain, and the rage of the hurricane. And she was angry.

A bullgor rushed towards her, bellowing, and a hand, limned in emerald light, snapped out to catch the creature by its throat. Alarielle lifted the beastman and snapped its neck with merciless ease, cowing the enemy around her. Skaven and bestigor alike began to edge away, their terror of the Radiant Queen obvious. She dropped the twitching body of the bullgor to the ground, where it immediately began to convulse. Green buds burst from the corpse, twisting up towards Alarielle’s hand. She threaded her fingers through the coiling shoots and came away with a handful of glittering seeds.

Without a word, she took the seeds in her hands and cast them away. In a single heartbeat, a hundred new green shoots burst from the ground. As they rose, they swelled and thickened, growing swiftly, becoming massive. The great bulbs on the end of each split with a sound like water slapping metal to reveal a cavernous maw. As one, the great plants snapped up their prey – skaven and beastman alike – and broke their bones to powder.

As he swooped past the twisting plants, Tegrus saw a strange shape lope suddenly from the depths of the smog that clung to the ground. A verminlord. The monstrous rat-daemon plucked a shrieking grey seer from the ground as it sprinted through the ranks of the ratmen. Tegrus flew after it, hoping that he would be in time to prevent whatever malign scheme the daemon had in mind. Whatever else happened, he would not allow the Radiant Queen to come to harm.

The verminlord sprang from the fallen body of a bullgor to one of the half-toppled trees, and dropped the grey seer to the ground beneath it. It hissed and snarled at the cowering skaven in the language of their vile kind and pointed one of its cruel blades towards the oblivious Radiant Queen as she tore a herd of bullgor to shreds with crackling magics. The grey seer pushed itself upright and hesitantly extended a shaking paw towards Alarielle. The air around it pulsed wetly, and a terrible light flickered in its eyes as it began a stuttering incantation.

Tegrus sped forward, faster than he’d ever flown. His wings blazed with all the fury of the storm, and his body ached with the force of his dive. Sigmar guide my flight, he thought as he plummeted towards the grey seer.

The creature’s fur stood on end, and its eyes glowed green as its outstretched claw started to tremble violently. Black smoke rose from the skaven’s pores as if it were being consumed by whatever energies it was summoning forth. Tegrus twisted through the air as a beam of unclean light shot from the skaven’s claw towards the Radiant Queen.

‘Only the faithful,’ Tegrus murmured, and swooped into the path of the beam, hammers crossed. The energies tore at him as they splashed across his armour, causing the god-forged sigmarite to bubble and melt. The light from his wings grew brighter and brighter as he plunged on through the beam. His hammers blackened and began to crumble in his hands, but he did not stop, or veer away. It was too late for that now. It was too late for anything except taking his foe down into death with him.

Tegrus screamed as he streaked towards the grey seer. He could feel his body warping and changing within his armour. Bones cracked and reshaped themselves into new and horrible forms as his flesh burned. But still he hurtled on and even as his hammers dissolved into nothing, he struck the grey seer full on.

The rat-thing exploded into swirling ash and streamers of green fire, its final, forlorn squeal cut short by the impact. Tegrus hit the ground a moment later, wreathed in smoke, his body contorted in agony as it continued its forced metamorphosis. His wings flickered and grew dull as new flesh squeezed out between the seams of his ruptured armour. Feathers of lightning were replaced by useless pinions of leather and bone, which flapped limply. His body shuddered as his spine split and grew, and his lungs shrank in his chest, forcing him to fight for every breath. His newly shaped bones had been shattered by his landing, and he could only thrash in pain as something monstrous approached him, tail lashing in anger.

‘Fool-fool,’ the monstrous verminlord hissed, glaring down at him. ‘You dare pit yourself against the will of Vermalanx, man-thing?’ The creature raised one of the heavy, curved blades it carried. Before it could strike, however, a tendril of emerald energy struck it full in the chest. The rat-daemon reared back and screeched in pain. A moment later it was plucked into the air. Through pain-dimmed eyes, Tegrus saw Alarielle stride forward, cloaked in ash and feathers, her inhuman visage sorrowful.

‘Who is the fool here, little mouse?’ Alarielle said, her voice causing the air to throb. The verminlord howled as it fought to break free of her magics, but to no avail. Alarielle reached up and flicked a silver acorn into the rat-daemon’s slavering maw. Instantly, green shoots burst through the creature’s form in great profusion. The daemon screamed in agony as the shoots flourished into branches and then boughs, before it was ripped apart in a stink of sulphurous musk. Tegrus coughed and tried to speak, but only managed a strangled screech. He reached up to her, with a hand that was more claw than anything else, and she nodded in understanding.

‘Be at peace,’ the Radiant Queen said, as her aura became blinding. ‘Sleep now, and forevermore, son of Sigmar.’ The light grew until it enveloped Tegrus, and he felt a moment of pain and then…

Nothing.

Chapter Seventeen

The drowning of the vale

‘No,’ Grymn snarled, as he watched the Great Unclean One pluck Gardus from the mud. ‘No, not again.’ He glanced at Morbus, and the Lord-Relictor looked away. Lightning snarled from his reliquary over and over, hammering into the daemons that pressed them. This is what you saw, Grymn realised. They had been wrong, before. This, then, had been Gardus’ doom, and they might as well have escorted him to it.

He turned back to Gardus, and saw the greater daemon pry open its belly to reveal a nightmare maw within its flesh. The creature made as if to drop the limp form of the Lord-Celestant into the black abyss of his gut, and Grymn knew then what he must do. He dropped his halberd and spun to snatch a nearby Judicator’s thunderbolt crossbow from his hands. He whirled back and took aim.

Damn you, Gardus, he thought, we shall not lose you a second time – not like this. He fired. The bolt sizzled gold through the rain, and struck true. Gardus thrashed as the bolt tore through the back of his neck. There was a blaze of blue light, and the greater daemon howled as azure flames wreathed his paw. Gardus vanished, lost to the Hallowed Knights once more. But not forever. Grymn, heartsick with guilt, shoved the crossbow back into its owner’s hands, and glared at Morbus.

‘It had to be done,’ he snapped. ‘It was the only way to save him.’

‘We will join him soon enough,’ Morbus rasped, as he set his reliquary and gestured with his hammer. The Great Unclean One had turned towards them, smoke rising from his form, as if sensing that they had had some part in the disappearance of his prey. As he lurched towards them, his followers redoubled their efforts to break the hastily formed shieldwall. Beasts and ratkin hurled themselves at the Liberators. The Stormcasts were holding them back, but only barely.

‘Maybe so,’ Grymn said. ‘But I’ll not do so in shame.’ Tegrus was nowhere to be seen, and what few Prosecutors were in sight were locked in battle with the plague drones that buzzed through the rain-choked air above. Zephacleas and Ultrades had formed their own shieldwalls, and were being pressed as hard as the Hallowed Knights. The rain was falling faster and harder with every passing moment, and the foul waters lapped at their shins. But they would stand firm, whatever fate awaited them.

‘Who will be redeemed?’ Grymn cried, raising his halberd high.

‘Only the faithful,’ the nearby Hallowed Knights replied.

‘Who will stand until the world cracks open?’

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Who will honour the Steel Soul, and fight in his name?’

‘Only the faithful!’ came the reply.

Grymn lifted his halberd.

‘Make ready to charge,’ he shouted. ‘We shall meet them head on, and show them how Stormcasts fight.’ No more the shield. Now, I will be the sword, until we meet again in the Gladitorium, Gardus, he thought. At his next word, weapons were raised and shields lowered. But before he could utter the command to charge, the enemy abruptly began to fall back.

A green light spread over the Stormcasts, rising from the ring of menhirs behind them. An ethereal screech suddenly echoed across the vale, causing even the Great Unclean One to pause in consternation. Grymn turned, and saw a glowing manifestation stalk through the ranks of the Hallowed Knights.

‘Alarielle,’ Morbus said. ‘The Radiant Queen has come at last.’

‘Why now?’ Grymn hissed. ‘Why not before, when Gardus…’ He trailed off as Alarielle’s eyes met his, and he looked away, unable to bear the torment he saw there. She was not mad, not quite, but there was nothing human, nothing mortal in that gaze.

Men stepped aside as Alarielle moved past them with an eerie grace, her robes whipping about her as if she were the eye of a storm. Leaves and shattered branches swirled about her, and her long, golden hair flowed in her wake as she stepped across the glistening surface of the water. Impossibly thin, and as pale as ice, she resembled nothing so much as a marble statue gifted with life, and her eyes blazed with a power far beyond anything Grymn had ever witnessed.

‘What is she?’ he whispered.

‘Life,’ Morbus said. ‘In all of its fury and power.’

Alarielle pursued the retreating forces of the Nurgle worshippers with slow, stately steps. Where the end of her staff fell, the water turned cool and clear, and ravaged vegetation sprouted green and lush once more. Any daemon so foolish enough as to move towards her, rather than away, was reduced to swirling ash in the blink of an eye.

‘This place is not yours,’ she said, gazing at the Great Unclean One. Her voice rang out, as clear as a bell, as loud as thunder. Daemons quailed back, and the sylvaneth began to shriek and howl. ‘I ceded my realm to you, but I shall not cede this place.’

‘What you will or will not cede is of no concern to me, my lady,’ Bolathrax said, leering at her. ‘Nurgle’s deluge falls, and this place will soon not be fit for such delicate flowers as those you call children. The sky roils with magics, and this place will fall to Grandfather. All will drown in his sacred slurry.’

‘No,’ Alarielle said. She looked around, and Grymn followed her gaze. Athelwyrd was flooding inch by inch. Soon, they would have no choice but to return the way they had come. Otherwise, this hidden bower would become their tomb. ‘No,’ Alarielle said again, but more softly. Her face contorted suddenly, and she threw back her head in a scream of denial so intense that sylvaneth and daemons both writhed in agony from its reverberations. Stormcasts clapped their hands to their ears as the dolorous sound washed over them.

Before the echoes of that cry had faded, Alarielle gestured sharply and a thick net of iron-thorns erupted from the waters to entwine the Great Unclean One.

‘I know you of old, Bolathrax,’ Alarielle said. ‘Long have I desired to take what I am owed from your rotting flesh.’

Bolathrax struggled against the vines, but for every dozen he tore from him, two dozen more replaced them. Alarielle began to chant, her voice rising and falling like the wind, and the cage of briars constricted about the greater daemon. The thorns dug into his flesh, lacerating him. Bolathrax’s roars became screams and then squeals as he came apart at the joints and collapsed into a gory ooze. His cries caused those daemons nearby to shudder, and many joined him in dissolution, falling apart even as they tried to flee the destruction of their leader. The briar vines rose from Bolathrax’s remains like angry serpents, and struck out in all directions. As the Stormcasts watched, those daemons that had not already come apart died in droves, torn asunder by Alarielle’s anger.

Though the leader of the daemonhost had been slain, his lieutenants still remained, as zealous as their opponents. Grymn fought on, and his warriors followed his example. Everywhere in the vale, where the Stormcast Eternals fought, the enemy died in hordes.

It was not enough, in the end.

The rain still fell, and it soon became evident to even the most stubborn amongst the Stormcasts that Athelwyrd was doomed. The storm hammered down as malign and benevolent magics crashed against one another in the sky above the battle. The pox-rain fell, harder and faster, inexorably claiming the vale.

‘We will drown if this continues,’ Zephacleas roared, fighting to be heard over the storm as he and his warriors joined the Hallowed Knights. ‘None but a servant of Nurgle can survive in this place now.’

‘We must move,’ Grymn said aloud, as he booted a struggling plaguebearer from the blade of his halberd. They would need to get to higher ground to escape back into the mortal lands of Ghyran. ‘We’ll have to fight our way back. Where is Ultrades?’

Zephacleas pointed with his sword, to where the Guardians of the Firmament had formed up in a shieldwall around a retreating grove of dryads. The bark of the treekin was cracking and burning beneath the plague-rain. Grymn shook his head.

‘Help him,’ he said. ‘We must fall back.’

‘Fall back to where, Lord-Castellant?’ Zephacleas asked, filthy water running down the contours of his battered war-helm. ‘Where is there for us to go?’

‘The only place we can,’ Grymn said. He extended his halberd towards the shimmering expanse of the River Vitalis above. ‘Up. Gather your warriors. Fall back to the River Vitalis.’ He paused. ‘The Hidden Vale is lost.’

Epilogue

Only war

In the end, the Hidden Vale was hidden once more.

On the banks of the River Vitalis, Grymn stared into the depths of the water, seeking any sign of it, but all he discerned was a faint scar of murk, running along the river’s bottom. The forces of Nurgle had not followed the Stormcasts and the sylvaneth as they retreated, first to the upper reaches of the valley, and then back through the breached portal, to the dubious safety of Rotwater Blight.

Then, why should they have? he thought grimly. They had what they wanted, he suspected. The Hidden Vale was gone, and Alarielle was cast adrift into a world that was no longer hers. Her power, while great, would not be enough to win back her realm. I wonder if she realises that, he thought, as he gazed surreptitiously at the Radiant Queen, where she stood nearby.

Alarielle’s screams of denial still rang in his head. They had echoed across the near-infinite kingdoms of Ghyran, he suspected, so loud had they been. She had wept and raged as they retreated, her cries of anguish so intense that daemons had shivered into incoherent fragments at the sound and Stormcasts had fallen, skulls burst. And while she was now silent, he could still feel the heat of her rage.

‘Where is he?’ she asked, suddenly, in a voice like the croaking of a murder of crows. ‘Where is the one who led my enemies to me?’

Grymn stiffened. ‘He is… gone. He fell in battle, defending your realm.’

‘Defending a realm he endangered,’ she snarled, and the fury in her voice shook him to his core. ‘My kingdom… my people… All gone, all lost,’ she keened. Dryads hissed and shrieked mournfully as they clustered about her. She looked at Grymn, and he stepped back. Her eyes burned like twin suns, and he knew that she could kill him as easily as she had healed him before. Life in all its fury and power, he thought, recalling Morbus’ words.

‘My lady, they are gone, as are our brethren. But we still live,’ he said. He set his halberd. ‘And while we live, so too does Ghyran. While we stand, your realm shall not fall. So I swear. We shall fight. We shall win. Your kingdom will be free.’

‘Free,’ she breathed. Surrounded by her dryads and branchwraiths, her tall form blazing with a strange light, Alarielle turned towards the Hallowed Knights. Her shimmering gaze flickering across their ranks as she studied them. Grymn hesitated, uncertain, then stepped forward. ‘But for now, my lady, you and your folk must come with us. We have cost you your haven. The least we can do is see you to safety.’

‘Safety,’ Alarielle intoned. Her voice echoed in his very marrow, and he trembled slightly to hear such despair. ‘There is no safety now,’ Alarielle said, ‘no safe haven or sanctum left in all the Jade Kingdoms.’ The Radiant Queen smiled sadly.

‘Only war remains.’

Prologue

Many centuries ago…

The heavens writhed with flames of blue and pink. In every corner of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok smoke rose. Only Elixia, the Sculpted City, held firm, but it could not do so for much longer. A circle of unmarred sky hung over the Great Monument as the city’s already lurid lightning flickered hungrily around this single, pure space.

In the shadow of the Great Monument stood the House of the Aldermen. It was here that Celemnis, Swordmaiden of the Argent Sisterhood, had come.

She entered the central chamber, a space forbidden to everyone but the council, at a swift stride, accompanied by a handful of her men. All the guard were at the walls and the council had fled; Celemnis was not denied.

Within the council chamber an uneasy peace held sway. The clamour of war breaking the city’s defences was distant. Above the ring of arms and roars of beasts was a dreadful keening. Odd and terrible were the sounds of Chaos as it forced itself upon the realms of Order, but this too was muted in the chamber.

From the courtyard garden outside the chamber a blackbird sang as if there were nothing amiss with the world. Celemnis could almost convince herself that the breeze wafting the window drapes was born of the summer, and not the burning of her home.

‘Celemnis!’ Forge Leader Jethelir waved at her from a curtained doorway. ‘He’s in here.’

Celemnis crossed the room. Her whole life she had walked quickly; there was always more to do. Why waste one’s time in ambling? And now time had nearly run out and she could walk no faster.

The High Alderman was sitting behind a desk in one of the many clerks’ cubicles of bronze and marble. He had taken refuge there, seeking some last pocket of sanity. His long beard brushed over thin sheets of tin as he read and reread the glyphs impressed into them. His fine clothes were dirty and his eyes red-rimmed with smoke and tears.

‘Ah, Celemnis,’ he said. ‘Do come in.’

Celemnis rested her fists on the desk and leaned over him.

‘Now will you return the hammer?’ she said.

The High Alderman glanced out of the window. He frowned as if he had noticed it were about to rain. ‘The hammer?’

‘Ghal Maraz. The Great Shatterer. Sigmar’s weapon. Now will you return it to him?’

‘We have had this conversation many times, my dear,’ he said. The High Alderman rolled up the tin scroll. ‘There is no one to return it to. The only way Sigmar would have parted from his hammer is if he were dead.’

‘The oracles told us he was tricked into casting it away,’ she said.

‘The oracles went mad not long after the gods abandoned the realms. Why do you trust books written a century ago?’

Celemnis thrust her arm out behind her, pointing in the direction of the battle. ‘Because the oracles prophesied this, Alderman. Let us offer up prayer and unlock the shrine. Let him know where it is!’

The Alderman radiated defeat; he had no more of himself left to give to this world.

‘And why should we? If the oracles were correct and Sigmar himself cast it away, why should we strive to return it to him? He left us. His hammer was drawn here by fate. Who are we to question fate?’

‘Everyone should question fate when it dances to Tzeentch’s tune,’ said Celemnis. ‘The armies of Chaos are breaking through the walls! The hammer cannot protect us, not anymore. We should never have kept it.’

‘Oh, my dear, dear Celemnis,’ said the High Alderman. His usual vitality had been stripped away by sorrow; now he looked his age, and worn out by it. ‘It is all rather academic.’ He took one of her callused hands gently in his own. ‘I am sorry. Perhaps you were right all along. Perhaps–’

The rattle of armoured men interrupted him. Celemnis ran from the room to witness a band of Chaos warriors thundering into the main hall. Each one was a head taller than a mortal man, far heavier and clad in ornate blue plate armour. They reeked of dark power.

Celemnis’ last few men attacked immediately. Their arms were strong from years in her smithies, and they carried her silver blades. The swords’ keen edges bit deeply, felling three of the warriors, sell-souls who had betrayed their own kind for a touch of power. But these men were mighty beyond her workers’ skill in war, and her swords were not enough. Within seconds the blood of her followers ran red on the marble floor.

Her hand flew to the hilt of her own weapon. The Chaos warriors surrounded her, swords levelled at her throat. Their leader’s face was drunk on triumph.

‘Now now, my lady,’ he said. ‘Stay your hand. We will not harm you.’

A delicate cough sounded behind the warriors, and they parted. There in the doorway stood a thin man, entirely bald. He was clad in robes covered in arcane sigils and wore a great deal of jewellery. His skin shone with scented oil. But the richness of his garb hid a sickness; a second glance showed his slenderness to be cadaverous and his skin grey beneath its copper tan. Behind his make-up his eyes were pouched and sunken, and there was something of the vulture to him. His smile was reptilian.

‘Celemnis of the Swords, the maiden who makes blades of such legendary strength and sharpness.’ He approached her, his eyes gleaming. ‘Here we are again.’

‘Ephryx of Denvrok,’ she said. ‘I should have realised that your hand was behind this.’

He dipped his head modestly. ‘I have worked a long time to undo this city’s defences. It was not easy. I am humbled that you see through my artifice and recognise me as the mind behind Elixia’s downfall.’ He held out his hand. ‘Are you not impressed? I have more to show. I agree circumstances could be better, but my offer still stands.’

‘I would not have you when you were merely a sorcerer. Now you are a slave to darkness. Never.’ She spat full in his face. Swords came closer to her neck.

Ephryx’s outstretched hand clenched. He withdrew it and waved his men back.

‘You are the daughter of a Ninemage, and should have greater respect for wielders of magic.’ He wiped her spittle away with a silken handkerchief. ‘Have you not heard, my dear? It is the season for treachery. The war against Chaos is lost. Only those who side with the victors have any hope of survival.’

‘Better to die with a clean soul than to sell it for baubles,’ she said. ‘You do not act from expediency. You chose your side a long time ago.’

‘Ah, if only it were so simple,’ he said. He beckoned forward a group of nine lesser sorcerers waiting by the bronze doors. They stepped nervously around the pooled blood of Celemnis’ men.

Ephryx waved another hand. A cruel-faced Chaos lord went into the cubicle where the High Alderman sat, his sword drawn. A moment later he came out, and his sword dripped red. The Alderman died as he had lived his last days: meekly, and without protest.

Ephryx smiled thinly. ‘We go to the vault. I must be sure that the treasure of Elixia is what it is purported to be.’

Celemnis was roughly disarmed and forced along with Ephryx and his acolytes through the gardens of the House of the Aldermen. The gates had fallen and the enemy ran riot through the streets of the city; a chorus of screams rose and fell in shrill waves. The smell of burning was overpowering, but in the garden peace lingered and the blackbird still sang its song.

They went through the portals of the monument. The building was deserted, and they descended its wide steps unchallenged. At the bottom was the vault, sealed with doors of black volcanic glass locked by wheels of silver. Upon the doors, Sigmar’s legend had been carved by the duardin. Tiny figures in long strips told of Sigmar’s life and his deeds in the realms.

Ephryx stood in thought for a moment, then indicated one of his acolytes with a finger and a smile. ‘You,’ he said.

‘Can I bear it, master?’ asked the acolyte hesitantly. ‘Will I die?’

‘That rather depends on you,’ said Ephryx. ‘If you can, then I will have no more to teach you. If you die, well…’ His smile broadened. ‘I could say the same thing.’

The acolyte nodded nervously. ‘Very well, master, I am ready.’

Two of Ephryx’s biggest warriors took station either side of the obsidian doors and grasped the wheel-lock handles. All but Celemnis and the acolyte averted their eyes.

‘Begin!’ said Ephryx. The Chaos warriors spun the wheels and heaved backwards. The doors parted and a line of brilliant light burst across them all.

The acolyte looked into the vault and made a noise of deep pain.

‘Is it there? Is it the Great Shatterer?’ asked Ephryx.

The man gasped out a reply. ‘Yes. Yes! I see a hammer, radiant with power. Oh, master, let me look away!’

‘I must be sure – describe it further. My favour will be yours. This is your final test!’

‘I see a comet with two tails upon the head, and the face of a great cat circles the haft. A spike is upon the… A spike… Ah, oh, it burns! It burns, ah, ah…’

Ephryx’s acolyte screamed and flames jetted from his mouth and his eyes. He flung out his arms and fell to his knees. His robes caught fire and his skin blackened from the inside out. He fell to the ground and rolled around, aflame. Within moments he was consumed utterly, leaving a pile of grey ash.

Ephryx held up a handkerchief to his nose and ordered his servants to sweep the mess away. ‘Close the gates!’

His warriors obeyed. The doors shut with a dull bang, sealing the light from view. Ephryx smiled again at Celemnis. ‘Well. I have in my possession one item I desire. What say you now to my offer? Be mine and rule at my side. Worlds could be your toys, such things I have learned! I will share them with you.’

‘I have seen what your favour brings,’ Celemnis said. ‘I will have none of it.’

‘You will submit yourself to me.’

‘If you are so powerful, make me,’ she said.

Ephryx bared his teeth. For a moment it looked like he would try to enslave her with his magic. One hand clenched and the other raised up, poised to release his arts. For a minute he stared at her, and she stared defiantly back. He let out an explosive sigh, and his hands sank back to his sides.

‘No. You will submit willingly, or you will die. You have fifty nights. Take her away.’

And so for fifty days and nights Celemnis was kept prisoner, and at every sinking of the sun she was brought before the sorcerer. Every night Ephryx would ask, ‘Do you submit?’ Every night she would spit upon the ground, or stare over his head, or look at the floor, or weep. But always she said no. ‘I will never be yours, Ephryx of Denvrok.’

For the first twenty days she was given every luxury, and was kept in a tall tower that had sprung fully formed from the wreck of the city. There was no way in or out, and she could never recall how she was taken to Ephryx. There was a single window of enchanted crystal, and through this she was permitted to look at the horror inflicted upon her home.

The days went by. Outside, the racket of industry set up. Slaves were driven into the city from all corners of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok. Whipped and weeping, they were made to tear down the centre of Elixia.

The Great Monument was the first to be demolished.

Perfumed baths, fine food and wine, and exquisite clothes were all provided to her by unseen hands, while outside the remaining populace was enslaved. She could not eat at first, so dismayed was she, but hunger drove her to it. Every mouthful felt like a betrayal.

The clothes she ripped and destroyed every day, until after the first ten days she awoke every morning to find herself dressed in them while she slept – hideous, filmy things that stripped her of modesty.

Perhaps Ephryx was a fool and did not realise his actions only strengthened her resolve. Or perhaps he knew full well that she would never give in to him and tormented her out of spite.

‘No,’ she said to him every night. ‘Never.’ And so she was taken away again.

Ephryx’s patience wore thin. For the next twenty days she was confined to a cold cell. Foul food and stagnant water was all she was given. This she forced herself to eat, for she was still hopeful of opportunity and would not let her strength dwindle. None came. Awful screams broke her sleep.

The enchanted window came with her, magically set into the dripping metal of her cell wall, and her view of the world remained. Through it she saw Ephryx’s armies of slaves labouring in the Shattered City, melting its grand arches of steel and adamant and recasting them as giant plates bedecked with grimacing faces and spikes.

Over Ghal Maraz, they raised a cairn of lead, and then around that a stone keep. The foundations of a giant tower were being laid to encase the keep when she was moved again.

For the next ten days she was subjected to physical torments. Nothing that might mar her body permanently, for her beauty Ephryx coveted above all other things save the hammer, but excruciating nonetheless.

Still she would not yield.

‘I can make it stop. I will make it stop. Be mine, join with me and rule this land,’ said Ephryx on the final night. ‘Help me, guide me. Chaos does not have to be excess. We can coax beauty from the world.’ He had become more wan than before, and on his forehead were the buds of horns. A mark of favour from his dark master.

Celemnis burned with fever. Her red hair was matted, her body filthy. Every muscle ached.

‘No,’ she said, her voice made little more than a croak by thirst. ‘There is no beauty to be had from evil. Even if I were to sell my soul to Tzeentch, if I were to embrace his madness myself, then still I would not submit myself to you, Ephryx. I will never be yours.’

Ephryx snarled.

‘Poor Ephryx,’ she said. ‘The whole of the realm might fall under your spell, but I will not.’

Ephryx’s face hardened. ‘So be it.’

He performed a series of conjurer’s gestures, and a large crucible appeared. Above it was a cage shaped to hold the human body. Silent torturers stood either side, their heads horned, faces hooded. A jet of warpflame hissed from thin air to warm the crucible, and the iron of it glowed as prettily as roses. From the crucible’s gaping mouth came the unmistakable smell of molten silver.

‘By your own favoured metal will you be killed,’ said Ephryx. ‘I shall boil you in it, and coat your corpse in it, and make of you a statue. You shall stand where all other statues have been cast down. There you shall watch for all time the city you so loved. Your beauty will be mine to enjoy, and my victory your torment. Now, you have one last chance. Join with me, and rule forever, or die in agony and suffer for an eternity.’

At that point Celemnis’ resolve wavered. She looked upon the end Ephryx had devised for her with mute horror. The sorcerer leaned forward in his golden throne, keenly anticipating her surrender.

She stood tall, and shook her head.

He threw himself back in his throne pettishly.

‘Very well! Executioners!’

They came for her and strapped her into the cage, and hung it out over the bubbling metal.

‘Ephryx!’ she said.

He looked sidelong at her.

‘Victory is fleeting. The day will come when I shall return, and I will play my part in your downfall. This I swear.’

‘Impossible,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Magic blows strongly in this age of Chaos. Your lord unwittingly makes wizards of us all! This is your doom and mine, Ephryx. Ask your master.’

‘I would have made you a queen,’ he said bitterly. He jerked his hand down. The cage dropped.

Ephryx found Celemnis’ screams were not to his taste, and he was glad when they were over.

Celemnis’ death did not pass unremarked. In Sigmaron, in Azyr, upon the half-finished tails of the Sigmarabulum which embraced the world fragment of Mallus, the Bell of Lamentation tolled. The God-King Sigmar looked up from his labours. Mallus quivered, pulsed, and pulled in on itself, diminished by another victory for Chaos. A moan went up from Azyrheim far below.

Sigmar looked to the shrunken world fragment, half visible through the tracery of his great endeavour. Soon the tendrils of iron and steel would reach for each other, close all gaps, and hide the secrets of his plans until they ripened to fruition.

On the other side of sealed gates, the denizens of a dozen hells beat their fists upon doors that would not open. The tolling of the bell focused Sigmar’s thoughts on all those trapped outside Azyr, those who must suffer the age of Chaos while he completed his work.

He returned his attention to his forge, and his tears fizzled on hot metal as he took up his tools again.

Chapter One

The Age of Sigmar

Now…

Vandus Hammerhand crouched in a world of light. He was alone, naked, bereft of comrades. Was he dead? Had the measure of godly power bestowed upon him been taken away? Was he Vendell Blackfist once more?

The glow dimmed. Vandus straightened. He had returned to Azyr, and stood within a quenching chamber. His sight took a moment to return; the light had been dazzling and the chamber was now dark. First he saw stars shining through an aperture at the apex of the dome, then he held up his arm and the starlight glinted from muscles larger and more powerful than those of any mortal man. His physique was still that of a Stormcast Eternal, and his skin was unmarked by the forge burns of his former life. He had not met death, not this time. Relief rose in him, and he felt ashamed that he had feared his power gone. Power was what the followers of the Four craved, not the Stormcasts. For the warriors of Sigmar, there should only be vengeance.

He thought back to Aqshy, to his plea to the skies as he had stood within the arch of the Gate of Wrath. Sigmar had struck him down as he had requested, but rather than destroy his bodily form it appeared that the God-King had taken him up to Azyr, just as he had centuries before. He only hoped that Korghos Khul’s realmgate had been destroyed by the storm bolt that had effected his escape, and that the battle for the Brimstone Peninsula had not been lost for his sake.

Light of a different sort grew. Shining shapes resolved around Vandus, burnished plates of golden armour that orbited him in stately dance. Vandus reached for them with a thought. Lightning leapt out from his skin to the armour plates, pulling them sharply into place until he was clad in the raiment of a Lord-Celestant once more.

A twinge affected him. Strange thoughts intruded upon his dressing. He felt there was a hollow space in his mind, as if in returning home he had chanced upon an unknown door and opened it to find an empty room pregnant with disquiet.

Vandus shook the sensation off, and called upon his war-mask. The visor, shaped into the impassive face of a judgmental god, slid into place. Vandus extended his hand and the hammer Heldensen crackled into being from nothing and clapped into his grip. The Lord-Celestant raised his other hand and grasped at the night sky, pulling down his cloak of star-silk from the heavens.

Outside, a trumpet note sounded, high and sweet: a summons. Sigmar called for him. The doors of the quenching chamber peeled themselves back. Vandus stepped outside into a long, curved corridor where many identical doors were set. Magical lamps burned with unchanging light in alcoves all the way along. Like everything else in Sigmaron and the Sigmarabulum, the corridor was beautiful.

Vandus was met by Knight-Heraldor Laudus Skythunder and Lord-Castellant Andricus Stoneheart, his friends and fellow officers, lords of the Hammers of Sigmar and its primary Warrior Chamber, the Hammerhands.

Laudus hung back, his silver horn tucked under one arm. Stoneheart was of a more demonstrative character, and he grabbed at Vandus’ upper arms and peered at him in wonder. His helmet was open. The battle armour topped with Andricus’ cheerful face instead of the blank war-mask of the Stormcasts made for an incongruous sight.

‘You’re alive then, lad?’ said Andricus. He unexpectedly embraced the Lord-Celestant. ‘Good to see you, Hammerhand. We feared you lost.’

‘Sigmar promises us an eternity, Andricus. I was taken from the battle whole and unharmed.’

Andricus stepped back. ‘Of course he does, of course. But we did not know for certain if you would survive the energies of the gate. You were snatched from the very jaws of the Realm of Chaos! And there have been…’ He shook his head, then forced a smile back onto his heavy features.

‘What?’ asked Vandus. ‘Why do you look at me so strangely? It is I, Vandus who was Vendell! The Hammerhand! Come, my friends, what did you fear?’

Andricus and Laudus shared a look. ‘Now’s not the time,’ said Andricus. ‘There’s much to discuss. We have been summoned again.’

‘How did you come to be here? You were not struck down?’

‘We were fortunate to avoid the agonies of death, my Lord-Celestant,’ said Laudus. He was altogether more aloof than the Lord-Castellant. Where Andricus spoke of his life as a peasant, Laudus had been noble born. They sometimes bickered over whose existence was the more honest. What was not in doubt was that they had both been heroes.

‘We returned to Azyr via the realmgate.’

‘The battle is won?’

‘Yes, son,’ said Andricus. He had been an old man when taken; to this he insisted he owed his cheerfulness. ‘We’ve all been invested with the power of the storm, but my joy doesn’t come from that,’ he was fond of saying. ‘I’m happy to see clearly, to get up from my bed without the crack of aching joints.’ When had he heard this, Laudus had pulled a face. ‘You’ll never understand how it is to be old now, my lads. And be thankful for it!’

Certain habits of speech and manner persisted from Andricus’ prior existence: his custom of speaking to all as if they were years younger than he, for one. Vandus was half-convinced Andricus did it simply to annoy Laudus.

‘Korghos Khul’s armies have been driven back from the peninsula,’ said Andricus. ‘His pyramid is cast down and his gate closed forever. More Stormhosts arrive every day. Our territory in Aqshy grows.’

‘I must have been absent for days.’

‘A week, my lord,’ said Laudus.

‘A week?’

‘Sigmar’s arts are mysterious,’ said Laudus.

‘None of us here know how long we were senseless when we were first gathered,’ said Andricus. ‘Why should it be any different this time?’

‘I must get back! Khul awaits me. I have failed to slay him twice, I will not fail a third time.’

‘You’ll have to put your own vengeance out of your mind,’ said Andricus. ‘We’ve a greater task at hand.’

‘We have been summoned to the palace. A new campaign awaits,’ said Laudus. ‘The palace is all abuzz. Sigmar is eager for something – none have ever seen him so roused.’

‘All the Hammers of Sigmar are here?’

‘All, my Lord-Celestant,’ said Laudus. ‘Those who fell are reforged. We are ready for war again.’

They left the quenching chambers and came through obscure ways to the exposed surface of the Sigmarabulum. Once more it churned with industry. The quiet before their assault on Aqshy had been but a pause, and now the magics and machineries there worked hard again, healing and remaking those warriors who had fallen. Sigmar’s wizard-artisans and their helpers hurried about. They paid no attention to the demigods striding among them – such sights were unremarkable in this city of wonders.

The Sigmarabulum gave off a nervous energy that had a man frantic to be about his work, and it stank of hot metal and magical discharge. However, its odd animus could not blot out the wider world around it.

To their right loomed the sphere of Mallus, the world remnant. It had swollen in the wake of the Stormhosts’ first victories. The metal was glutted with magic, and the surface glinted with an iridescent sheen. To their left the heavens of Azyr opened. Nowhere in any realm was there a night sky more beautiful; it blazed with stars of all colours and sizes, jewels set upon sumptuous cloths woven from nebulae. Rising through it was the Celestial Stair, a slash of bright metal climbing impossibly high, its top anchored beneath the High Star Sigendil. A handful of Azyr’s many moons arced gracefully along their heavenly tracks, while the lands of the Celestial Realm slumbered below. Rivers glinted in lazy loops of beaten steel, and towns and villages were picked out by yellow dots of lamplight. Forests were seas of purplish black in the moonlight, and farmland an orderly miniature landscape wrought in silver.

Vandus looked down on the land, and part of him yearned to enjoy its peace. He never could – that much had been made clear to him – but he could protect it so that others might live and grow old there. He did not resent his duty.

‘This way,’ said Laudus. They approached a trio of small realmgates set off to the side of the main roadway in the shadow of a giant foundry, glinting with soft blue light. The Stormcasts walked through this shimmer and emerged into a different place. Cool night scents hit them and crickets chirred in the dark.

They were far above the forges and factories, upon the dark moon Dharroth. The Sigmarabulum was forged in the shape of Sigmar’s twin-tailed comet, two arms reaching to embrace Mallus. This black satellite formed the head of the comet, and it was here that Sigmaron, the palace of the Heldenhammer, was situated. Vandus, Laudus and Andricus emerged into the grounds on the path they called the High Road. Sigmar’s palace soared above them, as wide and sprawling as any city, its many domes and spires gleaming by the light of the moons.

They made their way through the magnificent halls and vaults of the palace. Even the meanest chamber was monumental beyond anything Vandus could recall from his old life. Every stone was perfect, every decoration of the finest craftsmanship.

They took paths followed only by others of their kind, corridors they must take as ritual prescribed. Down they went, past the Forbidden Vaults, their heads resolutely turned away. Their oaths demanded they never look upon the vaults’ doors.

So it was that his companions did not immediately see Vandus stumble.

The strange sensation he had experienced in the quenching chambers returned redoubled. Vandus went down to his knees, clutching at his head. His mind burst aflame with visions.

He saw golden figures climbing endlessly up a glacier of precious metal, battles upon bridges that spanned an ocean of bubbling silver, and innumerable, wicked eyes glinting through a hole in the sky. He saw a two-headed winged shadow silhouetted before a portal of terrible power, and a tide of daemons. Holes ripped in the world’s fabric split the vision, clawed hands and needle-toothed snouts pushing through until nothing remained. Light burned them away, and he saw the sigil of the twin-tailed comet upon a hammer that shone brighter than any sun.

‘My lord!’

The hammer.

‘Vandus!’

Ghal Maraz.

Vandus came to his senses with Laudus Skythunder clutching his shoulders.

‘Vandus? Are you well? What is happening?’ Laudus was saying.

Andricus spoke quietly in reply. ‘It is the same as with the others. The reforged…’

‘Silence, Lord-Castellant. Vandus has not passed the gates of death. I will hear no more of your morbid talk!’

‘Vandus?’ said Andricus.

Recovering himself, the Lord-Celestant looked to his fellows. Concern radiated from them both. ‘I’m fine,’ he said hoarsely. He got unsteadily to his feet, pushing Andricus’ hand away when he tried to help him. Once up, he marched on as steadily as he could, leaving the others to follow.

Lord-Castellant sentries slammed their halberds against their chests as the three Stormcasts entered the throne room through doors fifty feet high. Within were the command echelons from a dozen Stormhosts, arranged in rows according to their rank and order either side of a carpet, a night-blue road that led from the doors to the celestial throne. Upon this, the God-King Sigmar sat tall in his majesty. The ceiling retreated up and away. Hundreds of feet overhead, carved panels shone, and it was as if the assembled host basked in the light of many suns.

Sigmar smiled broadly as Vandus approached. Andricus was right, something had occurred. Sigmar’s manner betrayed his excitement.

‘Vandus, my favoured son,’ said the God-King. ‘I am gladdened that you are here with me again.’

Vandus bowed his head. He dearly wanted to kneel, to show his pleasure at being in the presence of his lord, but the God-King had no time for sycophancy.

Before the throne was another Lord-Celestant, clad in the turquoise livery of the Celestial Vindicators Stormhost, and he was kneeling.

‘Thostos has discovered something,’ said Sigmar. ‘All of you have performed well, my sons. I bring you here to share with you Thostos Bladestorm’s discovery and to set for you another task of great import.’

The god turned his radiant eyes upon the kneeling Thostos, who had made no movement or sound.

‘Stand, Thostos Bladestorm!’ commanded Sigmar.

Thostos slowly lifted his head and looked around him. He appeared confused.

‘We shall kneel no more,’ said Sigmar. He gestured, encouraging Thostos to rise.

The Lord-Celestant of the Bladestorm got unsteadily to his feet.

‘You are reforged,’ said Sigmar. ‘Now tell me of Chamon.’

Thostos paused before he began. When he spoke, it was falteringly. His voice sounded hollow behind his impassive war-mask. ‘There was… There was a fortress of magic. We breached its walls, only to die in a burst of unlight that was fought by a greater light.’

Sigmar leaned forward. ‘Speak to me of this greater light.’

‘Golden,’ said Thostos with difficulty. ‘Not the energy of Chaos. Violent, but pure.’

Sigmar tensed, a man who had undone the final fetters on his passions. Vandus realised then that the wait for the war through the Long Calm had been harder on the God-King than it had been on any of the Stormcasts.

‘I remember it well,’ Sigmar said. ‘Lord Vandus!’

Vandus stepped up to Thostos’ side.

‘Prepare your warriors,’ commanded Sigmar. ‘That light is mine.’ He sank back into his throne and gripped the metal gryphons on the arms. ‘We have found Ghal Maraz.’

Sigmar swept his piercing gaze across the assembled officers. ‘This knowledge has been bought at great cost. Many of the Celestial Vindicators were slain and returned to the Reforging chambers, victims of evil magic.’ He looked to Thostos again. ‘Centuries ago, I was deceived into casting Ghal Maraz from me at the Battle of Burning Skies by Tzeentch. He has since conspired to hide its whereabouts from me, but long have I suspected that Ghal Maraz rested in the mountains of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok.

‘I am sorry, Thostos, that I did not reveal to you my suspicions. I am certain you and your comrades wondered why I would send my most vengeful warriors to seek out old allies when their hammers thirsted for war, not words. I needed your fury there, in case the hammer was uncovered and needed to be snatched quickly. Here in Azyr my actions are secret, but out there in the realms they are not. I could not risk rumour of my intuition coming to the ears of the Changer of the Ways. Now you know.’

Thostos said nothing. Vandus looked sidelong at him.

Sigmar stood. ‘Warriors! Stormcasts! This is your quest! Go to Anvrok in Chamon and assail this fortress of which Thostos speaks. Destroy it and return what is rightfully mine to my hand! I had not dared hope Ghal Maraz could be recovered so early in our struggle. With it, we might begin our war in earnest!’

A rousing acclamation roared from the Stormcasts. ‘Sigmar! Ghal Maraz for Sigmar! Sigmar!’

‘Vandus and Thostos shall lead you,’ continued Sigmar, his godly voice cutting through the shouts of his men. ‘Hammers of Sigmar! Anvils of the Heldenhammer! Celestial Vindicators! Lions of Sigmar! Twelve Stormhosts shall I send. We shall crush the servants of Chaos within Anvrok. The hammer shall be ours. Nothing will prevent our victory!’

Chapter Two

Kairos Fateweaver

In a place outside of time, Kairos Fateweaver peered intently into the Flame that Consumes the Now, its strange lights reflected in his four eyes. Both his faces frowned.

‘This troubles me, this fixation on the present and not the past,’ said one head to the other.

‘Or the future. But needs must. I must bear the agony of the instant. Watch our petty friend, as he postures in front of his minions.’

In the fire, an image rippled of Ephryx, Ninth Disciple of the Ninth Tower. He stood atop the walls of his broken fortress, addressing a crowd of lords and knights: the nobility of Chamon.

‘So many schemes, so many ambitions,’ said the left head. ‘So many little heads to hold them in.’

‘None of those schemers can match Ephryx’s plans. They would tear him limb from limb if they knew what he intended. Their mistake is to think his ambitions are as limited as theirs. Their horizons are not broad enough.’

‘There! His scheme I say – I talk like him. It is my scheme.’

‘When I look into the past, I see his hand more in evidence than mine,’ rejoined the other head.

‘And when I look into the future, I see my victory and not his.’

‘Much must be done to make fate bend to my will. The sorcerer does not deserve another chance. He had nearly enough magic to complete the translocation, but frittered too much away to save his pointless mortal life.’

One shoulder shrugged. ‘It was Tzeentch’s plan.’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course, of course, but I must take an active hand,’ said the right head.

‘Ephryx is vulnerable,’ said the left.

‘His magic must be replenished.’

‘How to accomplish that?’

‘Time. The dearest coin of all. He must have more of it.’

Kairos leaned forward to the flames, keen to listen to what the doomed sorcerer had to say to his allies.

‘War has come to Chamon!’ shouted Ephryx. His voice echoed from walls of steel and copper, from bastions of brass and bronze. He had dressed himself in his finest occult robes and his horns gleamed with fresh lacquer. It was an effort to maintain his appearance of power – a necessary fiction.

A week ago, the Eldritch Fortress had been a gleaming example of Ephryx’s ingenuity. But his perfect kingdom, so long laboured over, was much damaged. A gaping hole had opened in the curtain wall, gouged out by the wild magic of Ephryx’s mutalith during its fatal fight with the turquoise storm warrior. Many of the skulls that had adorned every inch of the outside walls, transmuted to copper to store magic, had been burned away by lightning or smashed to pieces by hammer and sword. Too much of Ephryx’s hoarded power had been spent driving off Sigmar’s warriors.

There were several minor breaches elsewhere. None were quite so devastating as that in the wall of the huge, central tower. A long crack ran up from the base, showing the domed keep inside. This too had suffered damage, and the cairn of lead within had been shivered from its foundations. A wild glory shone out through the ragged gaps, brighter than the sickly sun. There was no more hiding for Ephryx’s artefact. Its painful light was plain for all to see.

Ephryx was sure that the hammer’s location was no longer secret. They would be coming for it, and soon. On the other side of the breach, Ephryx’s tall tower cast a thick black shadow, as precise as a sundial’s. It provided a measure of relief from the blazing light, and so there gathered all the might of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok. Lord Maerac of Manticorea had emptied his kingdom of dukes and barons. They sat sullenly upon their manticores, or lounged against their mounts’ flanks. Even Mutac the Silent had come down from the remote island. The sorcerer had once fancied himself a rival to Ephryx, until Ephryx had called upon Tzeentch to curse him for his impertinence. Mutac had gone about cowled ever since. Ephryx alone knew what lurked under Mutac’s hood in place of a face – nine fleshy towers, capped with nine eyes; an unsubtle reminder of who was the supreme mage of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok.

That Mutac had come down suggested he thought Ephryx’s time was done. Ephryx looked out from his broken walls seeking allies, but instead saw two dozen scheming rivals that weighed and measured him as if he were a bullock ready for slaughter.

‘Friends,’ he began. ‘Allies!’ There were no such things under the gaze of the Great Changer, unless they were of convenience. Ephryx gave a silent prayer that the lords of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok would find him convenient for a little while longer. ‘We must defend ourselves!’

‘You mean we must defend you!’ shouted Baron Kergoth of Ungivar. Scattered laughter came from the nobles. A manticore growled and rolled upon its side. Scratch my belly or I shall eat you, the expression on its face suggested.

Ephryx licked his lips. There were a lot of Maerac’s men below. They all had manticores. In the Shattered City, ten thousand campfires burned. There, the bondsmen of Maerac’s followers waited. For a fleeting instant the sorcerer worried he may have miscalculated.

‘Defend this tower, and you defend your own kingdoms,’ said Ephryx.

‘Rubbish!’ shouted a minor count, far beneath Ephryx’s disdain and as thin as he was unimportant.

Maerac sneered. ‘Look at him. He has some scheme. I do not think he lies directly to us, although he will be lying about something. Tell us, Ephryx, the Ninth Disciple of the Ninth Tower, what have you hidden in this fortress? Why is it so imperative that we defend you, when we should look to our own in the face of this threat?’

Ephryx’s warped face split in an apologetic smile. He pressed his hands together. ‘The artefact is none other than Ghal Maraz! The hammer of Sigmar Heldenhammer himself.’

The nobles went quiet. They looked askance at one another. Now they appraised each other, and not Ephryx alone, each one evaluating his chances of seizing the weapon for himself.

That was more like it.

‘You had the Great Shatterer in your possession all this time, sorcerer, and you told no one?’

Ephryx shrugged. ‘The people who dwelt in this city before me raised a great monument over it. It was the talk of the realm. You did not know of it. Sigmar did not know of it. I knew of it. Why do you think this is, Maerac?’

Maerac scowled but held his tongue.

‘It is because the Great Changer desired me to have it, and removed it from the eyes and memories of other men,’ Ephryx said, smiling condescendingly. ‘Forgive me that I have not told you, but do you not see? Had this artefact fallen into the wrong hands then these valleys would have a different set of lords. I was entrusted with it. So you see, from me your power flows.’

Maerac stared hard at Ephryx. It was clear he felt Ephryx’s hands to be the wrong ones.

‘Protect me and you are doing not my will, but Great Lord Tzeentch’s will.’ Ephryx pointed a long finger upwards. ‘Tzeentch demands its safety.’

‘Why has he not claimed it for himself? He has had ample opportunity!’ shouted the Baron of the Floating Marches.

‘The Twisted God is untrustworthy. Perhaps he desires it to fall into Sigmar’s hand,’ yelled the Yellow Duke, a pompous little fat man with an over-fed mount. He fancied himself a wizard, and Ephryx loathed him. He did, however, have a point; second-guessing Tzeentch was impossible. Any plan was plausible.

‘Whatever our god’s plans, they are unknowable to us. We need to focus on certainties, my friends. If Sigmar’s hand closes about the haft of Ghal Maraz, then it will be used against all of you! Our land plays host to the Silverway, the duardin roadway between all realms. If he intends to storm each of the eight realms, the Silverway will be of great importance to him. How long do you think your fiefdoms will stand? The servants of the man-god must be halted before these walls, or your days of power are numbered.’

Murmurs of assent rippled over the gathering. Better still.

‘We tried for the Silverway last week and they cast us back. Even now they fortify it against us,’ said Kergoth.

‘There are more of them coming every day via the Bright Tor Gate. It is reopened and in their hands,’ said the Indigo Quester. ‘They rebuild the forts there, and have taken the road from the valley.’

‘Do you see? By your own words have you made prophecy!’ shouted Ephryx.

‘This fortress is breached and it will not stand long. I say we look to our own,’ said another. ‘This fool’s day is done.’

‘We will fight and die for nothing. Every day the numbers of the Stormcasts grow by the thousand. They do not attack, they prepare! How many will there be?’ said the Yellow Duke. He had a buttery, jeering voice.

Ephryx raised his hands to quell the rising debate. ‘Fear not, I have a plan. One that will save this fortress, and bring Tzeentch’s boon to us all!’

Furious shouting erupted, mostly in his favour.

If only they knew what I intend, thought Ephryx, and it was all he could do to stop himself from laughing.

Kairos waved the image away irritably. Ephryx’s plan had some merit, but that was chiefly because it was Kairos’ plan. The eyes of one head slid shut as he peered into the future. What he saw there made him shake his head.

‘What do I see?’ asked his past-seeing head, which had no faculty of foresight.

The other head whispered, its eyes still closed. ‘Ephryx will succeed in removing himself, but his persecutors will not rest. More time is needed. More time! The pursuit cannot be halted, but it can be delayed.’

‘I must be rid of Ephryx.’

‘I shall.’

‘Favours must be called in.’

‘I shall remind those that owe them of their debt,’ soothed the other head.

Kairos opened his eyes. The warpflame flickered. The image of Ephryx whirled away and became a view of a desolate fane.

‘My guest will be here soon,’ said the past-seeing head.

In the old temple, a glowing green blade slid through the air, as if cutting through the painted backdrop of a stage set. A pink hand curled around one lip of the cut and pulled it wider. A twitching, rodentine nose poked its way through. It snuffled at the air, then withdrew. ‘I saw him set out two days past. He will be here…’

‘…now,’ said the future-seeing head.

A ratlike figure, nearly man-high, wriggled through the slit in space. It scurried from wall to wall, pausing at the corner to sniff at the air. The creature was half flesh, half machine. One leg was steel prosthetic and one arm had been replaced by a flare-mouthed weapon of brass, but these crude embellishments did not appear to slow it. Satisfied it was alone, it reached within its jerkin and produced a set of chalks. With a quick, trembling hand it began to draw an arcane circle of surprising artfulness around the altar in the middle of the shrine. Kairos watched as the ratman calmed and became absorbed in its work.

‘This is no true champion of Chaos.’

‘No. An opportunist. A sneak thief. Like all skaven.’

‘Still, time is of the essence when one is buying time.’

‘It will have to suffice.’ The head looked to its counterpart. ‘Must I wait until his circle is complete?’

‘Why wait on convention?’ said the other head.

Kairos waved his hand. A column of vibrantly coloured fire erupted from the cracked altar at the centre of the ruined temple. A burst of multi-spectral light shone up from the circle in reply. The skaven was taken by surprise, and emitted an acrid stink. He jumped back, holding his claw up to his sensitive eyes.

‘You are looking for me, child of Chaos,’ said Kairos’ heads in unison. Through the vortex of warpflame, the Oracle of All loomed high over the creature.

‘Yes-yes!’ the skaven squeaked and shrank back before the apparition. ‘How you know?’

Kairos clattered his beaks. ‘I know everything. That is why you are here, is it not? To seek my knowledge. I am an oracle.’

‘I am the oracle,’ said the second head.

‘Always,’ complained the first head, ‘they are fools!’

The skaven cringed in on itself, but nodded. ‘Yes,’ it gasped. ‘Shreeglum, warlord of five clans, seeks the Great Oracle! And Shreeglum has found him, summoned him!’ The skaven grew bold, impressed by its own success. It held up its chalk and stared at it in wonder, then gobbled it down. It came a little closer, stood a little straighter. ‘I come with great treaty-gift! I see things no other sees! I go through the ways between the worlds, to the hall of the god-thing Sigmar.’ Shreeglum stroked at its whiskers, its long face calculating. ‘What you give me for the clever things I learn there?’

‘You come to tell us that Sigmar has found his hammer.’

‘How very dull,’ said the other head.

A look of consternation gripped Shreeglum. He stooped low, cautious and suspicious. Already he was backing away, preparing to flee.

‘How you know-guess?’ he said again.

‘The same question!’ said one head.

‘I refer you to the same answer,’ said the other.

‘Do not flee. I have use for you yet. All is not lost. You must do me a service, and you shall have what you want,’ said Kairos.

‘A very great service,’ said the other head.

The skaven stopped, his nose twitching. He crept forward tentatively, and looked up at the apparition within its column of fire.

‘Listen, then,’ said Kairos. ‘I bid you breach Chamon at Silverfall in Anvrok, and take battle to the Stormcast Eternals. Do you know where that is?’

‘Dead-ruined man town. Much silver. Hot-hot! Yes,’ the skaven nodded. ‘I know the secret ways.’

‘Good. The Stormcast Eternals must fall there. Is that clear?’ said the second head.

‘Yes-yes,’ said the skaven warlord. ‘I will do this task for you. And in return…’

‘Do not tell me,’ said Kairos wearily, ‘you wish to usurp your leader’s position.’ Always it was the same with the Horned Rat’s brood, scheming and plotting against each other. Tiresome.

The skaven warlord squealed gleefully. A dribble of warpfire squirted from his arm-cannon, hissing onto the ritual circle. ‘Yes-yes!’

‘Very well,’ said Kairos, gesturing theatrically. He was getting into the spirit of the occasion. ‘Kill the one called Hammerhand and the fates shall align as you wish.’

The skaven paused, nose bobbing up and down as if it would smell the veracity of what Kairos had said.

The daemon leaned forward.

‘You may go.’

‘Yes-yes!’ chittered the skaven, scampering into the darkness. ‘Biters! Drillfiends! Hurry! Follow the tell-smoke!’

The skaven ran out of the fane. Kairos extinguished the flame and nodded both his heads.

‘It will not be enough.’

‘I know.’

‘I shall call the rest of the Nine,’ said both heads together. ‘They will be needed.’

Kairos, the place he inhabited and everything within it winked out of existence, leaving an oily trail of magic that faded away into the formless void.

Chapter Three

Return to Chamon

Upon the narrow plain by the great Silver River of Anvrok stood the Bright Tor Gate, an ancient edifice open once more by Sigmar’s decree. A camp had sprung up. The ruins about the gate were thick with artisans from the Eternal City, working under the watchful protection of the Lord-Castellants and their warriors, whose keen eyes were ever searching for signs of attack.

Everywhere were the signs of fresh works. Wizard-wrights levitated the tumbled blocks of broken fortifications to stand once more atop one another, their fellows mortaring them into place with molten stone jetting from lances that burned with a magical heat. New life returned to the bones of the dead town. The gate shone with pure energies of untainted magic. Chrono-smiths worked their gentle but potent spells, walking solemnly around and around the gate’s town, and their deep, sonorous chants provided a calming counter note to the clamour of construction. Wherever their sandalled feet passed, the land seemed changed, cleansed.

The realm was healing.

Trumpets and warhorns blared. An honour guard formed up along the wide highway leading out of the gate eastwards towards the Shattered City. These men wore the turquoise armour of the Celestial Vindicators, and had left their Warrior Chambers to hold the gate when the first attack on Elixia had been undertaken. They stood tall and proud, eager to welcome their brothers back.

Black clouds raced overhead and lightning blazed. A vanguard of Stormcasts from five Stormhosts was deposited along the cliffs to the north and upon the road ahead of the gate. Liberators and Judicators took up defensive positions. Prosecutors leapt skyward, scanning the lands for enemies. All was expertly done, but done for the sake of procedure. The lands around the gate already belonged to the forces of Azyr.

Trumpets blew again. The Bright Tor Gate throbbed and opened. The field of magic bowed, glowing brightly, swelling forward over the road. Shining motes detached themselves from this luminescence, dimmed, and took on the shapes of marching men. Lord Thostos Bladestorm, as finder of the hammer, emerged first. A swaying forest of standards followed, the icons and banners of the Celestial Vindicators all together. Then the remainder of the Stormhosts came out.

Excepting a few brotherhoods assigned to guard the Silverway and the Bright Tor Gate, the entire host emerged in a long column. Their fellows lining the way cheered and shouted, but their welcome stumbled and quietened when their greetings were not returned.

The singing of the Celestial Vindicators, once renowned for its volume and fervour, had become restrained, though they marched with no less purpose. Thostos passed beyond the gate plaza, through a tumbled gateway that was already covered in scaffolding. Mortal craftsmen stepped back, first in respect but then in fear. Thostos’ armour sparked and fizzed with magic. His eyes glowed a dull blue, not bright enough to outshine daylight, but when he walked in shadow one could see them glimmer coldly. Many of the warriors who walked behind him showed similar signs of change. There was a silence and a certain dreaminess in their bearing. As more and more of those who had fallen and been reforged marched forth, the shouts of their brothers lining the route died altogether.

The grim rearguard of the Celestial Vindicators came out from the gate. A gap opened up. More trumpets sounded, and the gate’s light swelled again, and the Hammers of Sigmar came forth. The Hammerhands were at the fore, Lord-Celestant Vandus Hammerhand upon the dracoth Calanax leading them.

Amid Vandus’ own ranks were many who had fallen, and this was giving the Lord-Celestant cause for concern.

Vandus had summoned his Lord-Relictor, Ionus Cryptborn, to march at his side. They spoke quietly. Overly cautious perhaps, for the trudge of thousands of feet covered all but the loudest clarions and warsongs.

‘Thostos has changed,’ said Vandus to Ionus. ‘He speaks only a little, and what he says is distant. I feel that I must strive constantly for his attention. His eyes burn with blue fire. The air crackles around him and all who approach him feel the heat of his rage. And he is not alone.’

‘Small wonder,’ replied Ionus, ‘for here in the Bright Tor Mountains, Thostos died. Under these same peaks, he will be avenged.’

‘I spoke with him on the way to the muster chamber. I asked him if he had been changed, if we were truly eternal as Lord Sigmar promised.’

‘And what did he reply?’

‘He said “yes”. To which of the two questions, I cannot fathom. Then he strode away from me.’

Calanax rumbled. Vandus absently scratched at the celestial beast’s neck.

‘I see,’ said Ionus.

‘Ionus, I call you to me for counsel. You wield the magics of the storm.’

‘At my lord Sigmar’s command.’

‘You came from death, so they say.’

‘I have two masters. You know that, friend of old.’

‘Then please, as my friend and adviser, tell me what has occurred? We are promised eternity to bring war upon the minions of the Four, but I did not expect it to take this course. I see it in others too, many of my own. Andricus and Laudus are reluctant to discuss it with me.’

‘It is simple, Lord-Celestant. Your warriors have died and returned. Their alteration is inevitable.’

The Lord-Relictor carried a heavy reliquary: the bones of a hero from the Age of Myth in an open casket upon a staff. The casket was surmounted by a starburst of gold, and many other fittings of metal besides. It was heavy, but Ionus carried it as if it were nothing, and easily kept pace with Calanax’s swaying stride.

‘How is this inevitable?’

‘Death is a constant. It wraps everything, binding all fate as tight as a funeral shroud. One day, all this will die. Sigmar will die, you and I will die, the Four will die. We are eternal, yes, but even eternity is not without end. When all else is dead, then death will be the last to die. Sigmar defies death with his magic, plucking us from the underworlds and reforging our mortal form. Death is jealous. When our warriors skirt the borders of that dark country, a part of them is stolen away.’

‘None can defy Sigmar,’ said Vandus.

‘Death can, Vandus. Death only seeks to take its due. Sigmar is the thief in this affair, not death,’ said Ionus. ‘And so death snatches at our spirits, and we return to this life a little diminished as we pass him by. The shortfall has to be made up somehow.’

‘With what?’

Ionus shrugged. ‘Sigmar is the lord of the storm – I serve him but I am of death’s realm. You ask me of death, and are right to do so, for I guard the souls of our comrades. But to know the secrets of the storm, one must ask the lord of storms. And I do not think he will give up his knowledge.’

Vandus blew out a breath.

‘There is something else on your mind, Hammerhand?’

‘Yes, there is more. I have been troubled by sights of things to come. Visions. I am unsure of them. Are they part of the God-King’s gift, or have I too been changed?’

‘You have not died. You remain as you were.’

‘Nevertheless, I was stolen from under death’s nose, and I was exposed to the fell energies of the Gate of Wrath. The unlight of Chaos touched me, Ionus. Have I become impure?’

‘Your visions are nothing to be afraid of. Or they might be. How will you know unless you act upon them? This is an age of wonder. Should your visions lead you falsely, pay them no heed and we shall discuss them further. We are fortunate in being able to suffer the worst lapses in judgement yet live to learn from them.’

‘Are you not afraid of what might happen to us when we die and return?’

‘Death cannot change me, because I already belong to death. Why would death try to take what it already owns? And if I should fall and become as Thostos after my remaking, then what of it? It will be only for a while. Death is a transition. To change is not only the purview of Chaos, but a necessary part of Order also.’

The road from the Bright Tor Gate turned towards the cliffs and began to climb. The gorge of the Silver River dropped away to their right. Behind them, the bizarre sight of the celestial wyrm Argentine heating the Great Crucible dominated the sky. Beyond the cliffs the mountains stepped up, walling away the sky.

At the brink, where the road crossed the cliff top and joined the main Anvrok highway, were two crumbling towers. Once a toll gate perhaps, they were now piles of windblasted stone. Upon them snapped the banners of the Stormhosts in Anvrok’s hot wind. The angle of the road’s ascent allowed Vandus to see far up and down the line. He caught sight of Thostos, a lonely figure at the front of a tongue of brilliant blue-green. There was a gap of a hundred feet between Vandus’ own position and the last of the Celestial Vindicators. Behind the Hammers of Sigmar came the Lions of Sigmar, and so on, a long stream of warriors that led back to the Bright Tor Gate. The road was a marvel of duardin engineering, and although it had seen no maintenance for centuries there were few holes in its well-paved surface. The buttresses holding back the cliffs had stood the test of time and the roadway remained largely clear of debris.

Vandus thought on what Ionus said for a time, as the wide highway mounted higher and the thin lands of the river’s margin dropped away. ‘Do you think me a coward for asking on this, Ionus?’ he asked. ‘I assure you I am not. I pledged myself to Sigmar body and soul, and he has rewarded me well. I only wish to know the full price I am being asked to p–’

Vandus was interrupted by a whooping screech. He looked upwards, towards the top of the cliff, and saw tendrils of dark magic. A titanic rumbling growled across the Vale of Anvrok, building to a deafening cacophony, and a long swathe of the cliff face peeled away and came down. Calanax reared, backing into the Knights-Vexillor following Vandus and Ionus. Thostos’ Stormhosts ahead threw themselves into a desperate run as a mountain’s worth of ore-rich boulders crashed down upon them. Many could not get clear in time, and were swept away to their deaths or buried alive. Vandus’ Hammerhands surged behind him, desperate to get to their buried fellows and pushed by the weight of the column still marching up towards them.

‘Back, back! Do not approach!’ shouted Vandus.

All heeded the wisdom of their lord and halted. From higher up the mountains a second avalanche rushed from the high peaks, dislodged by the collapse of the cliff face, dumping thousands of tonnes of ice and snow atop the rocks.

‘Stop the march!’ Vandus raised a hand and a frantic series of trumpet calls rang back down the road. The column came to a stumbling halt.

The noise stopped. Stray boulders bounced only yards from his position. Puffs of storm-magic burst from the landslide, whisked upwards to join the distant thunderheads as trapped men succumbed to their wounds.

Dust sifted through the air. By now it was late afternoon and the sun coloured the metal-rich cloud a pale yellow. For a moment shocked silence reigned, to be shattered by braying laughter drifting down from the mountains above.

‘Beastmen,’ Lord Vandus shouted. ‘At them!’

Calanax roared and his draconic voice carried far back down the road. A score of Lord-Celestants broke from the leading three Stormhosts, their dracoths leaping to the mountainside. Vandus leaned forward as Calanax bounded upwards, his sharp claws and momentum propelling him up the nearly sheer surface. They reached the top of the cliff where the main road ran. There, the Bright Tor Mountains intruded deep into the valley, and five peaks reared their snowy heads high above. The scaled beasts bounded onto the slopes beyond the main road.

The beastmen, a strange copper-skinned breed, occupied a shallow ridge cutting out from the mountain. They were spread some distance along the road, but there was a thick knot of them on a canted ledge, grouped around one that Vandus assumed to be the leader. The beast-chief, a shaman of some sort, was a heavily built mutant, his aura alive with dark power. Vandus headed right for him. To his left and right, beastmen broke and ran, their nimble goat’s legs granting them unnatural agility on the steep mountainside. But the dracoths were quicker, as surefooted as mountain lions. Terrified bleating echoed through the peaks as the dracoths ran down their prey and tore them apart.

Vandus burst through the shaman’s bodyguard. These were larger and better armoured than the feeble specimens the other Lord-Celestants slew, but Calanax ripped them to pieces with his heavy claws just the same. Crude weapons bounced from Calanax’s peytral, and those that hit his body were turned by his thick hide. The dracoth bit down hard on a creature and shook his jaws viciously, casting the broken body aside. Vandus was intent upon the leader. The shaman raised a staff of black oak that burned with unholy power, but Vandus smote the creature on the head, slaying it instantly. The ledge was cleared.

‘Back, back to the column!’ shouted Vandus. He waved his hammer around as a signal then slid from Calanax’s back, bent down to the corpse of the beast-shaman and took his prize.

The Lord-Celestants returned to the column. Vandus rode up to Ionus and cast the head of the beastlord to the ground.

‘Swift vengeance,’ said Ionus.

‘Aye,’ said Vandus. ‘Yet the damage to the Celestial Vindicators cannot be undone.’ He was concerned, and a little afraid. ‘Some of these men meet their third deaths today. One wonders what they will become.’

Vandus called to his signallers and his Knights-Heraldor.

‘We must hold the march. Get men to the top of the cliffs and send Prosecutors to the mountain tops. And find me our scouts. I want to know how this ambush was missed.’ Vandus surveyed the fan of rubble burying the road. ‘Send back to the gate for workers and wizard-wrights. We can go no further before we have cleared the way.’ He looked back angrily down the stalled column. ‘This will cost us at least a day.’

Chapter Four

The Shattered City

The clearance of the road took time the Stormcasts could ill afford to lose. Vandus urged his men and the workers on to harder efforts, aware always that the delay suited their enemies perfectly. Once the digging had finished, the column set out again, up onto the great highway of Anvrok, and towards their goal. The Bright Tor Mountains brooded over their march, but even they seemed paltry things to the great tower of the sorcerer. This grew ever loftier as they closed, the great eye of Tzeentch sculpted into the top glaring at them from a great height.

Centuries of desolation had done little to diminish the scale of Elixia, and the men looked upon it with sorrow and awe. The tall walls of the Eldritch Fortress withdrew behind shattered ruins as the Stormhosts marched nearer, leaving only the tower visible. Broken buildings crowded the road with increasing density upon the approach, but the city proper was a jagged silhouette upon a bluff.

Vandus ordered a halt at the foot of these cliffs and called a council of war. The twelve Stormhosts were each sent to a different point of the tumbled walls, while a dozen Warrior Chambers were directed northwards to reinforce the Stormcasts holding the Silverway entrance. This could be seen far away, a dark slot in another tumbledown city clinging to the mountainside.

Bidding his men be wary, Vandus ordered the advance of the Stormhosts. He and Thostos led the way through a melted gateway that must once have been every bit as impressive as those of Azyrheim. As Vandus looked upon Elixia’s despoliation a thought troubled his mind over and again – this could so easily have been the fate of Azyr had Sigmar not sealed the realmgates.

Statuary lay broken in the streets, ornate temples and palaces were roofless derelicts, only the dryness of Anvrok saving them from total disintegration. Everywhere Vandus witnessed the touch of Chaos: twisted statues, deformations to the ground, buildings warped into ludicrous monstrosities, terrified faces trapped in stone. Friezes and statues were subtly warped to mocking effect: town dignitaries had the heads of swine, gods the faces of fools. Sorrowful phantoms cried on the wind, and when birds were scared up from their eyries, they clattered skywards on wings of metal, shouting in the voices of men.

The Stormhosts were forced to go retinue by retinue along the streets, for their sheer numbers hampered their manoeuvres. The columns, already split on entering the city, were forced to divide again. Tumbled heaps of scrap further blocked the streets, slowing them to a crawl. The Bladestorm and the Hammerhand Warrior Chambers went together, always at the fore.

Where the voices of the dead were absent, silence ruled the place, swallowing up the footsteps of the Stormcasts. Thostos burned with a palpable fury, his eyes fixed upon the tower of the sorcerer. Andricus Stoneheart shook his head at Vandus. Both were wary of Thostos’ change, and Vandus was tense, anticipating disaster to come.

They reached a wide square, paved with green slabs of copper and bronze. Ruined workshops surrounded the space, with enough of their collapsed arcades still intact to hint at the square’s past glories. Upon the wall was a sign in ancient script.

‘The Square of Living Blades,’ read Vandus.

‘Here was the armoury of Celemnis, Maiden of the Blades,’ said Ionus. He gestured to an impressive ruin on the west side of the square. ‘There she bound threads of her hair into the core of each sword. It is said that they could cut through soul and flesh with equal ease.’

In the centre was a single statue of tarnished silver upon a tall plinth. There was a haunting beauty to the woman it depicted, and an overwhelming sadness.

‘That must be her, but she died when the city fell, or so I would have thought. Who raised a statue to her?’ Ionus paused, suddenly alert. Vandus held up his fist, halting his men.

‘What is it?’

‘Death. Pain. Something else…’ Ionus’ words trailed off. His eyes were drawn to the collapsed arches of the arcade, and a movement there. ‘Watch the shadows!’ called Cryptborn urgently. His Retributor bodyguard drew in close.

As if Ionus’ warning were a signal, hundreds of horned warriors came scrambling from the ruins, screaming incoherently.

‘The sorcerer’s minions,’ said Thostos. ‘This time he sends evil men to contest our approach.’

‘We shall pass the test, brother,’ said Vandus. ‘Liberators, forward! Judicators, take the high ground!’ he ordered. ‘These are irritants, nothing more.’

Thostos made no reply, but lifted his hammer and sword and thundered into the square, sparks fizzling on his armour. Savages leapt from the arcade to fall upon him, but they were hurled back, their blood painting the metal red. Lord Thostos drove on across the square, hacking his way towards the road at the other side. His men streamed from the column and ran after him.

‘Thostos, wait!’ shouted Vandus.

Within seconds, Thostos Bladestorm had disappeared entirely. Vandus had not the time to go after him. Horns blared, and ambush erupted from all sides.

Throughout the city the vanguards of each Stormhost suddenly found themselves beset. Armoured warrior-chiefs roared, and a horde of bare-chested tribesmen burst from concealment. Vandus’ Hammerhands were assailed from both sides of the street. Half a dozen fell as the servants of Chaos got among them.

Vandus smashed down a man who leapt at him from a slender bridge. Calanax blasted another apart with a bolt of lightning from his maw.

‘I had anticipated an ambush, not an army. They come as if from nowhere!’ said Vandus.

‘There is magic behind this,’ shouted Ionus. He slammed his reliquary staff down. White light blazed around him. ‘But I have magic of my own.’

The worshippers of Tzeentch recoiled as the men they had cut down got to their feet, ready to fight again. Battle raged everywhere. Thostos’ Warrior Chamber in particular was becoming overstretched. They fought without order, their thirst for vengeance overcoming their training. A portion of the enemy in the square broke and fled, and the Celestial Vindicators pursued them. Many were laid low by axes, while others were battered to the ground by a hail of metal chunks cast from on high as they went into the westward streets.

‘Hold the line!’ called Vandus. ‘Halt!’

‘You may as well call for a hurricane to halt its fury, son,’ said Andricus. ‘Their prey is in sight, and the Celestial Vindicators will kill them all, or die in the attempt.’

Vandus took stock of his circumstances. With Lord Thostos missing and his Warrior Chamber over-extended, Vandus’ own flank was dangerously exposed. Hundreds more Chaos worshippers came out of the ruins, seeking to cut the line of Celestial Vindicators storming after Thostos in two.

‘Stoneheart!’ called Vandus, pointing at the pursuers.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ said the Lord-Castellant. ‘Hammerhands, with me!’ He ran to meet the foe, three dozen paladins at his side.

Calanax whirled around. More of the Stormcasts were making their way into the city, driving into the rear of the ambush. From north and south, sigmarite warhorns sounded. Vandus’ host was at the heart of the attack, but the ambushers were being encircled in turn.

‘Into the square!’ Vandus urged his men. ‘Make formation about the statue!’

With a precision born of long practice, the Hammerhands surged forward, Ionus and his Retributors to the front. They carved out a space around the statue, and the Liberators locked their shields around it. Judicators came running, filling the centre of the Hammerhands’ hollow square and loosing their bows as they ran, joining their fire with that coming down from the ruins above. The air hissed with arrows. Prosecutors flew in formation overhead, picking off warriors who showed themselves on the roofs.

‘Come out! I call to the architect of the attack!’ Vandus bellowed. Calanax bounded around the periphery of the square, the pair of them slaying every man they came across. ‘Come out and show your face. I, Vandus Hammerhand, challenge you to single combat!’ Mocking laughter echoed across the city, but no one came forward.

‘Appeals to martial pride will not work here, Vandus,’ shouted Ionus. ‘The followers of Tzeentch are far subtler than those of Khorne.’

The roar of battle intensified. The broad road beyond the square rang to the meeting of blades as another Warrior Chamber emerged from the south into the ambush. Both sides fought with skill and ferocity, and soon the gutters ran with blood.

Prosecutors were knocked from the sky with lead-weighted bolas, or caught by leaping savages. Vandus glowered behind his mask. Everywhere, mayhem reigned. Unable to bring their full might to bear, the Stormcast phalanxes were being fragmented.

Ionus held the centre of the square. Vandus sent his own Liberators to intercept a mob of bare-chested axemen forming a battle line to challenge Ionus’ position. Knights armoured in blue and yellow thundered out through the tall arches of the ancient Celemnite workshop. At Vandus’ command, Judicators broke from the back of the square, firing arrows on the move. To the mouth of each alleyway Vandus sent a retinue of Protectors. They stood no more than five abreast, but their whirling swordstaves set up an impenetrable barrier, and they killed until the alleys were blocked by the dead.

The worst was yet to come. Ionus felt it, a gathering fury rising through the ground.

‘Vandus!’ he shouted. ‘Death calls to death, and this place is rife with it!’

Puddles of molten metal welled up through the paving. From each of these rose a spirit, running upward to make the distorted forms of men and women. The faces of these silver-skinned revenants were masks of fury, and they fell upon any they saw. Ionus cursed, and set his magic to driving them back. The Stormcasts suffered for his distraction.

A shadow passed over Vandus as a manticore swooped low, wings wide. The body was that of a huge hunting cat but the face bore some semblance to a man’s, its eyes alight with bestial intelligence. Prosecutors pursued the creature, but it jinked and dived to avoid their lightning blasts. The beast carried a cowled figure with a huge spear. The manticore stooped. Giant paws batted Stormcasts off the ruins and the spear’s tip flicked out, impaling heads with each sweep. The manticore soared up, folded its wings, then plummeted down onto the pursuing Prosecutors, smashing two to the ground.

The sky was a-thunder with the passing of Sigmar’s warriors. Vandus counted more than a dozen manticores hurtling down from the tall tower.

Andricus Stoneheart gathered men around him and fought to the west while Ionus wrestled with the silvered shades of the dead in the centre. Vandus rode from point to point, exhorting his warriors to do their best, hoping that the ambush would break before they were overwhelmed. In other streets and courtyards, Warrior Chambers gathered into tight knots of resistance. The Stormcast advance halted, and all the while Vandus’ gaze was drawn to the tower. A sense of building power wreathed it. The cowled manticore rider made another pass, shouting arcane words that sent black bolts searing into Vandus’ men. He wondered for a moment if he were the sorcerer they were seeking, but Thostos had spoken of a horned man. Then a second voice became interwoven with the sound of the battle, coming and going, instilling the ruins with a throbbing pulse. Vandus guessed that this must be the voice of the sorcerer lord. He searched wildly for its source, but it seemed to come from everywhere.

And then suddenly a haunting song began, drowning out all, beautiful and terrible, a song of sorrow and rage. Silver swords shimmered into being wherever the song swelled. These shot out at speed, slicing into Stormcast and Chaos warrior alike. The blades encountered no resistance from either side’s plate, cutting through it as if the warriors were clad in soft robes. Chaos worshippers threw themselves at the swords, hoping to wrest them from the air and take them for themselves. Many died in the attempt, but a handful were successful, and with these blades inflicted sore losses on the Stormcast Eternals.

‘Celemnite blades,’ said Ionus to his men. ‘A legacy of a bygone age.’

A disturbance in the wind drew the Lord-Relictor’s attention to the corner of the square. A new puddle of molten silver bubbled from the ground, flowing upwards until it formed a gaunt female figure with hair the colour of copper. Rage twisted her beautiful features as she surveyed the carnage.

She opened her jaws far wider than any human could and her scream tore through the square, lifting a curtain of dust before it. Chaos worshippers and Stormcast Eternals staggered and clutched at their ears and throats. Ionus held his reliquary in front of him, matching his will with the maiden’s song. Brilliant light flared around him. There was nothing but the screaming song and the pain and light it brought. The scream stopped as abruptly as it had started. All around Ionus, men were dead. With cracks of thunder the lifeless bodies of his guard flashed up and away. A few lone warriors staggered about, blood leaking from their ears, but all who survived were swiftly impaled by the flying blades.

‘This city is not shy of horrors, Vandus,’ called out Ionus Cryptborn, but Vandus could not hear, for he was embattled a hundred yards away. ‘You cannot fight a curse with blades,’ he said under his breath.

The terrifying scream rang out again, slaying more warriors. Ionus found himself alone and he had a clear view to the statue. There was a plaque at the statue’s feet he had not seen before. ‘She would not yield,’ it said. He approached the statue. The face was wracked with sorrow and pain, the same face as upon the silver-skinned banshee. Death magic thrummed strongly from the monument, and he realised then that the epitaph was mocking, and the statue not raised from any respect. Curious, he cracked one arm from its shoulder with his hammer. The statue was hollow, with dry bone trapped within.

Ionus turned across the square to where the banshee wailed. He strode towards her, his reliquary before him.

‘Celemnis!’ he shouted. ‘We fight for the same cause!’

The banshee turned, her face twisting in a curious frown.

‘Celemnis! Hear my plea, O Queen of Blades,’ said the Lord-Relictor. He went to his knees and bowed his head. Celemnis’ skirts pulsed and flowed across the ground towards him, until she floated above him. Within the ghost two magics warred. Ionus sensed dark spells striving to trap her and her own essence fighting back. His respect for the warrior-maiden doubled. ‘I beseech you, send your ire against those that earned it.’ He took the blade from his reliquary, sliding it from the wired finger-bones holding it fast, and held it out, hilt-first. ‘This blade is a gift from Sigmar. Do you see? We fight for Sigmar.’

Celemnis looked at Ionus, and she was the epitome of terrible beauty. Her hair floated in a wide halo around her head. Ionus tensed, expecting his end.

Her hair reached out, taking the sword’s hilt. Celemnis looked directly at him, a sad smile on her face.

She screamed again, and the world was upended. A wave of anguish blasted across the square and Ionus leaned into it as a man leans into a gale. At the heart of the shout was the whispered promise of death; sweet, beguiling words. He yearned to give into it, to go back to his other master, away from Sigmar’s wars, and to join again with his beloved.

One day he would, he swore.

Not today.

The scream ended. The fighting stopped. Chaos worshippers stood stupidly, weapons dropping from nerveless hands.

As one, every single Chaos warrior in the centre of the city dropped dead. The silver ghosts rose shrieking from the battle, ignoring the Stormcast Eternals. Silver swords hissed after them as they flew onwards to the walls of the Eldritch Fortress.

Vandus was amazed. All of a sudden, his foes were dead.

‘Onwards! Onwards!’ Vandus bellowed. ‘Back into formation! To the Eldritch Fortress!’

The Hammers of Sigmar obeyed without hesitation, forming up into orderly blocks before hurrying forwards. The remaining Celestial Vindicators ignored him completely, running further into the city in search of new foes to slay.

Furious, Vandus vaulted from Calanax and onto a tumbled ruin. He ran up onto the tilted head of a toppled stardrake statue, intending to order Thostos’ Warrior Chamber back into the column. But as he drew in his breath to shout, his eyesight clouded, his nostrils filled with phantom scents and his head swam.

‘No, not now, not…’ A vision seized him with such blinding force it sent him to his knees.

He whirled away to a different place, speeding up over the Anvrok Vale. He came to a dizzying stop, and Lord Vandus saw a waterfall of silver, frozen in time. In the sky beyond it, the silver wyrm Argentine coiled and fought with another dragon mightier still. All the while Vandus’ eyes were drawn upwards, towards the top of the falls and the crucible there. He was in the air, with nothing ahead and nothing below.

The vision passed. Vandus shook in its aftermath. Thunder rumbled and it began to rain. Sigmar’s lightning clove deep into the city; reinforcements were arriving.

Vandus got back to his feet unsteadily and took stock. The Celestial Vindicators were gone. The area around the square was clear, but the sound of fighting echoed through the streets still. The tower of the sorcerer wavered in a haze of magic. He was running out of time, and made to go back down to the statue and Calanax.

‘My lord! The sky! Get down!’ shouted his Knight-Vexillor.

The warning came too late. Four manticores rushed at him and his command echelon in the street, claws out. Three struck the Stormcasts; one was smashed into the ground by heavy hammers, but the other two raked a long, clattered furrow in the warriors before shooting skywards again. The fourth was ridden by a huge Chaos lord, and came directly at Vandus. No amount of skill or speed could stop the beast’s dive. The Lord-Celestant leapt to the side, but he was still sluggish from his vision and moved too slowly. A heavy blow slammed into his shoulder and a spear transfixed him. He was plucked up and carried away, the ground dropping beneath him. All his weight was upon the spear point. Barbs bit deep into his flesh. Vandus grabbed at it with both hands, fearful his own weight would wrench him into pieces. The iron shaft was slippery with his blood. Gripping it sent agonies sparking down the nerves of his arm.

Let go, part of him said. Take brief pain and be returned by Sigmar. But then he thought of Thostos and his cold manner since he had returned, and gripped harder.

A cruel face looked down upon him, heavyset and doleful. The lord sneered.

‘So you are the Hammerhand. I thought you should be mightier, but here you are speared like a fish.’

‘You cannot kill me,’ choked out Vandus. Speaking sent further throbs of pain across his upper back.

‘We shall see. I am Lord Maerac, and I shall be your death.’

‘You are the servant of the sorcerer.’

Maerac laughed. ‘Ephryx is a fool if he believes that, and you are a greater fool to say it.’

Vandus gripped the spear. His situation was hopeless. Below him Stormcasts poured through the city, but the battle was far from over. Further in, nearer the shrouded outline of the Eldritch Fortress, there were more servants of Chaos. There the fight continued. Bright lines of Sigmar’s warriors duelled on every street with the followers of the Tzeentch while overhead, lightning crackled across a darkening sky.

Maerac scowled at the storm. He twisted the spear and Vandus cried out.

‘What is this fascination your god has for dreary weather?’ said Maerac. ‘Does he think he impresses us with his lightning and his thunder? He is a bigger fool than you! Your attack is faltering, and you face but a portion of the might of this realm. I am only one lord.’ Maerac leaned over in his saddle. ‘But soon I shall be the only lord. I shall take the hammer. I have been told by the Oracle himself that no mortal army can take Sigmar’s weapon. What hope do you have?’

Vandus caught sight of a flash of turquoise at the top of a bell tower as Maerac banked around it. The lord intended to take him towards the fortress as a prisoner.

‘We are no mortal army,’ Vandus said.

A blur of blue-green hurtled through the air from the tower. Lightning blazed all around it. The manticore jerked with a heavy impact and Maerac turned in shock to find Thostos standing astride his mount. He dropped his spear, and Vandus made a desperate lunge for the manticore’s neck. Pain punished him as he grasped two handfuls of blue mane. The manticore snapped at him, swerving sharply left. The spear dragged at Vandus’ shoulder, robbing all the strength from his left arm, and he nearly let go.

Thostos roared. Maerac drew his sword and raised it in a block, but Thostos’ hammer shattered it and carried on straight into Maerac’s face. The blow was so powerful that it obliterated Maerac’s head completely. The corpse spouted blood into the wind and slid sideways in its flying harness. The manticore bucked and twisted, but Thostos would not be shaken loose. The sword in his left hand punched through the manticore’s skull and its wings folded, causing it to fall like a stone and smash through the wall of a ruined temple.

Thostos stepped from the dead creature’s back. He extended a hand to Vandus, and hauled him to his feet. Then he took up the spear and looked questioningly at Vandus.

Vandus nodded, his teeth gritted against the pain. ‘Do it,’ he said.

Vandus screamed in agony as Thostos forced the barbs out of his back. He staggered and sank to his knees. One chop of Thostos’ runeblade cut the head off the spear and with a ragged groan, Vandus dragged the shaft from his body and dropped it.

‘The Stormhosts must see you live,’ said Thostos, and there was a trace of emotion to his words that had been absent since his Reforging.

Together they left the temple, battered but alive. Calanax had sought out his lord, drawn to him by their bond. Vandus mounted him with Thostos’ aid, and rode to the heart of the Stormcast forces again.

Manticores still swooped and harried the forces. Arrows arced up at them, driving the monsters off, only for them to come back around.

‘Maerac is dead!’ shouted Vandus, his voice amplified by the divine magic burning in him. ‘Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm slew him! Stay and suffer the same fate!’

It was enough. With several of their number dead, their king slain and much fire coming at them from the ground, the beast riders wheeled away and flew back to their scattered domains with all the speed their mounts could muster.

Upon seeing their masters abandon them, the morale of the Chaos army broke. In ever greater masses, the bondsmen of Manticorea fled, the wrath of the Stormcasts following them upon swift wings of light.

The Stormhosts’ vanguard plunged on towards the fortress. Vandus and Calanax ran past them all, until they were in front. The sense of magic on the air intensified and the outline of the tower and the fortress walls blurred into obscurity. There came a soft wash of air, and a tremor set the ruins shaking. The ground quaked and the Stormhosts stumbled.

‘No!’ shouted Vandus. He spurred Calanax into a gallop, gritting his teeth at the jarring pain in his shoulder. Buildings came down around him, ancient crystal shattering and metal tearing with mournful groans. The ground buckled under him, rising up as if turned by a plough. A fresh ridge rose up in the ruins, a wrinkle in the earth that upset the remains of the city, making them lean drunkenly on footings of broken stone.

Calanax surged up the ridge as it stopped growing and the tremors ceased. At the summit, Vandus’ worst fears were realised.

The Hammerhands clambered up behind him. Ionus and Andricus arrived at his side. Not a soul amongst them spoke. Before them was a crater, wide and deep.

‘It’s gone,’ said Lord Vandus dully. ‘And the hammer with it.’

‘So we go after it,’ said Ionus Cryptborn. ‘We keep going until we find it.’

‘But how, if some fell power has claimed it and taken it who knows where?’

Cryptborn shrugged. ‘Fear not, Lord Vandus. We will find a way.’

Chapter Five

Dragonfate dais

The leaders of the Stormhosts gathered atop the crater’s crest. Tempers ran hot and bewilderment ruled. No decision had been reached as to what to do next, and as the day grew old none seemed to be forthcoming.

Ionus did not take part in the debate. He found a block of stone to one side and sat upon it, removing his helmet to allow his pale skin to feel the sun and the sweat to dry. He remained there, facing west, as the day’s shadows lengthened and the great wyrm shone in the evening, its flames becoming brighter as the sky darkened. When Chamon’s sun had slunk past its coils and dipped behind distant Knatrok, a shimmer in the air resolved into a lithe figure.

Ionus stood and bowed, his hand over his heart.

‘Celemnis, the Silver Maiden. I give you greetings of the night. We are kin, you and I. United in death.’

She said nothing, but floated forward, the silver of her lower body flowing over the freshly turned rubble of Elixia. She gave Ionus a sad, lingering smile. Her face had lost its ferocious aspect, and Ionus presumed that aside from her skin of metal she looked now much as she had in life: a beautiful, proud face haloed by red hair. She bowed her head and reached out a hand. From it sprouted a long tendril of rippling silver. It steadied itself and became the sword Ionus had gifted her from his reliquary. She took it in both hands and offered it up to him much as he had offered it to her.

Ionus took the returned blade. Its edges glimmered sharp and silver, and he marvelled at the change.

‘Your work?’

She smiled again.

‘You have done me a great honour, my lady.’

By now, others had noticed what was occurring. The arguments of the war council subsided, and the lords of the hosts turned to watch this strange exchange.

Ionus carefully replaced the hilt of the sword into the clasped hands of the skeleton on his staff. ‘Perhaps you could do me another. I would not ask, as you have done so much for us already, but we have come to an impasse. Your efforts are important. If we succeed here, then this city might live again, and you could go to your rest.’ He smiled. ‘Or you might linger, and remain its guardian.’

She tilted her head to the side, awaiting his request.

‘Thank you, my lady. Firstly, tell me – where has the castle fled to?’

She looked upwards at the Great Crucible and pointed.

‘I see. And how might we venture there with so great an assemblage?’

She smiled again, and beckoned. Without waiting to see if Ionus followed, she set off west into the city. The Lord-Relictor went after her, tilitng his head to meet Lord Vandus’ gaze. Vandus nodded and motioned for his men to follow.

A sepulchral quiet was on the city, and Vandus had no desire to break it in case the maiden’s magic be broken also.

‘Sound no trumpet and say little,’ Vandus said, ‘but spread the word. The Silver Maiden shows us the way.’

The Stormhosts gathered themselves rapidly and said nothing as commanded. They had marched for days and fought for much of the morning, but the magic of Sigmar made them strong and unwearying. Sleep they could stave off for days, if need be. And so it was, for Celemnis did not halt to let them rest, but continued westward at a steady, unhurried speed.

They passed back along the Anvrok highway, past the turn to the Bright Tor Gate. There Vandus sent messengers down to the encampment and others to the entrance of the Silverway, and bade them take news of their progress back to Sigmaron.

On for a dozen more miles the Stormcasts proceeded, before Celemnis took them up an unassuming spur of the road into the Bright Tor Mountains. In this part of Anvrok there was no sign of the Stormhosts’ recent invasion. They trod secret paths shown to them by Cryptborn’s strange ally. Chaos tribes that had yet to face the Stormcast Eternals launched attacks, but they retreated soon enough. Once three had been bested, the army was attacked no more.

Celemnis and Ionus led the way, the others keeping a wary distance. Cryptborn could be seen speaking with the ghost and listening attentively. What they spoke of was his alone to know; he was too far ahead for his words to be heard clearly, and from her they heard nothing at all.

Before the eighth day was out, the Stormhosts emerged from a narrow pass and Vandus stopped in amazement.

‘The Argent Falls,’ he said.

For the last three days the confines of the mountains had hidden all but hints of the crucible and its strange guardian. Now revealed, Argentine filled the horizon, its coils impossibly vast. The Great Crucible formed a halo around Argentine’s upturned head. The roar of the dragonfires that heated the crucible were loud. The mountains there rose up high, but gusting, hot winds blew over them from the drake’s fires and molten silver, keeping them warm and free of snow.

The Argent Falls plunged from the edge of the crucible, falling miles through the air in a wide sheet. The surface was silver, but the orange glow of smelting was visible in the folds of the liquid. Where the falls struck the rock of Anvrok, gobbets of precious metal splattered across the mountainside, and a wide area around the river’s headwater was covered in globular formations of pure silver. The remains of catcher channels could be seen half-buried in the metal. These ruins of industry were far below the Stormcasts, who looked down onto them from a high road.

Beyond the falls was a little more of the land of Anvrok, then the mountains stopped abruptly and the skyvoids began. The road they were on curled downwards, closer to the falls, before it crossed a bridge over a ravine. Smaller roads led off to the works there, and then the main road rose up again to a township on a crag opposite the army, as ruinous as every other city in Anvrok. At the brink of the cliff the circular platform of a dais rose up on an artfully coiled staircase. Six statues of dragons stood around its circumference.

Vandus was close to Ionus and Celemnis, and heard his Lord-Relictor speak.

‘A dragonfate dais?’ Ionus said. ‘How can that aid us?’

Celemnis pointed a long-nailed finger at the dais and disappeared.

Vandus waited a moment before calling out. ‘Has she departed?’

‘No. I sense her still,’ Ionus replied.

Vandus rode up beside him.

‘I am glad. She is a good ally.’

‘She is in great pain,’ said Ionus matter-of-factly. ‘This place must have been fabulously wealthy. I have seen many dragonfate shrines, but never one rendered in solid silver.’

Calanax made a growling purr.

‘Calanax approves. This is a fitting honour to the great drakes. Silver is favoured by them.’

Vandus stroked between Calanax’s horns. ‘And yet, against the barbaric hordes of Chaos, the protection of their old gods availed them little. There is only one god who can stand before the Four, and that god is Sigmar. What would the Silver Maiden have us do, I wonder?’

‘Let us consider the question upon the dais,’ said Ionus. ‘The answer may come to us there more easily, and that is where she pointed.’

‘We cannot all go – look at the road. The town is small.’

‘We should not go alone. We have suffered several ambushes already. Summon Thostos and let his Warrior Chamber come with ours. He is deeply involved in this affair,’ said Ionus.

Vandus nodded. He raised his hand and horns blew. The Hammerhands and the Bladestorms came forward. Together, they went down into the valley and up into the ruined town of Silverfall.

The rumble of the Argent Falls drowned out all other sound. The heat of the silver was intense, and Vandus marvelled that men had lived there at all. Roofless houses and workshops stretched up the mountainside behind the crag for some way, exhibiting that mix of duardin and mannish craftsmanship that was the hallmark of Anvrok’s dead civilisation.

They reached the dais. The base of its supporting stair rose from a village square and a low wall edged it, but much of it had fallen away, leaving a dangerous drop to the rocks and silver accretions below.

‘Thostos, Ionus, Andricus – come with me onto the dais,’ said Vandus.

No sooner had he said the words than a deeper roar undercut the thunder of the Argent Falls: the unnatural grind of machinery. It came from thin air.

‘To arms!’ he yelled.

‘Another bloody ambush,’ growled Andricus. ‘Judicators! To higher ground. Liberators, shieldwall.’

All around the assembled brotherhoods, slivers of green light split the air. Green-black drills ground through each, ripping wide the fabric of reality before withdrawing.

‘Stormfiends!’ said a Liberator. ‘Skaven!’

His warning was cut short by a hail of bullets. Giant, rat-like monsters shouldered their way out of the tears in the weft of the world. Some bore multi-barrelled guns in the place of fists, and they fired as they came. Dozens of Stormcasts were shredded, falling to their knees before disappearing in blurs of azure lightning. Behind the gun-beasts came more giants, these armed with whirring drills and grinders. They bowed their heads and charged.

‘Stand ready!’ called Vandus.

‘Judicators, loose!’ yelled Andricus.

A storm of bolts spat through the air, felling one of the giant rat monsters. It collapsed face first into the dirt with a pitiful grunt, revealing the swollen-headed rat-thing bonded to its back. This twisted ratling mewled horribly until a hammer stroke ended its misery. Liberators charged the stormfiends. Those warriors that were not knocked flying by the swipes of the creatures’ arms rained hammer blows upon knees and ankles, hoping to bring the giant beings low. Vandus drove Calanax into the fray, but the stormfiends proved more than a match for the Lord-Celestant and his steed, and they were driven back under the shadow of the dais. The stormfiends grunted in recognition, seeming to single him out, and soon Vandus was surrounded by three of the things.

‘Protect the Lord-Celestant!’ he heard Andricus shout.

The rest of the battlefield was a blur to Vandus, his attention was focused solely on fending off the hammering blows of the stormfiends. Calanax gutted one and Vandus smashed the shoulder of another, but there were more coming and were it not for the might of Heldensen, he would have been overcome.

Behind the stormfiends came a flood of the lesser ratmen. They leapt from the tears in the world and ran for cover with preternatural speed. Once established there, they opened fire with their rifles, the force of their magical bullets punching through sigmarite and knocking Stormcasts from their feet. The noise of battle rose high enough to challenge the falls: the racket of the skaven’s hellish weaponry, the whoosh of slain Stormcasts departing for Azyr, the clang of weapons, the shouts of men, and a frantic chittering at the edge of hearing.

Vandus parried another deadly blow. Calanax was forced closer to the edge of the cliffs.

Then Vandus saw turquoise armour amid the gold of his own men. Thostos roared, and in that war cry was something of the man Vandus had known before. He and his warriors ran full tilt into the stormfiends.

‘Vandus! Vandus! We come!’ shouted Thostos. He cut a stormfiend’s leg free, sending it toppling. Hammers smashed into its head and the grafted rider, bludgeoning both to death.

‘Slay the leader!’ bellowed Vandus.

The warlord was larger than his servants, more metal than flesh, surrounded by a bodyguard of heavily armoured, black-furred henchmen. Thostos rallied his men about him and began battering his way toward the warlord, while Vandus was fully occupied deflecting the blows of a stormfiend. The next thing Vandus saw was a gout of black-green fire washing over his friend. Thostos’ men fell, incinerated within their armour.

‘Thostos!’ shouted Vandus, and his blow slew a further stormfiend, smashing its ribcage with a blast of energy. He urged Calanax forward but the dracoth was shoved back.

Another blast of fire. What Vandus saw next almost fatally distracted him.

Thostos strode forward, unharmed. The warpfire of the skaven beast washed over him with no effect, and he slew the creature with a whirl of hammer and sword. Thostos pushed on for the warlord. The stormvermin bodyguard, somewhat tentatively, moved in to engage, but their halberds broke upon the Lord-Castellant’s inviolable skin, and Thostos struck them down in seconds. The leader fled, leaping up the stairs in fear. Andricus was close by and went after him.

Vandus was now embattled with only two of the giant ratmen. Calanax clamped his jaw around the leg of one while Vandus battered back the second. With a mighty heave, Calanax sent it toppling from the precipice.

The second fought on. Calanax rounded on it while it was still reeling from Vandus’ blow and bit off its head. Still it fought. Whirling blades topped the stumps of its fists and these caught on Heldensen, juddering hard until they pushed the hammer aside. The creature smashed into Vandus’ injured shoulder and reopened the wound Maerac had dealt him. He cried in pain, backhanding his hammer into the beast’s chest and slaying it finally.

A second wave of stormfiends were emerging from the cracks between the worlds. Two came from a slit nearby, squeak-roaring with idiot rage. A pair of Prosecutors swept over them, blinding them with blasts of their hammers. Vandus and Calanax leapt at them, the impact of their charge sending one of the creatures back into the hole it had come from. Vandus directed Heldensen against the second, obliterating it.

Then green lightning was all about him. A bolt of it sent Calanax to his knees. Vandus urged him to rise, but Calanax was dazed and unresponsive. The Stormcast looked up to see a bizarre, clattering machine bouncing down the ruined streets, spitting more lightning.

‘Up, Calanax. Up!’ he shouted.

Bright white light speared down. The war machine exploded, raining wood and iron all over the town. A large wheel bounced down the street, and hurtled off the edge of the cliff. From the steps to the dragonfate dais, Ionus nodded at Vandus, the afterglow of his spell lighting his face.

The ratmen were wavering. A strange stench filled the square. As one, they turned and fled, shrieking in terror. They melted into the ruins and vanished.

The noise of battle ceased. There were three isolated crackles of fire, then the roar of the falls reasserted itself. Thostos came to Vandus’ side, drenched in blood. He raised his sword.

‘Victory.’

‘Victory!’ Vandus cried, and clanged his hammer against Thostos’ blade. He turned to raise a salute to Andricus upon the dais.

Andricus raised his own blade. A final gunshot rang out. Andricus Stoneheart buckled and fell, vanishing in a blur of light a moment before he could hit the street.

Vandus, Ionus and Thostos stood upon the dais. The view over the falls from the shrine was glorious, but Vandus spared it no glance. His jubilation at their victory was ashes in his mouth; Andricus would be sorely missed in the coming fight.

‘We cannot call upon the God-King’s beneficence again,’ protested Vandus. ‘The others look to us. We must show strength, not weakness. And how are we to speak to the heavens?’

‘Call upon the Great Drake,’ rumbled Thostos. ‘These statues are raised to him.’

‘That was Celemnis’ intention,’ said Ionus. ‘I am sure of it.’

Vandus glanced from one man to the other. His eyes lingered on Thostos’ cool blue stare. Would Andricus be that way when he returned? He felt a shiver of unease around Thostos where before there had been only friendship. ‘But… I know not how,’ said Vandus.

Calanax roared and rumbled as he prowled up the stairs to join the lords atop the dais. The dracoth looked down upon his master, head cocked to one side in question. Vandus nodded hesitantly, unsure if he understood the beast. ‘Very well. If you intend to talk with the Great Drake, go ahead. What harm can it do?’

‘You must retreat to the edges of the dais,’ said Ionus. ‘The dracoth intends to speak with his father, the Great Drake Dracothion, the first and greatest of their kind.’

For an hour the dracoth bellowed and roared at the sky. None of the men understood his speech, but the urgency of it was arresting. In ones and twos the Stormcasts ceased combing the ruins for the skaven and came to a halt, all eyes on the dragonfate dais. Upon the other crag where the majority of the army waited, the dracoths of other Lord-Celestants assembled, adding their voices to Calanax’s roar one by one.

Darkness fell. The stars were dim against the brightness of the silver wyrm’s fires and the town flickered in their perpetual firelight.

Finally, Calanax ceased his petition. The stars grew brighter, and brighter, until they outshone the fires of Argentine. The sky blazed as gloriously as those of Azyr. Stars moved, and the night rippled and resolved itself into a smiling reptilian face as wide as the sky.

‘My son!’ boomed the Great Drake Dracothion. His voice rumbled from the mountain peaks. He could surely be seen and heard in every country of the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok. His teeth were the glimmer of stars and in his coils galaxies turned. ‘How fare the wars of men?’

Calanax roared, his dragon-tongue inscrutable.

‘We have a boon to ask of you, mighty one,’ called Vandus. He stepped out from between the dragon statues, risking the zodiac beast’s scrutiny. ‘We must find the Eldritch Fortress that once crested the Shattered City.’

Dracothion’s regard pinned him in place. Vandus felt as a mouse must when sighted by a hawk.

‘I preferred it when it was Elixia, the Sculpted City,’ the drake said. There was a weighty mirth, timeless and savage, behind Dracothion’s words.

‘Tell us where the fortress is, and Elixia might rise again.’

‘A dark place, yet with a heart of light,’ said the beast. ‘I saw it rise. It bathes within the crucible. Do you seek to reach it? To claim the Hammer of the Stars?’

‘We do,’ said Vandus.

‘Then the sea of silver must cool,’ said Dracothion. ‘The flames must go out. It has been long since I dared the wyrm Argentine’s fires. He was among my most favoured children before pride wormed into him and Tzeentch’s promises turned that into a canker. I will go and speak with him, for he is due a father’s rebuke. Go swiftly, then, whilst his will is diverted. Farewell, noble Calanax!’

The great dragon disappeared. A cloud of lights streaked across the sky, shimmering into the west. The assembled Stormcasts watched in awe. The stars halted. Constellations swirled and took on the form of the dragon again. Jaws sketched in stars arrowed towards Argentine, and closed about his throat.

The silver wyrm jerked. Its roar shook the mountains, carried upon an angry wind that made Stormcast banners crack and icons waver. The wyrm’s fires were extinguished and flickering twilight was banished. True night fell. The two titans strove against each other in the sky. The underside of the Great Crucible was revealed entirely, the red heat-glow dimming quickly, and the mountains cooling with it.

Slowly the Argent Falls solidified. A thick skin wrinkled over the silver. Great globs appeared, breaking the flow of the metal’s silken appearance and rendering it ugly. The orange heat faded away, and the surface became a leaden grey in the fresh-born twilight. Hill-sized lumps of semi-molten silver slammed down, the first splashing apart with the impact, those coming later bouncing messily away and rolling glutinously down the hill, until the lumps that fell free were wholly solid. The river’s flow slowed, stiffened and stopped. The falls and river were both arrested, and the whole cooled into a solid, lumpen mass that creaked and pinged with the eerie music of metal.

‘Listen!’ said Ionus. ‘Celemnis returns!’

The Silver Maiden’s haunting song filled the mountain valleys. Hundreds of Celemnis’ flying swords flew to hang in front of the frozen waterfall.

Celemnis’ wordless singing reached a crescendo, and the swords plunged into the metal, making themselves into the rungs of a dangerous ladder.

Overhead, the battle of titans raged on in the sky as Dracothion fought his wayward offspring. The Eternals gaped at the spectacle, for Dracothion had served as Sigmar’s mount, and was godly himself.

‘We climb, then,’ said Thostos. Now battle had gone, his voice had become colourless once more.

‘Aye,’ said Vandus. ‘We climb. All of us.’

Chapter Six

The battle of the crucible

‘You seem nervous, sorcerer.’

Ephryx looked up from his scrying bowl. King Vexos Thrond had come into his chamber unannounced again. The man was insufferable.

‘You are king of all you survey in the Great Crucible,’ said Ephryx. ‘But you are not lord of this fortress. Send word you are coming next time – I am engaged in delicate magics that your arrogant interruptions risk.’

Ephryx turned his back on the giant warrior-king, a pointed signal that he should depart. Thrond did not. Ephryx frowned.

‘Do you treat all your hosts with such ill manners?’ asked Thrond.

‘Do you treat all your guests so poorly?’ asked Ephryx.

‘The beasts of my menagerie are always hungry, Ephryx. Do not insult me.’

Ephryx flapped a dismissive hand. ‘Your coterie of monsters from the rim might be enough to ensure your rule of the crucible, your majesty, but I have the support of Tzeentch himself. Be wary that I do not turn your creatures into statues of tin.’

Thrond snorted and came to Ephryx’s side. Thrond was enormous, for he too was favoured by Tzeentch. The sale of his soul had ensured Thrond would rule forever, and the king had become more and more swollen with the energies of Chaos as the years had passed. He had been the lord of the crucible almost as long as Ephryx had ruled Anvrok. The two were long-standing, if wary, allies.

The crucible king bent his horned helm to Ephryx’s golden scrying bowl – Ephryx had never seen him without it. Deep in the vision slits, tawny eyes reflected the bowl’s picture in miniature: Stormcasts ascending upon a ladder of swords or following the dracoths, who clawed handholds into the metal as they went. ‘They are still climbing.’

‘As they have been for the last four days,’ said Ephryx. In the bowl, the Stormcasts toiled upwards without pause. ‘See how they struggle. It is hard work for them. They are created for war.’ He laughed. ‘Each must weigh as much as three mortal men. They will be weakened when they attain the crucible lip.’

‘Yet they near the top. Do they lose many of their number?’ Thrond had a reputation for sudden fury. He was frustrated by the demands Tzeentch forced on him, and horrified at the boredom his eternal life brought. A fine jest on Tzeentch’s part, but his temper put Ephryx in danger.

‘Skyrays dog them, but take only a few. They are guarded by many winged warriors. I have seen others grip the swords too tightly and shear off their own fingers. Those who fall will fall forever through the void. Celemnis is a dubious friend.’ Ephryx smiled unpleasantly. The thought amused him. ‘Their force is reduced further by dissension. There was some kind of disagreement before they began.’ Ephryx’s smile grew wider still. ‘Many remained below in my land, and go about other business.’ He scowled. The trespassers irritated him, but there was nothing he could do about it from up here.

‘How many come?’

‘A thousand, I would say,’ said Ephryx distractedly. He dearly hoped Thrond would get the point and depart. ‘The dragons battle still. Now that is a sight I have never seen.’

Thrond grunted. ‘Argentine’s distraction at least provides my men with the chance for extra sport. They welcome this unlooked-for solidification of the silver. Ordinarily we must wait for the moon’s full waxing before we hunt upon the sea.’

‘Do not let them roam far. There will be plenty more sport soon enough, when the enemy reach the brink. They must be delayed long enough for me to effect another translocation. I’ll have them chasing this fortress all over the realm.’ Naturally, this was only one option Ephryx had, and the least favoured, but he wasn’t about to tell Thrond that.

‘Do you tell a king his business in his own kingdom?’

Ephryx curled his lip. ‘No,’ he said.

‘As it should be,’ said Thrond. ‘I will gather my army. Life has been somewhat tedious of late. I look forward to this battle. I will buy you your time, sorcerer, so you may build your power to remove your fortress from my kingdom. But remove it you will.’

Thrond swaggered out. Another muscle-bound idiot. Ephryx was doubtful Thrond could be killed easily, and he was far more dangerous than Maerac. Still, he mused, we shall see how well his strength serves him when he is trapped forever in the Crystal Labyrinth.

Ephryx pursed his lips in thought. He supposed he ought to thank the Stormhosts for dealing with Maerac. He watched the dragons fighting, immense god-beasts tearing wounds the length of canyons in each other. The celestial dragon was coming off worse. Argentine was youthful as star-dragons measure things, and invigorated by the power of Chaos. That battle would not last much longer. With luck, Argentine would drive off Dracothion and melt the silver before the Stormcasts could reach the lip. Now wouldn’t that be a fine sight, and most fortuitous.

He left the bowl troubled. Somehow, fortune did not seem to be on his side. From the great window of his tower he looked out across Thrond’s lands. The crucible kingdom was a series of islands in the Silver Sea, each capped by an ornate castle and linked by a complex set of raised causeways and bridges. Ephryx had brought the Eldritch Fortress to rest upon the biggest island. Thrond’s own citadel occupied this island also, but jutted out from the side. He had not built it at the summit, for that lay directly beneath the Shardgate. That suited the sorcerer perfectly.

As Ephryx thought of the gate, the window showed him a jagged gash in the world surrounded by a gemstone-studded archway that glowed with a hard, diamond light, for the Shardgate opened directly into the Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch and was the chief entrance to this realm for the god’s servants. Ephryx could feel the regard of the Great Changer coming from the gate, fixed upon him with a mixture of amusement, pride and malice. The giant crystals around the opening glinted threateningly.

Ephryx shuddered and bade the window show him the work of his slaves as they patched and mended his ruptured castle walls. He had brought his fortress beneath the Shardgate not only to deny the hammer to the sigmarites, but to speed the delivery of all of Chamon to Tzeentch. For that to happen, he needed the Stormcast Eternals to attack one more time, to die and fill his copper skulls with their magic.

Kairos was as likely to stop him as to aid him now, wishing to bring the prize to Tzeentch himself. They were coming to the end of their relationship.

Ephryx crossed his arms. Only a week ago everything had seemed so simple. Now he had Thrond threatening him, Kairos moving against him and Sigmar himself banging on the gate. He had to either fulfil his ultimate ambition or move the fortress by the time the Stormcast Eternals got there, and all before Kairos did whatever it was Kairos wanted to do.

As he thought over his predicament, his frustration gave birth to a fresh smile. Why pledge oneself body and soul to the master of the great game if one did not enjoy playing? The board as presented offered a fine challenge.

A great bellow shattered his train of thought. His window swerved and looked for him, finding the source. Dracothion was departing, his mighty head rising over the low hills of the crucible’s rim. Swimming through the aether, he fled ponderously upward, bleeding starlight from a thousand wounds. Ephryx’s window followed the Father of Dragons as he ascended high into the sky. There he vanished with a nova flash, and returned to the heavens of Azyr.

Moments later, Argentine’s flames roared anew.

‘Form up!’ bellowed Vandus. A thin line of Stormcasts bowed outward around the lip of the falls. A horde of Chaos warriors came at them.

‘Protect those still climbing!’ Thostos shouted.

Calanax roared. Others of his kind answered. Prosecutors alighted on the slippery metal to drag their comrades up from the ladder of swords. Others worked in pairs, wings beating hard as they flew Judicators and Liberators up. A mist had met the Stormcasts as the first gained the lip of the falls, but this was clearing and Vandus had a good view of exactly what they were up against.

The oncoming horde was emerging from a confusion of high towers, walkways and bridges that stretched across the set sea, linking island to island. In the far distance a plug of rock jutted out of the metal, the plateau atop it veiled by multicoloured clouds. The Eldritch Fortress was there. Even as Vandus looked upon it he was sure the great eye atop the central tower was looking at him in turn, as well as something on the far side of the gate that glimmered above. Master and servant regarded Vandus with uncloaked hatred.

Night had come. The scarred face of the Alchemist’s Moon was crawling along the horizon, its light glinting from plates of Chaos armour as the horde raced down steps and from wharfs onto the solid silver.

‘Ionus!’ Vandus called. ‘The sea warms already.’

‘We do not have much time,’ said the Lord-Relictor.

‘We must take the fight to them,’ said Thostos, and strode forward.

‘He waits for no counsel,’ complained Vandus.

‘Do not blame him. His wrath fills the hollows left by his death,’ said Ionus. ‘Come, let us be at them!’

The lords of Azyr led the charge. A wedge formation of Stormcast Eternals from half a dozen different Stormhosts ploughed into the foe. The climb had tired them all, but they fought hard, the knowledge that their brothers’ lives depended on their valour giving them desperate strength.

Ionus and Vandus fought close by, the magic of the Lord-Relictor and the hammer of the Lord-Celestant reaping dozens of lives. Many of the enemy bore terrible disfigurements and mutations. The army of Sigmar was nearing the heart of Chaos in this land, and its influence was becoming pronounced.

More Stormcasts were coming over the brink, running to reinforce the line of their fellows. A multi-hued phalanx pressed forward, weapons swinging as one engine of destruction. Never mind that they were of different hosts and tempers; all were Stormcast Eternals, and centuries of training had made them brothers. They fought with a single mind.

With the first formation reinforced, a second and a third were brought into being by Vandus’ peers and pushed out from the falls.

Thostos forged on ahead. Vandus saw him and his dwindling Warrior Chamber engaged by a crowd of giant mutants, more daemon than man. These beasts bore blades that shone with dark power, and they cut through sigmarite like paper. Celestial Vindicators fell around them, but Thostos’ skin was again somehow proof against their weapons, and he killed them with impunity. The changes in his friend were strange indeed, thought Vandus.

Vandus went about the slaughter grimly. For all their misbegotten nature, there was discipline to the Chaos army. Those sections of the Chaos line that fell back did so in good order towards the stairs where they formed deep ranks, keeping the Stormcasts upon the rapidly warming silver, while other Chaos warriors came around their flanks, seeking to cut off the route from the crucible lip.

Slowly but surely, the Stormcast Eternals were being surrounded. The silver underfoot became sticky and yielding, the armoured corpses upon it cooking as they sank into the sludge. The nearest stair was agonisingly close but blocked by black-armoured warriors.

‘To the stairs! Decimators! Gather together! Forge a path! Prosecutors, clear the way!’ ordered Vandus.

By now the Stormcast Eternals had become more organised, falling into their allotted units as they fought their way forward. Twenty Decimators advanced, heavy feet snagging into the softening silver. With a cry to Sigmar, they charged. The warriors in the front rank struck down the enemy before them, then peeled away to the back of their retinue, allowing the axe of the next warrior to hit, so that they kept up a flowing charge that penetrated deep into the Chaos warriors mobbing the stairs. Prosecutors blasted those enemies trying to reinforce the weakening regiment, and suddenly the Decimators were through. They battled up the stairway, their fellows coming after them. Nearby, Thostos roared out a command and led his own Decimators in a similar endeavour up another stair. Other Lord-Celestants followed suit. Once upon the road they joined forces and pushed on towards the first tower on the network of causeways.

Calanax bounded up the stairs, and Vandus urged him to the edge of the road so that he might see how the battle went. He cursed loudly, for the majority of the Stormhosts were still embattled on the Silver Sea. Streams of molten silver were opening up between the fragmenting surface. Large chunks of the surface sank abruptly as the silver underneath turned liquid, dragging down Stormcast and Chaos warrior alike. The air whooshed and banged to the departing energies of men he could ill afford to lose. A pair of diabolical voices rolled out over the conflict, delivering orders and rebukes in a dark tongue.

‘Ionus!’ shouted Vandus down to the Lord-Relictor. ‘Make haste!’ Though scores of warriors had fought to the stairways and beyond, the rest were still intermingled with the Chaos horde. Perhaps a tenth of their number would make it through before the sea baked the rest in their armour.

‘There are too many!’ shouted Ionus Cryptborn, raising his reliquary, ‘I shall forge a path if I can! For Sigmar and Azyr!’

There was a crash of thunder, and a colossal bolt of lightning shot from the skies to slam into the Lord-Relictor. It coursed through him, shooting through the molten silver to turn every Chaos warrior within a hundred paces to scorched meat. The Stormcast Eternals were invigorated by the divine bolt. Finding their passage suddenly unbarred, they surged for the walkways by the hundred. Cryptborn came last, sinking further as he struggled onwards. A giant Chaos warrior clad in golden armour and carrying a huge axe waded after him. Ionus reached the bottommost step of the stair before the surface collapsed and slid under a roiling swirl of molten silver. The Chaos warriors howled in agony as the sea took them.

‘Ionus!’ Vandus called. ‘To me!’

Ionus never made it to the top of the stairs. The giant in gold hauled himself from the silver, steaming with the heat. He swayed upon the bottom step.

‘Ionus! Beware!’ roared Vandus, but it was too late. The giant leapt, his axe swinging into the Lord-Relictor’s head and splitting it neatly in two.

‘Ionus!’ Vandus cried out. He slipped off Calanax and ran to the stairs. A trio of Prosecutors stepped before him, their sword staffs blocking his way. He made to shove past them but they pushed him back. Below, Stormcasts pressed forwards and the golden warrior was cut down, landing on Ionus’ corpse.

The Prosecutors placed their hands upon Vandus’ shoulders, gently restraining him. ‘No, my lord. You must not go to him.’

A crack of thunder, mightier than all the rest, split the sky. Ionus’ mortal form transmuted into a blazing spear of lightning that rushed upwards. Where it pierced the sky, black clouds wheeled and flickered with power.

Ionus Cryptborn departed the realm of Chamon. Vandus watched helplessly as his friend was taken home to Azyr. Then Calanax was there, growling at Vandus in rebuke. Vandus placed his palm flat on the beast’s hide in wordless apology for leaving him, and climbed onto his back.

Horns rang. There were two towers close by, one standing athwart the raised road Vandus was upon, and another situated further into the sea on the roadway parallel to him. Upon the second road Thostos and his Warrior Chamber had a group of Chaos warriors trapped. These were being pushed back, screaming as they fell from the edge. Vandus’ roadway was almost clear of the enemy and the army was retreating towards its towers. Another horn blared and the retreat abandoned all semblance of order as the Chaos warriors broke into headlong flight.

‘Hold!’ shouted Vandus. To his relief, the Stormcasts checked their pursuit, and began ordering themselves.

Another horn sounded, shrill and daemonical. The gates to the keeps clanked open, and out thundered tall knights of Chaos upon heavy horses. They rode forward without care for their fellows, and more than one fleeing infantryman was buffeted off the edge of the road. Their lances dropped, and they smashed into the lead elements of Vandus’ army. So many died that the Lord-Celestant lost sight of the Chaos knights as a wall of storm magic leapt upward. Vandus and Calanax hastened forward, the dracoth leaping between lesser walkways, support spars and the vile decorations that clung to them.

A clattering of metal wheels upon the road preceded the arrival of heavy chariots, fashioned from steel, each dragged by a grunting, ape-like creature. Their charge spent, the knights wheeled and fell back with admirable grace, leaving lanes free for the chariots to crash into the ranks of Stormcasts. Unable to move aside, Sigmar’s warriors instead leapt to the attack, and were cut down for their bravery. Dozens of Stormcasts were tossed high into the air by the impact and the flailing fists of the warbeasts. Scythes on wheels lopped limbs from bodies, while those Stormcasts wounded but not slain were finished by the halberds of the charioteers.

‘Is there no end to them?’ asked Vandus. He looked for opportunity. There, on the other causeway, a chariot went hurtling at the rear of a group of Celestial Vindicators. ‘Can you make the leap, my friend?’

Calanax grumbled deep in his chest by way of reply. He crouched down, muscles bunching in his huge haunches. With a tremendous push he jumped into the air. A blur of bubbling silver passed beneath his belly, and he and Vandus were over, slamming straight into the side of the chariot and tipping it over with an almighty bang. It skidded across the road and plummeted into the Silver Sea, its dray-ape hooting in surprise and fury as it was dragged to its death. Another chariot came at them and Calanax lowered his head like a bull, bashing aside the ape and knocking the chariot onto its side. The charioteers were thrown free, one sliding straight off the edge, the other arresting his fall and scrabbling for an axe. Calanax crept up over the upended chariot, and Vandus swept off the man’s head with a blow from Heldensen. The ape-thing ripped at its traces, dragging itself free enough to aim a brutal fist at the dracoth’s face. Calanax caught the hand in his jaws and wrenched it free in a spray of blood. The ape howled and staggered before Calanax disembowelled it with a swipe of his claws.

Calanax climbed atop the wreck, raised his head and roared.

Behind them, Thostos and his men were dispatching the remainder of the infantry. On the other road the Stormcasts finally halted the chariots’ progress and slew riders and beasts. Lesser walkways swayed as warriors duelled upon them.

No quarter was asked and none given. At great cost, the day belonged to the Stormcast Eternals.

Vandus stood atop a captured tower, and watched his men as they went about the unpleasant business that follows any battle. They walked causeways choked with corpses, tipping the bodies of Chaos warriors into the Silver Sea. The air was thick with heat, and the sea glowed ruddily in the dark. The Stormcasts went slowly, for all were by now mightily weary.

‘Eight days’ march, four days’ climb and a battle,’ said Vandus to Calanax, ‘and still Lord Thostos paces like a caged lion, eager for the hunt.’

Vandus watched his restless friend. The foxfire of his eyes glowed balefully. Vandus suppressed a shudder, thinking on the fates of Andricus and Ionus. Would they too be changed when next they met? He had assumed that his friendships in this new life would never be sundered by death. How quickly he had been proven wrong.

‘As for the rest, they are tired.’

Calanax rumbled beside him.

‘Men’s strength lies in another place to yours, my friend,’ said Vandus. ‘And these are not men, but more than men. Even they have their limits, and they must rest.’

He himself was exhausted. His muscles ached. Sorrowful and uncertain, he looked out down the network of pathways and roads. The day had been carried, but the price was almost too high, and Vandus had sincere doubts that he would be successful. First Andricus had fallen, and now Ionus. Only a thousand Stormcasts had followed him up the falls, the rest taken elsewhere by their lords, and of that number a full half had been slain gaining the crucible lip and the first tower. There were dozens of fortifications between them and the island where the Eldritch Fortress sat gloatingly beneath the Chaos gate. Fires burned from the tops of towers, and harsh music and uncouth shouts came from the nearest.

‘How do we reach it?’ he murmured. ‘We have but five hundred Stormcast Eternals remaining. So many are gone back to the chambers of Reforging. I will sorely miss Andricus’ guidance in the matters of siege. We are lost and alone in a nation of maniacs.’ He looked upward. The night was at its darkest, and the skies were rich with stars. He looked to them a while, and when he spoke again he was less bitter. ‘During the Long Calm, I would go to the top of the towers in Sigmaron,’ he said. Calanax huffed out a steaming breath. ‘I would seek enlightenment there, try to remember who I was, and to find my place in the new world I found myself in.’ He looked to his mount. ‘I hear the dragonkin ask the stars for sooth often, and that they sometimes reply. Will they answer me now?’ Vandus looked upwards and slowly shook his head. ‘No. I see nothing. The constellations are all different, and they do not know me. What should I do, noble Calanax? I wish you could speak the tongues of men and share your wisdom.’

Vandus returned his gaze to the stars. The venture hung by a thread. What could he do?

Perhaps… Perhaps the answer lay within himself. He recalled Ionus’ words to him about his visions, that they might prove either useful or treacherous.

Could he seek to trigger them consciously? Vandus was profoundly uncomfortable with the idea, but he closed his eyes. He had no clue what he should do. In his old life he had no gift of magecraft. But was his Stormcast body not suffused with magic? Perhaps all he must do was…

He fell deep within himself. His knees buckled. He felt it as if it had happened to someone else, but enough awareness remained that he fell away from the edge of the tower, and then he knew no more of his earthly body.

A flicker of images came. He saw the Alchemist’s Moon rising up over the edge of the crucible and climbing towards its apogee. As its light intensified, the great wyrm Argentine twisted and hid its face from the brightness. Silver stiffened and solidified. Baying parties of Chaos warriors poured from the keeps and islands of the land and hunted across the solid surface. The silver was still hot, and steamed in the reflected moonlight, but was made hard.

Vandus’ perspective shifted. He saw before him a citadel bigger than any other, and he knew with iron certainty that this was the castle of King Thrond, the lord of this land. It jutted out over the Silver Sea on a natural promontory of stone and metal. As he saw this, what he must do came to him with utter clarity.

He gasped, and his eyes flew open. His skin ran with sweat under his armour. Despite the heat of the crucible, he shivered.

Calanax nosed his master.

The Lord-Celestant slowly sat up, then stood. Again the weakness he had felt before afflicted him. He walked to the parapet of the tower to look upon his warriors.

He knew what he must do. He shouted for attention and began to address his men.

Chapter Seven

The siege of the citadel

After many travails of blood and sorcery, Vandus’ army had reached the centre of Thrond’s kingdom. Of the many thousands who had set out from Elixia, just a few hundred Stormcasts remained. Behind them burned a score of keeps and lesser forts. Thrond had fled, his armies overthrown and his citadel empty. The king had taken refuge in the Eldritch Fortress.

Nevertheless, Vandus feared victory might slip from his grasp at this last pass. The Alchemist’s Moon was rising and today it would reach its apex, an event that would cause the great wyrm to turn its fires away from the silver sea. Already the moon was sliding past the crucible’s rim, its light picking out the rough hills there in bright silvers and deep sable.

‘Faster my warriors! We must be quicker!’

Vandus sat upon Calanax on a knoll overlooking Thrond’s castle. Around the landward side, Stormcasts worked at the hill, hacking away at the hanging promontory the citadel perched upon. Magical hammers boomed and swords hacked slivers from the metal-rich stone. Thunderbolt crossbows sent crackling jags of energy searing into bedrock, melting the ores therein. Molten metal dripped into the sea and the stone glowed ruby red.

The Alchemist’s Moon cleared the crucible, its lower rim parting from the horizon like the end of a kiss. Argentine shuddered and shied away from its weird brightness, and the silver started to thicken.

‘Faster!’ called Vandus. His eyes flicked back and forth between his warriors and the Alchemist’s Moon. So quickly it hauled itself heavenward, flowing as smoothly as quicksilver. At the summit of the island squatted Ephryx’s Eldritch Fortress. Its walls ran up to the very brink, jutting over the Silver Sea here and there. Strands of magical force crackled and whooped around the walls. Its copper skulls glowed with evil energies. The air shimmered and ran with multicoloured sheet lightning. Over it pulsed the mighty Shardgate, an irregular gash in the air surrounded by an inhumanly tall archway studded with gigantic crystals.

The stepped walls of Thrond’s castle were modest by comparison, a crenellated ziggurat adorned with snarling effigies of his menagerie. It was situated upon a jag of rock standing clear of the island, directly above the Silver Sea.

‘You race against two hourglasses. The timing must be perfect for your plan to work, and the sorcerer prepares to shift his fortress once more,’ said Thostos. ‘Let the sands of one run out, and all is lost. How long can we chase this mage across Chamon?’

‘The timing will be perfect,’ said Vandus. ‘And if it is not, we will hunt him until the hammer is recovered. There is no other way.’

‘There is not, I concur. But we have only minutes before this chance is gone,’ said Thostos.

‘We shall be ready,’ said Vandus.

Some deep-set part of the castle’s foundations cracked. Stone screeched on stone. A quiver ran through the building, barely perceptible to the eyes of men, but strong enough to shake loose a statue and send it crashing into the sea.

‘Halt!’ shouted Vandus. He ordered the Stormcasts back from the trench they had hacked into the stone. Judicators aimed their weapons at the weakened section bridge and tensed for the final order.

The moon went higher, eclipsing the stars with its bulk. Magic shivered through Vandus’ armour at its waxing might. The silver wyrm’s fires had gone out. The sea heaved under a rapidly forming skin.

‘Stand ready,’ said Thostos.

The moon passed over the Shardgate, and its outline wavered behind the weird magics. The crystals in the gate glittered with colours as they captured the moon’s light.

Calanax roared. Vandus dropped his arm.

The assembled Judicators of his army fired with their magical arrows. The missiles transmuted themselves to darts and spears of energy, and slammed into the ground by the base of Thrond’s citadel.

A dazzling light burst across the Silver Sea, the moon’s glow reflected twenty times over. Deprived of Argentine’s fire, the ripples on the metal slowed and stopped. The shadow of the fortress and the island swept around the coast, and the silver stopped its churning.

With a tremendous crack, the stone under Thrond’s citadel broke. Showers of rock splattered into the thick medium of the sea. Then the fortress itself hit the setting sea, sending up a tall sheet of thick silver as it splashed down. This washed up the cliffs, onto the fortress walls, curling back onto itself in a massive argent wave.

The shadow passed. The moonlight arrested the ocean, and the wave froze. Droplets of suddenly solidified silver fell from the sky as hard as bullets, rattling on the surface of the sea.

‘The fortress is held fast!’ shouted Vandus. ‘Ghal Maraz awaits! Charge!’

With a shout, the Stormhosts scrambled forward onto the frozen mass of the wave. Digging in blades and clawed fingers, they hauled themselves upwards. The silver was still hot, and the metal burned them as they climbed, but the Stormcasts did not relent. In places it was thin, while in others too smooth or too hard, and a number fell, sigmarite clattering as they skidded helplessly off the metal and down to the sea below. Their departure boomed loudly over the frozen ocean, but still the Stormcasts were undeterred.

Calanax raced up the wave, taking Vandus to the plateau atop the island. Magic crackled and arced along the fortress wall, then gave out with a piercing series of whistles. Frozen silver anchored the walls firmly to the stone. The fortress was held fast.

Vandus got down from the back of Calanax and strode to the nearest gate. He hefted Heldensen and slammed it hard against the grotesque bronze face cast into the surface.

‘Bring out the hammer!’ bellowed Vandus. He smote the door again. ‘I call upon you, Ephryx of Chamon. Bring out the hammer and your end will be swift.’ A third time Heldensen clashed into the gate, scarring the metal.

The Stormcast Eternals had gained the cliff top and were forming up. No word came from the fortress. The outer walls were much cracked and damaged from Thostos’ earlier assault, and left unmanned.

‘Give me your answer, Ephryx!’ shouted Vandus. ‘You are lost!’

The rest of Vandus’ army came after him. Thostos strode to his side.

A crackling sound came from above, a whine building behind it. Vandus stepped backwards until he could spy the Shardgate over the looming tower and walls. The crystal adornments sprayed fountains of sparks and long, bright streaks of crimson fire into the night; they flickered, turning through forms of pure light, patches of darkness, and back to gems. The Shardgate rippled, the roil of energy visible through it coalescing and forming a wide landscape comprised solely of hideous faces. Uncountable voices whispered covetously as unearthly eyes fixed themselves upon Chamon.

‘Here is your answer, Vandus Hammerhand.’

The voice issued from the mouth of every gargoyle on the fortress walls. It was old and wise and full of dread power. Malice dripped from every word. ‘A tide of daemons to drown in. The hammer is no longer the godling’s, but mine. Begone from the gates of the Eldritch Fortress – take tidings of his defeat from here and you may yet live awhile.’

The whine reached a crescendo. A howling wind burst out from the Shardgate. One after another, the crystals exploded, sending tinkling fragments all over the fortress. When the last detonated in a burst of multicoloured fire, the Shardgate dilated, yawning wider and wider until it filled the sky. A triumphant scream blasted out and the faces upon the other side pressed forward then burst through, the single mass they made splitting into a cascade of daemons that showered to the ground in an unending flood. They were long-armed and pumpkin-bodied, of blue and pink. They laughed and grumbled as they landed, galloping forward in knuckling runs and swinging down the decoration on the outside of the walls, as agile as apes.

‘There is a breach in the wall,’ said Thostos to Vandus, unmoved by the horde of creatures leaping free from the Realm of Chaos. ‘This way.’

Moments later, the first of the daemons slammed into the Stormcasts.

‘Your magics are poor, wizard,’ said Korghos Khul. He and King Thrond seemed to fill Ephryx’s scrying chamber. Khul stank of blood and his eyes were manic in the sockets of the skull he wore as a helmet.

‘And you promised me a horde of daemons, but bring me only mortals!’ snapped Ephryx. ‘Fortunate it is for us all that my magic is strong enough to call up my own daemons.’

He stalked back and forth, mind working madly. His plans were not going as he intended, none of them. The daemon gale would hold the enemy for a while, but for how long? Already, upon seeing the Stormcasts approach, he had resolved to flee once again. But the fortress was held fast. Dare he attempt the translocation to the Crystal Labyrinth now? He fretted over the issue. Despite what he said to the warriors, he had taken no part in the daemon gale, and its advent spoke of but one thing: Kairos.

‘My chariots will stop them,’ said Thrond. ‘We have no need of this blood-crazed madman.’

‘Will they now?’ Ephryx cast his gaze heavenward in exasperation. ‘They did not stop the foe upon the walkways. Your forts did not stop them, your warriors did not stop them, your knights did not stop them!’ he said bitterly.

‘This remains my kingdom, Ephryx. Watch your tongue.’

‘Your kingdom has fallen, you fool!’ shouted Ephryx. ‘This fortress is all that remains! You complained at my behaviour as a guest, Thrond. Now you are my guest, so I say to you, watch your tongue.’

‘This is your doing, mage – you led them here,’ said Thrond. ‘I ought to kill you where you stand.’

‘And if they had the hammer, you would already be dead. We are forced upon each other’s mercies, Vexos. This is a common enemy. Surely even you can see that Khul’s presence here is proof of that?’

‘I am here only for the Hammerhand,’ growled Khul.

‘You invite the servant of the Blood God into my lands when I could deal with these invaders myself. We will live to regret this–’

‘Silence!’ screamed Ephryx. He jabbed a clawed hand at Thrond and the king went as rigid as a corpse. When his muscles relaxed, his eyes glowed a watery green and he was indeed silent. His head tracked Ephryx’s pacing as loyally as a dog’s.

‘Leave the one called Vandus to me. His head is mine,’ said Khul.

‘By all means!’ said Ephryx. ‘Now get to the defence. In the absence of more powerful allies it will be you facing their hammers. But not alone. Thrond, get your chariots to the breach.’

‘Yes, my master,’ intoned King Thrond. ‘I obey.’

The two warrior lords departed: Khul quickly, eager to be at the slaughter, with Thrond plodding after as sluggishly as a sleepwalker.

Feathers rustled in the shadows. A dry smell of birds and magic wafted across the room on a draught stirred up by broad wings.

‘Kairos!’ said Ephryx. He fought to keep fear from his voice, smothering it in a shrill haughtiness. ‘Why must you lurk so? You could have come forth and dazzled these wretches with your magnificence and saved my temper.’

Kairos emerged from an alcove much too small to have contained him. He looked down on his acolyte with detached amusement.

‘You cannot make them do your bidding? Must I do everything myself? You are a poor servant, Ephryx.’

‘All this is but a distraction!’ said Ephryx. ‘The daemon gale will hurl them back.’

‘Will it?’ said the daemon’s right head. ‘It was I that summoned it, though you told the bloody one otherwise. Alone it will not be enough. I shall bring up an Arcanabulum. You will have the honour of casting the Lunar Reversal, that we may escape the crucible’s grip and ascend to the Shardgate.’

‘The Lunar…’ Ephryx’s face dropped. ‘You will attempt the translocation now?’

‘When else, small-horned dabbler?’ said Kairos’ left head. ‘Did you intend to flee at our moment of triumph?’

‘Will I not die attempting it?’

‘Perhaps,’ said the right head. ‘If you don’t, then I will have nothing left to teach you.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said the other. ‘If you die, well, the same will also be true.’

A stab of cold terror raced down Ephryx’s spine. He had spoken those words himself once, long ago. ‘What have you seen? What is my fate?’

Kairos held up a taloned hand, bringing it up and round in a grand gesture, finishing as a clenched fist before the sorcerer’s face. ‘You of all people should know that your fate is unimportant. Sigmar once learned that even he is not beyond Tzeentch’s influence. What makes you believe your fate is your own to choose?’

Kairos’ index finger flicked out. Ephryx made to move but found he was immobile, transfixed by Kairos’ stare.

‘With the daemon gale come my brothers of the Nine. They gather now to call the Shardgate down. It is too late, I think, to bring all of Chamon to our master, but the hammer shall be his. Tzeentch himself will grant us many boons for that.’

Kairos tilted one head to one side, the other the opposite way. ‘See? A simple plan. One even you cannot disrupt for me. The spell you cast upon Thrond, I taught you that, no?’

Ephryx was unable to answer.

‘Of course I did,’ said Kairos’ other head. He pressed his long talon into Ephryx’s left eye and Ephryx felt his will drain away from him. First went his control over Thrond, then his desire to triumph, until all was replaced with a cool indifference. Beneath this numbing blanket existed an ember of defiance, but it was small and cooling. Green light pulsed from Ephryx’s eyes.

‘It is high time we reminded Sigmar who is the master of the spheres,’ said Kairos Fateweaver. ‘You will aid me, little puppet, whether you wish to or not. Your days of freedom are done, Ninth Disciple of the Ninth Tower.’

Kairos walked to a blank spot on the wall with a shambling gait, as if the form he wore were not entirely to his satisfaction. The Lord of Change spread his arms and the wall flowed apart, revealing a staircase that wound around and down through the thickness of the great tower. The outer walls were pierced by many windows that let out onto the howling storm of Chaos outside. Through them the sorcerer could see the vortex of energy spiralling around the fortress, carrying daemons on its winds. Thunder cracked and banged, fighting against the intrusion. Kairos clacked his beaks in laughter.

‘The storm god tries to bring his wrath to bear, but he cannot! All he can do is watch helplessly as we snatch away his true power. Your allies did better than you think, ninth fool of the ninth idiocy. They killed the rain-callers and the nursemaids among the foe, and they cannot call more of Sigmar’s lackeys down to earth.’ Kairos eyed the stairs. ‘You first, I think,’ he said.

He jiggled one hand in a mockery of a puppeteer.

Ephryx danced stiffly towards the stairway, unable to stop himself. He raised his arms up before him, straight as brooms. Strangled arcane phrases spilled from his lips.

‘That is good. Wage the war for me,’ said Kairos.

‘While I think,’ said the other head.

And so Ephryx was carelessly worked by the Lord of Change as they went down and round the mighty tower, heading towards the secret inner keep. Ephryx called up daemons by the score as Kairos muttered and argued to himself, his heads disagreeing on the most petty of matters.

Although he could not move without Kairos’ direction, Ephryx caught glimpses of the battle from the corner of his eyes. Stormcast Eternals had come easily into the ward of the castle via the unrepaired breach. They fought through Thrond’s chariots, his own traps and hosts of daemons. They were mighty, he had to admit. Being so enslaved robbed him of anger, and he viewed the furious battle outside in a detached, calculating manner. Each twist of the stair brought him a new view: winged warriors snatched from the air and magical flames incinerating the enemy by the dozen. Lords transformed and destroyed.

Warrior by warrior, the Stormcasts were being whittled down.

Kairos and Ephryx reached the bottom of the stairs. The tower encased a domed keep of stone, and the tall gash in the tower let in the light of battle to fall upon it. From the centre of the keep glowed the painful brilliance of Ghal Maraz.

‘Come brothers, we have great works to accomplish!’ Kairos croaked.

Through the gap in the wall came a procession of eight Lords of Change. They shuffled through, as slow as elderly men. All were different, their staffs marked with esoteric symbols even Ephryx did not know. Here was one with plumage of bright magenta, there one with four eyes above a hooked beak. One was fat, while another was skeletally thin. One was covered in scintillating plumage, another’s form flickered and blurred. They bowed to their lord as they passed, and Kairos greeted them all by name. Such names as hurt the minds of men, even those as well-versed in the arcane as Ephryx. Names like that should only be learned after great preparation, but Ephryx heard them all in relentless order. He was locked upright, unable to move. Inside the prison of his skull, he screamed.

The eight stepped by, croaking obscure mandalas or bandying ineffabilities with each other. Their chatter was the chatter of madmen and geniuses; they were the sages of insanity, and reality itself rebelled at their presence.

The foremost Lord of Change raised his staff, and the inner keep’s doors shattered into colourful motes that swarmed upon the air. The lead cairn that had contained Ghal Maraz inside the keep had been much battered, and the light of the hammer flooded out stronger than ever before. The Lords of Change were unconcerned by the light. At another croaked command the cairn exploded, scattering lead bricks across the chamber and revealing the hammer itself. Ephryx was exposed to its radiance in full. Some device of Kairos’ protected him, but the sight of Ghal Maraz to him was agony beyond agonies. Sweat dripped from his face, and he emitted a strangled scream.

The nine Lords of Change shuffled inside. As the last entered, the particles of light gathered themselves, and gates barred the way once more.

‘There, the first piece is in place.’ One of Kairos’ heads swung to address Ephryx directly. ‘Now for the second.’

Kairos raised his hands and extended his long necks. A yellow and green nimbus flickered around his staff. The Lord of Change said nothing, only held his arms aloft for a moment, then lowered them slowly.

‘It is done.’

The ground heaved. The space around the inner keep became hot as a forge, and the stone of the ground glowed white with heat. From this bubbling pool rose up a complex machine, plucked from the hidden workings of reality, its spars and cogs dripping molten rock.

‘To work, Ephryx,’ said Kairos. ‘I am afraid you must perform this rite. I do not wish to suffer the energies myself.’

‘Quickly now,’ said Kairos’ other head.

Ephryx stepped close to the machine as it fully emerged. His clothes smouldered. His eyes watered, but he could not close them. The machine and the ground were cooling, and it was this alone that saved Ephryx’s skin and sight.

‘Begin the reversal!’ said Kairos.

Ephryx set his body into motion. He knew the spell, of course, and locked inside his body he cursed himself for the curiosity that had set him to learning it.

At the black-worded incantation, the machine began to work, turning against the way its creator intended. Although physically divorced from the world, it retained a connection with it, and as it screeched into life reality grumbled around it. The natural order of things was flung into reverse.

‘Glorious! Glorious!’ cackled Kairos. ‘Magic infuses everything, a heady mix of so many colours and winds! Feel it, Ephryx – this is true power! Further, further! Make the silver flow away, so that we may greet our master in person.’

The ground shook, the tower encasing the keep swayed. With a groan of tortured metal, Ephryx’s dwelling sheared away from the tower’s stalk, revealing the Shardgate blazing directly above.

‘That’s the way, small sorcerer,’ said Kairos indulgently.

Ephryx’s limbs ached. Age ran cold claws over his bones. He had lived for hundreds of years and his powers promised thousands more, but the Arcanabulum ran roughshod over the laws of nature and magic both, and the sorcerer withered as he chanted. His spine twisted and his horns lost their lustre, becoming flaky and dull. His hands clawed with arthritis. All the while, Kairos croaked and clattered his beaks in laughter, and true hate bloomed in Ephryx’s heart.

‘Success! Ha! Well done!’ shouted Kairos.

The moon ground to a halt and slowly, reluctantly, began to slide backwards. It went back past the point of apogee, and with a sudden rush, the silver holding the fortress liquefied and ran back into the sea.

Chapter Eight

The will of Tzeentch

A cackling daemon ripped the head from the Retributor at Vandus’ side. His body vanished into a blaze of light that reached for the churning clouds, only to veer sideways and be dragged into the fabric of the Eldritch Fortress. Vandus shouted out his anger, smashing the pink daemon down with his warhammer. It burst, and from the gory remains climbed two smaller, blue daemons. Where the first had laughed and howled, these scowled and grumbled as they fought.

Vandus slew these two also, and spurred Calanax onward. Thostos fought nearby, an unstoppable tornado of hammer and sword. They were through the breach, into the first courtyard. Many ways led off the ward, leading into a labyrinth of passages and walls, but ahead the route was clear. The walls were riven by magic and war, and the tower’s base was visible to him through a further gap.

Vandus pushed his way on. The Stormcasts were dwindling in number, but remained in good order. With Liberators in solid lines, Judicators behind, Retributors and Decimators working in small groups to bring down the worst of the daemons and the greatest champions.

There was a screech like that of tortured metal. The Shardgate pulsed ever quicker. The ground shook and the top of the tower fell down. Incredibly, the moon was reversing its course.

‘We do not have much time!’ shouted Vandus. ‘Onwards, before they steal the hammer from us!’

With a ringing of trumpets, the Stormcasts pushed forward to the gap in the next wall. They poured through, routing the few warriors of Chaos that dared stand before them.

Vandus felt a surge of relief as they crossed the second courtyard, but then the walls rippled and became convoluted, trapping two score of his men within. The courtyard became smaller, then opened up at one end.

A fresh foe waited behind – a huge warlord with a skull for a helm and a daemonic hound beside him. He bore a daemon-weapon, a two-headed brass-bound axe the size of a mortal man. A band of massively muscled warriors attended him, eyes bereft of reason, teeth stained brown with the blood of the innocents. They stood tensely, a rabidity coming off them as a wall of iron-tinged heat.

‘Khul!’ said Vandus.

‘I have come for you, Blackfist. You are the last of your tribe. You think yourself my equal, raised up by your puny god.’ Khul swept his axe around to point at Vandus. It trailed streamers of unlight. The fabric of reality tore upon its edge. The air shed droplets of blood and screamed. ‘You are nothing! Craven! Fleeing into the arms of Sigmar when I proved stronger. I will destroy you and offer up your skull to Khorne as I gave the skulls of your wife and children to him!’

Vandus was nearly overcome by the urge to rush at Khul. Hatred boiled in every part of his being. The ghost of the man he had been demanded vengeance. Calanax felt his wrath and stamped and snorted.

Perhaps Vendell Blackfist would have broken from his men, his anger overcoming reason and sense. But Vandus was Vendell no longer. He fought down his fury and shouted out an order to his few remaining warriors. ‘Defensive square!’ he bellowed. Horns rang, and his men ran quickly into a formation opposing the mob of Khul’s warriors.

Khul laughed hollowly, a madman’s humour, sick and shot with bloodgreed. ‘Coward. Very well. Hide behind your golden weaklings. No matter how much magic Sigmar has imbued you with, it will not help you.’

The tribesmen around Khul gripped their weapons and growled, barely holding their anger in check.

‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ shouted Khul, his words so thick and crazed they were barely discernable; a raw cry of unfettered rage.

With an animal shout, the warriors of Korghos Khul surged forwards.

The Bloodbound crashed into the shieldwall of the Liberators with shocking force, only to be thrown back. A bloody toll was levied by the Judicators behind the Liberators, the last Prosecutors picking off Khul’s elite deep within their own ranks, while Protectors plugged gaps in the line. Again the Bloodbound charged, and again. Vandus and Thostos fought side by side, slaughtering the followers of Khorne by the dozen wherever they went. Soon enough, Vandus realised that no man of Khul’s dared raise a blade against him, and he used this reticence to his advantage.

But Vandus’ Stormcasts were fatigued and diminished in number, and the Bloodbound of Khul fresh and numerous. One by one the Protectors were slain, and the Prosecutors dragged from the air. Before long, the ranks of the Stormcasts were in tatters and the battle had descended into a swirling maelstrom of individual melees.

At this moment, Korghos Khul chose to strike. He burst through his own men, his great axe parting their souls from their bodies in his eagerness to bring down his enemy. The daemonic hound at his side leapt at Thostos. The strange magic infusing the Lord-Celestant saved his flesh from the creature’s teeth, but he was knocked sprawling and clanged off the cobbles of the courtyard.

Vandus and Calanax faced Khul alone.

‘Now you will join Khorne, Blackfist, as a skull to be ground beneath his feet,’ snarled the Chaos lord.

Vandus and Calanax were forced back by Khul’s ferocious assault. Their weapons banged and flared from one another as each lord strove to bring the other low. Through Vandus’ concentration on the fight came the realisation that he and Thostos were alone, beset on all sides by the Khul’s Bloodbound. No weapon could harm Thostos, and the followers of Khul drew back from the duel between Vandus and the Khornate lord.

Still Vandus was being forced backwards.

A clatter of wheels came from behind. From the corner of his eye Vandus saw Thostos leap, and heard a bestial cry as something died. Then Khul barged Vandus aside, knocking him sprawling from Calanax. The Chaos lord’s axe slammed into the blade of another, staying it from slaying Vandus.

‘I said the Hammerhand was mine, Thrond!’ roared Khul.

‘My kingdom. Who are you to demand the head of our foe?’ Thrond asked.

‘Wizard’s puppet. You dare defy me? I shall add your head to the tally!’ Khul’s fury broke like a dam and he slammed into Thrond, knocking him from the back of his chariot. The two Chaos lords wrestled upon the blood-slick cobbles.

Thrond’s warriors let out a cry and turned upon the Bloodbound. The far side of the square erupted into fresh and furious battle.

Vandus stood, Heldensen at the ready. The Bloodbound parted before him, teeth bared. Their muscles stood out from their necks and their eyes glared. They strained like dogs on a leash, but they would not defy their master. They would not attack him. He was Khul’s alone to slay.

Thostos came to his side.

‘We must kill him!’ said Thostos. The desire for revenge burned coldly in his baleful eyes.

‘Do you not think I wish to slay him?’ asked Vandus. ‘Our duty lies elsewhere.’

‘Where is your desire for wrath and ruin?’ Thostos’ voice reverberated strangely behind his war-mask.

‘There is a time for vengeance. This is not it. One petty revenge can upset the chance for ten thousand greater victories. Come.’

Reluctantly, Thostos backed away from the horde.

‘This way!’ said Vandus, and pointed to a gateway barred by a portcullis. Calanax rejoined them, forcing his way through the melee. The Bloodbound of Khul would not fight him either.

‘Strange luck,’ Thostos said as Vandus remounted.

‘Let us pray it holds,’ said Vandus. Most of the warriors had backed away, going to join the fight with Thrond’s knights. A few remained, unsure. Vandus held his hammer in a guard, ready for them, but still they did not attack. More and more of them were glancing over their shoulders to the duel between Thrond and Khul.

Thostos broke the portcullis into pieces with one swing of his hammer and rushed through. Vandus came behind him on Calanax. No warrior of Khorne dared follow him.

‘The hammer is close!’ Vandus shouted. Before them was the tower of Ephryx, its side rent apart. Light blazed through cracks.

A deafening shout made him turn. Riding upon the platform of another chariot came a warrior Vandus recognised, Khul’s lieutenant, the bearer of the icon that had summoned the Realm of Chaos into Aqshy. The bloodsecrator carried his icon with him, blood boiling from Khorne’s rune in a crimson fog.

‘We sell our lives dearly, then,’ said Vandus.

Thostos snarled.

From the other side of this courtyard, daemons came capering. The two Lord-Celestants were surrounded anew.

‘I will slay you! I will cut your head free! I will spit on your corpse and dedicate your skull to Khorne,’ shouted the bloodsecrator. Spittle flew from lips bitten raw.

‘Khul has claimed my head,’ said Vandus. ‘Do you dare his wrath?’

‘Khul is weak! Sigmar is weak! Blood for the Blood God! The Lord of Skulls cares not from whence the blood flows.’ The bloodsecrator grinned savagely, exposing black teeth filed to points. ‘Do you hear that, feeble one? Your power is nothing compared to mine!’ He slammed his weapon against his heavily muscled, scarred chest and raised his icon to the clouds boiling impotently in the sky. ‘Do you hear? You are weak, Sigmar! Weak!’

In reply a mighty thunder boomed. The sky split with a bolt of blue as wide as a tower. It struck the wall, then again, opening up a fresh breach. The metal of the wall exploded. The breaches revealed the sea and the broadness of the crucible. Clouds raced around its rim, and light played there, bright and godly.

More lightning bolts slammed into the earth. The bloodsecrator and his tribesmen recoiled. From out of the light stepped a figure bearing an icon of his own, topped also with the emblems of death.

‘It is you who are weak, to fearfully sell yourself to the murder god,’ said Ionus Cryptborn.

A bolt of pure magic shot from his hammer and blasted the chariot. The metal of it withered, the draught beasts were slain, and the bloodsecrator was cast from it and lofted through the wall, where he fell flailing into the Silver Sea far below.

Light faded. All around Ionus stood a host of Stormcast Eternals.

‘Ionus! You are returned!’ said Vandus. ‘How did you manage it so quickly?’

‘I told you, my friend. Death has little hold on me,’ said Ionus.

Singing their praises to Sigmar, the Stormhosts charged.

The renewed crusade fought on, smashing daemon and mortal alike, until Vandus and Thostos forced their way through the fracture in Ephryx’s ruined tower and into the space it contained. A bizarre machine sat there, creaking and pinking as it cooled. There was the hidden keep, light burning from its riven walls.

‘Ghal Maraz…’ said Vandus breathlessly.

‘The sorcerer, Ephryx,’ said Thostos. The heat of emotion entered his voice, his deadened soul awakened by hatred.

The sorcerer had become ancient, bent with age. He hobbled as quickly as he was able from the machine, towards the iron doors of the inner keep. As he passed within, a wall of fire leapt up, encircling the keep. The sorcerer’s bodyguard moved to interpose themselves between the gates and the vengeful Stormhosts.

In the sky, the Shardgate was sinking, the infernal energies spilling from it now caressing the tower’s stump.

‘We are running out of time,’ said Vandus. But Thostos had already rushed ahead, a group of returned Celestial Vindicators at his heels, and was slaughtering his way through Ephryx’s bodyguard. Vandus went after, Calanax bowling over four of the hulking warriors.

‘Retributors, to the gates!’ ordered Vandus. Calanax forced his way through the bodyguard, Vandus smashing them to the ground with Heldensen. In short order there were no more Chaos slaves to slay. Protectors held the breach into the tower, preventing others from assailing the lords. Outside, bolts of celestial energy rained down.

‘Hurry!’ urged Vandus. The Retributors banged rhythmically on the gates with their lightning hammers. The flames crackled, the warplight racing over the vile carvings that covered their surfaces. The fire went out and the warriors attacked. The gates shook with each impact, but did not shift. The Shardgate continued its descent.

There came a louder bang, and the gate shuddered differently, shifting on its mountings. A wide crack sprang across it. Blue light shone out and the Retributors called out joyously. They struck harder, until another crack, then another, crazed the surface of the door.

Together with the light came the sound of chanting, words so evil they crashed around his skull. Vandus fought against the pain though blood ran from his ears.

With one last impact, the doors burst inward in a storm of iron shards. Vandus and Thostos ran in, drawing sustenance from the holy light that bathed the chamber.

The whole of the inner keep was one large, domed chamber with but two apertures: the gate, and a slit window glazed with amethyst in the eastern wall. A rubble of lead bricks was scattered across the ground. Above it, chained by blood iron and bonds of pure magic, floated Ghal Maraz, Sigmar’s own hammer, and relic of the world-that-was.

A coven of nine daemons sought to take it for their master, and it was from them that the chanting came. They turned one by one to glare at the Stormcast Eternals, wizened faces full of hatred and amusement, knowing faces that carelessly harboured the wisdom of ages. There were eight of lesser order, great in their own right, but not so powerful as the ninth, a two-headed horror, taller than the rest and shrouded in dark majesty.

‘You cannot stop what has become. The end is in sight! Come in, come in! All are welcome in the Crystal Labyrinth of my master,’ cawed the two-headed greater daemon.

The Eldritch Fortress lurched, sending the Stormcast Eternals staggering. Slowly, it began to rise towards the Shardgate.

‘Get the hammer!’ yelled Vandus. ‘Bring them down!’

The Stormcasts charged. The greater daemons came down to do battle, and all the while Kairos laughed.

Vandus hurled himself at a Lord of Change. To his left, five of his warriors were cut down by a bolt of dark fire. Others exploded, disappeared or were transformed. The air wavered and the scene changed. Vandus staggered, finding himself in a quiet forest. He spun about, looking for his foe. A sudden coldness gripped his legs, but when he looked he could see nothing amiss. ‘Do not trust your senses,’ he said to himself. ‘They cannot help you. Trust Sigmar.’

He shut his eyes, letting the vision-fugue come down on him. In his mind’s eye the interior of the chamber overlaid itself upon the forest. The room was ablaze with magic. Some of his warriors staggered about, as lost as he. Only the Celestial Vindicators seemed unaffected, and in his state of altered perception, Vandus could see how the fury in them burned hot enough to sear away the magic set against them. A bird-headed daemon shrieked as enchanted blades cut into it and laid it low.

His own opponent stared at him with dead eyes, its hand waving up and down slowly. Cruel humour was writ upon its features.

It does not know I can see it, thought Vandus. With a great effort of will, he called upon his distant body to obey him. With a mighty heave, he swung Heldensen. His limbs felt feeble, as if they moved underwater. Heldensen sped true, smashing the daemon in the face. Its head snapped back and, with a blast of warplight, it fell dead upon the floor.

The glamour was lifted by the daemon’s expulsion, and Calanax pressed forward towards the hammer. The Shardgate was forcing its way through the domed ceiling, still descending as the fortress rose up. Chunks of masonry fell down, and the whole keep rumbled.

‘Thostos, the hammer!’ called Vandus. Calanax pushed onwards, fighting through a swarm of leaping daemons that twisted into being from jets of fire projected by a Lord of Change.

‘The chains!’ shouted Thostos back.

Vandus nodded in acknowledgement. He stood up in Calanax’s saddle, swinging his hammer at the first of Ghal Maraz’s restraints. Several links burst. Fizzling magic, they fell away. Thostos cleaved through one, then two, with his runeblade. Vandus rode swiftly to the next, then the next.

‘You cannot triumph! This hammer belongs to Tzeentch!’ crowed Kairos.

The greater daemon stalked across the floor and levelled his staff at Thostos. From the top of the rod spouted a gout of magical fire. When it touched the Celestial Vindicator, his magic aura seemed to transmute his flesh into pure sigmarite, but the fire burned hotter and hotter, and Thostos’ body began to run. With heroic effort, Thostos cut through another chain, one of pure light that vanished as Thostos’ sword passed through it. Stormcasts ran to Thostos’ aid, but Kairos sent them sprawling with a thought, and the Lord-Celestant remained trapped in the searing fire.

Vandus rode to the next chain and shattered it. The noise attracted the attention of Kairos’ left head.

‘Ah, ah, I think not,’ said the Lord of Change.

‘It thinks it can outthink me!’ said the other head.

‘Kairos Fateweaver!’ said the first head. He advanced on Vandus. The fire winked out and Thostos fell to the side.

‘The Great Oracle, to whom no secret of past…’ said the first head.

‘…or future…’ said the other.

‘…is any kind of secret at all,’ they said together.

The end of his staff glowed with awful light.

‘Now,’ said the heads together, ‘let us change you into something fitting–’

A bolt of light streaked from the side of the room, catching the Lord of Change on the arm. Kairos’ heads snapped round, and Ionus Cryptborn sent another blast at the daemon.

In the corner of the room, Ephryx blinked. The green light went from his eyes as Kairos’ control of Ephryx was shattered, his master embroiled in a magical duel with the skull-faced warrior.

‘Kairos,’ he said. His aged voice was a dry whisper. The sorcerer bent painfully to the floor and took up a fallen staff of change. Its violent energies coursed through him, warping his flesh and soul, but he hobbled forward toward his treacherous master. The Shardgate, the hammer, the invasion – all had become of no consequence. He was consumed by his hatred of Kairos.

Raising the staff in palsied hands, Ephryx swung at Kairos’ back. The head of the staff barely scratched the daemon’s skin, but it was enough.

Kairos flung back his head and screeched from both mouths. Rippling energy engulfed him. His physical form sped through a dozen transmutations: a tusked skyray, a moonfaced puppet jerking in multicoloured flame, a pink-skinned lesser daemon, a statue of coal and a chirring song bird.

Ephryx sank to his knees, all his strength gone.

‘You didn’t see that coming did you, you preening peacock.’

‘Vandus, the hammer!’ said Thostos, his voice a gurgle.

Vandus stood upon Calanax’s back and launched himself at Ghal Maraz. He flew through the air, hand outstretched. A Lord of Change reached out for him, only to be blasted back by a bolt of lightning from Calanax. A second fell to a magical attack from Ionus. Time slowed to a crawl. A thousand futures depended on this moment.

Vandus’ fingers closed upon the gleaming haft of the hammer. The last chain fell away, and it came free. His mind flooded with memories that were not his own, images from times and places far away, and a world long gone. Then he was falling and rolling. He came up easily, and he held the power of a god in one hand.

Kairos Fateweaver leaned over him, the last effects of his transformations flickering over his faces as he regained control of his form.

The daemon lifted a hand and a glow of power formed around it. ‘I do not think that is yours,’ he said.

‘Nor is it yours,’ said Vandus.

Before he had even formed the intent to move, Ghal Maraz streaked forward with the power of a comet. Vandus was only the means to the end. The weapon used him to exert its will.

Ghal Maraz smashed into Kairos’ shoulder, sending the arm spinning free in a spray of mashed flesh and daemonic ichor. Kairos shrieked, twin screams from both mouths.

The hammer arced round, dragging Vandus’ hand with it. It powered into Kairos’ left head, caving in his skull and sending it crashing into the right. Kairos toppled forward cawing in pain. Vandus stepped back, and the hammer swung up and down, crushing one head into a bloody paste upon the floor, then the second.

Kairos’ body convulsed, making a scream-like a whistle. He juddered, vibrating so quickly his outline was a blur. He convulsed, inwards, outwards, then with a sorry pop he transformed into a smoky crystal.

Vandus brought his boot heel down hard on the gem, crushing it to glittering powder. The Shardgate was now only feet above Vandus’ head. He held Ghal Maraz up in defiance.

‘See this, Great Changer! This is Ghal Maraz, Sigmar’s weapon of old! It is in my hand, and shall soon be in the hand of the God-King. Fear it, for as it slew your servant, so one day shall it slay you!’

Lightning burst from the hammer. Wherever it landed, it struck down a servant of Chaos. The roof of the keep was flying apart, the tower coming to pieces around it. The fabric of the Eldritch Fortress was rooted in the power of the hammer, and now that Ghal Maraz was free, it disintegrated, the pieces flying upwards into the Shardgate where they exploded into showers of silver sparks. The skulls around the walls burst. A furious howl raged from the Shardgate, sending the incarnate Stormcasts reeling. It went on and on, then changed pitch, becoming wild laughter.

The Shardgate winked out. An echo of the laughter remained, and for a moment the bare floor of the keep hung in the air over the site of the Eldritch Fortress. Ionus, Thostos and two dozen more Stormhosts stood upon a mosaic that depicted Sigmar in his glory, the last remnant of Elixia’s Great Monument. The sorcerer Ephryx lay dead upon the God-King’s face. Then the floor tilted and dropped towards the naked summit of the island, coming apart as it fell. Upon the bare stone its fragments shattered, scattering the Stormhosts all about into the ranks of their brethren. Of their foes there was no sign. All were gone, taken up by the Shardgate.

Vandus lay sprawled upon his back, looking upwards. The Alchemist’s Moon had resumed its true course, and as it passed overhead, a new light was revealed. A brilliant, pure radiance that banished every scrap of shadow from the island. A twin-tailed comet burned across the heavens.

Vandus held aloft the god-hammer, saluting the arrival of the Sigmarabulus. A great peal of thunder split the sky.

The Stormhosts fell to their knees, and were surrounded by a blaze of light.

Ghal Maraz was reunited with its master, and the war began in earnest.

Chapter One

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

The hammer falls.

Vengeance tears from my throat, ringing through the bloodless metal of my mask. ‘God-King!’ I cry in a voice that is no longer my own.

‘God-King!’ howl my lightning-born brothers as the tempest hurls us from the sky.

The ground gives as we land but Zarax rides on, ignoring the odd, yielding terrain. I cling to her scales, as blind as a newborn. The others are close behind and I hear their metal boots pounding across this broken, benighted land. Weapons are drawn, oaths are howled and I take my first breath of mortal air. Sulphur pours through my mouthpiece and I gulp it down, relishing the bitterness.

The storm thins, revealing plumes of smoke and embers. I whisper to Zarax and as she slows I sense the others gathering around me. I almost pity those we have come to destroy. Who could dream of such an enemy?

The smoke drifts, revealing glimpses of a tortured landscape. We’re heading down a glistening, crimson road that seems to have been carved from a flayed corpse. Sigmar’s tempest has landed us on a butcher’s block of body parts and thrashing, broken wings.

It’s a shameful sight but I don’t avert my gaze. I must be vigilant, aware. I must understand this place quickly.

I look harder and realise that it’s not a road, but a bridge of meat and chains, hazy with flies. Its span is vast beyond measure, stretching miles ahead before disappearing into a crimson wall of smoke. Over the side I glimpse wisps of cloud and realise we’re far above the ground. Shrieks fill the air and I see that the bridge is alive. The whole structure is made of living birds – thousands of them, broken and burned together by hot irons and fixed to a mesh of thick, oily chains. It’s the stink of their ruined flesh that fills my lungs. It’s their thrashing bodies I’m riding across and their pain I can hear.

I want to roar in outrage, but I bite down my fury and keep my voice level.

‘Advance,’ I say, rising up in my saddle and turning to face my army.

My heart races as I see what I command. The storm has spawned a golden host. Even in this stinking, bloody wound, they are a vision. Every one of them is clad entirely in gleaming armour, still crackling with the fury of the storm. Pennants trail above glinting, haloed helmets, bearing the divine sigils of Sigmar and the Celestial City. No army ever looked so glorious, so dignified. And Sigmar has entrusted it to me.

The vanguard is a seamless wall of shield-bearing Liberators; numberless ranks of heroes, marching towards me in perfect unison. Then come the retinues of paladins – striding goliaths that dwarf even the Liberators, clad in blessed, god-wrought suits of armour. Some carry great, two-handed hammers that look like they could topple city walls, while others wield pole arms – long, gleaming glaives with lightning in their blades. In the rearguard are my divine archers – hundreds of Judicators, moving with the same precision as the rest of the army, readying their shimmering bows. High above, riding the thunderheads, are our winged guardians, the Prosecutors: radiant, inviolable and more dangerous than the lightning.

I almost laugh. Stormcast Eternals – the God-King’s unbreakable fist. Removed from the golden halls of Azyr, we shine all the brighter.

I turn back to the bridge and see the sky for the first time. It’s almost entirely obscured by rock. A vast sphere of smouldering ore, hundreds of miles in diameter, hangs directly over our heads. Such a star-burnt hulk can only be a moon, dragged from the heavens by divine will. It’s moving towards us, shedding sparks and boulders as it glides majestically through the clouds. The sky ripples in its wake like water in the lee of a ship.

‘Lord-Celestant.’

I look down from Zarax’s back at Lord-Relictor Boreas. I can barely recognise my brother’s dry tones. His arcane duties have left their mark on his speech, just like every other part of him. As I was being drilled and remade in the Celestial City, Sigmar sent my brother through death and beyond. Eternity echoes in his every word.

Unlike the rest of us, my brother’s mask resembles a bleached skull, and I find myself wondering what lies behind. Would I recognise his face? Unlike me, he has endured Sigmar’s fire a second time. He knows what it really means to be immortal.

The rest of my captains stand back in respectful silence as he approaches.

‘What are your orders, Lord-Celestant?’ he asks, speaking formally, giving no hint of our shared past. He glances at the heavens. ‘This was not prophesied. None of my auguries indicated that we would land here, on this bridge of birds.’

I look back down the road, blanking out the thrashing wings and the insanity hanging overhead.

‘The tempest can’t have strayed too far off course, Boreas.’ I nod back down the bridge. ‘We’ve clearly found our foe.’

There are figures emerging from the fumes – a barbaric, crimson-clad rabble scrambling along the bridge, pouring from the smoke like blood from a wound. The moonlight shows them in sickening clarity. They wear jagged, red and brass helmets and their bare chests are lashed with scarred muscle. They carry repulsive, brazen idols and axes as tall as men, scored with foul sigils, and every one of them is draped in skulls and glistening with blood.

‘Bloodreavers,’ says a voice edged with hate. ‘Finally these snorting dogs will receive some justice.’

I turn to face the speaker. ‘Liberator-Prime. There can be no victory without discipline.’ I nod at the lines of Liberators marching towards us. ‘They will follow our lead, Castamon. Show them what Sigmar expects.’

He nods, humbled. ‘Lord-Celestant.’

I turn back to the bloodreavers. As they run they fill the air with a dreadful din. They are trailing something that clangs and clicks along the chains of the bridge but at this distance I can’t make out what it is.

The rest of the Liberators clatter to a halt around us, moving with such well-drilled precision that they could be on a parade ground.

I point my hammer at the bloated moon and raise my voice.

‘Remember this, Stormcasts: nothing is forsaken. Look deep enough into the darkness and you will always find Sigmar looking back.’

They remain motionless and silent, but I feel their battle-hunger; it radiates from their gleaming armour.

‘Lock shields,’ I say, and there’s a deafening clang as the vanguard snaps into place. The entire army moves as one, bodies, shields and armour, fitting together to make an impenetrable bastion of sigmarite.

Struggling to suppress my pride, I raise my warhammer, Grius, to the crimson heavens. It flashes in the moonlight, and Zarax lets out a roar. As the dracoth rises beneath me she opens her reptilian jaws and unleashes pure white fury at the clouds. The air crackles and spider legs of electricity dance across my armour.

I give the signal to advance and as we meet the enemy lines I become one with my expressionless mask – an emotionless implement of Sigmar’s will. Anger is forgotten. Grief is suppressed. Everything falls away: the sound of shields rattling on greaves, the torment of the bridge, the lunacy of the moon – all I know is this moment. I feel the long, slow arc of my life reaching its culmination. Finally, I face the monsters I was born to slay.

Gold and crimson collide. There is an explosion of grinding metal as the vanguards meet. Sparks glitter in the darkness, axes clang against shields and bucklers smash against armour.

The lines of Liberators hold steady and I order them onwards. Their shields lock tighter with every step and they drive the enemy back across the bridge of birds. Even from a few rows back I can barely breathe for the stink of the bloodreavers, a ripe stench even more powerful than the sulphurous moon. They fight like wounded animals, snorting, spitting and howling as they throw themselves against the Liberators’ shields, trying and failing to break our line. I glimpse deranged faces, eyes rolled back in sockets, delirious with rage. They’re more stampede than army.

‘Drive them back!’ I shout as the bloodreavers’ frenzy grinds us to a slow plod. ‘Drive them back to whatever dark vaults spawned them!’

They begin to drop, felled by lightning hammer-strikes, golden flashes that lash out from behind shields, crushing armour and bone. It seems that victory will come before I even have chance to gauge the strength of my army.

I hear a cry of pain from the shield wall.

I peer through the serried, golden lines and glimpse one of my Liberators clutching at his throat. His armour has been rent and there’s blood, lots of blood, rushing between his fingers. He vanishes from view as the phalanx closes around him.

His choked screams scrape around my skull and I drive Zarax forwards, keen to be done with these animals. Even the dracoth cannot easily wade through such a crush, so she unleashes a gout of lightning, tearing a channel through the enemy ranks. The smell of cooking meat intensifies the stench.

A bloodreaver bounds over the shield wall. He vaults several rows, screaming hysterically, and lashes out with a pair of jagged axes. Another Stormcast staggers as the bloodreaver crashes into him.

Before the Liberators can respond, a paladin strides casually forwards and brings down his huge, two-handed hammer. He moves with a languid, easy grace but his blow lands like a thunderclap. The bridge rocks and blinding light envelops us all. Even Zarax stumbles.

When the glare fades, the bloodreaver is gone and the paladin has calmly resumed his place. If it weren’t for the gore sliding down his breastplate there would be no sign that the Chaos creature had ever existed. I take note of the Stormcast’s markings.

‘Retributor Celadon,’ I shout, disguising my pride beneath a stern snarl. ‘Wait for my command.’

More of the howling curs manage to scale the shield wall, disrupting our faultless lines. It’s becoming harder to match the dispassion of my mask. Anger boils through my limbs. I clutch one of my honour scrolls and recite the Oath of Becoming.

Dozens of the bloodreavers are falling to the Liberators’ hammers and swords but I hear Stormcasts crying out too. Such noble beings were not made to succumb to such soul-sick dogs and my patience starts to fray. The crush of bodies becomes oppressive. My eyes blur with sweat and my muscles burn with the effort of holding myself back.

Another Liberator falls and a whole section of the shield wall gives.

The bloodreavers seize their chance and wrench the gap wider with a flurry of axe blows.

I signal to the paladins, finally giving them permission to advance, and they surge forwards, led by Celadon’s brutal blows.

‘Close ranks!’ I roar, rising up in my saddle and ordering the Liberators back into position as the paladins storm ahead. They try to obey but the bloodreavers are becoming even more feral. They fight with no structure or reason. Something is driving them into a boiling frenzy. It’s bewildering.

Another Stormcast cries out in pain and I will take no more.

‘For the God-King!’ I roar, launching myself from Zarax’s back and into the enemy, joining the wave of paladins.

Ranks of warhammers rise behind me, along with a chorus of battle cries.

The fight begins in earnest.

I pick out the largest bloodreaver and bear down on him. His face has been warped beyond recognition by deep jagged scars and there are thick hoops of brass hammered through his biceps. Every inch of him has been transformed by a lifetime of war. The din of battle is everywhere, but I’m deaf to everything beyond the deep, phlegmy rattle of his breath. He snorts like a boar, drooling and bestial as he smashes his axe into my hammer.

The blow jolts through me and I rock back on my heel, gauging the weight of him against my own strength. He is as heavy as iron, but I’m easily sufficient for the task, and after the crush of the shield wall I relish the chance to lash out. The stink of his breath is worse than the rotting bridge – he growls something in his disgusting, dark tongue and I recognise the smell of human flesh.

I smash Grius into his axe and savour the sensation of my armour-clad limbs. My body feels like a new weapon, forged in the stars. There’s a strength in me that I can barely fathom.

The bloodreaver recovers and swings but I’m faster. So fast. Grius crunches through the mouthpiece of his helmet, tearing it away in a shower of sparks and blood. His head snaps sideways and he reels away from me, jaw hanging loose from his head.

I stride after him, barging deeper into the crush, and draw back my warhammer for another blow.

Laughter explodes from his throat. He tears away what remains of his jaw, hurling it to the ground like the remnant of a meal.

There’s something so obscene about this that I pause – only for a second, but long enough for him to slam his fist into my golden mask. My head rocks back as a long, iron spike grinds through the eye socket of my helm. Pain explodes across my face and my helmet fills with blood. I stagger backwards, reeling across the thrashing birds, blinded in one eye, and almost drop my hammer.

He gurgles grotesquely as he lunges after me, blood rushing from where his mouth used to be.

Pain only makes me faster. My hammer connects with the top of his helmet and brass crumples beneath god-forged sigmarite. His skull collapses.

He gives a last, porcine, grunt and topples back into the throng.

I down another opponent with a backhanded blow, then step back to survey the scene. I’ve unleashed a storm. Freed from the crush, the paladins are striding through the bloodreavers like a tempest, their voices raised to Sigmar, lightning flashing across their hammers. The bloodreavers topple before the combined onslaught of Liberators and Retributors. It’s a massacre. My army flows like gold from a brazier. In minutes we have shattered their ranks, scattering heads and axes as we go. The battle is almost won.

Boreas fights beside me, smashing his way through the enemy with slow, precise determination, splitting shields and heads.

I wipe the blood from my golden mask and realise that we’re mirroring each other as we strike.

‘Victory and honour!’ I cry, and he raises his hammer in reply.

I take a fume-filled breath and look around. There’s a vast shape looming up from the smoke further down the bridge, punctuated by ominous crimson lights.

‘That’s not the Crucible of Blood,’ I call out to Boreas. ‘We must finish this quickly and find out where the storm has landed us.’

He peers at the distant tower. ‘You have eyes in the heavens, Lord-Celestant.’

I nod and look up into the darkness. ‘Drusus!’ I cry, fending off a blow and peering back down the bridge. At first there’s no reply so I battle on, scouring the heavens for my cloud-borne Prosecutors.

The moon has fallen even closer. The sight of it is dizzying, vast beyond understanding. Such a colossal, dazzling sphere has no place looming so low. As it gets closer it starts to affect the bridge. The structure sways so violently that birds are being torn free and hurled up towards the sky, and the chains reach up to the clouds, dancing like serpents.

‘Lord-Celestant!’ cries a voice.

I make out the golden form of Drusus, flying overhead.

Divine light gilds his wings as he dives through the fumes, trailing Sigmar’s heralds of death behind him. He banks and rolls, clutching twin hammers. Even the blank expression of his mask can’t hide his excitement.

‘See what this bridge has in store for us,’ I shout, levelling my hammer at the shadows up ahead.

Drusus nods but remains overhead, struggling to hold his place, buffeted by a new storm that has sprung up.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ he cries, pointing one of his hammers back to where debris is flying up from the bridge. ‘The moon is falling.’

Before I can reply, a circle of bloodreavers surrounds me, each clutching an axe as tall as I am. If they’ve noticed their losses, they don’t show it. They lope towards me like drunken brawlers.

As I ready myself, I feel a charge in the air – traces of Sigmar’s wrath circling once more, crackling in my joints, responding to my faith. I raise my warhammer to the clouds and cry an oath.

The bloodreavers charge and my armour blazes white, ignited by the remnants of Sigmar’s tempest. Grius erupts as I bring it down between my feet.

There’s a thunderclap and a ring of light slams into my attackers.

Blood flies from their mouths and they arch in pain as their backs break.

‘Make for the towers!’ I cry, vaulting their twitching corpses and hurling myself back into the throng. Whatever Drusus has seen, the battle is nearly over and we need to advance.

My leap takes me unexpectedly high and I have an odd sensation of weightlessness. It takes me several seconds to land back on the bridge. The battle rages on, but most of the bloodreavers are dead and the rest are in disarray, so I call my retinues back into formation for the final push. We will finish this with the same dignity with which we began it.

I’m still a few paces away from the phalanx when my feet lift off the ground again and my face turns to the sky.

Deranged laughter fills the air as I try unsuccessfully to grasp on to something. Dozens of birds are being torn free and hurled into the ink-dark sky. The whole bridge is bucking and heaving.

I spin in the air, thrashing my limbs. As I turn I see that some of my Liberators have been thrown to their knees while others, like me, are rising into the air.

‘Lord-Celestant!’ cries Drusus from somewhere nearby. ‘The moon is too close!’

An iron-hard hand locks around my throat and I turn to see one of the berserk warriors laughing wildly as he drifts up beside me, several feet above the bridge. His axe swings towards my face.

The sickening sensation of weightlessness slows my reactions. I bring Grius up but only quick enough to deflect his blow, and the axe slams into my gorget. The blessed sigmarite holds, but we continue to spin away from the ground.

The bloodreaver still has hold of my throat and we pirouette through whirling embers. His breath reeks of death. His scarred, leathery muscles are slick with blood and his battered helmet is daubed in tribute to the Blood God. His face is near enough for me to see cracked, corpse-dry lips and thin, blackened teeth. He’s too close for me to swing my hammer so I pound the handle into his face, breaking his nose. He just laughs harder as we float higher.

Then he twists his voice around words I can understand.

‘Fly home,’ he says, his voice an obscene gurgle. Then, with a snort of derision, he tries to shove me away, but my speed has not entirely left me; before I’m lost to the storm I manage to grab hold of his axe.

The fool is so rabid that he won’t let go of his precious weapon, so I haul myself down its length, grabbing onto his arm with one hand and swinging Grius with the other. It connects squarely with his head and I hear the crack of his breaking neck. He slumps in my grip.

I roll again, hanging onto his corpse and get a sickening bird’s-eye view of the battle below. Dozens of my Stormcasts are being lifted up from the jolting bridge. Only the paladins are too heavy to be moved. Most of the bloodreavers are dead, but the survivors howl ecstatically as the moon wrenches us from victory. Finally, I realise the significance of something that has been bothering me since I first saw it. Every one of the bloodreavers is shackled to the bridge.

‘Their chains!’ I cry, grabbing hold of the one attached to the corpse and lashing it around my leg. ‘Drusus!’ I can see him and the other winged Prosecutors still hurling hammers of lightning at the foe. ‘Their chains! Lash us to the bridge!’

He stares at me, confused, then nods and waves his retinues into action. They dive into the crowds of drifting Stormcast Eternals, grappling as many as they can back down to the bridge. Our orderly attack has become an airborne riot. As Drusus’ Prosecutors attempt to lock chains around their brothers’ legs, the remaining bloodreavers lash out with their axes, hacking them down as they struggle to secure the chains.

My head pounds as Liberators rush up through the clouds, snatched by the lunar storm and thrown to the heavens. The moon is so close the air is groaning beneath its incredible mass.

Drusus and the other winged Prosecutors lash countless dozens to the bridge, but others are disappearing from view, flashing like reclaimed comets as they rush towards the firmament. My Stormcasts rage as they are dragged from this world. Anger boils in my knotted gut as the storm spins me faster.

The grinding of the moon becomes deafening, throbbing in my still bleeding head until I think it might split.

Chapter Two

Vourla – High Priestess of the Steppe

My sorcery is almost spent; my books have been burned. What does that leave? Just a weak old woman, waiting to feel a blade at her throat. The gods played a cruel joke when they chose me as the steppe’s last chance for vengeance.

I shift in my chair, throwing shadows across the octagonal chamber. The floor gleams in the torchlight like a piece of perfect marble, but I’ve walked across it many times and know the truth. Hakh’s throne room is carpeted with human teeth, hammered and smoothed to a sheen. They spiral across the room in their thousands, circling a thick, pitted grindstone. The teeth are only a small reminder of the lives Hakh has taken. I doubt he considers them more than decoration, but I feel the pain of every sundered soul. Sometimes I run my hands over them, tracing the contours and cracks, recalling names and whispering a promise: I will avenge you. For a long time I did not know how I would achieve such a feat, but now, finally, it is in reach.

The throne beside me is the carcass of a great beast – a beautiful, feline thing from the time before Chaos. After killing it, Hakh hollowed out the corpse with his bare hands and had it cast in brass. Now it hunches over him, frozen in an eternal roar. The warlord sits silently and hasn’t moved for an hour, but I know he’s awake. He’s long beyond such mortal frailties as sleep. There are weapons everywhere, but if I took a single step towards him my game would end. I must bide my time. Vengeance is so close I can feel it in my tingling palms.

Hakh’s generals have yet to arrive and my only entertainment comes from his hounds. Most of them are as motionless as their master, slumped at his feet, but a few circle me, their claws scraping and clattering across the gleaming floor. Even after all these years they’ve not given up hope that Hakh might rethink my importance and present them with a meal. They’re not real dogs, of course, but hulking, reptilian things, the colour of flayed muscle and as tall as a man. Their enormous, canine heads are crowned with horns and their bodies have been bloated into a grotesque parody of nature, torn out of shape by heaving muscle. Smoke leaks from their jaws as they pad back and forth, their eyes always locked on me.

The spiked collars at their throats crush the magic out of me and they stink of the hell-pits that spawned them, but I’ve become fascinated by them. There’s a mystery to them that I can’t fathom: Hakh loves them. When slaves become too weak to work, he feeds them, still living, to the hounds. I’ve been forced to endure the screams more times than I wish to recall and, as the slaves die, I always keep my eyes locked on Hakh’s. They burn with pride as his hounds do their work – the pride of a devoted father. The thought fascinates me. I can’t stop thinking about it. There seems to be something profound just beyond my comprehension. This murdering, poisonous monster cares for something. What does that mean? What does it mean for his wretched subjects? These gore-hungry executioners own everything now. They own those pitiful few of us who still live on the Kharvall Steppe. Slaughter, hunger and fear are the only things we will ever know now. Few of us can recall the days when animals like Hakh’s great cat still breathed and hunted, moving through a realm unshackled by Khorne’s brass towers. The monster sitting in the throne is all we have, and he loves something. What does that mean?

The door swings open and Hakh’s eight generals march into the chamber, paying me no attention as they approach the throne. A more wretched group of stooges and villains never drew breath, but, as always, they adopt the mannerisms of proud, disciplined knights. Their twisted red and brass armour flashes in the torchlight as they drop to their knees and rest their foreheads against their axes. How furious they would be if they knew that a frail, human woman like me had written their death warrants. Not only have I convinced Hakh to call them home, but I have also convinced him that they are worthless. I have driven a blade so neatly between their shoulder blades that they did not even feel it.

Hakh remains motionless for a few more seconds, then his ember-red eyes flicker into life. The lord of the Blood Creed is still a man of sorts, I suppose, but he has more than a foot in the realm of daemons. The thick serrated plates of his armour cover most of his body, but his head is horribly exposed. Years of dark worship have earned him a pair of bestial, ridged horns that swoop up from his brutal, heavy brow. His face has the grey, greasy pallor of a month-old corpse.

For a while he ignores the newcomers and stares at me. My fear was long ago matched by hate and I hold his gaze, but I can’t read the thought in those inhuman eyes. Has he seen through my ruse? Will he turn his generals on me?

He waves a hand, allowing them to rise and bark out their tallies of atrocities, presenting them as proud victories. They list every head they’ve taken for their lord, but I’ve already told him a convenient truth: that they have nothing to boast of. They no longer have an enemy to fight. This kingdom is no longer on its knees – it is supine.

‘I have tightened the yoke on the cities of Iphilaus and Chius,’ cries one of them in strident tones. His massive frame is encased in jagged brass armour and he has the pure white pelt of a wild cat slung across his shoulders. ‘Their princes will not ask you for leniency again.’ He hurls a sack to the foot of the throne and bloodless heads spill out, tumbling across the floor with a sickening series of thuds.

Another of the warriors strides forwards. He wears a heavy, blood-drenched cloak that leaves a crimson smear behind him as he walks. His gauntleted hands are locked around a daemon-forged glaive that shimmers with inner fire, revealing a cruel leer deep inside his hood.

‘The Volpone River now runs red, Lord Hakh. The Volpone Knights seemed unsure whether they should kneel to you, so I helped them decide. I removed their knees. Three thousand of them are now feeding the fish at the bottom of their sacred river.’

As he listens to their boasts, Hakh leans forwards in his throne and starts to tap the blade of his sword against the floor.

I notice that Hakh has started to tremble and I edge back into my stone chair. His growing anger would be obvious to anyone with sense, but the generals carry on oblivious, crowing over their petty victories.

Hakh is a goliath – there is something almost bovine about his armour-clad bulk. But when he finally explodes, it’s with surprising speed.

The general nearest to the throne topples back into the others as his head flies off, removed by one clean swipe of Hakh’s sword.

The warlord roars as he storms across the room to grab the severed head and smash it against the wall. The others try to raise their weapons, but Hakh attacks them with the head, slamming it into their faces until it becomes a bloody lump of bone and metal. He roars as he kills, and then, when every one of them is dead, he hurls his dripping weapon at his throne, where it bursts like a flagon of wine.

I feel a mixture of nausea and pride at what I’ve done.

He’s not finished. Still roaring, Hakh strides across the chamber and gouges the wall with his horns, sending wood and masonry clattering across the floor.

Then he turns, panting like an animal, and locks his gaze on me.

I scramble backwards but there’s no escape. The doors are unlocked, but even if I could get through them, where would I go?

He crosses the chamber and stares at me, blood dripping from his horns.

‘You were right again,’ he says finally. ‘They found nothing. They failed.’

His voice is a low growl that makes my language as vile as his own.

‘What else do you know?’ he asks.

I’m terrified but, even now, he won’t hurt me, I’m sure of it. As the hounds throw themselves around the chamber, snapping and snarling, he bats them away, sending them sprawling across the floor.

‘What do you want to know?’ I ask.

He snarls and jabs one of his bloody, brass-plated fingers at my forehead.

‘No games.’

‘Why would I tell you anything more?’ I ask, playing a fool; playing along with his lie.

He relaxes visibly, thinking he still has me in his power. He points his sword at a space in the floor of teeth. ‘It’s not finished. You know who’s next.’ He leans close, dripping blood onto my face. ‘I’ll make an exception and kill them slowly.’

For a moment, I allow myself to imagine that his words are true – that I have a family to save, that they’re still alive somewhere, waiting for my powers as a sorcerer to buy their freedom. I picture their trusting, beautiful faces and it almost breaks me. My eyes fill with tears and the idiot thinks it’s because I’m afraid for them. He thinks I don’t know they are long dead.

His breathing quickens as I nod.

I sneer at his butchered generals. ‘They were wasting your time. They lacked the wit to find the real threat.’ I look beyond him, out through one of the narrow windows. ‘But there is still an enemy. There is a way you could shine.’

His eyes blaze and he moves to grab me, stopping himself at the last minute as though he’s afraid of shattering a precious jewel.

‘And if I slay this enemy?’

‘If you could slay the man I’ve seen, your future will be secure.’ I glance at the sign of the Blood God, Khorne, carved into the back of his throne. ‘You will have served your god well. He’ll be in no doubt as to which of his lords should rule this land. You’ll become lord of the Kharvall Steppe.’

He growls again and I wonder if he might finally kill me. But no, he’s just overcome with excitement. He’s picturing his peers – all the other lords vying for control of the steppe – and thinking of how he will feel when they kneel before him.

‘Show me.’ He sounds awed.

I shoo him away like a dog and, incredibly, he backs away, taking his hounds with him and sitting back on his throne. I take a cloak from one of the corpses and fling it around myself with a flamboyant gesture, as though it’s a beautiful robe. My sense of the theatrical has not entirely left me. Then I walk to the centre of the chamber and climb up onto the grindstone. It’s a huge ring of pitted granite, five feet high and almost as thick. I wince as I haul myself up onto it, but the thought of what comes next gives me strength.

For one ridiculous moment I wait for the musicians to start, but then I remember that they’re all dead. I look at Hakh, unsure what to do. He’s hunched forward in his throne, holding back his hounds and staring at me with such devotion that I almost laugh.

With the hounds restrained, a ghost of my power returns. I start to hum the Song of Summoning and beg my body for forgiveness as I subject it to another ordeal. My muscles remember what I do not and, as I start to dance, I hear the dead musicians in my head, willing me to succeed.

The whole performance is quite ironic. These meat-headed morons despise magic but they can’t remove it fully from their towers any more than they can bar the passage of the air. As my stiff, bruised limbs twist themselves into the old shapes, a breeze springs up around the grindstone, snapping through my borrowed cloak and whipping up the fragments of broken wall. It’s no natural breeze and as I look over at Hakh I feel the urge to laugh. To leave such sorcery unpunished is clearly a torment for him.

It only takes a few moments for the images to appear. My mumbled verses become an impassioned hymn and the breeze turns into a whirl of places and scenes. I spin faster and Hakh rises from his throne, staring in wonder at the figure forming in the tempest – a great lord, clad from head to toe in gleaming armour. His face is hidden behind a smooth, expressionless mask and he carries a great rune-inscribed warhammer. He’s leading a vast host of golden knights into battle, some borne on wings of lightning and all of them wielding hammers that flash with the light of the storm.

I’ve known of his coming for weeks, but now I see him I’m as enraptured as Hakh. The lord’s armour sparks and flickers as he moves, charged with some kind of divine energy, but it’s his demeanour that shocks me. I’ve never seen anyone move through a battle with such solemnity. He strides calmly through the fighting, untouched by the violence and corruption that surround him. Great chunks of the ground are being torn free and hurled up towards the sky, but he maintains a cool, regal majesty. As I study him, a painful thought creeps into my mind. It’s that most treacherous of worms: hope.

‘Is this him? Is this the warlord I must face?’ Hakh staggers towards the apparition, reaching through the flashing lights. ‘Who is he?’

My plans are forgotten. I stare in wonder.

‘He is called Tylos.’

Chapter Three

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

Duty keeps me sane. I will not let my brothers die.

I haul myself down the chain and step onto the bridge, ignoring the pain, the screams and the madness of the storm. I drive down my anger and level my thoughts. I study the fastening around my leg and see that the bloodreavers have designed them for a specific purpose – so that they might travel through the lunar storm. This must be something they endure regularly, and it must therefore be something that passes. I look up at the moon and see that it’s already swinging back up towards the stars. We will ride this out. We will sanctify the Crucible of Blood.

I fasten the chain tighter and stagger across the lurching bridge, barging between crowds of tumbling bodies. I grab those I can, fixing them to the structure, while crushing those in red with Grius until they are as broken as the birds. It’s hard to fight cleanly in this madness, but I refuse to slip into brutality. I’m no longer the animal Sigmar lifted from the slave pits. I’m a good man; a devout man. Every kill I make is in Sigmar’s name.

My men follow my lead and soon we’re on the attack again, bloody and shackled but twice as determined. The laughter of our foes ceases as they find themselves once more facing a wall of hammer-emblazoned shields. I doubt we look as glorious as when we arrived, but I’m sure we are more terrifying.

Drusus and his men loop through the night sky, supporting our advance, hurling Sigmar’s twin-tailed judgement.

The bloodreavers fight on. They can’t hope to win, but the pitiful few that remain throw themselves at us, fuelled by a senseless kill-fever, thrashing and hacking as we trample them.

The final push is over in minutes. The storm is definitely fading now and the bridge becomes calm. Eventually, the moon is high enough that we can smash our chains and charge, finishing the bloodreavers in a silent, efficient slaughter.

I grab the last of them by the throat and drag him to the edge of the bridge. He kicks as I hold him out into the night, studying him with silent dispassion. He stops struggling and spits on my mask, his phlegm sizzling angrily on the metal, and stares at the blood flowing from the eyehole of my mask.

‘Blood for the Blood God.’ He starts laughing.

I remain silent.

The bloodreaver’s eyes become lucid and I am pleased to see that I have confused him. He continues to laugh but it sounds forced. He strains to free himself whilst staring at my mask, trying to see what lies behind.

There was a time when I would have crushed him just see his pain, to see him beg for mercy, but I stay my hand. I am no longer that man. I brought the bloodreaver out here to denounce him, to list his crimes and vent my rage, but now I realise that would be as clumsy as revealing my face.

I drop him from the bridge.

As the bloodreaver falls from view, the insanity of this place hits me. I know the name of this kingdom – the Kharvall Steppe – but little else. I had assumed that the bridge spanned a great river, but the thundering noise I can hear is coming from something far stranger. Below us is an ocean of black fire, boiling with tormented creatures. I have no doubt that this place was once magnificent, but now it’s a monstrous sight. I look down on a frenzied tsunami of reptiles, mammals and crustaceans, bound together by flames and ash, tumbling and rolling over each other in a furious rush to escape the heat. Some of the scorched creatures resemble things I can recognise, but others have been warped into lunatic creations of horn and scale. The moon paints them red; a torrent of claws and blood.

Boreas’ cool tones interrupt my thoughts. He has left the other commanders behind and followed me to the edge of the bridge. Now that we are alone, he finally drops my title.

‘Your first taste of victory, brother.’

‘Victory isn’t enough,’ I reply. ‘You know that. If we’re to win the wider war, we must be a beacon. We must ignite these realms, not with flames but with hope. Vandus’ victory at the Igneous Gate has bought us passage this far, but we have to be worthy of him. We must show the people of this land what they can be.’ I draw back my shoulders and take a deep breath. ‘We must show them how to be stronger, better.’

Boreas glances back across the bridge. ‘Sixty Liberators are gone,’ he says, with no trace of emotion.

I look past him and see the truth of it. Of those that remain, many have dark stains on their golden armour.

‘The pull of the moon,’ he explains. ‘I can do nothing for them. They will endure hours of agony before their souls can return to the Celestial Realm.’

I look up at the sky. Which of those lights are not stars but men, screaming as they drift into the lonely void?

I turn to Boreas, wondering what kind of man he is now. We have shared so much and yet I feel like he is a stranger. Where has he travelled in Sigmar’s name? Every inch of his golden armour is draped in talismans: skulls, bones and scrolls, all inscribed with tales of the underworlds. There is a grandeur to him that I don’t recognise, and a coldness.

‘The scholars of the Celestial City did not foresee this,’ he says. ‘I did not foresee it. The storm should have landed us inside Hakh’s kingdom, at the foot of the Crucible of Blood. Instead it brought us here, to the Red Road.’ His words trail off and he shakes his head. When he speaks again, his voice is so soft that I can barely hear him. ‘Dawn will soon be here and there are now many challenges between us and victory. Hakh’s realm is encircled by a great fortress known as the Anvil. My visions have–’

‘Brother,’ I interrupt. ‘There are no walls tall enough to stop this army. You know that. It doesn’t matter where we’ve landed, Sigmar will not abandon us. We will reach the Crucible of Blood.’

He nods. ‘I just want you to know what lies ahead. After the Anvil, we will reach Lake Malice, a mile-wide stretch of lava. Our souls may be immortal, but our flesh is not. You will need to find a way across that liquid inferno.’

‘Then we have little time. How fast can we reach the Crucible of Blood?’

‘If we follow the road for another mile or so past the bridge’s end we’ll reach the Anvil. Lake Malice is not much further from there. If we can find a way across, the Crucible of Blood will be in sight.’

‘How long before the sun rises?’

‘Maybe as little as three hours.’ He looks up and I find myself trying to discern the eyes behind his skull mask. There’s something strange about the colour, or maybe it’s the absence of colour? I step closer, intrigued.

‘If the sun rises before we capture the crucible, even Sigmar can’t help us,’ he says, turning to the horizon.

‘Then three hours will have to suffice,’ I say. ‘Do you still have our key?’ I glance at the collection of relics that adorn his armour. ‘Is it intact?’

He takes a heavily bolted box from his belt and opens it with a muttered prayer. Then he lifts out a fume-filled bell jar. The opaque, green glass is thicker than my shield and locked to a silver base by a row of filigreed clasps. The jar is beautiful, in stark contrast to the contents. As Boreas lifts the glass from its base, a cloud of mist drifts away to reveal a shrivelled, black heart. The Kuriat, ancient beyond imagining, a living fossil from another age, still beating with a steady, unceasing thud. Tiny lights flutter around it, golden motes that dance and sparkle as Boreas holds the relic up in front of his mask to study its rhythm.

‘The Kuriat has already slowed,’ he mutters. ‘The radiant storms have been cast astray. Something has perverted the will of the Celestial City. Or someone perhaps.’ He glances at me, then looks down again. The golden lights billow and roll, forming symbols under his fathomless gaze. He reads something in the tiny constellations and nods, before closing the jar and locking it carefully away again.

‘The Kuriat is still true. Its potential is undimmed. If we bring it to the Crucible of Blood, Khorne’s legions will find that a new power has dominion over their prized realmgate.’ He notices the crimson smear across my metal mask. ‘You’re wounded. Let me see.’

I remove my helmet and allow him to examine my eye.

Pain explodes across my face as he touches me but I consider it just penance for being so careless. How absurd to have been injured in my first battle.

‘The eye is punctured,’ he says, a hint of humanity in his voice, a hint of my brother. ‘And the cut is messy. I’ll need to mend the wound as best as I can to avoid infection.’

I try to shrug him off, impatient to move on, but he points at the madness below. ‘Lord-Celestant, this is not a place to be careless, and your life is too precious to be taken lightly. Your soul may survive a corrupted wound, but your flesh will not, and I do not intend to lead this army in your stead.’

I loosen my grip on his arm. ‘Then work quickly, brother.’

He takes an object from his armour and presses it to my face. Something plunges deep into my eye socket. The pain doubles and fresh blood pours down my face, then the world turns crimson. I struggle to see what my brother does next. He chants in a language I’ve never heard before and the words sound furious and alien, then he reaches up, as though trying to grasp something from the air.

‘How long will–’ I start to say, when a blazing column of light slams into us. It hits me with such force that I almost topple to the ground. Only my brother’s firm grip holds me upright. The air crackles with arcane power and a sickening heat washes over me.

I try to cry out but my body is shaking so violently that I can’t speak. My weapons drop to the ground and I slump in my brother’s grip. Light pours through me, cramming my consciousness with dazzling energy as the celestial majesty burns through my skull. For an agonising, rapturous moment I feel not Boreas’ hand but Sigmar’s on my flesh. The light deepens and grows before revealing a hellish vision: thousands of grinning cadavers, rising up from a shattered wasteland. They crawl from their graves and swarm towards me, carrying ancient, rusting spears. One of them is a great, winged horror and, as it dives towards me I see its bleached skull in gruesome detail. I’m about to cry out in defiance, to denounce it, when the vision vanishes, replaced by the polished skull mask of my brother’s helm.

The light fades and night returns. Strength floods back to my limbs and as I look around, I see that I’m still on the bridge of birds.

‘You saw something,’ says Boreas, keeping hold of my arm. ‘What?’

I shake my head, confused.

He stares at me in silence for a moment, then gives a disapproving sigh that takes me right back to our childhood.

‘You are doubly blessed, brother. The God-King has worked a miracle through my humble flesh. I only meant to safeguard you from infection, but it looks as though Sigmar does not wish to be served by one-eyed lords.’

I blink and realise that he’s right: the vision has returned to my eye. As I study the storm clouds overhead, though, I feel as though I am seeing more than I should. The heavens are strangely vivid and mobile. I shake my head. ‘We need to go.’

I click my mask back into place and clasp my brother’s shoulder in thanks, then we stride back across the bridge to the others.

Some of them are wounded but there’s no doubt in their eyes as they see me approaching. Zarax is there, waiting patiently for my return. She looks unharmed and is scratching and pawing at the bridge, eager to carry on.

Drusus lands a few feet away and as he removes his helmet I feel again that I’m seeing more than I did before. Now I can clearly see how the Reforging has changed him. When I first met Drusus, barging his way to the front of a crowd of aspirants, he was a broken man, tormented by an illness of the mind. Now a steady, missionary zeal burns in his heart. He folds his lightning-bright wings behind his back and drops to one knee. The trust in his face feels like another inch of armour across my chest.

‘Forgive me, Lord-Celestant,’ he says. As he speaks, his head twitches to one side, a ghost of his former madness, but he refuses to let his voice waver. ‘I will not fail you again.’

‘True,’ I reply. ‘You will not.’

Ranks of Liberators, Retributors and Judicators climb slowly to their feet. They raise their weapons in silent tribute, ready to begin again. I’m so proud I could roar.

I climb onto Zarax’s back and survey my incorruptible host.

‘Your baptism is complete,’ I cry. ‘Prepare for war!’

After half an hour’s march we leave the bridge of birds and I lead the army through avenues of cloud-scraping, shattered towers. Drusus and his Prosecutors glide overhead, slicing through storm-wracked clouds, clutching their hammers and javelins as they search for signs of danger. From Zarax’s back I survey the lines of Liberators marching ahead of me. Even their presence in this wretched place is an act of defiance. They move in flawless, perfectly symmetrical phalanxes, illustrating everything that an army should be. They’re riven with faith and pride. Behind me stride the paladins, Celadon at their head and further back march the ranks of Judicators. Chaos-spawned horrors scuttle for safety as our boots crunch towards them.

‘Soon,’ says Boreas, looking up at me. There’s a trace of humour in his voice.

‘Soon?’

He waves his hammer at the army that surrounds us. ‘Soon you’ll have your chance to truly test them and see what Sigmar has entrusted you with. It won’t be long until you can show your mettle.’

I smile behind my helmet. How easily he still guesses my thoughts. I glance at the heavens, trying to discern our home in the stars. ‘They say that when Vandus opened the Igneous Gate, the heavens cried out in gratitude. They say a chorus of lost souls sang his name.’

Boreas nods. ‘You have a lot to live up to.’

We reach the plateau and leave the shadow of the towers, heading for a glittering, moonlit expanse of scorched earth that leads to endless fields of rippling grass. There’s a tinkling sound on the breeze, like hundreds of tiny bells. I look back and notice that the lunacy of this place is so profound that the moon has already resumed its natural place in the night sky. Sigmar’s tempest still flickers overhead and clouds race through the darkness. Our target is clear though. I don’t need Boreas’ relic to point the way. Across the fields stands a vast wall of shadow. It stretches over the horizon and flickers with crimson pinpricks of light.

‘The Anvil,’ says Boreas. ‘The border of Hakh’s kingdom. Manned by an army to make those bloodreavers look like a gathering of fishwives.’

‘Instruct my captains,’ I say. ‘Order them to spread the army out.’

Boreas snaps out commands to my captains and Zarax carries me to the edge of the fields. The tinkling sound grows louder and I realise my mistake: what I took for blades of grass are in fact real blades. We’re standing before an expanse of rusting metal – millions of swaying, broken swords, each one held erect by a rotting skeletal hand that juts out of the dusty soil. They chime gently against each other in the breeze.

‘What’s this?’ I say looking down at Boreas.

‘The Field of Blades. The last army of the Kharvall Steppe.’ He steps closer to Zarax and looks up at me. ‘Khorne found their attempts to defend themselves amusing. He buried them here in mockery.’

I glance back at the paladins. ‘Do we need to clear a path?’

‘No, Lord-Celestant, there’s no threat left in this army. They are simply a warning. Not even a warning – an illustration of what happens to those who brave the Anvil.’ He prods a sword with his hammer. ‘We’ll pass through them easily enough.’

‘There are so many,’ says Drusus, landing a few feet away.

He’s right. I look out at the Field of Blades and attempt to estimate the size of the army that Khorne found so unworthy. There must be millions of weapons quivering in the breeze while the Anvil overlooks them all, like a sated lion.

‘This must have been the greatest army that ever bore arms,’ says Drusus.

I laugh and signal the advance. ‘The second greatest.’

Chapter Four

Vourla – High Priestess of the Steppe

Hakh parades me along the battlements like I’m a prized pet rather than a woman. There’s no chain, no leash; the fool is so sure of his hold on me he never dreams I could be a threat. Others are less sure. As we pass ranks of crimson-armoured soldiers, they stare at me, outraged by the sight of a sorceress in their brainless ranks. None of them would dare to question Hakh’s will, though, not if they treasure their heads. Even the hounds don’t bite, although their presence is enough to cause me pain. As they pad at my side, the power of their collars crushes the magic out of me, draining me of power. They are as tall as I am and so close I can smell the brimstone in their veins.

I stagger on, playing the part of a tyrant’s consort, pausing occasionally to glare at one of Hakh’s soldiers, as though singling them out for punishment. They’re more afraid of the figure walking behind me. Vhaal is captain of Hakh’s honour guard and almost as massive as his lord. He’s clad in the same thick plate armour, painted blood red and edged in brass, and he carries a double-headed axe that I doubt I could move, let alone lift. From the neck up, though, he’s dramatically different to Hakh: the skin of his face has been flayed, leaving a mask of glistening muscle. His flesh is so corrupted that it never scabs. Blood weeps constantly from his eyes, flowing down into a long, knotted beard that hangs like a piece of intestine from his dripping chin. Hideous as his face is, it is his expression that unnerves me most. His peeled, lipless mouth seems to wear a constant smirk, as though he knows something that nobody else does.

I turn away from Vhaal and shiver. The Anvil is as high as a mountain and my tattered cloak does little to keep out the chill, but it’s a relief to be outside again. The Dark Gods long ago robbed us of clean air, but even this fume-filled miasma is better than the stench of Hakh’s throne room. Furnaces and forges work constantly in the Anvil’s bowels, rumbling and hissing behind the wall, and we are surrounded by lurid sparks that spiral up into the darkness. But high in the heavens I glimpse true stars and they hurt me more than the hounds’ collars. Their untouchable beauty is an unwelcome reminder of what has gone. As Hakh snaps orders at his men I recall folktales I learned as a child – tales of gods drenched in light, rather than blood. My father used to sing of immortals that walked the heavens, riding great star drakes into battle, driving back the daemons of the void. I try to shake my head free of such nonsense, annoyed at myself. Khorne’s butchers killed my father long ago and such thoughts can only bring me pain. My only hope now is revenge and I won’t risk it by dreaming of things that can never be.

The golden knight has done this to me. Something about him has turned me into a little girl again. I look down at the floor to give myself a reminder of the truth. The Anvil is hundreds of miles long and every inch is carpeted with shattered human teeth. This, I remind myself, is the true story of the Kharvall Steppe.

Hakh spends ten minutes or so inspecting his defences and berating Vhaal, but I can see his mind is elsewhere. His violence is cursory and half-hearted. Barely a dozen sentries have felt the sharp end of his sword tonight and, as soon as he reaches a watchtower, he heads back inside, taking me with him.

He leads the way through a series of skull-choked passageways and corpse-strewn antechambers until we come to a large, barred door. Guards step from the torchlight to challenge us, then quickly salute as they see Hakh’s bulk.

Vhaal steps forward and shoves one of them towards the lock, and we are shown into a long, rectangular chamber. The guards rush to light the torches, disturbing clouds of dust as they clatter back and forth. It’s clear nobody has been in here for a long time. As the flames sputter into life I see why – this is a repository of knowledge and learning, which are not Hakh’s favoured subjects. Maps and charts cover the walls and there are tables piled with obscure astrological devices and books.

Hakh catches my surprised expression and looks even more furious than usual. It almost seems that he is embarrassed.

‘Where is he?’ he grunts, waving his sword at the maps.

I realise that I’ve not been clear. Whoever this Tylos is, he is about to present himself at the foot of the Anvil. Hakh has no need to go trekking across the steppe to find him. I’m about to explain this when I realise how stupid that would be.

‘I don’t know, exactly,’ I lie. ‘But I know where he’s headed.’

Hakh nods, tapping his sword impatiently against the floor.

I stroll across the chamber to the window and beckon him to follow. There I point at the butchered landscape that lies beyond the Anvil.

On this side of the wall, the steppe leads to a blinding expanse of lava. It stretches three miles to the east, where it spits angrily onto a distant, fume-shrouded shore – a black horseshoe of basalt that rises even higher than the Anvil. Even from here I can glimpse our destination – the prize that the lake protects. Even through the smoke I see a flash of bronze; a brazen warning beneath the gathering clouds.

Hakh nods slowly. ‘Of course. The Crucible of Blood. The golden warlord seeks a route to Khorne. He seeks daemonhood.’

Even after all I’ve witnessed, I’m momentarily stunned by how moronic he is.

‘He isn’t going to find Khorne,’ I explain. ‘He doesn’t worship your god. Think of how he looked in all that golden finery. He’s dressed in tribute to the other gods – beings who ruled before you came. He imagines himself as a hero from some older, nobler age. He hasn’t come to pass through the gate – he means to conquer it.’

I see rage growing in Hakh’s eyes as I dare to lecture him, so I change tack quickly. ‘Just think of what it would mean if you could stop him. The Blood God would see without a doubt who should be lord of the Kharvall Steppe.’

Vhaal nods with his usual ironic smile. ‘Amakhus and the other warlords would have no choice but to kneel to you.’

Hakh grips the lintel so tightly that his gauntleted hands start to crumble the masonry. He glares at the captain. ‘They would never kneel. Nor would I give them chance. Once my lord has made me a prince, I’ll use their skin for banners.’

I nod. ‘Heroes forgot this kingdom a long time ago. I don’t know what brought Tylos here now, but you could wait an age and not see his like again. If you seek a chance to prove your worth, this is it.’

Hakh takes a ragged breath and backs away from the window. ‘When? How long will I have to gather my armies? They’re scattered along every mile of this wall. When will he reach the crucible?’

I frown, genuinely unsure. I barely touched Tylos’ mind, but I sense that he understands the Crucible of Blood. I think he knows what will happen when the sun rises. ‘He means to reach it before dawn.’

Hakh spits. ‘Dawn? That leaves me no time at all. Dawn is a few hours away.’

‘What time do you need?’ I ask, surprised by my growing confidence. ‘What do you need to stop one knight and a few of his men?’

Hakh stares at me, and I curse myself for overplaying my hand. Vhaal steps closer, lifting his axe.

Hakh throws back his head and laughs. ‘You have more guts than any of these worms, Vourla.’ He waves at Vhaal. ‘If you were a man and less of a runt, I’d give you his axe.’

I shrug, hoping he can’t see how close I was to running.

‘The golden warlord can dress up as any god he likes,’ continues Hakh. ‘It won’t fix his head any tighter to his neck.’

He turns to Vhaal. ‘Gather the Blood Creed.’

‘All of them?’ Vhaal’s cheeks glisten as his smile widens.

There’s a clicking sound as Hakh rolls his head back around his shoulders. I presume he’s about to take the captain’s head, but he just laughs. ‘No. I’ll take half of them. That will be enough. You wait here with the rest of them. Someone needs to guard this place against old women and peasants. And you can prepare my victory feast.’ He waves at the window. ‘There must be a few hovels left. Find me some new meat.’

Vhaal’s grin freezes on his face. After a pause, he gives a stiff bow and departs. I hear him barking out the call to muster as he strides down the passageway and before long I hear the braying of tuneless horns echoing along the battlements.

‘Will you leave straight away?’ I ask.

In reply, Hakh drags me out into the courtyard and within half an hour we’re mounted up and riding east across the steppe, with the spires of the Anvil disappearing into the haze behind us. We ride on huge, iron-clad monsters and I can feel evil simmering through the metal saddle beneath me. Death is rushing towards me now, but so is my chance; my one chance to strike a blow.

Chapter Five

Prosecutor-Prime Drusus Unbound

The voice is still there, whispering urgently at the back of my thoughts, but its power is gone. I’m no longer Drus Unaki, the man who let Ghuldiz burn; I am Drusus Unbound. I have been given a second chance. Sigmar’s heralds follow my command and I am trusted. Tylos has given me duty and hope and, by all the fire that burns in my wings, I will give him victory.

We’re flying so high that the Anvil looks like a nest of knotted serpents – a poisonous tanlge of guardians encircling the entire steppe with their crest of spine-like towers and countless crimson eyes. I lead my men into a dive and as the ground rushes towards us it’s hard to remain calm. These are the towers that encircled Ghuldiz and Tersoos. These are the fires that burned down those ageless, jasper halls. These are the serpents that took my life.

The voices in my head grow louder, but I refuse to listen.

As the final wisps of cloud part, I see the Anvil appear in lurid detail. It’s actually two walls – we are flying towards an outer curtain wall protecting a space like the outer ward of a castle. A hundred feet beyond that, a taller, inner wall rises up into the clouds. Two parallel lines of impenetrable rock. The whole structure is mind-numbingly huge and the towers that punctuate it are built around slender white spires, like huge, petrified talons. I remember my purpose and look back at the outer wall.

This will be easier than Tylos imagined.

The guardians of the Anvil are spilling out of their fortress. There are hundreds of the bare-chested berserkers we fought on the bridge – bloodreavers, Tylos called them – but they are striding out into the darkness as though preparing for a hunt. From my vantage point I can see my brother Stormcasts advancing through the Field of Blades towards them, but the bloodreavers are oblivious. I have to stifle my laughter.

White metal flashes in my peripheral vision as Prosecutor Sardicus approaches. His golden mask reveals nothing but I can hear his eagerness for battle.

‘Prosecutor-Prime,’ he calls out over the noise of the storm. ‘The Lord-Celestant said we would find the right moment to attack. Do we wait or do we strike?’

I look down at the bloodreavers, still oblivious to the danger. ‘I say we warm things up a little in readiness for our commander.’ Divine light tears through my body and forms hammers in my palms. The sensation is terrifying and wonderful. I’m a conduit for pure, unshackled vengeance. ‘I say we bring them Sigmar’s fire!’

I hurl the bolts down into the crowd at the gate and throw myself after them, summoning celestial fire from my fingers as I go. A chorus of war cries greets my words as my men dive too. A storm of light flies past me, slamming into the bloodreavers.

As I near the ground, it erupts with dozens of detonations. The bloodreavers are so close I can see the shock on their brutal, scarred faces, followed by outright fear.

I hurl another pair of hammers, filling the gateway with a plume of crimson dust, then seconds before crashing into the ground I swoop back up towards the clouds, screaming Sigmar’s wrath as the wind howls through my helmet.

The others do the same. When we reach a safe distance, we pause to look down at our work. The ground before the gate is a mess of charred craters, filled with wounded and dead. Twenty or so of the bloodreavers fail to rise, and many of those that do are carrying terrible injuries.

They slam the gates behind them but remain outside to roar and howl at us. Our attack has distracted them from the golden phalanx that is emerging from the Field of Blades. Before the bloodreavers have the chance to ready a defence, Tylos and the others crash into them, driving them back across the craters and bodies.

I lead my men over the outer wall to see how many bloodreavers are inside the gate. As we near the battlements I see movement and pause. At first I think it must be more bloodreavers, but the battlements themselves are moving, coming to life; shapes I mistook for gargoyles and grotesques rear their heads and twisted creatures of Chaos rise from the stone, bellowing and snarling as they fix their gaze on Tylos and the others. As they draw back their heads, like snakes preparing to strike, I sense a new kind of energy pooling around me.

I realise what’s going to happen, but too late. As I lead my men in another dive, aiming for the monsters on the wall, they unleash a torrent of blood from their crumbling jaws. Some of the crimson liquid hits us but most pours down on Tylos and the others.

They raise their shields seconds before they vanish inside a mushroom of red flame.

‘For Sigmar!’ I cry, launching a furious volley of thunder strikes at the wall. My retinues follow suit and several of the stone creatures explode. There are still dozens left intact though and, ignoring us, they vomit another tide of crimson at Tylos. The dome of red fire burns so brightly that I have to look away. One of my Prosecutors tumbles through the clouds, his armour trailing smoke and sparks as he tries to right himself.

I order Sardicus to his aid and lead the rest in another dive, blasting the stone monsters with so many hammer blows that the air starts to warp under the strain. Another of the daemonic shapes topples and I look back to the figures below.

The red cloud dissipates and there, scorched but unbowed, stands Tylos. At first I think no one has been harmed but, as Tylos leads his warriors forward to clash again into the bloodreavers, I see that several of the Stormcasts are left sprawled on the ground, their armour warped into odd, liquid shapes. I hear terrible cries of pain as the metal eats into their ruptured bodies, then lightning spears past me, enveloping them in white heat. When the light dims, the bodies have vanished.

We dive to join the battle but Tylos needs little help. The columns of light have ignited something in him. He crashes through the bloodreavers on Zarax, his armour blazing like a fallen star. For a moment I falter, awed by the sight of him. This is no longer a man. This is the God-King made manifest.

This is Sigmar bringing bloody redemption through Tylos’ willing flesh.

Chapter Six

Vhaal the Skinless,
Captain of the Blood Creed,
Executioner of Kyphanto

I taste your blood on my lips and your strength in my arms. I know that nothing else is real, Lord of Skulls. I see what gift you have offered and I will not refuse it. My spirit is ready. The hour of Vhaal approaches. Soon these pale shadows will fall away and I will join you in the Great Slaughter.

I hear the sound of battle through the gates and my blood surges in answer. Death is out there in the fields, screaming my name, but I hold my fury in check as the ranks of the Blood Creed line up behind me in the courtyard. Hakh has only left me with half an army but as they jostle into position, readying their axes and fixing their helmets into place, I know that all along the Anvil the other towers are emptying. Soon there will be thousands of puppets dancing to my tune. Nothing here is real, of course; not the Blood Creed nor those outside the gates. These talking sacks of blood are baubles, nothing more – tempting distractions that you have draped before me as a test. Even as a child, I knew that you and I alone were real. Before I could walk, I saw through the facade that surrounds me. Soon I will ascend and stand by your side.

Lord of Skulls, I know I am your son. Why else would you let Hakh be tricked away by that devious woman? Why else would you leave me this choice offering?

The outer wall is lit up with flames and embers and as I look up into the fumes I catch glimpses of gold and white, blazing wings.

‘Tell me again,’ I say, turning to the nearest warrior.

‘A golden knight,’ he replies, breathless after his run from the tower. He’s still fastening his helmet into place and I see the bloodlust in his eyes, but I know it’s only a pale mirror of my own true hunger. I watch him closely, hoping to catch the trickery in his words.

‘Maybe a king,’ he continues. ‘They’re all dressed in pretty gold suits, even the winged lightning wielders, but their leader looks like…’ He pauses, almost looking surprised or confused. ‘Like the paintings in the temple of Kaslov.’

That temple was a ruin long before we got to it, but his words only fuel my sense of destiny. This is the great lord that the witch was discussing with Hakh.

My scarlet lord, you have given me a chance to prove my worth. I understand everything. The great game nears its end. I thank you for this blessing and I give you my solemn oath: in this very hour that golden king shall give you his blood and I shall give you my soul.

The sound of battle moves closer to the gates and my men look expectantly to me for the order to advance. I won’t be fooled by such tricks. I know they would lead me astray if I let them. We must wait patiently and let you do your work. I can see you from here, pouring your fury down through the spirits on the walls. In their powerful shapes I see your form.

I look at the design that decorates the centre of the courtyard – hundreds of skulls hammered into the ground to create a stylised image of one enormous skull. Once I’ve torn apart this golden champion I will plant his fake heart in tribute. I will show you that I am ready to return to your citadel.

‘Wait,’ I snap, ordering my men to take up positions on either side of the gate. When the golden knights break through, the final act shall begin.

Chapter Seven

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

Blood-acid slams against my borrowed shield, hissing across the charmed metal. The blast hits me so hard that I’m almost forced from Zarax’s back, holding the shield over my head as the liquid forms a crimson dome around us. Most of my men do the same, but some are too slow. Just a few feet away, I see Liberator Arion tumble backwards, his shield torn away as the blast envelops him. His head warps like metal in a furnace and blood sprays from his gorget. The pain must be horrific but he does not cry out; he thrashes and rolls across the ground, unable to breathe, and clutches at the molten metal. The men nearest to him look on in horror, powerless to act as they crouch beneath their shields.

A figure races towards him through the madness – Boreas. He is holding his bone standard aloft as he runs, and power is radiating from it, blasting the acid away.

My brother plants the staff of his grim reliquary in the ground, lifts up one of his artefacts, a bone-handled knife, and starts writing invisible symbols in the air over Arion’s head as the Liberator paws at the congealed mess that used to be his face. A moment later, he ceases his thrashing and slumps back onto the broken ground, seeming to be at peace. He grips Boreas’ arm in gratitude.

The clouds part and light engulfs the pair of them as a column of lightning slams down into the ground. The Liberators standing nearby are thrown clear by the blast and the world is plunged into shadow by the brightness of Arion’s pyre. After a few seconds the light fades and when Boreas heads my way, there’s no sign of the fallen warrior.

‘What becomes of us when we fall?’ I ask Boreas as he comes to stand beside Zarax. ‘What have you done to him?’

He is too exhausted to speak for a moment and the storm is still crackling across his armour. Whatever happened between him and Arion has left him trembling and dazed. He watches the sparks dancing across his gauntlets.

‘I have…’ He pauses and closes his fist, extinguishing the light. ‘I only ended his pain, brother. Sigmar did the rest.’

He says nothing more on the subject and looks back at the Anvil.

‘We’re almost through,’ I say, jabbing Grius at the bloodreavers. ‘They’re trapped at the foot of the gates. Drusus and the rest of his Harbinger retinues are swinging back through the clouds, preparing for another attack on the gargoyles. When they strike, we’ll charge. We’ll slaughter the remaining bloodreavers and enter the Anvil. After that I will mount the walls and bring Sigmar’s judgement down on those stone horrors.’

The sky burns white as Drusus leads another attack. His Prosecutors form a dazzling ‘V’ as they dive from the heavens, hurling hammers at the walls. The torrent of blood ceases as the gargoyles are thrown back, enveloped in jagged arcs of light.

‘Advance!’ I cry.

Zarax hurls me forwards, bounding over charred, buckled limbs and leaping at the line of bloodreavers. As she locks her jaws around her prey, I bring Grius down into the first face I see.

Each hammer blow takes me further from my undisciplined past. Bones and teeth splinter around me as I advance with cold, inhuman precision. Zarax, meanwhile, is a vision of taloned, snarling fury. Her blue-scaled hide burns in the gloom and lightning pours from her jaws as she careers through the enemy lines.

The bloodreavers collapse before her in a shower of blood and broken weapons and I bring Grius down against the gates with a prayer. The runic hammer blazes like a star, a blinding fragment of Sigmar’s soul.

A splinter races up the centre of the door, glinting like quicksilver. Zarax roars and my men pause mid-strike, joining their voices to hers. The sound floods my mind and my second blow is twice as hard. As Grius hits the door again, it shudders beneath the blow and the crack widens to reveal rows of moonlit buildings.

Blood-acid rains down again as the gargoyles recover from Drusus’ attack, but Zarax and I are sheltered in the threshold and I swing my hammer for a third time. Grius burns with a flame so bright it lights up the whole doorway as it gives way.

My men roar as Zarax carries me through the splintering wood.

Their cheers falter as the dust clears and we see what lies beyond.

Gathered in the courtyard beyond, at the foot of the Anvil’s second wall, are ranks of red-armoured knights. As my vision clears I see that the guardians are heavily clad in suits of thick, brass-rimmed plate and their faces are hidden behind brutal, jagged helmets, all crowned with the icon of the Blood God. They wait in disciplined, orderly lines, and they’re huge – maybe as big as my own men. Standing ahead of them is what I take to be their captain. He’s as heavily armoured as the other knights but his head is uncovered and the reason is clear – his face is an angry mess of exposed muscle that he clearly wishes to display. As he strides confidently towards me he gives me the strangest look – a wry smile that implies we’re sharing some kind of joke. The idea that I could share anything with him turns my stomach but, before I can call the charge, Boreas steps through the broken gate and speaks.

‘There are too many,’ he says, looking up at me.

My men are clambering through the broken gate behind him, smashing the hole wider as they rush to escape the red death outside, but the crimson ranks make no move to advance. The one with a wound for a face is holding them back, studying us.

Boreas is shoved against Zarax as others crowd into the passageway. ‘Look at them,’ he says.

There are countless hundreds of these goliaths and they display a carefully drilled discipline quite unlike the lunatic barbarians on the bridge.

I look down at Boreas, unable to hide my anger. ‘Remember what we are, Lord-Relictor.’

I catch another glimpse of Boreas’ strange eyes and I see that he’s taken aback. For the first time since we landed in this hellish realm I’ve surprised my brother.

‘If you think we can’t break through by strength of arms,’ I continue, ‘use whatever secrets Sigmar has entrusted you with. This first strike against Chaos cannot falter, Boreas. Sigmar’s Stormhosts must be free to advance without fear of constant attack from behind. We will reach the Crucible of Blood and we will sanctify it.’ I reach down from Zarax’s back and grip his shoulder, hauling him towards me. ‘Forward is the only way.’

A clanging sound echoes across the vast courtyard as the red-armoured knights prepare to advance.

‘What would you have me do?’ he asks, an edge of pride in his voice.

I keep my tones level, not wishing to sound like the common street fighter I once was. ‘You carry death in you, Boreas, I can smell it. Bring it to our aid.’

‘I’m a storm-priest, Tylos, not a necromancer. Whatever you might remember from my past, I’m–’

‘Boreas!’ I wave at the mass of towers looming on the far side of the courtyard. ‘You’ve been to places I could barely dream of. Do what you were created to do.’ There’s no plea in my voice, only command.

He looks up at the Anvil and then back at me. ‘You’ll be stalled here for too long. When dawn comes you’ll still be battling through these dogs.’

As always, Boreas is infuriatingly insightful. I tighten my grip on his arm. ‘Then find us a way through.’

Horns blare out as the knights begin their charge.

I give an order and my men close ranks. A shield wall forms around Zarax and I turn to my rows of archers.

‘Seriphus,’ I cry, calling over the leader of my Judicators. I point at the steps inside the gate. ‘Take up positions inside the outer wall. Wait for my call.’

The Judicator leaps to obey, scaling the battlements and ordering his retinues to ready their bows.

‘Sigmar is with us,’ I say, looking back at Boreas as the archers take up their positions. ‘And I will win this battle’. I soften my voice. ‘But you must do whatever the God-King demands of you.’

He looks back through the broken gate at the Field of Blades and nods. ‘Hold them here. I will return.’

Then the battle engulfs me and Boreas is gone.

Chapter Eight

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

The guardians of the Anvil are no more human than we are. The air simmers and recoils from them as they approach, as if they are chiselled from hot coal. Their huge frames are bolstered by layers of red and brass plate and they smash into us like automata, animated by a rage so potent it pours off them like smoke. Blood warriors. Since Sigmar drove them back from the Gates of Azyr, their name has become infamous as Khorne’s most fearless attack dogs.

Zarax rears up and brings her claws down onto the first crimson-clad brute to reach us. I draw my runeblade, Evora. My heart swells at the sight of her intricate inscriptions. Like me, she is a holy weapon, forged in the heat of the stars. She sings in gratitude as I bring her round in a wide arc, slicing easily through shields, greaves and necks, toppling whole rows of Chaos warriors. Her voice is the sound of the heavens, a soaring, celestial chorus that rings out over the din of battle, elevating the bloodshed to the noble endeavour it should be. I join my voice to hers as we kill.

My Liberators hold steady under the weight of the attack, proud and determined behind their shields, an impassable wall of blue and gold. Their hammers meet with jagged, brutal axes and the air rings with the sound of breaking metal.

I see a flash of crimson. Something bolts through the crowd and slams into Zarax’s flank. She staggers to one side but I manage to stay on her back. I swing Evora down in another singing arc. She cuts through arms and faces and I follow her with Grius, swinging the warhammer with my other hand and crushing crimson helmets to a mangled pulp.

I fight with all the power and grace I learned in Sigmar’s golden halls, thrusting, lunging and pounding without ever fully losing myself to the violence. Faith is my lodestone, directing my every step. As Evora sings, I let her voice calm me. I feel like I’m taking part in a grand ceremony, rather than riding through a crush of armoured knights.

I order Liberator-Prime Castamon to advance and he leads his retinue with composed blows. The emotion I saw in him before is gone and he pounds through the blood warriors with cool, lethal efficiency. Every few paces, his shield wall drops and he strides forth, lashing out with his warhammer. A crimson-clad colossus attacks, swinging an axe at his throat. Castamon raises his golden shield, deflects the blade and drops the blood warrior with an armour-splitting blow.

Lines of blood warriors charge towards him but Castamon is already gone, swallowed by a wall of shields as his Liberators reform their phalanx. The enemy crashes uselessly against an impenetrable wall of sigmarite and the Liberators march on, implacable and unstoppable.

I ride towards Castamon, noticing something odd. However many times Castamon’s Liberators strike, the enemy aren’t falling back. My armour has turned as red as the enemy and my muscles are screaming with exhaustion, but I haven’t moved. I’m still just a few feet into the courtyard.

I take a moment to look around.

Castamon and the Liberators are still locked in their gleaming phalanxes – gilded fortresses, battered by tides of red and brass – but they haven’t gained an inch. However terrible the wounds we inflict, the enemy never falter. If I couldn’t see scarred, sunburned chins jutting out from their helmets, I would think they really were automata. They have no concept of pain and more of them are flooding into the courtyard all the time.

Zarax rears beneath me again as an enormous creature locks its jaws around her throat. She staggers under its weight and I see that it is a flesh hound of Khorne – an enormous reptilian thing, coated in red scales and armed with talons as cruel as Zarax’s own. As it attacks, it lets out a dread howl – a sound so full of animal bloodlust that it could only have come from the bloody plains of Khorne.

Sigmar’s wrath floods my limbs and I hurl the flesh hound back into the ranks of blood warriors. It crouches and roars, iron-hard spines bristling along its grotesquely muscled back, but before it can pounce, Zarax charges forwards and I slam Grius into its drooling jaws. White fire blossoms beneath its scales and it tumbles back into the enemy ranks.

As the flesh hound collapses into ash, the blood warriors crush around Zarax, grinding me to a halt with their armour-clad bulk. Grius and Evora do their work, surrounding me in a storm of sigmarite, and dozens of blood warriors fall away, but more pile in, careless of the wounds I am inflicting.

Then I see the lord with the skinless face wading through the battle towards me. He still wears that same, knowing smirk, but his arms are a frenzied blur as he hacks through his own men to reach me.

My heart quickens. This is my chance to behead this army and end the fighting so we can keep moving. Sigmar did not send me to fight for the Anvil. We should be far from here by now. As the lord approaches, I seize my chance.

‘Seriphus!’ I cry, standing in the saddle and raising my voice over the din so that the archers on the wall can hear me. ‘Now!’

A roof of white flame spreads overhead as the Judicators launch their lightning-charged bolts. The front row of blood warriors evaporates, replaced by an explosion of blood and dazzling arcs of power. Bodies are hurled into the air and a huge swathe of the army collapses.

Zarax is thrown backwards by the blast and, when she turns back to face the enemy, there’s no sign of the flesh-faced lord. The Judicators’ volley has had little effect other than that, though. Blood warriors are still pouring from the wall and the whole courtyard is now full of them.

‘Retributors!’ I cry, seeking another way to end to this deadlock. I smile as hundreds of the hammer-wielding paladins break ranks and line up before the phalanxes of Liberators. They step slowly, encumbered by armour that would crush a mortal man. Until now I’ve kept them behind the other Stormcasts. They carry no shields on account of their colossal two-handed weapons, but they still resemble a wall of metal.

The blood warriors finally pause, not afraid, but intrigued. As the paladins march to my side, the ground cracks beneath their weight and storm-charged air flickers over their amour.

While the enemy are momentarily thrown, I give a signal to the Judicators on the walls. Another storm of blazing arrows whirrs overhead and slams into the enemy. The blood warriors’ vanguard erupts in white flame and I order my paladins to attack. They pound across the courtyard – metal-clad titans with blazing hammers. Their blows land with supernatural force and another series of detonations rocks the enemy frontline. More arrows slam home. I order the phalanxes of Liberators to follow them.

The enemy are still reeling when the Liberators’ shields crash into them and finally we start to make some headway.

Zarax rears beneath me. Blood is streaming from her flank and several of her iron-hard scales have been torn away, but she roars lightning as she carries me back into the fray.

Chapter Nine

Lord-Relictor Boreas Undying

More than any of us, Tylos has been reborn. I’ve travelled so deep into the darkness that his soul is clearer to me than his flesh. Sigmar’s forges have made him anew; my brother is a celestial lord now, not the faithless sell-sword that tormented my youth. As I leave the Anvil and turn to the Field of Blades, I hear him leading the charge. I know he will fight with honour, but I wonder if he sees how close we are to disaster. His eagerness to match Vandus’ heroics could be a dangerous distraction. The Anvil stretches for miles across the steppe, and every minute Tylos spends fighting in that hell pit will see hundreds more blood warriors pouring from the battlements. This is not the battle we were sent to win – I must find a quicker way to end it.

As the clamour of battle fades behind me, I reach the solemn quiet of the Field of Blades, where skeletal hands clutch useless weapons in an eternal vigil. Tylos and the others recoiled at the sight of this place but as the cemetery chill reaches up through my boots, I feel a blessed peace. I almost relish this chance to turn away, to sink back into shadow.

I drop to one knee and take out the Thin Man. The jumble of claws and bone lies innocently in my palm. Such an ugly little thing and yet it contains incredible power – the power to bridge worlds.

I’ve toiled so long in the shadows that my memories play tricks on me, but some things remain painfully clear. I feel a rush of anger as I think of the man who gave me this gift, so many years ago. ‘One day you will wish to return,’ he had said. ‘Keep this as a parting gift.’ I had sworn I never would, but other, more powerful oaths have left their mark on me since then and I must crush my pride. Tylos is no longer my hot-headed young brother; he is my Lord-Celestant, an avatar of the God-King, and I must do whatever he needs of me – even if it means facing my oldest ghosts.

I grab one of the skeletal hands and prize the sword from its grip. The weapon crumbles at my touch and I push the Thin Man into the open hand, clenching the fingers around it in a fist. Some snap, but the relic stays in place. Then I hold my own hand a few inches from the bones and begin to pray.

The swords around me rattle as Sigmar’s tempest flickers in the dust. The sound of fighting coming from the Anvil grows fiercer, but I pray harder, summoning the God-King’s fire from the heavens. The dust becomes a whirlwind, spinning around me and cutting through the gaps in my armour. Finally, as my words become a howled song, the skeletal hand grips mine and the Thin Man turns to ash, his promise finally fulfilled.

Reality slips away.

Damp, bone-aching cold seeps through my armour as I enter the Realm of Death. Serpentine mist coils around me and I see bestial faces in the ether – spirit hosts, pawing at my armour, trying to wrap their deathless claws around my heart. An unholy chill seeps through my breastplate but such insipid souls are no threat to an emissary of the God-King. I grab one of my honour scrolls and mutter a prayer, driving them back with a powerful stream of litanies and oaths. They whir and spiral away from me, letting out thin, moaning wails as they tumble back into the shadows. As they fade from sight, I see how the heavy boot of Chaos has transformed the Tolgaddon Marshes.

Wherever I look there are cloud-scraping talons – Chaos citadels with brutal, triangular towers. They punctuate the horizon like a stone forest, spilling shards of crimson through the tumbling clouds of spirit hosts. I feel as though I am in the jaws of a beast. Hordes of bloodreavers are marching through the gloom, mustering for battle beneath crude, brazen standards bearing the sigil of the Blood God. They are accompanied by columns of smoke-belching monstrosities that could either be war machines, metal-clad beasts, or an unholy hybrid of both.

I tremble with rage as they barge past, screaming their obscene battle cries, but I have the sense to keep silent and stay in cover. The Thin Man has led me to a ditch full of brackish water, piled with mounds of armour and old clothes. It’s an undignified way to arrive but it gives me a moment to study my surroundings. I peer over the edge and see nothing familiar. The great charnel palaces that once filled the marshes have been destroyed. There are a few crumbling remnants of one of Nagash’s corpse cities, but they’re so defaced and ruined that I can’t work out where I am. It looks as though the Supreme Lord of the Undead has been usurped and driven from the marshes by a more potent power. If Nagash’s citadels have been overrun, what does that mean for the one I seek?

‘Where are you?’ I mutter, scouring the banks of wailing mist. Whatever has happened to the underworlds, my former master still lives, I’m sure of it. I can almost hear him, scratching away at his rolls of vellum – endlessly recording and reviewing, oblivious to the sound of his world falling down around his ears. I have no other option but to follow my instincts, so I wade off through the knee-deep mire in the direction that feels right.

I grimace as I barge through the floating mounds that surround me. They’re not clothes as I first thought, but corpses, bloated and deformed by the water. White, lifeless faces roll to stare at me as I shove the bodies aside, following the course of the ditch. Every few minutes I risk a glance over the top. As I near the fortress, I grow more alarmed. The Chaos bastion is built on a scale that defies nature. It’s so vast that clouds drift around its towers and the huge armies pouring through its gates resemble billows of glittering dust.

I’m starting to think I should head back to Tylos when a sound makes me pause. There’s something approaching from behind me. I can’t see through the gloom but I can hear the slurping, slapping sound of feet tramping through the mud and gore. I hurry around the next bend and freeze. Up ahead of me, there’s a figure hunched over the bodies, feasting on their ruptured flesh as if it were a glorious banquet. The creature is a stooped, grey-skinned horror, covered with open sores and threaded with writhing worms.

At the sound of my approach, the ghoul whirls around and stares at me with wild, rolling eyes. It’s carrying a half-gnawed femur, and at the sight of me it scampers through the filth, swinging the bone at my face.

My warhammer lands with such force that the ghoul’s skull collapses. It cartwheels back through the ditch, losing its makeshift weapon and collapsing into the bodies it had been feeding on. The blessed sigmarite of my weapon is engraved with holy tracts and as the monster tries to rise, its body collapses and burns under the weight of my faith, shrivelling and boiling into a pale soup that seeps away into the mud.

I’m now left in no doubt as to what is approaching from the opposite direction so I stride on through the bodies, keen to avoid making any more noise, but before I’ve taken more than a few steps, the bodies start to rise. Dozens of the corpses are revealed as wild-eyed ghouls, identical the one I just destroyed. They moan and gurgle as they lurch towards me.

My hammer flashes in the dark as I charge through them. There’s no time to stand and fight and no way to return. All I can do is race on and pray I reach my destination before I draw Khorne’s bloody gaze.

The ghouls swarm around me, rising from the mud and viscera like a pallid fungus. They’ve clearly been waiting for something to fall within their cadaverous reach, too afraid to venture out into the open.

Finally, a whole wall of grasping, broken-clawed hands slams into me, barring my way. I strike them down with furious blows but, eventually, they clamber towards me in such numbers that I’m driven up the wall of the ditch and out of cover.

The nearest of the warbands is less than a hundred yards away and, as I stumble into view, still pummelling the mob of leering ghouls, my golden armour flashes in the moonlight. I am seen.

Horns blare with renewed violence and there’s a great clattering of armour as a host of warriors turn to face me. At the head of the column there is a knight in thick, spiked armour. He bellows a command and his men break ranks, racing towards me with a deafening roar.

‘Where are you?’ I gasp, racing through the darkness. There’s nothing waiting for me but another mound of bodies. ‘You promised me a way back!’

The ghouls are butchered and trampled into the ground as the Chaos warriors bear down on me. I find myself surrounded by rows of heavily armoured killers. They slow as they approach, readying their brutal axes, intrigued by my strange armour.

I back onto a mound of bodies, my hammer raised before me, then laugh as I see what I’m standing on. Piled beneath me are the slaughtered remains of a library – charred remnants of books, trampled into the ash and mud. They are as familiar to me as the faces of my own family. I spent my youth cataloguing these ancient texts and I understand immediately what they mean. He has left me a way back – a way through the glamour that has shielded him from the Blood God. I grab a book and start to chant the old litanies, waiting for the necromancer to hear me.

The Chaos warriors howl in rage as I start to fade from sight.

It’s autumn, as the necromancer likes it, and as my boots sink deep into a mulch of muddy brown leaves I can’t help feeling a little impressed by what he has achieved. The Dark Gods have left their mark everywhere but here. Not a single brass tower mars the sombre beauty of his estates. The valley is lined only with leafless, rain-lashed trees and long, grasping shadows. The necromancer is ancient beyond even my understanding, more of a relic than the trinkets he collects, but despite everything that passed between us, I can’t deny that his learning has served him well. He claimed once that he was born in another age, long before the coming of Chaos. Such talk no longer seems quite so fanciful. Few have the power to mask themselves so completely that even a god cannot discover their presence. I never learned to pronounce my master’s true name, but the appellation I always gave him still seems apt: Mopus.

The fane itself was one of Mopus’ earliest finds. It’s the grandest of his homes and it squats at the end of the valley, as though ready to scuttle away; a crumbling mountain of faceted turquoise, forty feet tall, twice as wide and carved in the likeness of a colossal deathwatch beetle. Its compound eyes watch my approach with hunger and I pick up my pace, jogging through the whirling rain.

I hurry through the gloom and realise that not all of the shapes lining the valley are trees. I stop, peer through the drizzle and realise that there are hundreds of pale figures standing in rows around me, clutching ancient spears and staring away from the fane. They’re as motionless as the trees, but a cold light flickers in their shattered skulls. I step towards the edge of the path and see that the ranks of undead continue out of sight. There must be thousands of them, an army waiting patiently for a command. They pay no attention to me, but their presence gives me pause. Mopus was never one for wars. That was our great bone of contention – the wedge that drove us apart. It seems that many things have changed in the realm of the dead. I continue on my way with even more wariness. If Mopus is still the master of this place, then he is not the man I remember.

The entrance to the fane lies between the beetle’s broken antennae at the base of its head, and as I hurry towards the door a pair of milk-eyed cadavers step from the shadows to greet me. I would expect to be remembered at this place, but I lift my hammer just in case.

Mopus’ attendants twitch, as though tugged by invisible strings, then back away into the shadows, leaving the way clear.

I climb the steps to the towering slab of turquoise that passes for a door. It’s buried beneath a robe of dead ivy and clearly hasn’t been opened for months, so I am forced to tear and pull at the knotted mass until, finally, I uncover an iron handle. The door is locked, but the handle is so rusted that one good shove breaks it free and the door screeches open. A gentle sound seeps out through the gap: a whispered tapping, the sound of tiny pebbles pouring into a tin bowl.

I glance back and see the sentries staring blankly at me. They make no move to attack so I shove the door wider and stumble inside.

I’m met by a wall of clocks and mildewed books, stacked in mounds and filling the entrance hall. The smell of damp is overwhelming and there is something tragic about the scene. The books are rotting into an inseparable mass of gilt-edged pages and sagging, broken spines. It’s like the site of a mass burial. The clocks are in just as poor condition but, by some charm of Mopus, they are all still ticking. This is the tapping I heard – so many mechanisms working at once sounds like a distant hailstorm.

Cold blue light pours through the walls and washes over the dying books, revealing how tightly packed they are. For a moment I think there is no way to proceed, but then I spot a gap near the ceiling, to the right of the passageway. Time spent in the fane will bear no relation to the battle at the Anvil, but I cannot allow myself to dawdle. Already I can feel the lure of Mopus’ quiet cold, and I doubt the God-King would offer me a second chance at salvation.

I clamber up the wall of books and clocks, wincing at every torn cover, and reach the ceiling. The gap is too small but the air is so damp that I can shove my hammer through the barrier as though it were a bank of mud. After a few moments I manage to haul myself through the hole.

On the other side there are more piles of sodden books and broken timepieces, but I am able to crawl across them, just inches below the ceiling, until I reach the lintel of a wide doorway. I squeeze myself through the gap and into another room.

I slide down the slope of books but there’s still no sign of a floor. In this chamber, as well as more books, there are mounds of idols and fetishes. I see bronze, dog-headed statues and carved, wooden birds piled together with no obvious sense of order, but I notice that all of them carry Mopus’ tiny, handwritten labels.

It’s only as I approach another door that I notice I’m not alone. There are figures slumped amongst the relics. Some look up as I pass, but most remain intent on their work, poring over drooping pages or scratching at mouldering paintings. They’re as pale and lifeless as the monsters guarding the door, and the eyes that turn towards me are clouded and blue. Mopus has long made a habit of employing the studious dead and I start to feel more confident that my journey will not be wasted.

No one speaks so I hurry on. It’s a long time since I visited the fane, but I easily remember the way to Mopus’ chambers. If he lives, there is no question of his being absent. That much, at least, I can be sure of.

Another pair of hooded figures is watching over the entrance to his chambers, but, again, they back away at my approach, and I step through the door.

Everything is as I recall, a fact I can’t help but find comforting. Tapestries still cover every inch of the antechamber, so threadbare and thick with dust that the heroic scenes have faded into abstraction. The blurry, indistinguishable shapes, combined with the hazy, filthy air, make me feel almost drunk. That, along with the gloom, spare me from seeing most of the other things in the room. Crooked bookcases lean against much of the wall space, crammed with crumbling tomes and rows of jars. There’s enough light for me to see that the pale, half-formed shapes suspended in the jars are twitching and moving, excited by my arrival. There are countless other mysteries vying for my attention: abandoned sketches, broken pieces of scientific equipment and piles of bleached human bones, all covered with Mopus’ little labels.

I walk through into Mopus’ study and, to my surprise, the ancient scholar almost rises from his desk. He can’t quite force himself to leave his mouldering texts, but he sits in a more upright position than I have seen before, and actually turns to look at me. His face is as pallid and skull-like as ever, but his eyes flash victoriously as I approach his desk. His skin is so tightly stretched around his skull that it seems to shine in the candlelight. Every inch of him is tattooed with intricate, cabalistic designs – spidery blue wards of protection that enable to him to converse with even the most dangerous spirits. His gaunt face conjures up memories of our final fierce argument, but I can’t help feeling a little pleased to see that, amongst all this death, Mopus is still clinging to life.

I notice other figures loitering in the darkest corners of the room – ephemeral wraiths, draped in robes of pale mist, and newcomers to the fane. They drift a few feet above the dusty floorboards and I can see at a glance that Mopus has dragged them from the grave. The candlelight refuses to illuminate them fully, but I sense them staring at me with interest.

Mopus shows no anger as I reach his side, only pride that I could not stay away. Whatever passed between us, I sense I am forgiven. He waves me to a chair and grasps my hand as I sit. His long, filthy digits lock around my gauntlet and he gives me a smile of genuine friendship.

‘The Crucible of Blood,’ he says finally. His age-ravaged voice is hard to understand. ‘You kept me waiting for all these years, Boreas. You left me here alone, with no word of your whereabouts, take up a new religion, and then you embark on adventures without ever asking me for help. Why didn’t you come to me, Boreas? Can it really be that you no longer value my advice?’

I have few cards to play. The old scholar clearly knows why I’m here, and my new name. He probably knew my purpose before I did. I nod and then glance again at his spectral attendants. His tone is pleasant enough, but I’m in no doubt as to how much danger I’m in. His guards carry weapons of some kind, knives perhaps, but they’re too hidden in mist for me to make them out.

‘Look,’ says Mopus, shifting rotten books from the pile on his desk until he finds the volume he’s after. It’s a slim portfolio of prints and sketches and as he flicks through them he laughs. ‘Have you seen the thing?’ He jabs one of his crooked fingers at a particularly disturbing painting. It shows thousands of daemonic beings boiling in a vast pool of blood, surrounded by a rim of brass. Even so crudely rendered the daemons make a shocking sight.

I look away from the painting and he smiles at me again, making his face even more skull-like. ‘I imagine your new friends did not explain the whole story, did they?’ He traces his finger over the text beneath the image and reads aloud. ‘Beneath the ruins of the Nomad City stands the Crucible of Blood. It is an enormous brass skull. It is a gruesome relic of an ancient war, filled with the blood of a thousand mortals. It is charged with the power of the Lord of Rage.’

Mopus gives the robed figures a wild-eyed glance, as though expecting a reply. They give none, so he continues.

‘The skies above the Crucible of Blood are filled with the drifting fragments of the Nomad City. The ruins may once have been a great civilisation or perhaps, a single, fortified structure, crafted by forgotten beings in the time before Chaos.’

Mopus shakes his head in wonder as he stares at the painting. Then he turns to me, his eyes narrowing. ‘What have you got yourself embroiled in, young Boreas?’

So he doesn’t know everything; his omniscience clearly doesn’t stretch as far as the Celestial City. He doesn’t seem to know the significance of the crucible. So much has changed since we last met. Mopus, the great scholar of our age, is ignorant of our prize. His books have finally failed him.

He leans across his desk and, as he moves, his thin, parchment skin slides over his ribs. He peers through the eyeholes of my mask and runs one of his bony digits across the golden sigmarite of my armour, tracing the contours and sacred runes. ‘A uniform.’ The idea seems to amuse him and he glances mischievously at the figures in the shadows. ‘Boreas has joined a regiment.’

I say nothing.

‘But he has become no less taciturn,’ he laughs, flopping back into his chair and spreading his arms. ‘What do you want, boy?’

‘I do value your advice, Mopus, and I need your help.’

He keeps smiling but I sense that he also wears a mask. Behind that smile he’s worried. Another sign of how much things have changed. I can’t remember ever seeing fear in him before. He looks from me to the painting of the Crucible of Blood and then back at me again.

‘We all need help, Boreas,’ he says. ‘There’s still magic in the fane that those Chaos wretches could never hope to comprehend, but it’s failing.’ He grimaces and looks at his empty palms. ‘You know I have no appetite for war, but I have been forced to prepare for it just the same. I fear my solitude may soon be taken from me.’

I nod, thinking of the pale legions I saw in the valley.

‘And, after all these centuries, my second sight is failing.’ He waves his hand. The gesture draws a column of letters from the pages on his desk and they begin to whirl and spin. Mopus licks his ink-stained fingertips and jabs them at the luminous characters. After a while, images appear in the storm of words. I see Tylos and the others, battling furiously, trapped in the heart of the Anvil. I lean closer, trying to discern details.

‘They won’t break through.’ Mopus stares at the images, fascinated. ‘I can still see that much. Not without my help. Which, of course, is why you came.’ He peers at the tiny gold figures. ‘But what are they? I have scoured my libraries for a clue but found nothing.’ He turns to me, looking at my armour again. It must be galling for the great collector to see such an unfamiliar design. ‘What’s happening, Boreas? What have you become?’

‘The Age of Chaos is over.’ I try to keep my voice flat and impassive, but the words ring out through the darkness. ‘The Celestial Gates have opened, Mopus. The Lord of Storms has returned.’

Mopus licks his thin, cracked lips and glances at his shadowy entourage. ‘Sigmar?’ He frowns. ‘If that were true – if you are really his vengeful host – this is not the most impressive crusade, is it? You’re trapped in the Anvil, miles from the Crucible of Blood.’

‘We were thrown off course. We should have landed in the ruins of the Nomad City, right at the foot of the Crucible, but the storm was sent astray and we landed in the borderlands. We should already have completed our mission.’ I glance at him. ‘We were betrayed.’

‘So, Sigmar’s great homecoming ends with a whimper, just because you got lost?’ He softens his voice. ‘Come home, Boreas. Take off that ridiculous suit. Study with me, as you did before. Since you left, I’ve collected treasures you can’t imagine. Why get yourself embroiled in the wars of gods? They’ve always fought and they always will, but only we get killed. They’re not like us, Boreas. They don’t care about us. And there’s still so much to do here – so much to learn. There is knowledge here that you couldn’t dream of. If you joined me we could survive a hundred wars.’

‘Survival isn’t enough,’ I say calmly. ‘Murder and cruelty can’t just be ignored. Things have to change, and we have to change them. I won’t hide any more.’ I nod at the image of Tylos and the other Stormcast Eternals. ‘This is just a fragment. You’re seeing the tiniest glimpse of what will follow. We’re a raindrop at the cusp of a great storm.’

He keeps staring at me and I sense that I’ve touched something in him – some vestigial spark of honour. Then he slumps back into his chair.

‘I’ve lived too long to follow heroes, Boreas. I tried that once before. Their failure caused me more pain than all the gods combined. Change is not so easily brought about. I could get you past the Anvil, but I can’t see why I should. You’ve made it clear I no longer have your allegiance.’

For years I’ve suppressed my disappointment in him, the fury I felt at our final parting, but now it boils out of me. ‘You’re not the things you own, Mopus. You are not dead. You have knowledge and possessions here that could make a difference. You could end the suffering of thousands if you dared to apply the things you have learned. But you hide yourself away here, studying life so that you don’t have to live it.’

His expression hardens as I dig at the old wound. An awkward silence fills the room and I see something dangerous in his eyes. I curse my lack of tact – my anger may have cost me everything.

‘You’re not so changed, Boreas,’ he says after a while, staring at my armour. ‘For all your grand words, you still have an eye for interesting trinkets.’ He points at the box hanging from my waist. ‘You’ve not taken your hand away from that toy since you arrived.’ He studies the runes around its base. A few lonely threads of colour start pulsing in his cheeks. ‘It looks almost as old as I am. How important you must be that your new masters decorate you with such baubles.’

I back away, keeping a protective hand over the relic, and curse myself for revealing its importance.

I sink into one of the spectral figures. While we’ve been talking, they’ve formed a circle around the desk. They’re as cold and cruel as the spirit hosts outside. I struggle but I can’t force my way through and I’m reluctant to fight in front of Mopus. I turn to face the spirit. Its hood is deep but I see a gleam of skinless bone and grinning, bleached teeth.

It shoves me back towards Mopus with surprising strength.

‘Are we enemies, then?’ I growl, looking back to Mopus and glaring from behind my mask.

He still has a troubling brightness in his eyes. ‘Far from it. In fact, I’m beginning to think I might be able to help you. There’s more to life than friendship, after all.’ He stares at the bell jar. ‘If that’s as important as you obviously think it is, perhaps you have more bargaining power than you realise.’

‘Mopus,’ I growl, unable to hide my anger. ‘This means nothing to you!’

He laughs without smiling and I see that I’ve lost all hope of reasoning with him.

‘By the gods,’ he says. ‘You are eager to keep it. It must be very special. Why were you never this interesting when you were hanging off my coat tails?’

I can see his pulse racing angrily beneath his translucent skin. ‘If you give me that trinket,’ he continues, ‘the Anvil will be nothing more than a bad memory. You and your shiny soldiers can march on to fight whatever hopeless battles you choose. In fact, I’ll ensure your safe passage to the very mouth of the Crucible of Blood. Nothing shall bar your way. I’ll see to it. My reach is long. I’m sure you remember that much about me.’

‘Anything else,’ I say.

The fury in my voice just makes his eyes gleam all the more.

I feel like smashing the room apart. Without the Kuriat, capturing the Crucible of Blood will be impossible. Sigmar’s artisans spent years forging an icon that could reclaim the realmgate, and I know Mopus is only demanding it through spite. He has no idea of its true worth.

I’m about to storm out when I see the swirling image of battle still raging over Mopus’ desk. Tylos and the others are fighting with all the nobility and heroism I would expect, but the wall of blood warriors before them is impenetrable and growing larger all the time. Khorne’s legions are flooding from the surrounding towers, cramming the courtyard with a forest of axes. My head pounds. To give away the Kuriat means defeat, but Mopus is my only chance at breaking that bloody deadlock. For all his faults, Mopus is not a liar. If he says he will ensure our passage, then he will. If I refuse, Tylos will still be mired in battle when the sun comes up. And then all will be lost anyway.

When Mopus speaks again, his voice is cold and flat. ‘If the God-King is all you believe him to be, Boreas, what does it matter? Is there any deal you can make here that will hold him back?’

He’s mocking me, but he’s right. We must survive the Anvil and there is another way. ‘Forgive me, Tylos,’ I mutter as I unclasp the bell jar from my belt. I stare at it for a moment then reluctantly drop it into the necromancer’s grasping hands, whispering a prayer as I do so.

He tears off the lid and stares at the still-beating lump of black meat.

‘What will you do to the Anvil?’ I demand, all thoughts of friendship forgotten. ‘When will we be free to advance?’

He gives me a brief, unreadable look, before turning back to his desk and his endless reading. ‘It’s done. You should hurry. You’re missing all the fun.’

Chapter Ten

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

Sigmar’s light envelops me, blazing white, blue and finally crimson as it cooks our enemy alive. As the paladins advance in their hulking, star-forged armour they dwarf the surrounding Liberators, and each blow from their massive lightning hammers rocks the courtyard, scattering blood warriors and smashing craters in the ground. They look like gods torn from the heavens and as I lead them into the enemy, the ground shatters beneath their wrath. Hundreds of my Liberators are wounded, limping and staggering as they lash out with their hammers, but they hold their formations and advance close behind us.

Zarax tenses beneath me and unleashes another bolt of celestial fire. Finally we’re making some headway. The lines of Chaos knights are thinning and drawing back. The paladins are clearly too much for them. I wave the army on as Zarax tears into the reeling enemy warriors.

Only at the last minute do I realise that this is too easy; too quick. My instinct screams out at me that we’re being tricked and I shout an order, halting the advance.

As the Liberators lock their shield walls back into place, I see that I was right. The space that opened up before us is not the sign of a retreat. The smirking Chaos champion is ordering the bulk of his army to back away from us, making way for some new strategy. He barks out a command and his army parts, creating an avenue of armour and axes.

The ground judders as though a stampede is approaching. From my vantage point on Zarax’s back, I am the first to see the cause of the thundering sound.

Hundreds of skinless horrors charge from the opening in the enemy ranks, pounding across the courtyard towards us. They’re all eight or nine feet tall and lashed in glistening, blood-slick muscle. Tentacles burst from their raw, wound-like flesh as they hurtle towards our lines. We now have blood warriors on either flank and these newcomers charging us head on.

I act fast, ordering the Prosecutors into the fray. Drusus leads them over the battlements, dodging blasts of crimson from the walls as he hurls his lightning-charged hammers at the monsters.

More detonations rock the Anvil and the world turns white, but when the blaze dims, the monsters are still there. I manage to cry ‘Charge!’ seconds before they wade into us.

Revolting tentacles lash out from their armoured shoulders, hammering down against our rows of shields. Dozens of Liberators are forced to their knees but others rush to take their place.

Zarax does not wait for me to spur her on; she bounds forwards, crashing through the golden ranks of Stormcast Eternals and fastening her jaws around the head of the nearest monster. I bring Grius down into the head of another and, as it reels away from me, trailing blood from its obscene maw, a paladin pounds through the crush and lands his blazing, two-handed hammer between its cloven feet.

The creature is eviscerated, but the explosion also jolts Zarax to one side; she staggers, almost throwing me from her back.

Bodies crash into my steed and the echo of the blast grows louder. The ground shakes harder as the noise becomes a deafening rumble and I ride on through the scrum of bodies.

The monsters have forced us back through the archway. Hundreds of my men are now outside the Anvil, being driven slowly back towards the Field of Blades.

I yell a command but my words are drowned out by the rumbling noise. It sounds like the world is being torn in half. The tremor is now so violent that the walls around the gatehouse are crumbling and splitting. I look up, expecting to see the crimson moon overhead again, but the sky is empty.

Then I see Drusus. His incandescent wings hurl him through the darkness, lighting up the expressionless masks of the other Prosecutors.

‘Pull back!’ he cries, catching sight of me.

I shake my head, outraged by the suggestion of retreat, but then look up in shock. Weapons and shields are lowered as everyone in the passageway takes in the bizarre sight unfolding within the Anvil.

The cloud-high spikes that jut out of the watchtowers have started to move and the battle is forgotten as we all turn to stare. The rumbling is now so loud the cause is unmistakable: the Kharvall Steppe is in the grip of an earthquake. The huge talons around which the Anvil has been built are juddering like wind-lashed trees. We’re forced back, reeling out of the passageway as it collapses around us, filling the air with dust and spinning fragments of rock. A few hundred of the Chaos knights stagger into the Field of Blades with us and we quickly despatch them, but most remain trapped in the huge crush of bodies that fills the courtyard.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ says a voice from behind me.

I look down from Zarax to see Boreas striding through the Field of Blades. He looks no different, but as he reaches my side the scent of death pours from him. He reeks of the grave.

‘What have you wrought?’ I ask, looking from my brother to the tumult that surrounds us.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ he says, ‘we must back away from the Anvil.’

‘This is our only path.’

‘Trust me,’ he says and there is an uncharacteristic note of urgency in his voice that makes me listen.

‘Fall back!’ I cry, pointing Grius at the Field of Blades.

We barely make it clear in time. As my army floods into the rows of broken swords, the rumbling sound behind us becomes deafening: an oceanic roar followed by masonry whistling past my ears. As huge chunks of stone slam into the ground all around me I glance back and see what Boreas has done.

The talons at the centre of the watchtowers have risen into the sky, like the shoots of a strange plant. As they rise they’re tearing the Anvil apart, creating a new wall of dust and crimson light. As the spikes rise higher I see that they form the spine of an enormous fossilised serpentine skeleton – a snaking mass of ancient bones big enough to dwarf a mountain.

‘They never knew,’ cries Boreas, over the din. ‘They built the Anvil on the back of a fossil.’

I try to speak, but my words are lost beneath a new sound. As the mountainous, twisting skeleton rears up into the clouds, shrugging off the Anvil like a coat, it opens its jaws and bellows. The sound is unbearable, a cry of torment so loud that my ears ring when it ceases.

The ground rolls like a storm-lashed sea and whole towers fall from the sky. I’m blinded by dust and deafened by falling rocks, but my mind is racing. The blood warriors were still inside the courtyard. Nothing could survive this. I see Boreas up ahead and stare at him. Who could summon such a thing from the grave? What has my brother become?

Chapter Eleven

Vourla – High Priestess of the Steppe

We emerge near the shore, slipping from the fumes like a troupe of ghosts. Smoke whips up over rippling basalt, coating our metal steeds in ash and making us all gleam in the moonlight. It’s less than an hour since we rode out from the Anvil and we’re dead already; Hakh just doesn’t know it yet. I find it hard to suppress a victorious smile. The warlord rides on, blinded by his lust for power, carrying me behind him through the blazing heat. Tylos must be attacking the Anvil by now and I thank the fumes for the eerie, muffled quiet. If Hakh realised my trick, he might still have time to return and fight a battle he could win. I’m not going to give him that chance.

The Blood Creed ride behind us, the hooves of their hideous mounts crunching across the black rock. They make a monstrous sight, but it won’t make any difference. Nothing will survive what lies ahead. Not even Tylos and his gleaming host. As I recall his noble figure striding through the battle I feel a trace of guilt, but quickly suppress it. I didn’t choose Tylos’ path – I’m just turning it to my advantage.

Shapes loom out of the smoke and I gasp. The lakeshore is crowded with hulking beasts. They’re crouched menacingly on the rock, as though about to charge.

Hakh grunts with what might be laughter and rides on.

As we near the shapes I see that they’re not creatures but buildings – hovels, built in the shape of enormous horned heads. They’re all painted blood red and, as we walk past the mouth-like doorways, terrified faces peer out at us. There are few survivors of the old kingdoms left but some still eke out a pitiful existence as slaves and lackeys for Hakh and his ilk.

‘My kinsmen,’ I mutter.

As they realise that the Blood Creed hasn’t come for them, a few dare to wander out into the moonlight and I see their strange outfits. They’ve made costumes from scraps of wood in an attempt to impersonate the monsters they’ve based their homes on. They wear horned, wooden helmets, painted to resemble brutal, bestial faces. They look so absurd that I would laugh, if not for the pitifully deranged expressions on their faces. My beloved people have descended into superstition and barbarity. Khorne has broken their minds as completely as he has broken their land.

Our destination looms into view – a blackened fort, a hulking slab of scorched metal layered with dozens of smoke-belching chimneys and oil-spewing pipes. The artifice of the Blood God may be graceless, but it is powerful. I feel a growing nausea as we near its grumbling walls. Unlike the towers of the Anvil, the fort leans back at a drunken angle, as though straining against the huge chains that link it to the bubbling lava. The chains are each thicker than Hakh’s chest and there are so many of them that they form a kind of rattling skirt, spreading out from one side of the tower.

There is only one door and Hakh strides towards it, climbing a row of steps that circle the tower’s base. He leaves his army behind and drags me along with him. There’s nowhere I could run even if I wished to, but Hakh won’t let me out of his sight. As we wind around the scarred rock, I get a better look at the strange machinery that adorns the metal bastion. Illuminated by the hellish light of the lake is a vast collection of gears and spindles, scorched and blackened but still intact and coated in thick black tar. The chains are threaded through various wheels and jammed in place by hunks of rusted iron. I’ve seen such infernal engines in use before and I prayed never to do so again.

After several minutes, Hakh reaches the door – a brutal riveted slab of brass tall enough to admit a giant but with no obvious handle. Next to the crudely wrought door is a stone plinth, topped with a long, curved horn.

Hakh glances at me, then pounds the door.

The clanging echoes through the tower and soon I hear the slamming of doors and the clattering of armoured feet on metal walkways. After a few moments, the door swings inwards with a grudging moan. We’re greeted by the smell of old machines and rotting meat.

There are figures in the gloomy entrance hall – more of the brutish, armour-clad Blood Creed – and one of them steps out into the moonlight. I’ve met Khorlagh the Keeper once before but familiarity doesn’t lessen the shock. He’s almost as massive as Hakh but, rather than weapons, he carries the brutal tools of his trade. His bloodstained armour is adorned with billhooks, iron staves and thick, studded manacles. In his hand he clutches a jagged trident, warped and glowing with heat, as though recently drawn from a furnace. Tucked into his belt is a cruel, barbed whip. It’s not the brutal implements that make me shrink away from him though; it’s his skin. It is corpse-white, marbled with indigo streaks, and sags away from his body like an ill-fitting suit, revealing glimpses of the glistening flesh beneath. The effect is made all the more disturbing by his oddly gracious manner. He performs a ridiculous, formal bow and then gestures towards the open doorway.

‘My Lord Hakh,’ he says, his words turned into a moist rasp by his flapping, bloodless lips. ‘What an honour. What an honour indeed.’ He glances back at the figures loitering inside the tower. ‘I received no word from Vhaal that you would be inspecting the fort. We have made no preparations.’ He tries to tidy his face, tucking his skin back into place and smoothing it down like a courtier adjusting his wig.

‘Get us across,’ says Hakh, nodding at the ranks of knights gathered below.

Khorlagh frowns and then laughs. ‘For a moment there I thought you meant you were going to the crucible right now.’ His laughter causes his skin mask to sag again. ‘But of course you don’t mean that.’ He waves us inside again. ‘You’ll have to excuse our lack of preparation. You can use my chambers to rest until it’s safe to make the crossing.’

Hakh grabs Khorlagh by the arm and hurls him towards the brass horn. ‘Now.’

Khorlagh looks shocked. ‘My Lord, we can’t cross now. It’s nearly dawn.’

Hakh lets go of me and clutches his sword in both hands. ‘Are you the only one here who can take me across?’

Khorlagh briefly shakes his head, but then he sees sense and nods. ‘Yes, My Lord!’ He waves his trident at the lake of lava ‘No-one else can control them. Without me, passage is impossible, I assure you. I’ve spent long decades mastering the techniques and understanding the–’

Hakh silences Khorlagh by raising his sword a little higher.

‘Of course.’ Khorlagh turns to the horn.

He swings the mouthpiece to his lips and a harsh braying sound fills the air. Khorlagh’s lungs seem bottomless and the noise grows to an unbearable volume. I clamp my hands over my ears and almost topple down the steps, but Hakh drags me to his side.

Finally, Khorlagh lets go of the horn and staggers back from its stand.

For a while, there’s nothing but the echoes of the horn blast, but by the time Hakh has led us both back down the steps, a great din is booming out from the walls of the tower. I hear the rattle of machinery lurching into life and the roar of huge furnaces. The narrow windows spill crimson light out into the darkness – daemonic eyes, opening one by one.

Whatever engines are contained in the tower are so powerful that the ground beneath us starts to judder and shift. Geysers of oil and smoke burst from the ground and the pipes that go down start crackling as energy blasts through them.

‘How long?’ asks Hakh, ignoring the tower and staring out at the lake.

‘Not long,’ mutters Khorlagh. ‘The beasts do not dare keep me waiting.’ A little pride creeps into his voice. ‘Such monsters are difficult to control. Many died before I managed to perfect the machines. Too much power and they’ll die. Too little and we’ll die.’

I wish that I could take his trident and plunge it into his chest. Whatever creatures are out there, they deserve a better fate than to be tormented by Khorlagh’s sweaty hands.

Khorlagh catches my furious expression and stares, as though seeing me for the first time. Hakh doesn’t notice; he’s too busy watching the cluster of chains that have begun winding back in from the lava. The lake hisses and booms as the metal lurches from the depths, glowing and sparking as it rises.

Khorlagh smiles proudly as his machines do their work. A few hundred feet away an island of coiled, scratched brass rises, an entire headland wrought of spiralling, pockmarked metal. As the chains drag it towards us I see Khorlagh’s monstrous slaves: towering, ox-headed beastmen, with brutal, swooping horns and four arms, all lashed to the sides of the metal island. There are hundreds of them heaving the great disc of brass from the boiling lake. Their bodies are crackling and smoking like roasting meat.

‘Ghorgons,’ says Hakh, with a hint of respect in his voice.

Khorlagh nods proudly.

‘How do they survive?’ I ask. ‘Why doesn’t the lava burn them up?’

Khorlagh nods at the pipes and chains joining the tower to the lake. ‘These engines have girded them with the wrath of the Blood God. It doesn’t protect them from the pain, but it certainly keeps them moving.’ He laughs and pats his whip. ‘They’re more daemon than beast now, but they wouldn’t dare defy me.’

‘How will we ride it?’ asks Hakh, staring at the quickly approaching island.

Khorlagh laughs. ‘With care. And getting on isn’t the only challenge.’ He points his trident at the clouds of ash overhead. ‘When my servants rise, they always bring a crowd with them.’

I look where he’s pointing and see nothing but embers, falling from the night sky.

Hakh clearly sees something more. ‘Ready your axes,’ he bellows, looking back at the Blood Creed. ‘We’re going to have some sport.’

‘I must prepare for the landing,’ says Khorlagh, heading back into the tower, yelling orders as he goes.

The ghorgons make a horrific sight as they haul the metal to shore, straining and thrashing at their bonds as gangways hurtle down from the tower, locking the island into place. Khorlagh’s men dash back and forth through the lava spray, acting out a lethal dance as they fasten more hooks and chains onto the limbs of the giant beastmen.

Then, suddenly, with a grinding screech, one of the ghorgons breaks free. It charges through the lava, bellowing and making straight for us. Dozens of Khorlagh’s men are smashed from the walkways as they try to halt it, thrown to their deaths in the lava below.

The ghorgon reaches the shore and does not pause, still running straight at where Hakh and I are waiting. I back away but Hakh just glares at the monster. It towers over him but he looks at it as though it’s no more dangerous than a stray dog.

Khorlagh cries a command and grappling hooks blast out from the walls of the brass tower. They slam into the ghorgon with such force that they punch through its chest and send it hurling back the way it came. It crashes to the ground, lifeless.

I glance at Hakh, wondering if the attack has deterred him in any way, but he barely seems to have noticed. His gaze is still locked on the far shore and the tantalising glint of brass that lies beyond the walls of the crater. I’ve completely ensnared him. My heart races but I try to calm myself. It’s not done yet. My visions have misled me in the past.

After what seems to me a painfully long time, Khorlagh’s slaves succeed in pinning the island down under a forest of staves, chains and walkways. The ghorgons heave and roar, unable to break their bonds, and Khorlagh appears from the tower, his skin-mask in complete disarray.

‘Be quick, my lord,’ he cries, waving us towards the walkways and rushing to meet us there. He points at the clouds. The embers now look more like shooting stars, rushing towards the lake. ‘We must board before they attack.’

As we climb across ramparts and onto the trembling jetties I see crowds of Khorlagh’s slaves hanging from chains as they try to hold the ghorgons in place. As they crank their gears and shove their levers, the bonds tighten, finally silencing the monsters’ feral cries.

We’re only halfway across the gangway when there’s a scream of grinding metal and we are all thrown off our feet. Several of Hakh’s knights are hurled into the lava and, for a moment, I think I might follow them, but Hakh still has hold of me.

Another one of the ghorgons has broken free and is thrashing from side to side.

More slaves are thrown to their deaths before Khorlagh can reach the scene. He and several of his lackeys arrive carrying a long pipe that ends in what looks like a diamond harpoon. They fire the point deep into the ghorgon’s thick neck and it drops from view.

As they run back down the gangway, Khorlagh waves at figures lining the battlements of the brass tower. There is a flash of sparks and flame as they activate another machine and send a bolt of energy down the pipes. The metal crackles with power and the ghorgons twitch. The air crackles as they start to heave the island back into the lake.

Khorlagh grins as he runs back up the walkway, waving us on, towards the centre of the island.

The heat makes me feel sick and embers settle on my face as I run, scorching my skin, but the Blood Creed do not falter. Khorlagh leads us up an incline until I see where he’s taking us. There’s a scorched, blackened hole blasted right in the centre of the metal island. It has created a kind of walled enclosure lined with jagged terraces and trailing masses of chains. Khorlagh and his men wave us down into the scorched pit but the Blood Creed need no instruction; they flood down into the hole and begin fastening the chains to their armour. Hakh drags me down with him and binds me to his jagged plate armour with a thick chain.

We’re barely settled when Khorlagh gives another signal, eliciting more blasts of energy. There’s a clanging din as the Blood Creed are thrown to their knees, and I’m forced to cling onto Hakh’s armour. For a terrifying moment, I think we’re going to plunge beneath the lava, but the furious ghorgons keep the metal above the surface as it powers back out into the lake. Heat pours over me and I can’t seem to catch my breath. I try to rise and cry out, but then the world turns black.

When I come to, I’m on my back, looking at a mixture of stars and spinning embers. Hakh has gone, but I’m chained securely to a shard of heat-warped brass. At first, I think I must be delirious, the scene is so nightmarish. I’m surrounded by the howling, grunting ranks of Hakh’s knights, and they’re fighting for their lives. The air is teeming with huge, ferocious animals – snarling, feline monsters with great leathery wings and broad, slashing claws. Before my books were burned I spent long hours studying the creatures of myth and legend, and a name tumbles from my lips: manticores. They’re roaring furiously as they dive, tearing Hakh’s warriors from the metal, and feeding on them like gulls fighting for scraps.

The more the manticores kill, the more enraged their shrieks become. They hurl corpses into the lava and roar with bloodlust.

The manticores are almost as massive as the ghorgons but the Blood Creed are inhuman and utterly fearless. After the initial shock, they soon start to revel in the slaughter. They laugh at the terrifying creatures as they cut them down. Hakh has unshackled himself and climbed to the lip of the silver crater, surrounded by fumes and sparks. He’s like a captain at the prow of an infernal ship, howling as he cuts the manticores from the sky.

The beasts fight on, berserk, but the end comes quickly. As the last of them plunges to a fiery death, I lie there on the scorched metal, shaken by the horror my world has become. Chaos has tainted every part of the Khavall Steppe. Everyone I ever loved died at the hands of Hakh’s armies. Is revenge really enough?

As Hakh’s knights celebrate their victory I can think of nothing but Tylos, striding towards me through the flames, blazing with valour.

Chapter Twelve

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

As the Anvil entombs our foes, the fossil that destroyed it whirls away, leaving a tornado of dust and rubble as it hurtles across the steppe.

‘Follow it!’ cries Boreas, struggling to be heard over the din, battling through the falling debris to reach me.

The rest of my army emerges from the swirling clouds of dust, bloody but unbowed – looking for my command. As they stagger from the wreckage towards me, I’m distracted by the skeletal colossus filling the sky, blocking out the moonlight and shedding towers the size of mountains. Truly, this realm is full of wonders.

‘Hammers of Sigmar!’ I roar, rising up in my saddle and pointing Grius at the disappearing fossil. ‘Witness a miracle! Witness the power of the God-King.’

Boreas staggers to a halt nearby and the rows of expressionless masks turn to face me.

I keep Grius pointed at the enormous skeleton crashing across the steppe.

‘The realms will kneel no more!’

I bring Grius and Evora together over my head and they erupt in a ball of holy fire. Faith and fury pour through my skin and armour, surrounding me in a blinding nimbus of light. ‘For the God-King!’ I cry, as Zarax rears beneath me, spewing lightning from between her gaping jaws.

The Stormcasts reel away from me, shaking their heads in wonder, even Boreas. Then, as Zarax tears off in pursuit of the skeleton, I hear them echo my war cry and join the chase.

At first the going is slow, as we struggle over the ruins of the Anvil. Most of its defenders are buried beneath a landslide of broken masonry, but every few feet I see a grim reminder of the warriors who seemed so unstoppable a few minutes earlier: twisted, bleeding hands jutting up from the rocks and lifeless faces, staring up at the sky, their skulls sheared apart. I allow Zarax to hurtle past most of them but there is one corpse, skewered on a fallen spire, that catches my attention. I rein Zarax in and look down at the still muttering warrior. It’s the champion with the skinless face. His body has been torn almost entirely in two by the piece of masonry but he’s still clinging to life.

At the sight of me he laughs and tries to rise, but he only succeeds in pouring his viscera across his broken legs.

‘You do not exist,’ he gurgles through a mouth full of blood. ‘The Blood God and I–’

Before he can say more, Zarax roasts him alive with a blinding flash of lightning. I make the sign of the hammer as he crumbles into ash, then urge the dracoth on.

As I leave the ruins behind I see that Boreas’ warnings were not exaggerated. The fossilised serpent is heading directly east, towards a shimmering line of fire that stretches across the entire horizon.

‘Lake Malice,’ I say out loud, recalling my brother’s description of the impassable lake. I would never let Boreas know, of course, but I have no idea how we will cross this final hurdle. Even god-forged Stormcast Eternals cannot simply wade through lava.

As it nears the lake, the skeleton is lit up in red and gold and I have the strange sense that we’re chasing a lost soul, plunging into the depths of the underworld.

I rein Zarax in and allow the others to catch up. Boreas is at the fore and I’m about to praise him for destroying the Anvil when he speaks.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ he says. His voice sounds angry rather than pleased. ‘Our passage through the Anvil was not bought cheaply.’

‘I understand, Boreas.’ I glance at the quickly disappearing monster. ‘Sigmar sees all. Whatever pain you’ve endured–’

‘Tylos, you don’t understand.’ He glances down at the relics hanging from his armour. ‘The price was the Kuriat.’

I can’t hide my shock. ‘The heart? Boreas, what do you mean?’

‘I bought our passage with it.’ He steps closer. ‘It was the only way. We’re almost out of time. The tempest was sent astray. If we’d spent any longer trapped in the Anvil–’

‘Yes,’ I interrupt. ‘I understand.’ Anger pounds in my chest and it takes all my strength to keep my voice calm. The Kuriat was the key to the Crucible of Blood. Without it, there’s no way we can seize control of the realmgate. For the first time since we landed, I feel the ghost of my past rising to challenge me. I grasp the hilt of my sword in an attempt to steady myself. I hear a harsh voice at the back of my thoughts: the brutal, honourless killer I was before the Lord of Storms tempered me. I grip the hilt tighter until my heart steadies.

Boreas watches my hand on the runeblade.

‘I had no choice,’ he says.

The rage passes. I am as true as Evora’s blade. I dismount.

‘Boreas, do you trust in Sigmar?’ I place my hand on his shoulder.

He nods.

‘Then trust in me. We both know what we must do.’

He grips my arm. ‘Brother,’ he begins, ‘I swear that there was nothing else–’

‘I know,’ I reply, returning his grip. ‘And we both knew it might come to this.’ I manage to keep my voice level as I consider the path left open to us. ‘There can be no return.’

Before either of us can say more, an explosion tears the night open. Golden light flashes in the polished metal of my men’s masks. Boreas and I both turn to study this latest miracle.

The serpent has thrown its entire length across Lake Malice. The liquid sprays and hisses over bones as big as mountains and it is enveloped by a liquid heat haze.

‘You bought us a bridge,’ I say, turning back to Boreas with a laugh of disbelief.

He nods and, despite everything we face, I hear laughter in his voice too. But then he becomes serious again. ‘Not for long, brother.’

I follow his gaze and see what he means. Even through the haze I can see the skeleton smouldering and warping where it lies in the lava. As we stare, it raises its fanged skull and lets out a ghostly roar.

‘Move!’ I cry, leaping back into the saddle and waving Grius at the lake. ‘The Lord-Relictor has bought us a passage to victory. Our journey ends on the far shore.’

Zarax leads the charge, speeding me across the black rocks. Boreas and the others rush to follow as Drusus leads the Prosecutors overhead, scouting the night sky for signs of attack.

By the time we reach the shore, the skeletal serpent has left a trail of carnage. The area is littered with strange architecture – weird, domed houses built in the shape of bull-headed monsters, destroyed by the giant fossil. Zarax vaults over broken horns and shattered snouts. As we career through the strange scene, I get my first glimpse of those we’ve come to save: emaciated, wide-eyed mortals, cowering in outfits as ridiculous as their homes. They make a tragic sight and I raise my head, determined to show them what humanity can be.

As we near the lava, I see the remains of a bastion that must have been crafted by the same brutal hand as the Anvil. The smashed remnants show signs of jagged, taloned battlements and thick, brass walls. On the side facing the lake there is a pile of broken machinery – wheels and pulleys that were previously linked to great chains, now all gone, torn free by the impact of the bone serpent.

Zarax pounds on. As we near the bubbling lava, an intense wave of heat penetrates my armour. The skeleton is sinking fast, the fossilised remains slumping and snapping as the lava devours them, and I’m about to cry out a warning when Zarax makes the leap. The fossil’s tail holds as her great, scaled bulk crashes down on it, and the Liberators follow close behind, clambering onto the splintering ivory arch as though they were simply crossing a brackish stream. Again, I’m hit by the incredible charge I’ve been entrusted with – what kind of warriors would follow me across this searing heat, with death only a single misstep away? Only those born of the God-King’s immutable will.

Unlike the others, I have only to hold my nerve as Zarax carries me towards the far side. As the bones jolt and crack under her weight, gouts of smoking lava lash out, but Zarax has the heat of stars running through her veins and she charges on, dodging every blast the furnace can throw at us.

Boreas’ fossil has lowered its head and I can clearly see our goal ahead – a flash of moonlit brass, glimpsed over a ridge of basalt. The Crucible of Blood is painfully close, but so is the dawn. The dazzling lava beneath me makes it impossible to be sure, but I can’t help thinking that the sky is getting lighter.

‘Faster!’ I cry, turning back to my men. They’re already showing god-like heroism by hurling themselves over these bones, but I will not face Sigmar as a failure. ‘We have to reach the Crucible before the sun rises!’

They pick up their pace, but fossilised bones do not make for easy footing. The paladins in particular struggle to heft their massive suits of armour over the crumbling vertebrae and the heat is now so intense that the fossil is starting to spark and flame. Soon the whole thing will be ablaze, but I’m forced to rein Zarax in halfway across and wait for the others to reach me.

I can feel the seconds ebbing away and it is a torment to sit powerlessly, so close to my goal. I cast my gaze out across the lake and see a shape rushing in our direction. There’s something moving through the lava, making for the burning skeleton.

‘Faster!’ I roar, looking back along the fossil. The vanguard of Liberators has almost reached me and the Judicators are with them, but the retinues of paladins are trailing way behind, with Boreas at their head. Drusus has led his Prosecutors down from the clouds to help. They are hovering over the struggling paladins, pounding their celestial wings as they attempt to lift their brothers over the crumbling, sparking bridge.

Boreas sees more shapes rushing towards us, raises his hammer into the rolling fumes and cries out a litany. Whatever the things are, they must be as tall as oaks. I can’t hear my brother’s words over the hissing and burning of the lake, but I can sense a growing charge in the air as he prepares for an attack.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ shouts Liberator-Prime Castamon as he reaches my side. He waves his hammer at Boreas and the paladins. ‘We need to head back!’

I shake my head. ‘There is no going back.’

Boreas is standing proudly at the head of the paladins with his banner of bones and his hammer raised in defiance. The paladins form ranks behind him, readying their weapons for whatever is about to emerge. They’re perched on flaming, shattered bones a few feet above a lake that would burn them alive. They’re about to be attacked from all sides, yet even now they show no trace of fear.

The lava erupts as a goliath bursts into view. It has the head and legs of an ox and four, powerful arms, two of which end in jagged iron hooks. Strange, crackling energy shimmers over its scarred hide and the lava leaves no mark on it. The monster bellows as it crashes into the bones, surrounded by a rolling cloud of flames and sparks.

Boreas vanishes from sight and Castamon cries out. ‘Ghorgons!’ he yells, preparing to charge back down the bones.

I slam him back into place.

‘Hold your nerve,’ I growl and he nods, stepping back into line.

The place where the paladins were standing is now a wall of flaming spray and pounding, sparking limbs. I see golden figures dashing through the flames, bringing their huge two-handed hammers to bear, but the creatures are so vast they barely register the blows.

‘We can’t leave Boreas behind,’ says Castamon, and I nod.

‘You can. Lead the army to the far side.’

As ever, Zarax knows my mind better than I do and, before I can command it, she races back towards my brother.

We’ve gone no more than a few yards when the lava erupts again, spewing another howling ghorgon from its depths. As it attacks, I notice that it’s trailing a mass of chains and cords.

Zarax leaps clear as the monster smashes through the bones, splintering the fossilised spine with an explosion of cracking sounds.

I cling to her back as a ghorgon dives in our direction, smashing a hole in the bridge.

My army has been split in two. The bulk of my retinues are gathered on one side of the break, watching in dismay as Zarax and I are forced back towards Boreas and the others.

The ghorgon has torn a twenty-foot hole in the bridge of bones. Even if Castamon wished to lead his Liberators back to me, they could never leap the gap.

I look the other way and have to stifle a cry of outrage. Where Boreas and the others were standing, there is only a cloud of spinning bone fragments and embers. I see Boreas pounding his hammer furiously against the snorting monsters, but dozens of Retributors have already been thrown into the lava, and are in their agonised death throes. Moments after the paladins sink from view, lighting cracks down from the heavens, connecting with the lake in a blaze of blue fire as Sigmar reclaims his own.

Boreas staggers under a flurry of blows and I spur Zarax on. She leaps into action, hurtling towards him. There’s a crash of breaking stone as a ghorgon smashes into view, blocking my way. I’m too furious to think about the size of the monster and I drive Zarax to even greater speed. She slams headfirst into its massive chest and I bring Grius round in a wide arc towards the monster’s face.

The warhammer lands between the ox horns with such force that another explosion rocks the fossil. I slump back in my saddle, too dazed to see what’s happened. Then I realise that the ghorgon is on its back, pawing at its bloodied face, blinded by my attack.

The fossil groans and snaps. Zarax almost loses her footing, staggering towards the lava. I grasp on to a broken shard of stone and hold us steady seconds before we plunge to our deaths. I’m just inches from the lava and my eyes stream in the heat.

Zarax leaps back to safety and I draw Evora, preparing to attack the ghorgon again.

The monster’s legs are thrashing wildly beneath it and it is unable to rise. My blow has crippled it. I behead the beast with single clean swipe of my runeblade.

I take a look back at the way we came and see a breathtaking sight. Boreas stands alone and his golden armour has been torn away in several places. He’s swaying like a drunk as ghorgons charge towards him, perched precariously on a single, massive vertebra, only hanging on with one hand and holding his warhammer aloft with the other. His reliquary has gone and there’s blood rushing from his skull mask, but he will not yield an inch. I can hear his voice from here, hoarse but defiant, ringing out over the noise of the monster’s thrashing limbs. He’s surrounded by blinding columns of light as paladins die all around him.

‘Drusus!’ I howl, scouring the skies for a sight of the Prosecutors. Most of them are gathered at the opposite end of the fossil, defending Castamon and his Liberators as they try to reach the shore, but there is no sign of Drusus’ red-plumed helmet.

I cry his name again and look back to Boreas.

A ghorgon lunges with its rusted hooks and Boreas swings his hammer but as he does a staccato blast of lightning explodes along the creature’s head. It jolts back from the fossil, letting out a furious howl, and Boreas tumbles from his perch towards the lava.

I curse, but as the blast clears I see a pair of blazing wings and Drusus soars into view, holding Boreas aloft with the aid of another Prosecutor. Others dive into battle, blasting the enemy back into the lava.

A wounded ghorgon prepares to lash out at Boreas and his rescuers, but Zarax gets there first, bounding over a final section of bone and fastening her jaws around the monster’s tree trunk throat.

I bring both sword and hammer down into its face.

The afterglow of Drusus’ attack is still shimmering over the monster’s hide and it ignites my weapons, creating another dazzling blast.

The creature is thrown backwards, towards the lava. I turn to land another blow. A volley of hammer-blows lights up the monster’s flank as Drusus and the other Prosecutor swoop by, still clutching Boreas. The final ghorgon drops into the lava but manages to clamber back onto the bridge and slice its hooks into Zarax.

I thrust Evora into one of its eyes and ink-black blood smashes into me with such force that I’m knocked back in my saddle. By the time I rise, the monster has almost vanished back into the lava. The last of its hooks is still buried deep in Zarax’s hide.

She staggers and slips towards the edge of the bones, unable to free herself. Almost in the lava, she turns her proud, draconic head and unleashes a bolt of crackling energy into the ghorgon. The light burns with such violence that she becomes a silhouette, haloed by blazing white power.

A final, agonised howl bubbles up from the lava as the sinking ghorgon releases Zarax and she staggers back to safety.

She pauses to steady herself, then pads back towards the shore, majestic and magnificent, smoke trailing from her jaws and lightning sparking between her midnight blue scales.

Chapter Thirteen

Vourla – High Priestess of the Steppe

‘What were they?’ I ask, looking up at the sky and not expecting an answer. It is the first time I have crossed Lake Malice, and I’ve only ever heard rumours of what lies beyond. The ground is an ugly mass of dull black stone, but the scene overhead is breathtaking. Huge shards of masonry hang motionless in the air, defying gravity or explanation. They are carved from flawless white stone and covered with the most beautiful murals and statues – serpentine, mythological creatures that wind around graceful, arched doorways and looping, spiral stairs. They’re clearly the product of an elegant, cultured civilization, quite unlike the brutal Chaos architecture that has looked down on my entire life. But something terrible must have happened. All that remains are these broken, drifting fragments: steps that lead to nowhere and rooms that are open to the elements, revealing sad glimpses of forgotten halls and abandoned terraces. The lowest of the fragments is over thirty feet above the ground and it’s hard to gauge the scale, but I can tell the proportions are all wrong. No humans could have lived in these grand chambers. The rooms and doors are ten times the height of a man. This was the abode of giants.

‘It was a palace.’

I’m so shocked to get a response that I almost laugh. Since Khorlagh ushered us down onto the lakeshore no one has spoken. We’ve trudged beneath these ruins for half an hour in silence.

‘Whose palace?’ I ask.

Hakh looks up at the shards of white stone. The embers in his eyes flicker into life as he studies the floating remnants. ‘Can’t you see them?’ he asks, sounding surprised.

‘See who?’ I follow his shimmering gaze and think, perhaps, I can see something – a vague flicker of shadows near one of the doorways. But the harder I stare, the more it slips away.

Hakh grunts a laugh. ‘For once I see more than you. You’re too mortal.’

I stare harder, annoyed that this brute can perceive things that I can’t, but it’s no use.

He shrugs, still watching the figures I can’t see. ‘It doesn’t matter. They were nothing. Just stupid giants. They refused to kneel so Khorne gave them a gift.’

‘The Crucible of Blood,’ I stare through the moonlit ruins at the flashes of brass through the gaps in the crumbling walls.

He nods and spares me a proud glance. ‘Their magic could not save them – instead it trapped them.’ He laughs again. ‘Now they die, over and over again, forever.’

The pleasure in his voice hardens my resolve. Whatever guilt I feel over that golden knight is meaningless. All that matters is that Hakh pays. All that matters is destroying him.

‘Not far now,’ I say, looking further into the ruins.

He nods, but that’s clearly all the conversation he can manage.

As we march on beneath the drifting stones, I start to sense their architects even if I can’t see them. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I hear a low, alien cry filled with increasing desperation. At first it is intriguing, but it quickly becomes distressing. The voice sounds tormented. The centuries have done nothing to lessen the pain. It sounds like something forever on the brink of salvation, but unable to quite reach it. I try covering my ears to block out the sound, eliciting an odd look from Hakh, but it’s useless – the sounds are all in my mind.

As we reach the centre of the ruined city, the ground starts to become more uneven and slopes up towards the lip of a vast bowl – an enormous crater at least a mile across. At the centre is the thing I’ve been trying to avoid looking at, but as I reach the edge of the huge pit that cradles it, I’m finally forced to face the destination I’ve dragged us all to.

Grinning at us in the moonlight is a single brass skull. It’s so tall that my eyes struggle to make sense of its design, but I’ve heard enough to know this is the Crucible of Blood. It gleams a lurid yellow in the predawn light, but its expression is the thing that takes the strength from my legs. Its leering, rictus grin speaks of a bloodlust so full of vigour that I feel as though I’m facing a living beast, a merciless hunter, about to pounce. The eye sockets stare at me, revealing what lies inside – thousands of gallons of human blood, lapping gently at the thick, brass walls. Some kind of sorcery stops the blood pouring through the eye sockets, so it looks as though the skull is watching me with a pair of blind, crimson orbs.

Hakh shoves me aside and glares down into the pit of charred stone. ‘Where is he?’ he demands, his voice a low snarl.

‘What?’ I mutter, hypnotised by the skull’s bloody stare.

Hakh rounds on me, trembling with rage. ‘Where is the golden champion?’

He goes into a kind of spasm and swings his sword. The blade smashes into the ground a couple of feet from me, creating an explosion of black, glinting splinters that knife into my legs.

I cry out in pain and try to back away, but immediately bump into the armoured bulk of Khorlagh. He locks one of his white-skinned hands onto my shoulder and holds me in place.

‘He’s on his way!’ I cry, waving back through the ruins. ‘He’ll be here within minutes.’

Hakh is too angry to speak for a moment. Veins bulge from his tree trunk neck and he clutches his head.

‘Dawn,’ he manages to snarl finally, jabbing his sword at the brass skull grinning at us from the bottom of the crater. ‘We must be gone by dawn.’ He looks up through the ruins at the quickly vanishing stars. ‘There’s no time.’

I nod eagerly. ‘There is time! I’ve foreseen your victory. There’s still an hour before the sun rises and…’ I glance at the skull and lose my thread.

‘She’s lying,’ says Khorlagh. His flaccid lips brush against my cheek as he holds me tighter. ‘I saw that she was tricking you the moment you arrived.’

Hakh reels away from us, teetering across the lip of the crater, drunk with fury. ‘Tricking?’

Khorlagh pulls a long, rusty hook from his belt and presses the point against my trembling stomach. ‘We should gut her and leave.’

Hakh grabs one of his horns and starts wrenching his head from side to side, as though trying to shake understanding from his skull. ‘Tricking?’

Then he halts and his expression goes slack. For a moment I wonder if his anger has broken his mind, but then he grins and strides towards us, raising his sword.

I struggle to free myself but Khorlagh tightens his grip.

Hakh swings his sword and I find myself lying on the hard rock in a pool of blood. The warm liquid pumps over me, filling my eyes and mouth but, after a few seconds, I realise I’m not in pain. I’m still alive.

I feel my blood-slick throat and find that my head is still attached to it.

I wipe my eyes just in time to see Hakh reaching down to take my hand. He hauls me to my feet and I see Khorlagh’s corpse. Hakh’s blade has sliced down through the top of his skull and travelled almost to his waist. I find myself wondering at just how much blood can emerge from a single body.

‘Another fool,’ says Hakh.

I slump in his grip, weak with shock, unable to do anything but slap feebly at my clothes, trying to clear away bits of Khorlagh’s insides.

‘You didn’t lie. Khorlagh did,’ continues Hakh.

I’ve no idea what he’s talking about until I see what he’s looking at.

Tylos. I didn’t dream him. He’s here.

Chapter Fourteen

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

Boreas lives on at least, even though so many others are lost. He’s delirious with pain, muttering and flailing at shadows as though surrounded by ghosts only he can see. He’s struggling to walk, too – one of his legs drags awkwardly as we help him across the black rocks. Before we moved on from the lake I asked him if he needed to rest, but he just stared at me in proud silence until we continued our gruelling march.

As we crunch over the blasted basalt, we make a very different sight to the army that crashed down onto the bridge of birds. Along with the warriors dragged skywards by the lunar storm, I must now count those we lost in the battle for the Anvil and the retinues of paladins that were hurled into the lava attempting to defend Boreas. They will all find their way back to Sigmar’s halls, but I would have preferred to have them marching at my side. Nearly half of my army is gone and as we near the Nomad City I can’t mistake the pale glow of an approaching dawn. Anger simmers in my gut, testing me, daring me to revive my barbaric past. It is as though part of me is still in a vaulted chamber, watched carefully by the God-King himself. I will not fail the test. I suppress my rage and wave Castamon on, leading the lines of Liberators with calm disdain.

As Zarax carries me towards the city, I have the overwhelming sensation that I’m walking into a dream. After all the noise and violence of our crossing, these drifting ruins seem eerily calm. Strange, incongruous sections of rooms hang next to each other like an unsolved puzzle. If the scholars of the Celestial City are right, the ruins were left by a god. The fire of the spheres was still blasting through my bones when they told me the bloody history of this place. It’s hard to imagine such violence now, as the warm breeze whistles through the drifting towers, but I can see the skull clearly enough – a vast dome of brazen metal, flickering beyond the lip of the crater, just half a mile into the city. It’s so big I can barely comprehend it.

Between us and the realmgate lies our final challenge. Waiting in shadows beneath the city is another host of Khorne worshippers. These aren’t the bare-chested rabble that attacked us on the bridge, but lumbering, red-armoured knights, just like the unstoppable killers we faced at the Anvil, and this time they are not on foot but are mounted on horrific steeds that I recognise only from the darkest legends. Juggernauts – massive, hulking beasts, clad in plates of serrated steel and brass. As their riders sit patiently in their saddles, the metal creatures paw at the ground with blood-caked hooves, spewing gouts of steam and oil from the hinges in their flanks.

The lead rider is the largest knight I’ve yet seen and, even from here, I can tell that he is barely human. He has a pair of low, swooping horns jutting out of his forehead and his eyes burn like a pair of tiny dying suns.

I turn to face my men and draw a deep breath, preparing to rouse them from weariness and despair. My words fail on my lips, unneeded. They’re already preparing for battle, readying their hammers with silent, unshakeable faith. They’ve watched their brothers be butchered, hurled into the void and boiled alive, and now they face an army more horrific than anything we’ve yet seen, but not one of them shows any fear. My breath catches in my throat as they raise their shields and form a perfect wall of gleaming sigmarite.

Drusus lands just a few feet away with his remaining Prosecutors and they drop to their knees in silent genuflection.

The faces of my men may be hidden, but their nobility is not.

I sit taller in my saddle and lift my chin. The barbarian in my soul slips away.

‘Look at them,’ I say, levelling Grius at the red knights. ‘How different they are from us. Can you feel their hunger? Their desperation? These aren’t men, but animals, scrapping for dominion over a debased pack. They fight for power over their kin and to hold these broken lands for their own. They fight for everything that is meaningless.’

Zarax starts to pace beneath me, pawing at the ground, sensing that the battle is about to begin.

‘But you, my sky-born brothers,’ I say, raising my voice. ‘You fight for truth.’

They bring their hammers down against their shields, filling the night with sparks and noise.

‘And for Sigmar!’ I roar as we advance.

Chapter Fifteen

Menuasaraz-Senuamaraz-Kemurzil
(Mopus)

‘Curse Boreas,’ I say, slamming the palm of my hand on my desk. Dead insects tumble away from my fingers and dust fills the air. ‘How dare he wait so long to come back here and then try to fill my head with his religious nonsense? After all I taught him, how can he have fallen for a creed? And then try to drag me down with him?’

The Carrion Princes are watching from the shadows as always, and they drift a little closer as I shove back my chair. I try to rise from my desk and collapse onto the floor. Damp, pulpy books soften my fall and I break into a furious, hacking cough.

Skinless finger bones dig into my arms as the princes help me back onto my feet. I cling onto one of them for a moment, trying to stand straight, gripping a cold, dusty humerus as my legs tremble beneath me.

The princes whisper inside my skull. You need to eat.

‘Food?’ I laugh. ‘I’m no animal.’

I reach out and rummage through an old cabinet until I find a vial of sapphire-blue liquid. There are a few flies drifting in it but I pick them out and gulp the philtre down. Warmth rushes through my body and I slowly start to recover.

I shoo the princes away and stagger over to a mirror. It’s thick with dust and obscured by a mound of annotated skulls, but once I’ve cleared a space I manage to see myself for the first time in months. I feel a little calmer – I could almost pass for one of my skeletons. My skull grins out from behind its thin covering of white skin. I’m everything that an ascetic scholar should be. No gaudy gold armour for me, just a few simple robes and enough flesh to keep my mind working. There was a time when Boreas would have understood such asceticism, but not now. Anger and hurt drives me to drink another philtre. My eyes start to burn the same blue as the liquid and my heart pounds an irregular rhythm.

‘I always knew Boreas would return,’ I say, ‘but not like this – not to mock and accuse. How could he throw his lot in with brutish soldiers when I could have shown him the mysteries of the cosmos? How can he believe in Sigmar’s ridiculous doctrine?’ The more furious my words, the more I know that I’m lying to myself. I’m angry because I’m afraid he might be right, afraid that I’ve wasted all these years.

I shake my head, trying to rid myself of this infuriating self-doubt. It irks me that I’m not able to continue studying, but I can’t banish the memory of his faith. I stumble across the room, barging past the princes and knocking over towers of books. The Kuriat is on my desk, still thudding patiently. I pick it up and stare at its hardened, shrivelled arteries.

‘Boreas has been made a fool of. This thing has no power as a weapon. What did he hope to achieve?’

Then why did you take it from him?

‘Because the wretched fool cared for it more than anything! Because I wanted to hurt him.’ I realise how small-minded and ridiculous I sound, but it just makes me even more furious. I put the lump of meat back on my desk and try not to think about it.

‘If that really is Sigmar’s great army,’ I continue, ‘why would he send them to the Crucible of Blood? Why is the Kharvall Steppe of such importance to him? There are countless other strongholds he should strike first if he means to unseat the Dark Gods.’

I turn to the princes. ‘What else do we know of the Crucible of Blood?’

Very little. Your scribes have searched every text. They’re all curiously quiet on the subject. One of the princes waves at the gruesome illustration of daemons boiling in blood. We know nothing more than that.

‘There must be more. Something is happening here. This is all significant. I know that Boreas is not really a fool. I taught him too well for that. There must be something I’m missing.’

What about Giraldus?

‘Giraldus?’ I frown with distaste as I recall the pompous old bloodsucker. ‘He’s a third-rate scholar and a first-rate fool.’ I picture the deluded vampire as I last saw him, parading around Nagash’s court in the ornate, decorative armour of a grand noble. ‘He claims to be a king, but he behaves more like a spoiled little prince.’

As a mortal, he dwelled on the Kharvall Steppe. He was indeed a king. He was not always Nagash’s puppet. When he ruled, there was still a city where the Crucible of Blood now stands.

It annoys me that I didn’t know this myself, but I mainly feel relief. I can’t abide not having a thread with which to unpick a puzzle. My mind whirls with thoughts of Boreas, daemon-filled skulls and gleaming, noble armies.

‘Ready our legions,’ I say suddenly, looking around for some clothes. ‘Prepare the Coven Throne.’

They reply at once, filling my head with panicked questions. I can’t help but laugh. ‘Yes, my old friends. I may lack Boreas’ martial zeal, but I know when I need to act. Whatever’s happening at the Crucible of Blood needs to be stopped, or at least controlled. I can feel it as surely as I feel Boreas’ knife in my back. Giraldus will tell us what he knows and he will lend me his swords.’ I grab my rune-inscribed staff from beneath a moth-eaten fur. ‘And then I’ll make sure we can continue our work here in peace. I won’t let Boreas or his soldiers ruin everything with their wretched ideologies and faith. I will not have war thrust upon me by Sigmar.’

I stagger through the fane, clambering over my wonderful collections and starting to warm to my task. My purpose has always been to cheat death, but if I need to deal a little of it out, then so be it.

By the time I emerge into the drizzle my army is already mustered. I can’t help but smile when I think of Boreas’ boasts. This is an army. The power of the philtre pounds in my chest as I survey it. The entire valley has been painted white by the gleaming, fleshless skulls of my long-dead spearmen. While my enemies thought I was sleeping, I summoned a host that lesser scholars could only dream of. Countless thousands of warriors stare back at me in unflinching silence, bound by the impenetrable wards tattooed on my skin. Every one of them clutches a rusting, prehistoric weapon and wears fascinating scraps of armour. Their shields and hauberks display the design of myriad cultures. This is archaeology in the form of a lethal, fearless host.

Pacing before them is my greatest prize, a morghast – a winged giant of bone and metal, bleeding light from its armoured ribcage. I stole it at great risk from my supposed regent, Nagash, and it makes an incredible sight. It towers over the spearmen at eight or nine feet tall and it holds a pair of enormous, machete-like swords that predate even the fane. Its fleshless bones are lit up by screaming, tormented spirits. In fact, the entire host is shrouded in a pale green ocean of swirling figures, all bound to me by the same tattooed glyphs. For many years we kept a head count, but recently it has become impossible. Even my hordes of scribes and clerks cannot record the vast numbers arrayed before me. My army numbers in the tens of thousands; that’s all that matters. Has anyone ever assembled such a host? I can’t believe they have.

The princes materialise from the mist, hauling my chariot behind them – the Coven Throne, a relic of an ancient race, charged with the life force of their countless victims. It billows towards me on a storm of death-magic, drawn by diaphanous horses and a tempest of spirits. Ghosts lift me up like an offering and present me to the chariot. The blazing tumult envelops me and, as I take my seat, it turns to face the numberless hordes below. I hold my staff aloft and spirits whirl upwards, filling the valley with noise and light. The ranks of skeletons say nothing as the Coven Throne lifts me over their heads, but, as I give the order to advance, the sound of their feet falling is like the boom of thunder.

Chapter Sixteen

Menuasaraz-Senuamaraz-Kemurzil
(Mopus)

Shyish: the realm of ageless, boundless, grandeur. What became of you? There was a time when every one of the underworlds contained wonders beyond the imagination of the living. Now they are a collection of broken shells. The iron-clad boot of Chaos has crushed the wonder from my home. I have been hidden away for so long in the fane that it shocks me to see how far Khorne’s reach has extended. The horizon is a spine of bristling towers.

Your studies have served you well, say the princes, looking back at me from their skeleton steeds at the head of the chariot.

I nod. ‘There are few left who still have knowledge of the back ways through these lifeless groves.’ Just a few hundred feet from the flanks of my army, Khorne’s armour-clad monsters are scouring the landscape for something, anything to destroy.

They are blind to your passing.

I feel a swell of pride as I hear the respect in the spirits’ voices.

‘An open mind is hard to suppress.’ I grimace at the lumbering brutes that are trying to crush all the wonder from my world. ‘And a closed mind is easily confused.’ I glance at my pale legions of spearmen. ‘We’ll show our face once we reach Giraldus, but not a moment before. And, as long as he sees sense, we’ll be gone before they know we were there.’

Giraldus always had a penchant for grand displays of power but now, as we approach his fortress, I see how he has been diminished. His fortress was once a mountain of iron-hard bone, warped into solid, squatting towers and thick, hunched buttresses, but the sight that greets me now is far less impressive. The walls have been shattered by countless assaults and the colossal gargoyles are slumped and broken. His vampiric sentries still man the walls, wearing their distinctive winged helmets, but they’re a tiny fraction of the army that once marched beneath Giraldus’ banner. Still, I can’t help but feel a little respect. Almost every inch of this land has been flattened by Khorne’s armies, but Giraldus stands defiant.

‘How has he survived?’ I ask, turning to the princes.

Sorcery and courage. At the first sign of Khorne’s armies he severed his link with the land. His fortress is here today but tomorrow it will be gone. He stays long enough to strike a quick blow, then leaves. His luck can’t hold out much longer though. The spirits hesitate. They say he is very proud. What if he refuses to help?

I scowl. ‘He may only be here for today but that would be long enough for me to teach him a little humility.’ I wave my staff at my army. ‘That ruin could not withstand this for an hour. Still, I have no desire to waste my energy fighting Giraldus. I will find a better way to convince him.’

I give an order and the morghast lifts into the sky, filling the night with a cry torn from beneath the rain-drenched sod.

As my army pours from the shadowy hills, the full size of it is revealed. I wonder what Giraldus must be thinking as this dread host surrounds his crumbling walls. I nod to the princes and they pull my Coven Throne down towards the palace’s towering gates.

They open before we reach them, revealing a ridiculous fanfare of gaudy, fluttering banners and a column of ornately armoured knights. They’re all long dead, of course, even Giraldus himself, but they’re dressed as lordly, mortal knights. Their black armour is polished to a dazzling sheen and their rictus grins are hidden behind tall, winged helmets. Only Giraldus, riding proudly at the front, has his face on display. A life of murder and unholy pacts has kept his skin intact, but even the thick rouge on his cheeks can’t mask his antiquity.

He’s one of the few lords who has not fallen to Chaos, whisper the princes.

I’m unimpressed. ‘Look at that makeup and finery. Even after so many centuries of life he’s not learned to discard the baser pleasures. He could have used all that time devoting himself to study.’

Try to suppress your distaste. This will be so much quicker if you don’t have to kill him. Try to at least–

I wave the princes to silence as Giraldus approaches.

‘Menuasaraz,’ he says, performing an elaborate bow on the back of his horse. As he moves, his armour clatters with icons and medals, filling the night with jaunty music. ‘It’s rare to see you abroad.’ His voice is as inhuman as the cry of the morghast.

He makes no mention of the huge army circling his home but I can hear the outrage in his voice.

I nod in reply. ‘You’re looking well, Giraldus.’

He recognises the mockery in my voice and lights flicker deep in his hollow eye sockets. ‘What brings you to my door?’

I steer the Coven Throne closer and signal for my skeletal honour guard to remain behind.

Giraldus follows my lead and we meet, alone, in the centre of the road. The spirits that haunt my army have filled the night sky with vaporous robes and, as we dismount and approach each other, we’re bathed in green light.

‘I seek your advice,’ I say.

His expression remains wary as he studies me. ‘From what I hear, there can’t be many questions you can’t answer by looking in your own library. What has dragged you from the fane?’ He narrows his eyes. ‘Perhaps I’m not the only one who’s been hearing strange rumours.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard rumours, Giraldus – rumours of golden knights purporting to carry the might of Sigmar in their hammers.’ I feel my irritation growing as I say it out loud. ‘An army come to rid us of Chaos.’

‘It’s more than that,’ he replies. ‘They say these knights are fragments of Sigmar himself – avatars of his will.’

There’s a flicker of excitement in his eyes and I can’t hide my disbelief. I wave at the ruined landscape. ‘Giraldus, you’ve been trying to throw off this yoke for centuries and look where it’s got you. Do you really think a few gold hammers will turn back the legions of the Dark Gods? And if they did, what love do you think they would have for us? True wisdom means nothing to religious zealots. They’d probably see us as tomb robbers and necromancers.’

Giraldus grips the gilded handle of his sword. ‘What did you want to ask me?’

I curse my lack of control as I realise he’s almost as much of a zealot as Boreas.

‘What do you know about the Nomad City?’ I ask.

He laughs, surprised by my change of tack. ‘The Nomad City? What makes you ask me that?’

Before I can reply he draws back his shoulders. ‘No matter. I’m not ashamed of my past. Yes, necromancer, I was born on the Kharvall Steppe, your books have not misled you. I lived in the shadow of the Nomad City, but that was long ages ago. Have you really braved this journey to ask me about the adventures of my youth?’

‘Sigmar’s knights are heading for the Nomad City. That’s where they mean to strike – there’s a shrine of some kind, a brass skull called the Crucible of Blood. Of all the places they could attack, why choose that particular site?’

At the mention of the crucible he looks so pained that I think he might turn and leave. Then he shakes his head. ‘Forgive me. I have no love for the Blood God, Menuasaraz. If you’ve found a way to hurt him, I would be glad to help. What do you want to know?’

‘I want to know what the crucible is.’

‘It’s a monument to a tragedy, Menuasaraz. You have unearthed a great pain in uttering that name in front of me.’ He closes his eyes for a moment, then continues. ‘When Khorne’s legions began spreading across the steppe, the lords of the Nomad City demanded that we stand together against them. They said that it was crucial that their city didn’t fall.’ I notice a hint of emotion in his voice – shame perhaps.

‘But you didn’t aid them?’

He glares at me. ‘I’m no coward, but I’d been studying the obscure arts for a long time by then. I was consumed by my desire to uncover the secrets of Shyish. I was so obsessed by my studies that I barely registered what was happening to my kingdom.’ He waves at the bone-clad peaks that surround us. ‘I knew there was a finer, less transient world than my own and I could think of nothing but reaching it. Some of my subjects tried to save the Nomad City, but I paid them no heed – I had my eyes on something greater.’

I nod. ‘To survive and continue learning is an honourable goal.’

‘So I thought.’ He sounds either angry or ashamed.

‘What is the Crucible of Blood? Why would Sigmar care about it? Why would he send his army there, rather than to one of the great Chaos strongholds? Or some other shrine?’

‘Because it’s more than just a shrine. I know because I witnessed its creation. I was almost ready to leave when Khorne grew tired of the Nomad City’s insolence. He sent a powerful general…’ His voice becomes unsteady. ‘A being from Khorne’s own realm. It was like an army trapped in a single body. It dwarfed even the giants who guarded the Nomad City, but it couldn’t defeat them. Even from the very edge of the steppe I could see the battle. It raged across the heavens – three times the daemon attempted to level the city, smashing the walls with an axe as big as the watchtowers, and three times it failed. The titans wouldn’t yield. I realised then that I should have gone to help them, but it was too late.’

He shakes his head, and I get the sense he’s forgotten me. The emotion in his voice is now unmistakable – a potent mixture of rage and regret. ‘The daemon was called Khurnac. Its rage was so great that the ground bled in pain. The ground. The giants of the Nomad City had bound their city with powerful wards though, and their walls refused to fall.’

He’s speaking quietly now and I have to step closer to hear. ‘After the third attack failed, Khorne arrived to take matters into his own hands.’

‘You saw a god?’

Giraldus stares into the darkness. ‘After a fashion, yes. My rites were finished and I was already leaving, but I caught a glimpse. Gods spare me, I caught a glimpse.’

I find myself caught up in his story. I can almost imagine I’m there with him, witnessing the fury of Khorne himself.

‘My body was free,’ he continues. ‘Only a shadow of my being was there when the Nomad City fell, otherwise I doubt my sanity could have endured. Even now I don’t know exactly what I saw – a crimson thunderhead, perhaps, filling the horizon. My memory has spared me the details. I didn’t look directly, of course, and I was miles away, but Khorne was in my mind, of that I’m sure. As I slipped away, I saw a figure. It drew a brass skull from the storm, a skull as large as a mountain, and hammered it down into the Nomad City, destroying it utterly.’

He looks me in the eye, returning to the present. ‘The skull has since been named the Crucible of Blood and it stands there to this day, surrounded by the ruins of the Nomad City. The giants had poured so much magic into those walls that they’ll never crumble. They’re still there, hanging in the clouds – a reminder of Khorne’s wrath. For a long time I used to hunt down every record of those places I could find. The thought of that skull’s existence, even in the form of books or art, troubled me.’

‘You destroyed all that knowledge without studying any of it?’

‘I studied it – even when I would rather not. I can tell you what I know. I found out why the titans were so desperate to defend their home. The Nomad City was a doorway between worlds – a realmgate. The giants had been tasked with guarding it and they knew what would happen if Khorne seized control. Their worst fears came to pass – the brass skull claimed the realmgate for Khorne’s legions.’

I nod as all the pieces fall into place. ‘And Sigmar’s knights mean to take the realmgate back.’

He shrugs. ‘Perhaps. If they took control of the realmgate, they could travel from world to world. They could attack wherever they wish.’

Finally, I grasp the nameless fear that has been looming at the edge of my thoughts. ‘And they could attack whomever they wish.’

Giraldus frowns. I continue.

‘Don’t you see? Sigmar is the warrior-god. He won’t stop at defeating Khorne. He won’t stop until every realm is back under his golden boot. He has no love for necromancy.’ I laugh. ‘Imagine what kind of fate he will have in store for kings who abandoned their subjects and refused to aid those who tried to fight?’

Giraldus gives me a look of cold disdain. ‘I fear no mortal foe.’

‘Sigmar is no mortal foe. But if fear is not a reason to act then think what it would mean if we could seize the realmgate for our own.’

Giraldus looks past my Coven Throne to the army gathered behind me. His white lips roll back from long, curved incisors. It’s a chilling sight to see him smile.

He grips his sword again. ‘I would give a lot to have the upper hand, Menuasaraz, for one last time. I grow tired of this slow, pitiful defeat.’

‘Think what we could do together,’ I say, waving at the army behind me and the figures watching from the walls of his fortress.

He keeps smiling and rests a death-cold hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re more of a man than I realised, necromancer.’

There’s something odd about his smile. I get the impression that he’s holding something back from me – that he has different plans to my own. I decide that I don’t care, as long as he adds his army to mine.

I point at my army. ‘We have real power here, Giraldus. We could seize the realmgate for our own and use it to uncover the secrets of countless realms. And we would garner such power that we could keep all of those bickering gods from our doors. We could finally be rid of them – as long as we get there before Sigmar’s knights.’

He nods slowly. ‘But Sigmar is a step ahead of us. You said he has already sent his armies to the skull.’

‘But they were delayed. Somebody sent them astray. They are only now nearing their goal. There’s still time.’

Giraldus nods. ‘When dawn comes the daemon returns. Khorne bound it to the skull as a punishment. Khurnac’s rage is unimaginable, and it grows every year. From sunrise until nightfall it rages and thrashes at its chain, and as it tries to break free, other daemons pour from its bath of blood, born of its rage. They’re thrown everywhere: other kingdoms, other worlds, other wars, but many of them simply flood out onto the steppe. The region becomes a mirror of Khorne’s own realm. Nothing survives the slaughter that follows.’

Chapter Seventeen

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

I keep Zarax on a tight rein as we approach the ruins. The Chaos knights wait patiently on their grunting steeds and I count them as we march. There are at least as many as we faced in the Anvil. There will be no skeleton monster to rise up and save us this time and the thought makes me smile. We will finish this alone. I can feel the determination of my men beating down on my back, Sigmar’s light, blazing through their mirrored amour. It will not dim until we have broken through every line of red and brass that comes before us.

The Crucible of Blood is visible, jutting out of the crater beyond us. Our prize is so close now.

As we pass beneath the first of the drifting ruins my head fills with the sound of a roaring, anguished voice. The words hammer against my mind like a choir of lunatics, all wailing in a different key. It’s an agonised, inhuman cry and it’s impossibly deep. It sounds as though the rocks themselves are crying out in pain.

‘What is it?’ I gasp, looking back.

My men hear it too. Several are clutching at their golden helmets, trying to drown out the horrible din. Some of them have even dropped their shields and fallen to their knees.

I look back at the Chaos knights and see that they’re now riding slowly towards us. They were waiting for this to happen. The world shakes beneath the weight of their snorting juggernauts.

‘Boreas!’ I cry, scouring the crowds of staggering Liberators for a sign of the Lord-Relictor.

He emerges from the rabble, walking better and no longer clinging to a Liberator’s shield for support.

‘It’s the ghosts of the city!’ he shouts over the din. ‘They’re trapped here.’

Boreas sounds like he’s in agony, but he’s more awake than I’ve seen him since we reached the lakeshore.

‘They’re reliving their defeat,’ he continues, staring up at the massive shards of rock. ‘Can you see them?’

I follow his gaze and realise, to my amazement, that I can. What I took for flickering shadows are towering, humanoid figures charging into battle. They’re as faint and insubstantial as the moonlight glancing off my armour, but their pain is all too palpable. For a while, I can only stare in wonder at their massive forms, pounding into a fight that was lost before my ancestors were born. The longer I look, the less human they become. Their anatomy is similar to that of a man, if ten times the size, but their heads are strangely broad and sunk low in their shoulders and what little I can see of their ghostly faces shows brutal, exaggerated proportions – like crudely chiselled statues.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ gasps Boreas as he finally reaches my side. ‘The enemy.’

I drag my thoughts back to the present. The Chaos knights are moments away from us. I can see the face of the lead rider now, the lord with the swooping horns. This must be Hakh. His eyes are blazing with mirth as he watches my front ranks stumble. The Liberators are struggling to raise their shields as the war cries of the giants boom in their helmets. They look like a rabble.

‘Stand proud!’ I cry. ‘You are Stormcast Eternals.’

The Liberators manage to raise their shields and form ranks, but the sound is growing louder all the time.

‘Don’t they hear it?’ I ask, staring at the crimson-clad riders.

‘They’re revelling in it,’ replies Boreas. The sound of the giants’ pain only adds to the knights’ bloodlust. Their juggernauts are unhinged – snapping their great, bestial heads from side to side as their riders hold them to a slow trot.

The pain in my mind increases but I clench my jaw and bite down hard, determined not to cry out before my men.

I grab my Honour Scrolls and recite my oath. Pain may be my flesh. Death may be my fate. But victory is my name.

I shout with all my might and, as the sound leaves my throat, I wrap it around the words of a hymn. The song springs from somewhere deep in my subconscious; I haven’t sung it since I was a child, but the words ring out of me with all the force of my forging. It’s a hymn to Sigmar and I roar it like a curse. Behind me, hundreds of other voices pick up the tune.

Boreas raises his sepulchral tones in harmony and, together, we drown out the sound of fallen giants and thundering hooves. The louder I sing the more powerful I become. I start to picture the halls of Azyr soaring up around me – gleaming statues of star drakes and mythical heroes rising from the shadows as I sing louder, driving the noise from my mind.

I lift Grius over my head and give the signal for a shield wall.

The phalanx closes ranks seconds before the juggernauts smash into us.

Hakh leads from the front, his blazing eyes locked on me, and his steed hits us like a boulder. Shields judder beneath the force of the massive beast and, as the front line of Liberators stumbles, Hakh lunges at me from his saddle, swinging his great, two-handed sword. Zarax rears to defend me and the blade sinks deep into her face.

She falls backwards, crushing more rows of blue and gold shields as she lands. Lightning envelops her body as she dies. It spears through the battle, silhouetting us all in white heat.

I tumble, blinded by the detonation, but Sigmar is with me. As my vision clears I see that that I’ve landed near Hakh and he’s reeling from the blast, swaying in his saddle.

‘Victory is my name!’ I cry, grasping Grius in both hands and slamming it into Hakh’s chest.

Lightning flashes a second time, ignited by my blow. The crush of armour and weapons falls away and Hakh topples from view, surrounded by a red cloud of his own blood. Bodies slam into me and I’m driven to my knees. Grius is torn from my grip and I howl in frustration.

I draw Evora and she is singing before she has even left the scabbard. Her eerie tones cut through the cacophony and fill me with strength. The red knights may revel in the pain of the ghosts overhead, but Evora’s voice is another matter. They falter in their saddles, confused, giving Castamon and his Liberators in the front line the chance to drive them back and smash some of them from their steeds.

There’s a flash of golden sigmarite and I haul Grius from the carnage with relief. It’s only then that I see Boreas, trapped beneath a fallen juggernaut and thrashing in silent pain.

I try to reach him but our lines are battered and reeling under the weight of the juggernauts’ attack. I see flashes of gold as Liberators throw themselves at the brazen horrors, pounding their sacred hammers into fume-shrouded snouts and plates of jagged metal. The shield wall has held. My god-born brothers have dug their feet into the rock, thrown their shoulders against their shields, and held back the weight of a landslide.

‘Zarax,’ I whisper, in belated recognition of her death. These blasphemous curs can have committed no greater crime than ending such a proud life.

Hakh’s juggernaut tears through the crush. Hammers fall and flash but the monster is unstoppable. It may have lost its rider but it is clearly still set on my destruction as it charges straight for me. Its head is down and its speed shocking but I feint to one side, drop the other way, grab its horn and swing myself up onto its back.

Infernal heat pours up through my armour and my mind recoils at being so close to a creature spat from the Blood God’s own realm. It bucks and leaps beneath me, but I hold fast and ride the monster as it careers through the phalanx and takes me out into the enemy ranks.

Suddenly I’m surrounded by jagged, blood-coloured iron rather than gleaming gold sigmarite.

The juggernaut is driven to a frenzy by my presence on its back and it tramples several of Hakh’s knights as it circles and stomps, trying to shake me off, but then the daemon steed collides with a force equal to its own, and reels backwards.

When I manage to focus I see a glorious sight – a wall of implacable, towering paladins: the last of my Retributors.

They barrel into the monster, pounding it with their shimmering, two-handed lightning hammers.

Their weapons blaze and the monster staggers, then prepares to launch itself at them with renewed force.

I take my chance and let go of the juggernaut’s iron saddle, grasp Evora in both hands and drive the runeblade between its metal shoulder plates.

Evora’s voice soars as she sinks up to her hilt.

Flames spout from the wound and the monster bucks even more violently, throwing me clear. I roll aside as the beast tries to pulverise me with its thundering hooves and, as I lurch to my feet, the paladins strike again, bringing their warhammers to bear.

Their aim is true and the creature explodes, firing shards of metal through the air. When the blast clears, they pound across the rock towards me.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ one of them says as they form a protective circle around me. ‘Perhaps we should rejoin the others.’ His hammer is still sparking and crackling with power but his voice is a laid-back drawl.

I look around and see that we’re on the enemy’s flank and a line of them is already hauling their enormous steeds around to face us.

‘Celadon,’ I say, recalling his name. ‘We must find Hakh.’ I glance at the pale line of silver spreading across the horizon. ‘We have to end this quickly.’

As I stride on, the paladins throw their colossal bulk towards the oncoming charge, smashing and pounding into the bellowing juggernauts. Even their paladin armour can’t easily withstand such an onslaught and several of them are ridden to the ground before they can strike, crushed beneath iron-clad hooves. Retributor Celadon fights at my side, swinging his great warhammer in broad, easy swipes, cracking plates of iron like porcelain.

After a few moments the others have all fallen behind, mired in the enemy ranks, but Celadon keeps pace with me. As we smash our way into the heart of the enemy lines, splitting skulls and cracking limbs, he joins me in song, bellowing out the hymn like a benediction. His voice is ragged with fury.

Celadon is swinging his hammer with such force that when he reaches a wall of white rock he smashes through it without pause, surrounding us both in dust and rubble. Only then does he finally stumble, not from the impact but from an unexpected lack of resistance. Beyond the wall is an opening in the fighting and, with nothing to crash into, Celadon drops to his knees with a resounding clang.

I almost fall too as I stagger past him. The Chaos knights have backed away to create a circle and none of them raise their axes as I stumble into view. The ground is oddly shaped and, as I look around, I see that we have smashed our way onto the palm of a huge, outstretched hand. It is sculpted from the same white stone as the ruins overhead and I realise that some of the city has fallen. It must have landed with incredible force as it is embedded deep in the basalt. I look back and see that we have been separated from the rest of Celadon’s paladins. They’re lit up by white fire as they try to smash their way to us but, for the moment, we are alone.

I turn on the spot, Grius and Evora before me, expecting attack, but I hear words instead.

‘So this is the one,’ comes a low growl from the far side of the stone hand.

Standing a few feet away from me, at the base of a crumbling thumb, is Hakh. His pale, horned head is unmistakeable. His powerful frame dwarfs even his heavily armoured knights and he’s carrying a jagged, two-handed sword that simmers and hisses as though heated from within. His serrated armour is still scorched and smoking from the death of Zarax, and his low, jutting horns make him seem more animal than man.

‘He’s the one,’ confirms a woman standing next to him.

Her ordinary appearance is almost as shocking as Hakh’s mutation. The sight of a mere human, standing at the centre of such a dreadful scene, is quite surreal. She’s dressed in a filthy, matted fur but she has the penetrating eyes of a scholar or seer.

I straighten my back and stride towards them, wiping the gore from my armour. Now, as I stand before this dog, I realise that my Reforging is complete. I may not have been born a noble, but I have been lifted far from my humble birth. I draw back my shoulders, plant my feet firmly on the black rocks and level my hammer at Hakh’s head.

Some of the knights jeer and mock me, but Hakh and the woman remain silent. Hakh raises a hand to silence his men. Retributor Celadon steps to my side and casually plants the head of his hammer on the ground beneath his feet, resting his gauntleted hands on the handle.

Hakh locks his gaze on me. ‘Dawn is almost here,’ he grunts, nodding at the fading stars overhead. ‘Let’s end this.’

I nod and order Celadon to back away.

Hakh’s eyes burn brighter as he lifts his sword and steps into the circle.

The giants’ roar resounds through my helmet so I start singing again as I raise Grius and drop into a fighting stance.

The circle of knights burst into laughter again when they hear my simple melody, but the woman’s eyes open in surprise. Something about my song drains the colour from her face.

‘Leave!’ she hisses, when Hakh is just a few paces away from me. ‘It’s impossible. You’re too late. You can’t reach the skull before dawn.’

Hakh turns to face her and she lowers her head, too afraid of him to say more.

The warlord grins, takes a deep breath, and charges.

Chapter Eighteen

Lord-Relictor Boreas Undying

‘Hold the line!’ I cry, reeling back from the carnage.

The phalanx is still intact but even a wall of sigmarite will eventually buckle under such ferocity. The Liberators have thrown all their weight against each other, still singing my brother’s hymn as they shudder under the impact of the juggernauts. Where they can, they unseat the red knights with spring-heeled lunges, pounding their hammers into the enemy and then dropping back behind their shields.

The remaining Judicators are sheltered by the shield wall, loosing volley after volley at the enemy. Arrows blaze as they punch through Khornate armour, toppling some of the riders but leaving others hunched in their saddles, inured to the pain by their unholy rage.

I can no longer see Tylos or Retributor Celadon. I strain to look over the smoke-snorting heads of the juggernauts but it is useless. They had reached Hakh’s honour guard and marched calmly into the circle. I have to trust him. I have to believe Tylos can reach the Crucible of Blood or this will all have been for nothing.

Another charge crashes into the phalanx and, finally, the shields start to give.

‘Hold the line!’ I roar, and we surge back at them with a storm of hammers and arrows.

I slip back through the ranks and grasp my honour scrolls. My heart pounds as I consider what I’m about to attempt. My body is broken and my mind is close behind.

I look ahead and see, briefly, the horned figure of Hakh. He is flying towards Tylos, swinging a great two-handed sword. Tylos has proven his courage, but he can’t defeat them all alone. We need to reach him.

The Liberators’ song falters as another wave of juggernauts crash into us. They can’t hold out much longer. The Stormcasts are greater than any mortal foe, but the daemonic steeds are stealing our precious remaining minutes. Dawn is almost upon us. We have to get Tylos to the crucible.

I start to pray, reading from the mass of scrolls that trail down from my armour, and immediately, my gauntlets begin to spark and flicker.

I recite the final words and power jolts through my body. Before I have chance to register the pain, I point my hammer at the storm clouds and channel the power of the heavens, calling down Sigmar’s wrath. Lightning connects with my hammer and splays out over the heads of the Liberators, turning the night into a fierce, colourless dawn. It hits me with such force that I’m hurled backwards across the ground.

Blows falter as both armies pause to watch. For a brief moment, the clouds become silver, shimmering peaks. My prayer flashes across the sky and then hurtles back towards the ground, reborn as a thick column of lighting. The air rips apart as it slams to the earth. It lands in the heart of Hakh’s army like a comet from the heavens.

While the others stare in wonder, I’m already running. I ignore the pain of my wounds and stagger through the stunned crowds of warriors.

The column of lightning doubles and redoubles, lashing and arcing its way through the enemy warriors. It’s incredible, so beautiful that even the Chaos knights pause to watch, before being blasted apart.

As the column of light reaches the juggernauts it slices neatly through the daemon steeds. The blades of light leave smoking, butchered corpses in their wake.

Some of the knights manage to howl in rage, but most are simply thrown from their mounts and left in bleeding heaps of smouldering metal. As the lightning’s power grows, more of the juggernauts are dissected, spilling scarlet flames as their unholy bodies fall apart. Even the ground starts to rupture and crack, spewing gouts of lava from beneath its black, splintering crust.

‘Charge!’ I cry, weaving through the crowds of Liberators. ‘Make for the crucible! Find the Lord-Celestant – the night is almost done!’

As I run across the cracking earth, dodging jets of lava, the tower of lightning begins to slowly rotate, trailing twitching limbs of electricity that tear apart even more of the Chaos steeds. The red-armoured knights are so busy trying to control their bucking mounts that I stagger half way through their ranks before they even notice. Even then, they find it hard to place me in the blinding glare.

One of them manages to bar my way and attack. He’s lost his weapon so he simply dives headfirst through the inferno of spinning lights. I sidestep his clumsy lunge and pound him into the ground with my warhammer. Without breaking my stride I race into the heart of Sigmar’s fire. It’s so fierce I can barely see and my armour begins to ripple with heat, but I can’t falter. I will not let Tylos fail.

The warriors of Khorne have fled the blast and I stumble through the blaze alone. The arcs of power are still passing over me, rather than slicing me open, but my armour is starting to buckle and boil. The heat is incredible. I’m still a few feet from the core when my damaged leg gives way. The wound I sustained at the lake explodes with pain and I crash heavily to the ground. I crawl on but the light is growing more ferocious with every second. I take a breath that’s nothing but fire and agony blossoms in my chest. The pain is horrific, beyond even the pain of my Reforging.

As the lightning crashes down around me, the earth cracks and judders again. I crawl up a shifting ledge of rock, trying to see if the army is with me. After staring into the light, I realise I’m trapped. The lightning has left me surrounded by a circle of angry, spitting lava. I stagger from side to side, trying to find a way through, but wherever I go I’m met by more lava. There’s no way through. I shout, but the roaring of lightning drowns out my cries.

Chapter Nineteen

Prosecutor-Prime Drusus Unbound

It’s like dropping into the sun. As I plunge into the Lord-Relictor’s storm his howl of pain rings out and I pound my wings faster.

I order the rest of the retinue clear, sending them back towards the brass skull. Some of them falter, unwilling to desert me and unnerved by Boreas’ cries.

‘Lord Tylos ordered us to wait for him at the realmgate! Do as your Lord-Celestant commands or risk his wrath!’

Reluctantly, they swoop and sail back through the clouds. I turn back to the lights below. This is it. I can feel it clearly. This is my chance to erase the past.

I fold my wings and dive with greater speed than I have yet attempted. The descent is dizzying and exhilarating but the light burns into me like acid.

I have seconds at most.

The ground rushes towards me but it’s impossible to see anything clearly. The world is a maelstrom of white, celestial heat.

I realise, too late, how low I am, and only pound my wings seconds before crashing into the rocky earth. Agony jolts through me and I roll, howling, through the blaze.

The incredible heat drives me back to my feet and I see Boreas lying with his hand outstretched towards the centre of the lightning. His armour is warped out of shape and he’s struggling to move. I stagger to his side and lift his head. Blood pours from the eye sockets of his mask, but he manages to speak.

‘Tylos,’ he grunts through shredded vocal cords.

The heat is beyond anything I have experienced and I topple away from him, unable to breathe.

I reach out and my hand locks around a ball of agony. I see that I’ve plunged my fist into the magma. I draw back my ruined limb and realise a new wall of lava has sheared up from the ground, separating me from Boreas. I’m so close to death that it fills me with rage – I cannot die until Boreas is safe.

I throw myself through the curtain of lava, grab Boreas and fly with a fury I have never braved before. As the lava eats into me I soar upwards, surrounded by a spinning halo of light.

The pain grows and I realise my armour is collapsing.

I beat my wings harder, holding Boreas as tightly as I can.

I’m flying so fast that I can’t breathe. This is no mortal strength I can feel in my wings. This is the strength of a god.

The lightning falls away, the smoke fades, and soon all that lies ahead of me is the night.

My armour peels away and my skin runs like water. Slowly, my insides boil and break apart.

I die as I land, letting out a final roar, not of pain, but of victory. Boreas is safe. We will not fail. It is not my flesh but my past that I can feel burning away, my madness that’s dripping from my limbs. Finally, I am worthy of my name. Finally, I am Drusus Unbound.

As Boreas leans over me, reciting the Oath of Passing, I see the God-King, waiting for me in the blaze. He raises his hammer as he welcomes me home.

Chapter Twenty

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

The Blood Creed roar as Hakh swings his sword at my face.

I plant my left heel in the ground and bring Grius up to meet his blade.

As I am hurled back across the stone hand, I realise I’ve underestimated him. My arm sings with agony as I roll and stumble back to my feet. His strange, bestial features crease into a leer as he swaggers after me, drawing back the huge sword for another strike. The lumbering colossus should not be able to wield that sword with such ferocious power – the Blood God is in his flesh. Khorne is battling me through the body of this snarling ape.

The thought only adds to my pride. To stand alone, bearing Sigmar’s honour. It is not the fate I imagined for myself.

He swings again, but this time I’m ready. Rather than parry I roll towards him, leap forwards and bring Grius down between his obscene horns.

There’s a dull crunch as his skull gives way.

The force of the blow sends him reeling into the circle of onlookers.

I stride after him, raising Grius for another blow, but Hakh’s honourless warriors crowd around him, blocking my way with a wall of weapons and curses.

They hold me at bay as their lord climbs slowly to his feet. His thick brow has collapsed, giving his face an even more misshapen appearance. He shows no sign of weakening, however, as he turns on his own men. He’s clearly furious that they thought he needed help, and he butchers anyone within reach. Only when there is a circle of twitching warriors lying around him does he turn and face me again. He reaches up to his broken head and laughs.

‘Not enough,’ he growls, as he charges back into our impromptu arena.

I take a deep breath and lift Grius. This is going to take more time than I have.

Before he reaches me, light floods the sky and I realise to my horror that day is upon us.

Hakh and I both turn to look. It’s immediately apparent that this is no natural sunlight. A few hundred feet away, not far from my embattled Liberators, a column of light has burst from the ground. It’s pouring up into the storm clouds, coruscating and sparking as it lights up the ruins.

Hakh recovers from his shock and takes the opportunity to attack, bringing his sword round in a low strike at my stomach.

I bring Grius down in time to block the blow, but my mind is only half on the fight. As I back away from him, clutching Grius in both hands, I see that the shaft of light is having a devastating effect on the monsters attacking my army. It is spewing buttresses of energy that blast apart the juggernauts when they collide, creating spectacular eruptions of flame and armour.

‘Boreas,’ I mutter, recognising the power of my brother.

Hakh staggers to a halt and lowers his sword, staring at the scene beyond the edge of the stone hand. He howls in outrage at what follows. As the column of light turns, its radiance slices through the daemon-steeds and tears up the ground, leaving Hakh’s knights floundering in a swamp of lava, blood and body parts.

My men are still locked in formation and as their attackers falter they surge forwards, lowering their shields and unleashing a flurry of hammer and sword blows.

Hakh forgets me and races to the edge of the hand, still growling.

The light grows brighter and a fierce heat washes over the plain.

My Stormcast Eternals blaze like a constellation of stars as they smash through the enemy, but the heat is so great that they start to falter. Even Hakh’s knights, denizens of this hellish realm, recoil from the blaze, shielding their eyes as the night burns white.

The light grows so fierce that I’m soon unable to see even Hakh, who’s standing just a few feet away from me. I hear him raging and cursing as he tries to find my position. Is this dawn after all? Have I failed? Is the Crucible of Blood about to open its gates?

I climb along one of the hand’s crumbling fingers, feeling my way, trying to peer through the light.

My mind whirls as I see that it is fading.

As the glare dims, my vision starts to return. Hakh and his knights are still gathered in our makeshift arena, staggered by the display, but Celadon is striding towards me, clutching his great, two-handed hammer.

Blessed night floods back over the steppe, leaving just a single point of brightness, racing through the sky. It briefly becomes a golden, twin-tailed comet before crashing to the ground.

‘The God-King is with us,’ I whisper, as I see that my army is now free to advance.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ says Retributor Celadon, raising his hammer and drawing my attention back to Hakh. The Chaos lord turns his mangled face back in my direction, and I see the doubt in his eyes.

In the wake of Sigmar’s lightning, my men are now charging across the steppe towards the stone hand. The lightning has filled them with unimaginable fervour. I can hear their voices from here, still roaring the hymn as they smash, pummel and hack their way through the reeling knights.

Hakh looks from the butchery of his men to me and Celadon, fury written across his face. He throws himself at me like a bull, horns lowered. The ferocity of the attack gives him incredible speed and neither Celadon nor I have time to block it.

His horns crunch into my armour and we roll back across the palm of the hand.

Hakh’s men charge past us as we stagger to our feet, rushing to attack as my golden Liberators pour up over the rock, so incandescent with faith that even I can barely look at them.

Battle explodes all around me. Sigmarite pounds against brass and swords bite into flesh as a huge tumult of figures surge across the stone hand.

I haul myself to my feet and see that my armour is dented but not punctured.

Hakh lunges again. I block him but the impact knocks the breath from my lungs.

‘They will not save you!’ cries Hakh as he wades after me.

As I stagger backwards, clutching my chest, he draws back his sword to strike again.

He never stands a chance. Sigmar is everywhere. He’s in the sky, blazing through the cosmos. He’s in the song that’s roaring from my throat. And he’s in the hammer that I smash into Hakh’s slobbering jaws.

I swing Grius with such force that the front half of Hakh’s head shears away. There’s an explosion of red and he’s thrown several feet through the air, landing in a broken, lifeless heap.

‘Lord Tylos,’ shouts Retributor Celadon. He’s standing just a few feet behind me over a pile of broken bodies and I realise he’s been guarding my back while I dealt with Hakh. The red knights fight with a deranged fury as they’re driven back but Celadon pounds through them with fluid, easy blows.

‘We must reach the skull now!’ I cry, struggling to be heard over the din of tormented spirits, hymns and war cries.

The steady, unremitting blows of my men are smashing Hakh’s army apart. We’re still outnumbered but the storm summoned by Boreas has wiped out half of Hakh’s army, and his sacrifice has turned the survivors into a desperate rabble. In a few more moments we’ll have broken them and be on our way to the Crucible of Blood.

I rally my men and drive them in a surge to the far side of the hand. From there it’s just a few hundred yards through the drifting ruins and we’ll be at the lip of the crater.

At my command, they redouble their attack with a blinding wave of hammer-blows. We force the dazed knights back to the edge of the hand, where many stagger and fall onto the black rocks, dying beneath the shadows of the floating city.

Daylight is moments away, but moments are all I need. I shoulder my way through the lines until I reach the heart of the fighting.

Some of the knights recognise me as the man who killed their lord. They growl and charge, but Celadon is still with me. The first of them crumples beneath a blow from Grius, the second reels away headless, devoured by Evora, and the third is driven into the ground by the force of Celadon’s hammer.

Without pausing, I vault over the tumbling bodies and smash my way through the enemy ranks, making my way towards the centre of the Nomad City and the crater at its core.

The Liberators explode into action behind me, summoning up a final, furious push. The red knights collapse before us and we reach the lip of the crater with a victorious roar.

I raise Grius aloft and I look at our prize.

The Crucible of Blood grins back at me – the hideous creation of a brutal god. It soars overhead – thousands of tons of brass, cast by hellish sorcery in a realm of daemons. The top is open to the sky, and with dawn only minutes away, the lake of blood it contains is already starting to bubble and steam. Deep within its cloying depths, an obscenity is forming, preparing to spew madness across the steppe. The sight of it hits me like a physical blow – such a vast act of violence wrought against the landscape makes my breath catch. The bowl of charred rock that surrounds the skull still seems to be smouldering in memory of that ancient wound. Steam or smoke is rippling over the blast hole, but I stride on, feeling the seconds slipping away.

It’s only as I enter the crater that I realise that it is not steam that’s rippling across the ground – the rock itself is rolling and heaving.

‘What is this?’ asks Celadon, stamping on the shifting ground.

I shake my head and wave him on. There’s no time left to think, we just have to act.

We’ve only taken a few steps when Celadon’s question is answered.

As the rock cracks and opens, fleshless, gleaming bones begin hauling themselves from the ground. This is the vision I saw when Boreas healed my eye – this was the nightmarish scene that Sigmar poured into my mind. I pause and mutter an oath as a leering, sword-wielding skeleton climbs into view.

Chapter Twenty-One

Menuasaraz-Senuamaraz-Kemurzil
(Mopus)

Returning to the Kharvall Steppe is even worse than I remember. The air is so hot and sulphurous that I’m wracked by a violent coughing fit. When I wipe the spittle from my face there are a few withered molars lying in my palm and I curse Sigmar for dragging me up here. I warned Boreas against playing war games and now look what’s happened. My stomach lurches again, but I manage to steady it with a quick draft of my philtre. My head is full of metallic buzzing, and energy is fizzing over my skin.

Giraldus is riding as close to my Coven Throne as he can. A tempest of souls separates us, but I can still see his outrage at what has been done to his former kingdom.

Behind us, our fleshless host is clawing itself up into the moonlight. I ignore Giraldus and study the army we have created. Despite my misgivings, I can’t help swelling with pride as my morghast heaves its huge frame from the blackened stone as I form the crowds of skeletons into orderly ranks. We’re in a fume-filled crater that must be a mile wide but we’ve filled it with revenants and cadavers from every realm. Such a horde could lay waste to anything the gods have to offer. Death is the great leveller, after all.

‘There it is,’ says Giraldus, his voice tight with anger.

I turn back and see that the fumes have rolled away to reveal a soaring wall of brass. It’s stained with centuries of dried blood and I steer my chariot backwards, unable to take it all in. I can make out the jawbone of a skull but the rest of the brass idol reaches so high that it seems to support the clouds. This is the source of the energy that’s rattling my teeth and humming over my skin. Rage is pouring from the bloodstained metal, rippling the air and churning my shrivelled guts.

I hold a hand in front of my face as though blocking the sun.

‘We’ll have to be fast,’ I say. I turn to Giraldus. ‘How do we enter? Tell me that you learned that much before destroying anyone else’s chance of gaining knowledge about this place.’

He’s too furious to notice my harsh tone. ‘There are steps to the mouth. We enter through the teeth.’

‘Of course we do,’ I grimace, steering the Coven Throne towards the jaw. I deploy most of the army around the perimeter of the crater, but I take a few hundred skeletons with me, to keep an eye on Giraldus as much as anything else.

As we approach the skull, the power spilling from it becomes almost overwhelming. There’s a deafening grinding sound in the air and my bones ache as the throne lurches and sways above the black rocks. Even the spectral steeds that are drawing my chariot twist and writhe before the wrath of the skull, but I do not allow the princes to pause. I have no desire to be here when Khurnac awakes. I want to be travelling through the realms by then, raiding the mausoleums of a hundred cities and plundering wells of long forgotten learning. Or perhaps just back in the fane, safe in the knowledge that I control a route between worlds. The thought drives me on through the pain and we finally reach the wall of metal. The sound here is deafening and there are streams of energy billowing over the brass.

‘Over here!’ yells Giraldus, leading the way, and I drive my throne after him. My heart is pounding furiously now, as though I’m being charged by the skull. I shout at the princes until they pull the Coven Throne faster, speeding past Giraldus.

A few minutes later I see the steps. They’re wide enough to front a great palace and we race up them, the spirits of my chariot rolling tendril-like across the brass.

Khorne’s rancour rises through my seat and eats into my flesh. I can feel my skin starting to blister and burn, but I ignore the pain. My mind whirls with visions of greatness. The higher we go, the grander my visions become. Why stop at merely accruing knowledge? With this army and passage to other worlds, might I not use my scholarship for something greater? I could become the wisest lord who ever walked the realms. Everything starts to make sense. As I travel faster up the steps, I see that I was born for this. It is my destiny to rule with a wise and just hand; bringing the realms into the kind of unity that others have failed to do. And all those who deny my right to rule will face the wrath of the greatest host ever to emerge from the underworlds. If Nagash can no longer protect his kingdom, perhaps it is time that the undead had a new master? If I control the realmgates, who could stand against me?

I’m vomiting now and blood is rushing from my nose, but the spirits struggle on and haul the throne up the last few steps.

I notice that Giraldus and my army are no longer with me, but there’s no time to wait. I ride the chariot towards an opening between the skull’s enormous brass teeth. The doorway towers over me and I see that it’s framed by a huge portico wrought from the same bloodstained brass and forged to resemble snarling, reptilian hounds clawing and tearing at each other. It’s an unnerving sight but I drive the chariot on and, as it hurtles down the passage, I see that there is no door – just a wall of rippling blood, rising hundreds of feet over my head.

‘Now what?’ I try to ask, but my words come out as muffled gibberish.

I look back and see that Giraldus is dragging himself up the last few steps towards me. His sorcery has failed him and his face has assumed its true form. He looks like a reanimated cadaver, smeared with gaudy makeup. His shrivelled flesh has fallen away from his mouth, revealing long, inhuman teeth.

He tries to say something, but I can’t hear him over the roaring sound that is pouring through the brass.

He jabs his finger at the crimson wall, shaking his head. He looks to be in horrible pain.

Of course. He’s afraid of the power I will hold over him, but he need not be. I will be a benevolent, wise ruler. All my centuries of learning will inure me to the folly that has left Nagash battling to preserve his own domain. I turn to face the wall of blood that fills the doorway and try to ride closer, but the power flooding out is like a physical wall.

I kick the base of the throne and it lurches forwards. We’re still several feet away, but the chariot’s moving with slow, spasmodic bursts, as though wading through mud.

The closer we get, the more my mind slips away. All I can see is my vast army crushing the realms beneath skeletal feet, with me at their head.

Finally, we reach the wall and I prepare to enter the portal, preparing myself for unimaginable power.

Before I can enter the skull, the visions become even more violent. I picture myself crowned in the blood of a thousand slaughtered foes. I am standing above a mountain of corpses, screaming words of tribute to my lord as he watches from his throne of skulls.

I look down and see that my robes are drenched in blood, and steaming and shrivelling in the heat. I look like a slaughtered corpse. The sight shocks me and, suddenly, my thoughts seem deranged. I’m no servant of the Blood God – what madness has taken hold of me?

Giraldus hauls himself up the ribcage frame of my Coven Throne and drags my face away from the portal of blood.

‘This is not the way!’ he cries, finally managing to be heard over the din. ‘Not for us! We were wrong. All that lies through this gate is damnation.’

The skull’s power is smashing through my body with so much force that I think I might be thrown from my chariot. Dazed, I look from Giraldus and down the brass steps to the crater below and our wonderful army. Have I really summoned this host just to create more ruin? Visions of slaughter linger in my head and I’m filled with a growing sense of horror. Is this where all my learning has brought me?

Then I see something else. Racing across the crater towards the skull is a triangle of golden figures. Barely a few hundred of Sigmar’s warriors are left, but they make an incredible sight. Vast storm clouds are rolling in their wake and lightning flickers across their shields. There is something so righteous about them, so pure. They could never be consumed by the madness that just filled my thoughts. They are unassailable.

‘Boreas,’ I whisper, sensing that I might have made a terrible mistake.

The energy pouring from the skull suddenly triples its force. My whole body judders and my teeth begin to clatter against each other.

Giraldus points his sword at the sky and I see that it is grey. Dawn has come.

I look back towards the skull and the sight that greets me makes me collapse back into my throne.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

Sigmar’s wrath carries me through an avalanche of bones. Unnumbered hordes of skeletons press around me, crashing, tumbling and rolling in great waves, grasping with their brittle fingers, hacking with rusty swords. I stride on across the crater, leading what remains of my army in a glorious, martial tribute to the God-King. Despite the ivory waves smashing into me, I swing Grius with a grace and serenity I have never achieved before, shattering skull after skull after skull and filling the air with splintered bone.

‘We are the exalted!’ I cry. ‘We are vengeance! We are Stormcast!’

The skeletons topple like mannequins but the onslaught is endless. They are undaunted by my brutal blows. As Grius returns them to dust, hundreds more march into view, as relentless as the storm overhead. They hack at me with a bizarre collection of weapons. Some carry the most incredible swords – things of great workmanship, dragged from the tombs of kings – while others lurch towards me with clubs and broken scythes.

Between the brass skull and me there is now a field of grinning, gibbering faces. We need another way to break through. Dawn is imminent and I could smash these mindless wretches for an age and not reach my goal. There must be thousands of dead souls rising to block our way.

I look back and see that Castamon and his Liberators have almost managed to reach me – a wedge of glinting sigmarite trailing shattered bones as they slice through the host, followed by Celadon and his lumbering ranks of paladins and the last few retinues of Judicators, who have swapped their bows for short swords as they hack through the leering dead.

I raise Grius in tribute then bring the warhammer down, channelling all my rage and frustration. To my shock, a blast of light clears the area ahead of me. The nearest skeletons crumble into dust and dozens more roll away from me. For a moment, I think Grius is responsible but then, as I stride forwards into the gap, I see the truth.

‘Drusus!’ I cry, looking up at the heavens, delighted to see that he has managed to carry out the order I gave when we crossed the lake. I told him to wait for us near the skull and strike when our need was greatest, but I had started to fear that the Prosecutors must all have perished. They dive from the clouds launching javelins and hammers that blaze as they fall, ripping great holes in the skeleton army. For a moment, my heart races, but I realise that there’s no sign of Drusus’ plumed helmet. Another winged herald is leading their attacks.

The first ranks of Liberators start to reach my side, still singing as they envelop me with their wall of shields and hammers.

‘Where is the the Prosecutor-Prime?’ I demand, glancing at Castamon between blows.

The Liberator-Prime shakes his head. ‘He fell, Lord-Celestant.’

I glance at him.

He hesitates, sounding pained. ‘Lord-Celestant, didn’t you see the comet? Drusus braved that inferno so that the Lord-Relictor might live.’

‘Boreas?’ I feel a flint of pain in my chest but the Liberators are watching me, waiting to hear my response.

‘Drusus died with honour.’ I look at the sky. ‘None of us can ask for more.’

The crowds of skeletons smash into us again, but the Liberators hold their line and we force our way onwards.

‘Heralds of Sigmar!’ I cry, still staring at the sky. The stars have all vanished from view. The sky is the colour of lead. Morning is moments away. ‘Prosecutors!’

What remains of Drusus’ retinues sweep back around and tumble from the storm clouds. Some are struggling to fly, held aloft by their brothers as their lightning bladed wings start to falter and dim, but all of them are singing as they snatch lightning from the heavens and form dazzling weapons in their fists.

‘We’re almost through!’ I roar. ‘Carve a path!’

They raise their voices in song and dive at the skeletons. Storm-born javelins and hammers fly from their hands as they descend.

‘Brace yourselves!’ I cry to the Liberators and they drop to their knees.

The ground shudders as a blazing line of explosions tears through the skeletons. A smouldering, white road opens up before us.

‘Charge!’ I shout, and we race down the shimmering avenue, surrounded by charred, broken bones.

Overhead, the Prosecutors launch another storm of twin-tailed bolts, blasting the path further into the crater. Skeletons are still lurching towards us, but there’s now a clear way and we’re racing towards our goal through a valley of smoke and glittering embers.

Another series of blasts erupts up ahead and, finally, the brass skull looms before me. I see wide, metal steps leading up to an enormous doorway beneath two of the skull’s lower teeth. A metal portico leads to the door, and it’s hard to see clearly but I think there are figures at the threshold. Crimson shapes are flowing down to meet us. Khorne’s host has arrived.

‘Above you!’ roars an unfamiliar voice, from somewhere in the crowds of skeletons.

I look up and see a bone colossus dropping through the fumes towards me, borne on vast, skeletal wings.

I drop into a battle stance as it lands and rears over me. It’s a revolting construct of sorcery and bone that towers over the fighting. It pounds across the shattered rocks on clawed feet, clutching a pair of great, cleaver-like swords. It seems to be formed from the skeleton of a huge, winged warrior and its bones are clad in the remnants of ancient armour. Emerald light coils beneath its rib cage – luminous viscera wrapped around a collection of broken, human skulls.

I leap forward, whirling Grius around my head.

The bone monster raises one of its swords to parry my blow, but my fury resonates through its hollow limbs, sending it back down the blazing path, its sword spinning away into the melee.

I charge after it, followed by a wave of Liberators but, with a pound of its fleshless wings, the monster launches itself into the air and hacks down at me with its remaining sword.

I smash the blade back and leap again, grasping its legs and hauling myself up over its shimmering torso.

It lurches under my weight but before I can land another blow it grabs me by the throat and swings its falchion.

‘No!’ cries a female voice and there’s a blaze of light as something slams into the monster.

The impact sends the sword strike off target, saving my head, but the bone construct pounds its wings and soars up towards the clouds, with me and the other figure still hanging from its ribs. I realise, to my amazement, that it is the woman I saw with Hakh.

As we fly higher, the creature tightens its grip on my throat and swings again.

This time I’m ready. I smash the blow away with Grius, haul myself higher and pound the warhammer into the thing’s giant, bestial skull.

Green light blazes as cracks open up in its snout, but it clearly feels no pain. It pounds its wings again, throwing us through the clouds, away from the Crucible of Blood.

A Prosecutor whirls through the clouds and catches sight of us. He cries out my name and dives towards us. The bone monster lashes out and the blade clangs off the Prosecutor’s chest armour. The Stormcast tumbles away, pounding his wings furiously but, as the monster flies higher, I see him soar after us, refusing to let me go. I see the marks on his honour scrolls and recognise him.

‘Stay back, Sardicus!’ I shout.

Then I see the Crucible of Blood and mutter a curse.

The brass is shimmering in the crimson light of a new sun.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Menuasaraz-Senuamaraz-Kemurzil
(Mopus)

Shapes are forming in the blood. Dear merciful gods, what shapes. These are the malformed things I saw in the painting – hunchbacked daemons wrought of flame and crimson scales. Their heads are like long, snarling anvils and they clutch smouldering blades in their claws.

I order my spearmen to attack and then send the Coven Throne hurtling back down the steps. As I descend, the creatures pour from the wall of blood, spiderlike and frenzied. My spearmen clatter up the steps to meet them and the dead join battle with the damned, levelling a bristling wall of jagged spearheads at the emerging monsters.

‘Attack! Attack!’ I cry as my Coven Throne reaches the bottom of the steps, and the landscape boils into life as thousands more skeletons race to obey, flooding past me, climbing the steps and swamping the daemons trying to enter the realm.

‘Do you see?’ cries Giraldus. He’s a few feet away from me and back on his dead horse, surrounded by his knights. As the ranks of skeletons charge past him, his knights hold their line and Giraldus points his sword at the line of golden figures on the horizon. ‘Do you see now what they are?’

I try to laugh, but I can’t. The contrast between the noble, golden knights and my own bloodthirsty visions has left me bewildered. What good is all my learning if I can be so easily led to damnation?

‘But what can they do against that?’ I wave my staff at the vile daemons smashing into my ranks of spearmen. And yet, as I look back at Sigmar’s knights, I find myself wanting to believe. Even from here I can see that they are unlike anything I have ever seen before. They’ve battled across a world that was long thought lost and they have remained utterly defiant, still trailing their elegant pennants and shimmering with the power of the storm.

As they enter the crater that surrounds the skull, they tear through my army, blasting them back with huge explosions but, rather than feeling enraged, I find myself replaying my conversation with Boreas. Things have to change, and we have to change them. Could he be right?

‘Could we really turn back Chaos?’ I say.

I’m not addressing Giraldus but he hears me. His eyes blaze in their sunken pits. He points past the boiling mass of daemons to the brass skull. ‘If Sigmar’s army could seize this realmgate, I believe they could. I’ve heard such tales, Menuasaraz. This army is just one of many. Sigmar did not abandon the realms, he’s just been waiting for the right moment to strike.’

We’re jolted further down the steps as my spearmen are driven back by the daemons. I look back at the blood portal and see that they’re flowing through my skeletons – tearing them apart in their desperation to advance.

‘Hold them!’ I cry, waving hundreds more of my spearmen up the steps. They advance in cold, fearless lines, but the steps can only handle so many of them; most of my army remains trapped around the base of the skull or spread out across the vast crater.

Giraldus waves his sword at Boreas’ army. ‘We should help them, not fight them.’ He gestures at our combined armies. ‘We could hold the daemons here so that Sigmar’s knights can reach the skull.’

I look up at the daemons tearing my army apart and shake my head. ‘We need to leave, Giraldus. We were fools to come.’

‘Where would we go?’ he demands. ‘Do you think they won’t hunt us down? Do you think you can hide in your library forever? They’ll find you, Menuasaraz. It’s only a question of when. They’ll find you, they’ll burn your precious books and then they’ll mount your head on a spike.’

Suddenly I know this is true. I’ve tasted the bloodlust that drives these fiends – they will never stop until they have butchered every living being in the realms as a tribute to their furious lord.

I’m about to reply when a series of red shapes slam into my coven throne, causing the spectral steeds to rear and scream.

I howl a curse as a winged daemon hurtles towards me. I lash out with my staff and there’s a flash of phosphorous as the magic-charged wood connects.

The daemon screeches and tumbles away from me. The attack was so fast that I only get a brief glimpse of crumpled, bat-like features and black, leathery wings.

It loops around and dives at me again but, before it reaches the Coven Throne, Giraldus cuts it down with his greatsword. There’s another blinding flash as the daemon explodes.

More of the furies pour out of the fumes surrounding the base of the brass skull and I raise my staff, crying out a word of summoning, calling my greatest warrior back from the battle, but it’s too late. The daemons are seconds away and the morghast will never make it in time.

Giraldus comes to my aid with his knights at his side, hacking down those daemons he can, but dozens more are diving towards me.

Suddenly a blaze of white light envelops the steps. The clouds part, unleashing great columns of lightning. They slam into the daemons, blasting them away and causing my Coven Throne to lurch and judder.

I manage to hang on to the throne and as I do I’m blessed with an incredible vision. As I slump in my chariot, hundreds of winged warriors loop and soar down from the clouds. Their golden armour shines brighter than the dawn and there are javelins of pure energy hurtling from their hands.

Their lightning spears erupt upon landing, engulfing the daemons in holy fire, and Giraldus cries out in delight.

‘We have to help them!’ he cries. Without waiting for a response, he waves his knights back up the steps. ‘Hold the daemons back!’ he cries, charging after them.

For a moment, I can do nothing but watch the incredible scene unfolding before me. As the golden figures plummet from the heavens, blasting Khorne’s daemons into crimson dust, Giraldus and his knights lead a heroic counter-attack on the gate of blood. It’s hopeless and glorious at the same time. The daemons are pouring from the skull in such numbers that nothing could hold them back for long, but the sight of so much defiance in the face of inevitable defeat stirs something in me that I thought long dead.

Giraldus vanishes beneath the avalanche of horrors, but I’m already raising my staff. It’s as though someone is speaking through me, someone greater than I thought I could be.

‘Hold them back,’ I demand, turning to face my grinning, skinless captains and their bristling ranks of spearmen. I turn the Coven Throne around and find myself leading a charge back up the steps. Daemons are now pouring down the walls of the skull in their hundreds. There is no way I can survive but, somehow, I no longer care. I can think of nothing but Boreas and his belief.

‘Things have to change,’ I whisper as I level my staff at the Chaos creatures and hurl my army at the face of the Blood God.

Daemons crowd onto my chariot, but my staff is charged with more power than I have ever felt before. As I strike them down, the blows crack like thunder and their crimson flesh detonates in a series of spectacular explosions. All the while, Sigmar’s tempest is raging overhead, spewing golden knights from its thunderheads. They add their hammer-headed bolts to the carnage, ripping more of the daemons apart.

Countless hundreds of terrible monsters sprint into my ranks of spearmen. For every skeleton they destroy, dozens more rush to fill the gaps, but there’s no end to the skull’s profane outpourings. Gradually they drive us back down the steps, ripping my army to pieces with the ferocity of their sword blows.

Death is rushing towards me but an incredible vigour fills my limbs. As the white bolts slam down all around me, I blast daemon after daemon back from the Mortal Realms. The princes whirl around the Coven Throne, binding the daemons with death magic and hacking at them with phantom blades. They fight so heroically that none of the horrors can reach me. I look back through the inferno and see Boreas’ army hurtling across the crater towards us and my heart swells. They are going to make it. Boreas will never know it, but I have bought him the chance he sought.

One by one the princes are devoured and, finally, I am surrounded by snarling, blood-slick daemons. They pause for a moment, sniggering at my ruined body, then they fall on me with their vicious blades. There is pain, but it is dwarfed by my pride. After all those years cheating death, my final breath is the first taste of life.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

The morning sun blinds me as we soar higher. We’re so high I can now barely see the crater below.

Air explodes from my lungs as we crash into a wall. The woman and I roll across marble steps and the monster spins off through the clouds, dazed by the impact.

I glance around and see that we’ve smashed into one of the drifting fragments of the Nomad City, a vast, broken wing of white marble, the feathers of which spiral up towards a white, crumbling eagle’s neck.

The monster soars away and I charge after it. Pain fills my head, causing me to stumble as I climb the steps. The song of the ghosts is deafening now that I am actually in the ruins. It’s as though the soul of the Nomad City is all around me. I stagger and only manage to stop a few inches from the edge of the wing. My stomach turns as I look out over a mile-high drop.

As I back away from the edge, the bone monster dives back towards me with its sword raised.

I draw Evora and, to my relief, the runeblade’s otherworldly song eases the agony in my head, drowning out a little of the ghost’s pain.

I easily dodge the monster’s blade and plunge Evora into its chest as it smashes into me.

The sword passes cleanly through the empty ribcage and I only succeed in jamming the hilt between the bones. We roll across the marble wing, locked together as we clang and clatter towards the precipice.

Seconds from the edge I manage to draw Evora from the monster’s chest and bring her round in a wide arc, slicing through one of the monster’s shoulder blades and hacking part of its wing off.

The monster opens its weird, bat-like jaws and mouths a silent scream.

I throw all my momentum into a hammer-blow, smashing Grius into its chest and sending the creature tumbling through the clouds in a rain of broken bones.

The bone monster loops and prepares to launch another attack, but before it can, it pauses in midair, beating its wings as it looks down on me from the clouds, suddenly unwilling to attack. For a moment, it hangs there staring at me, then it banks away and dives back towards the battle below.

I stagger to the edge of the ruins and look down across the fighting.

‘Now what have you done, Boreas?’ I mutter as I see what’s happening. The vast army of skeletons is no longer battling my army. They’re charging towards the skull instead, rushing to engage the crimson host that is tearing its way into the world. I can only assume this is another sign of my brother’s burgeoning power.

As Evora’s kill-song dies away, the giant’s cries hit me with redoubled force, driving me back to my knees. The pain centres on the eye that Boreas healed, and blood is rushing from my golden mask again.

‘Let me help,’ says a voice.

I lurch to my feet, readying Grius for another blow, and see Hakh’s woman rushing towards me. Her skin is pulsing with sorcery and her eyes are featureless white orbs, but, as before, I sense that she means me no harm.

The lights in her skin fade and the colour returns to her eyes as she reaches my side and places her hands on my mask.

She sings a few quiet words and blessed relief pours through my skull. I can still hear the ghosts’ lament, but it’s just a sound now. The horrendous pain is gone.

‘I’m Vourla,’ she says, looking at my scorched, dented armour. Dawn blazes across the metal, dazzling her as she tries to look at me. ‘What are you?’

I study her in silence.

She backs away from me, looking anxious.

‘You need not fear me,’ I say, sheathing Evora and holding out a hand. ‘You came to my aid. I owe you a debt.’

She looks away, as though in pain. ‘You owe me nothing.’

I shake my head, confused, and follow her up the steps of the stone wing.

There’s a clatter of metal as Prosecutor Sardicus lands on the ruins. He folds his blazing wings and rushes towards us.

I’m about to greet him when I see a shocking sight. The brass skull is now aflame with morning light, but I’m blind to anything beyond the figure rising from the open top of the cranium. A crimson horror is drawing itself up from the boiling blood. As hundreds of lesser daemons flood from the skull’s mouth, a mountain-sized nightmare is rising from its open crown. The world unravels before its unholy power. Colours and shapes tumble into each other, forming a rippling kaleidoscope.

As the daemon, Khurnac, drags itself into the world I see black, canine flesh and vast, blood-red wings. Looking upon such perversion turns my stomach but I refuse to avert my gaze. Such virulent, blasphemous hate cannot be ignored.

‘I did this to you,’ says Vourla, sounding appalled.

She’s sitting on the edge of a crumbling step, paying no attention to the daemons, but staring at me.

‘Why did you save me if you despise me so?’ I say, managing to shield my thoughts from the abomination forming below us.

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t hate you. I just didn’t believe…’ Her words trail off. ‘It’s only now I see you that I understand.’ She stares at me again and her voice fills with panic. ‘I never considered that you might actually have a hope.’ She rises to her feet, shaking her head furiously. ‘I sent your storm astray. I did this to you. I still had a remnant of power in me and I saw a chance to use it before I died. I thought that you were doomed whatever happened, so why not use you before you met the same fate as all the others?’

Rage jolts through me as I realise what she’s saying. ‘You delayed us?’ I glance at the skull. Khurnac is beginning to thrash and grow. The blood that spews from its movements forms limbs and jaws as it drops. The hordes of the Blood God are here.

‘I couldn’t let Hakh live,’ she replies, talking to herself rather than me. ‘Not after so much pain, so much cruelty.’

‘So you used me as your executioner? And delayed Sigmar’s vengeance?’

My body is shaking with fury and I see that Sardicus is the same. I draw Evora as we walk towards the dazed woman.

Vourla makes no attempt to flee, she just nods her head in shame, waiting for my blade.

The runeblade lifts its voice in reply to my bloodlust. I’m hardly conscious of raising it but, as I near the priestess, I see myself reflected in her terrified eyes and pause. I look like every other monster in this pitiful ruin of a world. I look like the man I was long ago.

‘No.’ I lower the sword and back away. Not that. Of all the ways I could fail Sigmar, I would not become the thing he sent me to kill. I sense that this is the power of the skull at work. It’s twisting my thoughts.

‘I won’t harm you,’ I say, turning my back on the Crucible of Blood. ‘I’m here to save you.’

She looks up at me, her eyes full of tears and confusion. ‘But can’t you see?’ She nods at the scene below. ‘There’s nothing to save. It’s too late.’

Khurnac is wrenching its brimstone flesh from side to side, straining against an enormous chain that binds it to the rim around the skull’s open crown. An axe has formed in its claws – a weapon that must be thirty or forty feet long. As the daemon thrashes around it slams the axe against the walls of the skull, consumed by an immemorial fury, attempting to hack itself free. Every blow sends out a dull, tuneless clang and each one heralds the arrival of hundreds more daemons. They’re flowing from the skull in a crimson tide and pouring into the crater below. Through gaps in the clouds I see them scampering and sprinting into the ranks of skeletons. Nothing can stand against them. The undead crumble like kindling and, wherever my Stormcast Eternals are, I know that even their sigmarite shields will not stand against this. Clang after clang tolls out and the torrent becomes a storm. The writhing, ephemeral shapes become a vast wall of hate, pounding down into the crater.

I grab my honour scrolls and recite the runes. Pain may be my flesh. Death may be my fate. But victory is my name.

I know that Sigmar would not send me here without hope. I just need to look harder. I need to find Sigmar’s face in the darkness. I need to hear his voice. His voice… I remember the ghostly cry still circling my head and finally recognise something that has been at the edge of my consciousness since we reached the Nomad City. The dead titan is not howling in pain, but frustration. He sounds as though he is forever trapped in sight of a prize that’s just out of reach. It’s like he’s calling me to witness something.

I look around, trying to locate the source of the cries, and my eyes settle on the white tower at the top of the stone wing – the soaring, graceful neck of marble that rises away from me into the clouds.

Vourla’s still staring at me and follows my gaze to the tower.

‘It’s too late,’ she says, sounding almost angry at my persistence. ‘I’ve murdered you.’

I place a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re no murderer.’

She closes her eyes, holding back tears. ‘Why did you come?’

‘The Crucible of Blood is a gate between two worlds. It leads to the heart of Khorne’s realm. It leads to the birthplace of his whole empire. This skull feeds his armies. Every dawn, when Khurnac pounds that axe, he sends fresh legions. We have to–’

My words are interrupted as Khurnac strikes the skull again, vomiting more daemons onto the already swamped skeletons. I start to imagine what must have become of my men, then crush the thought before it can take hold. I’ll grieve when the realmgate is sealed.

‘We have to close it,’ I say, I racing up the steps towards the tower with Vourla and Sardicus rushing after me.

‘Lord-Celestant!’ cries Sardicus. ‘What about the Kuriat? The Lord-Relictor has the key to the realmgate and he’s still on the far side of the crater. If he’s even alive, daemons and the dead lie between him and us.’

I look back at him and shake my head. ‘The heart has been lost. Boreas bought our passage through the Anvil with it.’

Sardicus falters. ‘Then we will…’ His words trail off as he considers the significance of my words.

‘We can no longer claim the realmgate for Sigmar.’ I lift Grius and turn it so that light plays across the sigmarite. ‘But we have one card left to play.’

Sardicus stands proud despite the fear he must be feeling. ‘You will not go alone.’

Words will not suffice. I grasp his hand in silence.

He glances down at the boiling ocean of daemons where my army once stood. ‘But how will we get to the gates?’

I turn back to the tower, sure that Sigmar is already giving me the answer. The voice of the dead titans is so loud here that I can feel it buffeting against me. The more I listen, the more sure I am that this is a message from the God-King.

The tower is a stone shell, with no stairs and, as I step inside, I see that it’s open to the sky. Sunlight beats down on me through vast, serpentine windows, blinding me.

I hold Grius up to block the light and, as my vision clears, I look back through the centuries into the Age of Myth.

Overhead, one of the giant ghosts is clearly visible, frozen in the midst of a heroic dive; preserved at the moment of his death. The sunlight beats through his vaporous flesh and I can see clouds through his billowing spear, but his eyes are as fierce and vital as my own. They’re locked on something below, something on the Crucible of Blood. He’s showing me something; calling to me.

‘Carry me,’ I say.

Sardicus spreads his wings, flooding the ruins with light.

I place my hand on Vourla’s arm. ‘The time has come. Rise up and reclaim your home.’

‘Me?’ She looks from me to Sardicus, baffled.

‘You stood face to face with the enemy, Vourla, and you still found a way to fight. Find others and teach them to do the same. We didn’t come simply to close a gate. We came to start a landslide.’

She laughs in disbelief, but I can see a fire starting to kindle in her eyes. I’ve done enough.

The tower whirls around us as Sardicus lifts me up through the ruins, surrounding us with images. I see faces in the marble, heroic and proud, beings born in an age free of monsters like Hakh. They seem at once distant and recognisable. I see the same fire in their eyes that I saw in Vourla’s. Centuries of brutal oppression have not dampened it.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ says Sardicus, and I realise that my mind has been wandering. There’s something hypnotic about these ruins and the cry of the ghost.

Sardicus draws my attention to the figure looming overhead. We’ve almost reached the spectre of the dead titan. His cries are heartbreaking in their desperation. Wisps of armour trail around his gargantuan form and he roars as he tries, endlessly, to launch his spear.

‘Closer!’ I shout, struggling to be heard over the ghost’s cries. ‘Take me closer.’

Sardicus hurls us into the miasma of the giant’s flesh.

The effect is instant, and shocking. The crumbling ruins vanish, replaced by a dazzling array of colours and shapes. I’m seeing the Nomad City through the eyes of the ghost. The walls are covered with beautiful murals of gold and ochre and the rooms are capped with ornate ceilings. Enormous pieces of furniture are all around me, gilded and gleaming, and the air smells clean and pure. It’s no idyll though. Hundreds of titans are tumbling backwards past me, roaring in anger and fury, swarming with vicious, crimson daemons. They’re being devoured by a host of hunched, scaled monstrosities with anvil-shaped heads and gaping jaws. The giants are attempting to defend themselves, but it’s clear that the battle is already lost. Their strange, inhuman faces are tormented by fear and anger as the daemons flood over them in uncountable numbers, clawing and devouring like a plague of locusts.

Even over the din of battle, I can hear the voice of my host-spirit. His language is strange and incoherent, but I can feel the dreadful urgency in his cries. As I look out from his mind I finally see what he’s been trying to reach for all these centuries. As the daemons tear him apart, shredding his flesh with frantic, snarling mouths, the giant’s gaze is fixed on a goal he’ll never reach.

Of course.

My heart quickens as I see what I must do.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

The stink of charred flesh greets me as I return. I feel Sardicus struggling to hold me aloft as we fly up through the top of the ruined tower and out into the clouds.

Beneath us, the crater is a seething mass of red shapes but the skull has not finished its work yet. Blood-red figures are pouring over the lip at the skull’s crown, from its nose and from the doorway beneath its teeth. There must be thousands of daemons, tumbling over the rocks and charging to war. Some of them resemble the things I saw through the eyes of the titan, but others assume forms I cannot even describe – mongrel things that combine the canine and the reptile into something obscene.

And, over all of this pandemonium, Khurnac still rages, smashing its colossal axe against the walls of its brass prison and roaring in fury. Every blow spews another glut of daemons from the crucible and, as they tumble into the world, Khurnac turns its fury on its own kind, tearing apart anything it can lay its claws on, cramming visions of madness between its slavering jaws.

Reality has given up trying to contain such overwhelming corruption. The world beyond the daemon is like a tattered curtain, revealing glimpses of a landscape even more tormented than the Kharvall Steppe. This is now my destination – the Blood God’s foothold in the Mortal Realms.

Sardicus pounds his wings, struggling to stay aloft as I steel myself for what I must do.

‘Take me as close as you can,’ I call out.

‘Close to what?’ he cries.

‘Drop me on the rim of the skull, as near to the daemon as you can!’

Sardicus shakes his head, horrified.

‘Do you trust me?’ I cry.

‘But what can you do against that?’

‘That’s where darkness is deepest. That’s where I’ll find Sigmar waiting.’

Sardicus keeps shaking his head, but he flies down through the clouds nonetheless.

Daemons hurtle to greet us. They’re no bigger than dogs, but they have ragged wings, long, revolting snouts and mouths full of dagger-like incisors. They swoop towards us, screaming like demented gulls and reaching out with grasping talons.

I slam Grius into the first of them, crushing its head between its shoulders and sending it spinning back towards the skull.

The other manages to latch onto me, but I fling it off with a roar and, as it swings round to attack again, Sardicus blasts it from the sky.

‘More,’ gasps Sardicus, pointing at countless red shapes that are lifting up from the crush of battle to attack us.

‘Faster!’ I cry, jabbing Grius at the brass skull.

Sardicus dives with stomach-churning speed, plunging us towards the Crucible of Blood.

Before the smaller daemons can reach us, I leap free and land on the crown of the brass skull. Nausea-inducing pain rushes up through my legs. The whole skull is seething with power.

‘Go!’ I cry, glancing at Sardicus as I climb to my feet.

He hesitates, watching the mountain-sized horror thrashing through the lake of blood behind me. Then crimson-fleshed figures burst through the clouds, screaming as they attack him.

Sardicus launches Sigmar’s fury at them, but, as I rush to help him, I feel a wave of incredible power smashing into my back. I topple to my knees, clattering across the brass rim of the skull, and my head fills with dizzying visions of slaughter and bloodshed.

‘Lord-Celestant!’ cries Sardicus, from somewhere outside my pain.

I stagger back to my feet, just in time to see the source of the hateful energy that’s crippling me.

The daemon rises over me – a monumental fortress of scale and fire, blocking out the sky with leathery, tattered wings and raising its immense axe. I can’t meet its gaze but the hate in its eyes burns through my armour, scorching my flesh.

I dive clear just as the axe smashes into the brass wall. The force of the blow rocks the whole skull and I’m thrown from my feet.

The daemon roars and at such close quarters the sound fills my head with agony, but along with the pain comes outrage. This monstrous creation is everything I was born to destroy.

As Khurnac draws back its axe for another blow, I spit blood from my helmet and turn to face it, standing defiantly before the flaming goliath with my hammer gripped firmly in both hands.

I swing Grius and the warhammer connects squarely with the daemon’s colossal axe. There’s a blinding flash and sickening power jolts through my body, hurling me through the air. I manage to roll as I land and, as I break into a sprint, I see my target no more than thirty feet away.

The daemon laughs as it sees that I have no escape. It doesn’t realise that I don’t seek to run away.

Waves of blood boom against the walls of the skull as Khurnac wades slowly after me, drawing back its axe for the final blow.

My lungs are burning and I’m drowning in my own blood. The fury pouring up through the brass is starting to cook me from the inside out; I can feel my innards burning and twisting. I have nothing left in me but one, final attack.

‘My name. Is. Victory,’ I whisper, launching myself at the object I saw through the eyes of the ghost: a thick ring of brass that locks the daemon’s chain to the wall of the skull.

I leap, hammer raised, and cry out an oath as I swing Grius.

The air ignites. I’m thrown for a third time, this time by the thunderclap force of my own strike. For a moment I’m blinded by the afterimage of the detonation. When my vision clears, I see what I’ve done.

Khurnac has waded deep into the lake of blood and is staring at its broken chain. It lets out a final roar of exquisite relief as it realises I’ve freed it from its centuries-old bonds. I have unleashed one of Khorne’s most powerful servants.

But instead the daemon’s flesh begins breaking apart and drifting into the sky, like a swarm of insects leaving a nest. Khurnac reels back and forth through the gore, grunting and bellowing as its physical form collapses. Finally, there is a brittle cracking sound as its form dissipates completely. Then the daemon is gone. I have done what the giants of the Nomad City have long dreamt of – I have severed Khurnac’s link to the Mortal Realms and sent it home to its master.

Immediately, the blood ceases to boil and the violent power stops blasting through my body. All I’m left with is exhaustion and the pain of my wounds. I drop to my knees and groan.

From the top of the skull I see that the lesser daemons remain below. I had hoped that vanquishing their wretched progenitor might banish them too, but they’re still pouring across the landscape.

I climb unsteadily to my feet and study my surroundings. Standing up here, at the summit of the huge skull, I feel like I’m already dead, watching the death of the Mortal Realms from a lofty, god-like perch. Far below, I see where I need to be – the gateway between the skull’s teeth.

I whisper a prayer of thanks for Sardicus’ disobedience as I see him swooping towards me, still blasting daemons from the air despite terrible, bloodstained rents in his armour. One of his wings has been badly damaged. The blades of light have lost their lustre and they’re flickering and failing. He’s flying in lurching, drunken arcs, barely keeping aloft, but when he lands on the skull, he extends a hand towards me.

We fall rather than fly towards the earth, a dead leaf spinning from a tree, but Sardicus summons final reserves of strength as we near the ground, thrashing his one good wing just before we crash onto the steps. The impact still jars through me but we both manage to stand.

As we climb to our feet, the daemons swarm around us, loping across the brass on their cloven hooves and raising their swords. They’re wiry, crook-backed things, knots of scaly muscle that reek of death.

Sardicus launches a volley of hammers, filling the air with crackling energy and dazzling explosions. Dozens of the daemons fall, but dozens more vault the blasts and throw themselves at me.

My strength is all but gone. As their snarling faces speed towards me I drag Grius up to meet them. The warhammer lends me its vigour. It’s as though it can sense the proximity of its goal. I bring the slab of sigmarite down again and again, barging through their smouldering ranks as I try to reach the entrance up ahead. Sardicus lifts himself overhead and surrounds me with thundering, furious blasts of god-fire.

Our assault draws the attention of the whole host and I see countless hundreds of the daemons racing back up the steps towards us, gripping flaming swords.

I see a wall of blood up ahead of me and I realise I’m moments from victory.

Dozens more crash into me as I try to climb the last few steps. They tear my armour and flesh. I’m aflame with agony, but the pain only drives me on. I pound and lunge but it’s no good. My body is broken. I can barely stand. The opening is still ten feet or so away but the daemons are pouring over me in such frantic waves that I can’t fight through.

Finally, the weight of them drives me to my knees.

I try to fight on, but it’s impossible. They swarm over me like rats and I can’t find the strength to shrug them off.

‘Sigmar!’ I howl, turning to face the heaving throng. Where is my lord? He must be here. I’ve looked deeper into the darkness than any man. Where is the face of the God-King?

Sardicus swoops overhead, but his lightning is useless against such numbers, and I see that he’s as ruined as me. He’s on the verge of dropping into their waiting talons.

‘Sigmar!’ I try to shout, but my lungs are full of ash and nothing emerges but a croak.

And then I see him.

Crashing up the steps, ploughing through the ranks of daemons and piles of broken skeletons, comes a golden triangle of shields. They’re dented, scorched and bloody, as are the men behind them, but they do not stop.

My army lives. Despite everything, it lives. There are no more than a hundred or so left from the vast host that set out, but they have fought, tirelessly across this valley of madness to reach me. What valour is bound into those bones? I see Boreas staggering at their head, drenched in blood, followed by Retributor Celadon and others I recognise but, above all, in their gleaming forms, I see the face of Sigmar.

‘For the God-King,’ I cry, driven to my feet by the glory of it, raising Grius in tribute, shrugging off mounds of daemons as I stand.

They hesitate.

Boreas speeds up at the sight of me, powering through the crush, hurling entire rows of daemons aside in his determination to reach my side. Behind him, the Liberators finally lower their shields and charge, crushing daemons beneath a storm of golden boots.

They reach me. Despite everything Khorne has thrown at them, they reach me. I feel dozens of hands grasping my ruined body and hauling me towards the doorway.

I cry out, seconds before we leave the steppe. ‘Victory!’

Then we cross the threshold and step into a wall of blood.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Lord-Celestant Tylos Stormbound

The clamour of the daemons dies away and blood envelops us. The liquid is hot and cloying, flooding my armour and filling my mouth, but after the vision on the steps, nothing could stop me. I hurl myself through the curtain of gore and burst into a new kind of hell. As I leave the wall of blood, the sudden lack of resistance throws me forwards and I crash to the ground. No, not the ground – a pile of glistening skulls.

I clamber to my feet and look around as Boreas and the others emerge behind me. I can’t help but laugh. We’re standing on an endless, sunless plain of skulls, lit only by violent gouts of fire scattered across the landscape as though supporting the tormented heavens. In every direction, the plain is walled by brutal, brass fortresses, bristling with spines. Talon-crowned towers soar out of sight and comprehension, making me stumble as I try to study them. They’re huge in a way that staggers the mind. The horizon seems to sag under their weight.

Above the towers there’s no sky, only an endless, rolling storm of daemons. Countless thousands of them, billowing and heaving like blood spiralling in water, lit up by the blooming columns of fire.

Circling the plain of skulls are vast, roaming packs of daemon-hounds trailing smoke from their ruby eyes and howling at the tumult overhead. And wading between the hounds is a loathsome, thrice-damned multitude. Every form of debased soul that ever worshipped the Blood God is here: towering troll-like monstrosities, winged, bull-faced daemons and snorting, armour-clad knights, all locked in battle for their master’s enjoyment, all clashing in endless, pointless, war.

‘Lord-Celestant,’ says Boreas, wiping blood from his broken armour. My brother’s hammer is gone and his skull mask has been warped into a nightmarish grin, but he sounds as calm as ever. ‘The Crucible of Blood is still open.’

I grip his shoulder in gratitude then stagger back towards the portal. Crimson daylight is still pouring through the doorway and I can just make out the portico beyond. On this side the realmgate is surprisingly tangible – a tall stone arch, carved with brutal images of slaughter and war.

I heft Grius into my hands, savouring its weight; savouring its purity. No amount of blood could stain such a weapon.

‘There can be no return,’ I say, turning back to my men.

They nod in silence, wearing their wounds like medals, facing me with unshakeable pride.

I turn back to the stone arch and swing with all the strength I can muster.

I’m half dead with exhaustion and pain, but a greater force than me throws the blow. It smashes into the stone and sends thick, silver lightning up from the metal, splitting the clouds of daemons; drenching us all in holy light.

The archway collapses and the world beyond it vanishes from view. The realmgate that has stood for countless ages is no more. Now there is only the plain of skulls, grinning mercilessly at us from every direction.

‘Victory comes in many forms,’ I say, staring at the pile of smouldering rubble.

I turn back to my men and as the lightning dies away we’re plunged into the fitful darkness. The world starts to shake as a furious roar booms out from the towers. Khorne’s legions cease their games as they see what I’ve done – what I’ve taken from them.

They charge – a tsunami of daemons, monsters and killers, flooding across the plain.

As the damned hurtle towards us from every direction, remnants of lightning play across our golden armour, so that we resemble a tiny, polished coin set adrift in a lake of tar.

I feel no fear. No doubt. Only pride.

At my command, shield walls form around me and I hold Grius aloft.

The host crashes into us.

The hammer falls.

Chapter One

What use the weapon forged without the hand to wield it? It needs more than a mighty weapon to make a mighty warrior! Even if the metal is strong, how shall it prevail if the flesh that bears it is unready? By the fire of tribulation and ordeal is the spirit tempered; in the clamour of battle is valour proven.

The realms burn in the havoc of Chaos. Hour by hour their substance, their very essence, is degraded and corrupted. The powers of darkness assert their ascendancy, ready and eager to consume all. Never has there been greater need for Ghal Maraz.

Though the weapon is ready, the warrior must be proven. Haste in battle is oft as disastrous as over-caution. The cries of the numberless multitudes who languish in the chains of Chaos, whose lands and lives are despoiled by the Ruinous Powers, sear through my being like fiery daggers, urging me to throw aside all caution and descend in a mighty storm upon the enemy. Such recklessness would please the foe. The atrocities their creatures inflict are bait to draw me out, to stir my wrath that I may forget the greater purpose of war: liberation of the realms from the darkness that would devour them.

No, they will not goad me into foolish action. I will wait to loose Ghal Maraz into the greater war. I will wait until he who will bear it, he who will be my champion, is ready to fulfil his purpose.

Flesh, mind and spirit – tempered and tested until they have become as unstoppable and unopposable as Ghal Maraz itself, until the Hammer of Sigmar is ready for my war.

Such is the decree I, Sigmar, make now!

The crack of thunder boomed across the swamps of Krahl, sending flocks of hairy fen-hawks winging away from their nests among the dagger-leafed spineferns. An entire stand of the trees with their scaly, armoured trunks was obliterated as a blazing lance of lightning hurtled downward, smashing into it with volcanic fury. Embers and ash were sent flying across the swamp, splattering the sluggish streams and murky lagoons. A ribbon of smoke steamed upwards from the scorched crater.

Amid the wreckage of the thunderstrike, something stirred that was not smoke or ash. A figure climbed out from the charred hole. Towering in stature, he was of more than merely human proportion. The armour that encased him was a thing of wondrous craft and fearsome design, forged from sigmarite, with a nimbus of gold secured to the top of the backplate to provide a permanent halo framing the warrior’s metal helm, a helm cast in the shape of a human visage frozen in a scowl of perpetual and inexorable judgement. Mighty wings stretched outwards from the figure’s back, endowed with dazzling purity and a starry lustre. Upon the heavy pauldrons that shielded the warrior’s upper arms and shoulders was emblazoned the shape of a twin-tailed comet, sacred symbol of the God-King himself. Hanging from a loop on his belt was a golden sceptre cast in the same shape.

An even greater symbol of the God-King was gripped in the warrior’s hands. Crackling with ancient enchantments and the energies of Azyr, the Celestial Realm, the great warhammer was of such massive size that even in the grip of this formidable warrior it looked gigantic. Jewels shone from its golden haft and upon the broad and brutal head were inscribed runes that had been old even in the Age of Myth.

The blast of the thunderstrike was still echoing across the land as the crackling blaze dissipated from the warrior’s eyes and his vision resolved itself to take in the savage tableau. He had descended upon a primordial scene, sluggish streams of silvery muck that were neither liquid nor metal flowing past islands of rusty earth peppered with black spineferns and predatory leechpines. Jagged spires of raw, twisted iron stabbed up from the creeks, scratching at the murky sky. There was a hot, heavy quality to the air, fetid and stifling with a dull coppery reek.

The grisly environment was far from deserted. All around him the warrior could see feral, savage figures. Two great packs of barbarous fighters had converged upon a broad lagoon of the semi-metal swamp muck. Hideously mangled bodies floated downstream, their flesh sundered by claw and blade. Some of the bodies were human, though of a brutish and monstrous aspect. Other carcasses were those of horned beasts, their frames covered in matted fur and cabalistic brands. Man or monster, even in death the things carried the stench of cruelty and depravity.

More numerous than the slain were the living: horned creatures armed with axes fashioned from bone and stone and hulking men, their brawny frames draped in skins and scraps of armour. The combatants drew apart, stunned and bewildered by the warrior’s sudden appearance.

Beyond the brutish tribes, lumbering through the morass, two colossal horrors of muscle and sinew gave battle to a third monstrosity. The pair had the rough semblance of human form, though swollen and twisted with primordial ferocity. The foe of these monstrous giants was still more hideous. Squat and bloated, the thing was like some mammoth toad. One of the ox-headed giants wrapped its arms about an iron spur, wrenching it from side to side and trying to rip it free. While the creature was engaged, the other giant kept the abomination busy, swatting at it with the uprooted length of a spinefern. Blows that would have pulverized a man struck the toad-thing’s side, slamming against its shifting skin, splitting the slimy surface and drawing syrupy blood from the monster.

A mighty shout pierced the air, arresting the battle. The golden warrior could feel the black sorcery that leant the words forcefulness and command. Every creature turned, compelled to attend. Even the warrior felt his eyes drawn to the grotesque sorcerer who marched across the swamp. The mystic was a gangrel figure, draped in a feathered cloak, hands encased in gauntlets of black steel, head locked within a faceless helm of obsidian tipped with spiralling horns.

Another shout came, less forbidding and imperious than the first, and the mystic raised one of its armoured hands. The warrior could feel the fell energies rush out at him. He saw a tangle of leechpines between himself and the sorcerer wilt and crumble. Then the malefic magic was searing across his body. The dire power of the spell dissipated in a crackling nimbus of darkling sparks as it crashed against sigmarite armour. Unharmed, the warrior strode through the arcane residue and pointed his hammer in challenge at the horned enchanter.

Memories rushed through the warrior’s mind, images and imperatives that thrust themselves upon him. He had descended upon this realm to confront the Prismatic King, to bring an end to the tyrant’s sorceries. Such was his mission, his purpose, the duty stamped upon his very soul. Was this horned magician the fiend he sought?

The sorcerer cried out again, waving its armoured hands in an imperious gesture. Barbarians and beastmen alike responded to that call, roused from their shock by the command. Howling with bloodlust, braying with animalistic savagery, they rallied and surged towards the golden figure.

The warrior didn’t wait to meet the charge of his foes. Stretching his wings wide, he soared up into the misty sky to come diving down upon them. He arrowed into the midst of the horde. His warhammer cracked against the breastplate of a barbarian fighter, collapsing the man’s chest and tossing his broken body back into his bestial comrades. A goat-headed gor was next, its pelvis splintered by the crushing force of the golden hammer and its neck broken beneath the golden warrior’s boot as he trampled it underfoot.

The unearthly figure charged, striking left and right. With every blow, another of the Chaos creatures was struck down, their mangled bodies slipping away in the semi-silver lagoon. A hulking beastlord toppled into the muck with its horned skull split in half. A barbarian chieftain thrashed in the sludge with his side caved in. Packs of snarling gors were smashed aside, gangs of howling marauders beaten into the mire. Scores of the enemy dead lay strewn in his path, yet none had landed a blow. As unstoppable as an avalanche, he thundered through the horde, drawing closer to the horned sorcerer.

The Prismatic King. That title banged through the winged warrior’s thoughts as he smashed aside the brutish fighters. To vanquish that tyrant was his cause, yet with every step that took him nearer to the sorcerer, the more his mind made him question. Disconnected memories and images rose up, impressions of shadowy courtyards and mirrored halls, foggy battlements and moats of boiling fire.

A sweep of his warhammer spilled the wreckage of a dozen furred beastmen into the muck. King or minion, it was sufficient for the moment to know that the sorcerer was his foe.

The sorcerer fell back, hurling its magic at the oncoming avenger. Its conjurations, growing rapidly more desperate, pelted against the golden plates of its adversary. Spells that should have melted organs, enchantments that could pulverize stone: these sorceries simply dissipated as they drew near the warrior, fading away like smoke.

The barrage of sorcery swelled into a storm of destruction. Raging clouds of flame immolated packs of marauders as the sorcerer loosed his power against the winged avenger. Crackling spears of black lightning seared through herds of beastmen, yet whatever havoc the magic wrought against incidental victims caught in its path, upon the warrior himself they lost their terrible potency.

A fierce bellow boomed over the lagoon. The golden avenger swung around in time to face the charging one-eyed giant. With a great leap he flung himself into the sky and away from the brute’s path, leaving his enemies to be crushed beneath the cyclopean titan’s hooves and impaled upon its bovine horns. The great beast turned, stamping and braying in frustration, furious at missing its prey. Angrily, it tore the still writhing bodies of men and monsters from its horns, rending them in its enormous claws.

The warrior hovered in the air above the ox-headed giant. Before he could dive down upon the savage colossus, he was struck from a different quarter. Without warning, a slimy mass coiled about his leg, plucking him from the sky. He could see the obscene bulk of the toad-creature, its tentacle-like tongues lashing about its fanged mouth. One of these noxious appendages had latched onto him, dragging him back into the mire and towards the abomination’s maw.

Instead of struggling against the ropy tongue, the warrior propelled himself downwards, diving upon the toad-monster with meteoric fury. The obscenity reared up, its clawed forelimbs raking the air as it tried to swat its winged prey.

Nimbly, the warrior dived between those flailing claws. Uttering a mighty shout, he brought his warhammer crashing against the nearest of the toad-beast’s legs. The impact of the golden weapon sent a shudder pulsing through the swamp, causing the spineferns to shiver on their tiny islands and flakes of iron to crumble from the oxidized pillars. The reptilian brute reared back on its grisly hind legs, pawing at the sky with one of its forelimbs while the other quivered as a mess of torn flesh and broken bone.

The warrior scowled at the beast. The hammer should have wrought still greater destruction. He could feel the might of the weapon throbbing through his being, calling to him, urging him to loose its full power against the foe: to visit in truth the vengeance of Sigmar upon the spawn of Chaos.

The warrior raised his weapon to shatter the toad’s ribs with a second blow of the warhammer. Instead he was nearly bludgeoned by the monstrous tail of the creature. Arcing over the beast’s back, driven by some dull instinct rather than any actual awareness, the mace-like tail struck again and again at the mire, blindly trying to destroy the one who had hurt it. The warrior dodged the first strike, ducked beneath the crushing sweep of the second.

On the third swing of the tail, the warrior met the spiked bludgeon with the divine might of his own weapon. Sacred energies crackled across the hammerhead as he brought it slamming into the tail. A sickening tearing sound, the meaty pop of severed tendons and torn sinew, screamed across the swamp. The toad-thing howled anew as the weapon was ripped free and sent spinning back at the creature, slamming into its side and sinking its spikes deep into the slimy flesh. A fountain of blood sprayed from the broken tail as it whipped through the air in a spasm of pain.

The warrior noticed a tremor ripple through the sludge around him just before the giant came charging back to the attack. This time the brute attacked not with hoof and horn, but with a pair of spineferns it had torn from one of the islands. Wrathfully it brought one club slamming down with enough force to crack a mountain, sending a wide sheet of the silver muck streaming upwards in an uncannily sluggish wave. The second club gouged a crater in the bottom of the lagoon.

Instead of retreating before the giant’s assault, the warrior charged forwards. Exploiting the beast’s rage, the warrior was in motion the instant the clubs were swinging downwards. While the one-eyed monster obliterated the spot its adversary had occupied a moment before, mighty wings propelled the warrior beneath the massive cudgels. He darted past the giant’s assault, taking advantage of its graceless might to attack it.

A deafening howl of torment roared from the giant’s jaws as the warrior cracked his great warhammer against the beast’s leg. From ankle to knee, the bone was pulverized. The leg collapsed, knee sinking down to slam into the hoof beneath it. Crippled, the giant toppled forwards, slamming face-first in the sludge. It howled again as it pulled its head up out of the muck, streams of silver dripping from its mane and across its eye.

Soaring up into the air, the golden warrior glared at the stricken brute. ‘So fall all that bow to Chaos,’ he snarled at the toppled giant. Swooping down, he brought the warhammer crashing into the monster’s skull, splintering bone and brain. A crimson glaze of blood spilled across the cyclopean eye as the slaughtered beast slumped back into the mire.

A host of bloodreavers and gors advanced upon the warrior. In droves they charged at him, but with each sweep of his hammer, the winged avenger cut them down, hurling broken bodies into the ranks behind, flinging shattered chieftains into the faces of their followers. The silvery sheen of the sludge vanished beneath a patina of gore and still they came, too proud to admit a lone warrior could defeat them, too afraid of their Dark Gods to confess that a lone warrior had defeated them.

The warrior’s golden halo shimmered above the carnage, a beacon that drew the enraged minions of Chaos to it. A great hunk of jagged iron came hurtling towards that beacon, flung through the air by a titanic force. Taking wing, the warrior flew from the descending missile, leaving dozens of his foes to be crushed beneath it. From his vantage, he could see the second giant stalking away from the severed stump of an iron spur and making towards another of the oxidized pillars.

New determination gripped the warrior. Diving down, he fell upon the gors and bloodreavers once more. The ferocity of his attacks became too great for even them to bear. First by ones and twos, then by the score, his enemies began to flee. They had learned there were other things than the Ruinous Powers that they should hold in fear. Overhead, the celestial storm that had brought the thunderstrike and the golden warrior continued to rage, crashing and crackling with the God-King’s wrath.

The last of the routed marauders were obliterated beneath another of the iron pillars, crushed as it came hurtling downwards. Again, the missile failed to smash its intended prey as the winged warrior soared from its path. He had used the giant’s ungainly throw, exploiting the beast’s brutality to inflict further destruction against the mass of beastmen and bloodreavers. As he gazed upon the smashed bodies, the warrior felt outrage swell within his heart.

To fail in his duty would be a dishonour almost unthinkable, but to be crushed like a crawling insect was too much for his pride to bear. ‘The hour of Sigmar is come, beast!’ the warrior cried out. ‘The hour of your doom is here!’

Flying through the mist, the warrior could see the giant trudging towards another of the iron pillars. Snorting and braying, the brute turned to glare at him with its blemished eye. The beast seized the metal spire, rocking the pillar from side to side, seeking to rip it free as it had done to the others.

‘For Sigmar!’ the warrior cried as he hurtled down to the attack. His great warhammer didn’t crack against the bones of the giant, but instead slammed into the opposite side of the pillar the creature had weakened. A grinding, metallic shriek rose from the spur as it was sundered. Unprepared for the abruptly loosened mass, the giant found the full weight of the pillar crashing down upon it. It was borne down, smashed under tons of metal, its head crushed beneath the iron mass.

The warrior regarded the dead giant with a cold gaze. This was the ignominious end the brute had intended for him. Instead it was the beast that had perished. Surely the hand of Sigmar was visible in such irony.

Turning from the giant, the warrior surveyed the battlefield around him. Amidst the wreckage of beasts, men and monsters, he looked for any sign of the sorcerer who had united them against him. There was no trace of his enemy. Unlike its savage followers, the sorcerer had wit enough to abandon the field ahead of disaster. The winged figure could only hope that the fiend wasn’t able to rally other tribes of Chaos to further obstruct him.

The thought made the warrior pause. He could recall little enough, whispers and fragments that stirred through his mind. The Prismatic King, an enemy to overcome. Yet there was more. He was certain of that. Hints and suggestions tugged at the edge of his consciousness, slipping away whenever he tried to grasp them.

Only one certainty was firm in his mind. That was the nature of the weapon he carried. He’d felt the thrill of the warhammer’s power, the awesome potential lurking within it. A sense of abject reverence flowed through him as he reflected upon the great honour that had been entrusted to him. In his hands he held Ghal Maraz itself, the godhammer of Sigmar! He could feel that truth in every mote of his soul, every speck of his essence.

Such then was his purpose. More than warrior or hero, he was Sigmar’s champion. The duty entrusted to him was bestowed by the God-King himself.

If only he could remember what that duty was.

Chapter Two

The light was nearly spent before the warrior reached the edge of the swamp. Rising up from the silvery streams and islands of spineferns was scrubland. Clumps of ugly grey bushes with branches like wire and gaudy flowers of turquoise and emerald lay strewn about the plain. Here and there heaps of boulders and mounds of rock lay piled, each stone exhibiting a riotous range of colours in the swirls and whorls that marked them.

The warrior hesitated as he climbed out of the swamp. Carefully he studied the terrain before him. A weird sense of familiarity nagged at him, but nothing that resonated with conviction. Perhaps if his eyes could pierce the cloying mists that swept across the horizon in great undulations, then he might find his way.

Gazing into the dingy sky, the warrior shook his head. The temptation to take wing, to soar above the bleak landscape, was great, but so too was the appreciation of the danger such course would invite. From such a lofty vantage he would see leagues across the scrubland, perhaps even past the veil of mists. But he would likewise be seen by such loathsome things as inhabited the plain.

‘Mighty Sigmar, lend me your holy wisdom,’ the warrior prayed. ‘Guide my steps upon the path you have set for me. Show me the way to fulfil the purpose I have been chosen for.’ His hand tightened about the haft of Ghal Maraz, feeling the holy weapon’s power rippling through him. The relic was a connection between himself and his god, a compact between servant and master that resonated through the warrior’s very being. In battle, the powers of Ghal Maraz had asserted themselves with a primacy that was almost instinctual. He had felt the potential of the godhammer, felt rather than known how to evoke the relic’s might. It was a knowledge imprinted not upon his mind, but within his soul itself, something that transcended thought.

The warrior bowed his head in submission. That was the God-King’s answer. Not a mighty roar, not an imperious command writ in letters of fire, but a subtlety etched upon the soul. It was left to him to choose whether to submit or resist, to obey or refuse. If he quietened his thoughts, if he let himself feel rather than question, then he would find the way.

‘I have faith in you, Great Sigmar,’ the warrior declared. ‘I will trust you to lead me, for I understand that doubt is the first chink in the armour of righteousness.’ The curious impulses and inexplicable certainties that rose within him had yet to deceive him. He had to trust that they would continue to lead him true.

The warrior marched across the misty plain, his stride assuming the mile-eating jog of the soldier on campaign. Past windswept spires of crystal and around deep crevices billowing with strange vapours and stranger energies, he pursued the fading light. A dull luminance behind the shroud of mist, a lessening of the gloom that choked the sky, the unseen sun drew him after it like some celestial lodestone. Only the feathered lizards that crawled upon the rocks and the diamond-winged scavenger-flies that buzzed about the grey bushes attended his passing, skittering away as he drew near.

Darkness settled across the plain, the mist blotting out whatever light might be shining from moon and star. Still the warrior kept on, warier in the gloom, vigilant for observers more malignant than lizards and flies. Three times he had been set upon by the scrubland’s monstrous denizens in violent encounters of blood and carnage. The warrior drew no satisfaction from such skirmishes, recognizing them as naught but obstructions between himself and the purpose that drew him on.

Reaching one of the jumbled heaps of stone, the warrior spread his wings and rose into the sky. Keeping close to the jagged mound, he used the crumbling peaks to hide his presence. By staying close to the rocks, however, he exposed himself to unexpected danger. Sudden downdrafts buffeted him, seeking to sweep him into the knife-edged stones. He could see great polypus shapes wedged among the rocks, obscene growths that were at once both fungal and mineral. Like huge bladders, the growths expanded and contracted, sucking in great draughts, drawing nourishment from the air.

The warrior struggled against the pull of the fungal growths. A confusion of currents weakened his resistance. Opposing the draw of one cluster of growths would send him spiralling into the drag of another. His armour rang as it glanced across jagged heaps, sending trickles of broken rocks rumbling down the cliff.

Folding his wings against his back, the warrior caught hold of the rocks. If he couldn’t soar above the heap, then he would climb over it. Clawing handholds, he defied the dragging suction of the fungus and pulled himself across the face of the cliff.

As he climbed, the warrior’s keen senses caught the patter of dislodged rocks somewhere below him. He lingered, waiting for any new sound that might betray the presence of a pursuer. When none came after several minutes, he pressed on. Whatever was following him might reasonably suspect that the warrior had decided the betraying sounds were mere imagination or some caprice of the wind being drawn down into the fungal growths.

The warrior was content to lull his stalker into such belief. He knew what he’d heard and he knew what it meant. As he descended the other side of the crag, he kept his senses trained on the rise, waiting for anything that would expose the approach of his hunter. For just an instant, from the corner of his eye, he saw the drift of shadow among the rocks, a shape that had started forwards and then furtively withdrawn.

Just as suddenly as the shadow withdrew back into the rocks, a cry of anguish rang out. There was terror and despair in that cry, but there was something more, something that caused the warrior below to spread his wings and dare the dragging currents of the rock-fungus.

The cry had been human.

Reaching a height above the ridge, the warrior’s keen gaze pierced the shadows below. He saw a lean figure draped in a wispy cloak of grey languishing upon a plateau. The shape was caught in the grip of a squamous, monstrous thing. It seemed kindred to the fungal growths, yet endowed with a ghastly animation. Great stalks of squirming, fibrous material undulated from the mass, coiling around the cloaked figure in a constricting mesh of tendrils. Inch by inch, the horror’s tentacles were drawing its captive towards a slavering maw.

The imprisoned figure struggled to free itself. It gave a wail of frustration and despair.

The warrior didn’t delay. Folding his wings at his sides, he powered down towards the tableau in a dive. The might of Ghal Maraz blazed forth as he brought the relic slamming down against the horror. The obscenity burst apart in a splash of purplish ichor and pulp, its tendrils falling slack as the monster’s vitality evaporated.

The figure quickly pulled away, flinging the remains aside in disgust. Beneath the wispy web-like cloak there was a man, lean and lanky, yet with a hardness and firmness that suggested considerable strength and endurance. The face that stared from beneath the threads of his hood was thin and drawn with deepset eyes that shone with the brilliance of gemstones. His expression was one of resignation, of utter despair, uncountable worries etched into the wrinkled brow.

The man looked anxiously at the splattered husk of the horror that had seized him, then focussed upon the armoured visage of his rescuer. Folding his hands across his chest, he prostrated himself. ‘Glory to you, noble hero, that you should redeem the life of one so wretched.’

The warrior stared down at the cloaked man, studying him with a penetrating gaze.

‘Who are you and why do you follow me?’ he demanded.

‘Peace mighty master!’ the reply came. ‘I mean you no ill! No ill at all!’

‘Then answer me,’ the warrior said. ‘To survive in lands such as these you must either have a dangerously cunning mind or powers not apparent to the eye.’

An almost embarrassed look fell upon the man’s lean face. ‘Mind and powers wouldn’t have saved me this day.’ He pointed at the splattered husk. ‘A moment of incaution is all it needs to draw the attention of the Prismatic King.’

The warrior felt a tremor of hate boil inside him at the mention of the tyrant, the foe he knew he’d come here to vanquish. ‘You are an enemy of the Prismatic King?’

‘I am Throl of Shaard,’ the man said. Despite his fear and the quiver in his voice, there was pride when he spoke the name Shaard.

‘Shaard?’ the warrior repeated, finding the name strangely familiar.

Throl gestured to the misty scrubland around them. ‘All of this was the indomitable nation of Shaard, with its crystal palaces and golden cities. Towers of diamond and ruby that soared up to the heavens themselves. Roads of alabaster upon which were borne the treasures of discovery and the glories of empire.’ He shook his head, closing eyes that were suddenly watery. ‘Lost now,’ he whispered. ‘Torn down by the destroyers. All the wonder and all the beauty, all the craft and art crushed beneath the talons of our conquerors.’

The warrior nodded in sympathy. It was a tale that might be heard throughout the realms. Mighty kingdoms and great nations reduced to ash by the coming of Chaos. The despoilers left nothing in their wake, the corruption of the Dark Gods transforming the land itself into an unrecognizable horror.

‘I am all that is left of my people now,’ the man declared. ‘Throl of the Malachite Throne, greatest wizard of the empire. Once potentates and viziers grovelled before me, offering fortunes for my enchantments. My palace was more glorious than the sun – thousands of pilgrims would journey hundreds of leagues simply to gaze upon its splendour before they died. Princesses from a dozen kingdoms attended me…’ Throl waved his arms in an expression of helplessness. ‘Now I lurk in the swamps among the newts and vipers, living on a diet of rats and snails, hiding from those who are the new masters of the land.’

‘You saw the storm?’ the warrior asked.

Throl nodded. ‘The thunderstrike echoed throughout the swamps of Krahl. To me, its import could not be mistaken. I have seen such warriors before, descending upon Chamon from the realms beyond.’

At mention of others, a memory stirred deep within the warrior’s mind. There were others. Yes, others who he had been sent to find. Others who had fought against the Prismatic King.

‘You have seen the Thriceblessed?’ he asked, giving voice to the name as it emerged from the fog of memory.

‘A golden host wrapt in splendour and glory,’ Throl said. ‘But even they couldn’t prevail against the Prismatic King.’

Anger flared within the warrior’s heart. His eyes glared from behind his golden mask. ‘Yet somehow you have managed to succeed where the Stormcast Eternals have failed?’

Bitter laughter rose from the wizard. ‘You call this success?’ he scoffed. ‘I have magic enough to reflect his power. It is how I have remained as the last echo of my nation, the last shadow of my people. Yet what good does it serve? The Prismatic King’s power flows from his Eyrie of Illusion, contaminating the lands of Shaard. Nothing in these lands has been spared the touch of the Soulshriver. He is the lord of this blight. From his stronghold his corruption ebbs and flows like the tides of damnation, polluting all. Only I have remained unchanged.’

Throl pointed his finger at the warhammer. ‘My spirit is yet pure enough to recognize the energies that course through that weapon. Merely to gaze upon such a force would pain any creature of the Prismatic King.’

The warrior lifted the hammer high. Even in the misty darkness, there was a gleam of light reflecting from its golden surface.

‘Ghal Maraz,’ he declared.

‘The godhammer of Sigmar.’ The words came to the wizard in an awed gasp. ‘I had thought the relic lost, vanished into the mists of legend. It is spoken of in the oldest myths of my people, but never did I dare dream the stories to be true.’ He turned his eyes from the hammer to the man who bore it. ‘Now I understand how a lone warrior could decimate so many of the Prismatic King’s creatures. It pains me that I did not see your battle, only the aftermath. I had thought an entire warhost had wrought such havoc upon the enemy. I was confused to find the trail leading only to you. Tell me, who is this great hero who bears the godhammer to the very doorstep of the enemy?’

The question gave the warrior pause. Throl asked him for his name, yet there was none he could give the wizard. Perhaps there wasn’t an answer. Perhaps no name had been bestowed upon him. Perhaps it was something he had yet to earn. He looked down at the hammer he bore, at the ancient script etched into the golden metal. Here was all he needed to know. Here was all the identity necessary to him.

‘I am the Celestant-Prime,’ he declared, sensing the title buried deep within him. He looked at the holy relic in his hand. ‘But if you must name me, call me by the name of the weapon I bear. Ghal Maraz.’

‘There is power in names,’ Throl said. ‘Names are things to be guarded, especially in the domain of the Prismatic King. I will call you Ghal Maraz, for there is a name even the lords of Chaos fear to utter.’

‘You spoke of seeing my brothers? Others like me?’ the Celestant-Prime asked.

‘They descended upon Shaard in a rain of lightning,’ Throl recalled. ‘They were a glorious warhost, so vibrant and strong. The legions of the Prismatic King fell before them like wheat before the scythe. Man, daemon or monster, none could prevail against the golden warriors. Through the storm I could see a great gilded lord holding his hammer aloft in triumph, leading his army forth across my ruined homeland. In their wake they left the wreckage of the Prismatic King’s legions strewn about the plain. Such battles they must have fought as they pressed deeper into his blighted domain.’

The wizard sank down upon the ground sadly. The wonder left his voice, replaced by a mournful bitterness. ‘I dared to hope my people would finally be avenged, but it was not to be. I followed the path of their march from the swamps of Krahl to the hills of Zehnthi and the gates of the Maze of Reflection. And that is where their journey must have ended, and where my hope died.’

The Celestant-Prime shook his head. ‘It is impossible that the Thriceblessed could have been destroyed,’ he said.

‘There are things worse than death that await the enemies of the Prismatic King,’ Throl declared. ‘The Maze of Reflection is a trap that has claimed many who would oppose the tyrant. It was raised when he first brought his legions against Shaard. A great treasure is hidden in the maze, something of such power that it could break the Soulshriver’s magic. In the early days of his invasion, the knights of Shaard tried to breech the maze and seize the treasure, but none were ever seen again. Mighty wizards and cunning thieves matched their prowess against the maze, but never emerged. Dragons and giants, even rebellious warlords from the Prismatic King’s legions, have sought to seize the treasure.’ Throl waved his hands in a gesture of futility.

The Celestant-Prime was silent, wondering what manner of fate had claimed the Thriceblessed. If they’d been defeated in battle, then they would have been Reforged in Sigmaron, yet such had not been the case. That meant they were still here, lost within the Prismatic King’s maze.

The Celestant-Prime let his hand fall to the Cometstrike Sceptre hanging from his belt, feeling the destructive potential woven within its enchantments, the might to devastate armies. To depose the Prismatic King was his purpose, of that he was certain. He could feel that imperative echoing in his very bones. Yet to leave his brothers, to leave the Thriceblessed locked within the tyrant’s trap for even a moment longer, was something that sickened his spirit. His first duty was to his fellow warriors, to free them from the doom that had claimed them.

‘This maze,’ the Celestant-Prime said. ‘You can lead me to it?’

‘To what purpose?’ Throl asked. ‘That you can join the others in the Prismatic King’s trap? There is no defeating him. He is too devious, too cunning to overcome. This land is lost to him.’

The warrior glared down at the wizard. ‘Those are the words of a coward.’

‘No, they are the words of one who has clung to hope too long,’ Throl replied. ‘Hope can only cheat a man for so long before he understands that it is naught but a cruel illusion. It is the fool and the dreamer who refuses to abandon hope when it has abandoned him.’ He turned his head, staring out into the misty scrubland. ‘When I saw the warhost march against the Prismatic King I had hope. Forgive me if I have none left to spare for you, Ghal Maraz.’ He thrust his arm towards the south. ‘If you would find the Maze of Reflection, seek it there beyond the fires of Uthyr.’

The Celestant-Prime gazed off towards the south. ‘A guide would speed my journey,’ he said. ‘I do not ask you to brave the maze, only to show me the way.’

‘That would draw me nearer to the Prismatic King’s Eyrie,’ Throl said. ‘It is a fool who tempts fate too far.’

‘What of the debt you owe me?’ Ghal Maraz asked. He pointed at the fungal husk. ‘Were the men of Shaard a people with honour? Or were they no better than the beasts that have claimed their lands?’

The wizard glowered at the golden warrior. ‘You save my life only to throw it away again,’ he stated. ‘You would march into the heart of the Prismatic King’s domain.’

‘Is a life spent hiding in swamps and eating snails so precious to you?’ the Celestant-Prime wondered.

‘A man doesn’t choose his life, only the manner of his death,’ Throl said.

Ghal Maraz nodded. ‘There is wisdom in those words, wizard, but you are too afraid to recognize it.’

Throl stamped his foot against one of the tendrils lying on the plateau, grinding it beneath his heel. ‘You would shame me into following you,’ he said.

‘I need your knowledge of these lands,’ the Celestant-Prime told him. ‘Shame and dignity are riddles for your own conscience to decide.’

The wizard bowed his head in defeat. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I am weary of lurking in the shadows. Whether to doom or glory, I cannot say, but I will lead you to whatever fate has decreed.’

Chapter Three

The bleak scrubland of the plain rose into crystalline hills of chromatic splendour. Eerie nimbuses of light spilled from each facet, forming into broad strands of phantasmal substance, as transient and fragile as cobwebs. Hulking growths, neither tree nor stone but a riotous assemblage of both, thrust their way up through the rainbow webs. Pulpy fruit swayed from the craggy branches of the treestones, dropping to the ground in explosive displays of flame and smoke, gouging deep fissures in the crystal mounds.

Throl was able to steer the Celestant-Prime away from the more dangerous treestones, his magic giving him warning when the explosive fruit was ripe and ready to fall. The vapours that billowed up from the fissures, however, were a hazard that couldn’t be predicted. Several times the wizard had been forced to evoke a hasty spell to send the caustic emanations back into the crystalline depths.

‘The bloodreavers used to collect the fruit of the treestones,’ Throl explained, ‘but the gasses from below made them stop.’ He pointed at several curious spurs of crystal scattered about the edges of the fissure. ‘Those were men who tarried too long among the vapour. If you draw too near to them, you can still hear their moans.’

The Celestant-Prime shook his head. For expediency he had told Throl to lead him by the most direct route to the Maze of Reflection, but to guide him by such paths as the minions of the Prismatic King were unlikely to frequent. He didn’t fear battle with the hordes of Chaos, but he couldn’t accept the delay such combat would cause. It was why he continued to march rather than take to the sky and betray his presence.

Yet for all that, the hostility of this corrupted terrain made the Celestant-Prime wonder if the dangers of this course outweighed the potential gain. Throl had led him through canyons of porous bronze inhabited by birds with beaks of ice. They’d trekked through a desert where the sand was iron and the sky a bilious green, with vast slug-like behemoths surging through the desolation to feast upon creeks of molten glass.

The warrior wondered what this region had been like before the Prismatic King focused the corruption of Chaos upon it. The Realm of Chamon and all its many lands were known for strange transmutations, the alloying of substances into something new. How firm had Shaard’s grip upon permanence been? How transitory had been the essence of that vanquished empire?

‘This domain has no limit to its horrors,’ the Celestant-Prime remarked, nodding to one of the crystalline statues, a groan of anguish whispering from its frozen face. ‘How dear your thirst for vengeance must be. I pity you, Throl, for your memories of what these lands once were.’

Throl paused, staring out towards the horizon, across the shimmering expanse of hills.

‘Memory fades,’ he said. ‘It retreats into shadow, becoming naught but an echo after a time.’ His eyes were solemn as he looked to his companion. ‘When it is buried deeply enough, memory becomes confused with imagination.’ The wizard pointed his finger at the most distant of the hills. ‘Did the vineyards of the Brothers Kaltos stretch there once, or perhaps it was the fastness of the Knights Ebon? Perhaps there was nothing. Maybe what I think to have been never was at all.’ He kicked his foot against the crystalline ground, tiny flakes crackling beneath his toes. ‘Of what consequence is it to remember? It can’t change what is.’

The Celestant-Prime looked at the hills, trying to imagine grapes and castles as Throl described. He pondered his own sense of familiarity with the lands of Shaard.

‘No,’ he conceded after a time, ‘memory may not change things back to what they were. But memory can kindle the flame that avenges what was. If you didn’t have your memories of a vanquished people and a vanished home, would you have the courage to guide me? Do not belittle the power of remembering.’

The wizard bowed his head. ‘There is wisdom in your words,’ he said. ‘I will reflect upon what you have said.’ Throl tapped the side of his head. ‘For now, I fear we must test the limits of memory. Beyond these hills I think we should find the Daemon’s Hopyard.’

As he heard the name, the Celestant-Prime felt an inexplicable familiarity. His mind was filled with an image of strange columns of wind-carved rock and great mesas of basalt and onyx. He could almost hear the eerie whistle of winged rock-rats gliding from the cliffs and smell the pungent tang of flowering weeds rising from the loamy earth.

‘Something troubles you?’ Throl asked, noting the change that had stolen upon his companion.

‘Lead me to the Hopyard,’ the Celestant-Prime said. ‘I might know better then what it is that troubles me.’

With the crystalline hills behind them, the Celestant-Prime found that Throl needn’t have worried about the accuracy of his memory. The loamy earth, grey with its gritty, spore-like vegetation, rippled around great black mesas of volcanic rock that loomed hundreds of feet into a greasy sky of shining purple and gibbous silver.

As the Celestant-Prime circled a towering plateau of basalt and onyx, the sense of familiarity became overwhelming. He stared at the side of the mesa, trying to recall the memory. Almost without conscious volition, he strode towards the rocky base. Here the basalt was scorched and burned; there the onyx was disfigured and splintered. He looked down at his feet and saw something lying half-hidden beneath the crumbled rock and grubby spores. Brushing the debris away, he exposed a helm of blackened steel, its mask cast in the semblance of a grinning skull. The helm was cracked, a great gouge snaking from crown to chin.

A battle had been fought here, fierce and terrible. Gazing up at the mesa he could envision tattooed marauders howling as they poured semi-molten boulders down from the heights. He could smell the foul reek of daemonic things as they slithered down the cliffs. He could hear the booming challenge of an armoured warlord in blackened mail and, again, the clamour of conflict.

No. The sounds of battle weren’t in his mind. He could hear the crash of steel, the cries of warriors. Amidst the foul shrieks of beasts the Celestant-Prime could hear the shouts of men, voices raised in a cry that sent fire pouring through his veins.

‘For Sigmar!’ The war cry was repeated, ringing out above the din of battle. Leaving Throl behind, the Celestant-Prime hastened towards the sounds, running around the base of the plateau and on to all the eerie rock hoodoos that peppered the valley beyond.

Among the bizarre stone formations raged a bloody fray. Hundreds of gors armed with crude stone axes and clubs of bone charged up from burrows gouged into the valley floor. The beastmen swarmed around a tight knot of figures with locked shields, foes clad in golden armour who struck at the creatures with sword and hammer.

The Celestant-Prime recognized the cast of their armour and the emblem adorning their pauldrons. These were warriors of the Thriceblessed. For all his despair and bitterness, Throl had been wrong. At least these men had escaped the Maze of Reflection.

‘For Sigmar!’ the Celestant-Prime roared as he charged into the battle. The first blow from his warhammer sent lightning crackling across the body of a gor he struck, flinging the creature into one of the stone hoodoos and splitting the rock with the ferocity of its impact. More of the monsters turned to confront this sudden attack on their flank. A second strike from the hammer sent a dozen of the beastmen tumbling into the dirt, their bones shattered by the hammer’s might.

The Thriceblessed, ringed on every side by the gors, now broke out from behind their shieldwall and flung themselves full into the enemy. The confusion wrought by the Celestant-Prime’s sudden assault against their flank was now redoubled as the Stormcasts took to the offensive. Horned brutes broke before crushing blows from sigmarite hammers while others bleated and squirmed upon the blades of swords. Yard by yard, the warriors pushed the beastmen back, strewing the ground with inhuman bodies.

The Celestant-Prime fought with the cold determination of righteousness, smashing enemies at every step as he forced his way towards the Thriceblessed. A blow from his hammer splattered a bull-headed chieftain’s body across the rocks. Another strike and a pack of gors was reduced to a pile of carrion. Carnage was the hero’s herald, horrible and magnificent. Each yard he pressed into the valley was littered with the mangled carcasses of his foes.

The combined valour of the Celestant-Prime and the resurgent Stormcasts finally broke the savagery of the gors. Whining like whipped curs, the creatures gave up the fight, fleeing back down into their burrows. The Thriceblessed pursued the routed monsters, slaughtering many of them before they could withdraw into the subterranean darkness.

Only when the last of the beasts was gone did the Thriceblessed turn to regard the warrior whose aid had delivered them. They numbered less than a score, their armour scarred and stained with the filth of many ordeals. Liberators with their warhammers and swords, a pair of Judicators with their skybolt bows and a single Retributor with his immense lightning hammer clenched in both hands. The Celestant-Prime could feel the uncertainty as the men approached him.

‘Is he real or another trick of the Prismatic King?’ one of the Stormcasts asked his comrades, armoured fingers drumming menacingly against the blade of his sword.

Another warrior shook his head. ‘No, Othmar, he is real enough. Can’t you see he carries the Cometstrike Sceptre? Can you not see Sigmar’s hammer!’

‘Are you certain, Deucius?’ Othmar wondered aloud. ‘That could be a trick too.’

The Celestant-Prime held the warhammer towards them, pointing the runeweapon at each man in turn. ‘I could doubt you as well,’ he said. ‘Each of you bears the emblem of the Thriceblessed, yet they have been accounted lost. I have been told the chamber was caught within the Prismatic King’s Maze of Reflection. How then is it that you eluded the trap that claimed your brothers?’

Deucius shook his head and pointed at the weapon the Celestant-Prime bore. ‘I cannot doubt the God-King’s hammer. Only Ghal Maraz could wreak such carnage upon the foe. Only Sigmar’s hammer could make me feel such awe. No thing of Chaos, mortal or daemon, could bear the weapon you carry. Only one favoured by Sigmar could do so and only one mighty in his service could evoke the hammer’s power.’ Deucius bowed to his knees and removed his helm. He stared up at the hero. ‘No thing of the enemy can withstand the touch of the godhammer. Let it touch me and you will know I am truly Stormcast.’

Casting his gaze across the other warriors, the Celestant-Prime raised Deucius to his feet. ‘It is by faith that men prove themselves,’ he said. ‘It is through trust that men are made brothers.’

Othmar let his fingers be still. Slowly he too bowed. ‘Forgive our doubt, but we have come to question all that our senses tell us.’ He glanced at their surroundings, at the strange sky and eerie hoodoos. ‘In this place, nothing is what it seems to be. It comes hard to trust anything.’

‘It is in doubt that the seed of defeat is sown,’ Deucius said. ‘A Stormcast Eternal can have no room for doubt. His mind must hold room only for duty and honour. There is no place for doubt in the righteous.’ The warriors nodded, reflecting upon the catechism Deucius quoted.

The Celestant-Prime approached Othmar, laying his hand on the warrior’s shoulder. ‘Hardship can sap even the most stalwart faith. There is no shame in such caution.’ He looked across the other Stormcasts. ‘For myself, to find brothers in this desolation brings me too much joy to question it. Triumph and glory ring hollow without comrades to share it.’

‘We found no triumph and little glory when we challenged the Maze of Reflection,’ Deucius declared, lowering his face in contrition. ‘Devyndus Thriceblessed led us into the very heart of the enemy. But we were unequal to the test. We failed our Lord-Celestant and we failed great Sigmar.’

‘Even in failure there is room for redemption,’ the Celestant-Prime said. The words came to his tongue with a sense of humility, a feeling that they came not from himself but from something greater. A conviction that they were meant not only for the Thriceblessed but also for himself.

Deucius met the Celestant-Prime’s gaze. There was an almost reverent glow in the Liberator’s eyes now. ‘The wisdom of the Deus Sigmar brings both comfort and challenge.’ He turned and darted a triumphant look at Othmar. ‘Would a trick of the Prismatic King quote Sigmar’s holy scriptures?’

Othmar spread his arms wide in a gesture of submission. ‘I have already conceded the field, brother,’ he said. Bowing once more to the Celestant-Prime, he apologized to the winged hero. ‘You must indulge Deucius. He has enough devotion in him to balance the faults of all the Thriceblessed.’

‘If that were true,’ Deucius said, ‘then we should have conquered the maze and captured the Pillar of Whispers.’

The Celestant-Prime swung around, his eyes locking upon Deucius. ‘The Pillar of Whispers?’ he hissed, feeling the name resonating within him, blazing through his mind like a ravening firestorm.

‘It is the realmgate we were charged to capture,’ Othmar said. ‘A portal seized by the Prismatic King and hidden within the maze. Lord-Celestant Devyndus believed that by securing the Pillar of Whispers we would sever the Prismatic King’s source of power. We could begin to reclaim the lands of Shaard without the threat of new enemy legions being drawn through the realmgate.’

‘We never even came within sight of it,’ Deucius stated. ‘The sorcery of the maze overwhelmed us before we could threaten the enemy’s treasure.’

The Celestant-Prime could see the shame and remorse these warriors felt at their failure. It was an illness coiled about their hearts, slowly eating away at their valour, making them less than what they were. Boldly, he raised Ghal Maraz, compelling the eyes of every Stormcast to the relic. ‘Here is the key that will unlock the maze,’ he declared. ‘What sorcery can endure the God-King’s hammer?’

Many of the Thriceblessed fell to one knee, seized by their awe of the relic and their belief in its indomitable power. Othmar remained standing however, his tone dour when he spoke. ‘I know Ghal Maraz is mighty,’ he said. ‘But I have also seen the power of the maze. All of us have… except you, my lord.’

‘Tell me of the maze,’ the Celestant-Prime ordered. ‘Tell me of this power that makes you question the might of Sigmar.’

Othmar shook his head. ‘It is a thing beyond words. Something past sight and sound and feeling – at once all and none of these things. We marched into a place of nothingness, an emptiness where there was only ourselves. An emptiness that stretched on forever, without limit or end.’

‘Othmar found a flaw in the maze,’ one of the other warriors declared. ‘A crack in the cage of nothingness that held us.’

‘Only we few were able to slip free before the crack closed,’ Deucius explained. ‘But of what consequence has our freedom been? We’re too few to assail the Prismatic King’s Eyrie and we lack the secrets of the maze to seize the realmgate or rescue our brethren.’

‘Then it is well you have found Ghal Maraz.’ The Thriceblessed swung around, reaching for their weapons as the voice carried to them. Stalking out from the shadow cast by the plateau was the lean little wizard Throl. The man nodded respectfully to the armoured warriors as he hastened towards the champion.

‘Such do I call him, for his is the burden of the godhammer,’ Throl boasted. ‘If Ghal Maraz cannot break the power of the maze, then there is no force that can!’

The Celestant-Prime gazed down at the little man. ‘You took your time joining us.’

Throl plucked at his ragged cloak and slapped his lean legs. ‘You might have tarried a bit and given me a chance to catch up. I am hardly so spry as once I was.’

‘My lord, who is this man?’ Deucius asked.

‘Throl of Shaard,’ Ghal Maraz answered. ‘Last of his people and our ally.’

Throl bobbed his head in agreement. ‘My magic is too weak to oppose the Prismatic King, but I have been able to spy upon him. I know the secret paths that lead to the Maze of Reflection, ways hidden from even his most loyal servants.’

Othmar approached the little wizard, towering over the cloaked man.

‘And what of the Maze? Do you know its secrets too? Can you lead us through the trap? Can you help us redeem ourselves?’ The Liberator shook his head. ‘How can this wretch bring victory where the Thriceblessed have found only failure,’ he scoffed.

‘There is a time for valour and strength and a time for cunning,’ the Celestant-Prime reminded Othmar. ‘Pride is a poor substitute for strategy.’

‘I only want to redeem the shame we have all suffered,’ Othmar explained. ‘This is a burden that belongs to the Thriceblessed.’

‘Your zeal does you credit,’ the Celestant-Prime told him, ‘but it is presumptuous to think the burden is yours alone. All who oppose Chaos have a stake in the Great Battle.’ The winged hero turned back to the wizard. ‘You say you know the way to the maze, but what of the Prismatic King’s Eyrie?’

Throl took a step backwards, almost tripping over himself in shock at the question. ‘You can’t mean to attack the Prismatic King’s stronghold.’

‘It isn’t my place to question one chosen to bear the godhammer, but shouldn’t we overcome the maze before we take on the Prismatic King?’ Othmar asked.

‘The maze has been challenged before,’ Ghal Maraz declared. ‘If courage alone was sufficient to overcome its magic then the Thriceblessed would have prevailed. No, there is a secret behind the maze. None of us here knows that secret, but we know where to find the one who does.’

‘The Eyrie of Illumination is guarded by the most infernal of the Prismatic King’s legions,’ Othmar said. ‘When our chamber came here, we knew that only by capturing the realmgate and securing it could we prevail against the Eyrie. If our warhost was insufficient for the task, how can a mere handful triumph?’

‘You forget that we have the might of Ghal Maraz now,’ Deucius declared. ‘What army can stand against the power of the godhammer?’

‘It isn’t necessary to capture the Eyrie,’ the Celestant-Prime explained. ‘For that, we would need the strength of numbers. But our purpose isn’t to seize the fortress, only to find its master. To that end, a small group is better. Let the Prismatic King underestimate his peril, let him believe we are naught but a nuisance to be swatted aside. He will hesitate to commit his legions if he believes they are unnecessary.’ The hero turned from the Stormcasts and again regarded the cloaked wizard. ‘Do you know a way into the Eyrie?’

Throl smiled. ‘The Prismatic King moves his Eyrie whenever it suits him. Sometimes it is in the plains, sometimes the mountains. But always it must return to the fields of Uthyr where he first raised it from the fire. At dawn and dusk, the inbetween times when the borders of existence are at their thinnest, that is when the stronghold must return to its foundations.’

‘Then guide us to the fields of Uthyr,’ the Celestant-Prime told the wizard. ‘Do this, Throl, and know that you will have done your part to avenge your people.’

Chapter Four

The fields of Uthyr could be felt long before they were seen. Their stifling heat spilled across the domain like a blast of dragonfire. Only the hardiest of creatures braved the desolation surrounding the region: steely weeds that nestled in the shelter of rocks and ugly lice-like bugs that burrowed beneath the hot sands.

The Thriceblessed marched across this blighted expanse, their armoured boots digging deep furrows in the parched land. Throl trotted along behind the warriors, pausing every now and again to renew the spells that enabled him to endure the ghastly heat.

‘Does it never rain in this hell?’ Othmar growled, fingers twitching on his sword.

Throl chuckled darkly. ‘None that would quench your thirst,’ he said. ‘The storms of Uthyr are things of boiling lead and ash. If you want water, we must stray far from our course.’

Othmar turned to glower at the wizard. ‘If you can endure, then so can I,’ he declared.

The wizard smiled at Othmar. ‘If I told you that the clouds you see on the horizon are simply fumes rising from the flames of Uthyr, would that cheer you?’

Othmar looked at the black expanse stretching across the sky. ‘Not particularly,’ he grumbled as he pressed on.

Deucius shook his head and waved his hand at the smoke. ‘It seems the worst is yet to come. It is hard to imagine a blaze that could create such smoke.’

‘The fires of Uthyr have been burning since the founding of Shaard,’ Throl said, his eyes gleaming with the memory of his vanished nation. ‘Even the Prismatic King could do little to tame this part of his domain.’

The Celestant-Prime laid his hand reverently against the head of Ghal Maraz. ‘The sorcerer may have failed to overcome this land, but the power of the God-King will overcome him. He will atone for his evils and confess his secrets. With the threat of Ghal Maraz before him, even a sorcerer might reveal the truth.’

A scowl formed on Throl’s face. ‘So long as he doesn’t confess his secrets too easily,’ he grumbled. ‘It has been a long walk from the swamp to be cheated of watching the Prismatic King suffer.’

Against all hope, the heat grew worse when the Stormcasts reached Uthyr itself. Each breath they drew felt as though it must sear their lungs. A mortal warrior would have cooked within his armour before he could begin the climb out from the sandy waste and onto the fields. A lesser metal than sigmarite would have become blisteringly hot from the mephitic atmosphere that surrounded them.

The fields of Uthyr were a scorched morass of cinder and ash, gutted and scarred by streams of molten lead and boiling copper. Geysers of volcanic fumes exploded from yawning pits, dancing in fiery gyrations as they billowed upwards. Great pinnacles of pumice, their faces carved into the tormented shapes of the damned, thrust themselves up from the hellish terrain, piercing the smothering miasma of smoke.

Thrusting its way through the fire and slag, supported upon ethereal peaks of shimmering heat, was a great tunnel of volcanic glass. Rippling with strange colours, exuding weird harmonics that wailed across the bubbling din of the fields around them, the glassy channel cut across the fiery terrain. The shifting intensity of the heat that supported it caused the tunnel to pitch and roll, undulating like some vast serpent.

‘There,’ Throl declared, pointing into the tunnel. ‘That is the foundation upon which the Prismatic King raised his Eyrie. That is the place to which his fortress must return!’

The Celestant-Prime gazed into the cavernous passage. Navigating it seemed impossible, an insurmountable obstacle. Yet he remained undaunted. The Prismatic King held the key to both the realmgate and the missing Thriceblessed. Whatever obstacles the lands of Shaard put in his way, he would achieve Sigmar’s purpose and confront the disciple of Tzeentch.

‘Then that is where our path leads us,’ the Celestant-Prime declared. He cast his gaze across the Stormcasts. ‘Have courage, brothers. However arduous the task, know that if it is Sigmar’s will that we succeed, then only our own lack of faith can bring us to ruin.’

Deucius bowed his head. ‘By the grace of the God-King, let none of us be found unworthy,’ he said.

‘Can we be certain that the Eyrie will appear where the wizard claims it will?’ Othmar asked. ‘It is only by his word that…’

‘His word has led us this far,’ the Celestant-Prime reminded him. ‘It is late to doubt him now.’ As he spoke, he turned and nodded to Throl. At every step, the wizard’s advice had felt right in a manner more compelling than conventional logic or wisdom. In a way he couldn’t explain, he knew they weren’t being led astray. Perhaps it was the wizard’s fierce desire for revenge, perhaps it was the hand of Sigmar upon the Stormcast’s soul, perhaps it was something deeper buried within his very essence: he couldn’t say – all that he was certain of was that when the dusk came, they would find the Eyrie standing just where Throl had promised them it would appear.

‘No mean feat,’ Othmar declared, fingers tapping. ‘A tunnel of black glass floating in a sea of flame.’

‘A simple task for those with a small and simple faith,’ Deucius said. ‘Cast aside your worry, brother, and rejoice that Sigmar has deemed us worthy of such a trial.’

The Celestant-Prime strode out onto the fields, feeling the burning rock searing at his sigmarite boots. ‘Rejoice when we are through the tunnel and the Eyrie stands before us,’ he advised.

The Stormcasts followed him out across the scorched crust of Uthyr. The burning rock splintered and cracked beneath their armoured weight, fraying and splitting with every step they took. At times ugly holes would appear, vomiting toxic vapours in a spray of steam. Once a great fissure opened as Deucius advanced across the field, nearly swallowing the warrior as the surface crumbled away. The Celestant-Prime flew to the Liberator’s side and pulled the imperilled warrior back from the edge, hurling him back with a display of his prodigious strength. The champion stared down at the roiling river of glowing magma that yawned below, appreciating how utterly the molten fire would have consumed his comrade.

‘The ground is too treacherous,’ Othmar cursed. ‘We will never reach the tunnel.’

Throl hurried towards the Celestant-Prime. Lacking the armour and superhuman vitality of the Stormcasts, the wizard depended upon his magic to guard him from the hostility of Uthyr. As he sprinted across the blackened ground, patches of rock disintegrated under even his comparatively light tread. ‘My spells can show you the way!’ Throl shouted to the hero.

‘Then use your magic!’ Deucius ordered the man.

Throl shook his head. ‘It isn’t so simple,’ he warned. Shifting his gaze back to the Celestant-Prime, he hurried to explain. ‘Only my magic protects me from the fire and heat. If I turn my mind to a new conjuration, I will lose my focus. The spells that protect me will dissipate.’

The Celestant-Prime nodded towards the magma flowing at the bottom of the fissure. ‘Without a safe path, many of us may be lost before we gain the stair. It may be that Sigmar has sent you to us to overcome this obstacle.’ He looked across the flames at the sinister tunnel. It seemed as distant as when they had first set out across the fields. ‘If one of us were to carry you, would you be able to turn your mind to the magic that will show us a safe path?’

The wizard scratched at his chin. His gem-like eyes blazed as he considered the Celestant-Prime’s words. ‘Maybe the God-King did allow our paths to cross,’ he mused. ‘Maybe it is fate that has cast us together. Yes, I think if you were to carry me across I could focus my energies on exposing a safe path through the fields.’

Deucius came between Throl and Ghal Maraz. ‘You are the bearer of the godhammer,’ he told the Celestant-Prime. ‘It is unseemly that you should be asked to carry the wizard alongside the holiest of holies. Let me carry Throl across the fields.’

The Celestant-Prime let his hand brush across the golden head of his hammer, feeling its sacred power crackle under his fingers.

‘It will be as you say, Deucius,’ the hero decided. He fixed his eyes on Throl. ‘Begin your conjurations, wizard. We must be through the passage before twilight.’

Deucius reached down and lifted Throl from the rocks. As soon as his feet were clear of the burning ground, Throl closed his eyes and began to murmur to himself, strange incantations whispering across his lips. The Celestant-Prime could see tendrils of aethyric energy being drawn into the wizard’s body, dancing and writhing about him in ropy coils of light. At the same time, he could see luminous patches blaze into life all across the fields.

‘Where the light shines the ground is firm,’ Throl spat the words in a hurried gasp, then quickly resumed his incantation.

The Celestant-Prime raised the godhammer overhead, fixing the attention of every Stormcast upon him. ‘Follow the light. Make for the shining ground and keep to its path.’

Balancing haste against caution, the Thriceblessed picked their way across the fields of Uthyr. Stretches of blackened earth separated the patches of safe ground revealed by Throl’s magic. Here the rock splintered and crumbled beneath the warriors, threatening them with immolation as jets of hot gas spewed up from the ground or pits of magma were exposed. Despite the promise of an excruciating death, the men pressed on, moving from one expanse of stable ground to the next.

Chapter Five

At last the tunnel of volcanic glass came within reach. Othmar was the first to gain the eerie passage, climbing into the blackened corridor, feeling the heat of the glass billowing around him. Deucius was among the last. As the Stormcasts neared the entrance, he caught hold of Throl and flung the wizard into the arms of the Stormcast who had already entered the corridor. Then Deucius lunged at the undulating mouth of the passage, his hands sliding on the smooth glass as he fought to gain a grip on the edge of the opening. Before he could drop away, his comrades reached down and caught hold of him, dragging him back from the edge of oblivion.

The Celestant-Prime braced himself as he saw the tunnel dipping along the surface of the fiery pits. Holding back to aid any of the Stormcasts, the champion found himself the last remaining on the scorched field. The ground around him was splintering and cracking, sloughing away in a widening crater. Tongues of volcanic fury blasted upwards, searing the air with their fiery rage. What had been a patch of illuminated ground lost its enchantment, fading to the same charred hue as the rest of the fields. The meaning was clear: this ground was no longer safe and so Throl’s magic no longer shone upon it.

Feeling the earth beneath him trembling, the Celestant-Prime knew he couldn’t wait for the tunnel to rise back to a more advantageous position. Mustering all the strength in his mighty frame, the hero dived for the sinking passage, mighty wings propelling him into the yawning mouth as it skirted the surface of the flaming sea. The Celestant-Prime’s body hurtled through the narrow gap between tunnel and sea, fire licking about him as the thermal current smashed his body against the glassy roof of the corridor. Shards of glass from the fractured roof clattered around him as he fell to the scorching floor below. Almost at once, Deucius was beside him, helping the Celestant-Prime back to his feet.

‘As you said, my lord,’ Deucius stated. ‘We have come too far to falter now.’

‘With farther yet to go,’ the Celestant-Prime observed. Before them, the tunnel stretched away, writhing and whipping about in mad gyrations. The floor was broken, split into great slab-like sections with menacing gaps between them that opened into the molten sea beneath. What magic kept the fire from bubbling up through the openings, he didn’t know, but whatever its nature he was grateful for it. Gaps in the roof overhead let a patina of ash rain down from the smoky sky above.

‘The land itself fights us,’ Othmar cursed, wiping his gauntlet across the face of his helm to clear the scum of soot that was already gathering there.

‘The Prismatic King guesses your purpose,’ Throl said. ‘He unleashes the elements to defy you. He seeks to break your spirit and cast you down in defeat.’

The Celestant-Prime tightened his hold upon the godhammer, feeling the power pulsing within the weapon. ‘What better proof that the enemy fears us than these sorcerer’s tricks? He thinks he can break us with his magic, believes he can overwhelm us with his spells. He can’t understand our strength or imagine the fastness of our faith. He denies the power of Sigmar and the conviction of those who serve the God-King!’

The Stormcasts echoed the passion of their Celestant-Prime in a mighty shout, howling the name of Sigmar down the grim tunnel, defying the elements raging all about them. Boldly they followed the champion’s lead as he charged down the passage and hurled himself across the first gap in the floor. With a sea of fire blazing up at them, the warriors leapt across the gap, slamming down onto the undulating surface of the slab beyond.

As soon as the Stormcasts had crossed one gap they were running towards the next. They didn’t hesitate as the slab began to pitch, making their footing treacherous. They ignored the threat of disaster, the promise of burning death that awaited them below. For them there was only the objective ahead. Where the Celestant-Prime led, they would follow.

Throl matched the tremendous pace set by the mighty Stormcasts, the wizard’s lean body crackling with the magics he wove around himself to meet the demands of Sigmar’s chosen. Despite the taxing effort, he maintained the pace, confronting each hazard with the same fortitude as the warriors of Azyr. Only when they had leapt across the eighth gap in the floor did Throl hesitate. Throwing his arms wide, the wizard gave voice to a jubilant cry.

‘The ninth breach!’ he shouted. ‘Behold, the Eyrie manifests itself beyond the ninth breach!’

The roof of the tunnel and the smoky sky of Uthyr made it impossible to judge the disposition of the sun. Twilight, it seemed, had stolen upon the land without warning. As the wizard cried out to them, the Stormcasts stared at the far end of the tunnel. There they saw a deepening and thickening of the darkness that hovered above the fires of Uthyr. With each heartbeat, the blackness became a bit more solid, losing more of its nebulous appearance. Before their eyes, the Prismatic King’s palace was drawing shape and substance to itself.

The Eyrie of Illusion was built not from brick and stone, but seemed woven from shadows and echoes. It was a great pinnacle of darkness that drew all light into itself, making it stand stark and abominable against Uthyr’s fiery sea. Polished panels of darkling glass glimmered amidst the tower’s nebulous walls, pulsating with weird reflections and uncanny echoes. Twisted spires contorted away from the main bulk of the fortress, thrusting out in every direction like the thorns of some fecund growth. They would fade and distort even as the eye tried to fix them upon the map of memory, in one instant extending outwards a hundred feet and more, while in the next dissipating down to a mere nub protruding from the black walls.

The Celestant-Prime looked upon the Eyrie and felt his flesh crawl. It wasn’t fear that unsettled him, it was revulsion, the innate repugnance experienced by any mortal creature when faced with the infernal manifestations of powers profane and damned. It was a blight against the very concepts of reason and order – madness endowed with the most tenuous suggestions of shape and form, the most fleeting mockery of existence and substance. Only the most depraved and degenerate of Tzeentch’s minions could suffer such a blasphemy to be his abode, and only the bravest, most steadfast of men would dare to confront such a fiend within his obscene lair.

‘Thriceblessed!’ the Celestant-Prime cried out to the Stormcasts, raising the godhammer high, so that all his comrades might see the holy weapon and be bolstered by the relic’s sacred presence. ‘The enemy is before us. He thinks himself safe within his castle of nightmares. Now let us show him that from the Stormcasts, no pawn of Chaos can ever count himself safe.’

The Celestant-Prime rushed to the edge of the gap and flew across the span to the slab where the Eyrie had appeared. He drifted across the gulf and onto the narrow lip between the shadowy walls and the edge of the floating island. As soon as his feet touched the ground he was moving, circling around the fortress to make room for the warriors following him.

A piercing shriek shuddered through the cavernous tunnel, pulsing outwards from the very walls of the Eyrie. Ghoulish lights throbbed from deep within the fortress, glowing behind the veil of shadows. The Stormcasts locked their shields, Judicators taking position behind the defences of the Liberators, ready to loose their skybolts into whatever foe responded to the alarm.

‘Guard yourselves, brothers,’ the Celestant-Prime told the Stormcasts.

As he spoke, he saw shapes forming within the walls. The glowing lights were rising through the shadows, growing more distinct with each passing breath. It was like watching a swarm of kraken rising from the depths of a black sea, their outlines slowly taking form as they drew nearer the surface. At last the glowing forms began to bleed out from the walls themselves, a kaleidoscope of pulsing lights and undulating sounds. The defenders of the Eyrie had emerged to defy the Stormcasts, sallying from the fortress without either gate or door to mark their passage.

The creatures scuttled out from the walls: loathsome assemblages of madness, discordant fusions of flesh and bone, insane alchemies of claws and tentacles. Some were squat monstrosities with gaping maws and snapping beaks, ropey arms with clawed hands protruding from their bodies without pattern or symmetry. Others were boiling stumps of obscene flesh supported upon a single broad foot festooned with fang-like growths, the arms that grew from their wiry shoulders ending in mouth-like paws that drooled smoke and eldritch fire. Above these gabbling atrocities, sleek long-tailed beings soared into the smoky air, their bodies rippling with wordless screams and coronas of gibbous light.

‘Faith is my valour,’ Deucius snarled as he swung his hammer into the leering visage of a creature clawing its way out of the wall beside him. The pink-skinned abomination split apart under his blow, bursting in an incandescent display of flickering lights and crackling energy. The shattered energies coalesced into two smaller manifestations, blue obscenities that giggled to themselves as they surged towards the Stormcasts.

‘Thriceblessed of Sigmar, do not falter!’ the Celestant-Prime shouted to his comrades. He swung the godhammer in a murderous sweep, pitching a clutch of fanged daemons down into the gap. Their splitting shapes dwindled as they plummeted into the fires of Uthyr raging below.

A blast of aethyric fury seared past the champion’s shoulder, immolating one of the screaming fliers as it dived towards the Celestant-Prime’s back. Caught in the magical flame, the airborne daemon became frayed and tattered, dissipating in puffs of colour and sound. The warrior glanced aside, and saw Throl crouched between two of the Stormcasts, his fingers still aglow with the magic he was unleashing against the Eyrie’s defenders.

‘There are too many of them,’ Throl cried. ‘We cannot hope to prevail.’ The wizard spun around, a cascade of blazing light leaping from his palm to annihilate a clutch of daemons pushing themselves out from the shadowy walls.

The Celestant-Prime brought his hammer slamming down against the slab itself, cracking a piece of the ledge and sending it hurtling into the cauldron below, a score of daemons carried down with it to fiery oblivion.

‘Where there is faith, there is always hope,’ he told the wizard. As he spoke, a crackling daemon bounded towards him upon its stalk-like body, blue flames billowing out from the mouths at the ends of its pulpy arms. The Celestant-Prime stood within the fiery blast, the hammer held before his body.

In the next instant, the daemonic flames dissipated, broken apart before the holy power of the godhammer. The weapon crackled with energy as he held it before him, unharmed. The spirits of the watching Stormcasts soared as they saw the hero advance upon the daemon. With a single blow of his weapon, the Celestant-Prime burst the fiend into a spray of flickering cinders and wailing steam.

Inspired, the Thriceblessed pressed their attack, shields locked in an impenetrable formation as they advanced upon the reeling daemons. The great hammer of the Retributor swatted capering fiends from the slab down into the fiery sea. Arrows from the Judicators felled soaring abominations. And all the while the hammers and swords of the Liberators took a toll on the creatures spilling from the Eyrie’s walls.

‘Faith is the armour no daemon can pierce!’ the Celestant-Prime thundered as he strode across the ashy residue of his vanquished foe. A flock of the airborne monstrosities swooped down upon him, their ray-like bodies slithering through the blizzard of soot falling from the clouds. The daemons shrieked and wailed as they drew near the hero, the gash-like mouths that yawned across the bottom of their bodies gnashing their fangs in greedy anticipation of rending his flesh.

Before the daemons could strike, the Celestant-Prime swung the godhammer at them in a nimbus of crackling energy. Somewhere deep within the recesses of his soul, he understood how to evoke the relic’s awesome might. As the flyers descended, the energies billowing out from the godhammer rose to meet them. The hungry wails of the monsters became anguished howls as their profane substance struck the wave of holy power. The daemons wilted in the purity of Ghal Maraz’s aura, shrivelling like slugs under a hot sun. The withered, desiccated things fell from the air, the residue of their wing-like lobes fluttering uselessly as they sank into the fires of Uthyr.

Around him, the Celestant-Prime could see the other Stormcasts fending off the daemonic host, knocking squealing horrors into the gap or skewering flame-spitting blasphemies on their swords. Othmar struck down a beak-faced creature, splitting its skull with his sword, splattering the walls of the Eyrie with its ichor. Deucius struggled in the clasp of a ray-winged beast, his hands pushing against the edge of its fanged maw to keep it from snapping at his face. Before the daemon could prevail, a bolt of magic from Throl pierced its side and sent it floundering into the fires below.

The Celestant-Prime scowled within his helm as he saw more daemons pushing out from the walls of the Eyrie. They could stand here and fight the fiends forever, but doing so wouldn’t get them inside the fortress. There could be no confrontation with the Prismatic King while the Stormcasts were kept fighting on the palace’s threshold. How long would it be before the moment passed and the Eyrie was free to slip clean of its temporal foundations?

He couldn’t risk such potential disaster. Firming his grip upon the hammer, he brought the weapon crashing against the shadowy wall of the Eyrie. If the Prismatic King didn’t see fit to offer a door into his fortress then he would make his own.

A dolorous boom sounded as the godhammer struck the skein of shadow. Lances of light streamed away from the hammer, crackling through the ebon substance of the Eyrie. When the Celestant-Prime drew his weapon back, tendrils of shadow clung to it, dripping from the golden metal like rivulets of black blood. Where he had struck the wall, he could see that the web of darkness was fractured.

‘For Sigmar!’ the Celestant-Prime cried as he brought the weapon slamming against the already weakened section of wall. This time, when the godhammer’s blazing aura struck the shadows it did far more than simply crack them. The phantom material disintegrated, evaporating in black tatters of ash. Where it had been, an opening was exposed, a gaping wound in the side of the Eyrie.

‘Stormbrothers! With me!’ the Celestant-Prime shouted to his fellow warriors, charging through the fissure he’d opened. Ahead all he could see was a grey dinginess, like a cloud of dust. The foggy greyness clung to him as he rushed into the breech. Then he was through, past the walls of the fortress and inside the palace proper.

What he saw was a deranged confusion of angles and distorted perspectives, stairways of marble that folded in upon themselves or merged with alabaster ceilings or flowed both into and out of topaz floors. Corners were at once convex and concave, defying the senses with the insanity of their violations. Crystal fountains bubbled from the roof, the chromatic liquid flowing from them arcing about in gravity-defying spectacles that mocked every effort to define them.

The Celestant-Prime forced himself to confine his focus to only that which was immediately before him. Something inside him warned that if he tried to contemplate the infernal manipulations of the palace’s confines then the barrage against his senses would break his mind. Only by restraining his awareness could he defy the discordant architecture of the Eyrie and the transforming sorceries of the Prismatic King.

‘By the thunder of Azyr!’ Deucius gasped as the warrior joined the Celestant-Prime within the mad hall. As each of the Thriceblessed pressed through the breech in the wall, he felt a similar sensation of wonder and revulsion.

‘Do not marvel at the Prismatic King’s illusions,’ the Celestant-Prime cautioned them. ‘Focus upon what is near and tangible. Fix your mind upon what you feel and not what you see.’

‘Listen to the wisdom of Ghal Maraz!’ Throl echoed the hero. ‘If you allow your attention to wander, if you lose your focus, then your mind will abandon itself to the Prismatic King’s coils!’ The lean wizard looked towards the Celestant-Prime. ‘My magic can protect against the worst of his illusions but I worry that any spells I cast here may be corrupted by the sorcerer. To my cost I have learned how much greater his power is than mine.’

‘We will protect you, enchanter,’ the Celestant-Prime promised.

‘Whatever we do, let it be done swiftly!’ Deucius cried out. He pointed towards the crazed array of stairways and corridors that opened into the maddening hall. Every passage was swarming with enemies, mortal warriors in grisly armour of bone and chain rushing alongside gibbering daemons and horned beastmen. The Eyrie’s garrison was answering the intrusion of the Stormcasts into their master’s domain. Lost to the Prismatic King’s insanity already, the monstrous horde was accustomed to navigating the chaotic discord of his halls.

Throl closed his eyes, clapping his hands together as he drew upon his own magic. Eldritch energies flashed from his fingers, snaking around his body before stretching outwards.

‘Pursue the light,’ the wizard hissed through clenched teeth. ‘The Prismatic King seeks to usurp my spell. I know not how long I can fend off his sorcery.’

The Celestant-Prime led the Thriceblessed in pursuit of Throl’s guiding light. They rushed past gaping doorways that opened into nothingness, hurtled down stairways that descended into the ceiling and dashed around corners that bled back into themselves, racing against the malignity of the sorcerous tower. At every turn, bands of Chaos warriors and packs of shrieking daemons assailed them, seeking to drag them down with blades of steel and talons of iron.

Before them, the hall opened into a great gallery, the walls fashioned from bizarre panels of stained glass, each pane emitting a kaleidoscope of light. Strange scenes unfolded along the translucent walls, frozen images of obscene sorceries and magical atrocities, portraits of maniacs and monsters, each more wicked and obscene that the last.

Billowing up from the centre of the gallery, spreading like a skeletal tree, was a wide stair fashioned from shimmering hoarfrost. Branches of the stair stretched into the glass walls, vanishing through the images locked upon the panes. Other limbs of the stair connected with the raised arcade that ringed the hall, widening into broad platforms of mist and ice. From these platforms and down the arctic branches charged a snarling horde of Chaos knights, their foul armour stained with cabalistic sigils and arcane emblems. The weapons each knight bore were things of fell sorcery and vile ritual – great axes of brass and silver that shrieked as though endowed with monstrous vitality of their own, hideous swords, their blades coruscating with eldritch flames, spears of iron and bone that pulsated with the discordant harmonies of unchained ether, and flails that writhed with the infernal essence of the daemons bound within their steel.

The Stormcasts met the charge of the Chaos knights, and Ghal Maraz tore a path through the armoured fiends. The Celestant-Prime loosed the sacred fury of the godhammer against the degenerate men, shattering their armoured bodies with each blow. By the score he reaped a butcher’s toll upon the vassals of the Prismatic King, strewing the gallery with their broken bodies. Yet for each knight he brought down, a dozen more appeared to take their place.

The Thriceblessed locked their shields, letting the charging knights break against them in a wave of rage. Swords stabbed out from between shields to gut the warriors who strove to batter their way past. Skybolts sizzled into the howling guards, piercing corrupt mail to gouge the abominable flesh within. Safe behind their defending brethren, the Judicators were able to measure each shot, loosing only when certain of a killing strike. From the shadow of the Stormcasts, Throl worked his magic, unleashing fingers of flame that licked across the oncoming knights and left their armour scorched and smoking.

The Prismatic King’s slaves, however, took their own toll upon the Stormcasts. First the lone Retributor was pulled down, his knee shattered by the impact of a spiked mace, his head crushed beneath the halberd of a horned warrior. Then the Liberator beside Othmar was felled by a spear through his gorget, blood spilling from the mask of his helm as he coughed out his life.

Lightning rumbled through the great gallery as one by one the Thriceblessed were killed by the enraged knights. As life ebbed from the body of each Stormcast, flesh and spirit evaporated in a blast of coruscating brilliance, hurled back through the vastness of space to return to the realm of Azyr and the golden halls of Sigmaron.

Death might not be the end for the Stormcasts, destined to be reforged anew, but the loss of so many comrades pained the Celestant-Prime. They were now only ten. Each fighter lost raised the odds against them all and made the task ahead of them that much greater.

Leaping upwards, powering into the gallery’s frosty air on his shimmering wings, the Celestant-Prime drove down upon the stairway. Raising the Cometstrike Sceptre, he unleashed the magic bound within the relic. The head of the sceptre blazed with dazzling energies, a spike of divine power streaking upwards, piercing the profane vaults of the Eyrie. An instant passed, and then the ribbon of holy energy was hurtling down once more, bearing a fiery sphere. A sweep of the sceptre and the Celestant-Prime unleashed the imprisoned comet. His target wasn’t the horde of Chaos knights spilling down into the hall – with a thunderous shriek the comet slammed into the stairway. Branches cracked and split, sending howling knights crashing to the floor below. The main trunk of the stair shivered, sagging to one side then another, guards clinging to the swaying balustrades as they lost their footing.

The Stormcasts were quick to exploit the opportunity the Celestant-Prime’s attack presented. Breaking their formation, the golden warriors rushed forwards, striking down the stunned knights writhing on the floor, attacking the Chaos warriors who continued to slip free from the swaying trunk. A blow of the godhammer and the stair came crashing down in an avalanche of frost and flailing bodies. The knights caught in the collapse screamed in agony as they were crushed.

The Thriceblessed drew away from the mound of glowing debris, listening to the anguished cries of those being consumed within the frozen heap. The Celestant-Prime swooped along the overlooking platforms, driving back those knights who yet lingered above the gallery.

The mound of frost began to boil, rivulets streaming upwards to reshape themselves in new patterns. The Thriceblessed turned from their extermination of the crippled knights, circling around the shifting frost. The same thought was in each of their minds, the fear that the stair would regenerate and bring fresh waves of knights surging down upon them. The prospect of battle wasn’t daunting – it was the worry of failure, the shame lest they should never reach the Prismatic King and wrest from him his dark secrets.

Striking down a clutch of Chaos knights ranged along the platform, the Celestant-Prime turned and started down towards the bubbling geyser of frost. He had smashed the stair once already. To hold the gallery against the Prismatic King’s guards, he would do so again.

‘Wait, my lord!’ Deucius cried out as he saw the Celestant-Prime diving towards the resurgent frost. The Liberator waved his hammer in warning, imploring him to keep back.

The Celestant-Prime noticed what Deucius had seen just as he was raising Ghal Maraz to smash the skein of glowing ice. He pulled out from his dive, swinging away as he gazed in surprise at the billowing mass of frost. What was growing out from the mound wasn’t the stairway, but rather had the shape of an enormous door, a mammoth gate of icy spikes. Around the portal burned the magic light of Throl’s spell, the shimmer that revealed the path to the Prismatic King.

As the Celestant-Prime flew above the gate, the massive door began to shake and shudder. Folding upon itself, without any manner of substance or solidity behind it, the door swung open to reveal a murky chamber beyond, a room utterly different from the kaleidoscopic gallery.

Before any of the Stormcasts could draw near the uncanny phenomenon, something vast and monstrous erupted from the murk beyond the door. It was a gigantic, brutish horror, a thing of purple scales and leathery blue flesh, black chitinous plates and scarlet membranes that fluttered angrily in the arctic chill. The thing’s shape was not unlike that of some gargantuan ape, squat, powerful legs supporting it from behind while great clawed arms dragged its ghastly mass forwards. Twin tails lashed the air behind it, each ending in a slavering mouth filled with dripping fangs. Between its broad shoulders, instead of a head, a far greater maw stretched wide, a scourge of oily tentacles slobbering past its knifelike fangs. A grotesque star-shaped growth bulged from the abomination’s back, a baleful flame blazing at its centre, pulsating with arcane energies. Fingers of sorcerous fire seeped out from between the monster’s scales, crawling up its hideous bulk to merge with the conflagration at the core of the star.

‘The Prismatic King’s hound!’ Throl wailed. ‘Its very touch is annihilation!’

As though to prove the wizard’s words, the hulking beast sprang forwards, its great claw snatching one of the Judicators before the archer could loose an arrow. The golden armour sizzled beneath the thing’s touch. There was a cracking groan, and the sigmarite mail began to disintegrate, trickling through the horror’s claws in a stream of dust. The other Thriceblessed charged forwards to rescue their stricken comrade, striking at the beast with sword and hammer while the arcane lightning of Throl’s wizardry crackled across its hideous frame.

The efforts of warriors and wizard alike were hopeless. The slavering monstrosity ignored their assault, instead lashing out with its tails to catch a second Stormcast. The monster started to raise its second victim towards its dripping tentacles when a fierce cry from above caused it to rear back in surprise. Even its maddened bestial brain recognized the might behind that shout and the challenge it proclaimed.

The Celestant-Prime hurtled down upon the huge beast. A blow from the godhammer and one of the ape-like arms was shattered. His blazing hammer crushed the grisly mess of tentacles and fangs between the brute’s shoulders. Swinging the hammer on high, he brought it cracking around once more, shattering the weird star-like growth and causing the bubbling mass of arcane fire and eldritch energy at its core to cascade down into the beast’s own body. The gigantic creature howled in agony as the vortex consumed it, immolating its mutated frame from the inside.

The Celestant-Prime tore the whip-like tendril from the embattled Stormcast the brute had seized. The first to be caught by the beast was gone, but he lifted the second warrior into the air, bearing him back across the floor to their comrades. Landing beside the Thriceblessed, he watched as the vortex dissolved the Prismatic King’s nightmarish pet.

‘So dies the hound. Now we go and find its master,’ Othmar vowed as the last of the beast was consumed.

Throl pointed to the now undefended gateway. ‘The mutalith would not have been set to guard this door unless it was important to the Prismatic King,’ he said. ‘The tyrant’s throne itself may lie beyond it.’

The Celestant-Prime nodded. ‘Then let there be no further delay,’ he said, leading his remaining comrades through the gate of frost.

The moment they were through the doorway, the Thriceblessed froze, stunned into silence. The Celestant-Prime could feel the dismay of his comrades, could sense the trepidation that threatened to consume them. To his eyes, they had entered a shimmering canyon of glass. Tier upon tier upon tier of mirrored panels, rose far overhead and sank away deep beneath their feet. The floor upon which they walked felt as hard as stone but at the same time had the transparency of spring water, revealing the limitless depths below.

‘The Maze of Reflection,’ Deucius gave voice to the anxiety which gripped each of the Thriceblessed. The warriors had been prepared for almost anything when they breached the walls of the Eyrie, but they had hardly expected to find the insidious trap they had managed to escape – a trap that by any law of time and space should be leagues from the fields of Uthyr.

‘The Prismatic King!’ Throl cursed. ‘He has usurped my magic, twisted my spell to draw us all into his trap.’

The Celestant-Prime glared at the tiers of mirrors. The thrill of warning grew more insistent. He felt that if he concentrated, if he plumbed the very depths of his soul, he would understand the nature of the menace they now faced. But to do so would need time, and that was one resource he didn’t intend to squander.

‘We aren’t trapped yet,’ Ghal Maraz declared. ‘Back away to the door. We’ll try to navigate the hall again.’ As he turned, however, the Celestant-Prime found that their avenue of retreat was closed to them. Where the door of ice had been there was only a continuance of the mirrored rows. The doorway was gone, vanished after hurling them into the heart of the Maze.

Ghal Maraz looked to the Thriceblessed. ‘You broke free of this trap before,’ he began.

Deucius shook his head. ‘That was a miracle in itself,’ he said. ‘We managed to find a flaw in our prison.’

‘Or so I was allowed to believe,’ Othmar scowled. ‘Maybe it wasn’t fortune that allowed us to leave, but some scheme of the Prismatic King. Maybe he knew we would find the Celestant-Prime and bring him into this trap.’

The Celestant-Prime stared across the canyon, studying the mirrored tiers. As though in response, an eerie shimmer rippled through them. The reflective faces were no longer empty. Bound within them, he could see the armoured figures of Stormcasts. From the iconography that adorned their sigmarite mail, he knew these were the Thriceblessed, the rest of the warrior chamber that had been lost in the campaign against the Prismatic King.

The figures in the mirrors weren’t static images. He could see them marching, searching, struggling within the weird limbo behind the mirror. They were trying to find a way out, but their efforts never drew them any closer to the glass. Whatever they attempted, to the observer on the outside the warriors remained the same distance away. From their actions, the Celestant-Prime decided that they couldn’t see the glass, much less the world beyond it.

‘This is sorcery beyond any mortal,’ said Throl, shuddering as he joined the Celestant-Prime and looked upon the mirrors. ‘This is the magic of Tzeentch himself. Imperious and incontestable.’

‘It can be beaten,’ declared the Celestant-Prime. He gestured to the Stormcasts. ‘These warriors slipped free of the maze. That means this magic does have a weakness, whether it comes from Tzeentch or simply one of the Deceiver’s minions. There is a weakness.’

Even as he spoke, the Celestant-Prime saw the mirrors begin to shift, spinning across the walls, sinking from upper tiers to lower ones, ascending from beneath the floor to take a new position far above. It was a bewildering, disorienting display, like watching the world slide onto its side and then turn itself over again. Deucius staggered, overwhelmed by a sickening revulsion. The rest of the Thriceblessed outside the mirrors fell to their knees as nausea sapped their constitutions as well. The warriors locked within the mirrors gave no sign that they were aware of the rotation, the grey nothingness behind the glass unfazed by the shifting spin of its frame.

The revolving mirrors began to show other shapes now, captives far different from the noble Stormcasts. Behind some of the mirrors loomed the putrescent bulks of gigantic plague daemons, their antlers festooned with decaying carcasses of men and beasts. Lascivious monstrosities with snapping claws and supple bodies leered seductively from their magic prisons. A great rat-like thing with thirteen horns scrabbled against the glass, trying to gnaw at its cell with fangs of iron. Warlords and sorcerers, men and monsters, daemons and the abominable undead, all these had tried to oppose the Prismatic King during his tyrannical reign, and all had been consumed by his Maze of Reflection.

Something caught the Celestant-Prime’s eye as it went whirring past, revolving and spinning away amidst the confusion of panels. A bare pane amidst the riot of images assailing his senses, an emptiness that stood stark and clear among the clutter of the maze. A single mirror that didn’t have a captive locked behind its glass. Instead there was a jagged crack that snaked down its face. A memory, an impulse, made the Celestant-Prime turn and look to the other wall. Again, there was an empty pane, clear and distinct amidst the turmoil of the maze’s reflections. Taking wing, he rose towards the second barren panel. He found the exact same crack running down its glass as the one on the opposite wall. It would have been natural to believe the mirrors to be reflections of one another, but they were too distant from each other for that to be true. They were more than visual echoes of one another. They were more like twins.

An incredible idea rose within the Celestant-Prime’s mind, a thought that nagged at him with the persistence of some half-forgotten experience. He focused upon one of the mirrors holding the Thriceblessed and locked every detail in his mind. Swiftly he swung around and faced the opposite wall, eyes roving across the thousands of shifting mirrors to find the one which would further the theory he had formed. At last he spotted it, far overhead, a mirror that exhibited the exact twin of the scene he had memorized from the first one. Again, the two mirrors were too far apart to simply be reflecting the same image. In some way he didn’t understand yet, they formed a pair, and within that eldritch symmetry was hidden the secret of the maze.

‘Watch the mirrors,’ the Celestant-Prime said to Deucius, raising the warrior to his feet. ‘I am going to try something.’ Deucius nodded, tightening his grip on his weapon. The other Thriceblessed followed his example, ready to lend their own efforts to the Celestant-Prime’s plan.

The Celestant-Prime had just begun to soar towards the first of the mirrors, when he sensed an unsettling change in the air. The atmosphere, already tainted with the chill of sorcery and the stink of mutation, now became pregnant with a smouldering hostility. Turning his gaze below, he saw some of the ever-shifting mirrors begin to slow, their gyrations become more focussed. In a blaze of light, two of the mirrors flared outwards, a hideous form emerging from the midst of that light. Verminous and gigantic, the thirteen-horned rat-beast reared back on its clawed legs and chittered a fierce shriek of jubilation. Its yellow eyes glared about the Maze, fixing upon the Thriceblessed. With a snarl of inhuman malignance, the rat-beast was charging towards the armoured warriors.

Other mirrors now blazed with light, disgorging their own captives, loosing clutches of fiendish creatures against the Stormcasts. The Celestant-Prime whirled around, ready to lend his might to his embattled comrades. Before he could descend, however, his attention was caught by the mirror beside him. Here the glass wasn’t filled with the image of an imprisoned Stormcast. It was a different kind of captive that glared out from the mirror. A vision of hate and fury, its skull-like head sporting great curled horns, its blood-stained body rippling with thick cords of muscle. Vast bat-like wings erupted from its back. Strips of twisted mail and shattered plate hung from its torso, less as armour and more in the fashion of gruesome trophies. Carved into the beast’s forehead was a loathsome symbol, a sign that spoke of havoc and murder throughout the Eight Realms: the rune of Khorne.

The eyes that smouldered within the pits of the daemon’s face were unfocused at first, as unaware of the outer world as the Stormcasts. But then a grisly change came upon them. They shifted and fixated upon the Celestant-Prime, the lipless mouth below them spreading in a malicious leer. The creature could see the Celestant-Prime. It was aware of the world beyond the mirror.

The Celestant-Prime looked across to the other wall just as the whirring rotation of mirrors brought the exact opposite of the daemon’s glass into place. As the two mirrors now faced one another, a terrible rending sound echoed through the Maze. There was a blinding flash and then the two mirrors were spinning away again – only now the glass was empty. The thing that had been held captive was free, soaring towards the Celestant-Prime on its own wings. At a gesture, its clawed hand erupted into a cataract of bubbling gore. The stream lengthened and thickened, spreading out from the monster’s talons. With each heartbeat, the blood coagulated, building successive layers of solidity, assuming the form of a double-headed axe.

The Celestant-Prime darted away as the infernal creature swooped towards him. The thing’s axe slashed through the air in a murderous sweep, flecks of sizzling blood streaming from the grotesque blade. The Celestant-Prime retaliated with a swing of Ghal Maraz, the holy weapon causing the daemon’s flesh to bubble like molten bronze as it grazed past the fiend’s wing.

The daemon threw its head back in a savage howl, pivoting in midair to face its foe. It slashed its axe along its own forearm. Steaming blood dripped from the injury, writhing in a gory rope as it rushed from the wound. Like the axe the beast had formed, the rope quickly thickened, taking on the shape and substance of a barbed whip. The daemon cracked its lash in the air, spattering Ghal Maraz’s golden armour with flecks of blood that steamed against the sigmarite mail.

The Celestant-Prime glared back at the skull-faced daemon, ready to match his righteous fury against the beast’s murderous rage. Before he could, he was struck from behind, a brutal kick smashing into his back and causing him to plummet downwards. As he spun away, he could see a second Khornate daemon, another of the Blood God’s bestial champions, speeding after him, its spiked maul ready to deliver a further treacherous blow.

The first daemon howled, streaking past its comrade to lash at the Celestant-Prime with its whip. The crimson coil wrapped about the hero’s arm, snapping taught as it arrested his fall. For an instant, he hung there as the daemon with the maul came rushing at him. The beast flung its weapon at the Celestant-Prime. Only a rapid twist of his body prevented a more solid contact, as the maul ripped sparks from his armour as it scraped past him.

The second daemon was far from disarmed. It uncoiled a black mass of cord from around its wrist, a ghastly whip fashioned from skulls and sinew. It struck at the Celestant-Prime, trying to bind him.

Swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the Celestant-Prime defied the efforts of the daemons to hold him. The first greater daemon was trying to drag him upwards, but even its prodigious strength was no match for that of Sigmar’s champion. With the brawn of its twin to assist it, the daemon might have succeeded, but the Celestant-Prime was determined to thwart such ambitions. When the swinging motion of his body brought his feet against one of the mirrors, he pushed himself off with a mighty kick, feeding his momentum into an upward drive.

The daemon was taken utterly by surprise when its enemy arrowed towards it. Soaring upwards, the hero saw the trap the Khornate fiend had intended for him: an empty mirror, stark against the prisons around it. A quick shift of his eyes showed him the mirror’s twin waiting on the other side.

Just before he drew parallel with the empty mirrors, the Celestant-Prime arrested his ascent. Seizing the blood-whip in his hand, he wrenched the now slackened lash. The beast’s eyes widened with shock as it was jerked downward, tumbling towards the Celestant-Prime and past the empty mirrors.

Again there came the blinding flash. When it faded, the daemon was gone, its image caught in the paired mirrors that now swung about on mismatched courses down the tiers.

The remaining bloodthirster roared and shook its horned head, disgusted that the Celestant-Prime had slipped the trap that had once more claimed its fellow vassal of Khorne. Vengefully, the fiend leapt at the champion, powering its dive with its wings. The hulking brute’s lash licked out, the blackened skulls shrieking as they bit towards the Celestant-Prime.

He didn’t allow the daemon a second blow, and brought the godhammer slamming down into his enemy’s horned visage. The skull-like face shattered under the impact, golden fire from the hammerhead surging through the fiend. Like a weed shrivelling under a hot sun, the daemon’s body wilted away, collapsing into a scabby crust that rained down across the floor.

The Celestant-Prime looked down upon his comrades. The carcass of the rat-beast lay twitching, vermin spilling from its wounds. The bodies of plague-ridden warlords and wanton sorceresses lay strewn about the tiny wedge of Stormcasts. The Thriceblessed were holding their ground, but more foes were spilling from the mirrors with each heartbeat.

Glaring at the spinning mirrors, the Celestant-Prime cursed the malignant power that directed the revolutions of the tiers, ensuring only enemies were freed from their prisons. Then his thoughts seized upon a flicker of memory, something that only now did he recognize. The cracked mirror – there had been something familiar about the way the glass had splintered. Seizing upon that sense of familiarity, he flew upwards, sweeping past rows of enchanted glass to find the one panel he sought.

He found it, speeding away among the tiers, spinning and rotating as though desperate to escape. The Celestant-Prime could see now that his memory wasn’t wrong. The crack echoed the outline of Ghal Maraz. A conviction he couldn’t shake seized the hero. The damage had been wrought by Sigmar’s hammer. How, when, he couldn’t say, but he was certain he knew why.

With an effort that taxed his mighty wings, the Celestant-Prime chased after the spinning mirror. Swinging Ghal Maraz, he brought the great hammer smashing into the cracked glass, obliterating it in a spiral of glistening fragments and glowing aethryic harmonies. A titanic scream rippled through the Maze, an elemental wail of discord. The revolutions of the mirrors slowed, the tiers sagging downwards as the prisons collapsed one after the other.

The flaw in the maze. It had been found once before, but the opportunity to exploit it had been thwarted. Now, the Celestant-Prime was here to turn that failure into success. All around him, the mirrors were breaking, freeing the captives locked within them. Now it wasn’t merely the fiends of Chaos that were at liberty, but all the Stormcasts that had been caught in the Prismatic King’s coils.

The monstrous creatures imprisoned in the maze fell upon one another, less willing to make common cause against the Stormcasts than those beasts deliberately freed by the maze’s master. The Thriceblessed weren’t wracked by such disunity. As they emerged from the aethyric discharge of the mirrors, the golden warriors formed ranks and brought battle to their hideous foes.

Ghal Maraz blazing with holy light in his mailed fist, the Celestant-Prime dived downwards to join his brothers in battle.

Chapter Six

Locked within their prisons for so long, the Thriceblessed were disoriented as they emerged back into the mortal world. Questions of how long they had been trapped were forgotten when they saw the Celestant-Prime and the weapon he carried. The sacred aura of the godhammer swept through them, driving away all sensation but that which stemmed from their devotion to Sigmar. By the God-King they had been tasked to conquer. Now, with the aid of Ghal Maraz, they would accomplish that noble purpose.

The Celestant-Prime looked with pride at the fighters he had freed from the Maze of Reflection. Judicators armed with rune-etched skybolt bows and fearsome boltstorm crossbows. Retributors with great mauls of enchanted sigmarite. Troops of Liberators with their slashing swords and brutal hammers, their shields held proud before them. There were hundreds of the mighty warriors gazing with undisguised reverence at the hero and the weapon for which their Stormhost had been named.

‘Celestant-Prime,’ Deucius said, bowing to the champion. ‘This is Lord-Celestant Devyndus Thriceblessed.’

‘It is my honour to stand in the presence of Sigmar’s chosen,’ Devyndus said. He was a tall, powerfully built man even by the standards of the Stormcasts. The breastplate of his golden armour was fashioned into the image of a twin-tailed comet and from his shoulders there hung a cloak of woven sigmarite, its edges weighted with small hammers cast from the same material. Like the Celestant-Prime, the Lord-Celestant’s helm was ringed by a halo of metal, the spikey crown framing his head like the rays of a golden sun.

‘All who are reforged upon the Anvil of the Apotheosis are the God-King’s chosen,’ the Celestant-Prime told Devyndus. ‘It is only the bravest and most noble who can meet the rigours of such rebirth.’ As he spoke, he could see in his mind the great palace of Sigmar, and himself being remade upon the anvil of the God-King. Who and what he had been before was only a whisper, something just beyond the edge of his memory. What had been wasn’t important. It was the here and now, the ordeal before him that was. His role as rescuer of the Thriceblessed was fulfilled. Now it was left to be liberator of the realmgate and vanquisher of the Prismatic King.

Lord-Celestant Devyndus bowed. ‘We stand at your command,’ he told the hero. ‘Give us your orders and it shall be done.’

Throl stepped forwards, lean and miniscule among the mighty Stormcasts. ‘If you will forgive my impertinence, Ghal Maraz,’ he said, and picked up one of the broken shards from the mirrors. ‘The Maze of Reflection’s presence here and the fiendishness of the trap laid for you was no accident. We were led here, meant to be drawn to this place. It wasn’t mere chance that caused the captive daemons to be loosed against you.’ He held up the sliver of glass, turning it from side to side, letting the light play across its surface. ‘Everything was being directed by the Prismatic King, his terrible magic both setting the stage and moving the players.’

‘The Stormcasts are no puppets to dance for a sorcerer’s whim,’ Othmar snarled, bringing his foot stamping down on a piece of glass.

Throl bowed in apology. ‘No, the warriors of Sigmar aren’t so easily manipulated. That is why the Prismatic King’s trick failed.’

‘But he will try new ways to destroy us,’ the Celestant-Prime said. He clenched his mailed fist, glaring at what remained of the broken maze. ‘Unless we destroy him first.’

‘That is what I propose,’ Throl said. Holding the shard of mirror high, he pointed to its gleaming surface. ‘The Prismatic King spied upon us through the mirrors. More than simply prisons, they acted as windows for his witchsight. Through the mirrors he could watch those he’d caught and those he intended to catch. That is how he knew the right moment to free the blood daemons and when to shift the mirrors to try and snare Ghal Maraz.’

Othmar picked up one of the broken slivers, glaring at it. ‘I hope he’s still watching,’ he growled, scowling at the glass.

‘Is he watching, wizard?’ the Celestant-Prime asked.

‘The spell should be broken,’ Throl said. ‘When the mirrors broke, so too should their magic. But they remain things of the Prismatic King. The thread of his enchantment, the trail of his scrying is still there. My own magic may be able to exploit that lingering thread.’

‘Exploit it how?’ Lord-Celestant Devyndus asked.

Throl gestured expansively at the other shards scattered about the chamber. ‘Gather every piece together. Combine them in a great circle.’ He turned and looked up at the Celestant-Prime, an imploring look on his face. ‘The essence of the Eyrie is the stuff of Chaos – transitory and mutable. It is unfixed and unfinished by the rigours of mortal reality. I can use that shapelessness. My magic can bind itself to the aethyric tether linking the mirrors back to the Prismatic King. I can open a portal that will follow the path right to him.’

The Celestant-Prime nodded. ‘If you can do this, then we won’t need to fight our way through the Eyrie. You can take us straight to the Prismatic King’s throne.’ A concern flared through his mind, a worry that howled with warning. ‘Won’t your magic warn the sorcerer of our coming?’

Throl frowned, the light of vengeance faltering in his eyes. ‘His mastery of the black arts is such that there would be no hiding my magic from him. The instant I evoke my spell, the Prismatic King will know we are coming.’ The wizard shook his head. ‘There is small chance of surprising him if we march through his halls. This way at least you will be brought into the fiend’s presence. This way you will at least see the face of your enemy.’

Feeling the heft of Ghal Maraz in his hands, the Celestant-Prime experienced a sensation of righteous wrath. ‘Let me get that close to him, and your people will be avenged, Throl. The Prismatic King has mocked Sigmar long enough.’ He looked to Devyndus. ‘Have the Thriceblessed gather up the shards. Whatever the wizard needs to work his spell, we will render it to him.’

Lord-Celestant Devyndus clasped his hand to his chest in salute and hurried to pass Ghal Maraz’s commands on to the other Stormcasts. In a moment, the warriors were picking up the broken pieces of mirror, setting them into a growing circle of glass. Throl walked across the jagged shards, seating himself at the very centre of the ring. Closing his eyes, he began to chant.

The pieces of glass began to shift and shudder, quaking upon the floor. Gradually their reflective surfaces became suffused with a brilliant light, a whirring aura that turned from one hue to the next in rapid rotations. The frigid chill of magic swept through the chamber, the breath of each Stormcast ghosting through his helm.

‘The door is open,’ Throl declared, his eyes more glassy and gem-like than the Celestant-Prime had ever seen them. Sweat streamed down the wizard’s strained face. ‘Quickly, while I can still maintain it!’

Devyndus gripped the Celestant-Prime’s shoulder as the champion started towards the glowing circle. ‘Are you certain of the wizard’s magic? Let one of us…’

The Celestant-Prime shook his head. ‘I send no man where I fear to lead,’ he declared. Holding forward the golden head of Ghal Maraz, he shook the weapon at the magic circle. ‘If the godhammer’s might is not enough to bear me to victory, then the valour of the Thriceblessed will be for naught. Let me lead the way, Lord-Celestant.’ His voice grew low, subdued by the magnitude of emotion boiling inside him. ‘This is my trial, and there is none who may lift it from me.’

Without further word, Ghal Maraz strode out into the blinding ring of light. The luminance swirled around him in a coruscating miasma of brilliance, a cascading stream of reflections and echoes that flooded through his senses. With each step he could feel the energies of the broken mirrors engulfing him, blotting out the outside world. He was fading from existence, marching through the passageways between space and time. Where the passage would lead was a matter of faith, not in the magic of Throl, but in the divine power of Sigmar.

A deafening clap of thunder rolled through the Celestant-Prime’s skull as he emerged from the nimbus of eldritch light. One instant he was engulfed in the blinding flash, the next he found himself standing in a grand hall of cyclopean proportions. Titanic columns of crystal soared up into an arched ceiling of uncut gemstone. The floor was like a single mosaic of stained glass, its panes depicting the manifold atrocities and conquests of Chaos throughout the Mortal Realms.

Across the gargantuan hall, an enormous seat rose, a throne fashioned from diamonds that blazed with a kaleidoscope of colours smouldering deep within their facets. Upon the throne sat a vulture-headed Lord of Change, its face turned towards the Celestant-Prime as he emerged from Throl’s portal. There was amusement in the greater daemon’s jewel-like eyes as it sensed the champion’s shock when he gazed upon it. The Celestant-Prime had thought the Prismatic King would be a monster of at least mortal birth. Instead he found himself before an infernal steward of Tzeentch, one of the greater daemons who existed as extensions of their twisted god’s desire.

Bigger than the one-eyed giants he’d fought in the swamp, the Prismatic King rose from its throne. Possessed of roughly human shape, the Lord of Change adorned itself in a long robe of silks and satins, jewels woven into the pattern to form arcane sigils and sorcerous talismans. The gaunt, starveling body of the daemon was covered in black feathers that faded to a leprous yellow at the tips. The vulturine head leered from atop a bare, scraggly neck, the face dominated in a metallic beak of blackened iron. Upon the horror’s talons enormous rings burned with unholy energy. From the Prismatic King’s back spread gigantic wings, exhibiting a dazzle of whirling patterns among the rainbow display of coloured feathers. Upon the beast’s brow, a mirrored crown reflected the Celestant-Prime’s image back at him, but it was a reflection twisted and corrupted by the ruinous essence of the daemon.

‘You have come far to seek an audience with me.’ The Prismatic King’s voice was like the crackling of broken glass and the scrape of steel against stone. ‘In all its long existence my court has never entertained an emissary of Azyr.’

The Celestant-Prime felt every syllable the daemon uttered clawing at him, probing around in his mind and spirit for any trace of weakness. However mighty the godhammer was, however resilient his armour of sigmarite, their strength would account for nothing if the Lord of Change found a flaw within the man himself.

Thunder roared through the hall. The Celestant-Prime could feel the Thriceblessed emerge from the portal. Firm in their faith in the champion chosen by their god, the Stormcasts had dutifully followed him through the magical gate. He could feel the shock that swept through each warrior as he gazed upon the hideous enormity of the Prismatic King, but that shock was tempered, subdued by a sensation yet more powerful: the conviction that each Stormcast held that the Celestant-Prime could overcome even this foe.

Strengthened by the faith of his comrades, the Celestant-Prime took a step towards the diamond throne. ‘I’m not here as emissary,’ he snarled at the daemon. ‘I’m here as executioner. I’m here to answer the cries of the innocent you have enslaved and killed. I’m here to avenge the kingdoms and empires you have annihilated. I’m here to defend the worlds you would despoil with your sorcery.’ He held Ghal Maraz overhead, letting its holy presence blaze forth in a nimbus of sacred fire. ‘Tell me where you have hidden the Pillar of Whispers and earn the mercy of swift destruction.’

The Lord of Change uttered a cackle of withering mirth. ‘I whispered in the ears of priests and emperors in the Age of Myth. I set nations aflame in the Age of Chaos. What are you, Ghal Maraz? A mortal substituting for a god? A nameless vagabond who calls himself by the trinket he carries? Who are you to contend with me?’

The Celestant-Prime felt the bite of the daemon’s words. He felt too the strength of his own faith. His eyes burned behind the mask of his helm. ‘It isn’t who I am that matters – it is what I am!’ He brought Ghal Maraz slamming into the floor, sending a shockwave through the panes that cracked and splintered the innumerable atrocities of the Prismatic King’s glass legions. ‘I am your doom, Soulshriver.’

The daemon’s enraged howl shrieked across the hall. Translucent membranes slid across the fiend’s eyes as it brought its talons together. A surge of crackling magic swept down the gallery, dragging the cracked slivers of the floor into its seething storm. The gale rushed towards the Celestant-Prime and the Thriceblessed, an arcane tornado of boiling sorcery and razored glass.

The Celestant-Prime held his ground, brandishing the godhammer. In a shriek of elemental violence, the dark magic of the Prismatic King crashed into the faith and devotion of Ghal Maraz. The dark storm frayed, its grisly energies blown apart in splatters of roiling corruption that sizzled against the crystal columns and gem-encrusted ceiling. The slivers of glass dropped back to the floor in a cascade of broken fragments.

‘The chosen of Sigmar! The Celestant-Prime!’ Deucius raised his voice in a roar of adoration. The cry was taken up by the other Thriceblessed. Their shame at failing to overcome the trickery of Chaos and at their imprisonment in the Maze of Reflection was now fanned into a surge of judgemental wrath. Like an avalanche, they charged across the hall to confront the daemon who had worked its deceit upon them.

The Prismatic King glared contemptuously at the army of Stormcasts. With a gesture of its ensorcelled talons, the arrows of lightning loosed upon it by the Judicators dissipated into sparks of harmless light. A snap of its mighty pinions sent a gale that staggered the hulking Retributors. A ghastly squawk that was part scream and part incantation bubbled from the daemon’s beak and from the smouldering depths of its diamond throne shapes oozed into being, gaining in size and solidity until they stood within the hall – a mismatched horde of barbaric warriors and snarling beastmen. The Lord of Change extended its claw and the mongrel army leapt to the attack.

Sweeping the Cometstrike Sceptre overhead, the Celestant-Prime once more drew on the relic’s divine power. The ribbon of holy energy swept outward, wrenching a fiery ball from the heavens, flinging the conjured flame full into the swarming foe. Scores of Chaos warriors and beastmen were immolated by the cosmic fury of the comet, their mangled bodies flung across the hall, crashing into the stunned ranks of the Prismatic King’s vassals. Before the slaves of darkness could recover from their shock, the Stormcasts were charging towards them.

The Celestant-Prime led the advance. Faith and conviction were anathema to all things of Chaos, but it would need more than the valour of men to overcome a fiend as ancient and steeped in evil as the Prismatic King. Only a weapon as mighty and sacred as Ghal Maraz could vanquish the daemon.

The Judicators unleashed their skybolts across the hall. The Prismatic King didn’t squander any of its sorcery to protect its slaves, however. Dozens of mortal warriors fell, their blackened mail pierced by the crackling missiles. The Retributors took position before the Judicators, defending the archers against the rush of snarling gors eager for their blood. With precision honed over numberless battles, they swung their massive mauls in a brutal arc, breaking bones and crushing horned skulls. Soon the ground before them was littered with the battered bodies of dead and dying beastkin.

As the Prismatic King’s warriors struck the ring of Retributors, the Liberators pushed their way to the vanguard. With swords and hammers, the Thriceblessed wrought vengeful havoc against the minions of Chaos.

The Celestant-Prime cast down rank after rank of barbarous foes. Each strike from Ghal Maraz sent a thunderous clamour echoing through the hall. With one swing he obliterated a clutch of barbaric reavers. Another blow reduced a pack of horned gors into a heap of bloodied flesh and shattered bone. A hulking, bull-headed minotaur lunged for him, trampling the Thriceblessed who strayed into its path. A glancing blow of the godhammer tore the head from the beast’s powerful body and sent it crashing among the monstrous throng still emerging from the diamond throne.

Any mortal would have known despair as he contemplated the innumerable foes the Prismatic King had already conjured from the depths of its throne. To see still more swarming forth would have broken them. But the Stormcasts had transcended such limits. They had been recast by the God-King, transformed into instruments of Sigmar’s holy retribution. For them, there was no fear in battle, no such thing as unopposable odds. While they lived, they fought and while they fought they did so knowing that the glory of Sigmar shone within each of them.

None embodied this stalwart conviction more than the Celestant-Prime. Here was the fire in which he would be tested, the flame in which he would be proved. Yet as he would have pressed forwards, as he would have battered his way through the hordes of Chaos, a tiny warning made him hesitate. Had the Prismatic King, master of deceit and illusion, limited itself to such crude and obvious measures to protect its domain?

The Celestant-Prime looked beyond the crush of battle and the fires of his own righteous thirst for justice. Despite the ferocity of the fight, none of the Stormcasts had fallen. The chaotic horde was only trying to delay the warriors of Sigmar. After the Maze of Reflection, he could guess their hideous purpose.

Slain, the Stormcasts would dissipate, returning to the Anvil of the Apotheosis to be reforged. Trapped within the mirrors of the Prismatic King, however, they would be lost to the God-King. That was the peril which now threatened the Thriceblessed. The Prismatic King was going to work some feat of sorcery to achieve the same foul enchantment as the maze.

‘Devyndus!’ the Celestant-Prime’s voice thundered above the carnage. ‘The daemon’s slaves are trying to delay us, to give their master time to trap us all.’

The Lord-Celestant bellowed commands to the Thriceblessed near him, who in turn passed the orders down the line. The Judicators loosed a concentrated barrage of lightning-arrows into the midst of the vicious horde, focussing their shafts along a narrow front. Into this momentary gap surged a phalanx of Liberators, their shields locked together to form a wall of sigmarite that would stem the tide of warriors sweeping around them. The Celestant-Prime rushed through the narrow path the Liberators had created for him, Lord-Celestant Devyndus dispatching Deucius to protect the champion’s flank. In their wake, the wizard Throl scrambled towards the forefront of the battle.

Again and again, the Celestant-Prime swept the fury of Ghal Maraz across the ranks of savage reavers who stood before him. By the score the marauders perished, their broken bodies flung across the hall, yet still they came. Beyond them, the champion could see the huge daemon, its eyes glazed, its wings aglow as it summoned more magic into its loathsome conjurations. The transparent diamond of the Prismatic King’s throne was becoming steadily darker, assuming a reflective sheen. The daemon was exploiting the essence of Chamon itself, using the vibrations of the Realm of Metal to help it transmute the diamond throne into a nest of mirrors – a new maze in which to recapture the Thriceblessed.

‘Don’t let it complete its conjuration!’ Throl wailed, a stream of fire erupting from his splayed fingers to ignite a pack of gors, reducing the beastmen to heaps of ash. Deucius smashed down a dog-faced beastlord that had escaped the immolation of its followers, cracking the brute’s skull with his hammer.

The Celestant-Prime surged forwards, howling a challenge to the daemon. The flesh around the Prismatic King’s eyes twitched in fear but the Lord of Change was too committed to its mighty conjuration to break away from the spell. The creatures still emerging from the throne diverted towards the Celestant-Prime, seeking to answer the threat their master couldn’t face. Already the transmutive energies had wrought a change upon the throne, however. The creatures that staggered and crawled towards the hero were obscene half-formed things, their bodies as opaque as glass, their armour as brittle. When Ghal Maraz struck them, they disintegrated in a spray of shards that were both glass and flesh.

Reaching the daemon, the Celestant-Prime raised the godhammer, ready to strike it down with the fury of Sigmar’s wrath. As he started to swing, his eye strayed to the golden sheen of the hammer’s head. In that mirror-like surface, he could see the Prismatic King, towering and terrible. He could also see the shadows of its diamond throne and the creatures emerging from it stretching towards the wall. These shadows were constant, yet that of the daemon flickered with a grisly inconstancy. Only in the reflection of the godhammer was this weird effect revealed. Looking directly at the shadow, it seemed no different.

When Ghal Maraz cracked against the Prismatic King’s leg, the limb burst apart in a spray of light and thunder. The daemon shuddered, sagging back towards its throne. The shadow it cast flickered once more, then faded completely. The Celestant-Prime advanced on the reeling Lord of Change, but again there sounded within the deepest layers of his mind a cry of warning. Again he wondered at the trickery of a foe who could manipulate the senses as thoroughly as the Prismatic King.

He turned his eyes to the golden surface of Ghal Maraz. There, in the godhammer’s sheen, he saw only an empty throne. There was no daemon, no Prismatic King. Not even a flicker of the fiend. The monster’s sorcery could deceive mortal senses, but it couldn’t obfuscate the holy relic with its trickery. The Celestant-Prime turned, staring at the reflection in the hammer, searching for the true shape of the Prismatic King.

What he found was Throl. In the godhammer, the wizard’s shadow was a long ribbon of darkness, vast and hideous – the daemon had entered the man’s body. The Celestant-Prime glared at his enemy. Around them, the sounds of battle faded away, diminishing into nothingness.

‘Much better than the last time,’ the Prismatic King grinned, laughing at the shock the words provoked.

‘If we’d met before, you would already have found your doom,’ the Celestant-Prime snarled, advancing upon the daemon.

‘Only if you win,’ the daemon hissed. ‘You haven’t. Not now, and not then.’ Its gemlike eyes sparkled with malignance. ‘Haven’t you wondered, all those dim memories tugging at you, pulling you here and there?’

‘They brought me here,’ the Celestant-Prime said. ‘They led me here to destroy you.’

The thing wearing Throl’s body laughed again. ‘That is because you’ve been here before. Some foolish test set by your god for you to prove your worth. Didn’t you know? Didn’t your little godling tell you? We’ve danced this dance before, you and I.’

The Celestant-Prime raised godhammer. ‘I’ve no stomach for the lies of daemons,’ he snarled.

‘The best lies are hidden in the truth,’ the daemon mocked. The flesh around its mouth began to shrivel, scraps of blistered skin sloughing away from the bones. ‘There was a real Throl. He thought he could resist me. I even let his identity linger when I assumed his flesh. But there is only so long a mortal shell can contain the grand enormity of my spirit.’

A rending crash rumbled through the hall. Cries of bewilderment rose from the Stormcasts as their erstwhile foes disintegrated into broken glass. The vast shape that leaned against the throne broke apart like a reflection lost in a rippling pool.

‘Kill it, my lord,’ Deucius cried out as he turned away from the wreckage of his last enemy. Other Thriceblessed were converging upon the strange tableau now, surrounding the wizard who had deceived them for so long.

‘Destroy the traitor and have done with it,’ Othmar cursed.

The Prismatic King held its decaying hand towards the Celestant-Prime. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know where the Pillar of Whispers is? I will tell you. Such was ever my purpose, great Ghal Maraz. I will admit, Sigmar is clever in his way. The Maze of Reflection can thwart his cunning but is hardly capable of holding the hero chosen to bear the godhammer. No, I couldn’t kill you and I couldn’t trap you.’ The gloating daemon’s jaw fell off, crumbling to dust as it struck the floor. Still the fiend’s voice slithered from its decaying mantle of flesh. ‘All that was left to me was to destroy you.’

‘Then you have failed, monster,’ Deucius declared. ‘The Celestant-Prime is triumphant. It is you and your slaves that are vanquished!’

‘Do you know where the Pillar of Whispers is hidden?’ the daemon mocked. ‘It is locked away, buried inside a vessel of my own creation. I have held the Thriceblessed a very long time. While they were my guests, I fashioned a simulacrum in their shape. I took one of the Stormcasts from my maze and replaced him with my copy. A perfect copy. A reflection so complete that even it believes itself to be real! That, Ghal Maraz, is where the Pillar of Whispers is hidden! To find the realmgate, you must destroy the simulacrum! Only the godhammer will free it from its mantle of flesh!’

‘More lies!’ Othmar raged. He swung his hammer at the disintegrating body, collapsing its ribs and smashing the carcass to the floor. The desiccated head continued to grin up at the Celestant-Prime.

‘How many must die to unlock the realmgate?’ the Prismatic King’s mockery bubbled up from the bodiless head. ‘Will it be the first or the second, or the two-hundred and second? How many can you strike down before your spirit is broken? How much innocent blood can stain your hands before you are unfit to carry the godhammer?’

The Celestant-Prime listened to no more. Throwing back his head in a roar of outrage and frustration, he brought Ghal Maraz smashing down, obliterating the last shred of what had been Throl’s body and the Prismatic King’s vessel. Denied its host, the daemon’s spirit would be cast back into the Realm of Chaos.

But it was destruction, not defeat. The daemon was vanquished, yet its evil lingered on.

‘It can’t be true,’ Lord-Celestant Devyndus declared. ‘The daemon lies. We are all of us true Stormcasts. You have seen us fight. You have seen us cut down the slaves of Chaos!’

Deucius gestured to the dust that had been Throl. ‘That thing did the same, killing its own servants, springing its own traps all so that it could lull us into trusting it.’

‘But if the simulacrum doesn’t even know it’s false, how can we discover it?’ Othmar asked.

The Celestant-Prime was silent, brooding upon the choice the Prismatic King had put before him. Striking down the Thriceblessed would send them back to Sigmaron, but each time a Stormcast was reforged, he left something of himself behind, becoming less and less human with each incarnation. More, it would blacken his own spirit to massacre his own comrades. He would be tainted, befouled. Unfit to bear Ghal Maraz.

The champion stared down at the sacred hammer. As he did so, he studied the golden sheen. The reflection within the godhammer – the only true reflection within the deceit of the Eyrie. Inspired, the Celestant-Prime held the hammer aloft.

‘Sigmar will show me the way,’ he said. ‘The glory of the God-King will reveal the simulacrum!’ Spreading his wings, he rose into the air above the Thriceblessed, circling above them as he studied the image within the hammer’s golden sheen.

It was when he looked to one stalwart warrior who had fought so valiantly throughout their long march to the fields of Uthyr, that the Celestant-Prime saw a disruption in the reflection. Like the Prismatic King’s daemonic husk, the shadow of the warrior had no presence in the reflection Ghal Maraz revealed to him. The Stormcast wasn’t real, he was naught but a conjuration endowed with shape and form.

The Celestant-Prime returned to the floor, wings folding against his back as he sombrely marched past the Thriceblessed. He could feel the relief issue from each warrior he passed and the trepidation of those he had yet to approach. There was only one, however, who had reason to fear.

Deucius fell to his knees in shock when he saw the Celestant-Prime walk towards him and shake his head.

‘But I know who I am,’ he said.

‘You know who the Prismatic King made you to be,’ the Celestant-Prime corrected him. ‘Know this – by your sacrifice is the daemon undone. We will not forget you. We will mourn you. The realmgate will be secured and the darkness of Chaos will never again befoul it. By Sigmar, this I vow!’

One blow of Ghal Maraz was enough to shatter the simulacrum. The semblance of Deucius shattered in a blaze of light. From the midst of that destruction, a torrent of molten sapphire bubbled and oozed. Gyrating, spinning in a coruscating maelstrom, the Pillar of Whispers stood unleashed. The Celestant-Prime could feel the discordant vibrations spilling from the midst of the whirlpool, the opposing cadences of a different world.

‘A path back to Azyr?’ Lord-Celestant Devyndus wondered as he peered into the maelstrom.

‘A path away from here, at least,’ Othmar said. Staring down at the whirlpool, the warrior stepped out into the pulsating waves of force, diminishing as he was drawn through the gate. One after another, the rest of the Stormcasts followed.

The Celestant-Prime was the last to pass through the realmgate. In his mind, he wondered at the fiendish snare the Prismatic King had laid for him and at the daemon’s claims that theirs was an old struggle. The premonitions that had affected him so strongly – had they been premonitions, or memories of some failed effort from the past?

Whatever the truth, the Celestant-Prime had proven himself now. He would ascend with the Thriceblessed and take his place in the God-King’s war.

I

‘You come to me offering death,’ said Copsys Bule, stabbing his long-handled trident into the soft red soil. Blood or something distantly akin to it oozed lazily up around the sinking tines. ‘A kingly gift, envoy, but death flourishes where I choose to sow it. I am a harvester of death.’

Kletch Scabclaw studied him with eyes that could have gleaned weakness from diamond. They were milk yellow, and glared over the mangy scrap of man-skin that he held pressed to his muzzle in the claws from which he had taken his name. The look on his furry, verminous face might have been one of disgust, though at what, or who, was something the plague priest kept for himself.

‘A new age begins, they squeak-say.’ Spreading his paws, the skaven irritably swatted aside a buzzing bloat fly. Through Bule’s blurred vision it appeared to have three eyes, until the ratman snapped his claws and his vision once again became clear. ‘War comes. Even to you.’

Bule snapped his head up.

The skaven immediately backed up a pace, hunched for fight or flight. Light on his foot-paws, he stood atop the rotten mush that went up to Bule’s greaves. His right paw had gone for the weapon he concealed beneath his robes, and he hissed a warning through his scented rag.

Bule smiled, rotten flesh yielding to produce something too wide for a human mouth.

Slowly, Kletch held up his empty paws, then the gnawed-on nub of his tail. It switched over the ratman’s head with irritation. ‘I did not come-scurry all way from clan-burrow to fight-quarrel. The Black Thumb and Clan Rikkit were friend-allies in the Age of Chaos. Is written. Is remembered. Now we must-need fight tooth to claw again.’

Bule turned his back with a mild shake of the head. Withdrawing his bloodied trident, he stabbed three new aeration holes into the soil, the tines spearing an inch deep before hitting something unyielding. Baring the black stubs of his teeth he gave a grunt of pleasure, planted his foot to the back of the fork-head, and rocked back and forth on the handle.

Levering the trident against his bloated girth, he turned over the unyielding patch in a waft of decomposing flesh.

The human corpse tore off its blanket of topsoil and flopped over. A face that was grey-black and runny and lovely as a crop of sweet tubers fresh out of the ground stared up at the slow circling stars with the clarity of the dead. Disturbed maggots and worms squirmed under the starlight, as if divulging some great secret under torture. Bule watched them re-bury themselves, lulled by the drone of a billion bloat flies and the rank cackle of crows.

Wriggle. Wriggle.

‘Rotbringer,’ the skaven prompted him.

Bule pinched his eyes wetly, mind asquirm with worms and portent. The ratman continued.

‘The lightning men hit clan-burrows in Cripple Fang, Untamed Lands and Putris Bog. Even clan-cousins from far Ghyran come-flee, tunnelling the realm-places to bring word of war.’

Shouldering his trident, Bule turned around suddenly enough to elicit a low squeal of alarm from the plague priest of Clan Rikkit. The ratman leapt to one side, reaching again for his concealed weapon, but Bule merely squelched through the spot he had been occupying as though he were a zombie suddenly impelled to be elsewhere.

‘Bule. Bule!’

Copsys Bule ignored him, his armour emitting a mould-muffled clank with every step. Several of the spiked plates were split apart at the joins, but the damage to his armour had been inflicted not from without but from within. Corpse gasses distended his belly, opening up the plates from the inside like a fat grub eating its way out of an egg sac. Everywhere there remained living skin, swellings, boils and tumours caused further buckling, mottling the once-green metal to black.

Not since before the Age of Chaos had Bule known an equal, and his gardens brought weeping harvest to lands from the Bloodbloom Fields in the south to the Avalundic Ice Kingdoms in the north, from the peat bogs of Murgid Fein to the unconquerable Rabid Heights and their gargant kings.

His demesne was too vast for one name.

It encompassed the Pox Sands, the great Bloat Lake and the Plantation of Flies – fleshwork patches stitched with irrigation ditches that steamed with blight and hummed with spawning daemonflies. As far into the bubonic haze as the eye could see, scrofulous, once-human things tilled the soil with rakes and hoes, or waded into pools with long prods to turn the bloated corpses that floated in them, gestating towards ripeness. Hundreds expired in the time it took Bule to walk past them, and were dragged away to the nurseries to replenish the soil in their turn.

But it was the nature of lesser beings to attach small names to great things.

They called it the Corpse Marshes.

Seemingly at random, feeling where the dead desired his knife, he squatted down into the mire. A sigh of simple pleasure escaped him. The crucified remains of men, women and children staked the ground in serried rows for a stretch greater than a man could ride in a day. Here could be found the bodies of almost every race, including several that no longer existed anywhere but as they did here now. For reasons fathomable to few but Bule himself, he called it his Living Orchard. A foetid breeze moaned through the dead, making them hum and sway, like lush-leaved trees in bloom. Drawing a curved knife from his arming belt, he sawed away a hand that liquefaction was beginning to pull away from the wrist. It was human. A nectarine blackness trickled from the cut. He licked it from his hand, eyes closed in ecstasy.

There was no plan in his mind of how his garden should be, but he knew what needed to be done towards its completion. And it would be soon. Very soon.

The thought thrilled him even as the part of him that had cherished these labours was saddened by their imminent passing.

‘There are a great many of your kind here,’ Bule said, aware that the ratman had followed him and was now crouching on an old wall behind him. Keeping his distance. ‘Your fur. Your guts. You teem with life like no other.’ He cut away another sagging limb with a clinical slash. ‘Nothing rots as quickly as a skaven rots. Nothing embraces Grandfather Nurgle so completely.’

‘Is that what you want-wish me to take back to my masters?’

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

‘Why-why? What changes then?’

Bule licked his knife with a wide smile. Birds cried in fevered tongues, a diseased animal sagacity that he might one day have the fortune to fathom but half of. ‘You come on an auspicious night. For the first time in thousands of years the stars will align my realmgate with another.’

‘And then?’ Kletch hissed, suddenly wary.

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

II

Fistula, First Blightlord of the Black Thumb, delighter in sickness and death, opened the orruk from hip to hip with a sawing reverse of his blade. A surprised snort issued from the greenskin’s tusked helmet, but the fighter remained upright, tough as necrotic flesh and just as dead to pain. Holding its squirming guts in a fist the size of a buckler, it swung its axe at the blightlord with a roar.

Hardwearing, vicious – orruks were infamous. But the fever spreading fire through its veins from the infected belly wound made it sluggish. Fistula sidestepped the clumsy slash with ease then broke its shin with a heel jab. It was sweating. Most men would never know that an orruk could suffer the way this one now did. But still it would not yield.

Fistula appreciated that.

Dashing aside its weakening backslash on the flat of his sword, he stepped in behind its flailing trunk of an arm, close enough to smell the daemon plaguelings rampaging through its veins, then plunged his parrying dagger through its throat.

The orruk’s mammoth jaws snapped spasmodically as Fistula tore his dagger loose and kicked the brute away. Blood from the torn artery sprayed in a rising arc and painted the open face of Fistula’s helm green. He gasped. Partly to drink the wetness from the air. Partly for the raw pleasure of doing so.

Fistula looked down on the beaten orruk. It was still snapping its jaws even as it drowned in its fluids and its eyes turned white. Fistula could have ended it quickly, should have, perhaps, but endemic as the orruks were in the shadow of the Rabid Heights there were never enough to last. He looked up.

The orruks were still fighting in scattered mobs spread out along the length of the narrow gulch into which the Black Thumb had pursued them, but they were broken. Not in the manner of a human or Rotbringer host. They did not run. Rather, they held on with the witless tenacity of sick beasts. Hardy as they were as a race, all bore the stigmata of infection: weeping sores and crusted cuts that would not heal. For every hundred that lay dead with an obvious wound, a hundred more twitched on the ground with blood foam in their mouths and flies on their rotting flesh.

Gors and bestigors plunged headlong into the fray, hacking and goring with frenzied abandon. Rotbringer knights on maggot-riddled steeds galloped up the steeply climbing wall of the gulch to strike at the orruk warleader. The huge beast was surrounded by his biggest and most brutal, but was already heavily beset by the Tzeentchian warhost driving in from the opposite side of the ravine.

The Changeling host was a cacophonous legion of colours and shapes. Gold glittered. Strange voices whispered. Flames of every cast, smell and texture danced along the crossbars of banner poles, and suits of almost-sentient armour whispered secrets to the deepest subconscious of all nearby with a mind to hear. Daemonflies buzzed over everything and everyone. Blight hounds ran along the flanks, pulling down the isolated and the maimed. Giant slugs burrowed up from under the hardpan to swallow Tzeentchian warriors whole while plague drones and sleek daemonic screamers swept at each other in pitched battle for the skies.

The orruks had become almost incidental.

Fistula read the kindred mood in his opposite number, the hunger, coming from somewhere out there in the gulch. They had both come to torment prey, but now, starved of a true challenge, they threw their warriors at the other with greater ferocity than they had ever before.

It was something that Copsys Bule had become too fat and old to realise. Even the most rapacious of plagues could be tamed, lingering only on the scraps left by those they had once devastated in their millions.

A stamp of hellsteel and an ebullient cry called Fistula back from the abstract of the battle. Through a congested melee of putrid blightkings and sickening orruk fighters half again their size, a Chaos warrior encased in full plate armour of azure and gold barged towards him. His helm was solid metal, with only the etching of half-lidded eyes through which some enchantment perhaps permitted him to see. From the sides, golden horns spiralled inwards towards infinity. The Tzeentchian knuckled aside an orruk and roared the final strides with his broadsword swept high overhead.

With a shout, Fistula pivoted on the spot and smacked his saw-toothed blade hard into the larger blade’s descent. It was not a parry. He struck the Tzeentchian’s broadsword as though meaning to do it harm. The impact arced up his arm. He felt it vibrate in his teeth. Reflex action shocked his fingers open and would have lost him his blade if not for the blood and pus that pooled endlessly into his grip from infected calluses and glued palm to hilt.

The Tzeentchian reeled as though it had been struck on the head by a blow that had left its helmet ringing. Its heavy sword trailed, elbows locked in spasm with the aftershock of keeping a hold of his blade.

Fistula struck off the warrior’s head with a single blow to the neck and laughed.

He was the opposite of Copsys Bule in most ways. Where the Lord of Plagues had become a bloated wreck of a man, Fistula’s body was wasted, the favour in which he was held written in lesions on pared bone and in the ropey musculature that seeped and seeped without end. He was a warrior. A fever raged in his mind that no level of war could ever purge and his armour, lighter by preference, was etched with tallies of the blights he had tasted and the civilizations he had brought low.

‘Secure the dead,’ bellowed a cadaverous, jaundiced blightking wearing a cruel harness of scythe-edged plates and hanging mail. He lay into the orruks with a pair of matching knives, bloodily proficient in his preferred mode of killing. Fistula was one of the few to know him as Vitane. To most, he was Leech. The blightking turned and waved a come now gesture. ‘Bring up the wagons. If we are not back by high moon it will go poorly for you.’

Rattling in under a fug of disease came a dozen wagons. Each was drawn by a team of six wheezing horses, their loose wheels the size of a man, their high sides scratched with the knife marks of individual warriors and with a splintered parapet of aged wood. Leprous harvesters in hoods and swaddling leaned over the parapet with hooks to draw up the dead. The drovers called a halt. The horses snuffled in their traces, hacking, puking, biting at each other’s flea-ravaged coats.

Fighting his way to Fistula’s side, Vitane looked down on the orruk still dying at his lord’s feet. The leathery tissue was continuing to shrivel away, the liquidised remainder sinking around the bones.

‘He will be unhappy. This one is worthless.’

Fistula sneered. Vitane was old enough to have fought with Copsys Bule from the beginning, lacking enough in ambition or favour to prevent his star being eclipsed by the man he now followed into battle.

‘I am not here to scavenge and I am not here for Bule,’ Fistula said.

They could not all dine off glories past.

Fistula scanned the confusion for the Tzeentchian champion. Warriors of every stripe filled the gulch from wall to wall with a riot of colour and noise. Even the sky reflected the vivid clash, the bubonic haze that blanketed Bule’s demesnes turned a sickly turquoise by the rolling cumulus of Tzeentchian fire that followed the war horde from the north. Twisted trees covered in naked sores and weeping black foliage clung to the ridgeline. They swayed under the opposing winds.

Fistula shivered though he could not say why. His eyes narrowed.

There was something there, hidden under the drooping canopy. Fistula glimpsed a figure, or the suggestion of one. More a feeling than something he could later describe and claim with certainty had been real. He perceived a sense of robes, of a gaunt, skeletal height, but his overriding impression was one of watchfulness, of many, many sets of eyes trained upon every aspect of this moment in time. In a blink of the mind it was gone. The inkling of its prior being was a subliminal glamour that nevertheless refused to fully fade, as though he had gazed overlong upon a daemon and imprinted its corona of power onto his mind.

He shook his head, and with the blessed release of a peeled scab pulled off his helmet and wiped the orruk’s gore from his hairless scalp.

The sense of watchfulness remained on him, a nagging question at the back of his mind. He felt judgement, though for what, Fistula doubted he had the faculties to comprehend. Nor did he care. He bared his teeth in anticipation and raised his sword to signal the charge. His own glorification was all that mattered.

Let it watch. Let it judge.

III

Kletch Scabclaw spread his arms out to either side while a skavenslave hung the heavy ambassadorial cloak of Clan Rikkit over his shoulders. It was a bit much for the cloying humidity of the Corpse Marshes, and itched in hard-to-reach places that no garment so august should. Its fleas had been passed from priest to priest for two hundred years, and were now the hardy descendents of those that had survived the clan’s full arsenal of pesticidal sorcery.

His dresser ducked under his arm and shuffled around to the front.

The slave was naked but for its own scrappy fur and the brands of clan and owner, but Kletch was only partially reassured by that. To his mind there were any number of innovative places in which a determined assassin might secrete a weapon. His yellow eyes drilled into the side of the slave’s head. The wretch bared its throat with a whimper, stabbing its thumb several times in its panic to fasten the cloak’s rat bone collar. Kletch fidgeted as the slave fussed.

It was too hot. The garish green light of the warpstone braziers around the low-roofed tent was too bright. The spiced scent they gave off to hold back the reek was too sickly sweet.

‘How much-long to high moon?’ he asked of the plague monk seated against the wall of the pavilion behind his back.

‘Soon-soon.’

Scurf’s piebald fur was pox-scarred, so denuded of hair from his own incessant scratching that he resembled a game bird that had been abandoned before it could be fully plucked. The crusted word-bringer set his claw quill onto the stack of man-skin parchment on which he had been cataloguing the many new diseases they had encountered since their arrival in the Corpse Marshes and shrugged. ‘An hour, I think-guess.’

Kletch wriggled his shoulders in discomfort. ‘Something is about to happen-come. I feel-feel in my claws.’

‘I feel-smell also,’ said Scurf, always eager to concur.

The slave scurried over to the brass-ribbed chest sitting open by the hide wall of the tent, and returned with Kletch’s warpstone-tipped staff. Kletch snatched it off the slave with a snarled rebuke. Feeling a little better, he gave the air a fresh sniff, opening his mouth to taste. Between the reek of putrefaction and his own efforts to keep it at bay, there was little left to be smelled, but somehow he knew, knew, that there was more than just the three of them present in that tent.

‘You want-wish to go home?’ asked Scurf.

‘No,’ said Kletch, meaning yes. ‘Clanlords will not reward us for returning with paws empty. The lightning men hit them much-hard in lots-many places. Clanlords grow desperate. They… make bad decisions when they are desperate.’

The slave scurried back bearing a bottle filled with a greenish red liquor that it poured into a goblet. Steam hissed off the cup as the liquid hit the lacquer. The slave bobbed its head low and presented the potation. Kletch eyed the rodent severely. With a gulp, the slave brought the cup to its lips and took the daintiest sip.

Kletch took the goblet from his retching slave, stole his nerve, and then downed its contents. He grimaced, throat tightening, musk glands clenching, and stuck out his tongue. ‘Blegh!’

‘Best-best potions taste worst,’ said Scurf sagely.

Clan Rikkit had once been part of Pestilens, before a tunnel collapse in the ways between worlds had separated them from their brethren. They still retained many of the old immunities, but the cautious rat was the healthy rat.

‘This all a waste of time anyway,’ said Scurf, picking up his quill once more and dunking it in the shelled ink bug still twitching on his table. Scratching away at the parchment, he went on. ‘He has many warriors, but this not the Copsys Bule used to frighten my litter when I was small-young.’

Kletch was unconvinced. Bule could afford to let the world pass him by for a millennium or two if he chose to do so, of that he was certain. And if Bule was any less than the tyrant of clan legend then Kletch was glad that he had not been the envoy sent to treat with that Lord of Plagues.

‘One hour more we can wait. Let us see this over-done, but have all my warriors ready to go.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Scurf, carefully folding his quill and packing it away.

Kletch twitched aside the tent flap and slipped out into the muggy night with wrinkled nose and downcast eyes. Two from the two-dozen plague monks quietly chittering their praises on the broken ground outside of the tent fell into step behind him.

A colossal fortress-temple had once stood here, built by a people who had worshipped the stars and raised towers of incredible scale that they might feel the distant objects of their faith more keenly. For all that their eyes had attended the heavens, they had clearly also been masters of stone. Many of the great structures still stood though they were ruinous now, verterbral columns of stone that had been yellowed by blight, weather and war. Copsys Bule called this place the Hanging Gardens, named so for the thousands upon thousands of dead and dying strung up from its moss-clad defensive walls. Those still alive writhed in fever so that the walls themselves appeared in motion. Their mouths moved but no evidence of their torment could be heard from them, not above the flies.

To count the flies was to court insanity. They were infinite, swarms within swarms, billowing over the corrupted fortress in such numbers that at times they were as the chitinous outer wings of a beetle closing over the world and shutting out the sky. At such times the drone was a gnawing on the boundary between earth and heavens, between real and unreal. At other times it was simply maddening. It set the teeth on edge.

The Clan Rikkit camp pavilion was set up on the rubble where the innermost gate had crumbled to create a rockery populated with razor weeds that were watered each day with the blood of year-dead men. It would foul a charge as surely as any gate ever would, assuming any enemy had the fortitude to survive as far as Bule’s innermost defensive line.

From that vantage Kletch had an unimpeded and deeply unpleasant view.

The Corpse Marshes were monstrous. It reminded him only somewhat of the honeycombed pox caves of Murgid Fein, where diseases were bred, mutated and harvested from slaves of every race. But here the scale was far more epic. The very fabric of the world for as far as his dim eyes could show him felt rotten, perished. The reports of all of his senses scurried about his mind to decry its wrongness and even he, master of the industrialisation of degradation, felt sickened by it.

A geyser of corpse gas rippled upwards and outwards from a sinkhole further down near the gatehouse. Grime spattered back over the rotten gates and the band of warriors marching home over its splinters. A column of plague beasts and meat wagons followed them. Kletch recognised Fistula’s pack: the most useful of Bule’s warriors, but a drop in the septic ocean of his horde.

Leaning against his staff, he settled in to wait.

‘Another day spent in genuflection to our lord’s placidity, envoy?’ said Fistula as he tramped up the slope, evidently bound for the same destination as Kletch. The champion was spattered with loose gore and beaming, contempt for all and sundry and for Kletch in particular vibrant in his bloodshot eyes.

The blightlord walked over, laden carts drawn by withered, pestilential beasts creaking on behind him. Kletch stiffened with immediate suspicion and sniffed at the flies buzzing lazily after the vehicles’ cargo. The experiments of Clan Burrzik in breeding eavesdropping mosquitoes had faltered as a consequence of the clan’s incompetence, but one never knew. One never knew.

‘Maybe,’ he said, then chirred something conciliatory and gestured with his tail to the top of the hill.

There, encircled by a ring of luminous white pillars that in their cleanliness exuded a sense of power and prominence, was a marble archway carved with astrological constellations and runic notations. It stood bare to the stars as if waiting only on their call, and even inert as it was, the sight of it sent a frisson of imagined dread running to the tip of his tail. He could understand why the ancients here had built such a monument to the heavens.

He licked his gums nervously. ‘What does Bule want-think will happen tonight?’

‘I can tell you what I think will happen.’

Kletch caught the blightlord’s look and read the need there. Battle. Survival. Aims not identical to his, but with cunning words and enough will perhaps complementary ones. He glanced upwards again to mark the approach of high moon, his neck, accustomed to tunnels and caves, already sore from continually doing so. That was when he noticed what had been worrying at him since he left his tent.

The stars were moving.

IV

For a count of years numbering seven times seven times seven times seven, Copsys Bule had tended his garden. He did not know how many millions he had pulled out of the ground since that first day. Unlike some, he kept no lists, no ledgers, except that which existed in his mind. He knew only that his god saw it as good.

Turning his knife so that it was point down, he pushed the blade into the mushy chest of the body spread like soft grey cheese over dry bread across the trencher table in front of him. There was no resistance. It was like cutting into marrow jelly.

Flesh separated in a great swelling of maggots as Bule carved from collar to coccyx. A comingling of organs and body juices dribbled from the gash. The smell was pure ambrosia. His belly gurgled. Decay was a master gourmet. It loosened the fat, softened fibres and pulled meat from the bone. It brought out a depth and range of flavours that the impatient flesh-eaters of Khorne or the squeamish that burned their meat with fire could never experience.

He licked the juices from his knife blade, mouth distending to accommodate his entire fist. The panoply of tastes and odours gave him shivers and he closed his eyes.

The added spice of plague magic, the power of new life, tingled on the tip of his tongue and then diffused through him like a warmth. He withdrew his hand, sucked clean, and then hung the knife from one of the curing hooks that protruded from his armour.

‘All. Ready,’ snuffled Gurhg, the bray shaman thumping the ground with a skull-topped stave as he walked around the stirring realmgate. Standing behind the sagging trenchers in an octed around the realmgate, blightlords and champions watched solemnly. The shaman raised his bull snout and snorted, bone fetishes and feathers tinkling from blistered horns. He closed his eyes and emitted a low sigh that made the hanging flesh of his throat quiver. ‘Feel. Him. Stirring.’

Bule spread his arms with a smile. Torchlight flickered from sconces set in the columns. Brass tocsins played by hooded slaves with wire brushes hummed a sonorous chorus.

‘Feast, my children.’

To a great squishing of meat and crumbling of rot-softened bone, the gathered worthies of the Rotbringers tucked in with a hunger. Bule watched them all, hands across his swollen girth. There was Fistula, ever prideful, ambitious, filling his mouth with the same abandon as the others. Beside him the old bloat hound, Vitane, sucked jelly from his fingers and laughed at a joke. Their greatly honoured guest from Clan Rikkit was hunched behind a corner trencher, nibbling diplomatically at a bit of bone and throwing uneasy glances up at the sky. Copsys Bule basked in the paternal glow.

It was nearly time. The magic was rising, and Bule could feel the realmgate responding. For a moment he could feel the connections that ran through the Eightpoints to some other place, some other realm, where one far mightier than he tended a garden of his own. He looked up. The moon was approaching its zenith. The stars were in alignment, brighter and clearer than Bule had ever seen them before. One of them momentarily grew brighter.

Bule examined the moving constellation with wide open eyes.

Yes. Yes.

The star grew brighter, brighter, shining out the others around it and projecting a beam of starlight directly onto the realmgate. Bule grunted at the sharp glare and shielded his eyes with his arm. As the light dissipated, he looked immediately back to the gate.

A slender-bodied lizard wielding what looked like a dartpipe and a spear was now standing on the pedestal before the gate. It stood on its hind legs like a man, shorter even than Kletch Scabclaw and more wiry still. The black colouration of its scales mottled to white as Bule watched, matching itself almost seamlessly to the marble hues of the gate behind it. His eyes continuing to recover from the flash, Bule noticed a hundred or so more of the little creatures, spread out in the shadows around the gathered Rotbringers.

A strained silence fell over them all. Even Gurhg noticed and stopped chanting.

The lizard-man lowered its head, spines engorging to raise a vivid frill. It emitted a warbling chirrup then lifted its dartpipe to its beak.

For one so vast, Bule could move like poison through a panicking man’s veins when quickened to do so. That he had not been so roused in over a hundred years was nothing. He was Copsys Bule, the Black Thumb, and his knife was in his hand and wrist deep in the lizard’s still-shattering ribcage before the creature had drawn its breath.

The lizard’s nictitating eyelids fluttered in shock. Already its scaly skin was beginning to blister with the lesions of Nurgle’s blessed rot, daemonflies pupating inside the wound in its chest, but to Bule’s surprise what emerged from that wound was not blood but pure, cleansing starlight.

Scalded where it touched his arm, Bule tore his hand back, ripping a chunk of the lizard’s chest out with it. It shuddered and fell, vanishing in a cascade of glimmering motes before it hit the ground.

Clenching and unclenching his fist around his knife handle, feeling the burned, cleansed, tissue pulling, Bule grunted at the barely comparable sensation of a metal-tipped blow dart puncturing his neck. He felt the venom enter his blood and would have laughed at its impish ineffectuality had he not been building towards such a fury.

This was his moment, his time. The signs had been guiding him for centuries towards this night.

With a snarl that came from deep in his monstrous belly, he turned and flung his knife. It spun end over end, so fast it appeared as a solid discus, and punched a chameleon lizard from its feet in an explosion of light and bone.

Blow darts and javelins droned around him like hornets, snuffing out the torches with the wind of their flight, and falling on the Rotbringers. They bristled from unfeeling flesh, rattled off heavy armour and even downed a handful of the mighty warriors before they had a chance to react. The beastman, Gurhg, dropped to his haunches and backed into a trencher table with his head down. He found Kletch already under it.

Air rippled inside the arch of the realmgate.

It was subtle but there, the power awakening in direct response to the plague magic that Bule had nurtured in his garden for two thousand four hundred and one years. That power was still rising. Nothing would stop it now.

Copsys Bule looked again at his hand, free of blight for the first time since he knew not when.

‘Kill them all!’ he shrieked. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

V

Fistula was more disoriented than angry. He was drunk on meat and cankerberry wine, and on a power that he could not put name to but which filled him with a fever swirl of thoughts. The discordant moan of tocsins droned through his mind, though they were playing a cadence of battle now rather than of ceremony. The taste of meat was in his mouth, but it was fresh, torn not from the embrace of Copsys Bule’s soil but from the struggling bodies of the living.

He spat out a mouthful of blistering starlight. Or tried to. His throat burned, however hard he wretched and gagged.

Goaded into lucidity on a knife-edge of pain he struck down a lizard-man that was hissing in cold-blooded consternation at the chunk bitten out of its wrist. It disappeared in a drizzle of glimmer dust. Two more took advantage of the light-shock to blindside him. They came with spears held short.

Fistula caught the haft of the first spear thrust, then with his sword hand punched it in half. The lizard stumbled. Turning his body across and through it, he pushed it on its way to the ground, spitting his sword out to arm’s length to impale the second. Light exploded from its back around the tip of his sword. This time he was ready for the glare. Eyes already narrowed, he spun quickly away, stamping on the first lizard and grinding the light that bled from its fractured skull under his boot.

Something small and metallic spanked his pauldron guard. Darts tipped with starmetal zipped by. He saw a burly Rotbringer with a cloak of festering hide go down under a volley of them. Another took a freak hit, a dart straight down the ear, dropping the warrior like his weight in dead meat.

From somewhere, screaming. Melting flesh and starlight.

Every one of these warriors was a master of war, the mightiest of mortal champions uplifted to near daemonhood by the Lord of Decay. But they had forgotten what it felt like to be challenged. After millennia of pointless warfare they had forgotten what it truly was to fight.

Fistula clutched at his gut with his off-hand.

He felt ill, stricken, a great swelling pressing up from inside his chest. Pressure climbed up his throat, as though he were a snake trying to regurgitate a man that had been too large for him to swallow. A bilious taste flooded his mouth and, on unconscious reflex, he doubled over and vomited forth a torrent of foulness and corruption.

The lizard-men caught in the flow died instantly and in agony. The Rotbringers similarly touched were healed as if by the beaming intercession of Grandfather Nurgle himself. Maggots squirmed over open wounds. New and glorious infections puckered flesh that had been rankly cleansed by the lizards’ light.

Swallowing several times to assure himself that he too was whole again, he looked about for more enemies. There were none. All around him were in advanced stages of rot or already returned to whatever heavenly body had spewed them forth.

He panted, heart racing. Was that all?

‘Kill them all!’ he heard Copsys Bule shout, a shrill note of fury screwing his voice tight. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

Fistula shot around to look down the slope. His heart thumped hard for joy.

Light knifed frenziedly from the heavens. Flashes blossomed within the fug of flies, then glowed and spawned warriors. Many of them were bigger than the lizard-men he had just slaughtered. Some of them were a lot bigger. That first wave must have been some kind of advance party. Scouts. Assassins, perhaps. This was an army, coming down in conventional formations.

Accompanied by tocsins and bells and calls to glory, warriors of the Rotbringers mustered over the old corpse-hung curtain walls to oppose them. Bule commanded the souls of a hundred thousand, and although more than half were scattered wide over the Corpse Marshes and beyond, what remained was a mighty host indeed.

He bared sharpened teeth, a feral grin. Now for notice. Now for glory. This was going to be a fight.

‘You want war?’ Bule roared at the stars, and the very ground beneath seemed to tremble at his words.

Someone had passed the Lord of Plagues his helmet, and his voice boomed from inside the steel. In both hands he gripped the haft of the trident with which he tended his garden, veins standing out from bulging biceps as he continued to howl without words. God-gifted power oozed from him, turning the air around him syrupy brown. Sickly, cyclopean figures began to take shape there. They were horned, drenched in mucous and stooped over serrated swords that reeked of soulrot. Nurgle’s tallymen. Plaguebearers. From the strain in Bule’s bearing it was though he passed them from his own body. In a sense he did.

Fistula howled, maddened by battle-lust and plague.

Bule crashed the brass ferrule of his trident into the ground and screamed.

‘I will give you war!’

VI

Kletch Scabclaw ran in the middle of the Rotbringers’ counter-attack, where he felt naturally safest, ducking, weaving, leaping between pockets of solid ground. Not that he felt all that safe. Beastmen thundered downhill like rabid animals while Chaos warriors, each with their own maddened cry on their black lips, battled each other to be the first to meet the enemy and in their blundering almost dragged Kletch under more than once. Of course, the plague monks of Clan Rikkit could be just as zealous in battle, but only with the inspiring words of their priest in their ears and the fumes of his blessed censer in their snouts. As well as being unruly, the horde was not as sufficiently numerous as he would have liked. That wasn’t exactly helped by those who were continually peeling off to strike out at the lizard-man skirmishers firing down on them from their flanks.

The lizards scampered with near-impunity over walls and pox moats that, judging by the clear lack of defenders, the Rotbringers had considered impassable.

The Rotbringers had been fools.

Even by Kletch’s own standards, the lizards were light on their feet. Their bones seemed to be hollow, and with little else to them but light they skipped across floating corpses as cleanly as if they were solid ground. Only the moats themselves gave them pause – fecund nurseries of disease that hummed with deadly daemonflies – but they served only to funnel the rabid Rotbringers through their own defensive works where they were easy pickings for the lizard’s dartpipes.

Skinks.

Kletch shivered, some deep residual instinct to freeze and play dead almost killing him there amongst the running column of Chaos warriors, beastmen and mind-plagued fanatics.

He kept running, not watching, his pre-conscious replaying him impressions of jungles he had never seen, of stepped pyramids he had never visited, the terror of being prey in a land he had never called his. He had not seen or heard of these lizard-men, these seraphon, before now, but deep down he knew them, and it was a knowledge that a thousand generations of new lands and new enemies could not wipe from his racial memory.

He leapt from one patch of solid ground to another, then another, easily outpacing the beasts and once-men that ran around him. His heavy cloak slowed him only a little, flapping out as he made one long leap, landing on a leaning root of a column. Sinking around his staff onto all fours, he sniffed the air for the musk of his own.

Useless. The whole castle was thick with decay. With a snarl, he resorted to using his eyes.

Despite the lizards’ – the skinks’ – success in drawing the Rotbringers into more difficult terrain, the bulk of Bule’s horde were still charging for the good ground where the main outer curtain walls converged on the gatehouse citadel. He could hear the drums and horns, the shouts and the roar of beasts. Skaven eyesight grew dim over any kind of distance and for that, today, he was grateful.

‘Go around!’ he squeaked, gesticulating furiously from his pedestal to the band of Rotbringers that were wading into a stinking brown pond to get at the brightly scaled skinks on the other side. ‘Go get. Kill-kill. Go!’

To no surprise of his, the Rotbringer’s champion plunged on into deeper water. The warrior was an idiot. He’d earned the dart in the throat that dropped him face down into the mire a moment later.

The skinks were making a mockery of the heavily armoured blightkings, making them look sluggish. The daemons were another matter.

Every sore on Kletch’s body wept, every ache seizing and filling his wiry body with pain as ten of Nurgle’s tallymen strode onto the pox moat, walking weightlessly upon the scum that floated on the surface and through the stinging daemonflies. The cold-blooded star-creatures barely reacted. Kletch watched as a skink shaman rustled his feathered cloak, flying over the plaguebearers’ heads to land in a swirl of red and gold on a stump of wall behind them. There, he shook his staff, exhorting a hail of darts from his kin that fell amongst the closing daemons.

Kletch snickered. Everyone knew that daemons could not be killed that way. But the tallymen fell by the handful, if anything even more vulnerable to the seraphon’s envenomed darts than the mortals they marched beside.

With a snarl, Kletch reached inside his cloak for his weapon, eyes locked on the shaman.

‘See-smell how tough you are. Kletch not afraid of scrawny scaly-meat.’

The faintest trace of reptile musk warned him of the danger just before an ear-splitting shriek from above re-triggered every instinct he had to freeze, run, hide. Terradon. The giant reptile swooped overhead, banked gracefully under the effortless direction of its skink rider, then dropped a boulder from its hind-claws. It came down like a meteor. It was a meteor.

With a terrified squeal, Kletch leapt from his column, arms and legs churning as the spot he had been standing on was annihilated, the air at his back electrified by a starlight explosion. His tail peeled. His cloak caught fire. He landed in a roll, steaming from fur and clothes and from the accidental release of fear musk down his leg.

‘Scratch and sniff,’ he swore.

Patting himself down, he brushed a string of darts from the back of his cloak. He swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Dropping to all fours to make himself less of a target to any skinks looking to pick off survivors, he scurried from the path, zig-zagged through a verge of bloodgrass that stuck up from a hummock of dead men and horses like pins, and then dived into a wild patch of bruise-coloured bushes that clung to a ledge growing out from the second curtain wall. A few tail-lengths in he poked his head up through the scratching branches.

Below, clanking streams of Chaos warriors fed into a blurrily defined blob of screams and steel, a blood-and-lizard stink spilling out over half a league of the Hanging Garden’s heartlands. He didn’t need the eyes of a surface-dweller to see the blocks of bulky lizard warriors – saurus – grinding in under their golden icons. He could see well enough the giant reptiles that towered over all with swaying howdahs on their backs, even if he couldn’t quite count the horns on their bony head shields.

The seraphon were being held back for now. Nothing stood up to attrition like a warrior of Nurgle, and Copsys Bule commanded monsters of his own. Kletch sniffed the air and shivered at the sharp, unmistakeably vile scent.

The Lord of Plagues was down there. Good riddance.

‘Scabclaw-master!’

Kletch hissed angrily to mask his surprise, but this time held onto his musk. Scurf was scurrying through the flesh-drinking grasses, surrounded by a clawpack of stormvermin mercenaries in muddy black plate mail and wielding vicious-looking halberds. Several hundred raggedy plague monks followed, individuals breaking every so often to sniff the air, lash their tails in fear, and then hurry on.

‘Lightning men!’ Scurf squealed.

The word-bringer was in the same stained linen cassock he’d been wearing an hour ago, but had, apparently in great haste, donned a mail coif and was clutching a cracked tome that he held onto like a shield. He waved a rusty scimitar at the stars. Flies eddied and swarmed, a billion billion, but the stars behind no longer moved. An unnaturally intense constellation in the shape of a squatting toad glared down with eyes tinged red.

‘Fool-fool,’ Kletch snapped. ‘This is something other.’

‘Something new?’

Kletch shook his muzzle. ‘Something old.’

‘The claw-packs are ready to leave-go,’ added Scurf. He glanced down to the battle and gulped. ‘Very-very much-ready.’

Kletch bared his teeth, yellow eyes shining. This might all just work out after all. If Copsys Bule was defeated, as looked likely, then the clanlords could hardly blame him for failing to secure an alliance that the Lord of Plagues had never appeared to want at all. And if the weakened Lord of Plagues somehow managed to secure a pyrrhic victory? Perhaps then the generous backing of Clan Rikkit would appeal to him more.

‘This way,’ Kletch hissed.

Darting back into the bloodgrass, he wove through it, driving purposefully away from the main seraphon assault. Corpses at varying stages of rankness wobbled underpaw, tipping, sinking, at times disintegrating before he was able to leap clear and plunging him into foetid water. He spluttered a wordless prayer to the Pestilent Horned Rat that the tonic he had drunk would continue to prove effective. Keeping his head down and his nose clear, he scurried on. He was moving inside the circle of the inner walls to the far side of the fortress-temple. From there, with luck, he would be able to clamber down and escape without great difficulty. He upped his pace, becoming a blur of fur and movement.

There was nothing in all the realms quicker than a skaven with a battle to escape, but Kletch was not yet so anxious to flee as to allow himself to pull ahead of his brother monks.

Not for the first time – and he fervently hoped not for the last – sound skaven thinking saved his hide.

Crashing through a canopy of hanging dead, a lumbering reptile as massive as a barded warhorse snapped the lead clanrat up in its jaws, trampling three more before the saurus riding it could rein it back.

Its predatory head was huge and low-slung, supported by a monstrous neck and counter-weighted by a thick tail that tacked menacingly in advance of its movements as it turned. The skaven in its jaws was shrieking. A savage yank of neck and jaw and the beast bit the pitiful creature through, sending legs and torso flying over opposite shoulders. A rake of its vestigial forepaws claimed another.

Scurf issued a rallying squeal, backing into the stormvermin clawpack as the beast completed its turn and snorted in his nose. He whipped up his book of woes with a frightened squeak as the saurus’ mace came down.

The book was mouldering parchment bound in cracked leather.

The mace was meteoric stone.

Hurriedly withdrawing from the smashed word-bringer, the stormvermin lowered their halberds, throwing up a wall of hooked blades between them and the beast. The reptile – a cold one – snapped contemptuously, taking off one of the blades and eating it.

The saurus hefted its bloodied mace and with cold calm scanned the skaven scattered across the grass before it. Every scale armouring its grossly powerful hide was chipped and scarred. Its eyes were old. Beautiful works of golden plate clad vulnerable spots such as its throat and wrists. It shone like the light at the end of all the skaven’s tunnels.

Pumping its mace up into the air, it gave a roar that shook the air. With answering roars, a full cohort of glittering saurus warriors marched into the open.

Kletch squealed for order, for ranks, shoving his way to the back of them as he did so. These saurus were on foot, armed with spears and shields, but it scarcely mattered. Each one was twice the size of an armoured stormvermin and looked the match for any six.

With frenzied squeals, the plague monks charged. The saurus trampled them without appearing to notice and slammed into the line of stormvermin.

‘Hold. Fight! Kill-kill!’ shouted Kletch, growing ever shriller as the lizards’ massive line troops ground their way through his.

A rustle from the tall weeds to the right made his heart sink. There were more.

Hacking wildly at the bodies that came at him on nooses from all sides, Blightlord Fistula ran through, savaging a saurus from behind before the cold-blooded brute had even realised he was there. Coming under a swarm of flies, his putrid blightkings piled in behind him.

This was a more even fight. The blightkings were Bule’s elite and, Kletch knew, Fistula’s were the best. He was not at all surprised that the first blightlord had been amongst the reckless few to be dragged out into the swamp chasing skinks.

‘In! In!’ Kletch squeaked, urging his warriors on.

Scenting blood, the clawpacks and surviving plague monks pushed forward, wedging the saurus between two sets of enemies.

Observing the reverse in fortunes with an impersonal, calculating detachment, the saurus pointed its cold one towards Fistula and roared its challenge. The first blightlord ran at it with a yell, both weapons out at his side, armour dripping with bile.

The saurus struck first. The cadaver-thin blightlord parried the lizard’s mace with a blow that would have broken both of their arms had either been a lesser being, then rolled out of the lunge of the cold one’s jaws. His knife chewed down the side of the beast’s neck and spat out scales. He dodged back, turning a crunching side kick from the old saurus on his vambrace, then charged back in.

The saurus was wheeling his furious mount when Fistula stepped onto a plague monk’s mushed body and, using it a springboard, vaulted over the reach of the cold one’s flailing snap. Sliding down the beast’s spiny neck, he slammed bodily into the saurus and punched a knife towards its neck. It moved just fast enough to take it in the shoulder. If it felt either surprise or pain it didn’t show it. A shattering head butt snapped back Fistula’s head and sent him crashing over the cold one’s flank and down to the sucking ground. The cold one stomped on his breastplate, pushing him deeper under.

Then Kletch withered away the saurus’ head with a bolt of plague magic.

The cold one issued a defiant roar that shook the eardrums long after it vanished into the same cloud of light that reclaimed its master.

Shivering off the giddy tingle of the warpstone fumes from his pestilent censer, Kletch secreted the relic back into its pouch underneath his robes. He had taken the weapon from the clan vaults to deal with Copsys Bule, but it smelled like that was one precaution he didn’t need anymore.

‘He had me.’ Fistula’s laughter bubbled crazily, riding down from some wild adrenaline high.

‘We should be going-gone. Before more like it come.’

‘Going?’ Fistula sat up straight, face flushed red and cut in half by a razored smile. ‘I would fight more of your lightning men.’

‘They are not lightning men,’ Kletch snapped, suddenly lacking all patience for the stupidity of others. ‘The lightning men are... are much worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘Come with me,’ Kletch hissed, sidling closer, tail switching side to side. ‘Bule is old. Leave him to rot in his garden. Come kill-slay with Clan Rikkit.’

Fistula looked to his warriors. Kletch bared his fangs in a grin. He wouldn’t be returning to the clanlords with empty paws after all.

VII

Copsys Bule was untouchable.

Of the lizard-men that came close, only the very mightiest amongst them could make it within reach of his weapon before Nurgle’s Rot left them crippled and blind. And yet on these star-lizards came, fearing neither death nor disease.

His trident struck like an adder, piercing the throat of a heavily scarred lizard and exploding through the back of its neck. With one huge scaly hand it grappled with the haft, swinging a glowing starmetal axe with the other. Bule yanked back on his trident, pulling the impaled scar-veteran into a forward stumble and sending its axe stroke flailing harmlessly past his shoulder. An open fist to the gut punched the scar-veteran off his weapon’s tines, two feet through the air and onto its back. Bule closed the distance, trident spinning once, twice, overhead, and then smashing through the lizard-man’s chest. With a heave, he drew the trident up, the weapon arcing back overhead to its full extension to polearm the spear warrior that had been charging his supposed blindside.

With the rest of his horde struggling to hold their line, Copsys Bule took another forward step.

A powerful lizard in golden armour blocked him. The blinding might of Azyr screamed between the joins of its scales, and the roar of its challenge was like that of a furnace. Saliva stellar white hissed from its jaws as it brought up a primitive-looking two-handed blade.

Bule turned the hacking stroke with a loop of his trident, then took the haft between both hands and drove the ferrule into the sun-lizard’s groin. The warrior emitted a grunt and staggered back, unhurt, throwing a punch that caught the haft of Bule’s weapon. The struck trident popped out of Bule’s fingers and landed in the mud behind him. It was the deft, impish move of a master of unarmed combat.

With a celestial roar, the sun-lizard swept its weapon overhead.

Spinning and dropping, Bule planted his knee on the ferrule and slid his hand under the trident’s haft. Halfway along, a flex of the fingers bounced it up, reversed against the slope of his shoulder, just as the sun-warrior charged in to deliver the deathblow.

There was a heavy crunch, a sigh, the burn of starlight raining across his back.

Bule turned as he rose, swinging his weapon out like a scythe, letting fly, and sending the dying sun-warrior cannoning into the head of the hulking lizard giant that had just strode into view. Both went down in a mighty crash. The sun-lizard vanished in a flash of sunbeams. The giant, merely unconscious, did not rise again.

‘Is this it?’ he cried, laying out a murderous sigil of overlapping figure-of-eights. ‘Is this all that you have?’ To kill again, and to kill swiftly, felt glorious. Colours were vivid, scents sharp, cries like bells. He was a man awakening from a coma and remembering that he was furious. ‘Do you even realise whom you face?’

He shovelled down another lizard-warrior on the flat of his tines, then span, alerted by the prickling sense of something approaching from behind.

A robed figure stood there on the writhing carpet of sickening lizards. It regarded him through the haze of flies, neither noticeably human nor obviously reptilian. Daemonic perhaps, yet not. Its head was angled like a hoe with a row of eyes along its ridge. Some of them examined Bule archly, others with compassion, mirth, and contempt. In spite of himself, of what and where he was, Bule felt a chill.

Blind to their visitor, a cohort of warrior lizards charged through the hazing flies. They died one by one. The inhuman apparition did not react, but, despite having no obvious mouth, Bule had the impression that it smiled at him, as though he were a bloat hound that had earned a treat.

A tremendous death bellow drew his attention away.

There, the mighty plague maggoth that had been rolling over the lizards’ advance with a wedge of Rotbringers in train collapsed in an avalanche of folds. A sunbeam split the monster from shoulder to navel and the armour-plated head of some apex reptile butted it aside. Fixed to the lizard creature’s back was the silver and star-metal housing of some inscrutable god-engine, which clicked and reset amidst a glow of energies. The Rotbringers retreated, their forward push stymied. Bule was aware of the enemy pouring forward on all fronts now as his own defences began to crumble. With a snarl, he took his trident overhand like a javelin and made to challenge that armoured reptile’s invulnerability.

‘He seeks a champion.’

The apparition’s robes whispered as it followed him. Its clothing was made not of hides or cloth but of eyes, and the susurrus it made was the sound of hundreds of blinking eyelids, rippling white, green, black, and every other colour that skin came. It moved without truly moving. It spoke without speaking.

‘Seek him, champion.’

Turning, gesturing without anything so prosaic as a pointed finger, the figure directed Bule’s gaze to the realmgate. The skin within it flexed. The stars above it wheeled. Even from afar Bule could see that the view within was no longer of the garden with which it had previously been twinned. Fury returned to him redoubled. Disbelief. It was not mere bad fortune that had brought the seraphon upon him with the aligning stars. They had come for his realmgate.

Somehow they had manipulated the Eightpoints to change its destination. How? The magic involved in enacting such a feat was godlike!

The apparition hissed in sudden distress. Its cloak shimmered with many colours, every eye tightening shut as though simultaneously blinded. And then in a searing moment of universal light, it was gone.

‘Grandfather!’ Bule cried, light like a fire in his eyes. ‘Aid me!’

Shading his eyes with one heavy arm, he peered into the oncoming host.

Floating on a cushion of force above the golden spears of its warriors came the source of the light. It was as if a star had been called down from the heavens and condensed into a brittle caul of bone-brown wrappings and dry flesh. Its presence alone was massive. From its palanquin, the mummified creature regarded the battle with the distant disinclination of an inhuman god. Instinctively, Bule understood that here came a being that had known power long before some daemons had even come to be. He felt himself drawn spiritually towards it, the golden funerary mask that picked out its amphibian features in jewels swelling to fill his mind as the universe subtly reordered around it.

It made no word or gesture, but somewhere in the cosmos something gave.

The heavens opened.

Bule howled impotent fury as the stars glimmered and fell, plucked from the sky, and smashed into his horde.

The first meteorite hit at an angle, obliterating a dozen Chaos warriors utterly and blowing a crater hundreds of feet wide. Then came the rest. The ground shook under the fury. The sky turned white, light and sound reaching an intensity where they sublimated into one, a single shrieking colour in Bule’s inner eye, and even the daemons burned in fire.

Bule struggled gasping onto hands and knees, tripping a warrior lizard running in behind him with a backward kick and riding it face-down into the filth until it stopped thrashing. He stood up, dazed senseless by thunder. Waves of power smashed out from the advancing palanquin. It was almost impossible to stand against it, but in a tremendous feat of will, he stood. He shook his head.

‘Aid me!’

Nothing. Nothing but the awesome presence of this starmaster.

Moving with difficulty, he turned and staggered back the way he had come. Never in his life had Copsys Bule run away, but Grandfather Nurgle did not know defeat.

With every waning, he would wax again.

VIII

First Blightlord Fistula stepped out of the realmgate and onto another world.

The air was syrupy, hot, sweetened by the sweat of fat citrus-scented leaves and by the bell-shaped blue flowers that he and his warriors crushed underfoot. He looked around in amazement, turning ponderously. He felt… weightier, as if the sky itself pushed him down under its palm. And the sun – forgetting for the moment that it should be night – was over large and buttercup yellow. Winged creatures rustled through the leaves above. And from somewhere, screams.

He pulled off his helmet, wiped his running nose, and drew deep.

‘New lands.’

Soon all that was green would be a verdant collage of yellows and browns and leaf-rust reds. It would be the cradle of a new land’s blight, the metastasis from which a new canker would swell. And all of it was his.

‘Over here,’ growled Vitane, crunching through the undergrowth in the vague direction of those screams.

Fistula acceded to the old blightking’s instincts for pain and followed. After a few minutes of unexpectedly heavy going through the dense foliage of this foreign land, the warriors were, to a man, blowing hard, their armour hanging loose on straps. The screams got nearer. More abject. Chesting aside a branch, too weary to bother his arm with the task, Fistula pushed ahead into a sun-drenched clearing.

Varicoloured lichens and mushrooms covered the split bark of the fallen log that dominated the clearing. The cries were coming from the other side of the log.

Shading his eyes from the visceral brightness of the sun, Fistula saw the bray shaman, Gurhg, who was easy enough to pick out with his totemic staff and cloak woven with bones, even within a knot of his followers. There were perhaps two-dozen, stomping about and smashing horns – re-establishing dominance hierarchies and staking claim to new territories. Gurhg stood hunched and swaying in the middle of it, nodding his goat head approvingly as six men and a woman bound to a line of hastily woven racks screamed. The wails of the seventh man were of a different order. A beastman with the face of a horse and a line of horrendously infected iron piercings through its top lip diligently flensed the human with a blunt knife.

Fistula smiled. There were people here. Good. It had been too long.

‘Blightlord.’ Arms spread, snout turned to bare the throat in that odd gesture of his, Kletch Scabclaw padded towards him through the forest. The skaven envoy fussed at the clasp of his cloak, but despite his obvious discomfort he did not seem inclined to take it off. At the treeline, he bobbed low and withdrew with a hiss, averting his eyes from the sun.

‘Where are your warriors?’ asked Fistula.

‘In woods. Less brave rats than I must cower where sky is less bright-strong.’

‘Good.’

Fistula looked across the clearing at the brawling beastmen, and the blightkings now spreading out through the lichens to crash down and rest. It was not much, but it would be a start, and more would flock to him soon enough.

‘I will have them seek-burrow for the way home at once,’ said Kletch, stamping his foot-paw anxiously.

‘Good…’

Fistula put his hands on his hips and turned his face full on to the sun. It was his. It was all his.

Something heavy and wet tramped up through the woods behind him. The wheezing breath on the back of his neck was thick with the stench of stagnant meat.

‘I began my quest with less. I can begin again.’

Fistula spun around.

Bule.

‘I see now,’ said Copsys Bule, unhelmed, smiling blackly. ‘I see what I have been missing.’

‘This is mine,’ Fistula snarled, baring his blades. Some withered instinct for self-preservation kept him from using them, some dim recognition that the gods too had their favourites. He backed into the clearing. Bule moved towards him, Fistula continuing to retreat until the fallen tree prevented him from going any further. He dropped into a fighting crouch. ‘I will not let you turn my conquest into another garden. You have forgotten how to do anything else!’

The Lord of Plagues spread his arms in forgiveness as he passed from the tree line and into the sunlight. His eyes squeezed shut against the sudden glare, but still Fistula did not think to attack. Mosses mottled and died where Bule trod. Insects dropped dead out of the air as he breathed it. Throughout the clearing beastmen, skaven and blightkings alike stopped what they were doing and abased themselves.

He came within sword’s reach, knife’s reach, arm’s reach. Fistula lowered his weapons. He felt lethargic. His skin was hot.

Dropping to one knee in front of him, Copsys Bule leaned in and embraced him.

Fistula made an attempt at fighting it, but he felt so weak. His breath drained up and down like fluid. He shivered with chills even as fever sweat poured down his skin. Jerking in his determination to fight, he struggled as the Lord of Plagues cradled him, lowering him to the ground. Fistula tried to stare hatred at him, but failed even in that. Delirium fogged his eyes and opened his mind to wisdom’s flood.

Sorcerers robed with eyes. An army of champions. Chaos united. A three-eyed king. Round and around.

‘I’ll. Fight you. Forever,’ he swore.

‘Grandfather Nurgle does not want us to submit,’ Bule smiled. ‘He wishes us to rage.’

The last thing Fistula saw before Nurgle’s Rot fully entered his mind was Bule turning towards Kletch Scabclaw, arms open in blessing and friendship.

IX

Copsys Bule broke up the earth with his trident. A tangle of roots knotted up the soil, making it tough, and before long he was breathing hard, a burn spreading through his shoulders. It felt good. The simple labour eased his mind and his muscles. The repetitive activity gave him the chance to think, and to order his thoughts.

He had much to think upon.

‘There,’ he said, giving the ground a vigorous final crumbing, then stabbing his trident to one side. He ran his arm across his lank-haired brow, then turned and nodded.

Vitane slid his toe under Kletch Scabclaw’s body and rolled the corpse into the rill that Bule had prepared for him. Flies crawled over the ratman’s lips. His eyes were the black of rot-pickled eggs and the smell had that same astringent piquancy.

‘So much life.’ However many skaven he buried, the truth of that still filled him with wonder. ‘My garden will thrive here. It is as I said to you, envoy, no other race gives so thoroughly of themselves to Grandfather Nurgle.’

The skaven did not answer and nor did Bule expect him to. He would live again, of course. That was Nurgle’s promise to all. The ratman’s flesh would nurture many millions of short and wondrous lives, his decomposition would bring bounty to the ground in which he lay, but never again would he talk, think, or interfere in the ambitions of a Lord of Plagues.

Pulling up his trident, Bule proceeded to bed the skaven in.

The humans would go here, and here, either side, where their decay would be accelerated by the skaven’s proximity. One of the other rat-men he’d dig a plot for over by the south-facing tree line where its remains could feed the poplars there. They were fast growers, and the rot would spread quickly. Already their leaves were beginning to wilt and brown at the edges. Birds hawked up a thin and sickly chorus of phlegm on the bowers.

He could see it now. He did not know how this was to end, he never had, but he knew how to begin.

‘Archaon.’

Fistula was fetched up against the log, shivering like a man just fished in full armour from an ice pail. He muttered non-sequiturs under his breath, tired, for the moment at least, of raging them at the forest. His eyes rolled, like bones cast by a feverish shaman, and his brush with Nurgle’s Rot had bequeathed him a circlet of rugose blisters that rimmed his bald head like a crown. Bule examined the stigmata. There was a sign there, he knew it, but of what?

‘He grows more lucid,’ observed Vitane.

‘Nurgle favours him greatly.’

‘A lord of flies,’ Fistula murmured, shaking. ‘A king with three eyes.’

A sign. Definitely.

Taking up his trident, Copsys Bule pushed it into the ground and began again.

He had much to think upon.

Eye of the Storm

The sorcerer opened his eyes. All of them.

The Many-Eyed Servant. Disciple of Tzeentch and subject of Archaon, who was the Everchosen of Chaos and the Ender of Worlds. Envisioner of sights unseen.

The Many-Eyed’s gaze reached far, for he saw as gods do. He was Archaon’s eyes. His gaze reached across the Mortal Realms. Searching. Searching for those who would become giants among men, warriors already pledged to ruin, who themselves searched for greater meaning and dark service. And there was no warlord of Chaos darker and greater than the Everchosen, for Archaon was Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse.

The Many-Eyed missed nothing. He saw through the living and dead, the inhuman and inanimate, and through the eyes of daemons, glinting in shadow. Coins fell from the lids of corpses, laid out on funeral pyres. Statues blinked the dust from their stony orbs. The eyes of cutthroats, kings and all wretched existence in between were spyglasses of the soul, through which the great sorcerer observed. Even the mind’s eye was the sorcerer’s to see. The play of pictures in the blackness behind the face. Memories churned up from the past. Secrets kept and fantasies imagined.

The daemon sorcerer looked for warriors worthy of his master’s blade and plate, seeking out the darkest potential amongst a sea of butchers, corrupters, deviants and witchbreeds. True paragons of Chaos, like Archaon himself. Knights of Ruin, ready for the Everchosen’s invitation in symbol, sign or vision, so that they might pass his test and join his baleful ranks – the living, armoured embodiment of Archaon’s wrath, visited upon the Mortal Realms.

The Many-Eyed blinked his way across the worlds of men. He saw as the beasts did, and as the denizens who would act like beasts. In the forgotten reaches of the realm of Ghur, on a storm-lashed wasteland that savage nomads and wind-worshippers knew only as the Blasted Plain, the sorcerer found who he was looking for.

Orphaeo Zuvius. Blessed of the Great Changer. The one they call the Prince of Embers.

The Many-Eyed looked on Orphaeo through the eyes of the Tzeentchians that he led, the twisted wretches of his warband. In the cerulean plate and skirts of his half-robe, Orphaeo Zuvius pressed his slender body against the storm. The skies were bleeding and the winds streamed with blood, while grit plucked at his unholy vestments.

Zuvius steadied himself with the length of a wicked glaive. He walked with the polearm like a sorcerer’s staff. It was a daemon-forged weapon, a shaft of sculpted metal crowned by a blade fashioned in the shape of Tzeentch’s willowy symbol. It was called A’cuitas, and it was a gift from Zuvius’ patron. The Many-Eyed came to know this as he opened the ensorcelled weapon’s eyes – for it had three, like his master, the Three-Eyed King – one that opened in the fat counterweight of the glaive’s pommel and two set in either surface of the blade. The Many-Eyed took this as a good omen. From A’cuitas, the sorcerer commanded a better look of the champion’s gruesome features.

Helmless, his face was a web of melted skin stretched across scorched flesh. The skin strands squirmed continuously across scalded features that might once have been handsome – features now contorted with self-satisfied determination and dark humour. Threadbare tresses of blue hair streamed from his head. Zuvius licked his smeared lips with a silver tongue: another of the Great Changer’s gifts.

The glaive’s blade blinked in the bloodstreaming storm. Now the sorcerer saw through the eyes of the Prince of Embers himself. Zuvius looked up at Mallofax, who sat atop the perch created by the blade’s billhook. The creature was a familiar – a reptilian bird of cerulean plumage. The damned thing spoke to Zuvius in an ear-bleeding squawk that only the champion seemed to understand. The Prince of Embers nodded and looked back at his warband, trailing through the maelstrom of blood and wind-borne grit.

Trudging across the Blasted Plain in his wake were Sir Abriel and the remains of the king’s household guard. Formerly charged with the protection of the royal family – for the Prince of Embers was royal indeed – the knights were now shadows of their former selves. Gone was the lustre of their plate and the mirror-finish of their weaponry. The Great Changer had twisted them as he had done the prince. They were but slaves to darkness, gangling horrors. The knights’ besmirched plate had fused to their bodies and stretched with their unnatural step and reach. Covered in the glowing sigils of ruinous sorcery, they were now the Hexenguard of Orphaeo Zuvius.

Behind the knights, in their shredded cloaks, were the Unseeing – the Tzeentchian sorcerers who completed Zuvius’ warband. Blind wretches, the Great Changer had taken their sight and cursed them with terrible, warped visions of the world about them. Striking out with their powers, the Unseeing turned their enemies into the frightful realisation of their horrific imaginings. With crooked hands on shoulders, the Unseeing formed a line of the blind following the blind – and all following the crunch of their master’s footsteps.

Zuvius closed his eyes against the bloodstorm. Behind them and in the blackness of his lids, the Many-Eyed found light and the roar of flame. The prince’s past was never far from his thoughts – an appalling vision of death and destruction that formed a dark stillness within the madman. It was the eye of a storm, a vision from an age long ago, before Zuvius and his warband were the twisted things they had become. A memory that would not be forgotten, floating to the surface of Zuvius’ mind to sicken and be enjoyed.

Night. The walled city of Stormhaven, ablaze. The tower tops writhed in unnatural blue flame. The people screamed for their lives and then their deaths. The king was dead. Long live the king! The household guard stumbled from the north gate, the only one that was open. The others had been locked shut from the outside. People died like animals behind them, barging and clawing – swallowed by the blue flame. Sir Abriel and his men hacked and coughed, the power of change already finding its way inside them.

With them was Orphaeo – youngest son of the king and the only surviving member of House Zuvius. Surviving – but only just. He too had received the touch of change. Licked by the furious flames, Orphaeo was horribly burned. His face. His head. His hands. He did not cry out in pain. He was calm. The red raw muscles of his face remained uncontorted. He gave the order. Sir Abriel and his soot-smeared knights could not believe what they were hearing.

‘Seal the gate,’ the prince told them, stumbling away from Stormhaven’s mighty walls. There was disbelief, disagreement, dissention even. But Orphaeo Zuvius was now the king and his will was absolute. Burying their doubts, the knights sealed the towering north gate, trapping the screaming innocents inside. They hoped that their liege had a good reason for acting so.

He did.

Ascending the nearby foothills, Zuvius turned to watch his city burn. A city loyal to the God-King, whose walls had stood against storm and ruinous savagery for generations. The prince felt the heat of the fire on his blistering face. He fancied this to be the satisfaction of the Great Changer, bathing him in the warmth of approval. It was a feeling that his face would not allow him to forget.

Mallofax circled the roaring, spitting firestorm of the burning city, the sapphire flames reaching for the heavens. He swooped in to land on Zuvius’ shoulder. Abriel hated the prince’s pet but the dread spectacle of Stormhaven ablaze meant that he barely noticed the scaly, feathered thing. If he had known that it had been Mallofax that was responsible for Stormhaven’s fall, he would have cut the bird out of the air with a swing of his longsword. For it was Mallofax, flying over the walls and arriving one day on the prince’s balcony, that had spoken of such horror to Orphaeo Zuvius, that had taught the prince the secrets of sorcery, the arts of manipulation and the power of change. That, as Tzeentch’s emissary, had empowered Zuvius to turn brother against brother, son against father and the people against their king, all culminating in riot and treachery, atrocity and flame.

Sir Abriel and the household guard gathered about their young king. He was not their king, however. He was no one’s king. He was forever the Prince of Embers – heir to the glowing ashes of a razed kingdom.

Zuvius watched the palace towers fall. He watched his own topple, falling like a mighty felled tree through the flames. Its tower top smashed into the city walls before the prince, knocking brick and stone from the defences. Zuvius stood transfixed. The bright blue fires within the city lit up a symbol rent into the wall.

‘What is that?’ the Prince of Embers demanded. Mallofax twitched his head and turned a glassy eye towards the damaged wall. The bird squawked. Through the soul-curdling sounds Zuvius heard the familiar’s dark words.

‘’Tis the mark of the Everchosen,’ Mallofax told him. ‘An invitation.’

‘To what?’

‘The Exalted Grand Marshal calls,’ the bird squawked. ‘The Architect made you but Archaon will break you. You are to be forged anew, Zuvius, like I taught you. Listen to the screams. Look into the fire. Tell me what you see.’

Zuvius watched as the blue inferno flared up through the damaged wall, reaching for the battlements. In the lick and flicker of azure brilliance, the Prince of Embers saw a far off place take form.

‘I see a storm within a storm,’ he said to Mallofax. He squinted at the blaze.

‘And?’

‘Rising from it is a landform, sculpted by the storm,’ Zuvius said. ‘A mesa, shaped like a great anvil, with a path leading up to it.’

‘The Beaten Path,’ Mallofax told him. ‘Your mettle is to be tested there, for the Everchosen selects only the best warriors of Chaos for his inner circle of death and dread.’

Zuvius nodded to himself. ‘You know this place?’

‘Of course,’ the bird said. ‘The storms you speak of rage across a distant wilderness called the Blasted Plain.’

The Prince of Embers jerked his shoulder, prompting the familiar to once again take flight.

‘Then lead on,’ Zuvius said. ‘It would not be wise to keep the Everchosen of Chaos waiting.’

The Blasted Plain was living up to its name. Orphaeo Zuvius put one foot in front of another, forcing his way on through the streaming haze of crimson. There was nothing there but a maelstrom of everlasting gales and the blood of those claimed by the storm. The prince’s hair and robe skirts twisted and tangled in the wind, while Mallofax’s plumage was a constant ruffle. More miserable still was the twisted thing that had been Sir Abriel, and what remained of the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing who followed.

They had reason to feel misery. They had been wandering through the bloodstorm for weeks. Their cloaks and robes were in tatters and their plate scratched and dented. With only the beady eye of the bird Mallofax to guide them and the nods of his beak to indicate their heading, Zuvius and his warband moved from squall to squall. The storms that tormented the Blasted Plain were filled with whirls and eddies. In places, the Tzeentchians were drenched in fat droplets of gore that rained down from a crimson sky, while in others the gales and tempests turned the blood to a diluted smear. Exposure was not the only danger in the perpetual storm. Whirlwinds snatched up shrieking sorcerers of the Unseeing, lifting them into oblivion, while on the rocky expanse, sudden gusts lifted grit and pebble from the ground, blasting them through the Hexenguard like grapeshot from a cannon.

The Prince of Embers left a trail of corpses in his wake. What had been an army of Chaos knights and witchbreeds was now a warband numbering fewer than forty dark souls – still a potent force, but the trials of time, the perversities of the weather and enemy encounters had taken their toll.

He did not regret his decision to brave the Blasted Plain in search of the Beaten Path. He had been chosen. Those knights and sorcerers who had fallen had been unworthy of the Everchosen, and unworthy of him. Zuvius was to be tested. What kind of prospect would he be if he couldn’t even reach the site that had been chosen for his trial? Zuvius pushed on through the bloodstorm. He could not allow it to defeat him.

Still, the depleted ranks of Zuvius’ grand warband did not bode well for the challenges he knew to be ahead. He would have to supplement his numbers with lost wretches looking for direction and dark purpose. Fools were never in shortage. The Prince of Embers would give them purpose and they would give their lives in service of his destiny.

The Chaos champion heard Sir Abriel call something unintelligible through the storm. It was all the twisted knight was capable of now, beyond the devastating reach of his bladework. Peering at him through the bloody curtain of rain, Zuvius saw that Sir Abriel was pointing off to their right with the freakishly long fingers of his warped gauntlet. Following the direction the finger indicated, Zuvius squinted at the outline of tents in the distance – some kind of encampment in the wilderness.

‘Food. Water. Shelter?’ Zuvius said, shaking Mallofax on the glaive.

‘Death?’ the bird returned. Zuvius looked around. After weeks out on the Blasted Plain he honestly thought his warband wouldn’t care.

‘We’re more than a match for a few nomads,’ the Prince of Embers hissed, almost insulted at the insinuation of their vulnerability. Recent encounters and the toll of the storm had depleted his numbers but the Hexenguard and the Unseeing were more than capable of bringing horror and death to a tribe of wind-worshipping savages. Zuvius lurched through the storm in the direction of the camp.

‘Onwards,’ he called. With warped appreciation, the knights and sorcerers of the warband followed their master.

Zuvius pulled back the thick flaps of stitched flesh. Inside, the huge tent was a structure of giant bones. It was like stepping inside a giant ribcage. Torches flickered smokily. Zuvius immediately got the impression of many bodies – no doubt the tribesmen and savages he had been warned about. As Mallofax had predicted, the place stank of old blood and death.

The Prince of Embers stepped forward with confidence, allowing the Hexenguard and his sorcerers in. Regardless of the horrors they could inflict, the Unseeing did not make for an intimidating sight. The twisted knights, however, in their ghastly plate and glowing sigils, would be more than enough to startle the tribesmen. Then they would come to know that warriors of the Ruinous Powers were among them and that the sight of these doom-laden forms would be their last.

As Zuvius blinked blood from his eyes and adjusted to the gloom, he came to realise that he was not standing among scrawny nomads. Instead of wind-worshippers, the tent was filled wall to wall with muscle. Red flesh and scar-markings confirmed Zuvius’ fears. They were not the first warband to take shelter in the tribesmen’s tents. Barbaric servants of the Blood God had beaten them to it. Looking down, the Prince of Embers saw that he was standing in the splattered remains of its previous occupants.

Casting a gaze across the tent, Zuvius made a quiet estimate of his rivals’ strength. It was a veritable warband, all armed to the teeth, with perhaps more in the other tents. Zuvius had nothing approaching their number. A ripple of brute surprise passed through the barbarians, followed instantly by snarls and the wrinkle of lips. Muscles twitched to tautness and weapons scraped as they were snatched from the tent floor. Zuvius saw bloodreavers of the Goresworn, obvious from their decorative scarring. Other savages he recognised from their brazen cuisses and greaves, rattling beneath the broad red musculature of their chests. They were the wrathmongers of Khorne, blessed with the unyielding fury of their Ruinous god.

A stitch-faced chieftain and a wrathmonger closed on the Tzeentchians. The chieftain drew wicked blades from a selection of leather sheathes, holding them like talons in his gore-stained hands. The master of the wrathmongers, wearing the fanged skull of some daemon creature as a helmet, dragged the blood-rusted chain of a flail behind him, ready to yank it forward and hurl the hammer head attached to the length.

‘Fight or flee?’ Mallofax shrieked, flapping his wings and hovering above Zuvius and his warband. When the champion of Tzeentch didn’t answer, the familiar repeated, ‘Fight or flee?’

‘Neither,’ the Prince of Embers said. The Tzeentchian didn’t move. He made the effort not to straighten and his glaive remained upright in his hand like a walking staff. He didn’t want to provoke the savage disciples of Khorne any more than he already had by simply being there. At the same time, he wanted to present the calm front of a champion too powerful to be threatened by warriors of the Blood God, even in such number.

‘Mine,’ the chieftain hissed.

‘The scraps, perhaps,’ the wrathmonger rumbled.

Sorcerous sigils burned bright on the plate of the Hexenguard as the ghastly knights formed up in front of their prince with their notched longswords and battered shields.

‘Stand down,’ Zuvius said, his tone perverse and playful. Sir Abriel was unsure. He issued some kind of question from the hole in his face that he used as a mouth. The chieftain and the wrathmonger advanced, their men drawn up behind them.

Zuvius’ eyes moved beyond the furious warband. Rising from a throne of stained skulls – the nomads’, the prince presumed – was a champion larger still. A deathbringer, an exalted champion of the Blood God. Though he had been a man once, Khorne had blessed his chosen with hulking brawn. The warband leader was a veritable wall of muscle. The teeth of great beasts jangled on sinew necklaces while a pair of bull’s horns erupted from his malformed skull. His hands were encased in bone weapons – pronged gougers that extended like a pair of claws. On his back, he carried a battle-axe, the blade of which was as broad as the champion himself.

‘Hold,’ the monstrous champion said. His voice was deep, like some bottomless trench reaching down into the bowels of the realm. His dogs of war stopped in their tracks, as if they had been yanked back on a running chain. The Goresworn came to a halt at the champion’s command. They parted to let the deathbringer through.

Zuvius could see the champion’s mind at work – which was something to be said of such savages. A hardening of the eyes. A tautness in the lips. Zuvius reasoned that the deathbringer had probably fought just about everything that lived and breathed on these plains. He had faced the sorcerous servants of the Great Changer before. Unlike his lieutenants, he was cautious. Wisely so, Zuvius agreed.

‘What are you doing here on the Blasted Plain?’ the warrior called across the tent. ‘Speak fast and true or the bloodreavers here will smash your bones for the marrow inside. The wrathmongers will simply kill you out of spite. At my order, your blood will join that of the storm, in honour of mighty Khorne.’

Zuvius felt the eyes of all on him. The barbarians were aching for the violence to come.

‘That would be ill advised,’ the prince told him, playing for time. Zuvius’ mind whirled. The Khornate savages within the tent would swamp them. Others, responding instinctively to the sounds of battle, would come up behind the Tzeentchian warband. It would be a slaughter, standing on the blood and bones of a previous one. Zuvius tasted the air with his silver tongue. Swords and sorcery couldn’t take him where he needed to go. He would have to rely on one of his other god-given talents. ‘For then you would not hear what I have to say.’

‘And why would the great Skargan Fell-of-Heart need to hear the lies of filth witchbreed like you?’ the Goresworn chieftain hissed, looking back at his master.

‘Because even if only half of what I tell him comes to pass,’ Zuvius said, ‘then his ascension will be assured.’

‘What ascension?’ Skargan rumbled.

‘The Everchosen calls for you, mighty one,’ the Prince of Embers lied.

‘Almighty Archaon?’

‘Aye, my lord,’ Zuvius said. ‘The Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse asks only for the greatest warriors of the age, and he has called for you.’

‘I’ll cut that lying tongue out of your mouth, Tzeentchian,’ the chieftain promised.

‘Kraal, son of Zhufgor, let the sorcerer speak,’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart said. The bloodreavers seethed about their chieftain while the wrathmongers foamed at their snaggle-toothed mouths. ‘How came you by this knowledge?’

‘A vision, my lord,’ Zuvius said.

‘Visions and enchantments,’ Kraal, son of Zhufgor, spat in disgust.

The deathbringer’s mouth curled into a snarl. He nodded his great horned head. A member of the Goresworn stepped up behind his chieftain, slipping his reaver blade beneath Kraal’s chin. In a moment it was over. Zuvius felt the speckle of warm blood across the sensitive flesh of his face. The chieftain dropped and his killer stepped forward.

‘Voark, son of Kraal,’ the deathbringer said, ‘the Goresworn is yours.’

Voark nodded his murderous appreciation.

‘Sorcerer: speak.’

‘I saw a vision in the flames of a burning city, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. ‘Skargan Fell-of-Heart, wearing the sigil of the Everchosen. The Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse is gathering his troops, deathbringer. Khorne knows you belong among them.’

Skargan narrowed the bloody orbs of his eyes at Zuvius.

‘Your sorceries will not work on me,’ he told the prince, tapping the talon-tip of a gouger against his bronze collar. ‘The Blood God will not allow it.’

Zuvius nodded. He had seen such artefacts on Khornate champions before – the Blood God was eager to protect his butchers from the manipulations of magic. But the Tzeentchian did not need such powers.

‘Come between the Ender of Worlds and his chosen?’ Zuvius said. ‘Not me, deathbringer. Not for all the dark glory in the realms. I know my place – in this, as in all things. I am merely the messenger.’

Skargan Fell-of-Heart looked to Voark, son of Kraal.

‘Tell me more of your vision, sorcerer,’ the deathbringer commanded.

‘You must walk the Beaten Path, exalted one,’ Zuvius said, ‘to a place of testing – so that the Everchosen may judge if he chose wisely.’

‘A battle?’ Skargan said with a gory glint in his eye.

‘I suspect, my lord.’

‘You know this path?’

‘I do,’ the Prince of Embers said. ‘And I have seen you walk it to glory.’

‘What do you get out of this, sorcerous mongrel?’ the deathbringer spat. Zuvius thought on the question.

‘Nothing, mighty champion,’ the prince told him. ‘But I cannot deny destiny or the will of the Everchosen.’

Skargan scowled. Zuvius could see that the monstrous warrior didn’t believe him. The prince watched as a flicker of doubt crossed the warlord’s features. To disbelieve a servant of Tzeentch was one thing – common sense even – but to defy the will of the Everchosen of Chaos was something else entirely.

‘Then you shall guide me along this path,’ Skargan said. He turned to address the warriors in the tent. ‘And if I seem displeased with this sorcerer and his wretches or you see them doing something that you know would displease me, then in Khorne’s name – kill them.’

‘As fair as you are wise, my lord,’ Zuvius told Skargan Fell-of-Heart.

Orphaeo Zuvius forged on through the storm of blood. His warband trudged laboriously through a mire of rising gore, while Mallofax flapped his wings and shivered his feathers, shaking crimson droplets from his plumage. The Prince of Embers was now surrounded by Khornate killers intent on his blood. Looking back along the ranks of the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing, Zuvius could see the horde of Skargan Fell-of-Heart following them through the maelstrom. Two wrathmongers strode either side of him like a brute escort and Voark, son of Kraal, walked at the head of the bloodreavers, who swarmed about their beloved deathbringer, shielding Skargan as best they could from the storm with their number.

When Zuvius had seen the true size of the deathbringer’s horde he knew that he had made the right decision in not attacking the Fell-of-Heart and his butchers. Skargan’s warband numbered hundreds of battle-hardened warriors. To destroy them would have cost the prince dearly, perhaps even his life. Skargan and his horde had come to the Blasted Plain to honour their god, baptised in a bloodstorm they thought to be a manifestation of Khorne. They did not know that the storm existed only to scour the plain and claim the unwary. Mallofax had told his prince that the Blasted Plain was a cursed place. Nomads, wind-worshippers and travellers found eventual death in the perpetual tempest, their blood becoming one with the rains.

And the rain came down harder than ever, strumming fat droplets against Zuvius’ plate. As they moved across the Blasted Plain, the Chaos champions left corpses in their wake. Moving from maelstrom to maelstrom and subject to the perversities of the storm, both Skargan and his sorcerer guide had lost members of their warbands. Twisters suddenly made landfall, stirring up the shallows and snatching bloodreavers up into the sky. One of the hulking wrathmongers was claimed by a sinkhole in the flooding mire. The temperature would change rapidly: in one moment red icicles hung from the plate of the Hexenguard, then an hour later Zuvius would lose a sorcerer to a balmy haze of swirling red steam.

‘What is it?’ Zuvius asked as Mallofax began to squawk and flap his wings furiously.

‘This storm has teeth,’ the bird said cryptically. Zuvius gave the familiar a quizzical look before the patter of bone against his plate told him all he needed to know. As the rising gale whistled through his skirts and the ragged ribbons of the Hexenguard’s cloaks, it carried with it teeth, fangs and splinters of bone. Zuvius felt a shard cut across his cheek. Another tore through his skirts and plucked at the flesh of his leg. As the tempest intensified about them, so did the hail. It shredded through one of the wrathmongers and turned a bloodreaver into a bloody smear.

‘The hollow!’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart bawled through the storm. The horde had just passed a flooded hollow and the deathbringer directed his savages down into it.

‘Do we follow them?’ Mallofax squawked.

Zuvius looked about as the Hexenguard closed in with their shields, giving their sorcerous lord shelter. It was their best chance to escape Skargan’s warriors. Conversely, the storm might still eat them alive and the Khornate warband was not without its uses.

‘Do we have a choice?’ Zuvius said, marching towards the hollow, teeth and bone rattling against the metal of the knights’ shields.

Slipping and sliding down into shallows, Zuvius looked up at the wind streaming blood and bone above. The hollow offered shelter but was flooded with a crimson murk that sloshed around their boots. Zuvius wondered how long the squall of razored teeth and bone shards would last.

‘How much further?’ Skargan demanded, pulling fangs from his red flesh. Zuvius didn’t know.

‘Not far,’ the prince said.

‘What does that even mean?’ Voark, son of Kraal spat. He could not hold back his ire. Looking around for his own son, Skraal, the bloodreaver continued, content that there was not a blade heading for his back. ‘This sorcerer-filth is trying to get us killed out here. Leading us from trap to trap.’ One of the wrathmongers grunted agreement from nearby. Zuvius realised that he had to stop this before Voark ignited the Blood God’s hatred of sorcerers in Skargan and his horde.

‘Apologies, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. The deathbringer’s monstrous features creased with disgust. He despised any man who would beg for his life rather than fight for it. Voark allowed cruel glee to creep across his lips.

‘I can hold my tongue no longer,’ Zuvius spoke quickly. ‘My vision revealed knowledge that I was too fearful to grant you.’

‘What knowledge?’ the Fell-of-Heart snapped. He eyes narrowed in fury. ‘You would deny me all that you know?’

‘Having met your chieftains, I could not believe it,’ Zuvius said. ‘No champion commands warriors as fervent and loyal.’

‘Believe what?’ the deathbringer fumed.

‘That the bloodreavers and the wrathmongers would betray one another,’ the prince told him, with as much grave sincerity as the Tzeentchian could muster through his sly lips. ‘And through each other – you.’

Skargan looked incredulously at Zuvius, at the wrathmongers and at Voark, as if he did not know which of them to kill first. Voark made the decision for him.

‘Turncoat wretch! I knew you were planning something,’ he shrieked, drawing his reaver blade and pointing it at the nearest wrathmonger. At Voark’s accusation, the bloodreavers started to advance, only to be caught in the terrible arc of the wrathmonger’s hammer-flail. Splatting through bloodreavers, the warrior roared in confusion, heaving his devastating weapons about him on their wrist-clasped chains. Others erupted around him, cutting down swathes of warriors with ugly swings of their flails. Agile bloodreavers leapt and ducked out of the weapons’ devastating paths, those too slow becoming a splatter of flesh chunks and detached limbs. Running back at the crimson hulks, the bloodreavers swarmed the wrathmongers, climbing up onto their backs and globed shoulders, knifing and stabbing with their short, cruel blades.

For a brief time there was mayhem. Wrathmongers stamped fountains of crimson rainwater about them as they charged throngs of rabid bloodreavers. The warriors danced out of their path and slashed at them with their razor-sharp blades. Skargan Fell-of-Heart cut through the havoc. Grabbing his colossal battle-axe from his back, the deathbringer strode through the shallows and into the murderous clash. Smashing one of the wrathmongers down with the flat of the monstrous blade, Skargan shattered his skull helm and knocked him unconscious.

Turning savagely, he stamped out with his boot, landing a kick on the chest of Voark, son of Kraal. The warrior flew through the air with a crunch before splashing into the shallows.

‘This is good?’ Mallofax squawked from Zuvius’ glaive.

‘I’m not sure,’ the Prince of Embers said. The ruthless violence and bloodshed about him was distracting. Being butchered by Skargan’s savages was not part of Zuvius’ plan, but having them butcher each other was not desirable either. He had acted to distract them from killing him, but he needed to harness their strength for the trials ahead. He had a feeling that he could not achieve his fell goals without their strength. Standing in the flooded hollow, Zuvius’ sorcerous instincts twitched.

‘Wait a minute,’ he told the feathered familiar.

Zuvius saw a cloud forming through the bloody shallows of the hollow. The waters began to thicken to a muddy paste about the boots of the Chaos warriors, slurping and bubbling. Arms of pink brawn and sinew broke the surface of the unnatural mire, clutching with daemonic claws.

Zuvius watched as infernal horrors spawned from the water about them – a plague of Tzeentchian monstrosities drawn to the deliciousness of treachery and dissention in the ranks of the horde.

The hollow filled with the roars and screams of the Blood God’s servants. Grabbed about the boots and ankles by the frightful appendages, they were dragged down into the sludge. Jaws formed in the fleshy surface of the shallows, brimming with row after row of jagged fangs, and Goresworn killers were swallowed whole. A wrathmonger had his leg chewed off, sending him into a sludge-punching fury, but his fist became entangled in the sinewy stickiness of daemon flesh.

Faced with a common enemy, the butchers forgot their former enmity and visited their rage upon the spawning pool in which they stood. Zuvius smiled to himself. The Great Changer, in all his perversity, had sent a blessing. The Khornate horde was once more unified in the face of a common enemy. They had swiftly forgotten their desire to end the prince. The daemon attack, meanwhile, was thinning out the dissenting forces. The appearance of the horrors not only gave Zuvius a chance to fight at the Khornate savages’ side, but it would make them easier to manipulate than ever.

The sludge seemed like a single monster but from it individual creatures of nightmare rose, stretching themselves free. Wrathmongers splattered the daemons within the monstrous arcs of their hammer-flails, while the bloodreavers struck grasping limbs from the creatures with their blades only to find two more erupt from gushing, pink stumps in their place.

The horrors seemed never-ending, scrambling free of their spawning pool like a plague of jubilant insanity. Their grotesque bodies were all fang-filled maw and beady eyes that frantically set upon new victims to maul. Clawed, muscular legs helped them to bound and latch onto Skargan’s berserkers, while an eruption of supernaturally strong arms tore armour, limbs, helms and heads from the warrior-victims.

‘This cannot be,’ Mallofax shrieked above the carnage. ‘These are the lesser playthings of our master.’

‘The daemon horrors of Tzeentch,’ Orphaeo Zuvius said, spinning the shaft of his glaive about him in willowy gauntlets. The prince’s warband were not immune to the creatures’ attentions. Infernal monstrosities dragged members of the Hexenguard down into the fleshy embrace of the pool to crack their plate in writhing knots of daemonic muscle.

The sorcerers of the Unseeing, meanwhile, clutched to one another in their blindness. Judiciously deployed, they were among the most powerful wretches at the prince’s disposal. Their sorcerous powers could transform even the most deadly opponents into statuesque spawn of ruptured flesh and twisted bone, visiting the form of their dread visions upon the enemies about them. Against these formless monstrosities, their powers were all but useless. The daemonic horrors already took the form of the sorcerers’ nightmarish imaginings.

‘The Great Changer must be displeased,’ Mallofax flapped. ‘The Exalted Grand Marshal’s invitation has angered him.’

‘No,’ Zuvius said, gritting his perfect teeth as he lopped off the clawed fingers of a reaching daemon with a graceful swing of A’cuitas. ‘It is an honour. The joint damnation of this hollow strengthens our association with the Blood God’s barbarians. Battle is like ale shared across a table to these brutes.’

As a member of the Hexenguard was pulled apart by two multi-limbed horrors, Sir Abriel splashed up through the slime to smash aside another monstrosity with his shield. Holding his glaive by the base of the shaft, Zuvius wheeled around, allowing the heavy blade of the weapon to lop limbs from the attacking creatures.

‘Why do the Great Changer’s daemons try to destroy us, then?’ the bird squawked, unconvinced.

Zuvius turned A’cuitas around in his gauntlets, aiming the pommel of the glaive at the horrors emerging from the pool.

‘For perversity’s sake,’ the prince said, with a grin of insanity. ‘Why else?’

His daemon-forged weapon’s searing blue eye opened. Lightning cracked from the glaive, causing the air to burn and the heart to jump. As the jagged bolt struck the nearest daemon, the thing seemed to rupture, exploding in a shower of pink slop. Aiming the sorcerous weapon across a line of advancing creatures, Zuvius had the lightning jump from monster to monster, turning one after another into flinch-inducing splatters of flesh.

Stomping through the curtain of gore, Skargan Fell-of-Heart was a destructive machine. His great axe was everywhere, chopping daemons asunder, lopping off limbs and cleaving the gibbering creatures in half. The clawing, strangling, savaging things climbed across his muscular frame only to be gouged free by the bone blades the deathbringer wore on each meaty fist. Flinging them off and down at the floor, Skargan sent them shrieking back to the fleshpool before stamping down on them with his boots.

‘You!’ the deathbringer roared at Zuvius. ‘This is your doing.’

The Prince of Embers was tiring of the belligerent champion and his savage lieutenants. Thrusting A’cuitas forward, Zuvius impaled a creature before tearing the weapon back and turning it around in his hands. Blasting lightning into the stricken daemon, Zuvius coated Skargan with filth.

‘Does this look like my doing?’ the prince shot back, before passing the glaive behind his back and thrusting it to the side. The Tzeentchian horror coming at him opened its gaping mouth and attempted to swallow the weapon. The glaive blade was momentarily lost in the darkness before bursting forth out of the daemon’s back. Zuvius turned to the approaching champion of Khorne. ‘Does this look like my god favouring me?’

Skargan Fell-of-Heart considered the prince’s words, with all of the calm thought of which he was capable. Furious at his brute conclusion, the deathbringer carved out a circle of destruction about him. Chopping. Hacking. Obliterating. His battle-axe dribbled ichor. The colour in the hollow was changing, however. The pink that had clouded the shallows and solidified to a spawning fleshpool was now dashed with azure. Every time a pink horror was mulched into formlessness, blue claws would prize the ruined daemonflesh apart. As the dying monstrosity rippled and quivered, a blue horror would climb out of its corpse, followed by another. Apart from its colour, each was identical in form to the foul being from which it proceeded.

Zuvius pursed his smeared lips. He was once more caught between the fury of the deathbringer and perverse circumstance. Looking up, he saw that the wind had dropped. The storm of fang and tooth was passing. The fat droplets of the bloodstorm still hammered down about them, however.

‘It is an affliction of the land, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. ‘A hellish hole through which daemons bleed into the world. A flesh without end, my lord, living, dying and dividing. We must withdraw.’

‘Never!’ Skargan roared, tearing his gouging talons through a creature before batting three blue clawing beasts away with the flat of his axe blade.

‘Get the sorcerers,’ Zuvius commanded, sending Mallofax off in the direction of the Unseeing. The Prince of Embers would not die in some squalid hollow with a mindless berserker. As the sound of the bird’s squawking led the blind wretches back up out of the hollow, Zuvius pointed a finger at Sir Abriel and the slope behind. Batting mad creatures aside with their knightly shields and cutting down horrors with their notched longswords, the Hexenguard covered their master’s retreat.

Stepping back up the incline and towards the howl of the bloodstorm, Zuvius crackled lightning down on the creatures rushing Skargan. Dripping with pink and blue daemonblood that sizzled with sorcerous energy, and with monsters exploding about him, the deathbringer had a moment to take stock. His warband was dying, overrun by the daemon plague, despite the bloodreavers’ savagery and the devastation of the wrathmongers. A single decision separated Skargan Fell-of-Heart from annihilation.

Zuvius watched as the deathbringer exercised judgement beyond his powers. Skargan believed that the Everchosen of Chaos had demanded his dark service. Zuvius had put that belief in the champion’s mind. Pushing several wrathmongers back up the slope and snatching Voark, son of Krall, from a small massacre of bloodreavers, Skargan bellowed his order across the hollow.

‘There is no glory to be had here,’ Khorne’s champion roared, pointing his battle-axe back up at the storm. ‘Onwards! To the glory of the Blood God and the Exalted Marshal!’

With Skargan’s command cutting through the red haze of berserker rage, the horde began its staggered withdrawal from the hollow. Stumbling up the incline and away from the Tzeentchian swarm, the host re-entered the bloodstorm.

They were drowning. Drowning in blood.

The heavens broiled with fury and a crimson rain hammered down, flooding not just the hollows, cuttings and craters of the Blasted Plain but the storm-wracked wilderness itself. Zuvius and his Tzeentchian knights waded through the wounded waters. The Unseeing half-stumbled, half-swam. Mallofax flew, the bird buffeted this way and that in the gales that swept across the rising waters of the shallow sea.

Following the Prince of Embers through the deluge were the warband of Skargan Fell-of-Heart. Wading in disbelief through the waters, the Khornate warriors had never quite got over their rout at the hollow. Their champion’s order to retreat from a fight and the soul-crushing demands of their trek through the storm and flood seemed to be breaking them. The cursed land and the daemons that haunted it notwithstanding, Zuvius had manipulated them with his lies. He had convinced Skargan to take this road to self-destruction and he was not finished with the deathbringer yet.

‘Mallofax?’ Zuvius called up through the storm. In the past hour, the prince had felt the blood slopping and splashing lower and lower against his plate. ‘Are the waters receding?’

‘We are on the Beaten Path,’ the bird shrieked, swooping down onto the blade of A’cuitas. ‘Look!’

Zuvius peered through the blood-streaming sky. A dark silhouette was rising above them, a feature so large and tall that even the unnatural storm’s best efforts could not hide it. Zuvius recognised the mesa from his fiery vision, eroded by the erratic elements into the rocky shape of a colossal anvil.

Zuvius nodded absently at the bird. They were climbing, ascending the path that would take them up to the strange land. This path would test him, even more than it had already. Like a piece of bronze, Zuvius would be remoulded. The bronze had no comprehension of the blade it could become and the power over life and death it would wield. The Everchosen had selected his raw materials in Zuvius. The Tzeentchian hoped to now be hammered to hold an edge, to become a weapon worthy of Archaon’s choosing. It was on the Beaten Path and the mesa that he would be tested and reforged. Zuvius pledged in the dark recesses of his heart to become that which would please the Everchosen of Chaos: a vision of death and destruction to earn the demigod’s gaze.

‘Deathbringer,’ Zuvius called, prompting Skargan Fell-of-Heart to push roughly past several of his horde and slosh onwards through the shallows. ‘The place I saw in my vision,’ the Tzeentchian told him honestly, pointing to the silhouette of the anvil-shaped land formation. ‘There challenges will be issued and destinies realised.’

The champion of Khorne didn’t seem to hear Zuvius. Instead he barked a barely intelligible order to his warband, urging them on through the strength-sapping flood.

‘Out of my way, sorcerer,’ Skargan said, striding through blood and pushing past Zuvius, ‘for gods help any wretch that stands in it.’

Standing aside, Zuvius issued an order to Sir Abriel and the Hexenguard, bringing them to a halt. The stumbling progress of the Unseeing was also checked by squawks from a hovering Mallofax. Zuvius let the spent savages of the Goresworn through, the wrathmongers stomping miserably up the Beaten Path after their master.

Several hours were spent ascending the weathered mesa. The storm still raged about them, with dark droplets hammering into the rocky surface of the colossal formation.

Skargan stomped off across the mesa with his warband following in a loose, exhausted formation.

‘I am here!’ he roared, announcing his arrival with bombast only the blessed of Khorne could manage. ‘Here to be judged. Judged worthy of your favour.’

The deathbringer’s words were lost to the storm. The skies howled above but no answer came. The champion’s face creased with anger. His horde gathered about him in expectation, driving the Fell-of-Heart’s frustration further. They had travelled so far and given so much. He would not be humiliated in front of them. He would slaughter them all to a man before suffering doubt to cross their faces.

‘Test me, Lord Archaon!’ Skargan roared. ‘End me if you can, Ender of Worlds.’

The blasphemy passed unheeded. Blood rained down. Skargan lowered his battle-axe.

‘The Blood God’s chosen is displeased,’ Mallofax squawked. As Zuvius watched rage take the Fell-of-Heart, he knew what was coming.

‘Ready yourselves,’ Zuvius warned his Hexenguard and sorcerers.

‘The sorcerer betrays the Exalted of Khorne,’ Voark hissed through the ranks of the Goresworn. ‘He lies for his amusement and that of his twisted god.’

Two of the wrathmongers flanked their furious master. Skargan himself steamed, his burning hatred for Zuvius and his sorcerous kind turning the droplets of bloody drizzle on his red skin to a searing haze.

‘Unworthy…’ the Deathbringer roared.

Sir Abriel’s sword cleared its scabbard with a whoosh, followed by the blades of the rest of the Hexenguard. The Unseeing began to moan. Blind though they were, they had some inkling of the butchery to come. They would recraft the enemies of their prince, sculpting, breaking and contorting his foes to uselessness and agonising death.

As Orphaeo Zuvius went to answer the champion of Khorne, it suddenly stopped raining. It had rained forever on the Blasted Plain – yet here on the Beaten Path and the rocky mesa, blood suddenly ceased to fall. The storm died and the clouds that boiled above them began to clear. Such was the unexpected change in the weather that Zuvius, Skargan and their followers forgot one another and looked up into the sky.

‘What is happening?’ the Fell-of-Heart asked.

‘This is vision become reality,’ Zuvius told him. ‘We are about to be judged. Now we shall see who is truly unworthy.’

After the storm, distant thunder. The darkness was bleached clean by a blinding light. A swirling vortex of lightning streams fell from the sky and hammered into the mesa between the deathbringer’s warband and Zuvius’ Tzeentchians. The rock cracked with the force, sending spidery fractures through the surface of the landform. Everyone stumbled back, shielding their eyes.

Zuvius forced himself to look, despite the eye-scalding brightness of the intervention. The air burned. Snapping arcs reached out from where the lightning had earthed. The spreading storm created shapes from the crackle and static of bifurcating bolts, almost as though the power seethed across the surface of invisible figures that were already there. The crackle grew to a blinding intensity until finally, in a crescendo of light, heat and sound, armoured figures were suddenly among the Chaos warriors, having burned into reality.

‘Stormcast Eternals,’ Mallofax squawked in alarm. ‘The God-King’s vengeance made metal and flesh.’

Zuvius turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets, causing Mallofax to take flight. The interlopers were no champions of Chaos, sent by the Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse to test them. These were not the legendary warriors of Archaon’s inner circles, taken from the very ranks the Prince of Embers wished to join. These were warriors crafted beyond the Mortal Realms – the Stormcast Eternals of the God-King. Zuvius had never seen such champions of light. They had been a fantasy, a myth, a rumour – but now they were a searing reality. As they stood before him, it seemed impossible that they were anything else.

Clad in celestial silver plate, the Stormcasts were armoured perfection. Their helmets were moulded and close-fitting, presenting a cold mask of terrible impassivity framed in the spiked halo of their calling. Zuvius could almost hear the laughter of the Dark Gods. Tzeentch, revelling in his perversity. In Lord Archaon’s trial, the Great Changer had presented Zuvius with both opportunity and certain death. The Everchosen had led him to his doom, into a trap with a sworn enemy.

A warrior – especially a sorcerous one – had to rely on more than a sword and the muscles used to swing it. Zuvius hadn’t known what he would face at the end of the Beaten Path. He had tricked Skargan Fell-of-Heart into standing between him and whatever it might be. Perhaps the deathbringer might end them all and catch Archaon’s eye after all. The Prince of Embers had to take that risk. Sigmar’s living weapons, heralded by the thunder and riding the storm, had given him no choice.

‘Exalted one,’ Zuvius called over the crackle of lightning. Skargan looked through the lightstorm at the Tzeentchian. ‘It’s time. As I promised you: an enemy worthy of your blade. Here, on the great anvil of the world, Archaon means to craft a warrior worthy of his banner. In the fire of battle, you will be forged anew. I have seen it, Skargan. Here, in the eye of the storm, I have seen it.’

The Blood God’s champion levelled his axe at the column of lightning that spawned the champions from its blinding brilliance.

‘Only the faithful,’ one of the Stormcast Eternals called, his words burning on the air with dread purity.

‘Bring me heads,’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart growled to his savages.

The first of the celestial warriors marched forward, undaunted. Skargan and his Khorne-worshipping savages were the kind of mindless barbarians that brought death and destruction to the realms. Zuvius felt a perverse glee in the clash of such warriors.

Advancing with bows of gleaming metal that crackled with a spiritual energy, the Stormcasts drew back arrows almost as long as a man was tall. As they held them there, the metal missiles glowed as though heated by some internal source of energy. With the arrows shafts of crackling brilliance, the Stormcasts let their missiles loose. As they left the bow, the arrows turned into bolts of lightning that shot forth in a streaming barrage too fast for the eye to follow. The loosed lightning blasted straight through members of the Goresworn, turning the impact sites on their chests into a molten vortex of flesh and bone before blazing on through a second and third victim.

The wrathmongers battered aside Voark’s bloodreavers, swinging their hammer-flails about their hulking bodies. Zuvius saw the flails smash into the metal arrows with a resounding clang, but fail to turn the missiles aside. A celestial warrior came forth with an even larger bow clutched in his silver gauntlets, aiming it up at the crystal clear sky. Raising it to the heavens, he blasted a lightning storm up at the stars that then fell towards one of the wheeling wrathmongers. The barbarian had incredible reflexes for a warrior of his size and somehow dodged the descending blast of energy. Erupting into a maelstrom of furious arcs upon impact, the snaps and cracks of energy seized upon another wrathmonger and several nearby bloodreavers like a tentacled beast. At first stricken by the power coursing through their bones, the warriors began to smoulder and blacken, burning from the inside out. Crashing to their knees as the lightning storm died away, the charred remains hit the stone floor and shattered in a cloud of ash and soot.

Zuvius heard the clatter of shields as Sir Abriel and his monstrous Hexenguard formed up before their prince. The Stormcast Eternals would not be deterred, however. Stomping forward in their immaculate plate, they aimed the lightning of their bows straight at the ruinous knights. As all became blazing white before them and the metal crackled and snapped, the Hexenguard instinctively lowered their shields. Running forward, the knights set upon the warriors of Sigmar, smashing at burnished plate with their notched blades. Pushing back Sir Abriel with a stamp of his silver boot, a Stormcast stove in the ghoulish helm of another knight with the reinforced nock of his bow. Loading it once more, the warrior turned to blast a stream of lightning straight into a charging wrathmonger’s head. The decapitated barbarian stumbled on several steps more before thudding to the ground.

The Prince of Embers could stand by no longer. It was in the nature of a Tzeentchian to manipulate, lie and allow others to assume the burden of circumstance in their stead. In presenting his sworn enemies, the Everchosen had assigned him a trial that could destroy them all. The Stormcasts were not some monstrous aberration of Chaos, a horde without number or champion blessed by the ruinous pantheon. They were an implacable foe for whom the destruction of all that Zuvius craved was absolute. The prince knew that he would have to throw everything he had at them.

Helping Sir Abriel back up to his feet, Zuvius felt his gauntlet creak about the A’cuitus. Dark desire drove him into a run and he hurled the glaive at the nearest Stormcast. A’cuitas closed its eyes as the blade of the daemon-forged weapon cleaved through the warrior’s breastplate. The glaive sat there, embedded between the sculpted pectorals of the plate as something horrible happened within. With a blast of spiritual energy that knocked Zuvius back, the eye slits of the Stormcast’s mask lit up. Something proud and lost died within the suit of armour. Like a bolt of lightning launching up from the realm and into the sky, all that the Stormcast warrior was disappeared in the momentary afterglow of the blinding arc of raw energy.

The death seemed to feed the rage of Skargan’s warband, with the wrathmongers indulging their berserker fury and the bloodreavers throwing themselves at the advancing wall of celestial plate. Taking dark inspiration from Zuvius’ kill, the slayers doubled their efforts, taking the fight to the Stormcasts that marched forth from the storm.

Wrathmongers swung their great hammer-flails about their mountainous frames, smashing Stormcast helms aside with one impact before taking them clean off with a second. Voark and his warriors swarmed Sigmar’s Stormcasts, jumping, clutching and climbing – prizing apart plate from sculpted plate with the tips of their reaver blades. As another champion of Sigmar died nearby, skewered on the tapering blades of several Hexenguard, Zuvius ordered his warriors back. He looked up at the blood-swirling sky. He hoped that the Everchosen was watching, that the prince’s sorceries, manipulations and slaughter had pleased monstrous Archaon.

‘Form up,’ the Prince of Embers called from behind the wall of warped shields. Lightning bolts crashed into the metal as the Stormcast Eternals unleashed the power of their bows at the knights. Sir Abriel and his gangling warriors staggered back. As Sigmar’s celestial heroes pressed their advantage, the Prince of Embers willed them on. His knights had taken the fight to the mighty Stormcasts but it was now time to visit upon the God-King’s warriors the true power at his disposal.

‘Now!’ he called. The Hexenguard parted their shields and pulled to one side, allowing the Unseeing through. The sorcerers thrust their gnarled, outstretched hands forward and the symbols tattooed into the flesh of their palms burned with dark enchantment.

Zuvius hadn’t thought it possible for beings such as the Stormcasts to scream. The mesa was suddenly afflicted with horror as flesh, metal and bone contorted and changed shape. One moment the Stormcasts were sacred knights of purity and doom, the next they were horrific statues of twisted plate and ruptured innards. Blood pooled about the stillness of their forms as they suffered their final agonising moments frozen in place – warped representations of the sorcerers’ nightmarish imagination.

As a bolt blasted over Zuvius’ shoulder, Mallofax beat his wings for the sky, the bird shrieking and leaving behind a cascade of blue feathers. Stalking confidently forward, the Prince of Embers snatched A’cuitas from where it had fallen on the floor after striking a Stormcast down. He moved through the fray like a madman, untouched. The cold determination of Sigmar’s holy warriors was nothing to him. The blood fever of Khorne’s barbarians was nothing to him. The dark sorcery of the Unseeing and the swing of swords clasped in the Hexenguard’s stretching limbs were nothing to him.

He spun his glaive about him elegantly, passing it about his wrist and across his back. With vicious turns of the shaft, Zuvius brought the blade down through the enemy, slashing ragged paths through celestial plate and flesh. Pillars of spiritual energy vaulted back to the sky at each merciless death like comets unleashed. The Prince of Embers sent the Stormcasts blazing back to their god, the Tzeentchian’s devastating downcuts and heart-stabbing thrusts a whirlwind of death.

The Hexenguard moved up behind their prince in a wedge of dark plate and blade, forcing their ghoulish way through Sigmar’s disciplined ranks. The Unseeing followed in a huddle, moaning and thrusting out their palms in sorcerous fear, turning armoured attackers to warped visions of plate and bone.

Zuvius was a force of serene destruction. He reached out with the length of his glaive to stab and stove in the masks of Stormcast helms. He swung the shaft of the daemon-forged weapon about him, smashing through the metal of bows and cutting gashes in the breastplates of advancing enemy warriors. He carved a path through the Stormcasts. Reckless insanity lifted his spirit as he ended those of pure heart about him.

He knew he had done well in the eyes of Tzeentch and the Everchosen of Chaos. A true warrior of Chaos served the Dark Gods not only to the best of his ability but through the abilities of the best. Skargan Fell-of-Heart and his host were battle-hardened slayers whose talents were best put to work in the service of a greater darkness than Khorne’s simple bloodlust. Zuvius had put them exactly where he needed them to be, turning their strength againstthe warriors of the wretched God-King. Here, on a mesa crafted to celebrate Zuvius’ victory, the Stormcasts and the mindless savages of the Blood God wasted their lives on one another.

Stormcasts marched out from the column of lightning with their glaives thrust out before them. The shimmering weapons were like sword blades mounted on shafts and the armoured warriors used them to cut bloodreavers in half. Slicing down through the savages of the Goresworn from the jaw to the hip, they marched on through the fallen flesh, coming together to skewer individual wrathmongers on their blades.

Zuvius felt the death about him as Voark, son of Kraal, was bludgeoned into the rocky surface of the mesa by a Stormcast with a glorious mace. He was avenged almost immediately by one of the wrathmongers who brought around the hammer head of his chain-flail in a brutal arc. It struck the warrior, smashing through the plate on his back and turning him into a shower of mangled plate, gore and blinding light.

The mesa was brightest about Skargan. As brilliant as the continuous column-stream of lightning was in bringing forth the God-King’s warriors, the maelstrom of blazing death about the Fell-of-Heart was brighter still. Skargan was unstoppable, killing Stormcast after Stormcast for his god and the Everchosen. While his warband died about him – the Goresworn’s savagery was no match for the Stormcasts’ implacable, armoured advance, and the wrathmongers went to their deaths with reckless abandon – Skargan was a rock upon which the Stormcasts smashed themselves in the storm. He was death. He was fury. He was the exalted avatar of Khorne.

As the Prince of Embers approached, leading his warriors and killing with judicious flair, he saw Skargan gouge skulls out of masked helms with his bone claws, impale Stormcasts on his monstrous horns and smash bows from the cowardly grip of Stormcast Judicators. He broke armoured warriors in two with savage kicks and wheeled about him with his axe, the weapon taller than the deathbringer himself. He chopped through plate, he cleaved limbs from torsos and he felled mighty warriors of the God-King’s holy storm. He tore heads and helms from bodies with his bare hands and rammed the shaft of the battle-axe back through throats and chests.

There was no stopping him. With the bodies of his warband about him, Skargan roared his challenge to a cloaked lord in immaculate celestial armour. Flanked by two of his brothers, the lord leading the host closed in, wielding a great halberd in one gauntlet and a warding lantern in the other. Zuvius could feel the soul-scarring magical energy coming off the lantern and flinched as it was unleashed. Skargan Fell-of-Heart cared nothing for its terrible light. His red flesh cooked on the bone at its proximity.

He killed the celestial leader’s guardians, his axe screeching through their armour before sending their soulfire raging for the heavens. The lord came at the deathbringer with all the righteous fortitude of Sigmar himself. He smashed the warding lantern back and forth across Skargan’s horned skull, battering and momentarily blinding the Chaos brute. For a moment, Skargan was caught off guard and stumbled. Wielding the length of the halberd in one gauntlet, the lord chopped at Skargan with elegant sweeps of the axe blade and thrust with the bladed spike that crowned the weapon. He smashed the bone claws of the gouger Skargan held up to defend himself and ripped through the smoking flesh of the Chaos champion’s forearm. The lord landed a kick on the deathbringer’s muscular chest with an armoured boot before cutting one of the monstrous horns from the warrior’s head.

For a moment, Zuvius thought that he might have to face the mighty Stormcast lord himself. As the champion swung around the warding lantern for another disorientating blow, Skargan raised his axe with both hands. Instead of batting the magical weapon aside, the deathbringer’s wrath-fuelled swing smashed the lantern into a blinding nova of magical energy. Surprised by his weapon’s destruction, the lord staggered back. Skargan bellowed as the fierce flash of the lantern’s destruction bathed his Khorne-pledged flesh in the God-King’s scalding brilliance. He would not be stopped, however. Blindly back-swinging with his axe, he cut the halberd in two. Aiming with a slayer’s instinct alone, Skargan brought his axe down and cut straight through the lord.

Plate, flesh and bone sheared away in two halves as the axe blade sparked. Zuvius watched the blinding essence of the warrior rocket into the sky. As it did, the column of lightning burning into the rock of the mesa crackled and spat to nothingness, leaving behind only heat and an afterglow.

‘Hold,’ Zuvius commanded. Sir Abriel and the remaining Hexenguard locked shields and waited, while those sorcerous wretches of the Unseeing who had not been skewered or blasted by the Stormcast Eternals grasped blindly for one another. They were not the only ones to have lost their sight.

The deathbringer was a mess, but an impressive mess. His red flesh was burnt and raw, smouldering about him. The bulging muscles of his arms, chest and back hung like ribbons where the God-King’s warriors had sliced and stabbed, exposing rib and bone. One of his great horns was but a smashed stump while the champion’s eyes were misty with the scorching brilliance of the warding lantern. It was obvious from the clumsiness of his movements that he was blind but he still clutched his battle-axe to him with the murderous talent of ten sighted warriors.

Mallofax flapped down to land on Zuvius’ shoulder. The sound seemed to spook the deathbringer, who looked about and then up into the sky, expecting the judgement and reward of Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos.

‘Filth sorcerer,’ Skargan growled. ‘Is that you?’

The Prince of Embers turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets, aiming the pommel of the daemon-forged weapon at the deathbringer. The eye opened in the metal.

‘Aye,’ Zuvius said. ‘It is me. I have bad tidings for you, exalted one. You have been judged unworthy.’

Skargan’s ugly features screwed up in fury. He peered blindly up into the blood storm.

‘By who?’ he roared, challenging the gods. ‘By Khorne? By the Everchosen?’

‘By me,’ Zuvius told him. As the lightning leapt from his glaive and struck the deathbringer in the chest, Skargan Fell-of-Heart exploded. In an air-cracking blast of blood and flesh-scraps, the Blood God’s champion turned into a crimson mist, thick and bitter. Zuvius cocked his head towards Mallofax.

‘I sent him back to his dark god,’ the prince said, a crooked smile on his lips. ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’

Orphaeo Zuvius didn’t have to wait long for his judgement and reward. He had been reforged to the Everchosen’s liking, and the bodies about him erupted in blue flashes. The unnatural lightning reached up into the sky with a whoosh and surrounded him. It sizzled in the blood rain, the licks and flames encircling the Prince of Embers and forming shimmering shapes.

‘What do you see?’ Mallofax asked of the prince. Peering hard into the heat and light of the furious vision, Zuvius looked about. In the surrounding energy, he could make out the outline of a great fortress.

‘Jagged spires,’ he said, ‘towers and keeps, reaching up into horror-choked skies. Walls – spiked, colossal and thick. A fortress of ruin so large that it spans the Mortal Realms.’

‘You see the Varanspire,’ Mallofax told him, ‘the fortress of the Everchosen. Your invitation is extended, my lord. You are worthy and he calls you to his service.’

The raging wall of flame that encircled them suddenly died. Everything became ominously still. The skies cleared to reveal a darkness beyond. Then came the flapping of wings. While Mallofax hopped between the prince’s shoulder and A’cuitas, a flock of carrion birds descended from the darkness to feast on the flesh of the fallen.

‘And where do we find this Varanspire?’ Zuvius asked.

‘It sits in the Realm of Chaos,’ Mallofax said, ‘linked to the Eightpoints, a nexus of gateways connecting the Mortal Realms.’

‘A place of unrivalled destruction and death,’ Zuvius said.

‘Yes, my prince.’

Zuvius licked his mangled lips. He stabbed at the rock, tapping the pommel of his glaive on the surface of the mesa. The carrion birds took to the air in a swirling flock, startled by the impact. Mallofax flapped his wings also but retained his purchase.

‘Invitation accepted,’ Orphaeo Zuvius said. The knight that had been Sir Abriel followed with the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing.

‘What now, my lord?’ Mallofax asked.

‘We follow the crows,’ the Prince of Embers said, ‘and trust in their appetite for death.’

The Solace of Rage

In a castle fashioned from crystal, a weaver of destiny worked.

He, she, it – who could tell? None knew if the sorcerers had once been mortal or were daemon made. There were nine, or there were one, or there were both one and nine. In all things, including their number, they were mysterious. Or so they had meant to be.

The Many-Eyed Servant was one of the names of the nine, and it applied in this instance to a tall, skeletal figure, impossibly thin, with limbs like reed stalks and a body to match. Atop a strand of a neck balanced a broad head, disturbingly smooth and featureless save for a line of eyes along its ridge. A body of this sort was nought but a garment, and not the most important that it had occasion to wear. In this form, the Many-Eyed Servant’s cloak defined it, name and nature – a long covering made of eyelids that fluttered and blinked, from behind which moist eyeballs of every hue peered out curiously.

The Many-Eyed Servant dabbled long fingers in a pool of steaming quicksilver, flicking through the images it conjured there. Scenes of war. All the realms were in uproar with the coming of Sigmar. From time to time, it stopped to examine this hero or that, emitting a gentle purr of satisfaction when it saw one worthy of note, clucking in annoyance at those who disrupted its carefully placed webs of cause and effect. Once it had toyed with individuals of this type for its own ends. The Many-Eyed Servant had spent long lifetimes of men twisting the threads of fate into pleasing patterns – but no longer.

There was a tightness around its spindly limbs, chains of fate that were not of its making. Once it had been merely the Many-Eyed, but then Archaon had learned its one true name, and forced upon it the role of servant. Now it was bound to the Everchosen’s purpose, along with all its siblings.

The facets of the Many-Eyed Servant’s lair darkened along with its mood. Displayed by sorcerous means in panes of crystal were images of its eight counterparts. A few worked in their own dens, each a sanity-testing place conjured by the architect’s ineffable whims. Others were abroad in the realms, doing the bidding of their master. Wherever they were, they looked up as one at the Many-Eyed Servant’s pique and scolded him, wary lest Archaon’s attention be directed toward them. The Many-Eyed Servant hunched its shoulders and turned its back upon them. The others were overly concerned by Archaon. If Tzeentch learned of their bending to the Everchosen’s will, the displeasure of the Changer of the Ways would make Archaon’s worst wraths seem as nothing. Nevertheless, although the Many-Eyed Servant would not admit it was afraid of their current lord, it returned to its scryings, compelled by dread and duty.

Archaon demanded champions, and so the Many-Eyed Servant looked for them in every realm.

In the Realm of Beasts, there was a prairie of such extent it had no single name, a landscape that a man could not cross in the space of a single life. Stretching for thousands of leagues, the plains encompassed mountains and seas, forests and mighty canyons, but for the most part they comprised grassland of rich and infinite variety. Great beasts walked there, their horns as high as the crowns of trees. Men hunted them, as bewildering in the profusion of race and tribe as the beasts themselves were in variety.

The Bloodbloom Fields were found on these plains. The grasses were red, and its flowers crimson. The partly fossilised ribcages of animals of impossible size studded the scarlet, higher than cathedrals, their breastbones covered in patches of woodland that trailed long creepers earthward. Their eyeless skulls were osseous mesas, the phalanges of their paws greying crags.

At the time of the Bloodbloom’s breeding, when the wind blew just so, the flowers opened and spat their pollen to be carried far and wide. The flowers sang for days during this season. Individually, the voices of the flowers were almost too quiet to be heard, but the sound of millions together created a musical sighing that gave the Bloodbloom Fields its other name, the Singing Steppes.

These were rich lands, well populated with beasts and tribes. Even at the close of the Age of Chaos when Sigmar’s warriors rained down from the heavens with wrath in their hearts and lightning in their hands, there remained free people of the plains who had survived the terrible centuries. They were hunted because of it, for the gods loathe freedom above all else, but they survived.

It was to this place that the Many-Eyed Servant’s attention was drawn. Its restless fingers paused in their fretful dibbling, the ripples on the silver stilled. The image sharpened, and it leaned in closer.

Upon the Bloodbloom Fields was assembled a host of men. These were the Bloodslaves, the horde of Lord Kalaz the Hewer. The name came to the Many-Eyed Servant immediately. In ordinary times they moved restlessly across the plains, cutting a swathe across grass, herd and nation alike. Not today. Rank after rank of blood warriors and bloodreavers were arranged in a hollow circle atop a hill of stacked, gargantuan bones. To the north, the greying faces of the bones made cliffs twenty yards high; to the south, the hill sloped down gently to the plain. Atop this plateau, black and bronze armour gleamed in a sultry morning hazed by pollen.

Around the hill, the scorched marks of the Bloodslaves’ hundred campfires pitted the red with black. A broad road of crushed flowers stretched over the horizon, marking their passage to this place of battle. A trampled field of torn earth and dark bloody stains bore silent witness to the great slaughter that had been done there the prior day. Eight cairns of fresh skulls, still pink from flensing, ringed the site, all that remained of the Heyeran people.

The Heyeran’s horses’ bones charred in fires made with the shattered timbers of the defeated tribe’s chariots. A hundred of the tribesmen lived on, but in body only. Given the choice between the dark feast and death, they had opted to consume the hearts of their comrades. Already their old existence slipped from minds clouded with Khorne’s rage.

All present desired fresh slaughter, and none more than the once-Heyeran, but all was still. The horde waited in silence. Their eyes were upon the open space at the centre of the ring of flesh and brass they made. Save for the moaning of chained khorgoraths and the snap of banners in the wind, silence reigned.

The extermination of the Heyeran had been a costly victory. Lord Kalaz the Hewer was dead, cut down at the height of the battle, the last bold act of the War King of the Heyeran.

Five of the tribe’s Gorechosen remained. The slaughterpriest Orto, the bloodstoker Danavan Vuul, the skullgrinder Kordos and the tribe’s two exalted deathbringers. There to the south of the ring was the one who called himself Mathror, horned and proud. The other was the voiceless Ushkar Mir. The ranks of the Bloodslaves were a quarter reduced, the three other Gorechosen among the slain. It did not matter, for Khorne cared nothing for the deaths of his followers, only that death had been done, and the Heyeran had been worthy foes.

The banner of the tribe’s dead bloodsecrator spiked the earth. The hum of wrathful energy demanded a new bearer, but it and all other things must wait. Before aspirants could attempt acceptance to the circle of eight, the Bloodslaves required a new lord.

Ushkar Mir and Mathror glared at one another. They had fought for many years together, but such things counted for nothing among the worshippers of the Blood God. Barely contained fury radiated from both.

Mathror was a hulking brute, muscles swollen by the dark energies of chaos. A pair of brazen horns sprouted from his temples. He wore the Blood Armour, a spiked set of plates that completely enclosed his body from his cloven feet to his eyes. A bevor encased the lower part of his face, but he had no need of a helmet. His horns were as much a part of that dread panoply as any other piece, offering protection to his head. From above the bevor glared a pair of bloodshot eyes, yellow irised, trapped within a perpetual glower and overhung by brows tense with the need for violence. He bore a huge sword the weight of two men, finned and spined the length of its bloody blade. Old gore caked its runnels, but the edges glinted bright steel and were sharp enough to draw a cry from the wind. On his other arm he carried a tower shield, dark red, embossed with the runes of Khorne and the holy eight-pointed symbol of Chaos.

Ushkar Mir was taller. He too retained a general human shape, but was also grossly swollen with unholy power. An unbeliever would have seen him as a giant, although like all the Bloodslaves he had once been an ordinary man, untouched by divinity. About his face, Khorne’s whims were clearly exhibited. Mir’s lips had withered away, leaving his teeth exposed to the root in a perpetual snarl. Around his eyes was bound a brass ring, riveted to the bone of his skull with iron. The brass was stamped deep with runes. Dark now, they glowed hot in battle. Ushkar Mir’s head was consequently a mass of twisted tissue haloed by thin wisps of brittle hair, for the runes’ heat tormented him, driving him to greater rage, which in turn made them burn hotter.

Mir disdained armour, preferring speed and fury to a coward’s shell of metal. Beneath his simple leather harness his scars were clear to see, raised welts all across his back and chest. Unlike his mutilated head, these made coherent imagery – Khorne’s skull rune, Chaos’ eight-pointed star, and the four-base tally marks of his many slaughtered foes.

Mir’s twin axes Skullthief and Bloodspite lay crossed upon his back, their querulous heads muzzled by their sheaths. One was black, the other red, gifts from Mir’s master. His fists were clenched, the brass bands around his knuckles buckled with the expression of his great and furious strength. His chest heaved in and out, muscles flexing with every bullish breath. Mir’s snorting was a provocation, an invitation to violence. The noise of it dominated the hilltop.

Orto looked between the two once-men facing each other across the circle.

‘So?’ he said. A single word, loud as a bell and as clear as a trumpet call, carried on breath that reeked of blood. The Bloodslaves shifted at its uttering, movement rippling through the crowd’s mass. Fire kindled in their hearts after their rare minutes of inaction. However the day was to end, its beginnings were sown then, in that moment, in that one word.

Orto had drunk of the slaughtergruel the day before, a tincture of boiling heartblood tainted by daemon gore and powdered warpstone. Khorne had deemed him worthy once again, for he lived still, and he had been granted yet more power. His skin was taut with new muscle and his terse words carried the authority of the great Skull Lord himself. Power shone through him from Khorne’s own throne.

‘Mir is not worthy,’ said Mathror. ‘It should be I who leads.’

‘See!’ said Orto. He strode to Mir’s side on legs grown unnaturally long. He pinched at Mir’s muscles, rapped huge knuckles against Mir’s brass blind, caressed the raised scarring on his massive chest. ‘The gifts of Khorne.’

‘Gifts for the unworthy,’ said Mathror.

Orto touched the black and red axes of Mir fleetingly, so as not to rouse the daemons sleeping within.

‘Twin axes he bears, daemon-kin from Khorne’s own legions. These are not the marks of the worthy?’ Orto barked a laugh. ‘You deny Khorne’s judgement. Your skull shall be his.’ Orto gripped his double-handed axe meaningfully. It was a cruel thing, toothed with black spikes.

‘I do not deny the judgment of the Skull Lord,’ said Mathror. He raised his hand, and Orto paused. For all his monstrous appearance and the fire of rage that burned in him, he spoke evenly. His voice was no ragged war-shout, but a silken thing, suggestive and deadly, a weapon in its own right. ‘Instead it is you, Orto, who denies his sense of humour!’ Scattered guffaws came from the horde. ‘Khorne laughs at Mir, and that is well. You mistake amusement for favour. Ushkar Mir will not lead us. He lacks faith.’

‘You think you should lead? Ha!’ said Orto.

‘I will not follow you,’ said Danavan Vuul. Kordos the smith, as ever, said nothing.

A blood warrior stepped forward from the horde. He was smaller than many present, close in size to the city dweller he had once been. Tight black armour clad him, while his tall-crested helmet he carried under one arm, leaving his face free. His skin was pale blue, marbled with bloodmarks. His eyes were the same colour, so that they were hard to distinguish from the rest of his face. He looked a living sculpture carved from exotic marble. Even so, the intelligence in those eyes could not be missed. Skull was cunning, a master of intrigue in a herd of killers, and that made him dangerous on and off the field of war.

‘Skull!’ Orto spat. The priest despised Skull’s temerity, most especially in his taking of a holy name. ‘What do you want here?’

‘I speak for Mir,’ said Skull. His voice was high, insinuating.

‘You have no business here.’

‘Lord Khorne saw fit to deprive the Great Ushkar Mir of his voice, and then Lord Khorne saw fit to provide him with the service of Skull.’ He bowed to the slaughterpriest. ‘Skull speaks for Mir. Skull always speaks for Mir.’

Orto growled and snapped his teeth.

‘You dislike my name, I know,’ said Skull. ‘Must we have this dance every time we meet? If you would slay me, do so!’

‘You have no right to it,’ said Orto. ‘You will die for your blasphemy.’

‘You may challenge Mir to dispute my right,’ said Skull. ‘I am under his protection.’

Mir growled, the first sound other than his bellows-breath he had made since the gathering began.

‘Let the Court of Blades decide the matter. Then you may present your complaint directly to the brass throne,’ said Skull.

Blood rage flushed Orto’s skin, but he restrained himself. He had no desire to fight Mir – it was not a contest he could win.

‘Speak then, insolent wretch!’ he said.

Skull inclined his head in mock deference to the slaughterpriest. ‘I shall, and I say this – Mir is worthy.’

‘And why would you not say Mir is worthy?’ scoffed Mathror. ‘Your word means nothing! You are his thing, his creature. You live because of his patronage. How dare you address your betters – get out of my sight! When this is settled, I will come for you and scrape the flesh from your living bones. Run now, and you may survive a little longer.’

A smile flitted across Skull’s face. He adjusted the grip on his sheathed longsword. Mathror exaggerated. Mir was not his sole guarantor of safety – Skull was a talented warrior himself. He thought often on his own and Mathror’s relative might. Perhaps Skull’s skill was greater, though his strength was undeniably lesser. Khorne’s servants were not known for their consideration, but for those like Skull who could hold back the fury and fight with head and heart, life was full of such assessments.

‘Mir is worthy,’ said Skull again. ‘None fight better or harder for the Blood God than he.’

‘Fight harder? Maybe. I fight better,’ said Mathror, clanging his shield against his breast. ‘And however he fights, he does not fight for the Blood God.’

‘No?’ said Skull. He cocked one silver eyebrow. ‘Then who does he fight for?’

‘Ushkar Mir fights for himself,’ said Mathror, and his contempt revealed itself fully.

‘Your proof, my lord Mathror?’ said Skull.

‘His words are his proof. All heard them. His own prayer condemns him. “By each skull I pave the road to your throne, by each step I come closer to vengeance.”’ He quoted the prayer of Mir, one the champion had uttered quietly in every battle before Lord Khorne took his words forever. ‘Who else but a faithless servant would say that? And a fool to whit – none may fight the Lord of Skulls!’

‘Khorne took away his voice. There is nothing to hear,’ said Skull. ‘Khorne respects bravery. Mir is brave, not a fool. Khorne enjoys defiance, not the cringing obeisance you offer.’

‘Khorne took his voice to protect his toy so that none could hear his blasphemy! I am no toy. I am worthy, he is not!’ bellowed Mathror. ‘I will lead the tribe!’ He held up his shield and sword, and the larger portion of the Bloodslaves chanted his name.

Mathror sneered at his opponent in satisfaction.

‘Silence!’ shouted Orto, and his voice was the crack of Khorne’s own whip. The chanting of Mathror’s name faltered. ‘Mir is worthy,’ said Orto. ‘It is you who blaspheme. Mir reaps skulls and lives. They go to Khorne, as will Mir, his skull for the skull throne. You also fight for yourself. Your ambition to lead is clear. A true servant fights not for his own glory, but for Khorne’s.’

‘I am for Mir,’ said Danavan Vuul. He walked to stand by Skull and Mir, his well-fleshed body wobbling as he walked. ‘Khorne has use for all murder, no matter the cause or the manner of death. This is our creed. Mir is a greater deathbringer than you, Mathror.’

‘You are a coward who hides behind your whip, making others do your killing!’

‘My whip and blade bite deep,’ Vuul hissed through crooked, yellow teeth. ‘By their application I slay more than even you, mighty Mathror. Khorne cares not as long as the blood flows.’

‘Mir is a test!’ roared Mathror. ‘Many of us fell in the fight with the Heyeran. Khorne tests us with this blasphemer, rewarding him to see our reaction when we come close to failure time after time. He is displeased – that is why Kalaz fell. It is plain!’

The agitation of the horde was growing. A split formed across the mass of warriors. Men glanced at one another. Minds clouded again with Khorne’s red vision and the distinction between friend and foe became blurred, irrelevant.

‘Khorne is not a subtle god,’ said Skull. ‘Do we not follow him for his directness? Do we not revel in his rage? He has no time for petty intrigues. Skulls and blood are his demands, and Mir delivers no matter his own intent. That is why he is rewarded.’

‘This one is the proof of my argument,’ said Mathror, gesturing at Skull. ‘A weasel’s tongue in a serpent’s mouth.’

Mir growled again.

‘Venerated Skullgrinder Kordos,’ asked Skull. ‘Where will you throw your lot, with Mir or with Mathror?’

The warrior smith did not reply, nor did he move, his chained, burning anvil scorching the flattened red grasses. His masked face gave nothing away. Skull shrugged. Skullgrinder Kordos served Khorne alone. He had no loyalty to any man, and few words for them. ‘And what does the slaughterpriest say? You speak for Khorne, give us his judgement!’

Orto’s eyes flicked back and forth between the deathbringers, weighing them against each other. His black tongue wormed along scarred lips as he hesitated. ‘Khorne does not speak. Khorne is displeased we do not fight, but talk like weaklings. There is one way to settle this. Skull invoked the Court of Blades, so let the test of arms settle it.’

‘You will not name a favourite? You are unsure who will win,’ said Mathror. ‘You do not wish to take sides. Who can respect such cravenness? You display your weakness this day, Orto.’

The slaughterpriest puffed himself up and snarled. There was truth to Mathror’s words.

‘Does any of this matter?’ said Skull. ‘Mir is the best warrior. None is as mighty as Mir. No one has a higher tally in skulls and blood. Whether Mir reaps skulls for Khorne or Mir reaps skulls for revenge, it does not matter. All death is worship, however given. Khorne does not care from whence the blood flows.’

Mathror smiled evilly. ‘Now you see my point exactly.’ He drew his sword and leapt at Mir.

The horde bisected itself, swift as the surging sea parts on a reef. A faultline of animosity that had existed for many weeks yawned wide, those for Mir on one side, those for Mathror on the other. It was telling that Mathror’s followers outnumbered Mir’s by a third again.

Mir did not speak, but Mir could hear. Mir looked like an insensate monster, but Mir could think.

Here is what he thought as he unsheathed the axes Bloodspite and Skullthief: Mathror is right. I have no faith. I have only hatred for Khorne.

Khorne did not care. Khorne was amused, Mathror was right in that too.

Bloodspite and Skullthief cried out with joy at their release.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ screamed Bloodspite, the red axe.

‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ replied Skullthief, the black axe.

‘I shall spill more blood than you,’ said Bloodspite.

‘And I shall take more skulls!’ rejoined the other.

The axes laughed metallically as Mir swung them. Several blood warriors were ambitious enough to chance their lives against Ushkar Mir, and flooded into the space between he and Mathror. None were his match, and all died quickly. Skullthief and Bloodspite drank the life fluids into their uncanny alloys. Their gleaming surfaces were never marred by the death they wrought.

The two parts of the horde crashed together with a tumult of bloodthirsty roaring. The singing of the Bloodbloom flowers was eclipsed by the clash of arms as the sides met. None were taken by surprise as their fellows fell upon them; these were warriors of Khorne, and they were ever ready for the spilling of blood and the red harvest of skulls. Men who had fought together and shared the flesh of the slain Heyeran around fires yesterday gladly buried their swords in each other’s guts today. Axes lopped heads from shoulders. Blood sprayed from severed arteries as limbs were cleaved from bodies.

‘Khorne! Khorne! Khorne!’ they roared. ‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the skull throne! Let the red votive flow!’

Within minutes, a battle that began as two rough sides degenerated into a formless melee. The flowers sang mindlessly and on the hill skulls watched disinterestedly as the warriors of the Blood God butchered each other. Sights like these were common occurrences in those dark times.

Kordos stood motionless amid the turmoil, awaiting some signal known solely to him. Orto roared his praises to Khorne as he fought, but was careful not to seem to help either Mir or Mathror. The melee would be done eventually, and his instinct for self-preservation stayed sharp even as the deep rage came on him. Skull protected his master’s back, his sword quick enough to best any but those of the Gorechosen.

In the centre of the battle, Mathror and Mir fought. They were well matched. Mathror was methodical, in control of every movement and action. Mir was rage and fury, his daemon axes screaming exultantly as he leapt and twisted through the air. Neither gained advantage. Mathror’s shield turned Skullthief and Bloodspite aside, and they caught Mathror’s blows in return. The air around the deathbringers was misty with smoke shocked from their weapons’ blades. Blinding, multi-coloured sparks erupted from them as they met. Bloodspite and Skullthief howled in anger. They were bloodletters of the legions, and they did not recognise defeat. No mortal weapon could stand before them, but Mathror’s was no ordinary blade. A mighty sword, heavy with blood-magic, this also was a gift of Khorne. The Lord of Slaughter was generous with his boons, for he liked to see them pitted against one another.

Mathror shoved Mir backwards with a combined push of blade and shield. ‘You cannot win, Mir. You lack the proper regard for Khorne. Only I am worthy of leading the Bloodslaves. Lay down your arms and acknowledge me as lord and you shall live.’

Mir made a curious growling and came in for another attack. Words he could not speak ran through his mind. I hate you, Mathror. I hate you all. I look upon what I have become, this monster of rage and anger, and I hate myself. But above all things I hate Khorne, and I will not rest until I have trodden the red road to its very end and stand before his brazen throne with my axes in my hands. You will not stand in my way, you will fall before me.

Khorne had rendered Mir dumb, and so his words went unsaid, but Khorne heard. In response to Mir’s treacherous thoughts the runes in the band that blinded his mortal eyes glowed with growing fire.

Searing pain built in Mir’s head. The furnace heat of the ensorcelled brass cooked his skin, transmitted down the iron nails into the bone of his skull where it gnawed and spread and baked his brain. The Bloodslaves saw the ring as a great blessing, but it was not. Khorne allowed Mir to live, but he punished him often and hard for his blasphemy. Pain became agony. Thought became impossible. Mir surrendered himself to his killing rage. The shades of red that coloured his vision grew deeper, until the world around him was clouded by a gory murk. Far away he heard the roaring howl of Khorne, ever hungry, demanding more skulls, more blood, more war.

‘Interesting,’ murmured the Many-Eyed Servant, watching from its crystal donjon. It was party to the secrets of men, being able to peer into their minds. The brass ring about Mir’s head was resistant to sorcery and stymied some of this ability, but the Many-Eyed Servant saw enough of Mir’s thoughts to intrigue him.

‘Here is a man who defies his own god, even while he serves him,’ it whispered. ‘Here is a man who is dedicated to Chaos, but to serve his own ends.’ The Many-Eyed Servant made a hideous sound which served it for laughter. ‘How Archaon will adore this one! How alike they are!’

More had to be done before the Many-Eyed Servant was convinced. The Bloodslaves were a lesser horde – their dead master had been no Khul or Baudrax. Kalaz the Hewer’s name was unknown beyond the rolling steppe. And who had sung the name of Ushkar Mir in either praise or fear? Few, if any.

‘A test, a test, I must set a test!’ hissed the Many-Eyed Servant.

It searched a while through the Realm of Beasts, a thousand scenes of strife and horror passing beneath its hands. In a land far away, it found what it sought. The ogor followers of Skargut burned to avenge the death of their master at the hands of Baudrax. They massed around their cook-priests, who at that very moment offered up the choicest offal to their hungry god, beseeching him to guide them to their foe.

Maw-portals opened, red and glistening as gullets. The ogors screamed out their desire for revenge and poured through.

For one such as the Many-Eyed Servant, it was a small matter to manipulate such simple magic and send the ogors where it willed.

Somewhere far away in the Realm of Chaos, the Many-Eyed Servant heard an angry, brutish bellowing, but it paid the complaints no heed. The Ravenous One was feeble. Tzeentch was not.

It seemed to the Bloodslaves that Khorne grew bored with their squabble. Around the battleground where Mathror and Mir duelled, several shimmers took hold of the air. The stink of magic flooded the plain. A foetid wind blew, ripe with the smell of spoiling meat, rank sweat and old food. As it rippled the grasses, the Bloodbloom’s song wavered. Discharges of energy crackled from the centre of the shimmerings.

‘Look! Look!’ bellowed Orto, severing the head from a screaming bloodreaver. ‘A new foe comes! Khorne blesses us! Khorne hears our war! Skulls! Skulls! Skulls!’

At first the magical storms stabbed lightning out randomly, earthing in the wargear of the dead. But the jags of power concentrated themselves, gathered up by magic into a double row of crackling, interlocking dagger shapes. Only when the skittering light blinked out were these revealed to be teeth – fangs in a mouth like Mir’s, bare of lips and dripping with drool.

With a roar, the first of these mouths opened into a gaping circular maw. The quivering skin of a realmgate was held between, delicate as a meniscus of saliva.

Through this stepped a huge ogor, then another and another. More gates opened, all around the horde and within it. A whole tribe of ogors charged into the brawling horde, knocking men flying with their huge guts and striking down those who raised their weapons against them with great clubs and mauls.

‘Khorne favours us! A true foe!’ shouted Orto ecstatically. ‘To war, to war!’

The battle between the Bloodslaves ceased immediately. Men stepped back from one another and unlocked their blades. Their prior enmity was forgotten.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ they roared, and attacked the ogors gathering on the field.

‘Another time perhaps, Mir,’ said Mathror. He disentangled his sword from Bloodspite, but kept his guard up in case Mir had ideas other than a truce.

Through the fog of pain and rage, Mir recognised the greater threat and the opportunity it presented. Here were many skulls for his road, large cobbles on the route to revenge. He nodded to Mathror, and they stood side by side.

‘For Khorne! Skulls for Khorne!’ shouted Mathror.

Mir roared out his wordless self-hatred, and together they ran at the ogors gathering on the plain.

There were at least two hundred ogors, and they attacked with a cunning that defied their brutish appearance. The first wave threw themselves on their foe as the greater part organised. The ogors in the centre comprised their best fighters, far bigger than the biggest of the Bloodslaves, and heavily armoured. Large iron plates covered their guts and arms, and they carried long falxes which cleaved warriors in two with a single blow. The ogor vanguard, more lightly armoured, halted their advance into the horde. Mir saw that they awaited their fellows still pouring through the realmgates. The heavier ogors were forming themselves into a hollow arrowhead that new arrivals quickly filled in.

Skull jogged at Mir’s side. ‘We must crush them quickly, my lord, before their wedge is completed.’

Mir nodded. He understood this. Once he had been a general of note, and was greatly frustrated that he could not communicate his intentions. Tactics that he could not speak crowded his boiling head.

But Skull seemed to infer them somehow, and was able speak Mir’s own thoughts back to him.

‘My lord, should I call upon your authority? I can order the men by your name, tell them to form squares to oppose the ogor rush, when it comes. Mathror is no use. Look at how he howls after glory, trailing those bloodreavers behind him in no formation. They will break on the wall of the ogors!’

Mir grunted a laugh. It was true. He nodded at his follower. Skull peeled away from his side and bounded up the spongy, weather-worn surface of an ancient bone to the top of a knoll higher than the rest of the hilltop. Shortly afterwards a horn winded, and Skull’s voice cut across the battle, shouting orders to chieftains and champions.

‘Control your fury, warriors of Khorne! Meet the ogors together, do not throw your lives away piecemeal. Do not disappoint Khorne! As a wall of flesh and steel shall we throw them back! I speak for the Lord Mir. It is he commands you now! Form up!’

Men stopped to shake the rage from their minds, looking back to Skull. A small group of warriors already gathered themselves around him. Mir strode to Skull’s side atop the knoll, and the trickle grew to a flood, scores of men ranking up into tight blocks about the bony knoll. Mir roared out and men looked to him. He gestured with his axes, and they understood, deploying themselves to his intent without error. Soon five hundred well-blooded warriors stood in readiness. A score of skullreapers came to Mir’s side, all slick with gore. Their skullseeker leader saluted Mir, and they gathered as a bodyguard around him. Then came Orto and Kordos, and the deathbringer’s battle line was complete.

But many of the Bloodslaves did not heed Mir and instead followed Mathror.

The wedge of ogors was two hundred yards from Mir’s position. Mathror’s men had broken through their skirmish screen and seethed around the ogor arrowhead. Ogor weapons scythed them down, sickle blades hacking them into bloody chunks. Mathror fared well, slaying all who came against him, but there were always more to replace those felled, and the ogors required great effort to kill.

Mir looked to the flanks of the horde. The ogors continued to display their cunning. Large beasts were coming through the gates, arraying themselves into battle lines either side of the wedge. Bellowing at their shaggy mounts, the ogors goaded them so that the lines became oblique, facing in towards the leading edges of the wedge.

‘They mean to trap Mathror’s warriors between their skilled centre and the beasts,’ said Skull. ‘Should we aid them?’

The shake of Mir’s head was decisive. Mathror would live or die on his own. Those men that had chosen Mathror could die beside him. They were caught up in battle lust and remained ignorant of the approaching danger.

Mir’s attention was fixed on a massive ogor at the heart of the wedge. Bigger and even fatter than his followers, he stood a head over the next largest. His thick armour was decorated with gaping mouths inlaid in precious metals, and he carried a massive, two-ended bludgeon whose heads were huge ingots of spiked iron. Mir marked him. This gutlord would fall to his axes, he resolved, a fitting tribute to the god he would eventually slay.

The last of the ogor elite strode through the portal. The wedge was complete. A number of ogors lifted their hands to their mouths and let out a tremendous hallooing, strangely musical after a fashion, and the others drew themselves up.

‘Skargut!’ roared their warlord.

‘Skargut! Skargut! Skargut!’ they replied.

‘We kill for Skargut! Revenge!’

That was a sentiment Mir could understand.

The ogors marched. The rest of Mathror’s supporters were shoved aside as easily as children.

A second vocal trumpet hooted from the left flank, a third from the right, and the ogor war-beasts lurched into motion, braying loudly, their heavy tread making the ground shake. The war animals broke into a ponderous trot. Shouting their warcries, the riders guided the warbeasts to smash into the horde either side of the wedge, decimating the Bloodslaves. Mathror was confronted by a rearing monster sporting a wide sweep of stony horns, and disappeared under its feet.

Mir grunted at this with a hint of satisfaction, and turned his attention to the closing ogor elite. He stared at their leader until their eyes met. Mir saluted with his axes. The ogor inclined its head in recognition. The challenge had been accepted. The ogors picked up speed. They came on, guts swaying, shouting deafeningly. As they neared, they raised their weapons over their heads.

‘Brace, O bloody men of Khorne!’ shouted Skull. ‘Cast them back!’

‘Blood! Blood for Khorne!’ screamed Orto, and brandished his axe over his head.

Kordos silently wrapped one more loop of chain about his hand and gripped it tightly.

The ogors’ charge was slow, almost sedate, but when it hit the Bloodslaves’ line it was devastating. With a roaring cry louder than the falling of city walls, the ogors thundered into Mir’s men. Return shouts of ‘Khorne! Khorne! Khorne!’ were cut short as the first ranks of Mir’s Bloodslaves were crushed or knocked flying to land on those behind them. There was a rolling clatter emanating from the point of impact, followed by a second as the ogors’ long hook blades fell, lopping limbs and heads.

The men of the Bloodslaves were encircled, but they did not fall. Leaning into their adversaries, they pushed back against the great scrum of ogors. Their feet ploughed furrows in the blood-sodden earth as they were forced backward. Men threw themselves at other men’s backs, pushing hard until all the horde strained against the enemy. The ogor wedge penetrated only a little into the massed Bloodslaves. Their line flattened against that of the Chaos warband, and their charge was arrested. Hooked weapons whistled through the air, cutting down three men at a time, and the line buckled, but still the ogors could not force their way through to the bony knoll at the Bloodslaves’ centre. Men leapt up from the rear ranks, lightly armed bloodreavers running along the armoured backs of blood warriors. They screamed dark praise to their bloody god and hurled themselves forward, axes swinging for ogor heads. Dozens fell, split by the ogors’ massive blades, but more came through, planting their axes into piggy faces, or scrambling onto shoulders and stabbing down with serrated knives into the tough muscle of the ogors’ necks. Others leapt for the ogors’ arms, preventing them striking with their weapons. Their fellow warriors saw their chance, and pushed their blades up to the hilt in the ogors’ fleshy bodies.

With terrible screams and crashes, the ogors began to fall. The Bloodslaves’ horns let out a brazen call, and they surged forward.

From their vantage upon the bony knoll, Mir, Orto and the rest watched the battle shift. The ogors surrounded them in a long bow. Their war-beasts had done with Mathror’s men and were coming to the aid of the others, but the ogor elite barred their way, and the beasts milled about uselessly behind the main line. The time was right. Mir raised his axes.

‘Forward for the glory of Khorne!’ screamed Skull.

‘Skulls for the skull throne!’ shouted Skullthief.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ shouted Bloodspite.

Mir leapt from the knoll, sailing with supernatural might over the heads of his warriors to smash into an ogor. The giant warrior was rocked off his feet by the impact, gaping in surprise at the power of one so small.

Its face was still wearing that expression when Skullthief swept off its head.

Mir ploughed on into the ogor elite. Now they were in disarray, not the solid wall Mathror had encountered, and he hacked his way through them. Where they pressed too thickly he leapt at them, pushing off their thick limbs and stout bodies with his legs. Every swing of his twin daemon axes killed another. By his efforts alone he opened a wide gap in the ogor tribe, and his skullreapers came behind him. Massive, mutated men whose Khorne-given strength was a match even for that of the ogors, they widened the gap in the line. Lesser Bloodslaves came in their wake, advancing over a carpet of ogor fat and muscle.

Mir fought forwards, seeking out the ogor lord. All the while, his open challenge to Khorne played in his head: By each skull I pave the road to your throne, by each step I come closer to vengeance.

The runes in his punishment band glowed with hellish fire. His flesh sizzled, but he did not stop his blasphemous prayer.

The last of the ogors between Mir and his target fell, and the ogor lord was before him.

‘You! Little man!’ roared the tyrant, pointing a finger fat as a man’s arm. Gobbets of saliva flew from his red mouth. ‘You I kill now.’

Mir raised his axes to attack. The ogor tyrant swept round his double-ended maul, catching Mir in the chest and slamming him backwards. The ogor’s smile of triumph turned to a snarl as Mir shook off the blow, though his ribs glowed with a swirl of bruises, and blood ran from a deep gouge that showed bone. The tyrant advanced on him.

‘I don’t know who you are, twisted one. The Great Maw sent us to you, and not to he who slew Skargut, but you will do as an appetiser. Your god killed Skargut the Great, Prophet of the Maw, so we kill you!’ grunted the ogor chieftain. ‘We smash you puny men down, then we eat your livers while you watch.’

The tyrant spun his maul around with astonishing speed, turning the iron heads into blurs of grey. Mir dodged one, then the second, but the third crashed into his face. Nails tore at his skull as his punishment band took the brunt of the blow. His head reeled, and he went down onto one knee.

‘Now you die. I ain’t one for pretty speeches, but I’ll tell you, I’ll kill every one of your bloody kind I see. I should have started long ago. Your god will learn to fear the followers of Skargut!’ The tyrant lifted up his maul, and brought it down towards Mir’s head with a force that would have pulverised the skull of a juggernaut.

Inches before the impact, Mir swept Skullthief and Bloodspite together onto the bludgeon, shattering it into a thousand spinning fragments of iron that glowed with magical heat. They hissed as they landed on the combatants’ flesh. The ogor roared, overbalanced by the sudden shift in the weight of his weapon. Mir’s unholy vitality drove back the pain of his wounds, and he stepped aside as the ogor stumbled forward. The chief half recovered before Skullthief took his leg off at the knee, and he collapsed to the ground. A hand he raised to protect himself was similarly removed by Bloodspite, who cackled madly as he drank the blood coursing over his blade. Great hot spurts of life fluid pumped from the tyrant’s wrist to drench Mir.

‘A curse on you and all your murdering kind,’ spat the ogor chief, before Mir ended him. The deathbringer stooped, picking up the sodden mass of the tyrant’s ruined head, and held it aloft. Its face twitched as Mir roared his incoherent defiance at his divine master.

The ogors quailed to see their mightiest warrior cut down. The end had begun for them.

Mir fought his way onwards, butchering ogors wherever he met them. Kordos barged past him, flaming anvil whooshing through the air, each ogor it hit engulfed and flung backwards. They wailed as their copious body fat ignited with the sorcerous fire, turning them into living candles. Danavan Vuul’s barbed whip whirled around his head to strike the Bloodslaves and drive them on, provoking them to greater savagery.

Many ogors were fleeing back to their gates. The Bloodslaves gave chase. A war-beast, its riders hanging dead in their harnesses upon its back, reared up against Ushkar Mir, threatening to pound him flat. A mad cry answered from the left, and the Bloodslaves’ two khorgoraths leapt at the monster. The beast fell. Mir did not stop to watch as one of the khorgoraths bit the beast’s head off, shattering its great horns in its powerful jaws, and swallowed it whole.

He ran on. Bodies large and small carpeted the field once more. He fought down his exultation at the slaughter. That way led to true damnation. He clung to the kernel of his own will that still survived. He cut down a fleeing ogor, then another. The maw gates shone redly not far away. And then there was Mathror, coming toward him, sword held high.

Mir abandoned his pursuit, and readied himself to continue his duel.

Skull grabbed his next trophy’s hair and yanked upward, preparing to cut his skull free so that he might add it to the growing cairns.

The man moaned and opened his eyes, and Skull let his head drop. He rolled the man onto his back. The warrior, a bloodreaver, blinked eyes that were free of rage and newly filled with fear.

‘Where am I? Where is this place?’ he said. He looked down his chest to inspect the deep wounds in his torso and saw the thick muscle, the crude tattoos, the spiked harness he wore as clothing. His eyes widened. ‘What has happened to me? What have I become?’

‘Ah,’ said Skull. ‘The fury has fled you.’

‘Fury? Who are you? Where am I?’

‘I am Skull,’ Skull said. He squatted next to the bloodreaver and drove his long knife into the turf. ‘Tell me, why do men fight?’

The man’s face creased in puzzlement.

‘I am dying, and you pose me riddles? Help me!’

‘I am helping you. Answer the question, and you will have some idea of where you are.’

The man gasped. His breaths were coming in short bursts, pink blood frothing at his lips. ‘A man fights to protect his land and his family. Or for money.’

‘And when those things are gone?’

‘A man fights to survive.’

‘Very good. So did you,’ said Skull.

The man’s face took on a look of horrible realisation.

‘Old gods! I remember… What have I done? What have I done! The redness has gone from my vision. I see, I see!’

‘Shhh,’ said Skull, and knelt by the warrior. He smoothed hair wet with sweat and thick with blood. The man’s skin was slick, his beard caked and filthy. His face was disfigured by tattoos like those on his body, but what looked out from behind the savage mask was pure anguish.

‘The red rage has left you. Khorne has no more use for you. He abandons you.’

The man wept. ‘I killed them all... My friends. I ate their hearts.’

‘And why did you do this?’ asked Skull. ‘You did it to survive.’

He looked over to where Mir and Mathror still battled. In the gathering evening the men fought, neither besting the other. The ogors were dead or gone, and the Bloodslaves had ceased their own struggles. Those handful who were left sank exhausted to their knees, dumbly watching the deathbringers. A few of them made their offerings to Khorne. Wandering the battlefield they hewed the heads from the fallen and piled them onto the cairns from yesterday’s battle. One of these had grown higher than the rest, and had been lit. Open jaws and eye sockets glowed with fire.

‘I shall tell you a story,’ said Skull softly. ‘There was once a land, with a glorious city named Mir at its heart. It had kings both just and kind, whose reigns were held to be exemplary. Mir had many armies, with fine warriors and knights mounted upon fabulous beasts, and a talent for battle. Hundreds of mages were theirs to call to war, and the peoples of its towns were master wrights. They were peaceable, but they turned their talents to the construction of engines of death readily enough once the gods abandoned the realms. By these means they remained free while the nations of their neighbours fell to Chaos, either destroyed or seduced one by one, until only the land of Mir was left, all alone in a sea of darkness.

‘For long years Mir persisted, a beacon in a dark age of blood. Refugees from other lands flooded the streets, but Mir took them in without complaint. Diversity became their strength.’

Skull sighed. ‘There is but one story Chaos tells, and that is of defeat. Fast or slow, it comes to all who defy the Four. Every year saw the borders of Mir shrink. A duchy here, an island there. Sometimes the land of Mir fought back and retook the lands it had lost. Every victory was tainted with sorrow, so many dead in return for territory made barren by the power of Chaos. Seas turned to blood, forests became hellish groves of screaming bone trees, farmland withered to dusty plains where phantom armies fought every night. Very little taken back could be made use of, and Mir died, one bloody bite at a time, until only the city remained.

‘Ushkar Mir...’ gasped the man. ‘He was the king?’

Skull shook his head. ‘No. Mir was not the king, but he was the champion of his age, blessed with an ability at arms to rival Sigmar himself, and a command of strategy not seen since the Age of Myth.’ Skull smiled at the futility of it. ‘But he could not win. Then came the inevitable night when Mir’s walls were assailed a final time. The full might of Khorne’s armies were brought to bear on this one last city, for Mir’s continued defiance had become an affront to the Lord of War. They could not hope to win. But Mir, he was... he is... a singular being. He looked out upon that endless horde of brass and steel, and he did not despair. He could not win, not on that battlefield, so he chose another. That is why Mir wished to survive, to find a ground better suited to victory. He was offered the Dark Feast by Korghos Khul himself, it is said. He accepted without complaint.’

‘So did I, so did I! I am sorry, so sorry.’ The man choked. ‘So sorry.’

‘Do not ask for forgiveness!’ snapped Skull. He pointed to the duelling deathbringers. ‘That is Ushkar Mir! His wish to live is no petty desire to preserve a worthless life. Mir plots revenge! By dedicating himself utterly to Khorne’s red road, he hopes to ascend to the heights of daemonhood, and challenge the gods themselves. Do you not see my friend? In a sane world, a man achieves immortality through his children or through his works. But this is no longer a sane world. Children are slaughtered and works cast down. If the great powers of the universe take family and achievement away, a man is left only one means to gain immortality – to survive, and to exceed his master. Of course, the Lord of Skulls knows of Mir’s desire, but I think the Blood God takes some pleasure in his defiance. Maybe Mir shall succeed, maybe hubris is the gods’ only weakness. Maybe... well, who knows?’

Skull looked down at the bloodreaver. Sightless eyes stared out of his face, the light gone from them. Horror remained on his dead face. ‘This is what I have learned, this is what Mir taught me.’

Skull stood. ‘Skulls for the Skull throne!’ he whispered, and severed the man’s head with a quick downward strike of his sword. He retrieved his knife, took the head up and carried it to a pile where he tossed it high, then went to the next dead man to repeat the grisly ritual.

All around the battlefield, the skull cairns grew.

Finally, as night drew in, Mathror fell. The two deathbringers were exhausted, their bodies sporting dozens of cuts and Mathror’s armour in tatters. Blood stained their skin from head to foot. Mathror’s ankle turned on the horned helmet of a dead blood warrior, and he went down, driving the point of his nameless weapon into the warrior to steady himself. Were he fresh, he might have sprung back to his feet with alacrity.

Were he fresh.

Bloodspite swept across Mathror’s blade. With a chilling scream it cut straight through the metal. The magic left Mathror’s blade with a mighty bang, and the halves turned to granular dust that pattered down onto the ground.

‘Wait!’ said Mathror.

Skullthief was Mir’s answer to that plea. The daemon weapon lived up to its name, its edge so sharp it cut through the flesh and bone of Mathror’s neck without leaving a mark. For a second Mathror gaped and gurgled, his eyes rolling, then blood welled up through his mouth and along the line of the razor cut. Only then did the head topple to the floor. Mathror’s severed head lived just long enough to feel itself lifted from the ground in Mir’s brass-bound fingers.

When Mathror’s skull was laid upon the highest cairn, a silky, diabolical laugh rolled over the Bloodbloom Fields. It grew louder and louder, until it became a clarion ringing in the distance. Mir looked that way, toward the sound’s eminence far out over the Bloodbloom Fields. The stars swam and became eyes looking down upon him on the slaughter ground. A faceless creature, spread thin over the night sky regarded him. Man or daemon or both, Mir could not tell. Its body was tall and thin, its head oddly shaped with many eyes upon it. Its robe too was made all of eyes, millions of them, greater in number than the stars.

‘You hear the call, Ushkar Mir. Heed the horns of Chaos.’

Who are you? thought Mir, and the apparition heard him.

‘No one, and someone. I am the herald of Archaon. Go to him, fight for him. He will reward you. You hate the Lord of War. This is your chance to fight for something greater than a god.’

I desire only revenge, thought Mir. I fight to live, so that I might become great in the eyes of Khorne and come into his presence. There I will offer up true worship, I will smite him down.

‘As you wish, Ushkar Mir. Go to Archaon, in Shyish he awaits! Go toward the rising sun, there you shall find a gate amid the Arman Forests. It will take you to the Realm of Death! Go!’

The figure faded. The eyes closed, becoming stars again.

Mir felt rage unending, but his thirst for revenge outweighed it. He clung to this tiny pebble of himself. The core of who he once was grew smaller with every passing year, but it was not gone, not quite.

The Bloodslaves had a new master. There were but an eighth of the number that had been present that morning, but they were the strongest, the fastest, the most skilled. They gathered behind their new lord and awaited his command.

Ushkar Mir, Warlord of the Bloodslaves, threw back his head and roared at the sky.

Knight of Corruption

The daemon considered the nature of vision. It was his power, it was his goal and it was his frustration. Through vision, the Many-Eyed served Archaon. In serving, he saw more and more. The more he saw, the more distant the moment of great revelation became. That sight, lost to him except in blurs and fragments, was his eternal torment and goad.

No accumulation of knowledge came close to what had been. It must never stop. His vision must reach further and further, embracing more and more. Piece by piece, he would construct infinity.

The Many-Eyed Servant thought about the eyes of a fly, of the mosaic of a single insect’s vision, limited in distance yet all-encompassing in the immediate. Sight compounded then compounded again by the multiplicity of a swarm. So many pieces coming together, creating clarity.

For those with eyes to see.

How well does he answer the call? The voice came, as deep with power and with the thunder of Chaos as if the speaker were present. It was the voice of the sorcerer’s master, the voice of Archaon, reaching across the realms.

‘He hears,’ the Many-Eyed said. ‘He strives. He lacks clarity.’

He is aware of his shortcoming?

‘He is, Everchosen. He seeks to know what he must do.’

Then the trial continues.

‘As you command.’ Standing in the empty throne room, the Many-Eyed Servant looked beyond its walls. He received the vision of the swarm.

The flies were speaking to Copsys Bule again. They burrowed into his scalp, took his blood and laid their eggs in his lank, dripping strands of hair. Their buzzing was music that had accompanied him for years. It was the sound of Grandfather Nurgle’s growing garden, the melody of blessed corruption. Now, though, it had become something else. It sounded very close to whispers. The drone of insects, growing louder and softer as the nimbus circled him, had a shape just beyond his ability to perceive. He wondered if that shape would match the apparition that had spoken to him. The drone was urgent. It was commanding. It pulled, but he could not discern the direction of the tug. Since the retreat from the seraphon, the call had become both more insistent and more vague. He had a duty to fulfil, one different from any he had known until now.

He seeks a champion, the apparition had said. And then, with meaningful symmetry: Seek him, champion.

And Fistula, deep in fever, speaking unconsciously, had said Archaon.

And there were other duties too. A portion of the garden had been uprooted. Nurgle’s blessings had been rejected. There were reparations to be made.

So Fistula was quick to remind him.

‘We should go back,’ said Fistula. He marched beside Bule. His words were for the commander’s ears alone, but he did not temper their volume as much as he should have.

Bule did not know if any of the other Rotbringers heard. He thought not. But Fistula’s anger was clear. His tone was on the verge of a challenge.

‘You would have us return to annihilation?’ Bule asked.

‘No, for vengeance. For Grandfather.’

‘Your zeal is sound. Your judgement is not. We cannot go back. What makes you think the gate would return us to our point of departure? Do you even know what realm this is?’

‘No,’ Fistula admitted.

‘We are fortunate to have emerged where we have,’ said Bule. ‘Grandfather Nurgle still blesses us.’

The realm was blighted; the Plaguefather’s gifts were everywhere. The warband moved through a diseased forest. The gate was far behind but Bule wanted it further yet. He didn’t think pursuit was likely, but until his diminished warband had recovered some of its strength, it was better not to risk another clash with the seraphon. He had lost his trident in the most recent clash and now carried a pock-marked axe. He looked back at his warriors. They had been bloodied. Their numbers were reduced and the shame of retreat hung over them. This portion of Nurgle’s following had withered, and it needed to blossom once more.

‘There is no glory in luck,’ Fistula said. His bald head reddened with anger. The white spots of emerging blisters appeared. They gave him no joy. ‘And we are still retreating.’

Bule did not argue. Whether an enemy pursued or not, the effect was the same. The march had begun as desperate flight. Nothing had changed that initial impulse. Bule needed to turn the retreat into an advance. There was still strength in his warriors, and there was strength all around them. For the day and the night since their arrival, they had been surrounded by the glorious blight. The garden was flourishing. There was cause to rejoice even as there was work to do.

The terrain was rolling and gaining altitude. A river flowed on Bule’s left. The water was brown and grey and gelid, despite a fast current, and soft, rotting shapes tumbled through it. Black-crusted foam burbled around rocks, leaving a patina of slime. On both sides of the river, the forest quivered. Pendulous fungi hung from trees. There were no leaves. Huge colonies of mould covered the branches, the growths thicker than the trunks. They hauled the branches down toward the ground. The loam was thick, a festering carpet of decomposition. It rippled with feasting insects.

‘Children of the Plaguefather!’ Bule shouted. Phlegm thickened his voice, and he revelled in the wet, crackling pain at the back of his throat. ‘We turn our backs on sorrow, and march towards the ecstasy of blight. Enough of retreat! Now we hunt!’

‘What is our prey?’ Fistula asked.

Bule smiled. ‘It must be found. That is the first stage of a hunt, is it not?’ His chest expanded with an eager hope.

Bule’s optimism found its reward after they had marched less than another league. To the east, deep in the forest, a huge shadow lurked. Its form was suggestive, and Bule turned off the path to investigate. He found himself standing before the crumbled remains of a vast monument. Much of what had once been was gone, but the angle of the exterior sides of the foundation stones suggested an obelisk. If that were so, it would have towered many times the height of the tallest trees. The shattered base extended far into the forest, wide enough to have supported an entire keep. The ruins were overgrown with black, glistening lichen. At the top of the stones, the growth had been scraped away, revealing naked rock.

Bule walked the length of the monument, his boots squelching and sinking deep into the toxic mulch. Disturbed by his footsteps, swarms and stench rose in waves. All around Bule, life erupted in the celebration of abundance and decay.

‘There has been work done here,’ Bule said. ‘Someone has been building something.’ The monument had fallen long ago, but it had been disturbed recently. Though the rot had spread over it again quickly, he could see the marks of tools. Stones had been removed. Beyond the wall, the diseased vegetation had been flattened as the scavenged masonry had been dragged away. The stones that remained were so huge it would have been impossible for anything less than an army of slaves to move them.

The flies buzzed in Bule’s ears. The whine was excited. He grinned, ripping open the pustules on his lips. He had the scent of prey.

And there, the words of the flies became a little clearer. Here was purpose. Here was destiny. If he hunted this prey, he would find what he had been told to seek. And he would serve…

He blinked, surprised and puzzled.

A conviction formed. He would be in service to a being who was neither Nurgle nor one of his champions. Yet he was equally certain this allegiance would not in any way be contrary to the Plaguefather’s wishes. The paradox confused him. His need to answer the call was clear. It was his paramount duty. He was summoned. But the source of the call was lost in the insect miasma. He did not know how he was to answer.

He looked again at the wide swathe of drag marks in the putrefying vegetation. There was his direction. The marks were a clear sign. Whatever answer he must make, he would be propagating the garden, and clarity lay ahead.

Clarity and prey.

Exhilaration drove away the shame of defeat. His laugh was loud, long and braying. It turned into a generous cough, spraying yellow phlegm before him. The sputum hit the ruined wall. At its touch, the sickened, spreading lichen convulsed, bursting into sudden, accelerated, tumorous growth before dying. The lichen decomposed into a corrosive acid, pitting and crumbling the stone beneath. But as the lichen liquefied, it revealed a portion of an engraving. Bule paused. He used the edge of his axe to scrape more away, revealing the head of a hammer. Decayed as the stone was, the skill of the ancient work was clear. The majesty of the weapon shone through the grime. Bule growled and struck the wall, smashing the engraving and erasing the memory.

He turned to Fistula. He wondered if the other Rotbringer could see the triumph in his eyes.

‘I have the scent,’ he said. He raised his voice for the warband to hear. ‘Feasting lies before us!’

He lurched off, cutting through the suppurating woods in the direction of the drag marks. His vigour spread over his followers, a joyful contagion. After a few minutes, they reached another, wider path. It showed signs of recent use, and of the ferrying of heavy loads. Bule charged along the route, his hunger and eagerness growing together. The ground rose. The forest thinned, withering to a bubbling sludge at the peak of a hill. There, Bule saw his goal.

Below the hill was a wide valley. A river, much larger and even more polluted than the one the Rotbringers had left behind, flowed in from the west. It had once irrigated agricultural land. Even now, long after its conquest by Nurgle’s children, the valley’s former character could be seen in the grotesque parody it had become. The fields waved with tall, ergot-covered stalks and undulated with squirming decay. At their edge, heaps of fungi multiplied, each the parasite of the one beneath, their accumulation rising many feet into the air. A ruined city rotted in the centre of the valley. Black water filled the open foundations. The ramparts were gone, lost beneath fungal mounds. The roads were broken, collapsing into the banks of foetid canals. None of the original buildings stood; they had all crumbled into piles of shattered stone and brick.

But not everything had fallen. There were statues here, colossi hundreds of feet high, bestriding the valley. An army could pass between the huge columns of their legs. The statues had been defaced. Some heads were shattered half-moons. Others were missing altogether, and monstrous faces had been carved into the torsos. None had any hands, their arms ending in jagged stumps. Their shapes, once heroic, had been eaten away until their proportions were skeletal. They were corpses now.

And they moved.

Arms rose, coming together for absent hands to clasp in prayer before absent faces, then fell again. The western-most statue, closest to the entrance to the valley, bowed and straightened again and again, filling the air with the slow grinding of rock. Creations of wonder and majesty had been reduced to immense, meaningless, idiot gestures. A great city had been razed to nothing but a mockery.

In its place, something new had risen.

A tower had been built using the ruins of a hundred other structures. Its construction was crude. Even from this distance Bule could see the mismatched stonework, each block marked by the fragments of ancient carvings. It was a rough, scavenged construct. There was no artistry in its design. It was blocky, almost as wide as it was tall. Speed and resilience had governed its making. But it was big – its crenellated peak soared higher than the Rotbringers’ position on the ridge. Where it rose, the glorious ruin and bounty of Nurgle’s generosity ended. Around the base of the tower and spreading eastward to the valley’s mouth, the ground was barren. The temple was order reformed from chaos. Its stones, irregular and damaged, had been forced into something coherent. And clean. The walls had been scoured. There was no growth, no celebration of convulsed life on its surface. Though it was heavily fortified, it was not merely a keep, it was a site of worship. The walls had been carved to suggest armoured visages of a sort Bule had never seen before. He guessed what they represented: a myth he still refused to credit with any validity.

Further to the east, the land dipped towards a barren plain. Bule saw no life there, either. There was only the evidence of a terrible cleansing, the ground scorched by lightning. Worse still, it held the potential for new growth, unblessed by the Plaguefather. Less than a league from the temple, Nurgle’s blight ended. The meaning was clear. The land beyond was the site of another defeat. There was no way to guess what enemy had scraped the land clean of blight, but that a foe had done so was beyond doubt. For a moment, Bule wondered if the inhabitants of the tower were responsible for this tragedy. No, he decided. They had built this high edifice, but only from the wreckage of what had been before. The scoured earth did not begin at the tower. Rather, a finger of purifying fire had reached this far into the valley from the battlefield. What had happened beyond the valley must have been the inspiration for the construction of the temple, and for the noise that came from within and from the roof.

The temple rang with human voices.

‘What’s that sound?’ Fistula asked.

‘You don’t recognise it?’

‘No.’

Of course he didn’t. Such a young warrior. So inexperienced. He had not known the great wars of the past. He had not been formed by those struggles. He had not witnessed the fall of empires. He had not witnessed the extinction of what had suddenly dared to be reborn.

‘That,’ Bule said, ‘is song. It is hope.’

The song travelled to them on the humid air in snatches. It was, Bule thought, uncertain. It was spontaneous, but unled.

‘Hope.’ Fistula’s breath wheezed with the intensity of his anger.

Bule shared his underling’s rage at the blasphemy. But he also celebrated. Here was a prey whose destruction and instruction would be satisfying. The annihilation of hope was a pleasure to be savoured. The Rotbringers would hurl the temple down. All within would experience the gifts of Nurgle and know true apotheosis in the exquisite opulence of disease. An easy victory for the warband, but rich in satisfaction.

His flies buzzed in growing excitement. The pull was much stronger. The longer he stared at the temple, the closer to clarity he drew. The fall of the temple became of crucial importance. The defeat by the seraphon was suddenly trivial, merely one battle among many. Somewhere in the temple, destiny awaited.

‘Sound the horns,’ Bule commanded.

To raise his voice in praise was a strange sensation. All his life, the very idea of song had been inconceivable. He only knew what song was because of the monstrous chants of the dark warhosts. Song was the triumph of Chaos. Song was the announcement of doom. It was the liquid, burbling, discordant, cackling sound that presaged slaughter. There was no song in the lives of the people struggling to survive under the reign of night and plague.

No song until that moment when Brennus witnessed the deeds of the beings that blasted down from the heavens. Beings of light, beings of fury, their coming had illuminated the landscape with fire and routed the armies of disease. He and his fellows had watched the battle from a distance. The waves of the war had lapped at the edge of the valley while they had hidden and sought what refuge they could in the remains of the city whose name had been lost long ago. A purging sliver of fire had reached into the valley, and that holy blaze was surely the promise of more.

The destruction had been pure. The blight was gone. The emptiness to the east was sacred, and so was the sear in the valley. It was the sign of healing to come. Of the return of dawn.

And so they had built the temple and built it as high as the dead-but-restless statues. The inhabitants of the valley had numbered only a few score at the beginning. But the battle had been witnessed by many more, scattered through the hills and the forest. The activity of construction had become a beacon. Before long, hundreds had joined in the act of worship. Then thousands. They were all ragged, hungry, ill. Many were maddened by pain and grief, yet they were able to complete the simple tasks of hauling stone, even as they babbled and shrieked their horror. But even the most feral also had hope, and they were strong with it. A following formed. And those who began the building, those who led by example, and so were expected to continue to lead, were the priests.

Brennus was among their number. He knew what he had become. He accepted the calling. He was proud of it and humbled by it, as were the others who had been called to wear the robes of their new office. To their rags they added pieces of scavenged armour and fragments of robes, vestments that bore marks which resonated with their spirits, even if they did not know the meaning of the signs. And now they sang their strength. They sang their praise.

On the roof of the temple, the celebrants had erected their altar of war. Brennus himself had found its largest piece, half-buried in the ancient foundations upon which the temple would be built. It was a portion of an ornate crimson anvil, larger than a man. The beings of light had great hammers. Surely the anvil had some connection to their divinity. At the entrance to the valley, a black helmet framed by a golden halo had been found. Its visage was as unforgiving as it was blessed. The priests had placed it on the altar and it had given focus to their praise, and to their determination. They would pray here, and when the time came, they would take up the hammer to fight for their lives and their still-inchoate faith.

A large fire pit was next to the altar. A massive cauldron sat over the flames, its contents boiling. Around the cauldron was a large group of the most damaged of the faithful. Most could barely speak, and they mortified their own flesh with their fervour. They were no longer victims. Now they were flagellants, and their wasted bodies were kept alive by the fury. On all sides of the temple, sentinels stood at the crenellations, keeping watch at all hours, vigilant for signs of evil or of deliverance.

And around the altar, around the fire, around the ramparts, Brennus and his comrades sang.

The song was a patchwork, constructed of bits and pieces dredged from the collective memories of the worshippers. The people combined melodies and words passed down from generation to generation, eroded and forgotten as the centuries of darkness passed. They took the fragments, many of them devoid of any meaning save the impulse to praise itself, and put them together in the same manner they had built the temple. The result was irregular, a thing of awkward rhythms and strange halts, but it was powerful. It gave voice to the soul. Brennus sang his thanks, even though he did not know who he thanked. The hymn was raised to unnamed gods. The objects of praise were the warriors who had brought the light. Whoever they were, they had broken the forces of the Dark Gods, so they must be divine.

The worshippers sang for the warriors seen only from a distance, offering thanks for the miracle already performed, and calling upon them to return.

‘Movement,’ Kalfer shouted.

The worshippers kept singing. Brennus and four others detached themselves from the circle and joined Kalfer at the ramparts. Silhouettes gathered on the summit of the hill to the south. Soon they covered the slope. The forms were bloated, twisted. Torsos and limbs were malformed. Some were swollen. Others were too long, tentacles instead of arms. The air, foul and choking as ever, became fouler yet. Brennus’ throat began to feel tight and raw just from looking at the hulking, pestilential shapes.

And then there was music, the terrible music, a jangling discordant sound in celebration of corruption.

All along the lines of the assembled host, horns were raised. They sounded. Their blast reverberated across the valley. The noise was huge. It ratcheted like lungs filling with fluid. It buzzed with the wings of millions of insects. It echoed, it squirmed.

Brennus was sure the light in the valley began to fail more quickly, as if sickened by the sound. The air grew still worse. Brennus swallowed, and he felt the tickle of legs crawling at the back of his mouth and down into his chest.

‘Our trial has come,’ Kalfer said. He sounded determined, but Brennus could hear the fear just beneath the surface.

‘We are prepared,’ said Brennus.

‘I had hoped…’ Kalfer trailed off as the warband began to march down the hill.

‘For what?’ Heccam asked. ‘To be left alone?’ He had already picked up a double-headed flail from the stacks of weapons lining the ramparts. Its handle was long enough to be used as a staff. He held it up like an icon.

‘No,’ said Kalfer, already sounding stronger. He touched his forehead, where he wore a tight band of studded metal.

‘Good.’ Jessina was arming herself too. ‘Our duty is not to hide and hope for deliverance.’

‘It is not,’ Brennus agreed. ‘We will give praise in struggle. And if we die, we must die with pride and with hope. Then victory will be ours, no matter what.’

The horns sounded again. The army of Rotbringers was midway down the slope and moving fast. Laughter and shouts followed the second blast. Voices thickened by the flow of pus and the pressure of tumours mocked the celebrants. At the head of the host was a massive warrior. His helmet was terrifying in the blankness of its features – it had just three holes drilled into the front, which suggested an unnatural configuration of eyes. A single horn curved out and down from the right side. He raised his right arm, pointing a gigantic, pitted battle axe.

‘Grandfather Nurgle summons you to the celebration!’ he roared. His voice was thunder, and beneath it was the hum of a million insects. It came from a throat raw and suppurating and powerful. Its invitation should not be refused.

The celebrants of the tower refused it.

They loosed volleys of arrows at the Rotbringers. Untrained, they did so too soon. Most of the arrows fell short. The few that reached the warband did so only because the corrupted warriors advanced into the hail of shafts. Their shambling gait was surprisingly fast. The diseases cratering their skin and twisting their forms gave them strength, and they charged with the fervour of zealots. They too gave praise, and they came to spread the contagion of their faith.

Brennus looked back toward the centre of the roof. ‘Hurry!’ he called. A group of flagellants dragged the cauldron toward the north rampart. Brennus helped lift a curved length of metal. It was the first and only product of the temple’s forge, ten feet long and widened at one end to better receive the contents of the cauldron. The priests fastened the chute into place with rope and a wooden framework. The larger group hauled the cauldron up. As they did, disease-ridden ungors loosed a volley of arrows against the temple walls. The plague warriors laughed. The attack was simple mockery. Even so, a number of arrows whistled through the crenellations. One struck Kalfer through the throat. He staggered back, eyes wide, his mouth open in silent shock. His hands clutched at the shaft. They came away slimy. The arrow was dark with filth. The fletchings looked as if they were made from feathers, but the vanes were coiled and wiry, and they released a small cloud of spores as Kalfer stumbled and the arrow shook. One step away from him, Loressa began to cough. Kalfer fell, twitching. Retching blood, Loressa pulled his body away to the north end of the roof. She managed to reach a wall before slumping over the corpse.

‘Ready!’ Jessina called. The cauldron was in position. At the same moment, Brennus heard the clash of weapons far below against the metal door that was the sole entrance to the temple.

‘Burn them! Burn them!’ Heccam shouted.

Many hands tilted the cauldron. The boiling water poured into the chute. Brennus ran to the next aperture and looked down.

He wished they had oil, but there was only water, collected from a clean and pure stream that ran through the edge of the scoured region. Hauling the water back over those leagues had been a task almost as painstaking as the construction of the temple. Now, kept in stone reservoirs, was enough good water to last for months. And enough to hurl at the enemy.

Steaming, the boiling embodiment of resurrected faith and hope, the water fell upon the Rotbringers.

Bule had his axe raised to strike the door of the temple when the scalding rain came down. It took a few moments for the water to work its way through his armour. He ignored the pain at first, but then it became ferocious. The warriors on either side of him howled, recoiling from the burn. Bule snarled. Simple water should not hurt like that. It should turn to muck on contact with him, more irrigation for Nurgle’s garden. Instead, it dug deeper into his flesh with flashing agony. One warrior fell to the ground, the skin of his skull and his left arm sloughing off, dissolving into sludge.

This water had been transformed. It burned with noxious purity. When it touched the ground, it scoured again, eating the diseased plant life and leaving bare stone.

Bule had expected sport in killing the inhabitants of the temple. Now he encountered blasphemy. He would permit no portion of Grandfather’s garden to wither. He roared, dismissing the pain. Where his skin deliquesced, pus ran over the surface, overrunning the purity with a wealth of illness. Beside him, Fistula also stood his ground, his scalp an oozing mass of open blisters. They exchanged a look. In this moment, Bule shared the blightlord’s rage. Fistula pulled back, giving Bule the space he needed. Heedless of the searing rain, he raised his axe again, and brought it down against the door. The iron barrier shuddered in its frame. The blade left a gouge two feet long and as deep as his hand. Rust spread from the lips of the wound. The disease of metal cracked the face of the door. A prayer to the Plaguefather on his lips, Bule smashed the door again.

It buckled.

Brennus rushed down the uneven stairs of the temple. His spirit was fired by what he had witnessed. The temple worshippers had struck a true blow against the Rotbringers. He had believed they could be defeated after seeing the beings of light. Now he believed they could be defeated even by forces that were not divine. He did not dare hope that defeat would come at his hands and those of his fellows. But he would fight as if it could.

On the ground floor, there were no windows. There was only the door. In the vast hall, the worshippers in their thousands stood armed with old axes and blades. The people waited as another terrible blow battered the door. They were ragged, but they were an army, and they were ready to fight.

Brennus stopped on a landing at the top of the hall.

‘No!’ he cried as he saw some movement towards the entrance. ‘We’ll keep them out yet! Block the door!’ In a direct confrontation, he knew the Rotbringers’ strength would be overwhelming.

One of the men nearest the door turned around. ‘But we’ll be trapping ourselves.’

‘If they get in, they will win quickly,’ Brennus said. ‘Keep them out, and we continue to hurt them. Do it now!’

The man began to object again, but at both sides of the door other congregants rushed to release a cluster of ropes. Freed, the ropes swept up toward the ground floor’s ceiling, passing through a large iron hook. On the other end, massive blocks, the heaviest the people had been able to find and move, fell from their suspended position just above the doorway. They hit the floor with a booming crack. The door to the temple became meaningless. Now there were only walls.

‘Take to the stairs!’ Brennus called. ‘Strike the enemy from above.’ There were hundreds of arrow slits in the tower. The faithful would fight until the end.

Iron tore and crumbled before Bule. The door fell. Behind it was solid stone. Bule laughed, his good humour returning. He walked away from the blocked entrance. More scalding purity fell on him. The pain meant nothing. The bounteous rot of Nurgle surged into the wounds, infecting and swelling his flesh with new toxic gifts. He gathered his warband a few yards from the base of the temple wall, out of range of the water, but well within reach of the archers. He and his warriors laughed at the poorly aimed volleys. Arrows bounced off armour or sank into putrefying flesh, doing little more than release floods of larvae to the air.

‘Why hide yourselves away?’ he asked the mortals. ‘Why refuse Grandfather Nurgle’s generosity? His garden is a riot of delights. If you will not revel in the garden out here, we will send the garden to you.’ He faced his warriors. ‘They send us purity. We should answer in kind.’

The warband constructed a bonfire from the diseased branches of trees standing twisted and putrefying in the ruins. They filled copper vessels with the thickened water of the river. Within minutes, as the horns sounded again, a thick, damp smoke filled the air. It embraced the temple. The breath of Nurgle wafted into the tower’s apertures.

When he heard the first sounds of distress emerge from the interior, Bule said, ‘Thus the Garden grows.’

There was satisfaction in the lesson being taught, but even as he spoke, he knew it was not enough. His warriors would not content themselves with victory at one remove. It was a poor substitute for the direct mortification of the enemy’s flesh. And there was more. The goal that called to him was not the simple extermination of this false hope. His destiny waited inside those walls. The flies about his head flew in a concentrated swarm at the temple again and again. The call, now so tantalizingly close to clarity, was just beyond his reach.

He must find a way to pass through those walls, or shatter them.

Brennus returned to the roof of the temple. The Rotbringers’ smoke came for the priests and flagellants. He felt his chest hitch and his throat tighten in anticipation in the moment before the coiling tendrils enveloped the tower. He coughed. The stench was foul. It was rotten meat and writhing flesh. It was as dry as hollowed-out bones, yet it was as clammy as a damp fist. Heccam was among those at the ramparts and the first to breathe in the poison. The defenders dropped their bows and collapsed. Heccam clutched his head, weeping and choking.

‘We can’t,’ he moaned.

‘Stand up,’ said Brennus. He breathed through his mouth. The air felt thick enough to chew. It was furry with legs. It sank into his body. It tried to sink into his soul. It weighed him down, whispering the death of hope.

He refused to listen. With weeping lesions on his arms, he hauled Heccam upright. ‘Do not surrender,’ he exhorted. ‘Keep fighting!’

‘For what?’ Heccam muttered. Thick, yellow saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Sores appeared on his face, clustering and bursting.

Brennus let go of him. He picked up his weapon instead. He turned to the wall and loosed an arrow into the spongy air. He was not alone. Others acted with him, and when one priest fell back, another stepped forward. They fought, though Brennus knew their arrows were futile against the warband, and though he heard the bubbling laughter of the Rotbringers. Each time he drew the bow string, Brennus struggled against the despair that sought to erode him from the inside out. And each time he released the bow string, he struck a blow against the despair. His eyes were watering. He felt the lesions spreading over his skin. But he would not surrender. Hope had returned to the world, and he held it fast.

The valley dimmed with the murk of floating plague and the coming of a darker night. Yet there was light. Brennus felt it in his soul. It was his strength. He saw it behind his eyes, and it guided his shots.

And then the light was real. It slashed through the gloom from above. Lightning slammed into the ground at the base of the temple. It struck the edges of the ramparts, and for a moment the temple had a dome of thunder. Priests threw themselves to the side. The light faded. Brennus’ eyes cleared, and he saw the divine warriors.

The largest part of their number had appeared outside. The blast of their arrival forced the Rotbringers back. It banished the evil smoke. On the roof, Brennus gazed upon the leader of the gods. He was a towering figure in cloaked armour. He was flanked by archers. Above, winged warriors alighted for a moment on the edge of the broken roof before taking off once more.

Holy terror assailed Brennus. He joined his fellow priests in falling to his knees. These gods were forbidding in aspect, clad in obsidian, and the cold visages of their helmets were ominous. They were beings of metal forged from the night itself. Yet there was nobility here, reflected in flashes of gold amid the black. It rimmed the shoulders. It shone from the hammer icon of the shields. And it was there in the halo that framed the helms.

The leader spoke. ‘I am Merennus. We come to bring justice to the darkness. You have fought well in the defence of the gate.’

‘Gate?’ Brennus said. But his voice emerged as a croaked whisper, and the warriors had already turned to the needs of the battle. They moved to the wall facing the Rotbringers. They towered over the ramparts. They raised magnificent bows whose strings were of searing blue light. They drew their weapons and awaited the command.

‘Judicators,’ Merennus said, ‘pronounce your judgement.’

As one, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer visited destruction on the bearers of plague.

The light. The thunder. The sudden host of warriors, their armour black yet gleaming with ghastly purity, sterile, an affront to the carnival of decay and life.

No, Bule thought.

He knew what he saw. He knew what these beings called themselves. They were Stormcast Eternals, and they were a rumour. He had heard of the struggles against them. He had dismissed the reports as lies. The gods of Chaos were triumphant. Sigmar was beaten, hiding behind his walls, trembling before the spread of the garden. The Stormcasts were lies propagated by Nurgle’s rivals and by warbands who refused to acknowledge the shame of their own defeats.

The Stormcast Eternals did not exist. This he had believed. This he had declared.

And now the myths attacked.

On the roof of the temple, armoured figures drew bows, but the arrows they loosed turned into lightning. The blasts incinerated tumour-bloated barbarians. Bule took a hit in the shoulder. It knocked him back. He snarled at the flames that shook his body. They burned brightly, attacking him with the purity that he strove to destroy with his every act, with his every breath.

‘Decimators to the fore!’ came a voice of doom from the tower. ‘Tear out the heart of the enemy! Liberators, lock shields! You are the marching wall! Crush all before you! Prosecutors, strike from the east and west! Teach the enemy to fear the skies and the wrath of Sigmar!’

And from ahead and from above, war as he had never known fell on Bule and his legion of plagues.

The lightning arrows continued to rain down. In the midst of the fury, Bule exchanged a look with Fistula. The blightlord’s eyes blazed. He nodded to Bule. They were united. The Rotbringers had fled one defeat, and now, still weakened, they faced an enemy fresh to the battlefield. This new war began with the odds against them. This was not the prey Bule had brought his band to hunt. This was a formidable opponent.

So be it.

There would be no retreat. Bule had seen, beyond the valley, the desert that came when Nurgle’s garden was uprooted. He would die to preserve the Grandfather’s gifts. And he would smash through any barrier, be it stone or metal or flesh, that stood between him and the call of his destiny.

He raised his axe high. He defied the lightning. He roared his joy of service to Nurgle, and of the fight for the glory of the garden. The warband echoed his cry. Barbarian marauders and knights of Chaos, vassals and lords, mortals and things transformed into shambling infections, all of them charged with the Lord of Plagues.

The enemy lines clashed, Bule’s mob of pestilence hurling itself against the perfect, shield-locked line of the warriors of light. Phalanxes of Stormcasts wielding huge thunderaxes cut into the mass of the Rotbringers. Bule hit the Stormcast before him with the full force of his bulk. The impact brought his enemy to a halt. The warrior swung his two-handed axe into Bule’s exposed flank. The blade cut deep through fat and muscle. Polyps burst. Rot surged through Bule’s flesh. It did not weaken him. It purged his body of the light. It gave him the strength of contagion. He laughed at the wound. He leaned into it, trapping the axe blade in the folds of his body. He brought his own axe down, shattering halo and helm. Beneath the metal face was a visage just as noble, but animated, snarling with its own fury. The Stormcast yanked his weapon free. Before he could strike again, Bule, still laughing, swung his axe sideways into his foe’s jaw. He cut the knight’s face in half. The warrior fell.

And then he and Grandfather Nurgle were robbed. He should have seen the body burst open with maggots and worms. It should have blackened with the proliferation of life, become a new mound for the garden. Instead, the corpse vanished, transformed into a blast of light. It shot from the ground. It cut through the clouds, and was gone.

These beings would not even die properly.

The falling night rang with the clash of blades and the shouts of combatants. Bule took down more Stormcasts, but their line remained unbroken. They tightened their ranks with each loss, and held the Rotbringers back from the temple’s foundations. The bowmen sent volleys of lightning into the rear ranks. Winged Stormcasts swooped out of the sky, their hammer bolts smashing into the flanks of the warband.

‘Break them!’ Bule shouted. ‘Loose the maggoth!’

The ground shook as, from the rear, the beast thundered forward, a huge mass of festering muscle and horns. It stamped into the Stormcasts with legs thick as tree trunks. Its arms were longer than its legs and batted the foes aside with broad claws. Its multi-forked tongue lashed out from a circular maw, grasping warriors in an armour-crushing grip. It lumbered into the line of Liberators, and broke the formation.

A Stormcast with a skull-faced helm cried out to the skies, and they answered. Lightning stabbed down at his command in a night-shattering, blinding maelstrom. The maggoth vanished, burned out of existence, and across the wide swatch of scorched earth, the Stormcasts surged forward once more, trampling Bule’s Rotbringers into the dead stone.

‘There is no retreat!’ Bule shouted. ‘There is only victory for Grandfather Nurgle!’ He wielded his axe with one hand. He spread his arms wide and grabbed two Stormcasts by the neck, yanking them from their shield formation. He used his massive bulk to immobilize them. He reached deep into the Plaguefather’s blessings. His strength was more than physical. He was disease made flesh. To see him was to sicken. To approach him was to die. He roared, and his voice was the vortex of contagion. His reach was enormous. He embraced his warband. He embraced the enemy. He grasped the length and breadth of the temple. In the ecstasy of his decay, he turned the air into a roiling mass of death.

His roar became the lead voice of a choir. It was joined by the shouts of his fellow Rotbringers, the ratcheting, coughing, gurgling cry of plague at war. The warband fought with greater ferocity. Each warrior’s own manifestations of disease blossomed, polluting the air even further. From inside the temple came the cries of the prey. The men and women who had been singing in praise now fell to coughing and spluttering. He could not reach their souls as his forces had with their earlier attack, but his grasp eroded their bodies. Skin turned slick. Lungs filled with fluid. Bones softened.

His assault hit the Stormcasts too. They shouted in defiance, but those near him weakened. They coughed. They staggered. The two he clutched sagged. When he released them, they clawed at their helms. Their movements were slowed, clumsy. One of them managed to pull his helm off. He gasped for air. His face was cratered. His tongue, swollen by layers of sores, filled his mouth. He could not breathe. Bule left him to suffocate. The prolonged death gave the Lord of Plagues the satisfaction of seeing a Stormcast rot before returning to the sky in that hateful light. He decapitated the other before wading in against the next, slamming his axe left and right, and at last he broke through the line.

The temple wall was only a few yards away, sealed and featureless. The route to his destiny was still blocked. The momentary triumph brought him no closer to his goal. A swarm of flies whined about him, calling and urging, but clarity eluded him.

In the moment of Bule’s hesitation, the leader of the Stormcasts leapt from the upper floor of the temple. His leap took him over his own men, and he fell to earth like a meteor. He broke the spine of a barbarian as he landed, causing the swollen marauder to burst open in a spray of pus. The Stormcast Eternal wielded a rune-marked blade and a hammer. He tore his way through the Rotbringers, gutting, severing heads, and chopping warriors down with a single blow. Three knights of Chaos charged him at once. The ground shook with their heavy steps. Their swollen, suppurating muscles expanded through the gaps in their spiked, filth-encrusted armour. They came in with halberds, axes and blades gripped in both hands. They swung with strength that had felled trees and infected entire cities.

Their blows never landed.

The Stormcast made a sweeping gesture. His cloak billowed as if caught in a wind of its own creation. Lightning and shadows clashed within. In a storm of gold as bright as the Lord-Celestant’s fury, a hail of spell hammers slammed into the knights. Amour exploded into fragments. The hammers pulverized limbs. They reduced torsos to jellied pulp. They punched through the skull of one knight and his body took two confused steps before the fact of its death sank in, and it collapsed.

Bule saw the tide of the battle turn again. The Stormcasts reformed their lines and moved to join their leader. They brought ruin to the Rotbringers between them. When the warriors met, their wedge would cut the warband in half.

The hammers of lighting came in volleys from above. The winged Stormcasts were besieging the Rotbringers, always beyond reach, beyond revenge.

Bule snarled. As the Stormcasts nearest him pulled back in order to create a more powerful formation, a fist to smash his forces, he started to pursue. But more of the enemy leapt from the upper floor of the temple to engage him. Three were on him. He welcomed them with rage. Let them gaze upon the three-eyed blankness of his helm. Let them see the mark of the fly, the mark of the Plaguefather.

And let them die.

He turned to drive his spiked pauldron up through a Stormcast’s gorget. The spike was as long as Bule’s forearm. The warrior choked, impaled through the throat, then up into the brain. Bule turned his gaze from the glare of the Stormcast’s dying light. He used his anger at the purifying burn to power his axe swing into the next warrior. He cut an enemy’s sword arm off at the shoulder. The third stabbed him in the gaping sore in his belly. The corruption of his organs hissed against the steel. This was no common blade. It burned him with a god’s anger, but his own god’s blessing reacted against the assault, keeping him alive on a foundation of plague. He slammed his axe into the Stormcast’s chest plate, hurling the warrior back. The sword slid out of his body. He pressed his advantage, blinded by pain, furious with determination. This battle was more than a struggle between two hosts. It was a war between gods.

Bule was willing to die for the glory of the garden. No matter the numbers of the Stormcasts, he would fight them, ripping them asunder with his bare hands if need be. If this was his final battle for Nurgle, he would make it a brutal one.

But no, not here. The conviction was too strong. The buzzing call was deafening. His duty was not to make a final stand. He must answer.

The call was not just coming from inside the temple. It was coming from below.

Bule looked beyond the Stormcast with which he wrestled to the left of the temple wall, at the polluted river. It flowed behind the temple, but part of the structure’s base extended into the water.

Flies clustered at that corner. The swarm took on a shape. There was the suggestion of robes. A hint of a hoe-shaped head with many eyes. A long, clawed hand pointed down, to where the river flowed beneath the tower.

Bule ran at the Stormcast. He wished the warrior could see his smile behind his helm. It was the smile of revelation. He collided with the Stormcast. The thunder of their impact shattered the air. The ebon-armoured knight drew his arm back and stabbed Bule again. Bule moved forward on the blade. His axe shattered the Stormcast’s mask. Corruption spread over the warrior’s face. Bule struck again, cleaving the hated visage in two. The Stormcast fell. Bule pulled the sword from his own gut. Steam rose from the blade and he hurled it into the night.

The path was clear to the river. Most of the combat had moved to Bule’s right as the Rotbringers sought to mob the Stormcasts’ wedge.

‘Hold them!’ Bule shouted to his army. ‘Destroy their illusions!’ He pointed to a group of knights and marauders nearest to him. ‘With me,’ he cried. ‘We go below!’

He ran for the river. It was blacker than the coming night. It was the sanctuary of life’s final degradation, unspoiled by the repulsive purity of the Stormcasts. Insects and worms squirmed in their millions over its surface. Its depths promised worse. They welcomed Bule as he plunged into them, closing over his head in a foetid embrace.

The water was thick with chunks of rotting matter. Its textures washed over him as he sank. It flooded his wounds with new parasites and infections. As he fell into the dark, he discovered it was not absolute. The glow of decomposition lit his way. In the wavering strands of green, he could just make out the black mass of the temple’s foundations.

He touched bottom, Fistula and the others following a few moments later. Already his lungs were straining. He took slow, heavy steps toward the wall. His boots disturbed the muck of decay. Bones, rags and heavy putrescence floated upward, wreathing him in a nimbus of greater filth. The sounds of battle filtered down through the water in muffled echoes.

Bule neared the wall, and it was all he could do to hold his breath, to not shout in exultation. There was an archway before him. He tried to run. Destiny was open to him. The call was so intense, he thought he could hear the buzzing of the flies underwater.

And even now, he did not know what called. He did not know what answer he must give.

He entered the archway. Now the darkness was complete. He was blind, yet his steps were sure. There was only one direction now. There were no barriers.

His lungs cried out for air. His head filled with the sounds of his body: the strange beats of his pulse, the bubbling in his blood, the wet rustling of flesh disintegrating and reforming in distorted configurations. The slowness of his movements turned the expectation of triumph into agony.

Then he found steps. He mounted them, rising into a sickly green aura again. At last he broke the surface. He drew the air into his lungs. It was close, stale and thick with spores. Bule found himself on the edge of a wide dais in the middle of a domed chamber. The curved walls and the dais dripped with fungi and lichen, which were the source of the glow. They were green-black, bulbous with disease and formed a carpet thick enough to distort the lines of the masonry. At the centre of the dais stood a high archway.

A gate. Bule approached it. He stared at it while Fistula and the others gathered on the dais. Flies circled it endlessly. The call had brought him here. This was his goal. But the gate was inert. There was no passage here. The buzz of whispers was the most insistent it had ever been, but even now they were not clear. He had no answer. Revelation was withheld.

‘Why have you brought us here?’ Fistula snarled. ‘There is no way up. All we have done is ensure our defeat.’

‘Destiny has brought us here,’ Bule said. ‘This was commanded.’

‘By whom?’

Bule didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Again, he felt that paradox: the command was not Nurgle’s, but if he served the master who called, he would not be betraying the Plaguefather. He might even be pleasing Nurgle.

There was no way through the confusion except forward.

Fistula was correct, though. There were no other exits from the chamber. There was no way of moving upward into the temple and turning the tide of the battle from the interior.

Yet this was where Bule was supposed to be. He examined the growths on the archway. They looked different from the rest. They were a pure, glistening black. No glow came from them. He reached out and his hand sank deep into their moist, fleshy texture. They were not fungi. They were naked tumours. They were the material of disease itself. The pure, unfiltered gifts of Nurgle.

They were inspiration.

New strands of pestilence ate into his flesh. They turned his blood to slime. He became their master. He was a Lord of Plagues, and he commanded his vassals to multiply.

To spread.

To march.

The garden of Nurgle exploded into voracious life. The black growths of the archway infected those on the dais, remaking them. Darkness poured from the gate. It spread over the waters. It rose up the walls. The green glow fell into the devouring corruption.

So did stone.

This concentration of disease was so virulent that its hunger surpassed flesh. Whatever could be eroded fell into its jaws. Bule willed it into the mortar. He sent it gnawing into the fissures in the stone, widening them, destroying structural integrity. His soul was a thing of uncounted hungers, and he would eat the temple.

Sigmar, Brennus thought. That was the name the divine warriors called out as they fought. They were not gods, as much as they appeared to be. They served Sigmar, and how resplendent must be his glory if these beings were his servants.

‘Sigmar!’ the warriors shouted as they cut into the Rotbringers with light and sword.

‘Sigmar!’ Brennus called too, and his fellows joined him. Many could not shout. They were too weak. Brennus could barely stand, but he leaned at the edge of the ramparts and he used his bow. Heccam was further gone, but with the coming of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, he had recovered his will to fight. He slumped against the wall. He could barely draw his bow. But he fought. And he whispered, ‘Sigmar.’

Disease wracked Brennus’ body, but he had hope. He believed in the defeat of the plague. When a portion of the Rotbringers had broken off and disappeared into the river, the struggle shifted decisively in favour of the Anvils. The evil would be vanquished. The land would be purged of the foulness. So would his body.

‘Sigmar!’ he called, and drew his bow.

The roof cracked. The tower trembled.

Brennus stumbled, his arrow flying wild. He clutched at the crenellation to keep from being pitched out to the ground below. Darkness seeped up. Tendrils of multiplying growths spread over the roof like talons. Dust burst from the walls. The sounds of breaking stone became deafening. The tower shook harder. It groaned. The temple was diseased, and it was dying.

The blackness shrouded Brennus in a cloud of jagged flakes. His throat and eyes were on fire. Breathing felt like drowning.

The Anvils of the Heldenhammer remained in their positions. They unleashed their lightning on the Rotbringers. But their bolts dimmed. The darkness spread up their legs, the black of corruption seeking to cover the gleaming black of retribution.

Tendrils became talons. Talons became tentacles. They uncoiled from the tower and reached into the land. Perfect putrescence covered the battlefield. The Rotbringers rejoiced. They fell upon the Anvils with renewed fervour, propelled by the wave of unleashed plague.

‘Sigmar,’ Brennus croaked. He had found his light in the darkness. He would not release it. He would have this victory until the end.

The temple shuddered. It swayed. The blackness closed its fist completely around the tower. All that remained was for the grasp to close, and crush everything.

‘Sigmar.’ A desperate whisper against the night.

But then a great shout…

‘SIGMAR!’ The Anvils of the Heldenhammer roared at the night, and though Brennus could see nothing, he could hear a still more ferocious clash of arms.

And he knew that where the Anvils fought, the monsters could be defeated.

He was fuelled by a power far beyond his own. Bule felt the tower and the land contained in his hands. They were his to turn into the most perfect flowering. He had tended Nurgle’s Garden faithfully, and now he would make it bloom through the heart and bones of the enemy. The strength of a thousand plagues was his. He was the plague.

The dark was complete. The light was gone from the temple. His power reached its apex. And in that moment of completion, something else was accomplished.

The gate sprang to life.

The centre flashed. It twisted and coiled. Paths opened before him. He saw them with the myriad eyes of insects, a compound vision of choices. One choice dominated all others. It came into being with the activation of the gate. The power he held had opened the way, and now he must pass through or bring the temple down.

Behind him, the other Rotbringers were shouting victory as the walls shuddered.

‘Drop the walls!’ Fistula shouted. ‘Crush the lightning men!’

But Bule heard the call again, and it came from the other side of the gate. Archaon awaited.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Fistula demanded.

‘Archaon…’ Bule whispered. Louder, he said, ‘We pass through the gate.’

‘And leave the field again?’ Fistula was outraged.

Yes, Bule thought. They would leave. ‘Yes!’ he shouted. ‘Archaon calls!’

He stared at the path through the gate. It flickered. It led into a grey void. A cold wind blew in Bule’s face. It felt like emptiness, like the wail of the tomb. There was no garden at the end of this path. There would be nothing to cultivate. The call demanded he step away from any recognisable trace of Grandfather Nurgle’s dominion.

He made his decision. I will go, he thought.

The passage exploded with swarms of hungry flies. A welcome.

Bule looked back at Fistula and the rest of his warriors. His chosen few, he saw now, much as he had been chosen. ‘We do not abandon the field,’ he said. ‘We march to a grander one. A magnificent flowering.’

He entered the gate, abandoning the temple to its illusion of hope. Let the Stormcast Eternals triumph here. How meaningless that victory would be. How bitter it would taste for them when he returned.

When they and all their kind would learn what he had become.

The Trial of the Chosen

Under purple skies flickering with far-away storms brooded a vast desert the horizon could not contain.

Its sands appeared coarse, greyish in colour, but closer inspection revealed them not to be sand at all, but crushed bone. In some of the smaller pieces the delicate lattice of desiccated marrow was visible, clinging to sharp-edged shards. The larger fragments were recognisable as the knobbed heads of femurs or curved portions of skull, like pebbles and stones. Few people ever saw the desert and fewer still lived to tell the tale. The realm of Shyish abounds with lands that do not take kindly to the presence of the living. The Bone Sands were among them.

Unlike in a mortal desert, there were no traces of any living creature; no mummified plants awaiting the next rain, no tracks in the rough sand to hint at small creatures eking out a life. There was bone, and more bone, and nothing else, for league after league until the purple sky and grey sand touched at the edge of sight.

But the Bone Sands were not quite empty.

At the very centre was a monumental archway. Though huge, it cast no shadow in the directionless gloom. Two giant plinths stood either side, as tall as towers, their sides covered in bas reliefs depicting the bloodless wars of the dead, still crisp after aeons in the changeless desert. Atop the plinths waited a pair of giant necrosphinxes, facing each other across the broken bones cluttering the ground. The statues were massive beasts of stone and metal with men’s torsos atop lions’ bodies, barbed scorpions’ tails, outstretched wings and twin blade shields on their arms. The statues held their bladed limbs forward to point at one another, forming a lesser arch under which a traveller had to pass on entering or exiting the greater.

The sphinxes were huge, but the gate was bigger. Stacked vertebrae threaded onto green copper rods made the posts of the archway, curving together like monstrous tusks. The bones at the base of the columns were the size of buildings. Those at the apex were tiny, stolen from dead animals of the fields and hedgerows of distant lands. Many of the bones had crumbled. The left column leaned a little because of this erosion, but the structure held and the distortion robbed the edifice of none of its power.

The desert around the gate had a vital tension entirely lacking from the rest. The feeling of magic was strong there, and perhaps it was for this reason that the arch was surrounded by generous heaps of skeletons. All lay face down, their outstretched arms reaching for the arch. They were piled around the base of the plinths, and cluttered the span of the gateway three deep. Examples of all the strange races of the Eight Realms could be found, for all things that die find their way to the underworlds of Shyish in the end.

Pitted weapons were tangled with bones. Brittle cloth was draped over fleshless limbs, ready to vanish into threads and dust at the slightest touch of the desert’s rare winds. Banners were planted in the ground, leaning drunkenly, all colour leached from their blazons. Shields of every conceivable kind hid their designs under the bones of their bearers.

A thing walked out of thin air, growing from ethereality to solidity in the space of five long steps. It was a curious creature, with arms and legs so thin it should not have had the strength to move, but it walked with energetic purpose, its staff clacking down onto the bones with every decisive step. Its long cloak of fluttering eyes stirred the dust into lazy whorls that settled slowly.

This was the Many-Eyed Servant, agent of Tzeentch, but now unwilling vassal of Archaon.

It came to a halt fifty yards before the arch. The aura surrounding everything there – bones, gate and guardians – revealed itself to the sorcerer’s supernatural vision as a deep purple. Very rarely was one colour of magic so clearly presented, and the sorcerer stopped to admire its patterns. The creature remained in contemplation until the weight of its enslavement became palpable, invisible chains of sorcery binding it to the Everchosen’s will. The Many-Eyed Servant became uncomfortable. Archaon saw all, and he was impatient. If the Many-Eyed Servant was not swift, it would be punished.

The Many-Eyed Servant set to work. With keen magesight it pinpointed the parts of the gate that had to be charged with magic. This realmgate had long been dormant, locked and barred by parties unknown through the long centuries of the Age of Chaos.

The Many-Eyed Servant gripped its staff with reedy fingers and raised it over its hoe-shaped head. The line of eyes that crested its face closed in concentration. It began to chant.

It was a powerful sorcerer, and so its magic took effect rapidly. Power blazed from the ends of its staff in braided torrents that unfurled into individual tendrils of lightning, each striking at the gate columns’ vertebrae. They skittered about, probing for the points the Many-Eyed Servant’s magic required. Finding them, the lightning rooted itself in the bone, joining gate to sorcerer. The space between was quickly filled with jumping, arcing currents of yellow, blue and purple. The gateway vertebrae shifted on their copper supports, flexing like trees in a storm. Hidden runes carved into the bone revealed themselves in blazing colours.

The gate glimmered, the air framed by the arch growing thick with light, blurring the vista behind it, then turning opaque.

The Many-Eyed Servant cried out in pain from the magic coursing through it and in exhilaration of its mastery over the energy. Slamming its staff down, it uttered a deafening word of power. The lightning ceased. A blast of energy emanated from the base of the staff, sending a shock wave out across the plain that whipped up an expanding circle of dust and sent it racing towards every horizon. The Bone Sands moaned, a sound akin to the last breath expelled from the lungs of a corpse.

The staff remained embedded in the bony ground, quivering with potency. The Many-Eyed Servant lifted its hands, placed them back to back, and pushed them wide as if it were parting a curtain.

With a silken tearing sound, the realmgate opened onto another world. Some difference in the atmospheres caused an imbalance in the wind, and a gust of tomb-dry air blasted out from the desert, exchanged for the brief, moist scents of leaf mould and animals. The Many-Eyed Servant looked through onto a broad rise of forested mountains somewhere in the realm of Ghur. Men knelt on the other side, two hundred huge killers warped by the power of Khorne, a pair of chained khorgoraths in their midst. The Bloodslaves had been praying to their god to open the way, but as the gate opened they stood. They hefted their weapons and looked suspiciously through into the world beyond. The slaughterpriest Orto, the blood warrior Skull, Danavan Vuul the bloodstoker and the taciturn skullgrinder Kordos, smith of Khorne, who rarely deigned to speak to mortal men, all looked on. These were the leaders of the Bloodslaves, and they gathered around their lord, Ushkar Mir, another silent killer, although unlike Kordos his silence was not by choice. Mir was taller than a man ever should be, massively muscled, his burn-scarred head bound with a tight ring of brass that covered his eyes. The runes stamped into the band were dark for the moment.

‘The way is open! Khorne gives to those who take! Onwards to battle,’ shouted their priest. The Many-Eyed Servant winced at his bellowing. So obnoxious, the priests of Khorne. It pained the sorcerer to make use of such crude pawns.

Ignorant of the sorcerer that had opened the way, Orto lifted his double-handed axe in one fist and pointed it into the bone desert.

The Bloodslaves moved forward with a rattling of armour. They stank of blood and sweat, their beards were stiff with gore, and their filed teeth were yellow. Eyes wild with rage and desperation looked right at the Many-Eyed Servant, but they did not see it. The Many-Eyed Servant was visible only to those it allowed to see.

Mir rumbled a soundless warning and held his hand up. His men stopped.

‘See, my lord!’ said Skull eagerly. His blood-and-blue marbled face was full of triumph. One day this warrior might be a danger, thought the Many-Eyed Servant, but that was a concern for another time. ‘Why do we wait? Khorne has provided!’

Ushkar Mir stared into the Realm of Death. In his head the call of Archaon rang loud. The Many-Eyed Servant could hear it too. For each of the champions it was different; for Mir it was the brazen blare of harsh trumpets and the cries of angry daemons.

The Bloodslaves looked to Ushkar Mir expectantly. For five minutes he stood, before moving without warning straight towards the gate. The Bloodslaves followed unhesitatingly.

They stepped from lush turf to dusty plain in a single step, leaving one realm for another, their boots crunching on shattered bones as they passed into Shyish.

‘Is this the land of Khorne?’ asked one. He kicked a skull from the shoulders of a skeleton. ‘There are many skulls here.’

The khorgoraths sniffed at the bones, but quickly withdrew and mewled. Crumbling bone had no interest for them, and they were hungry.

To the Many-Eyed Servant, the Bloodslaves’ disappointment was obvious. They were wary. This was not the warrior’s welcome they expected Archaon to lavish on them.

‘No,’ growled Orto. ‘Fool! This is Shyish, the Realm of Death. These are bones stolen by the Lord of Death from the Lord of Fury. This is an unholy place.’

‘But where in Shyish?’ asked Skull thoughtfully.

‘Who knows?’ said Orto. His nostrils flared, sniffing at the wind. ‘Shyish is a million underworlds, with ten deaths for every mortal in each.’ He snorted and spat bloody phlegm onto the bones. ‘Khorne will rule it all. It is his right. This is the start.’

Such confidence, such naivety, thought the Many-Eyed Servant.

It was then that the sorcerer chose to be seen, although not in its favoured form. It drew the shape of another over its being and manifested. The champion’s test had begun.

A stirring of dust fifty feet from the gate caught Skull’s eye. He patted Mir’s massive bicep and pointed as the disturbance grew to a tiny whirlwind. Mir looked with his Khorne-given blindsight and saw fragments of bone leaping up from the ground. To Mir’s eyeless vision, the maelstrom was surrounded by flickering fires of magic. He growled and drew the axes Bloodspite and Skullthief. They howled, eager to prove themselves against weakling sorcery.

The whirl of dust grew until a column writhed before Mir. Then it abruptly stilled, what little fragments were carried on its currents pattering to the floor. In its stead stood the skeleton of a man, garbed in the ancient panoply of war, a spiked helmet on its skull, a visor covering its face and ragged robes about its legs. A dull steel sword hung at its side.

Skull took a step. Orto moved forward, axe up. Mir stayed them with the flats of his axes.

The skeletal warrior lifted up its hands to its head and removed the helm, revealing a bony face set with five eye sockets. In each one a lidless eye glistened.

‘What is this?’ asked Skull. He loosened his sword in his scabbard. The Bloodslaves drew around their leader, fear tainting their divine fury.

‘Ushkar Mir hears the call of the Grand Marshal of Ruin!’ pronounced Orto. ‘He comes to serve him!’

The skeleton remained silent.

‘Who are you?’ said Skull. ‘Answer, or I will add your malformed head to Khorne’s bone piles.’

‘It is a test,’ growled Kordos, speaking for the first time in weeks. ‘One does not walk into the camp of Archaon. Mir must prove himself worthy.’

‘Where is he? What do you know of Archaon?’ demanded Skull. But Kordos said no more.

‘Ushkar Mir is worthy,’ said Orto. He clacked his sharpened teeth at the skeleton in challenge.

‘None are worthy until they have proven themselves,’ said Danavan Vuul. ‘A simple truth.’

‘Pah! Let us cut this corpse thing down,’ said Orto. ‘Let us gather fresh skulls for Khorne. Who cares for the glory of Archaon, when Khorne’s hunger is never sated?’

‘Khorne’s fires are not what Mir desires,’ said Skull.

Orto looked at Mir uncertainly. He was still not comfortable with Mir’s blasphemous desire to challenge Khorne, and yet his might was undisputable, as was Khorne’s favour of him.

‘Kordos spoke of tests. Who will set them?’ asked Skull. ‘This creature?’

‘Khorne sets all tests for Mir,’ said Orto.

‘Archaon serves all the four powers,’ said Vuul. ‘We must be wary.’

‘A test of the gods then,’ said Skull. ‘Four in number.’

‘We should attack! Kill it again.’ Orto advanced. Mir motioned again for him to hold. Orto did so reluctantly.

That will be the way, thought Mir. The creature sports many eyes, as did the herald I saw in the sky. He struggled to keep his thoughts straight against the rage of Khorne. The red haze in him thickened daily. He must not forget who he was. Four tests it would be – one for each of the gods. To serve Archaon will aid me, he thought. I will brave these tests. No matter the outcome, there will be bloodletting, and that will take me closer toward my vengeance.

Mir nodded to the skeleton. It inclined its head in response.

‘Mir has accepted the challenge,’ said Orto. ‘Praise be to Khorne.’

‘Stand ready!’ said Skull. He drew his sword and the warriors of the Bloodslaves raised their weapons in response.

Ushkar Mir saw. In his blindsight he saw a dread purple glow creeping across the desert ground, gathering about the skeletons lying there. It was strongest around the great statues guarding the gate.

The first test begins, he thought.

A creak of metal, so loud in that endless silence, made the Bloodslaves start.

The purple light of death magic was strong enough now to be seen by mortal eyes, glowing from every skull. Suddenly the Bloodslaves began slashing downward, smashing bony hands that were stretching out to grasp their ankles and stamping ancient skulls to fragments.

A great host of the dead was clambering up all around them. A bloodreaver went down, bellowing out glory to Khorne as he was torn to pieces by raking fingers.

The worst was yet to come. Mir pointed and growled a warning. The eyes of the necrosphinxes glared with amethyst magic. With the grinding of stone muscles, they turned their heads to look upon the trespassers. At their awakening, the skeletal warriors presented arms, adopting attack positions. The dust of ages poured off the statues as they stepped down from their plinths, revealing skin of black stone and the dull bronze of their mighty weapons. The ring of dead warriors surrounding the Bloodslaves parted noisily to let the sphinxes through, closing ranks once the beasts had trodden heavily past. The Bloodslaves waited uncertainly, brandishing their axes and cursing the silent dead.

Mir did not wait for the attack. Roaring loudly, he shoved his way through his own men and ploughed into the skeleton horde.

‘Skulls! Skulls for Khorne!’ yelled Orto, and the Bloodslaves followed their master.

Sightless eyes tracked axe swings. Skeletons dodged and parried with all the alacrity of the living. This was the Realm of Death, and its servants were strong there. The Bloodslaves roared out their cries to Khorne, but the skeletons fought soundlessly, having no voices with which to speak. They moved mechanically fast, their ancient weapons ringing from dark iron, bones clacking a rapid tattoo.

The Bloodslaves split, each of them heading into a different part of the undead army – all save Skull, who was ever by Mir’s side. Orto went at the head of a phalanx of blood warriors, sweeping his giant axe through brittle ribcages. Kordos strode on alone, his flaming anvil roaring through the air on its chains as he swung it around his head. Every pass decimated the skeletons, shattering them into burning flinders of bone.

Mir made straight for the sphinxes and attacked one head on while the other ploughed into the body of his warband. Though huge and fashioned from stone, they too moved quickly, slicing their arm-blades through the air at such speed that they blurred. The wind of their passing stirred Mir’s fire-scorched hair. He leaned backward, barely evading the cutting edge. Mir swung Skullthief at the living statue’s leg, seeking to cripple it, but the great blade attached to its left fist swept the blow aside and its scorpion tail stabbed down, the gems on it glowing with evil magic.

Mir dodged the sting, and the tail smashed into the carpet of bones on the ground. He swung Bloodspite around with all his considerable might. The daemon axe crashed through the enchanted stone of the tail. The tip came away, and the tail whipped back. The face of the sphinx was an expressionless mask, but it reared up in response to the wound. Its broad lion’s feet pawed at the air before stamping down in an attempt to crush the life from the Chaos warlord. He spun aside, axes whipping round. Bloodspite shrilled in excitement as it bit a chunk of onyx from the left foreleg. Cracks spread from the impact. Mir followed with a hit from Skullthief, and the cracks widened. Splinters of stone sprayed outward and the leg came free, falling to the ground and smashing more of the bones there. The sphinx staggered back, its remaining forepaw thumping down heavily. It limped around on three legs, the veins of minerals in its shattered limb bleeding magic.

Mir attacked again. Deflecting the axe unbalanced the sphinx, and Mir leapt high over the construct’s sweeping blades, twisting his back and body to clear them by inches. He landed on the other side. The crippled necrosphinx staggered around, but Ushkar Mir was already clambering up the decorative bronze-work studding its hide. The creature’s human torso twisted around, but it could not bring its arms, bound as they were into its blades, to bear on Mir.

Howling madly, Mir drew both axes back to his right and swung them together at the creature’s neck. Their supernatural blades cut through the bronze like paper, and clove deep into the stone.

The necrosphinx went rigid and its head toppled from its shoulders. Mir leapt from its back as it fell over onto its side, now only a defaced statue, metal bending and stone limbs cracking free as it crashed down.

The second necrosphinx was in the thick of Mir’s warriors. They attacked from all sides, their weapons marking its smoothly polished hide with chalky scratches, but they could not bring it down. Seeing an opening, Vuul whipped the khorgoraths into the attack. Both took long, deep wounds from the animated statue’s blades, but they did not fall. Driven to greater heights of fury by the bloodstoker’s expert goading, they grappled with the sphinx, holding its arms in place while the rest of the warband laid about it with their weapons. Orto hacked at its back leg, taking chips from the stone with his two-handed axe.

One of the khorgoraths roared, wrenching off the blades from the construct’s stone arm with a squeal of rending metal. The sphinx lashed out with its fist, slashing the khorgorath’s hide with the twisted remnants of its weapon. The khorgorath bit down hard, shattering its own teeth on the arm, but crushing stone nevertheless, and the arm came away.

Mir moved in for the kill, pounding through the swirling melee. He smashed into the side of the necrosphinx, battering at its side with his daemon axes. He howled as his rage was stoked higher by Khorne and the runes in his punishment band burned. Stone chips flew and cracks ran all over the statue’s sides. His followers joined him, jabbing weapons into the crevices Bloodspite and Skullthief had opened up and levering them wider.

Vuul goaded the khorgoraths, manoeuvring one into position on the far side of the statue to Mir while the other hung off the sphinx’s remaining arm. The poisonous tail of the necrosphinx stabbed down, the bronze barb plunging deep into the khorgorath’s back. The crystal bulb on the tail pulsed, and the poison drained away, pumping into the twisted Khornate beast. Bellowing, the khorgorath raised its fists and pummelled at the statue’s back, ripping open its own skin on spined armour as it tore it from its mounts, exposing the fixing pins beneath. Three times the khorgorath’s fists pounded down, each blow weaker than the last. Mir and the Bloodslaves hacked away at the living stone on the other side. Then the khorgorath’s fists descended a final time, and the statue shattered into two pieces joined only by twisted trails of wire.

Its unnatural life left it instantly.

Around the gate the battle was nearly done. The last few skeletons fell under heavy axe blades. Silence returned to the Bone Sands.

The five-eyed skeleton alone remained. Its glistening eyeballs rolled in their sockets in different directions as it took in the aftermath of battle.

Skull leaned panting on his sword hilt not far from Mir. ‘The first test. Fury for Khorne. What is the nature of the second?’

The skeleton raised one hand and pointed. Whether north, east, west or south had any meaning in this realm was unknown to the Bloodslaves, but the purple glow of the sky was brighter in that direction.

The skeleton herald collapsed into the bone carpeting the floor.

Skull turned over its head with a foot, revealing five eye sockets full of dripping ooze. ‘I don’t trust this,’ he said.

Mir grunted. A soft wind whispered over newly shattered bone. Behind him, the poisoned khorgorath was choking out its last painful breaths. The other plodded around the field, stuffing dry skulls into its maw and lowing mournfully, perhaps for the lack of meat to savour, perhaps in sadness for its companion.

‘Ushkar Mir brings us victory!’ shouted Orto. His loud voice was immediately swallowed by the dry vastness of the desert, and the slaughterpriest looked dismayed for a moment.

‘A hard victory,’ said Vuul. He looked at the dying beast. With a last rattling moan, it expired.

Many Bloodslaves had died on the march to the gate. Two dozen at least had fallen to ancient blades here. There had been two thousand Bloodslaves only months ago. Less than a tenth remained.

‘Mir leads us. What does Mir command?’ asked Skull.

Ushkar Mir grunted and pointed with his chin to the lighter patch of sky.

‘Onward, then,’ said Skull. He plucked his sword from the dry earth, and sheathed it. ‘More skulls await, though precious little blood in this dusty place.’

If a sun shone over the Bone Sands, it was forever hidden by louring clouds. There was a day and a night of sorts, but the cycle played inconstantly. A day might last ten hours, or one. The land never grew any brighter than when they had first arrived, and the nights were utterly black, starless and frigid. The Bloodslaves’ lips blued and they shivered in the chill. They had nothing to burn and nothing to hunt. Each man carried only scanty provisions. There was no change to the relentless landscape. Horizons receded before their march to reveal yet more endless flat land, its featurelessness broken only by isolated skulls or ribcages that had escaped the attentions of time.

All save Kordos felt the punishments of thirst and hunger. The skullgrinder was sustained by the unholy fires of his chained altar.

By the end of the third day, their meat and drink had been exhausted.

The Bloodslaves’ confident march became halting. They dragged their weapons through the dust, leaving wavering trails behind them.

On the fifth night, the Bloodslaves fell on the weakest among them.

Darkness came suddenly. They huddled together as close as they dared as the temperature plummeted. Some instinct took a sole bloodreaver away from the rest. One too many hungry glances in his direction, maybe. He sat crosslegged, his hands on his weapons, but he could not defeat sleep. He had had no rest for days. No power can keep man from rest forever, unless he is highly favoured by the Four.

Three men attacked as soon as the drowsy bloodreaver’s head nodded onto his chest. He was up quickly at the sound of their approach. He desperately dispatched one of his attackers, but if he had hoped that this provision of unlooked for meat would save his life, he had been mistaken. He had been marked for death, and in that realm death did not relent.

Skull, Vuul, Mir, Orto and Kordos watched as the bloodreaver was killed. The warrior’s axe halted a blow aimed overhand for the crown of his head, but he had nothing to stop the knife that one of his erstwhile comrades plunged up under his ribs, piercing his heart. He fell dead instantly – a mercy. The Bloodslaves were not above eating their victims alive.

‘Fresh meat!’ rumbled Orto. The brassiness of his god-voice was diminished by thirst, and the desert was quicker to steal it the further they went into it.

‘Aye,’ said Skull. ‘We eat, but there are fewer of us.’

‘The weak perish,’ hissed Vuul. His lips dripped at thought of the feast. He wiped them on the back of his arm.

‘That they do,’ said Skull. ‘But there can only be one who is strongest. Do we devour each other until he remains, then starves himself?’ He half drew his sword, then slammed it back into its scabbard.

The rest of the band gathered around the corpses of the bloodreaver and his felled killer. They waited, glassy-eyed with hunger, as the bodies were stripped. Two skullreapers hoisted the slain bloodreaver up by his ankles. A third crouched and slit the throat. Life fluid drained from the cut neck, splattering on the dust.

‘Meat for us, blood for Khorne,’ said Orto, his voice growing stronger at the sight of the blood.

‘Meat! Khorne provides!’ responded the others.

They cut their dead comrade’s head free.

‘Skulls for Khorne!’ shouted Orto.

‘Skulls! Skulls! Skulls!’ howled the others.

‘No,’ a voice boomed across the desert. The Bloodslaves looked around fearfully.

‘Look!’ cried one. He pointed at the ground, and they all stepped back. Where the blood wetted the bone dust it bubbled and hissed.

They readied their weapons. A figure rose from the ground, slathered in blood at first, but the fluid froze and cracked away to reveal a greenly glowing phantom within. Its ghostly eyes were blank orbs and its face bore no expression, but its mouth jerked to a will not its own.

‘This land belongs to Lord Nagash. All who perish are his,’ spoke the phantom.

Spectres arose from the ground all around the Bloodslaves and flew over to spiral around the first, making a terrible shrieking that had the Bloodslaves clapping their hands over their ears.

‘No!’ shouted Orto. ‘These skulls are Khorne’s! Begone!’

Three skullreapers lunged for the spirit. Their twin blades slashed the air, cutting nothing. The spirits moved around them like weeds disturbed in water, swirling about but never snagging. Their eyes grew brighter and they shrieked, diving down on the Bloodslaves. Their touch was death. Ethereal claws slid into chests and men’s eyes bulged as their hearts stopped. The Bloodslaves were brave and fired by the righteous wrath of Khorne, but against a foe that no weapon could touch they began to waver. The remaining khorgorath moaned, batting at the untouchable spirits as their hands caressed its warped flesh, leaving blackened trails of necrotic tissue in their wake. One swooped low, scooping up the half-flayed head of the slain bloodreaver, and started to retreat.

Mir had no fear of the spirit host. His men drew strength from his example, forming up as best they could around him as he strode into the thick of the spirits. Skullthief and Bloodspite hissed through the air. The daemons within whined at the touch of the dead, for they were of fire and hate and the coldness of the grave was unpleasant to them, but Mir forced them to strike. Wherever the axes fell, the spirits dissipated into shreds of vapour that were sucked screaming into the blades. They tried to flee, what little was left of their mortal souls terrified of the deathbringer’s axes, but they all fell to Mir and were consumed. He pursued the last, that which had stolen the skull of the bloodreaver, and hewed it from the air. Orto plucked the head from the dust and brandished it triumphantly.

Only the first phantom remained. It turned doleful white eyes on the deathbringer. Once again, its mouth seemed puppeted by some distant, malign entity.

‘You shall suffer for this insult. These are the lands of death!’

With a mighty cry it departed, shooting skyward as a pillar of green light. Where it hit the clouds above there was a flaring, and a single peal of thunder boomed across the sky. It echoed across the desert for an age.

‘Khorne’s meat! Khorne’s blood!’ shouted Orto.

There were many corpses now, thanks to the spirits’ attack.

‘We feast! To victory! To Mir!’ bellowed Orto.

‘Ushkar Mir! Khorne! Blood and flesh!’ The Bloodslaves cheered and drew their knives, advancing hungrily on their dead.

From nowhere, a sudden wind blew, dry but laden with the scent of slow putrefaction, whipping hair into eyes and choking the men with whirling dust. The Bloodslaves’ looks of anticipation turned to horror and woe, for the corpses withered in front of their eyes. Skin turned grey and flesh wizened. Lips drew back in hideous black grins. The bodies of the fallen dried to husks in an instant. Their skeletons collapsed to the ground where they fell into brittle pieces, as ancient in appearance as the bones they joined. Most were reduced to a powder that was carried away by the fell wind.

A few corpses held together, scraps of dried flesh adhering to their bones. Two bloodreavers, one desperate in his hunger, the other disdainful of the magic of the dead, tore off strips of this matter. It was tough, leathery as jerky. They worked their mouths on it hard, the hungry man fearful, the other laughing in his boldness.

They died choking on the flesh of their fallen brethren. Black lines ran over their skin, a map of corruption depicted by tainted veins. They fell, fingers scrabbling at the ground.

The Bloodslaves watched nervously. The wind did not return, and the bodies remained whole, but they did not eat these last casualties. Nor did they attempt to slaughter one of their own again. The servants of Khorne had learned wary respect for Nagash’s domain.

‘Onward,’ croaked Skull.

The Bloodslaves’ ranks thinned further as they succumbed to thirst. At first those falling listlessly were the weaker bloodreavers, but it was not long before the blood warriors started to drop, then even the mighty skullreapers, whose Khorne-given might availed them not against the harshness of the desert. Still the Bloodslaves followed Mir, who was fixed single-mindedly on the call of Archaon. Always it sounded in his ears, sometimes so faint he had to strain to hear it, at other times blaring so loudly in the night that all his followers heard it. Orto exhorted them to go on, while Skull whispered terror into their ears. Kordos said nothing.

One pale morning, the last khorgorath left them. As the Bloodslaves twitched awake from dreams of corpse banquets, the beast consumed the skulls of four warriors dead of thirst in the night. Ordinarily the creature would have continued its snuffling after fresh skulls to devour, whimpering at the endless pain that dogged it. Not this time.

The last skull eaten, the khorgorath stood erect, head held high and eyes wide. It came out of some stupor, for it gazed around the warband as if seeing it for the first time. It took up the chains that hobbled it in paws that had mutated into snapping mouths. Weighing them for a moment, it tugged hard, then wrenched, until it had split them asunder.

‘The beast!’ hissed Skull, kicking the bloodstoker, Vuul. ‘It is loose! Use your whip! Do something!’

Vuul looked up, startled.

‘Catch it!’ roared Orto. ‘Stop it from escaping!’

Several warriors advanced on it, grabbing at its manacles, but the khorgorath was indifferent to their efforts. It walked away, dragging the men that would not let go behind it and swatting at those who attempted to bar its progress.

Ushkar Mir reached for his axes, but the pudgy, calloused hands of Danavan Vuul stopped him.

‘No my lord, it cannot be stopped,’ he said. ‘Orto! Skull! Do not stand in its way.’

The others faltered, looking to Mir. Mir nodded that they should obey. The men got out of the beast’s path.

‘It has eaten its fill of skulls,’ explained Vuul. ‘Now it must return to the Lord Khorne and vomit them at his feet. Later it will return to the Mortal Realms. Maybe it will come back to us, maybe not.’

‘Let us hope,’ said Skull, rejoining his lord.

Orto stood at the edge of the crowd and watched the khorgorath go, then his long, mutated legs brought him back to the side of the deathbringer and bloodstoker. ‘It is true. It is the sacrament of beasts. As we smash skulls upon Kordos’ anvil, or stack them into cairns so that they might be taken up by Khorne, the khorgorath has its own way of honouring the Blood God.’

‘You should have prevented it from feasting!’ said Skull. ‘That is a sore loss.’

Vuul shrugged. ‘I kept watch upon it and my whip kept it from consuming too many skulls. Who else took upon themselves this duty? I am no beastmaster. If it is time for it to depart, then that is as Khorne wishes. The khorgoraths are his creatures.’

‘It is the will of Khorne,’ agreed Orto. ‘Do not question it.’

They watched the Khorgorath plod away from the warband. The desert air was clear, and even after they took up their march again in the opposite direction, the khorgorath could be seen as a dark shape far away, until a flash of fiery light carried it away from the Bone Sands and the realm of Shyish.

‘It is still a sore loss,’ spat Skull.

The twelfth day came. Armoured corpses marked the Bloodslaves’ trail as far as the horizon, lonely metal islands in the bone dust. Above, the clouds cleared a little, finally revealing glimpses of a dim, purple sun. When it shone, the desert turned violet and made their eyes ache. There was no change to the desert until Skull stopped and raised his hand to shield his eyes against the glaring sky. He caught Mir’s wrist.

‘My lord! Look!’

Some distance away there was an irregularity on the horizon. The Bloodslaves picked up their pace, staggering and half dead though they were, desperate for something other than ceaseless dust and bone to look upon.

Giant stone skulls were set in a circle facing outward. The spaces between them were tangled with a thicket of black-leaved thorns. As they grew nearer, the tell-tale glint of water shone.

‘An oasis!’ they cried. ‘Water!’

They jogged toward the oasis, many abandoning their weapons and throwing themselves at the bushes to get at the pool they guarded. Thumb-sized spikes of wood tore at their skin as they fought their way through. Others, more circumspect, hacked at the branches with axe and sword.

Mir marched up and swung Bloodspite at the bush.

‘I am no woodsman’s axe, to cut back the weeds!’ protested the weapon. ‘I am the chosen killer of Khorne!’

Down Bloodspite came anyway, forced to do Mir’s will. Where it cut into the tangle, the thorn bushes curled back, shrinking away like paper from fire. In a moment, the way was clear and the Bloodslaves were through. A silver-grey pool awaited, as still as a mirror. Mir’s men bounced from his back as they struggled past him, throwing themselves at the water. Mir watched them.

‘Stop! Stop!’ shouted Orto, his commanding voice ruined by thirst. He went to the men and pulled them from the water’s edge, but those there did not heed him and drank deeply. ‘This land is cursed!’

The men started to cry out. Those not yet at the water backed away cautiously as several of their comrades were afflicted by wracking pain. They splashed around in the water, crying for mercy and gripping at their heads.

Flesh convulsed and warped, limbs withered, and new ones sprang in profusion from backs bent into fantastical shapes. One man screamed as his bones tore themselves from his skin, the bloody skeleton running laughing into the desert, leaving the man’s soft parts behind as a heaving mess. Another lit up with blue flames that did not consume him as they burned, and the bloodreaver writhed and screamed until Orto cut off his head. The rest mutated rapidly, dying as their hearts gave out under the strain.

Orto pointed into the oily water. Green light pulsed in the depths.

‘Warpstone. This oasis is poisoned.’

There was a crack of thunder and a smell of brimstone. Over the water the messenger of Archaon appeared.

It was the same being as before, but in a different form, one assembled from other remains. The eyes were the same, nestling moistly in a skull ten thousand years dry, but the skull was different, as were the clothes and the rest.

‘New bones for our examiner,’ croaked Skull. ‘Why does it show itself now? Is it another test?’

‘I say Mir has completed three,’ said Orto. ‘Fury for Khorne, endurance for Nurgle,’ he looked at the shivering remains of the mutated Bloodslaves, ‘and restraint for the Dark Prince.’

‘You guess. These tests could go on forever,’ said Vuul.

Skull scowled at him. ‘You were vocal in your support for Lord Ushkar Mir.’

‘That was then, this is now. This gambit offers no reward. The call of Archaon could be false.’

‘It is not false.’ Skull pointed back at the desert. ‘If you are unhappy, leave. My lord is ready for the fourth test,’ said Skull.

‘Then what is it?’ snapped Vuul.

The skeleton responded by pointing to the water.

Now Skull felt doubt. ‘No, no! The water offers only death.’ He drew his sword and waved it at Archaon’s herald.

The skeleton gestured and the sword flew from Skull’s hand. Another gesture stayed his attack, freezing him in place, and a third lifted him into the air. Skull made a strangled noise.

‘Maybe, maybe,’ murmured Orto. ‘To drink deeply of this oasis is to die as you have seen. But to take one drop – could it bring power, visions, wisdom?’

‘It will kill him,’ said Vuul.

‘I drink of the slaughtergruel. That is deadly, if one is unworthy. Mir is worthy.’ Orto addressed Ushkar Mir. ‘You, Ushkar Mir, must face this trial and triumph, or the way to Archaon will be closed to you and we will all die.’

‘How can you know?’ said Vuul.

‘Khorne whispers in my ear. He must drink but a single drop!’

‘It is his choice, not yours, slaughterpriest. What will Lord Mir do?’ asked Vuul.

Orto grunted. ‘Cowardice is not Khorne’s way!’

Ushkar Mir was already kneeling by the pool. He extended one huge finger to the surface, and touched the water. The mirror surface broke but slightly, rings of ripples chasing each other and fading fast.

Skull fell to the ground with a clatter.

‘I do not see we have much choice,’ he said.

‘Nevertheless, it is our lord’s choice,’ said Orto. ‘It is not ours. He is the chosen of Khorne!’ He held his axe aloft in his hand and the remaining Bloodslaves fell to their knees.

Raising the finger to his exposed teeth, Ushkar Mir looked at the herald of Archaon. Its five eyes stared back.

‘But one drop!’ warned Orto.

Mir extended his crimson tongue, and licked the tip of his finger.

Immediately, the world went black.

Ushkar Mir fell through darkness. Wind rushed past him, but even its roaring could not subdue the far-away bellows of Khorne, demanding more blood and war. The call of Archaon he heard also, a trumpet blast that went on and on, unvarying in pitch and volume.

Then it was over and he was upon solid ground. Rain hammered off his head. It revived him, washed the dust from him. He licked at it, running his tongue over his arms and his chin to catch the moisture and moaned at the relief it brought from days of thirst. Noise of a different sort came to his ears – the sounds of battle. A wall of rough stone met his hands, and he scrabbled at it ineffectually. Shakily, he got to his feet, alarmed at the weakness in him, but it quickly passed. His sight returned and he found himself leaning upon a parapet looking down into a cauldron of war. Daemons and mortal followers of Khorne seethed around the base of mighty city walls, as numerous as ants.

Towering bloodthirsters whipped on lesser daemons and humans alike as they pushed at the bases of brass siege towers, two hundred feet tall. There were dozens of towers, absurd in scale. They should not have moved at all. But Chaos has no respect for the natural laws of Mortal Realms, and move they did. Gargants and other, less recognisable things strained in harnesses at the towers’ fronts. As Mir watched, one was speared by nine long bolts hurled by war machines from the wall, and fell howling. It did not matter. Its traces were cut, its body hauled aside by dog-faced beastmen, and the siege tower ground forward. The towers moved slowly, but were indomitable. Boulders rattled off their thick plating. The fire from magical artillery fizzled harmlessly from their spell wards. Every hit that was turned aside marked another dozen feet moved toward the wall.

Lightning boomed in stormy skies. The churning clouds were black, patterned with bright blue lightning. The wall on which Mir stood was deserted by the living, and choked with the dead. Proud knights and humble soldiers lay contorted in the positions of final agony, commoner and lord intertwined. Death holds no regard for rank.

The rain pouring out of the gargoyle spouts set into the wall’s outer face was coloured red with blood washed from the wall-walk. Mir knew, remembered, that soon the skies would send down not water but blood. A great tear would open in the very stuff of the realm, and the kingdom of Khorne would send forth its mightiest daemon legion. Already three of the five bastions he could see from his position had fallen, and the wall was riven with cracks. It would not be long now.

He looked again on the last day of Mir, and his last hours as a mortal.

‘I should kill you where you stand, traitor,’ said a voice behind him.

Mir turned suddenly, taken unawares for the first time in decades.

A tall, powerfully built man stood there. He wore a lamellae coat of iron plates enamelled red and gold, and a tall helmet with a horse hair plume. In his hands he held twin axes of blue steel.

‘And yet why do I not?’ asked the man curiously.

Ushkar Mir gaped, the rain running into his lipless mouth.

‘Ushkar Mir,’ he said, discovering to his amazement that he could speak once more. The words were clumsy, his lack of lips hindering his ability to talk, although less than it should. The man before him was Mir as he had been, before that terrible choice. A choice that, the Mir of the future realised, must soon be made again.

‘That I am. General of this city, and until hours ago bearer of its last hopes. But hope has deserted me.’ He looked hard at Mir. ‘How came you here to the top of this wall? None of the Blood God’s servants have surmounted it alive. Are you an assassin, come to kill me before the final attack? I did not think that your lord’s way, but then, we have irked him for some time.’ He smiled sorrowfully. ‘Tell me, before I kill you, what is your name?’

‘Ushkar Mir,’ said the future Ushkar Mir.

The Mir of the past shifted back in alarm. ‘What?’ He searched Mir’s face for any recognisable feature. ‘That may be so. I have fought too long against the madness of Chaos to discount anything. That time is not free from the perversion of the Four surprises me not at all. But if it is the case, then I am much changed.’

‘Khorne,’ said Mir. ‘He... Argh!’

This latest test was the worst of all. Pain attacked Mir from every angle. His punishment band glowed with heat, his heart thudded with anger fit to burst, his blinded eyes ached. Worst was the pain in his soul. All the rest was imposed from without, but this pain came from deep within and tormented him mercilessly.

‘Look at you grovel. How could I become such a thing? No doubt I am offered the choice of the Dark Feast.’

Mir nodded.

‘And I fail?’ said the Mir of the past.

‘Not failure!’ gasped Mir. He pitted his will against his punishment band, pushing back the heat. He managed with effort, a feat he had not accomplished before. Perhaps this was some effect of his journey through time, or perhaps he was strengthened by the presence of his purer self.

‘Revenge?’ said the Mir of the past.

Mir nodded. ‘I fight in his wars, but I have but one goal. I will stand before him and spit in his face, and bury my axes in his head.’

The Mir of the past laughed. ‘That does sound like me.’ His laughter deserted him. ‘How many innocents have you slaughtered to further your vengeance?’

‘Thousands,’ said Mir. ‘They would have died anyway, and for ignoble ends. There is nothing good left. Better a quick death for the weak. After Mir falls, there is only Chaos. Revenge is all there is.’

‘Revenge that can never be achieved!’ said Mir of the past. ‘They say Khorne is as tall as a mountain and as mighty as the sun! Nothing can fight him. No man or daemon can kill the Blood God.’

‘Gods die,’ said Mir.

‘By the hand of the likes of us?’ Mir frowned. ‘Impossible. The realms are large and not all the free people will fall. I still harbour hopes of that. Better to kill as many of these filth as I can, and die with honour.’

‘I once thought so, but all kingdoms fall, one by one,’ said the Mir of the future bitterly. ‘To serve Chaos is your only chance at survival, and the only path to revenge.’ He shook his head. ‘This cannot be. This is an illusion. I have not been as you are for five hundred years.’

The Mir of the past silently contemplated their situation. ‘If it is an illusion, then you are the illusion, not I – one last torture before I die. The Chaos Gods are boundless in their cruelty.’ But then he closed his eyes. ‘No. This is real. I feel it.’

The Mir of the future felt it too. He felt his memories change. He recalled this meeting from the other side, many years ago. Within a minute, he could not remember ever having not recalled it.

They watched as magical fire shot in a giant plume to engulf one of the towers, burning so hot the metal of its superstructure glowed red and ignited. Screams of pain and outrage sounded from that quarter, as showers of burning brass mingled with the rain fell among the warriors of Khorne.

‘If you are myself from some distant time, tell me what befalls me,’ said the Mir of the past. ‘How do I go from this to you.’

‘In but a short time, the rain will turn to blood. The Lord of Skulls will open the gates to his own realm, and the worst of his hellish legions will come out. The city will fall. You will fight every step of the way while everything you care for and love is destroyed. Finally, in despair you will be taken, alive, at the steps of the Old Palace, and given the choice by Korghos Khul himself.’

‘You said yes to this choice.’

‘With my voice I did. With my heart, I did not,’ said Mir. ‘I say no every day. Khorne took my voice for defying him. He put this band upon me to torment me. But I amuse him, I think. He keeps me alive. That will be his mistake.’

The Mir of the past looked at his twisted future in disgust. ‘Then I thank you for showing me the consequences of revenge. I shall make sure to choose differently.’

‘No!’ shouted Mir. But his earlier self had brought his axes up with blurring speed. Mir’s arm was cut deep.

‘Stop! Wait!’ he shouted.

‘I will slay you first. You have become what I most fear, all for a coward’s moment of weakness. Death is preferable to this.’

The steel axes came at Mir’s head. But the Mir of the past stopped suddenly, his eyes wide with surprise. His axes fell from nerveless hands.

Mir of the future wrenched Skullthief out of his earlier self’s chest. The Mir of old had been a mighty hero, but the Mir of the Bloodslaves was blessed by Khorne. No normal man could best him.

‘No!’ screamed Ushkar Mir. ‘No!’

Then a most curious thing happened. A lightning bolt smote the wall-walk where Ushkar Mir had died. The Mir of the future was thrown back, dazed. When he recovered his wits, his earlier self had gone.

Ushkar Mir had no time to ponder this new development. The first of the siege towers hit the wall. Its brazen drawbridge clashed down onto the parapet and the warriors of the Blood God streamed across.

Very well, if his earlier self was not here to fight, then Mir would take his place. Mir ran forward to engage them, to spill their blood again and try vainly to save his home. But the wall dissolved beneath his feet, and the battle’s noise vanished. He wheeled his arms as he fell back into blackness, helplessly falling.

Ushkar Mir’s body convulsed. He sat bolt upright, coughing hard. Black sludge poured from his mouth. When he reached his hand up to wipe it away his arm twinged with pain. Looking down, he saw the gash inflicted by the Ushkar Mir of the past, and marvelled at it.

‘You have succeeded,’ said a voice from the sky. The skeleton fell apart, splashing into the pool. The sky wobbled, and a huge skull set with five eyes shimmered into being in the heavens. The sky convulsed again, and the daemon-thing that Mir had seen in the Bloodbloom Fields revealed itself to all the Bloodslaves.

‘The way is open!’ said the Many-Eyed Servant. Its voice sounded loudly, from everywhere, and the Bloodslaves shrank back from it. ‘I judge you worthy. Go to Archaon and submit your pledge. The final decision rests with him. You will find him elsewhere in Shyish. Beware, for others come also.’

‘Do we fight them?’ shouted Skull.

‘That is up to Mir,’ said the herald.

The vision, Mir tried to say. Was it real? All that came from his mouth was animal moaning. The herald understood.

‘All choices carry consequences, Ushkar Mir. Choose wisely!’

A crackle of magic ran from horizon to horizon. The bushes withered to nothing and the pool was sucked away into the ground, leaving no trace of its existence. The skulls pulled themselves under the ground. Endless desert once again greeted the Bloodslaves, and they wailed in despair.

‘A trick!’ hissed Vuul.

‘Wait,’ said Orto.

A light shone over the place where the pool had been. A bright star as large as a fist flared into being before Mir’s face, rays of hard light stabbing out from it. The desert wavered through its light. The star burst outwards. A shower of sparkling motes hit the ground and a way opened up.

The Bloodslaves looked through the portal and saw a new land where a kinder sun shone. Dark against the horizon was a range of low hills covered in sere grasses. The tiny dots of birds wheeled in the sky. It was arid, but a paradise in comparison to the Bone Sands. Warm wind blew through the gate.

The horns of Archaon blared again. Ushkar Mir stood. He probed the wound he had taken in his vision, uncertain what it meant. Was what had happened real or illusory, or both?

Skull sniffed at the wind. ‘I smell decay.’

Orto pointed through the gate. On the faraway hills a line of marching figures went along a ridge. The faint strains of cheerful music reached their ears along with the foetid reek.

‘The servants of pestilence. Filth-eaters,’ said Orto.

‘The others the herald spoke of,’ said Vuul.

‘Some. There will be more,’ said Orto. ‘We will slay them all.’

Mir was not listening. He put the vision from his mind. There was only blood and skulls, and the distant possibility of vengeance. Nothing else mattered.

He sheathed his axes, and set out towards his destiny.

In the Lands of the Blind

The Many-Eyed Servant, whose many eyes were everywhere at once, blinked his way across the Mortal Realms. Sights. Scenes. The serenity of horror observed but not experienced.

A banquet for the eyes. The daemon drank in the multiplicity of the realms, and of existences beyond that.

Life, death and everything in between played out before him like an unpleasant fiction. Children were born, their cries echoing those of their mothers just moments before. Men roared their rage, groaned in agony and spoke their secret and most desperate thoughts to themselves. Kings and beggars ached for what they couldn’t have, while the beasts that roamed the realms around them knew only the living moment. Here in the lands of the blind, where mortal wretches understood nothing more than the immediacy of their world and their miserable place in it, the Many-Eyed Servant was all-seeing, all-knowing.

The daemon’s gaze focused. In a blink it was drawn back to a story unfinished and a tale untold. Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, was near. A fellow disciple of fate’s dread architect, the god Tzeentch, and a sorcerous champion of darkness, it was he who would find a place in the ranks of the Varanguard – those ushers of the apocalypse, those knights of almighty Chaos selected by the Everchosen to serve the Ruinous Pantheon by his side.

The prince had come far since the Many-Eyed Servant had first seen him. He who had been far was now nearing. He had already faced great trials but he had to be tested anew, for the Everchosen was exacting. Only those of the blackest soul and darkest talents would fight in the company of living doom.

It was for that reason that the Many-Eyed Servant kept his eternal watch. He was Archaon’s terrible gaze cast far across the realms, but here he found an aspirant before their gates.

The Great Spoilage. A rotten wasteland.

Death, as far as the eye could see. Bodies carpeted the land, lying as deep as a lake or shallow sea. Mouldering. Putrefying. Liquefying. Whatever cataclysmic event had been responsible for such devastation was lost to time. Thousands, perhaps millions, had died or been dumped there. Had it been a battle to end all battles? There were plenty of butchered warriors rotting there, but it could just as likely have been a genocidal slaughter, a grand suicide pact or some unnatural disaster that had visited its elemental wrath upon the masses, with corpses raining from the sky.

Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, negotiated the cadavers with difficulty. From the Beaten Path, Zuvius had followed the crows. He had followed them as they moved from battlefield to common butchery. He had followed them as they feasted upon lone travellers and slaughtered armies alike. He had followed them to the Great Spoilage, where it seemed every other crow in the realms was enjoying a scavenger’s bounty.

Like harsh, hilly terrain or the crests of powerful waves, the Great Spoilage was an undulating landscape of cankered flesh and bone. Ribs gave, soiled cloth tore and rotting meat turned to maggot-choked, watery mush about Zuvius’ boots. However, while the land reeked of death, the place was very much alive. Blankets of fat flies smothered the sea of carcasses, filling both the ear and mind with their incessant drone. Rats swarmed through the dead, gnawing, tunnelling and expanding their rancid nests. Crows feasted on both flesh and flies, hopping, swooping and wheeling about Zuvius and his warband as the Tzeentchians made their way across the corpselands. So great was the plague of carrion birds that they blacked out the horizon ahead. Larger pot-bellied scavengers scrambled up and down the fleshmounds, tearing yellowing flesh from bodies and crunching the marrow from bones.

Zuvius held the ragged edge of his cloak over his mouth. The web of melted skin that stretched across the rawness of his scorched face squirmed with revulsion. This place was undoubtedly sacred to the Great Lord of Decay. Its stench saturated the blue straggles of the prince’s hair. Its rank taste was on his smeared lips and silver tongue. Zuvius detested it but in truth could think of no more suitable test or obstacle to place between a servant of the Great Changer and his goal than an expanse of stagnant rot.

The bird Mallofax circled their progress, riding on the rising stench, watching for potential threats. The warband had come across few. Small nests of ghouls picked over the bounty in places, while nomadic looters crossed the corpselands, neither interested in Orphaeo Zuvius or where he was headed. Even Zuvius had doubts about that. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos and Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse, had called for him. Zuvius had followed the signs, followed the crows, but they had led him to a carrion paradise, a mouldering land of dead flesh that undoubtedly attracted every bird in the realm.

Behind the Prince of Embers, Sir Abriel followed. The groaning knight had once been the captain of the royal guard. What remained of that band was now the Hexenguard. They trudged through the spoilage in silence, dark knights of Tzeentch whose plate glowed with enchantments. In their footsteps followed the Unseeing – Zuvius’ coven of blind sorcerers. The wretches staggered and tripped through the dead, one gnarled hand laid upon the shoulder of the sorcerer in front. They looked ancient and helpless, but their appearance belied their true power. With a gesture, the sorcerers could re-craft the flesh of nearby foes into representations of their twisted visions.

Using the sorcerous glaive A’cuitas to cut a path, Zuvius waded through the morass of breaking bones and sloughing flesh. Hauling himself up onto the corpse of a festering gargant, the prince knelt and rested, putting the raw skin of his forehead against his weapon’s haft. As Sir Abriel, the Hexenguard and Zuvius’ wretch-sorcerers climbed up onto the monstrous cadaver beside him, Mallofax returned, perching on the bill-hook of the glaive’s crowning blade.

Zuvius tapped the pommel of the glaive on the gargant’s hide. It was hard, waxy and mummified. Fungi bloomed across the giant carcass. Looking out across the corpse mounds, the prince watched as crows spooked by other scavengers took to the skies, wheeling about in rancid formations before settling once more. He tried to catch his breath but it was difficult. Every lungful of air was concentrated corruption that closed the throat and heaved the stomach. Mallofax flapped. The Hexenguard stood like warped, knightly statues. The Unseeing broke up and spread out across the gargant’s chest, feeling their way across jutting bone.

‘The Varanspire,’ Zuvius said. ‘Where is the damned thing?’

‘Everywhere and nowhere, my prince,’ the reptilian bird told him in a series of hisses and squawks. ‘It exists in the Realm of Chaos. It is here but also there. Near but impossibly far.’

‘Enough with the riddles,’ Zuvius warned.

‘I speak only truth,’ Mallofax said.

‘Well, you’re bad at it,’ Zuvius told him. ‘You should stick to lies, they’re more convincing. I’m beginning to think that we are going to end up the same way as these miserable souls.’

‘My lord?’

‘Perhaps they all set out for this palace of Chaos,’ Zuvius mused, ‘and died on the journ–’

Zuvius felt a quake through the soles of his armoured boots.

‘What is it?’ Mallofax squawked.

Zuvius stood, looking down at the yellowing flesh of the gargant. The quake turned into a series of thrashing tremors that shook the colossal carcass. The Unseeing froze while Sir Abriel and his malformed knights drew the notched blades of their longswords. In front of them, a sorcerer of the Unseeing suddenly disappeared. One moment he stood there in his rag-robes, the next he had been swallowed by the cadaver.

Disappearing into a pit of chewed flesh, the sorcerer screamed his way to death. The gargant’s corpse bucked as a terrible creature erupted from it. Feeding quietly on the underside of the great carcass, a horrific maggoth had smelled their freshness. Chewing up through the rot with the shredding teeth of its maw, the thing erupted from the gargant like a monster of the deep. Its arms and legs were but stunted remnants used to propel it through the dead, and its skin was sticky with spoilage. It held there for a moment before blasting a stream of half-digested rot back at the sky.

As Mallofax took off, Sir Abriel and the Hexenguard came forward with swords presented to protect their master. The maggoth went under once more, wriggling itself loose of the carcass. The Unseeing grasped for one another while the Hexenguard pulled Zuvius back from where the giant corpse met the sea of bodies. Cadavers twitched and death-stiff limbs moved as the monstrous maggoth swam and ate its way through the corpses. Zuvius turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlets and pursed his lips in disgust. Not only did the prince have to wade through the Great Lord of Decay’s detritus, he now had to suffer the attentions of some Nurglesque monstrosity stalking them through the killing fields.

Zuvius felt the cadaver buck beneath them again as the maggoth rose once more. Chewing up through the body, it exploded from the gargant king’s gut. Another sorcerer of the Unseeing fell back into the pit of shearing teeth and rotting mulch. As he instinctively reached out, a member of the Hexenguard grabbed for him.

‘No!’ Zuvius called.

As the sorcerer thrust out his hand blindly, the tattooed symbols on his bony palm burned with fear. The Hexenguard knight, already a twisted, god-pleasing thing, clutched his chest, his screams joining the sorcerer’s own. His plate screeched as he began to contort and change shape, becoming the frightful vision of terror that flashed through the sorcerer’s mind during his last moments.

Toppling forward, the monstrosity knocked into another member of the Hexenguard. The knight slipped, his armoured boots scrabbling down the pit of rotting flesh. His dark blue steel sword bounced behind him, down into the maggoth’s great trap of teeth. Zuvius lunged and grabbed the knight by the arms. Surging once more, the maggoth clamped its obscene jaws about the knight and thrashed its teeth. Cutting the warrior of Chaos almost in half, the creature tugged, dragging Zuvius over the ragged lip of the pit. Sir Abriel reached for his master. Zuvius scrambled away from the great maggoth but his boots and gauntlets slipped through the slime of the gargant’s entrails.

The Unseeing moaned in their blindness. Mallofax squawked overhead. Zuvius kicked and turned, freeing himself of Sir Abriel’s ghoulish grip. The maggoth’s jaws gaped open and a black pool of digestive rot rose up from within. A warty tongue shot out of the pool like a serpent, wrapping itself around the prince’s leg. As Zuvius kicked and slid towards his doom, the muscular tongue retracted, hauling him to the edge of the maggoth’s fang-lined jaws.

From above, Zuvius heard Mallofax’s half-stifled squawk. The bird was flapping his wings with effort, trying to stay above the cadaverous pit while clutching the metal shaft of A’cuitas in his scaly talons. As the weapon dropped, Zuvius watched the glaive tumble blade over pommel. Both the prince and his weapon were heading for the same place – the maggoth’s foetid mouth.

Zuvius snatched the daemon-forged glaive out of the rank air. Spinning the weapon around, he cut through the monster’s scabrous tongue with one sweep of the heavy blade. It did not stop the beast. Turning A’cuitas about, he aimed the pommel of the weapon down the creature’s cavernous throat. The eye at the end of the glaive’s shaft opened and a stream of lightning leapt from the weapon. Lighting up the darkness of the doom within, the lightning caused the maggoth to retract, tremble, boil, and finally explode.

Zuvius held his position through the black tempest of rot that erupted about him. As a putrescent mist drifted back down, Zuvius used the glaive to climb out of the gargant-corpse’s abdomen. Reaching down, Sir Abriel hauled his master up. With the exception of Mallofax, who circled above, the whole warband dripped with stinking corruption.

‘We are being tested,’ Zuvius said through gritted teeth. Spitting rot from his lips, he once more descended into the sea of the dead and set forth, leading the warband onwards.

‘Where is it?’ the Prince of Embers demanded. They had been walking for days, the rankness of rot and death coating them like a blanket. There had been no sign of the dark citadel that Zuvius had seen in his vision or the gateway leading to it. The Great Spoilage seemed to extend forever, in all directions. The flocks of crows blacked out the sky, the cacophony of their incessant cawing an invitation to insanity.

‘We shall find it, my lord,’ Mallofax assured him.

‘Will we indeed?’ Zuvius roared. ‘Will that be before or after we join the fallen at our feet?’

He turned A’cuitas on the bird, whose cryptic explanations were almost as infuriating as the endless horizon of crow-pecked corpses, and unleashed a blast of lightning that arced across the mouldering landscape and scalded the stench about it. Narrowly missing Mallofax, the stream of energy sent the bird flapping and squawking for the safety of the sky.

He wasn’t the only one. Disturbed by the sudden crack of lightning, the crows carpeting the wasteland ahead of the warband took to the air in a storm of black feathers. As the flock lifted and cleared the path before the Prince of Embers, a fortress was revealed. The colossal castle reached into the skies with clawed turrets, citadels and towers of brick and blade. It was an abominate construction, its concentric walls an unbreachable barrier of dark stone and iron, each more towering than the last. They surrounded a central spire that pierced the heavens and resembled a spiked gauntlet punching victoriously at the sky.

The infernal architecture of the place was as disturbing as it was impressive, a fortress-shrine to Chaos, blasphemous in sculpture and indomitable in design. Its very presence brought forth storms that tore the sky asunder. Daemonic furies perched amongst the spires and circled in furious unnatural squalls. Elevated walkways of blood-stained stone spanned the fields of perpetual flame that raged about the castle and its moat, while its gargantuan gates were lined with monstrous metal teeth.

‘The Varanspire,’ the Prince of Embers said.

‘What else could it be?’ Mallofax agreed, coming in to land on his master’s glaive.

‘Let’s find out,’ Zuvius said.

The corpselands, though they had sapped the vigour of the warband with their stench, their marshy putrefaction and their bone traps, were now nothing to the Tzeentchians. Every crunching, squelching, spore-cloud-disturbing step took them closer to the dark majesty of the Varanspire – the fortress of Archaon, the Destroyer of Worlds.

As the cadavers began to thin and Zuvius’ boots found the blasted black grit of the solid ground that lay beyond the corpse marshes, the prince noticed other groups moving towards the fortress. Some were armoured and rode on horseback, while others moved in great barbarian hordes. Champions of Chaos and their doomed followers. The Blood God’s butchers. Slaaneshi deviants. Other sorcerers of Tzeentch, and the diseased of the Great Lord of Decay. He shouldn’t have been surprised at the sight, and yet he was. These were other warriors who had fought their way to this dark place from across the Mortal Realms, intent on impressing unholy Archaon with their dark talents and commitment.

Grit became shattered stone and shattered stone the blood-polished marble of an elevated walkway. It trembled with the killing taking place there. Zuvius became part of the madness. Perhaps it was the infectious doom of the place, or perhaps it was the collective insanity of ruinous champions who had fought through so much to be there. In reality, Zuvius knew that the servants of the Chaos pantheon did not really need a reason to fight. Like territorial predators, it was in their nature to kill their competition. Through such unnatural selection did the forces of ruin grow ever more powerful. The weak were sacrificed for the Chaos Gods on the dark altar of the strong.

Warriors of Chaos threw themselves at the prince and his warband. Battle cries and all manner of damned weaponry cut through the air. It was a bloody free-for-all, an unspoken quest to be the last champion standing on the bridge. Zuvius became one with the slaughter. He needed no invitation. With his Hexenguard fighting behind him and the sorcerers of the Unseeing casting nearby champions into horrific new forms, Zuvius fought his way across the bridge. In the shadow of the Varanspire and with, he hoped, the gaze of the Three-Eyed King upon him, Zuvius killed for his new master, for his place in the ranks of the Varanguard. For the Everchosen’s entertainment and for his own murderous whim.

Zuvius moved through the dread butchery. Khornate savages jangled with teeth and skulls while swinging serrated axe blades at sorcerers who smouldered with unnatural powers. Slaaneshi hedonists gutted Nurgle’s children, who were already one with their own agonies. The diseased, in turn, seemed desperate to spread their suffering to all. The greatest hostility seemed to erupt between champions of the same patron. Blood knights on horseback hacked their way through barbarian hordes pledged to Khorne, while the witchbreeds and warriors of the Great Changer couldn’t take their eyes off one another for fear of the treachery they all too well knew existed in the hearts of their compatriots. Mouthing dark enchantments and blasting Tzeentchian flame at one another, they created a spectacular firestorm of mutually assured death and damnation. No champion of Chaos wished to show their weakness before Archaon and his monstrous shrine-fortress, especially not the Prince of Embers.

Zuvius stabbed and skewered servants of the Dark Prince, who moaned their ecstasies while impaled on the daemon-forged weapon. The infected spilled pus and entrails before his boots. Monstrous knights in bone-lined armour stained their plate with their own gore as Zuvius passed his heavy blade through their throats. He stove in the skulls of warrior-enchanters like himself before the cursed incantations that resided there could reach blue Tzeentchian lips.

As Zuvius fought up the walkway, with unnatural flame roaring about him from the broad, infernal moat, he noticed the daemonic furies thunderbolting from the sky. Bringing their leathery wings in close, the fiends snatched warriors from the many walkways leading up to the great iron gates and portcullises of the castle. Tearing horses apart and tossing the remains of Chaos warriors between them like rag dolls, the flocks of furies seem to delight in their sport. Champions screamed as they were dropped from the storm-wracked skies and knocked into the roaring inferno that surrounded the Varanspire.

As the warriors of Chaos killed each other, the daemons thinned out their number, further, protecting the Varanspire from those who would threaten it. Zuvius tried to remain calm as the champions he was fighting were torn from the walkway about him and savaged by the flying monsters. A ragged fury landed on one of the Hexenguard and proceeded to snap his head from his shoulders and feast on his warped flesh. Zuvius heard Sir Abriel issue the low groan of an order. The Hexenguard brought up their battered shields.

Striding on towards the fortress, buried in the shadow of the Varanspire’s mighty walls, the Prince of Embers held his nerve. The raw stench of death was intoxicating. He drank it in, uncaring of the daemons that swooped by. The furies’ attacks became ever more savage and indiscriminate. A muscle-bound barbarian of the Blood God, as broad as he was tall, was knocked from the walkway and into the flames below. A bloated knight of Nurgle exploded with the rank gases of decomposition as a daemon sank its talons into him, while a smooth-skinned marauder screamed in pleasure as he was dragged up into the sky and shredded.

Zuvius tried not to flinch as another of his Hexenguard was snatched from the walkway and his flesh stretched between winged monstrosities trying to tear him apart. A moaning sorcerer of the Unseeing was next, and then another, the wretches never setting eyes upon the horrors that were their end.

Zuvius felt the blood-bead eyes of some plummeting beast upon him. It was a thing unknowing of the Prince of Embers’ destiny. Zuvius’ gauntlets tightened about the shaft of his glaive. He killed the Khornate crusader before him, knowing the fury was sweeping down towards him. With savage beats of its wings it surged, claws and talons ready for the kill.

The prince held on for as long as he could. As he turned the glaive to present it to the beast, however, the thing’s infernal reflexes saved it. Crashing down onto the walkway, it skidded and hauled its head back. Zuvius swung the glaive about him with a devastating reach, but it was not enough. The arc of the blade should have passed straight through the monster’s ugly skull but instead whistled past it, incensing the beast. Screeching its rage, it drew others from the sky and away from their slaughter. Zuvius felt a throng of furies, all enraged by the champion’s challenge, swoop down towards him.

Like some hellish hound, the fury on the walkway snapped and shot forward. Jabbing with the glaive, Zuvius held the creature’s blood-stained jaws at bay. Pretending that he hadn’t seen another fury dropping down at him with outstretched talons, the Tzeentchian kept his focus on the beast in front of him before bringing the weapon up suddenly. Skewering the airborne monster with the force of its own momentum, Zuvius heaved it aside, smashing it into the stone of the walkway. As the first daemon surged, it found the thrash of wing and claw and the spear-point of Zuvius’ glaive. Holding tightly onto the weapon as the thing impaled itself, the champion leaned back out of the snapping, spitting death-rattle of the beasts.

As a third landed behind the sorcerer, cracking the stone, Zuvius unleashed the sorcerous power of the glaive. With the weapon still skewered through the daemons, he blasted the newcomer off the walkway with a stream of lightning. As scraps of the creature and a mist of infernal blood hissed across the surface of the flames below, more furies swooped in on Zuvius. Putting his boot against daemonflesh, he freed his glaive from the bodies of the impaled creatures. Behind him, the Unseeing moaned their blind fear and the Hexenguard stood with shields raised.

‘Protect your prince,’ Zuvius ordered, prompting the Tzeentchian knights to run forward and surround him. Beasts smashed their horned heads against the blue steel and tried to push their snaggle-toothed jaws between the shields. Sir Abriel put his ghastly form between Zuvius and an attacking fury, distracting the creature while the Prince of Embers thrust his glaive over the knight’s shoulder and into the daemon’s open mouth. Retracting the polearm and pulling half the monster’s warped skull out of its jaws with it, Zuvius turned to find another fury almost on top of him.

The beast reared and brought up a wicked claw, aiming to rip down through the Tzeentchian champion. Its eye bulged suddenly and its jaws chomped in surprise as its flesh suddenly rebelled against it. Bones broke within it and leathery skin stretched over the new form it was taking. As it fell to one side, Zuvius could see a sorcerer of the Unseeing behind, visiting the damnation of his dark magic on the thing.

It suddenly came at Zuvius, morphing into something warped, ungainly and even more terrifying than before. The prince ducked a pair of jaws within jaws and rolled between the spawn’s erupting legs. As it turned to reacquire him, the wretch-sorcerer visited his dark visions upon the daemon once more – twisting and sculpting the monster into ever more horrific forms. As a second head and a pincer ruptured from the body, Zuvius batted them aside with the pommel of his glaive. Aiming the opening metal eye of the weapon at the abomination, he prepared to blast it to shreds, but the transformation inflicted upon it by the Unseeing finally – horribly – wrung the life out of the creature.

As Orphaeo Zuvius and his warband fought their way towards the fortress, other warriors of Chaos kept their distance. Some even watched with bitter amusement as daemons rained from the sky to attack their competition. Zuvius spat. He would kill them all. Flicking infernal ichor from his glaive, Zuvius turned around and then around again. Up until now there had always been some winged thing behind him ready to pounce. Suddenly there was not. Looking up, he saw that rather than hauling off or losing interest, small throngs of furies were simply hovering, flapping their bat-like wings. They were waiting for something.

The fortress before him shimmered in shadow and heat. Zuvius looked about. Something was not right. In fact, everything seemed wrong. The flames around them seemed higher.

‘Mallofax,’ the prince called, catching his breath.

‘My lord?’ the bird squawked, swooping in to land on the warrior’s shoulder.

‘Fly on ahead,’ Zuvius ordered. ‘I want to know what we’re walking into.’

Zuvius could see now a tidal wave of fire rising through the flames surrounding the fortress. It was a doom conjured by Archaon’s fell sorcerers. Roaring its way around the Varanspire, the wave would engulf the elevated walkway. That was why the furies had taken to the skies. Zuvius would be damned before he let himself be seared free of the Varanspire like an insignificant insect.

‘Hexenguard,’ the Prince of Embers called. ‘Form up and lock shields.’

Sir Abriel and his Tzeentchian knights moved to create a shell of battered blue steel. Bringing in the Unseeing behind the shield wall, Zuvius watched for warriors of Chaos attempting to take advantage of their distraction. A mounted Slaaneshi warlord in immaculate plate looked down his nose at Zuvius. Khornate killers bedecked in spikes and horned helms fought on towards the Varanspire.

A nearby figure stood regarding Zuvius and the shield wall with suspicion. The champion was a Tzeentchian warrior whose ensorcelled blade crackled with dark energies. He held out the weapon between Zuvius and himself as a warning, slipping off his helmet. A nest of tentacles that had been squirming within dribbled down his breastplate like a beard. The change-blessed warrior regarded Zuvius with dead, deep-sea eyes, before considering the apocalyptic tsunami of flame rolling towards them. Shouting to his cerulean-skinned followers, the champion of Tzeentch and his horde of warrior witchbreeds took cover behind the shield wall of the Hexenguard.

A chain reaction was initiated along the stone walkway. Champions and the servants of Chaos behind Zuvius saw what was happening and saw the blaze encroaching with their own eyes. Some emulated the Hexenguard, locking shields if they had them to present a unified front against the wall of flame. Others abandoned their warped steeds, skidding and scrabbling down behind blue steel.

Zuvius watched as a hulking warrior of Nurgle ran towards him, slimy, pale rolls of fat spilling out of his rusted chainmail. The warrior shook the stone beneath Zuvius’ feet with his determined steps, grubs, maggots and leeches raining from his blight-festered flesh as he ran. Ducking down beneath the shield wall Zuvius waited for the blast wave. The Tzeentchian smiled to himself. He cared nothing for the followers of other fell gods, disciples of his own or champions of Chaos competing with him for the Everchosen’s favour. He only cared for what might be achieved through saving their lives in the undoubted challenges to come.

Zuvius heard the boom of the inferno against the shield wall and felt the shudder of the stone walkway. He watched the Lord of Decay’s monstrous warrior disappear in a rush of flame. Slaaneshi swordsmen on steaming horseback lost their race with the firestorm, while there was little the blades, muscle and fury of the Blood God’s brutes could do to save them in the face of such fiery destruction.

The Prince of Embers felt his hair burn and his flesh blister. The raging flame boomed about him – and then it was gone. The Hexenguard unlocked their shields and the Chaos warriors that had sheltered behind them brought up their heads. They watched the bank of flame roll away.

Zuvius heard the flapping of wings. Mallofax was back. He had flown above the fire and scouted out the fortress approach, its portcullis gate and defences.

‘The gate?’ Zuvius asked as the bird landed on the blade of the glaive.

‘Carnage, my lord,’ Mallofax told him. ‘The gate stands firm against all assaults. Archaon’s warriors wait within.’

‘And the wall itself?’

‘Sheer,’ Mallofax told him. ‘There’s no way in.’

‘There’s always a way in,’ Zuvius growled. ‘There has to be. All those who stand in service of Archaon within once stood beyond the fortress walls.’

Zuvius knew he had to keep pressing forward. He wasn’t going to wait for the infernal wave to come back around. He wasn’t going to wait for the furies to attack again. He had saved the warriors of Chaos on the walkway. If he could just get them and others into range of the fortress’ warped defences, a retaliatory assault on the Varanspire might be able to achieve some momentum. He would lead by example, down a doomed path the warriors of Chaos had already chosen.

Zuvius ran. The bridge between him and the Varanspire was all but clear of warriors. Only those champions already close to the Varanspire’s walls had managed to find shelter from the bank of flame and, hiding in the architectural flourishes of the dread fortification, they had survived the inferno. Now, they were dying.

Arms of sorcerous stone shot out from the Varanspire wall, grabbing warriors and dragging them to their deaths in the solidifying wall. Boiling spawnflesh spurted from the mouths of daemonic gargoyles decorating the ramparts, splattering down on the warriors below. Coated in liquid horror, the spawnflesh assumed the shape of lesser daemons that assimilated the warriors’ dissolving forms. Braziers situated either side of the gate smouldered with a debilitating fog that, when breathed in, afflicted the victim with blistering burns to the skin, an agonizing blindness and a lung-curdling cough. Arrow slits sang with the thud and whoosh of crossbows and monstrous spear-shooting ballistas. Each bolt was crafted from hell-forged iron and carried a bound daemon within. Even if a striking bolt or spear failed to kill an approaching warrior, the blood-mad daemon that bled from the iron to possess the injured victim shredded both their flesh and soul.

Zuvius ran towards the fortress with his warband following, while the knights, butchers and swordsmen who had taken shelter behind the shield wall stomped across the bridge after him. Zuvius didn’t care whether this was out of a desire to kill him or to attack the Varanspire. Once they were in range of its dread defences, intentions would matter little. The Chaos fortress was a challenge that could not be ignored. The Chaos warriors accelerated across the bridge. The energy of their charge was almost infectious: blood knights in full plate, wasted warriors in leper’s robes, barbaric pleasure-seekers whose flesh was stuck with pins and shards of bone, and sorcerous champions like himself, wielding daemon-forged blades. The growing horde charged along the walkway. The fortress wall grew higher above them and the monstrous gate hove into view, shimmering in the heat of the broad moat.

A great arch lined with iron teeth, it was sealed by a series of warped portcullises, each lowered one behind the other. Through the grille of the bars Zuvius could see the warriors of Archaon, armoured silhouettes in thick plate mounted on fearsome steeds. They waited, weapons sheathed, seemingly unconcerned. They were confident in the Varanspire’s defences. Zuvius snarled. He would make them pay for their arrogance and serve Archaon all the better for taking their place. No warrior would breach the Varanspire while the Prince of Embers stood in their path.

Suddenly he was amongst bodies – the unfortunates who had failed to breach the Varanspire’s defences before him. Zuvius would not fail. Their remains were trapped amongst a forest of iron shafts and ballista bolts embedded in the stone. Zuvius could feel the raging daemons bound to the iron reach out for him in their fury. Savages and warriors who had shed their plate sprinted ahead of Zuvius, desperate to get out of the killing ground. They could not, however, for the fortress was designed with such desperation in mind.

Within seconds, the vanguard of the horde was dead. Such was the power behind the crossbows and the infernal ballistas that within a blink, daemon-bound bolts and spears were thudding into the stone about them. Marauders were thrown off their feet by shafts that hammered into their chests. Black projectiles hit the ground about Zuvius’ feet while shards of stone showered him where the missiles from ballistas shattered the walkway. A daemonic roar could be heard with their passing. Half-stifled screams and grunts of sudden death filled the air as Chaos warriors were impaled by the missiles and staked to the bridge.

There was no avoiding such an onslaught. Mallofax, who soared above the stabbing storm, had called it carnage; the bird had not been wrong. Aspiring champions, pledged to all manner of Dark Gods, died with brutal indifference. They had braved the lethality of the realms to reach the Varanspire and now it was their undoing. Alongside them, Zuvius heard members of his own warband dying. He ran on through the forest of iron and the impaled warriors. The heart-stopping whoosh of a ballista bolt nicked Zuvius’ ear and thudded straight through the battered breastplate of a Hexenguard knight. Zuvius heard the daemon in the missile rip the armoured warrior apart in seconds.

Step after feverish step took the Prince of Embers on towards the gate. It grew before him, its iron teeth threatening to swallow him whole. Madmen and driven warriors of darkness ran beside him. Behind them pounded a swollen blightking of Nurgle, who seemed to soak up bolts and the Varanspire’s daemonic heralds with his diseased flesh. As they neared the gate, the hail of bolts from above began to ease. Confidence welled up once again in Zuvius and those about him.

Suddenly, Sir Abriel’s shield flashed before him. The Tzeentchian knight put his willowy fingers on Zuvius’ chest to slow him. The prince heard the thud of several opportunistic bolts slam into the shield – daemon iron that had been meant for him. He didn’t usually waste sentimentality on the Hexenguard but immersed in the death and destruction, he found himself grinning hysterically at his father’s former captain of the guard.

When the ballista bolt came, it sheared the shield in two and did much the same to Sir Abriel. Skewered through his ruined chest and down into the stone, the groaning knight was pinned. Zuvius wasted a few precious moments trying to pull Abriel free before coming to his senses. The knight was all but dead already; Zuvius would not end the same way.

‘Sorry, old friend, but this is the price of entrance,’ the prince told the warped knight as the bound daemon ravaged what was left of him. With screams echoing about him, Zuvius ran for the gate.

A huge Khornate knight in baroque plate smashed into the portcullis with his colossal axe, causing the metal gate to shake. Feverish berserkers thrashed at the grille with their axes, while pus-swollen warriors of the Lord of Decay put their backs and bellies into lifting the colossal portcullis. It would not move, however. Even if it had, two more lay behind it, as secure as the first. With a metallic squeal, the hell-knights beyond the gates thrust the length of their fellspears through the gate grilles and skewered the Chaos champions hammering to get in. With infernal discipline, the knights withdrew their weapons and allowed their victims to fall before thrusting forth and impaling those that took their place.

Dark champions, filled with a warrior’s ecstasy at surviving the sorcerous flames and the storm of bolts, threw themselves at the fortress gate. Sparks flew where their hammers bounced off daemon-forged metal. Light-armoured deviants covered in tattoos, chains and studs reached through with their cruel blades, attempting to slash at the machinery that raised the gates, but nothing worked. Archaon’s hellish garrison were ready for them. The interlopers would die at the gate. With a whoosh of steam, a foul liquid cascaded down the walls and turned the besiegers to screaming statues of melting flesh. All the while, the skin of champions blistered as they stumbled blindly through the diseased smoke of braziers.

Zuvius felt the fight leaving the attacking horde. Even dread warriors such as these needed some expectation of success, but the Varanspire gave them none. For a moment the prospect of braving the ballistas back across the walkway began to assume a grim appeal. Zuvius knew he had to rally the besiegers. He had to find an advantage.

‘My sorcerers,’ Zuvius called. ‘My Unseeing, move on. Show me what you can see through this wretched gate.’

The Prince of Embers knew the cost of the sacrifice and accepted it. Before the Varanspire and under the gaze of the Three-Eyed King, he had to relinquish the trappings of a Tzeentchian warrior. Those that fought for Archaon cared not for the Dark Gods they formerly served or the warbands that in turn served them. Their only concern was the wish and whim of the Everchosen of Chaos – for to be one of his knights was to forsake all other things.

The Unseeing moaned as they stumbled through the bodies before the gate. They flinched as they bumped into the grille and laid their gnarled hands on the bars. Several died immediately, the cruel points of fellspears bursting from their backs. Reaching through the warped grille, the wretch-sorcerers struck out their palms.

Tattooed symbols burned in their flesh as the horror of their visions was unleashed on the armoured warriors beyond. The screams of the Varanspire’s hell-knights fortified the resolve of the faltering champions of Chaos trapped outside the fortress walls. Through the grille, Zuvius could see the twisted silhouettes that the Unseeing had created. As a fresh cascade of boiling oil came down the towering walls, the sorcerers’ screams joined those of their victims – robes were set alight and flesh was burned from bones.

‘Get back!’ Zuvius called, gesturing to the knights of the Hexenguard and the rest of the champions clustered at the gate. He raised his glaive. The gates would resist a sorcerous blast from the daemon-forged weapon, but the stone of the wall might offer a different opportunity. He adjusted his aim, pointing the glaive to one side of the portcullis.

The metal eye of the pommel opened and Zuvius blazed a continuous stream of lightning at the wall. It crackled and glowed with the blinding power of the arcing blast. As the sorcerous stream ceased, Zuvius walked up to the point of impact. All about the side of the portcullis the stone of the gate had turned to a dark glass. Jabbing at the smouldering crystal with the pommel, the prince shattered the wall around the edge of the portcullis grate.

The Hexenguard filed through first. The Tzeentchian knights found only warped sculptures of mangled flesh, bone and plate on the other side. The horde swarmed the opening, a lord of Khorne pushing past in his blood-dripping cloak and great horned helm to lead the way. Newly filled with resolve and a desire both to impress the Everchosen and destroy the unworthy among his servants, champions of all powers and patrons followed him. Zuvius watched pleasure-bound killers enter, armed with blades that glistened with poison. Hulking sacks of indomitable pestilence followed, with the cerulean-skinned warriors of Tzeentch. Barbarian berserkers jangling with skulls clawed at each other to be the first to the fighting within. They were a horde of unwitting puppets, all serving as a distraction for the Prince of Embers.

As Zuvius entered and moved through the gallery of twisted death the Unseeing had sculpted in the barbican, he found Mallofax. The bird had risked the sky-bound furies to fly over the wall and gather intelligence for his master of the trials to come.

‘Speak,’ Zuvius commanded.

‘Daemons, my prince,’ Mallofax told him, hopping from statue to statue. ‘The legions of hell, fighting for the Everchosen.’

As the barbican opened up onto another stone walkway, Zuvius found that his horde had run straight into the determined resistance of the hell-knights who had escaped the gaze of the Unseeing, and a throng of daemon shock troops – things unleashed to immediately check the advance of any besieger entering the fortress.

Beyond the barbican troops, the lord of Khorne had dived straight into combat, his cloak and monstrous axe wheeling about him in a spatter of blood. Inspired by his fearless example, the champions of other dark gods fell in behind him – the Chaos lord was the point of a wedge that the horde was driving through the ranks of savage Varanspire daemons. Horned plaguebearers tore warriors of Chaos limb from limb with their diseased claws. Pallid nightmares of claw and dread feminine form snapped off heads with cruel elegance. Fury-red fiends of horn and claw danced death through the horde, wielding hellblades in devastating arcs of destruction. The lord of Khorne found himself fighting for his life against a trio of bloodletters, turning a storm of swords aside with brutal swings of his axe.

No less devastating were Archaon’s Knights of Ruin. Decked in plate of black and gold, they were broad and powerful, and thrust their fellspears through champions of Chaos, sometimes two or three at a time, impaling them like stuck boars.

The Hexenguard moved about their master, giving Zuvius the protection of their shields while sweeping through lesser daemons with longswords. As change-blessed flesh and bone stretched, the arcs of the tapering blades surprised the infernal creatures and opened up throats and bellies. As a plaguebearer clawed through the Hexenguard shields, the daemon batted one of the knight’s heads from his armoured shoulders with a diseased hand. It beat another into the ground with a fist before pulling out a jagged, rusted cleaver and swinging it with droning abandon at Zuvius.

Like his former patron, the Prince of Embers had a special hatred for the Lord of Decay’s foetid daemon foot soldiers. Bringing the blade of his glaive down, he knocked the creature’s weapon to the floor before slicing its hand from its gangly arm.

With the foul thing at a disadvantage, Zuvius brought the pommel of the glaive around to smash the daemon in the face, before turning the shaft in his hands and ramming the blade straight into its swollen belly. Pushing through the shields of his Hexenguard protectors, Zuvius forced the plaguebearer back. Rot-infested entrails tumbled from the thing’s cleaved form. Slamming it into the back of one of the Everchosen’s ruinous knights, Zuvius turned the glaive blade like a key, bursting the rest of its putrid organs.

Feeling the blow, the blood knight turned around. Despite the weight of his thick plate, the warrior moved like a striking serpent, his ensorcelled blade a blur of runes and dark steel as it smashed A’cuitas aside. The knight seemed drawn to the Prince of Embers’ confidence and lethality, recognising the competition. Perhaps, Zuvius thought, he had seen him issuing orders to the horde outside the gate and gain entrance with his crackling power. The knight stared at the prince through the eye slits of his helm, the ornate headdress of metal horns thrumming with dark power.

Zuvius felt the intensity of the knight’s attentions. He was hungry for the kill. The prince’s life was his to take and every second Zuvius was allowed to breathe was a grievous insult to the Everchosen of Chaos. His sword was a stabbing, sweeping, cleaving instrument of cold steel. Relentless in the economic savagery of his attacks, the warrior backed Zuvius towards the barbican wall, away from others of his warband and the horde that might help him. Away from the other dark knights of the fortress who might take the honour of the kill.

Working his glaive around, Zuvius turned the cuts and swings of the ensorcelled blade aside. The knight moved with incredible speed and assurance, pressing the prince to his limit. He felt the warrior’s attacks burn with the desire to end him. Zuvius backed into the barbican wall and sparks flew as the knight carved his blade into the stone. The prince ducked and weaved around into an alcove doorway.

‘Expect to get no further,’ the knight hissed through his helm. A haft-ringing deflection knocked Zuvius’ weapon aside. A brief stream of lightning scorched and crackled away to nothingness on the smooth stone. The knight had the measure of him now. He wouldn’t allow Zuvius to press his sorcerous advantage.

As the murderous thrusts and stabbing attacks forced Zuvius through the spike-inlaid doorway and up a crooked spiral of stairs, the prince felt the dread knight gearing up for the kill. Even with the advantage of higher ground, Zuvius could not get past the warrior’s defensive sweeps. It was as though his weapon were part of him, moving with speed and force to knock the glaive aside.

As the walls opened out onto a stone landing, Zuvius readied himself for the end. Archaon did indeed only select the very best warriors for his ranks. As their blades clashed and the knight backed Zuvius across the landing, barbican archers in dark helms and with bare, scarred chests moved their bows, arrows and ballistas across the stone floor. With the sound of battle within the walls alerting them to a breach, the archers were intent on moving their deadly weaponry over to the arrow slits on the other side of the landing so that they could once more target the horde below.

‘Think never to wear the dark plate of the Everchosen,’ the unhallowed knight spat as he attacked. Sparks lit up the landing as Zuvius turned the ensorcelled blade away, each deflection a little slower, each lethal lunge of the blade a moment closer to ending the prince.

As they reached the end of the landing, Zuvius saw the knight’s eyes widen with surprise and hostility. Instead of skewering Zuvius, the rune-encrusted blade pointed towards an archer standing behind the prince. Turning, the prince saw that the archer was standing next to an unloaded ballista and was holding the heavy, iron bolt above his head like a cudgel.

‘This dubious honour is mine,’ the knight shouted at the archer, warning him off.

Zuvius knew that this was his last chance. This knight of ruin, this warrior acolyte of the Destroyer of Worlds, would slay him. Touching the pommel of the glaive to the metal of the knight’s weapon, Zuvius allowed the briefest stream of lightning to course through the blade. The sword leapt from the knight’s gauntlet with a sudden shock and rattled across the floor, away from them both.

As the knight and Zuvius stared at one another, the sorcerer thrust the crowning blade of A’cuitas back, stabbing the archer through the chest. Without looking, Zuvius listened for the cacophonous clatter of the heavy bolt on the floor. Zuvius knew what to expect next. The knight was so skilled with the sword, the prince wagered, that he wouldn’t continue the combat without it.

Grunting his hatred, the knight made a run for the ensorcelled blade. Zuvius was right behind him. With the haft of the glaive in both gauntlets, Zuvius thrust the weapon over the knight’s head. As the warrior’s ornate helm was knocked to the floor, Zuvius hauled him back. The knight reached for his blade, but it was just out of reach. Zuvius pushed the glaive’s blade to the knight’s throat, and the warrior was forced to grasp the weapon at his neck instead.

Without his helm, Zuvius could see the knight was some kind of albino, with unnaturally pallid flesh. His mouth opened, gulping for air, and the sorcerer caught a brief glimpse of his black tongue and needle teeth as he bucked around. Like a tormented animal, the dark knight – who had been so deliberate in his murderous bladework – reared with Zuvius on his back and flung them both at the wall. Zuvius held on for his life as the knight backed and battered them both against the stone. Heaving the shaft of A’cuitas ever closer, his arms burning with the effort, the prince felt something give, and the knight suddenly go limp. Riding the cascade of hell-forged plate and muscle to the ground, Zuvius held the knight there for a few moments longer, just to make sure. Getting to his feet, Zuvius turned his blade about in his gauntlets and struck the dread knight’s head from his shoulders.

‘You fought well,’ Zuvius told the corpse. ‘Just not well enough. The honour might have been yours but the pleasure was mine.’

Archers came around the corner armed with their bows and improvised weapons. Turning A’cuitas on them, Zuvius arced lightning from one killer to another, turning each into a wall-splattering eruption of blood.

Leaning against the glaive, Zuvius took a moment to catch his breath. At the arrow slit he heard the flap of wings. Mallofax settled in the opening, watching his master with beady, black eyes.

‘Where have you been?’ the prince asked.

‘Our siege does not go well, my lord,’ Mallofax squawked. Zuvius went across to the arrow slit and peered down at the walkway leading from the barbican. The Varanspire’s daemonic shock troops were taking the Chaos horde apart. The Hexenguard were all dead. Champions of different fell gods fought side by side against the Everchosen’s monstrosities, killing the dread things when they could. Only the Khornate lord in his blood-baroque armour and gore-drizzling cloak seemed to be making headway. With his axe dripping with infernal ichor, the bodies of bloodletters, plaguebearers and daemonettes twitched at his feet. Zuvius thought on the mess he had made of the archers who had been about to open fire on the walkway.

‘The siege goes better than it might,’ Zuvius corrected the bird.

Zuvius looked down on the horde below, the champions of Chaos doomed to become little more than a daemon-slain distraction. His gaze followed the walkway spanning the exterior wall and the next. While the Everchosen’s knights, sorcerers and daemons haunted the fortress corridors and clung to the architecture like warped gargoyles, the colossal courtyard in between blazed with torches: an assembly ground for monstrous hordes, led by countless champions and Chaos lords who fought under Archaon’s banner. They waited to be summoned to battle at the Everchosen’s order, somewhere in the Mortal Realms, while other armies of darkness arrived with the spoils of war to take their place.

There was no way that the invading horde could fight through such numbers and horror. Zuvius would have to find another way. The horde could still serve his interests as a timely distraction. He would not tolerate a challenger for the Everchosen’s attentions, however. Scooping up the iron bolt the archer had dropped on the floor, Zuvius loaded and cranked the ballista. He could feel the hate of the bound daemon radiating off the cursed iron. Aiming the weapon down through the arrow slit, he lined it up with the back of the Khornate lord that was still leading the fighting.

Allowing the Blood God’s champion to finish one of Archaon’s black-armoured knights with a bludgeoning swing of his axe, Zuvius fired the ballista. Mallofax flapped his wings at the sound and hopped onto the prince’s shoulder.

The iron bolt speared through the warrior’s back and out from his chest, and the lord of Chaos staggered. The released daemon savaged at the warrior’s soul while a daemonette leapt on him, scything with her claws, but the Khornate champion somehow fought on. Tearing the creature from his pauldron, the Chaos lord smashed her into the ground. Falling to his knees, he took the legs out from beneath another daemonette as she ran at him. Dropping his axe and falling onto all fours, the Khornate lord was surrounded by stalking bloodletters. The daemons waited for a moment and then pounced, tearing into the Blood God’s champion with horn and claw, pulling free his skewered heart and snarling skull.

‘What now, my prince?’ Mallofax asked.

‘Now we find the Everchosen of Chaos,’ the Prince of Embers told him.

The Varanspire.

Orphaeo Zuvius negotiated the leagues of fang-lined battlements. He stood in the monstrous claws of tower turrets, watching greater daemons on the wing, hunting furies in the storm-wracked skies.

In search of Archaon, Zuvius explored the citadel, its towering heights and corrupting depths. There, all the Chaos Gods and Archaon, as their undisputed champion, were celebrated. Shrines and temples dedicated to the Ruinous Powers turned Zuvius’ heart black. Labyrinthine libraries of sorcerous tomes threatened to claim years of his life, while crowded fighting pits were places of perpetual death. Zuvius walked through miles of corridors sizzling with dark intent. He found lavish chambers that were nests of writhing daemonflesh, and stagnant ruins in which time almost stood still. Indeed, the heart of the Varanspire barely seemed to observe the natural laws at all – an architectural nightmare crafted in darkness, stone and fire.

On the courtyard expanses he passed beneath banners depicting the symbols of the Everchosen and the unruly hordes of ruin: spawn, savages, Chaos knights, enslaved monstrosities, charismatic champions and dark warlords, all serving dread Archaon. Mallofax warned his prince of lesser daemons and infernal beasts haunting the fortress corridors ahead.

While the diversionary sacrifice of his warband and the besieging horde had allowed Zuvius within the Varanspire’s walls, it had been his patience and cunning that had allowed him to traverse the walkways and courtyards, the ramparts and corridors. When he needed to, the prince murdered with silent impunity, strangling the lesser guards of the fortress garrison with the A’cuitas’ haft and stabbing the blade up under chins, through backs and into helms.

With every treacherous blow Zuvius got nearer to his goal, until he walked straight through the monstrous gates of the citadel spire itself. Mallofax hopped and flapped down empty corridors ahead of his master.

Lost in this hellscape, each twist, turn, deathly drop and corrupting flourish was dedicated to the Everchosen of Chaos. Only the strangest of daemonic creatures stalked the dream-like depths, feverish abominations writhing with tentacle. Daemon monstrosities that struggled to keep their form, erupting with mouths and limbs that spewed forth sorcerous flame, drove Zuvius on through the insanity. Magical hellfire not only thundered up corridors and through chambers but scorched the very nature of reality itself. Zuvius stumbled away from the heat, light and sound, driven down into one corridor and then the next, until he could no longer escape the corruptive bloom of daemon flame coming at him from all directions.

As the booming inferno enveloped him, Zuvius simultaneously lost and found himself. Blinking the nightmare from his eyes, the Prince of Embers stumbled across a gargantuan chamber of black marble that he couldn’t remember having entered before. It was dark magnificence given form. Mallofax hopped and staggered behind him across the polished floor. A forest of colossal pillars rose to the ceiling and Zuvius stumbled between them. Into each was crafted the horror of screaming faces.

Pushing himself between two pillars, Zuvius suddenly caught sight of the back of a monstrous throne, a thing sculpted of darkness and ossified ambition, a thing that radiated unholy power and struck a chord of dread in the Prince of Embers’ heart.

‘This is it,’ Zuvius said to Mallofax. ‘This is a throne room fit for the Everchosen of Chaos. A place of doom and dark majesty. We have made it, Mallofax.’

Zuvius staggered about the corruptive splendour of the throne, keeping his distance as he moved around in front of it. The throne itself was blinding in its dark brilliance and the prince found himself crashing to his knees in exhaustion and dread.

‘Mighty Archaon,’ Zuvius managed, his helmet off and forehead to the floor. ‘You have summoned and I have answered. I have travelled far and fought hard in your name, all to take a place at your unholy side. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos, Destroyer of Worlds and men: I supplicate myself before you. I pledge myself to you in bringing an end to this world and all others.’

‘You seek Archaon?’ a voice came, burning with age and sorcerous power.

Zuvius brought up his head and stared into the radiating darkness. He got the impression of a gaunt figure rising from the throne, at one with the unholy dread of the object. It walked down the steps towards the kneeling Zuvius. The prince rubbed the darkness from his eyes. He could make out a skeletal figure and sorcerer’s robes. The thing’s features were warped, and blinked with a thousand eyes. Zuvius burned under its fell gaze.

‘I seek Archaon,’ Zuvius confirmed, holding his hand out in front of him to ward against the darkness, and getting to his feet.

‘In a fortress he has barely set foot in?’ the sorcerer said. ‘Before a throne upon which he has never sat?’

‘Archaon is not here?’

‘And never shall be.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Zuvius told the sorcerer honestly. ‘I am–’

‘You are blind and foolish,’ the sorcerer said. ‘That is all that matters. How came you to be in this place?’

‘I followed the crows,’ the Prince of Embers said.

‘For where the Everchosen treads, the crows indeed follow,’ the sorcerer said.

Zuvius heard it. Faint at first. The distant flapping of wings. The caws of hungry carrion birds. The sound grew, booming about the cavernous chamber. Suddenly they were everywhere. Birds, black of feather and sharp of beak. A storm of crows swarmed through the pillars in all directions – flying at Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers. A squawking Mallofax was lost in the thunder of the flock. Zuvius was lifted from the ground but remained in place, being shredded from all angles. They ripped his armour from his form and tore at his skin with their beaks and talons. Zuvius screamed as they pulled the remaining hair from his scalp and his eyes from their sockets. Like a torrent of darkness, they baptised him in death.

Zuvius crashed back down to the marble floor. Black feathers floated down beside him, an agony on his raw flesh. He felt blood spill down his face from the empty sockets and drip to the floor. He heard Mallofax squawk his misery from nearby.

‘My prince…’ the bird said, but got no further.

The sorcerer moved painfully close to the Prince of Embers and leaned in, causing Zuvius, blind, to angle his head awkwardly this way and that, trying to fix on the presence.

‘Your trials are over,’ the sorcerer told him. Orphaeo Zuvius didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead he settled on a dumbfounded silence. ‘What did you expect? Some kind of dark coronation? The Everchosen of Chaos here to recognise you personally for your dread service? Service to Almighty Archaon is recognition enough.’ Zuvius nodded slowly in his private agony.

‘Don’t worry,’ the sorcerer said as he left him, the horror of his voice growing distant. His words were laced with a dark amusement. ‘There are none so blind as those that will not see.’

The Prince of Embers knelt there, the sorcerer’s parting words echoing horribly about the colossal chamber. They were everywhere, melting into his mind behind the empty sockets of his eyes. There, on his knees before the empty throne, Orphaeo Zuvius came to know the true nature of damnation. He had forsaken all in his search for the Everchosen of Chaos and Archaon, in turn, had forsaken him. Letting the torturous darkness where his eyes used to be sink down into his soul, the Prince of Embers became one with the potent doom of the place. The wicked laughter of insanity. A haunting whisper in the fortress depths. A cautionary tale never told.

Blood and Plague

In a dead land, the cold arena waited. Echoes of battles past and civilizations forgotten lined its cliff walls. The land did not remember the glories that had been. It remembered their loss. It remembered their fall. And it muttered to itself with the whisper of tombs. The whispers spread across the floor of the arena: broken archways, depressions of absent foundations, doors to emptiness. Eroded walls faded to nothing, sentences trailing off into silence.

Above the cold arena, on a projecting spur of rock, a sorcerer watched the whispers. He watched the land beyond. He watched as the waiting came to an end.

The Many-Eyed Servant faced south, seeing much further than the arena. The carriers of his vision flew over the land. A multitude of fragments became a composite panorama of the battle to come. From the east and west, warbands approached through the canyons of vanished waterways and time-gnawed sepulchres of civilisations. ‘They are almost here,’ he said.

Heavy footsteps crunched the stone behind him. A presence loomed at the daemon’s back. The Many-Eyed Servant’s master had come. He said nothing, but the daemon sensed his satisfaction. The Everchosen had arrived to witness the final display.

‘Where have you brought us?’

Copsys Bule thought before answering. Fistula’s words were less a question than an accusation. They had marched for a day and a night since passing through the gate. Until now, Fistula had said nothing to challenge the lord of plague’s command. Since their escape from the seraphon, Fistula had been less and less inclined to hide his anger and impatience. The blightlord had, for a time, been willing to accept that abandoning a second battle to the Stormcast Eternals was the right price to pay for the greater glory of joining the forces of Archaon. But that promise still showed no sign of being fulfilled. Instead, they travelled through nothing. The land was cracked, bare stone. The gate had brought the Rotbringers to the floor of a wide, twisting canyon. The riverbed had dried out centuries before. The journey between the cliffs took them through the traces of fallen cities and immense, fading graveyards. There was no life at all. Bule had abandoned a realm bursting with the gifts of Nurgle’s garden for a wasteland. No disease could flourish here. There was nothing here to decay. There was only the slow erosion of wind, and the fading into a greater silence. The groans of this realm’s flesh had been spent long ago.

But this was the way. The call of Archaon was as clear to Bule now as it had been mysterious before. The land held no promise, yet Bule followed the certainty of destiny.

‘We are where we must be,’ he said. ‘I have not brought us here. Archaon has. The blessing of Grandfather Nurgle has. There is no reason for anger, Fistula. Rejoice instead, and learn patience.’ Fistula fought well, but he had too little experience of the larger ebb and flow of war. Plague waxed and waned, but in the end, it consumed all. To deny this was to fail to understand the nature of disease. Rage was useful, but had its limitations.

Bule’s exhortation had little effect. The blisters on Fistula’s bald head crowded each other with suppurating anger. Bule watched Fistula’s grip tighten on his blades. He gauged the other Rotbringer’s stance. Are you going to attack? Bule wondered. He followed his own counsel and remained patient. His armour was heavier than Fistula’s. He had the advantage of bulk. He could absorb a first blow. But there was no need to precipitate a struggle; ahead lay glory for all. He would lead by example.

‘You don’t hear the call?’ Bule asked.

‘No.’ More anger in that single word.

‘Then put your faith in the path we have followed.’

‘From one retreat to another?’

‘The call I heed led us to that gate. Now it takes us to a culmination.’

Fistula grunted, but he plodded on. Bule looked back over the rest of the band. It was a much smaller horde now, consisting of only those who had followed him into the polluted river to find the gate beneath the foundations of the humans’ temple. The newly constructed symbol that rejected Nurgle’s gifts had concealed in its heart a cancer: the key to a greater victory. The loss of the rest of the warband, abandoned to the Stormcasts, had been a small price. Patience would see the coming of a greater bloom; of this, Bule was sure. Did the rest of his warriors share this certainty? Did they have faith, or did they doubt like Fistula?

He pushed the question aside. Though the canyon stretched onward, twisting in its grey death, the summons was clear to him. The flies that birthed from his head and swarmed about him buzzed with greater intensity. Faith would soon no longer be necessary. It would give way to proof.

If not around the next bend, then the one after that. The march through desolation would end soon.

Bule lengthened his stride. His gut bounced and roiled with his steps. Putrid gases rose from the rotting sores in his flesh. The garden was alive in him, and he would see it flourish in service to Archaon.

There were too many silences. Some were offensive to Ushkar Mir. Others were dangerous.

The snarl of his breath tried to fill the silence of the land. The absence of blood and fire was a frustration so intense it was agony. He saw bones. He saw skulls. But they were old, meaningless. They crumbled to nothing beneath his steps, giving off puffs of grey dust. There was no war here. If there had been violence once, even its memory was buried in stone. The emptiness of the canyon and the emptiness of the days: these were the silences that offended the exalted deathbringer.

It was the silence of Danavan Vuul that was a potential threat. The bloodstoker had said nothing for many hours now. With each day that had passed since Mir’s last trial, each day absent of any foe, each long day in the empty land, Vuul had said less. They were still in the Realm of Death. The longer the march had gone on through this cursed canyon, the more Vuul’s silence had expressed his doubts about the direction the Bloodslaves were taking. His face was hidden by his helmet. In his heavy crimson armour, he marched with a steady gait, leaning forward as if ready to break into a charge. Ushkar Mir monitored his every step out of the corner of his eye. He was braced for an attack. He contemplated killing Vuul, terminating the threat before it declared itself. He would have already done so were it not for the call. Archaon’s summons pulled him forward. He would find the Everchosen here, and soon. There was battle in this realm, and Archaon was at its forefront. The scent of war and bloodshed had brought him this far. It was immaterial whether the rest of the warband felt the summons too. Destiny was close, and the moment was coming when there would be an enemy to shatter.

Mir stayed his hand. In so doing, he surprised himself. Regardless of Vuul’s anger, his ambition was obvious and dangerous. He resented Mir’s status as one of the Exalted. He made no secret of that, and obeyed orders with grudging reluctance. Two days ago, Mir would have treated the prospect of a prolonged period without a foe as intolerable. He would have assumed Vuul would move against him. He would have killed Vuul at the first opportunity.

Now he didn’t. For perhaps the first time in his life, another goal superseded self-preservation. The greatest need to was to find Archaon, and to become his champion. To achieve that goal would make him stronger yet, ensuring his survival and perhaps the immortality of his name. But now he wondered if perhaps he was reaching for something even greater than that. To fight alongside a being who refused to be the vassal of any single god would be a personal victory beyond any other. The brass band over his eyes burned his flesh. The endless pain of the metal and the miracle of his continued sight were perpetual reminders of his unwilling allegiance. Khorne owned him. His existence was devoted to the reaping of skulls for the Blood God, and so it would ever be.

Until he could achieve his vengeance.

But to be a champion of Archaon, to be among the number who fought for Chaos under the banner of the warrior who was a force unto himself – there would be pride in that achievement. There was no such thing as redemption. The concept was meaningless. He had witnessed the immolation of all such hope. He would grasp instead the chance to shed blood no longer for the sole benefit of Khorne.

The prospect of soon standing before Archaon subsumed all other thought and so he kept his eye on Vuul, but he did not instigate the duel. He had no patience for such a pointless delay. Even his axes were eager to reach their destination: Bloodspite, black as old blood, and Skullthief, red as a fresh arterial fountain, each containing a bloodletter daemon. The perpetual rivals for greater slaughter vibrated with their hunger, and they pulled him forwards. They too wished to fight for Archaon. Let Vuul stew in impotent rage. Let him witness the truth.

The canyon took another turn and beyond it, revelation unfolded. It opened up into a vast bowl, with a second entrance to the west. A great host lined the top of the north wall, but from the floor of the arena, he could not judge its full size. It extended along the entire wall of the arena, and he could hear the clamour of ranks upon ranks. Black smoke rose in the distance, and from somewhere in that direction came the screams and moans of prisoners.

Mir had never beheld such an army before. He saw exalted deathbringers and skullgrinders. He saw a warrior in huge and terrible crimson armour, a warrior who could only be a Lord of Khorne. And these powerful servants of the Blood God stood beside those sworn to the Plaguefather, and the Changer of Ways, and the lost God of Excess. Vuul even saw the tall, angular shape of one of the Great Horned Rat’s corruptors. The most powerful knights of Chaos in all its forms were gathered in a unity Mir could barely comprehend. They looked down upon him and they waited, for they did not command.

They followed a being greater than all of them.

‘I never imagined…’ said the slaughterpriest Orto. He who had been so confident in his preaching of Khorne’s will was at a loss.

You serve Khorne utterly, Mir thought. This army serves Archaon. You knew this was our goal. But you never imagined? Is your faith inflexible, slaughterpriest? Can it not survive paradox?

Below the host, a stone staircase descended to the floor of the arena. The staircase was huge. Its width took up half the cliff. It was badly eroded. It had become a majestic ghost.

A narrow spur projected far into the air from the centre of the north wall. On it stood a towering figure in black armour.

Archaon.

And at the sight of that being, that supreme warrior of Chaos, Mir too thought, I never imagined.

The Everchosen spoke.

Bule guessed what he would say. The lord of plagues saw the other warband enter the arena at the same time as his. Even though Bule knew the test that lay ahead, Archaon’s words rooted him to the spot. The voice, terrible in power, echoed across the arena. It was more than the voice of destiny. It was the voice of a being who had made destiny his slave.

‘Champions,’ Archaon said, ‘I welcome you to the Ossuar Arena. You have fought well. Now you are at the end of a journey. One will be found worthy to join my Varanguard. One.’ Archaon paused. His great horned helm tilted downward. He was gazing at the two warbands.

‘You will exact your own judgement,’ he said.

Across the line of the Everchosen’s warriors, war horns lifted. The arena resounded with the deafening blast of the call to war. The air trembled and cracked. The moment had come for the act of killing to return to this corner of the dead lands.

At the signal, Bule turned his gaze from Archaon and signalled to his warband. They began a rolling charge across the arena. The enemy was clad in armour the colour of blood and fire. Warriors of Khorne. He focused on their leader. Hundreds of yards separated the two forces, and Bule could make out few details of his rival. He was easy to identify, though, as he led his attack, fronting the warband’s collective howl of rage. In contrast to his followers, he wore no armour. A brass band covered his eyes. It gleamed, though no sun pierced the heavy clouds. His flesh was marked with burning runes. He was already outpacing the rest of his band. He was fast. Faster than Fistula.

The Bloodbound were a real threat. No matter. Here, at last, was the destiny that had guided Bule through three realms. No one would stand between him and his apotheosis. He would strike this pretender down, and, at Archaon’s side, he would see the Grandfather’s garden flourish as never before.

Bule answered the snarl of the Bloodbound with his own roar. He revelled in its wet ratcheting. It was the sound of disease at war. He would drown the rage-possessed in the joyous flood of pestilence.

Behind him, his Rotbringers joined in his call.

Plague rushed forward to clash with Blood.

Then, from the skies, came a storm of wings.

There was his challenge. The putrid worshippers of Nurgle. Their charge made Mir snarl with disgusted rage. Their gait was a shambling rush. Their stench washed through the air in waves. Their blood would be a polluted stew. Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, he thought. Nor does he care for its purity, as long as it flows.

The Rotbringers were one more threat to his survival. He would tear them apart, and he would join Archaon.

He ran across the uneven floor of the arena, leaping over empty tombs and crumbled walls. As he did, he saw movement on the spur of rock. He looked up. Archaon had stepped back. A daemon moved to take his place at the end of the spur. It was a thing of skeletal majesty. Mir could feel its manifold gaze burning down on him from a hundred angles at once. The daemon spread its arms wide. A flapping cloud came into being around the daemon. It spread and swooped down into the arena, bringing winged night with it.

It was a gigantic murder of crows. Thousands upon thousands of the birds. They cawed and whirled. They were everywhere. They covered the space of the arena. And as they beat their wings and gave voice to their raucous song, the land began to change.

The ground rippled. It dipped and rose, transforming into hills and gullies. Stone became malleable. It turned into a liquid, then smoke. It lost its form. Barrenness gave way to convulsive life. Naked stone became muck. Mir’s boots sank past his ankle. Clouds of insects descended on him. Trees speared out of the mud. They unfolded branches heavy with rotting leaves. Growths twisted the limbs, and from them, things squirmed to be free, worms with pale, grasping hands. The trees reached out to each other, and the worm-things clasped and clawed across the growths, and a tangle of wood, soft, rotten, yet resilient, surrounded the warband. Blackened vegetation flowed around their legs. It was a rising tide of dying mulch. It fell apart, blossomed, sickened and died, then rose from its own decay in the space of a breath.

Mir could no longer see the enemy. The Rotbringers had vanished behind the wall of embodied putrescence. The crows dived through the canopy. They perched on branches and circled above the warband. Some of the birds were rotting as they flew. Others were on fire. They all had too many eyes. They cawed their mockery. Mir slashed at them and at the vegetation blocking his way forward. His advance slowed to a crawl.

‘You have turned Khorne against us!’ Orto shouted. ‘Archaon favours the followers of Nurgle.’

‘Are you already defeated?’ Skull answered. In the blood warrior’s words, Mir heard his own thoughts given voice. Khorne had rendered him mute, but Skull always spoke for him. Skull, whose loyalty was so unshakeable, it had to be a form of enslavement. ‘Do you abandon your duty to the Blood God?’ Skull demanded.

Vuul answered before Orto. ‘The transgression is Mir’s, not ours,’ he snarled. To Mir he said, ‘We followed you and this is our reward.’

Mir swung his axes. Branches fell, burning at their touch. I will have your silence and your effort, or I will have your head, he thought.

Skull said, ‘The enemy is close, and Ushkar Mir will not let a few trees stand between us and their skulls.’

Mir paused and faced Vuul. He parted his jaws, his teeth ready to tear flesh. He felt Vuul’s gaze on his face. There were no eyes for the bloodstoker to see, but Mir knew his band of brass blazed in the foetid shadows of the forest. Vuul hesitated, then, with a snarl, he turned back to hacking at the growths.

Vines tangled around Mir’s arms. He tore the lanyards apart. Spores burst from the ragged ends. The air thickened and sought to choke him. He spat it out and forced his way through the wall of rot. With each slowed step, his anger grew, and the forest began to shrivel at his touch.

He moved faster, a vector of wrath burning through the woods. He still could not see the Rotbringers. Nor could he hear them. He could barely hear his own troops over the shrieking of the birds. The stench of putrescence drowned out the scent of his prey’s blood.

No matter. He drove forward. If he did not reach the foes himself, the foes would come to him. And his rage would reap the harvest of their skulls.

The land erupted with violent death. Rivers of flaming blood ran between hills of skulls. Through the darkness of the crows’ wings, everything was the red of fire and the crimson of gore. Bule had been running across a barren plain, and then it had heaved skyward, stone transforming into bones soaked in blood, steaming and burning. Bule struggled up the slope. Skulls and femurs rolled and shifted. The ground tried to swallow his legs in avalanches of remains.

The Rotbringers reached the top of the rise. The walls of the arena had vanished. Bones, blood and flame stretched out to burning horizons in every direction. Overhead, the crows wheeled. Their many eyes glittered and judged.

‘We are abandoned,’ Fistula said.

There could be no garden here. There was no life. Only the perpetuity of pyres and the scarlet flow of rage.

‘We are challenged.’ Bule said. He would not despair, though the omen of the transformation was an ill one. Let it be a further trial, then, another means by which he would prove himself worthy of serving Archaon, and of the blessings of Grandfather Nurgle.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing, ‘we have an opportunity.’

The Bloodbound were further away than they had been before the land had transformed. The wall of the arena had vanished, and the battlefield was infinite. Still, the Khornate warriors were on the same heading. There was something odd about their advance. They moved more slowly than Bule had expected. Their gestures were strange. They were slashing at the air as if battling invisible enemies.

‘What are they doing?’ Fistula wondered.

‘I don’t care, as long as it does them no good.’ Bule thought for a moment. The Bloodbound warband looked strong. Whatever the confusion of the warriors’ gestures, they were striking forward with the coherence and force of a battering ram. Bule had little doubt that a head-on collision would go against him. That would be playing to the strengths of the wrathful. Neither band was very large. The possibilities for manoeuvring were few. But they still existed.

‘Embrace the enemy with the generosity of Grandfather,’ Bule ordered. He would take advantage of the Bloodbound’s apparent distraction. ‘Advance to meet them, encourage their charge, then split up and hit their flanks.’

Fistula nodded. Of course he’s pleased, Bule thought. He will lead half our band.

It was a risk, but one he saw no way to avoid.

Bule resumed the charge. He bellowed and stormed down the hill of bones. The footing was treacherous. He stomped hard on the shifting bones, shattering them, splashing through rivulets of blood, imposing his bulk on the burning land. The distance between the two bands narrowed. Though both struggled, it seemed as if the field were contracting once more. The crows called their excitement as the champions hurled towards each other.

We’re closing too fast, Bule thought.

There was nothing but the forest, nothing but the black, viscous, rotting density of the vegetation. Mir heard the Rotbringers, but could not see them. The sound of their tramping was muffled by the vegetation. There was no way to gauge their distance.

And then the forest fell away, shrivelling and burning at his touch, and the Rotbringers were before him. He roared. His hatred fuelled by frustration, he shot forward, axes raised. They screamed their hunger. The warrior at the Rotbringers’ head was huge, a festering mass of muscle and bulk. The spikes of his armour squirmed with rotting meat. His helmet was featureless except for a down-curving horn and a cluster of three eye-shaped holes. Mir saw in the design the idiot implacability of an insect, and his jaws parted in anticipation of the foe’s blood.

The Rotbringer was faster than he looked. He took a step back and pivoted to the right. Mir’s momentum carried him forward, too powerful to alter course. Skullthief slashed into the Rotbringer’s torso. Dark, stinking blood erupted into the air, boiling from the strike. The axe blade scraped against ribs. The Rotbringer shouted in pain, but kept moving, pulling free of Skullthief. Behind him, a second warrior, lighter in build and armour, broke left. He was very fast. He escaped harm. The knight coming up behind him was not as lucky. Mir brought his two blades together. The daemons within, as frustrated and raging as he, bit deep into the rotting, rusted armour. The double sweep slashed through flesh and bone. The knight’s head flew off. Blood fountained over Mir. It was thick with parasites. He snarled and batted the slumping corpse aside and the head rolled into the muck and vegetation. The plants rotted to nothing, as if the touch of the dead plague-bringer broke their hold on reality and they withdrew before the greater force of wrath.

Behind the fallen knight, a trio of marauders hurled themselves at Mir. They hacked at him with blades dripping with filth. The edges of his wounds turned black. The pain squirmed. He roared. Rage turned his vision red. It burned his veins clear of the infections. He brought Bloodspite down on one marauder’s skull, splitting it in two. Skullthief took another’s sword arm off at the shoulder. The wounded Rotbringer howled but pushed in closer, his rotten blood washing over Mir. Insects and worms tried to burrow through the brass. They succeeded in smearing his vision. Behind him, the rest of his band pushed forward.

But as he swiped the slime from his face, he saw that most of the Rotbringers had moved out to the left and right, flanking his warriors.

The wound burned. Not with the generous malignancy of Grandfather Nurgle’s munificence. It burned with a destroying fire, one that put the torch to the beauty of decay and left nothing but bone and ash. Bule hissed. His breath was pained and angry. The Bloodbound had hit so hard, so fast. Bule had seen them coming. He should have been able to judge when to move out of the way. But the distances in the battlefield were fluid, treacherous. He could not trust them. Fistula was right – there would be no blessings to look for from Nurgle. Everything was up to Bule. He would not find the garden in this landscape of skulls. It would be up to him to bring it here by fertilizing the ground with the blood of the wrathful.

Reeling from the blow of the Bloodbound champion, he moved in an arc away from the enemy horde. He glanced back. Just over a third of his knights followed him. The marauders took the brunt of the Bloodbound charge. They would be dead in moments. That was all the time he needed. On the other side of the enemy, Fistula kept pace with another third of the warband, mirroring his manoeuvre. The Khornate fighters smashed through the Rotbringers that stood in their way.

That’s right, Bule thought. You have broken us in two. Hold that belief.

He angled back in, ploughing through the bones, splashing through blood, bringing the weight and disease of his troops against the rear flank of the Bloodbound. The enemy turned, eager in rage to meet the challenge. But the ragged line was narrow. A concentrated wedge of Rotbringers hit it from both sides. Plague-ridden Chaos knights clashed with Khornate ones. Rotting armour and slimy, rusting blades met iron glowing red with the forge of anger. Barbarians in joyous states of decay fought counterparts whose faces were frozen in a rictus of perpetual wrath. Bule raised his battle axe. A green miasma spread out from it. The air itself sickened. Some of the foe began to stumble even before he made contact. One doubled over, choking with violent, rib-shattering coughs. His lungs, already half dissolved, pushed out through his straining jaw.

Bule brought his axe down. The pain in his chest faded into the background as the blade smashed down through a skullreaper’s shoulder and halfway down the torso. The warrior’s face screamed with hatred and pain. He struck at Bule with his other arm, wielding a sword the length of a man. It bled its own ichor. The blow struck just above Bule’s pauldron. The skullreaper had been aiming for his neck, but was weakening from more than loss of blood. The axe’s venom was running rampant through his body. Anger was impotent against the surge of transformative decay. Bule absorbed the blow and hit the skullreaper again in the other arm. The Bloodbound fell. Bule stepped over the still-breathing body. Where the blood of the Khornate warriors flowed, the land cooled. The low flames that flowed like oil over the mounds of skulls dampened. The bones crumbled into mulch. Shoots burst from the ground, pendulous with growths.

‘Break the hold of wrath!’ Bule shouted. ‘Let the garden flourish in victory!’

To his right, he heard a snarl so fanatical in its rage it withered the sprouting vegetation.

Mir decapitated another marauder and turned back in time to see the rear half of the warband caught in a vice. Where the Rotbringers attacked, the diseased vegetation exploded with a new exuberance of rotting life. Vines and branches rose in tangled exultation towards the sky of crows.

He snarled at Vuul. The bloodstoker was fighting at his shoulder, flaying a Rotbringer knight with his great whip.

‘Why are you here?’ Skull said to Vuul. ‘Lord Mir commands you go back up the line. Hold the centre.’

‘And you?’ said Vuul, challenging.

‘Do it.’

There was a single moment’s hesitation. Had there been a second, Mir would have attacked. But Vuul turned and saw the imminent collapse. The triumph of the enemy was too hateful to be borne. He raced down into the thick of the fray.

Mir killed the last of the Rotbringers at his position. The blood warriors around him paused, uncertain. They were poised to lend support to Vuul and push back the enemy attack. Mir shook his head. He gestured with Bloodspite. With me. Skull, the skullgrinder Kordos and the rest of the leading warriors followed as he turned right, off the clearing forged by the battle, plunging back into the festering green. He knew exactly where the Rotbringers were now. He would use the obscurity of the foliage against them. He would even turn their own manoeuvre against them. He would smash their illusions of strength. They flanked us, he thought. Now we flank them.

He wanted the skull of the Rotbringer champion. Killing him meant more than achieving the task set by Archaon. It meant more than destroying the principle threat. Skullthief had tasted the champion’s blood, and it was hungry for more. Bloodspite, envious, sought to steal its twin’s kill. Mir shared their hunger and their frustration. The Rotbringer should already be dead at his feet. The absence of the corpse was an insult.

The forest was thick with disease and insects. Almost immediately, Mir’s sight was reduced to a few steps in front of him. All directions were the same. The sounds of the struggle were too close to muffle now, though. He knew where he was going. Nurgle’s profusion would do nothing now to impede the path of rage.

He slashed through vegetation. It barely slowed him. He moved in a fated arc. There was no doubt, no confusion. He came in behind the lord of plague’s contingent. Around the struggle, the land was in flux. Vegetation burned and fell away, revealing a terrain of skulls. Blood flowed between the bones, turned black, and fertilized the ground. Growths and flame blossomed, the marks of the gods battling each other for supremacy with the same fury as the warriors. The Rotbringers had their backs to Mir. He could catch them in their own trap, crushing this part of the horde with greater numbers, then annihilating the other.

On the point of beginning the attack, Mir stopped. He raised his right arm, calling a halt.

‘Why do we stop?’ Kordos asked. It took much to move the skullgrinder to speak. His confusion must have been great. Since when did the Bloodslaves stop mid-charge?

‘Why do you question Lord Mir?’ asked Skull.

Kordos didn’t answer. Mir turned his head in Kordos’ direction for a moment, letting the skullgrinder know he had Mir’s attention. Then he faced forward again.

Vuul was fighting with ferocious skill. The Rotbringers attacked on two fronts, but the bloodstoker held them off. His whip and torture blade were blurs. His voice rose in a howl of thirst. He took the skulls of the enemy in a frenzy of blows. He cut through the Rotbringers as though they were no more of an obstacle than the forest. He was a towering storm of wrath.

Archaon had said there could be only one champion.

Mir had understood what that meant, but he had pushed the consequences aside until now. The priority was the defeat of the Rotbringers. Afterwards, he would deal with any of his warband still standing. But now, as he saw Vuul fight, his priorities changed. Vuul was fighting too well. His rage was fuelled by desperation and ambition. He understood the import of Archaon’s words too. Vuul sought to become the Varanguard.

Skull and the others with Mir obeyed when he signalled them to stop. Did they realize what he was doing and why? Did they understand what awaited them? Or were they too blinded by their dedication to Khorne? Perhaps they thought no further than the next kill, the next skull. Perhaps they dared not think any further. Certainly they dared not challenge him. To do so would be to invite the end of their lives even sooner.

So they obeyed. Even Kordos. They stopped. And with Mir, they waited.

Vuul fought through the violent roil of battle to reach the lord of plagues. Fire clashed with thick green fog. There were too many warriors in the way. Mir watched another Rotbringer, a blightlord, close in on Vuul. He was lightly armoured. He was fast. His lips were pulled back in a snarling rictus. His body was riddled with sores, but his rage was so great that it rivalled that of the Bloodbound he cut down.

Vuul sensed the approach of the blightlord and turned to meet him. The bloodstoker blocked a dual-bladed attack with the hilt of his blade. The Rotbringer stepped back, pulling his swords away. He feinted forward as Vuul lashed out with the whip, aiming at his neck. It was a trap, and Vuul fell into it. The blightlord took another step back. The whip went wide. The blightlord tangled it with one of his swords and yanked. Vuul stumbled forward. The blightlord came in and brought his other blade down on the bloodstoker’s right upper arm. The sword cut deep, slicing through armour, flesh and bone. The arm hung limp, swinging on the end of a flap of skin. His whip fell to the ground.

Vuul’s wrath gave him speed. He still had his torture blade. He stabbed forward. ‘Behold your champion, Everchosen!’ he cried. The Rotbringer sidestepped. The blade glanced off his torso, hacking away a chunk of flesh. It was not enough to slow the blightlord down.

Archaon sees nothing in you, Danavan Vuul, Mir thought.

The blightlord brought his right blade up, into Vuul’s forward momentum, and used the bloodstoker’s mass to ram the tip through the left eye-slit of his helm. Vuul stiffened. His war cry turned into a stuttering, wordless howl. Then it stopped. His knees buckled. The blightlord yanked his blade free, and blood gushed forth. On contact with the air, it turned into a black froth. Tumorous fronds unfurled to embrace his corpse.

The blightlord moved forward, leading his forces through the few Bloodbound that separated him from joining up with his chieftain. One of them was Orto.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ the slaughterpriest shouted. ‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

His zeal was unbroken. Mir knew that the Orto had found his path – he too understood how the contest must end, and he welcomed that meaning. He kept to the simplicity of fidelity to Khorne. He fought for the Blood God, and only the Blood God, to the end. He swung his bloodbathed axe with a speed that defied its size. The heads of rotted knights and barbarians flew in its wake. But there were too many, and the blightlord drove his blades into Orto’s back.

Mir roared. Now! His game was over. His rivals were falling. Time to finish off the others. He ran forward, blood boiling with the taste of victory.

Bule saw Fistula kill the bloodstoker. A few moments later, as the two groups of Rotbringers made contact, crushing the remaining Bloodbound between them, he heard the roar of the Bloodbound champion. The flames shot higher with the Khornate charge. Blood geysers erupted on either side of the warriors’ path.

Bule had seconds before the impact. There would be no evasion this time. The Bloodbound had been slow to arrive, though. The Rotbringers now had the numerical advantage.

But Bule turned away from the enemy. He had seen Fistula kill the slaughterpriest.

He had seen the skill, the speed and the rage. The skill and the speed were threats. The rage was an opportunity he must seize.

‘Fistula betrays us!’ he shouted. ‘He is apostate! Look how he abandons Nurgle for Khorne!’

Fistula blinked in astonishment, his blades deep in the corpse of a blood warrior. His battle rage gave way to blank surprise, and then returned, greater than ever, as he realized what Bule was doing. He snarled, freeing the swords, and played right into Bule’s hands. The violet blotching of his face and the contorted tendons of his neck were clear for all to see. He had always been the impatient warrior. His faith in Nurgle had been a crusading one, but only in the sense of the destruction of the Plaguefather’s enemies. He had shown little interest in the cultivation of the garden.

Now his anger doomed him.

Bule hurled the accusation. The Rotbringers heard and saw Fistula’s reaction. And Bule acted. He did so without pleasure. He swung his axe because he must, because only he could be Archaon’s champion, and Fistula’s visible wrath meant this was the moment his apostasy was plausible, and there was no chance Fistula could turn the warband against Bule.

He also swung the axe with conviction. Fistula’s rage was suspect. Bule believed the blightlord was a threat to the garden.

Even taken by surprise, Fistula’s reactions were fast. He swiped a blade across Bule’s torso. He tore the wound left by the Bloodbound champion wider and left a new furrow, dragging down deep into Bule’s gut. The filth on the blade reacted with the filth in Bule’s blood. Strains of plague did battle. Bule welcomed the conflict. It could only bear fruit, wonderful and dark.

Bule accepted his injury, gave thanks to Nurgle for the violent spread of infection, and smashed the massive axe blade down on Fistula.

The blightlord managed to jerk his head out of the path of the blow at the last second. It did him little good. The axe shattered his chestplate. It shattered his sternum. It split him open. He flailed. His arms batted at the weapon buried in his body. Their movements were so loose, so independent of one another, it was as if Fistula’s mind had been divided too, each half pulling at one set limbs.

Fistula staggered backwards, choking and gargling. Bule yanked the axe free and brought it down again. This time he smashed Fistula’s skull. The blightlord collapsed, his body erupting with maggots and rot. Its shape softened. The flesh rippled, then crumbled. Blood spread over the land. Where vegetation had grown from the death of Bloodbound warriors, it burned at the touch of Fistula’s blood.

‘Behold his treachery!’ Bule yelled, though his belief in his lie collapsed. Fistula’s blood had the same effect as that of his brothers in disease. Bule shouted to keep the lie alive in the minds of his warband just a bit longer.

Then the Bloodbound champion was upon them, and Bule abandoned all thoughts of strategy. There was no deception, no forethought.

There was battle, and there was his faith in Grandfather Nurgle.

And that was all.

Mir led the charge into the Rotbringers, and Chaos embraced the conflict. The land heaved and bucked. It burned and flourished. It was bone, it was muck, it was brackish stream and it was flaming blood. The order of the warbands broke down at once. There were no longer enough warriors on either side to maintain coherence after the initial shock, and as the numbers fell, the significance of Archaon’s words was felt by all. Mir embraced the disorder. From the moment he struck, from the moment Bloodspite and Skullthief began to feed, he saw only red. Every presence on the battlefield was a threat. The existence of any other being filled him with desperate rage. He waded in, killing any warrior within reach.

To Mir’s right, Kordos laid waste to the plague warriors with the burning fist of his anvil. He fought in silence, he killed in silence, until the anvil buried itself in the corpulent body of one of his foes. The Rotbringer slumped, his corpse smouldering, and the collapsing mass held the brazen weapon for a moment. Kordos grunted in anger, and that was the last sound Mir heard from him. The rhythm of his blows was disrupted just long enough for the huge lord of plagues to attack his flank. Mir saw Kordos’ death coming just as he cut down another barbarian. Two steps to the right and he could have joined Kordos, blocking the lord of plague’s attack.

He stepped forward instead. He heard the axe blow. The shattering of armour and the rending of flesh. When he heard the axe hit again, he knew Kordos was dead.

Mir fought on, killing his way toward glory, each corpse another step toward vengeance.

The land mirrored the storm of the war. It rose and fell with greater violence, as if Bloodbound and Rotbringers fought on the heaving chest of a great beast. It burned and flourished. It was turbulence itself.

Mir kept his feet. He lost himself in murder and wrath. He howled in an ecstasy of rage. He filled the air with his hatred for his enemy, hatred for his rivals, hatred for the other Bloodbound, hatred for himself. And the air answered. A fresh storm broke. Thunder roared, and blood lashed down in torrents and vortices. It blinded. It filled lungs. It surrounded Mir in a perfection of violent death. It turned blades away. He was coated in the bloody manifestation of his hate.

Every warrior fought for his own survival. Mir no longer knew whom he was killing. Nothing mattered except that those who stood before him fell to his blades. His axes, maddened and drunk on gore, screamed for more. And the storm of blood battled with another tempest, one of pestilence. A diseased wind battered Mir. It shrieked in his ears. It forced itself into his lungs. It was hot with decay. Each breath took in a legion of parasites. He burned the sickness out with the fever of his hate, and then in it came again.

The threat made him more furious yet. He slashed as if he would kill the air itself. He became part of the vortex of blood. Every blow was lethal. The death fountains of his enemies anointed him with victory and survival.

He saw no faces, only prey. Only shapes to be torn apart. Only skulls to be severed from their necks.

But then one spoke to him. One word, in the moment before the slavering Skullthief made the killing stroke. One word, in a voice so familiar, so in tune with his thoughts, that he had come to think of it almost as his own.

‘Lord–’ said Skull. Then Mir killed him.

He paused, suspended in his blood haze. He stared at the severed head of the blood warrior. Pale blue eyes in pale blue skin looked back at him with the final glimmers of life, and in them Mir saw not rage, but betrayal and grief.

What happened could not be helped. Only Mir could survive this war. Only Mir could be Archaon’s champion.

But this was Skull, who in all the warband had displayed a loyalty that went beyond an alliance of convenience. A loyalty that Mir now recognized, too late, as the last thing of value, the last thing unconsumed by wrath, that he would ever know.

He was vaguely aware of replacing Skullthief on his belt and picking up the head. Then he fell into the crimson fire once more, and there was nothing else. He killed and he killed and he killed. He was incoherent with rage and self-loathing. The world fell into ruin. All was storm. All was chaos. All was blood.

No longer for the Blood God. Blood for himself.

Killing and killing and killing.

Blood and blood and blood.

And…

And then Bule was alone. Alone against the being of wrath.

The storm raged on. Flame and pestilence whirled around him. The earth on which he stood shifted from loam to bone to blood to rock to all and none. There were bodies everywhere, rotting, burning and being devoured by the shifting land. The horizons had vanished. He and the Bloodbound champion faced each other in the midst of the collapse of all form.

The exalted deathbringer stood with an axe in one hand and a skull in the other. The head had been used as a weapon, and was a battered, smashed relic, but Bule could see it had been one of the Bloodbound, not a Rotbringer. The deathbringer looked at the skull with his head cocked, almost with regret.

How many of his own Rotbringers had Bule killed? He did not know. The answer did not matter. What mattered was the fulfilment of destiny. What mattered was to ascend to Archaon’s side as a warrior of the Varanguard.

His mind cleared of battle frenzy. He braced himself for the charge of the deathbringer. Bule was no match for his speed. This warrior was faster and more powerful than Fistula. Bule could not evade. He would not get the first blow in, but he would, with the Plaguefather’s blessing, get the last.

Against the quick, he had always used his great bulk. He won by being the hardest to kill.

The deathbringer dropped the skull and seized his other axe. He turned his maddened eyes to Bule and rushed in. He was a thing of crimson hate. His blades howled with him.

Bule braced for the impact. He stood with all the strength of a warrior for Grandfather Nurgle. He knew the fevers and the bodily erosion of a legion of diseases. They made him strong, for Nurgle valued the great resilience of life, and its ability to decay into ever more bounty, ever more life. Bule gathered the great endurance gifted to him by the Plaguefather. He would let fury spend itself against the bulwark of illness.

The deathbringer hit. He stabbed the axes low. He plunged both blades deep into Bule’s exposed belly.

It was exposed because it was a trap. Bule’s organs had long ago ceased to function in any mortal fashion. They were reservoirs of disease. His body was the carrier of pestilence. He was beyond the reach of ordinary weapons, no matter where they stabbed him. Time and again, foes had plunged their blades into his festering mass only to find their weapons stuck, and themselves left open to his counterblow.

This time was different. Wrath itself was upon him, with speed and fury and the frenzy of boiling blood. The deathbringer’s axes had their own will. They were a higher order of death-dealer. They went too deep. They burned too profoundly. They severed something too important.

Bule felt himself come undone. The strength went out of his legs. He lost feeling in the lower half of his body. His knees must have buckled because he was sinking toward the ground, drawing the wounds even wider. The exalted deathbringer’s face twisted into an expression of hate-filled triumph. The weakness spread up Bule’s arms. He dropped his axe.

He had lost without landing a single blow.

No, he thought. Not like this. I will not fail you, Grandfather. I am still your gardener.

He held on to the most fundamental fact of his being. Death was coming to Bule, but Bule was just a name. He was a lord of plagues. To the end, this was his truth, and so he took all that he was, all the vast strengths bestowed upon him by Nurgle, the power that was more important than his axe, more important even than endurance, the essence that shaped his physical form into a poor mirror of its full reality. He became infection. As he fell, he reached out for the wounds on the Bloodbound champion’s body. His arms were weak. His blow was glancing.

But infection needed only the slightest touch to take root. All it needed was a point of ingress. All it needed was blood.

Bule found the other champion’s blood. And with the totality of his being, with the pure transmission of disease, he stole this blood from the Blood God.

The land became quiet. Fire, rot and bones became simple stone again. The empty wastes of the arena returned. The crows flew off, vanishing against the dark of the sky. The Rotbringer fell at Mir’s feet. He spasmed and twitched, still alive but fading quickly. There was no need to strike again. Even so, Mir prepared to mark his triumph with the decapitation of his foe.

He tried to raise his arms.

He could not.

He staggered back from the body. Something crawled over his flesh and through his veins. He shook so hard that he lost control of his limbs. His lungs could not draw air. He was suffocating. His gasp was the sound of iron dragged across stone.

Mir wheeled away from the Rotbringer. The stairs of the arena seemed leagues away. But Archaon stood on the end of the rock spur once more. The Everchosen waited for his champion to climb up and claim his prize. Mir would climb.

Except he was on all fours. The tremors had him in their jaws. Cold and fever hit him in waves. Thick, bloody mucus poured from his nose and mouth. He crawled toward the stairs. They were too far, too far. Behind him, he heard the Rotbringer drag his carcass forward with slow, pitiful scrapes.

Mir gasped. Everchosen, he thought. The victory is mine. Free me of this pestilence. Induct me into the Varanguard. Heal me, he thought. Let me live.

‘The final blow was mine,’ said the Rotbringer, his words barely audible. ‘Let me serve.’

Mir collapsed onto his stomach, racked by coughs. There was nothing either of them could do. Archaon knew who the victor was. He would raise that warrior up and save him.

Archaon’s laughter rumbled across the arena. ‘And thus do both exact judgement. Well done. On this day I witnessed more than a struggle between wrath and pestilence. You presented me with the contest between survival and fealty. It was instructive. And, for both of you, futile. I chose my champion before your arrival.’

No, Mir thought. His anger flared, but it could do nothing for him now. He watched Archaon walk away and out of his sight. Darkness fell over his eyes. In his last moments, he regarded the monstrosity of his years, and he recognized the fitting pointlessness of his end.

He thought he heard the laughter of crows.

The Many-Eyed Servant watched Mir and Bule die. And then it was done. He had witnessed every moment of the contest across the realms. He had looked through the eyes of insects and crows, and he had seen all there was to see. The compound tableau of vision was complete.

Except it wasn’t. There were gaps. He had not seen through the eyes of the combatants themselves. Their thoughts were closed to him. So were Archaon’s.

The Everchosen stopped up beside the sorcerer. ‘More eyes, Gaunt Summoner,’ Archaon said, in answer to an unasked question. ‘I always need more eyes.’ He gestured to the corpses below. ‘They were blind. My champion is not. And it is time he assumed his duties. Return us to my fortress.’

‘My lord,’ said the Many-Eyed Servant. He moved his arms in eldritch signs. Mystic energies gathered around him and Archaon. They grew into a great pillar of fire. It rose to the heavens. And with a clap of implosive thunder, the cold arena vanished.

‘Rise.’

Orphaeo Zuvius stood. He knew he was in the throne room. He was conscious of his body. It was healed, it was strong, and yet it retained a wound. His sight was odd. It was off-centre. He raised his fingers. He moved them toward his eyes, and when he did, his vision turned and he saw his own face from the perspective of his shoulder.

He was looking through Mallofax’s eyes.

The blue daemon bird watched what Orphaeo needed him to see. A blue jewel sat in Orphaeo’s right eye socket. A pink one occupied the left.

Orphaeo tilted his head back, and Mallofax looked up at Archaon. ‘Why have you spared me?’ Orphaeo asked.

‘Spared you? I have made you my champion. And why? Because you have vision. Because you think to look and see where others race to pointless combat and die. You sought me here, not on the battlefield. For your trespass, I have punished you. For your vision, I have blessed you.’

‘But you have stolen my sight.’

‘Have I? Look further.’

Through Mallofax’s eyes, Orphaeo examined his face again. He considered the jewels. Their facets. So many planes and angles. So many perspectives.

Of course.

With understanding came more sight. He saw as Mallofax, and he saw as the warriors under his command. He was in the fortress. He was outside its walls.

He was everywhere he would send his forces.

All the facets of the battlefield would be his.

‘Do you see?’ Archaon asked.

‘I do, Everchosen. Oh, I do.’

‘Then it is time to go to work, champion. I have wars for you to witness and to shape.’

See No Evil

The searing gaze of the Many-Eyed Servant travelled far. Nothing was beyond his regard. He could see an entire people put to the blade and moments later the cavernous emptiness in the heart of the man who had ordered such an atrocity. He saw what the Everchosen could not see, and went where the Everchosen could not be.

Archaon exercised his omnipotence through the black-hearted loyalty of those who were pledged to the Chaos gods. The realms were nothing without the mortal souls infesting them, and souls could be corrupted, bought and bartered. Those wretches already lost to the myriad corruptions of existence found deeper damnation in Archaon’s fell ranks.

The Many-Eyed Servant peered through the storm of a land long sundered. A place the Everchosen’s armies had conquered an age before. A haunted corner of the realms, empty of the people who had existed there – for either they had been assimilated into Archaon’s conquering hordes, or their skulls now made up the bonemeal beaches of the shoreline.

The Many-Eyed Servant’s gaze had passed across this dead place before. There he had seen something that he knew would anger his master and shake the realms with his fury. What the Gaunt Summoner saw was a land retaken by an enemy force. For now the darkness of these craggy fortifications had been scalded away by columns of lightning reaching down from the heavens. From these blazing conduits came the Stormcast Eternals. The God-King’s weapons of war. Sigmar had been busy and so had the forges of the Celestial Realm, crafting immaculate plate, weaponry and souls to wield them.

The Stormcast Eternals appeared on a dead peninsula called Cape Desolation. They took the fortresses lining the hellish coast without raising a weapon, and had clear plans to expand their invasion. They would bring freedom to the people of the darkness beyond the peninsula – the Shatterlands – which the Everchosen had held in his crushing grip for a thousand years.

The Many-Eyed Servant whispered what he seen to his master.

‘There is a light in the darkness, Exalted One.’

‘Light is but a brightness of the moment,’ the Everchosen said, his words burning on the air. ‘The spark of flint. The strike of lightning. It passes. Darkness is forever.’

‘This spark,’ the Many-Eyed Servant said, ‘has started a fire, my lord. A fire from the sky that threatens to rage through the Shatterlands and bring hope to peoples beyond. The God-King’s warriors rain from the heavens and have made landfall. Our bastions along Cape Desolation are theirs.’

‘Sigmar’s warriors,’ Archaon said, ‘in the Shatterlands?’ The Many-Eyed Servant heard both searing outrage and relish in his master’s voice. ‘Its people will come to know the exquisite torment of hope dashed and the terror of lights extinguished.

‘Send word to my warlords, my champions and the fell kings of the surrounding regions. Summon my unholy Varanguard. I shall lead the Knights of Ruin myself in a counter invasion. Those bastions shall be mine again. The God-King’s light shall be banished and his warriors shall flee for the skies. I want Sigmar to know that he will find no purchase in lands forever dedicated to the Chaos gods.’

Peering down through the tumultuous skies of the God-King’s storm, the Many-Eyed Servant could see his master. Riding atop the monster Dorghar – an abominable creature of twin-tail, colossal wings and three terrible heads – Archaon led the way through the holy tempest. With his cloak streaming in the maelstrom and the Slayer of Kings held out in front of him, the Destroyer of Worlds rode out the storm at the head of his fleet.

A thousand dreadships coursing through the crash and squall of a spectral sea, all flying the flag of the Everchosen. The sea was a ghostly swarm of lost souls, the crash of waves and the hiss of the surf the sound of spiritual suffering.

Thrashing with their galley oars and with flayed-flesh sails full of sacrifice-bought winds, the armada surged on towards the black peninsula. Each ship carried hordes of Chaos warriors and Archaon’s own Knights of Ruin – thousands of dark templars, clad in plate of black and gold, utterly committed to the Everchosen’s service and the absolute destruction of his enemies. Among them was a worthy warrior the Many-Eyed Servant recognised from a past trial – the sorcerous warrior they called Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, now a knight in the Everchosen’s service.

The Prince of Embers burned for battle.

Standing on the deck of the dreadship Aftermath – so named for the death and destruction left in its blood-churned wake – Orphaeo Zuvius felt the surge and drift of the vessel through the spectral sea. Crafted from the torched wood of treelord ancients that groaned their suffering still, the landing galley’s black prow cut through the ghostly seas. Riding the swell, he looked to the flesh-sails, filled with the doom-laden winds that took the Everchosen’s armada on towards the skull beaches of Cape Desolation. Bloodreavers scrambled up and down the rigging of raw tendons while masts of braced bone creaked with the weight of wind and sail.

Zuvius made his way across the deck. His plate was black and gold and hell-forged to fit his slender frame. While one pauldron bore the crafted symbol of Archaon, the other had a metal spike. On the spike perched the familiar Mallofax, a reptilian bird of blue feather and black heart. It had been Mallofax that had guided the Prince of Embers down his destined path and into Archaon’s dark service. The wind ruffled the intense blue of the bird’s plumage.

About the main mast the deck was crowded with warriors of Chaos – Varanguard like Zuvius who had proved their worth to the Everchosen. The bloodreaver crew gave such warriors and their monstrous, armoured steeds a wide berth. The planks smouldered where the hooves of the mounted Varanguard held firm to the deck. The ruinous knights bled malevolence and, despite the subtle differences in their appearance and the myriad blessings of their dark gods, all wore the black and gold of their master. He was the Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse and they were his instruments of doom.

Zuvius mounted his own steed, Hellion. A muscular abomination that seemed mostly horse, Hellion blinked multiple dead eyes that ran the length of its fang-filled snout. Horns erupted from its malformed skull and its transparent hide revealed the ghastly inner workings of the beast’s grotesque body. Hellion’s spiked hooves clopped across the deck. Zuvius’ daemon-forged glaive A’cuitas sat in a saddle sheathe like a spear ready to be drawn in the charge.

Around the prince, warriors of the Varanguard were making preparations. Some were readying weapons and armour. Others were bringing their steeds to heel with vicious tugs on the reins. Some were even mumbling dark prayers to the Ruinous Pantheon, bidding the gods to grant them worthy foes and a merciless victory for their Everchosen.

Nearby, Zuvius saw fellow former acolyte of the Great Changer, Aspa Erezavant. Like him, the prince had forsaken his dread god in favour of service to Archaon. Through the Everchosen, Zuvius had pledged his soul, blade and talents to the unified forces of Chaos. Aspa Erezavant never spoke of such a pledge, however. The Varanguard warrior said nothing. He never did. There was only flesh where his mouth used to be.

Zorn the Brazenfleshed, however, always had something to say. A knight of dread threats and bombast, the Varanguard had once belonged to the Blood God. Now he commanded the Aftermath for the Everchosen, ensuring the vessel – in coordination with others cutting through the souls of the spectral sea – landed their Varanguard and meatshield hordes on the beach.

‘By the fell gods,’ Zorn roared through the storm at the ship’s bloodreaver crew, ‘if you don’t get more flesh to the wind I’ll flay your hides for extra sail!’ He turned to a pair of bloodreavers attending to the rebellious tiller. ‘Hold your course, damn you. And you,’ the Varanguard warrior bellowed at a bloodstoker called Killian, ‘get below decks. More power on the stroke. Take your lash to the oar crews. I want them sitting in a pool of their own blood. The Exalted Grand Marshal demands from them everything they have to give. Gods help the wretch who holds back his best from the Everchosen of Chaos!’

Zuvius watched the Varanguard warrior knock a passing bloodreaver brutally to the deck and then deliver a vicious kick with his armoured boot.

‘Fetch my weapons and my steed!’ Zorn roared at the unfortunate.

‘The Everchosen watches,’ Sarsael Hedra said. ‘The Brazenfleshed bids to be first on the beach for our master’. The Varanguard slipped his helm down over the oily flesh of his handsome face. The warrior’s words were slick with suggestion – insolence even. No one would actually level such an accusation at Hedra, however. He had killed too many in Archaon’s name.

‘I think he just might be,’ Kadence Salivarr said, looking from the saddle out across the ghostly waves at the rest of the fleet. His eyes were bright within his twisted helm. Like Salivarr, Zuvius could see that the Aftermath was pulling ahead.

‘Not if I get there first,’ Sarsael Hedra said, pulling on the reins to line up his fell steed with the ship’s prow. An armoured mountain of filth, Vomitus Grue, shook the deck with the boom of his laughter.

‘The Everchosen watches,’ said another Varanguard warrior through the ranks of mounted knights. Known as the Unslaked, his words were barbed much like his blood-stained blade. ‘He sees all. He hears all. He hears the prattling of his warriors. Witless boasts to calm the nerve and steady the cowardly soul.’

The deck fell silent but for the clop of hooves and scolding tongue of Zorn the Brazenfleshed. The Prince of Embers moved Hellion around, edging the steed ahead of Sarsael Hedra’s own. He licked his lips with a silver tongue.

‘The Varanguard will see the dark will of the Everchosen done,’ Zuvius said, his voice assured and even. ‘Each according to his gifts. We can all trust in that – as the Exalted Grand Marshal puts his trust in his Varanguard.’

Kadence Salivarr nodded his helm slowly at Zuvius. As the storm raged about them and the ship, that seemed to be the end of the matter. The dark templars waited. Waited to disembark, to take the beach and then the bastion beyond for their dark master. If every warrior of the Varanguard did their duty well, each fortress along Cape Desolation would be taken back in the Everchosen’s name. The warriors of the God-King would be naught but the blot of an afterglow on the eye. The Shatterlands beyond the dark peninsula would belong stone and soul to the Chaos powers once more. The Varanguard about the Prince of Embers weren’t wrong though. Archaon and his sorcerous servants would be watching. They always were. Orphaeo Zuvius aimed to give them a sight to see. The Prince of Embers would make it his honour to lead the warriors of the Aftermath in their charge up the beach, behind the Everchosen himself, who would ride on ahead and strike the first terrible blow.

As well as the unhallowed ranks of the Varanguard, the Aftermath carried a small horde of Chaos killers to help take their section of the beach and soak up enemy fire: hulking khorgoraths of the Red Death, Tzeentchian sorcerers of the Glass Spire, and spindle-limbed bloodletters of twisted horn and daemon wrath. The largest contingents were the indomitable plague-bloated warriors of the Rank and Vile, led by a sack of corruption called Bloatus Belch, and the Chaos knights of the Mazarine in their glowing blue plate, directed by a two-faced champion called Vitas and Volitae. Even the Fleshblessed, the Slaaneshi spawn shackled below decks, had their role to play in the battle to come. But they were all nothing to Archaon’s chosen.

A bloodreaver walked past Zuvius with his eyes on the deck. He carried a crude spyglass in his hand for scanning their landing at the beach and the approach to their target fortress, called the Ebon Claw. Unlike Zorn the Brazenfleshed, Zuvius needed no glass. Isolated straggles of blue hair danced in the wind, while the remaining threads of his skin squirmed over the red raw flesh of his face. His silver tongue licked at scorch-smeared lips. The prince’s crow-pecked sockets now contained jewels instead of eyes – sorcerous gemstones, one blue and one pink to honour his former patron. These eyes saw for Archaon now, the labyrinthine facets of the precious stones giving him unparalleled vision.

He could see the spectral sea lapping up along a beachhead of weathered skulls. He took in the Ebon Claw beyond, a craggy edifice of petrified, black stone. Its battlements were razored like flint, while its towers were jagged like the crooked fingers of a grasping talon. Across the phantasmic waves, Zuvius saw other dreadships of the Everchosen’s armada, carrying knights like himself to take the Ebon Claw and all the other enemy-occupied forts along the coast of Cape Desolation.

Zorn had instructed the bloodstoker and his bloodreavers to keep the tiller trained on the lightning stream coursing down through the stormy skies into the Ebon Claw. It was just one of many pillars of searing power that carried the God-King’s warriors and their reinforcements into the bastions that punctuated the peninsula coast.

The dreadships converged on the shoreline. Zuvius could feel the rancid excitement on the air. Below decks, the spawn of the Fleshblessed were whipped to an ecstasy while bloodreaver oarsmen surged the galley towards the beach. The oars of the Aftermath tangled with those of another closing dreadship. Every knight of Chaos in the fleet wanted to be the first to reach the beach and earn the approval of Archaon.

Peering down the coast, however, Zuvius saw that his unhallowed master was busy. He had already reached the peninsula on the back of his monstrous daemon steed. The beast flapped his giant wings and soared across the battlements. While most would flee before the sight of the Everchosen astride his monster as they might a city-razing dragon, Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals stood like golden statues: cold, implacable and unimpressed. As Dorghar banked, Archaon swept helms and heads from shoulders with the Slayer of Kings. Dorghar stove in towers with his lashing twin-tail and tore away sections of battlement with his great claws, sending Stormcasts raining to the ground.

‘Pass the word,’ Zorn the Brazenfleshed called down the length of the ship. ‘Prepare to disembark and fight for your lives.’

Zuvius heard Bloatus Belch and the Tzeentchian Vitus and Volitae readying their warriors below decks. He knew that the Red Death would barely be able to contain their fury and that the predacious bloodletters would be hissing their anticipation of the kill. The Varanguard would go first, however, for there were no servants of Chaos worthier than Archaon’s dark templars. And among the Varanguard ranks, there would be none as worthy as the Prince of Embers. Zuvius promised both himself and his Exalted Grand Marshal that.

‘The honour is mine,’ Zuvius hissed to himself. He worked Hellion around, lining the beast up for disembarkation. He could hear raised voices beyond.

‘My lord…’ Bloodstoker Killian said.

‘Hold your damned course,’ the Brazenfleshed spat. Zuvius looked down the coastline. Dreadships were taking in sail and stowing oars, coursing through the shallows the rest of the way to the shore. The Aftermath would not take such precautions on the approach. Zorn meant to hit the coastline at ramming speed and ride the galley as far up the skull beach as he could get.

As the vessel coursed through the shallows ahead of the armada, Zuvius saw bloodreavers wind their arms and legs about the rigging. The Chaos warriors below the decks began to chant their bloody expectation, while the ruinous knights settled into their saddles and stirrups, ready to follow the Prince of Embers.

‘For the Everchosen,’ Zuvius roared, kicking his heels into Hellion’s flanks. It was as much a challenge as an announcement. ‘May he and all who follow in his shadow know absolute victory this dark day.’

Standing up in the stirrups, Zuvius urged his steed down the length of the ship. With the steed’s spiked shoes tearing up the deck, the unnaturally swift and strong beast hit a gallop by the time it passed the mast. Dread knights of Chaos watched the prince thunder by, readying their own steeds for impact. Even on Hellion, Zuvius felt the Aftermath shudder as the vessel’s keel bit into bonemeal and then the shattered skulls of the beach. He readied himself for the inevitable. In the contest between the galley and the land, the land would eventually win.

The prince’s timing was perfect. The Aftermath had rammed its way out of the shallows and cut into the skull beach. As the vessel ground to an abrupt stop, the mast let out an excruciating creak and the flesh-sails billowed the other way. Steeds stumbled and bloodreavers were thrown from the rigging. Hellion made his jump just as the full force of the impact struck. Clearing the bulwark, the monstrous steed soared across the skulls. Hitting the beach of shattered bone at a gallop, Zuvius slipped the glaive A’cuitas from its sheath and spun it in his gauntlet. His exalted master had been the first to achieve an enemy kill on the cape. Zuvius would be the second. At his side, keeping pace with the monstrous steed, flew Mallofax.

‘Find me a way in,’ Zuvius said. The bird squawked an acknowledgement before taking to higher altitudes. Looking back, Zuvius saw that only now the other dreadships were slowing in the shallows and lowering their ladders for disembarkation. The Aftermath, however, with her keel torn out and hull well and truly beached, was disgorging her fell cargo. Inspired by the prince’s example, the knights of Archaon’s chosen had followed Zuvius and were riding up behind like a tidal wave of blade, plate and doom.

The khorgoraths of the Red Death hadn’t waited for bloodreavers to open the vessel’s fang-lined boarding-maws. The monstrous creatures of red flesh and fury had smashed their way through the hull and were lumbering up the beach towards the enemy. While the Fleshblessed spawn were unleashed upon the beach and made their mindless approach at unnatural speed, Bloatus Belch and the two-faced Tzeentchian exited the vessel through the holes the khorgoraths had left behind. They led their warriors past the sorcerers of the Glass Spire and out onto the bonemeal. Bloodstoker Killian cracked his whip and blew a horn, prompting the Aftermath’s bloodreaver crew to grab their blades and leave the ship.

Racing towards the Ebon Claw, Zuvius could see the golden shapes of the Stormcast Eternals. The God-King’s warriors had been busy. The black talon of petrified stone was now but a derelict shell. Like the petals of a dead flower, the sharp walls and cragged towers of the fort had given way to new fortifications built within the ruins. About the column of lightning streaming down, new and glorious fortifications had sprung up – domed citadels of silver and gold. Immaculate structures of globed indomitability, at odds with the petrified jaggedness of the surrounding fortifications. It was as though the Ebon Claw suffered some kind of taintless cancer, with towers of metal, light and storm blooming amongst the twisted architecture of the malefic bastion.

Zuvius read the enemy’s defence of the fortress. Archers in glorious plate and their watching lords took position on razor-sharp battlements and looked down on the beach approach through crooked arrow slits. Meanwhile, destroyers in burnished plate collapsed the fortress gateway, turning the entrance into a barricade of smashed rubble with earth-shaking blows from their crackling hammers. Atop towers and derelict ramparts, Stormcasts waited for the Chaos invaders with glaives and great shields, their impassive stillness an invitation to death.

Suddenly everything was gold and bone. Zuvius resisted the urge to haul upon the reins as the beach exploded before him. Hitting the ground and throwing skulls and bone shards into the air with the force of their landing were the warrior-heralds of the God-King. Launching from the walls of the Ebon Claw, armoured warriors had flown down to the shoreline, dropping with the force of a meteorite shower crashing to the ground. Their wings were a spread of lightning blades whilst they clutched a pair of ornate hammers in their gauntleted hands.

Zuvius would not be stopped. Urging Hellion on into the warrior heralds, the prince extended A’cuitas out in front of him like a spear. Zuvius crashed into his foes.

The knight’s glaive punctured its way through a faceplate, impaling the skull of a landing herald. The Prince of Embers allowed himself a flesh-smeared smile. As the weapon skewered the head clean off the armoured warrior, Hellion rammed his horn straight through the breastplate of another and tossed the enemy aside. With the death of each Stormcast, soul-lightning leapt for the sky with a satisfying crack and flash. Battering another Stormcast aside, Hellion turned the warrior into a staggering mess of celestial plate. Allowing the glaive shaft to slide forward in his grasp, Zuvius smashed the heavy metal pommel of the weapon down through the herald’s helm. Braining the warrior with the bulbous counterweight, Zuvius saw another flash of lightning rocket up to the heavens.

Thundering through the heralds’ freshly landed ranks, Zuvius heaved on the reins and turned Hellion about. He would ride them down from behind, pounding their plate into the skull beach with his mount’s hooves.

The warrior-heralds had recovered quickly, however. Having turned to receive the knight’s attack, they threw their celestial hammers head over haft at Zuvius. It was all he could do to lean out of their pulverising path. As one smashed his gauntlet, while another grazed his pauldron. Zuvius didn’t see a hammer flung at the last moment towards his head.

Smashed in the face, Zuvius almost tumbled from the saddle. His skull felt as though it had been split in two and though he fought to stay alert, consciousness started to slip away from him. The prince shook his head. He could not allow himself to fall. He would be butchered by the God-King’s warrior heralds.

Zuvius was suddenly at the eye of a storm of hammer blows. Hellion reared and the prince tried to turn the beast while fending off as many of the strikes as he could. He heard something crack in his side as both plate and bone gave in to the force of a righteous smash. Zuvius grunted. There was nothing his serpentine words or silver tongue could do to get him out of this. Hellion was drowning in a sea of plate, while heralds smashed at Zuvius, attempting to pierce his hell-forged armour and drag him down.

Zuvius briefly entertained the blasphemous notion that he was finished. That his service to the Everchosen would end here on Cape Desolation. Zuvius turned A’cuitas about in his gauntlet and clutched the shaft under one arm. Aiming the pommel at the advancing heralds, the prince unleashed a crackling arc of lightning. The Stormcasts trembled for a second as the sorcerous energies of the daemon-forged glaive coursed through them before exploding in a shower of blood and crackling soulfire, their spiritual essence rocketing for the sky.

Untouched by the arcing bolt, a surviving herald lifted his hammers to pound Zuvius into the bone beach. The prince put his glaive between him and his enemy, deflecting the hammer heads with the shaft. Pulling the glaive back with sudden violence, the prince cut the crowning blade through his enemy’s throat before heaving it back to take the herald’s head off his armoured body.

As the bloody mist cleared, Zuvius saw other newly landed warrior-heralds racing for him, hammers held in both hands. Zuvius felt thunder rolling up the beach. His brothers in corruption had arrived. Riding their monstrous mounts like a black wave crashing up the beach, the knights of the Everchosen’s calling crashed through the God-King’s ranks. While some warrior-heralds managed to land blows on the armoured steeds or knock the warriors of Chaos from their saddles, most succumbed to the earth-trembling charge. Fellspears sheared straight through plate and the blessed flesh within. Daemon-forged swords and great ensorcelled axes chopped down the Stormcasts as the line of steeds passed through, sending columns of lightning arcing for the heavens.

The horde from the Aftermath stormed the beach after their Varanguard, making their way towards Zuvius. The spawn of the Fleshblessed, gibbering with expectation, and the bloodreavers ran ahead of the mob. The Mazarine and the lumbering fury that were the khorgoraths of the Red Death weren’t far behind, with the Glass Spire sorcerers and Bloatus Belch’s Rank and Vile making more sedate progress up the beach. They would all play their part in the horror to come. As a meatshield before the mighty Varanguard or as scavengers devouring the scraps Archaon’s chosen left behind, the horde would find service to the Dark Gods.

As injured warriors tried to get to their feet, more heralds glided across the charging columns of knights to fortify their number. Zuvius turned Hellion about and raced off to join the mounted ranks of the Varanguard, leaving the warrior-heralds to be swamped by butchers, monstrosities and dread swordsmen.

Cape Desolation was a vast shoreline of bone and darkness, swarmed by the Chaos hordes of Archaon’s monstrous army. It was swallowed by the charging ranks of Varanguard, their mounted number shattering the skulls of the beachhead and closing about the twisted forts lining the peninsula. The Everchosen was everywhere, soaring through the storm, setting the monstrous Dorghar on fortification after fortification. As Archaon cut Stormcasts from the ramparts with blazing sweeps of the Slayer of Kings, the daemon mount tore down sigmarite towers erected amongst the razored ruins of Chaos bastions.

To any other mortal in the nine realms, the sight would have shredded their minds and turned their hearts white with terror. Like the fires of doom, the Everchosen and his World Enders had arrived. Suffering and death awaited all in Archaon’s path. The God-King’s Stormcasts were not just any other mortals, however, if they were mortal at all. Crafted of immaculate plate and righteous flesh, the Stormcasts were Sigmar’s cold wrath incarnate. They knew no fear and lived for the sole purpose of driving the scourge of Chaos from the realms.

All along the coast, the beach was lit up by streaming shots of celestial energies. Flights of skybolt arrows blazed up out of the fortresses before dropping back down onto the beach in searing volleys. Lightning blasts created craters in the shattered skulls and blasts were shot through rough arrow slits from boltstorm crossbows. Zuvius rode up through the lines of mounted knights and the blinding storm of celestial energy being visited upon the approach to the Ebon Claw.

‘Damn these armoured curs,’ Sarsael Hedra roared from the saddle as Zuvius pulled level with the dread knight.

‘Hiding behind our walls with their craven weapons,’ Vomitus Grue rumbled from along the line. Aspa Erezavant, who was riding up behind, said nothing. Drawing ahead of the Prince of Embers, Sarsael brought up his warpsteel shield. Riders along the line did the same. Skybolt arrows rained from the sky, stabbing into the beach about the hooves of the knights’ steeds and fizzling to nothing against the surface of their shields.

‘Behind their breastplates they fear us,’ Zuvius roared. ‘Let us be the realisation of that fear in flesh and blood. Let us besmirch these lands once more and send the Stormcasts shrieking back to their God-King.’

‘For the Everch–’ Zorn the Brazenfleshed called, riding up behind them. The red-skinned knight never got to finish his proclamation as both he and his blood-sweating steed disappeared in the blast from a thunderbolt crossbow.

As lightning struck the beach, reaching out from the impact site with spidery arcs of energy, armoured warriors went down. Steeds crashed into the skulls, throwing their Varanguard riders, who died in crackling cages of arcing power.

Zuvius and Sarsael’s steeds jumped the fallen. As Hellion crushed skulls to bone dust on the other side, Zuvius hauled the reins from one side to another, avoiding more sizzling arrows dropping from the sky. The Prince of Embers spat his disgust. The Stormcast Eternals aimed to thin out the Everchosen’s warhordes before they even reached the bastion and mounted their siege. Varanguard were dying. The approach to the fortress was a lightning-scalded killing ground of havoc and confusion. With Zorn the Brazenfleshed and a number of veteran Varanguard dead, the Prince of Embers felt the eyes of the Everchosen on him. Archaon swooped overhead astride his daemon mount, momentarily drawing the lightning storm of fire from the Ebon Claw. Zuvius would not fail his dread master.

‘With me…’ Zuvius started to say to Sarsael Hedra, but the dread knight was dead – a skybolt arrow finding its way around his shield to skewer his horned head.

‘Come on!’ the Prince of Embers called down the line. Savagely digging his boot heels into Hellion’s ghastly flesh, Zuvius drew ahead of the charge. Galloping headlong through the celestial streams, explosions and lightning traps, the ruinous knight led by example. Other warriors in gold and black plate similarly urged their steeds onwards through the tempest of light. In cutting down the amount of time spent on the approach, Zuvius hoped to limit their casualties. It was imperative that the Chaos forces arrived to besiege the forts in unstoppable numbers. With the lightning column blazing down into the Ebon Claw supplying fresh Stormcast Eternals, the Varanguard would have to overwhelm the Stormcasts there and cut off the God-King’s reinforcements.

As the charge entered the deep shadow of the Ebon Claw, the bolts and shafts of celestial energy began to dwindle. With Archaon’s chosen all but to the walls, the angles became too tight for the Stormcast archers. Instead Zuvius felt the arrow storm pass overhead, destined for the advance of Archaon’s hordes making their way up the beach. It was a gauntlet that Bloatus Belch and the Tzeentchian Vitus and Volitae would have to run.

Zuvius slowed Hellion before the petrified black rock of the Ebon Claw’s walls. Above, the magnificent sigmarite towers reached up out of the jagged talon of the fortress’ damned architecture. Zuvius hauled on the reins and had his steed come to a stop on the shattered bone of the beach. As Archaon’s chosen arrived at the fort walls they did the same, drawing their daemon-forged battle-axes and ensorcelled sword blades.

Zuvius heard the flap of wings. Landing on the prince’s pauldron spike in a cascade of cerulean feathers was Mallofax, returned from his reconnaissance. From his singed wing, Zuvius could see that the bird had also suffered the attentions of Stormcast archers.

‘Speak, bird,’ Zuvius said as the creature got its breath back. ‘How many?’

‘Hundreds, at least,’ Mallofax squawked, ‘with reinforcements coming down from the sky.’ Zuvius looked up at the column of lightning blazing out of the heavens into the fortress. It was going to be a problem. The Varanguard would have to find a way to cut it off.

‘Does the host have a commander?’

Mallofax squawked his incredulity. ‘They all look the same to me.’

‘A Stormcast,’ Zuvius pressed the bird, ‘surrounded by banner men, coordinating defences, issuing orders…’

‘Yes,’ the bird said. ‘There’s one sat astride a great reptile.’

‘Where?’

‘The courtyard,’ Mallofax squawked. ‘With the main body of the host.’

Zuvius snarled at the thought of the enemy commander so close beyond the wall.

‘Entry?’ he demanded of the bird.

‘All the entrances have been collapsed,’ Mallofax said, hopping about on the pauldron spike as grit rained from above. ‘There’s no way in.’

‘There’s always a way in,’ the Prince of Embers insisted. He had besieged all manner of fortresses. Not even the Everchosen’s own Varanspire had stopped him.

‘The Stormcast fortifications favour the north and west structures, reinforcing the demolished towers there. The walls are thinner,’ Mallofax said, ‘more dilapidated on the southern side.’

Zuvius nodded his approval, grit pitter-pattering off his plate.

‘Fly,’ he told the bird. ‘Bring the sorcerers and breachers for the walls. We shall need a shield of tainted meat before us as we enter.’

The Ebon Claw blazed with energies launched from the jagged ramparts and Stormcast towers. Mounted Varanguard charged up to the walls, leaving smouldering mounds of corrupt flesh and hell-forged plate in their wake – Knights of Ruin and their mounts who had failed to run the blinding gauntlet of the Stormcast archers. With many veteran Varanguard dead on the beach or struggling their way up it, Archaon’s chosen had stalled. They needed an objective. All that faced them, however, was the petrified black stone of the fortress wall.

Zuvius watched the warhorde advance up the beach. While the spawn of the Fleshblessed made a maniacal dash across the open, crossbow-blasted ground and the horrific khorgoraths of the Red Death cared little for the searing streams and explosions, the rest of the horde followed the Glass Spire sorcerers. The Tzeentchians used their unnatural talents to create changes in the landscape about them. Moving their willowy arms and fingers in strange patterns, they caused the skulls of the beach to tremble and part to admit glowing blue shafts of crystal. Creating natural shields for the advancing hordes, the sorcerers strode up the beach with Bloatus Belch’s Rank and Vile, the Mazarine knights and the bloodreaver crew of the Aftermath.

Moving from outcrop to crystalline outcrop, the warhorde made good progress. The bolts and streams of lightning blazing from the Ebon Claw scorched the crushed-bone beach about them. There were casualties across the killing ground, however. Mindless spawn were reduced to charred meat by the eruption of lightning storms. Slow moving members of the Rank and Vile exploded in plague-swollen splendour as streams of celestial energy struck their outliers.

As crystal shuddered up through the skulls to absorb the worst of the lightning storm and the warhorde took advantage of the cover, the surviving warrior-heralds on the beach smashed into the mobs of Chaos warriors. The warhorde was a monster, ravenous for its first taste of slaughter. While the heralds fearlessly ran at the ruinous horde, they were enveloped by corrupt killers and torn apart. Khorgoraths snatched up the Stormcasts, wings and all, and hurled them furiously into the bone-shattering surface of the conjured crystal. The knights of the Mazarine went toe to toe with the warrior-heralds, while bloodreavers slit their throats. Those Stormcasts unfortunate enough to smash their way into the Rank and Vile found a host of implacable foes. Their diseased flesh soaked up all the punishment the God-King’s servants could mete out, all with the rancid smiles of their jovial patron plastered across their pox-marked faces. With the blaze of fallen Stormcasts shooting for the sky, the warhorde made their approach on the fortress.

The Varanguard known as the Unslaked sidled his steed aggressively up against Zuvius’ own. He had seen Zuvius despatch his bird for the hordes following the Varanguard up the skull beach.

‘Zorn would have smashed through that barbican,’ the Unslaked stated.

‘Zorn’s dead,’ Kadence Salivarr called across the storm.

‘The Stormcasts will expect it,’ Zuvius told the Unslaked. ‘While we’re excavating the rubble from that gateway, they’ll rain down destruction upon us. Look,’ Zuvius said, indicating the way in which the Stormcast fortifications had grown up out of the shattered stone of the Ebon Claw. He then pointed at the approaching sorcerers of the Glass Spire and the shafts of crystal they were drawing up through the beachhead. ‘There will be losses beneath the barbican. There will be no siege. We shall create our own entrance. Large enough to admit a meatshield and our mounted ranks. We shall rush the Stormcasts from within.’ Zuvius saw Vomitus Grue and Aspa Erezavant nod their approval. Salivarr stared at the Unslaked, who seemed to rage within his helmet.

As a storm of celestial energy blazed from the ramparts, something else dropped down from the battlements. Before the Unslaked could respond, towering Stormcasts in ornate armour landed about the knights and their steeds. Dropping down from the castle walls, the Stormcasts carried massive battle hammers that seethed with celestial power. A huge warrior landing with assuredness next to Zuvius brought his colossal hammer down on Hellion’s back with a blaze of power. The steed almost buckled, staggering away from the Stormcast warrior. As Zuvius recovered his balance and hauled Hellion back, the Stormcast turned swiftly on Zuvius.

The prince thrust his glaive at the God-King’s warrior with enough force to skewer a gargant. The Stormcast was swift as well as huge, however, and twisted his ornate helm to one side to avoid the glaive blade. Knocking A’cuitas aside with the shaft of his hammer, the Stormcast spun around and landed a hammer blow on the prince’s leg. Knocked back with Hellion into the unforgiving stone of the fortress wall, Zuvius felt both the wind and all sense knocked out of him. His armour plate was buckled and a pain in his thigh blazed to agonising intensity.

Struggling to see through the pain, Zuvius just got his head out of the way of a hammer blow that stove a hole in the stone of the exterior wall. As Zuvius hauled Hellion away from the wall and the plunging arc of the great hammer, he could see hulking Stormcasts and Archaon’s chosen fighting a ferocious battle along the fort wall. Another huge Stormcast landed nearby, falling into a crouch to absorb the distance of the drop. Zuvius rode up behind him, thrusting the glaive down, stabbing him in the back. Punching the heavy blade through the golden plate, Zuvius feverishly stabbed him twice more before kicking him forward. Crashing faceplate first onto the skull beach, the dead Stormcast turned into a vaulting arc of lightning.

With blood on his teeth and scorch-smeared lips, Zuvius pulled Hellion around. He shot the first Stormcast a contemptuous grin. The towering warrior swung the hammer about him, stepping forward to smash the knight to oblivion. The prince allowed the Stormcast to advance. He kept Hellion moving and jabbed at the warrior with his glaive to keep his attention.

‘Erezavant,’ the prince said finally, ‘just kill him.’

The Stormcast turned to see another of Archaon’s chosen behind him. The dark knight’s eyes said everything. They narrowed, serpent-like, right before the strike. Erezavant already had the broad and smoking blade of his ensorcelled sword up and ready. At Zuvius’ words, Aspa Erezavant swung the cursed weapon and cut the top of the Stormcast’s head off. As the sorcerous smoke cleared, the warrior’s open helm and skull were revealed to the sky.

The Stormcast crashed down onto his knees and fell face forward. By the time the spirit of the God-King’s servant had blazed away, Erezavant was gone – on the bloody trail of another foe.

Turning, Zuvius saw the Varanguard fighting hard against Stormcasts who were dropping down the rough wall from the ramparts. The fighting was bloody. Stormcasts hammered monstrous steeds to death before pulverising their trapped riders with polished, crackling hammers. The dread knights of Archaon fought back, spearing lone Stormcasts or hacking them apart with daemon-forged blades. Vomitus Grue, whose fell blessing was to know no pain, took several blows to the head with a lightning-wreathed hammer. Almost knocked from the saddle, the indomitable warrior leant down to grab the armoured Stormcast by the helm and smashed him repeatedly against the fortress wall.

The battle was turning. The Stormcasts were fearless and powerful but while they were undoubtedly the living weapons of a god, their god was not with them. Archaon, the Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse and demigod of Chaos, fought side by side with his dread armies. Every damned wretch on that beach simultaneously adored and loathed the Everchosen. He led by example, inspiring his slaves to darkness with monstrous acts of destruction, and through the heart-stopping incentive of fear. Battle-hardened champions, lords of Chaos and abominable daemons dared not fail him and, if asked to, would walk into certain death for Archaon.

‘Come on!’ Zuvius roared back down the beach, riding around to the south wall through throngs of knights and Stormcasts in desperate combat. Kadence Salivarr gave chase, Vomitus Grue and Aspa Erezavant on his heels, and the Unslaked in their wake.

Mallofax had returned. With him he had brought the warhorde: spawn, monstrosities, daemons and men of dark purpose.

As Zuvius and two other ruinous knights carrying fellspears impaled a trapped Stormcast in an excruciating three-way skewer, he saw the Glass Spire sorcerers approach. Ripping A’cuitas out of the unfortunate warrior, the prince left him to the other two warriors.

‘Sorcerers,’ Zuvius called. ‘The Everchosen has need of your wretched talents.’ Salivarr and the Varanguard drew up behind the Prince of Embers.

‘My lord,’ the first of the robed creatures said, his eyes on the ground.

‘The Stormcast have denied us entrance to our own fortress,’ Zuvius said. ‘I want you to create another. I’m assured the wall is thinner and weaker here. Bring forth your creations and split the stone apart.’

‘At once, my lord,’ the Glass Spire sorcerer said, signalling to nearby enchanters with his third arm. Zuvius turned to see the knights of the Everchosen’s calling and the monstrous horde gathering at the south wall of the Ebon Claw.

‘Well,’ Kadence Salivarr said. ‘Tell them.’

Zuvius spat at the beach of skulls.

‘This miserable scrap of land is ours,’ the prince said. He slapped the petrified stone of the wall beside him. ‘This is ours. The realm is ours and all others beyond. Ours by dark right. By right of conquest. Ours for the taking. The warriors of the God-King trespass on unholy ground.’

Zuvius directed the sorcerers of the Glass Spire to work their dread magic. ‘For corruption’s sake, for the coming end, for Almighty Archaon. Bring it down.’

Shafts of blue crystal burst from the wall of the Ebon Claw. The columns of crystal sheared away sections of the wall. Working their way through the rock like a wedge, they pulverised the crumbling material in between, creating not only a large, ragged entrance but also crystalline columns to support it.

‘Now!’ Zuvius roared.

Bloatus Belch ordered his Rank and Vile in through the breach. Putrid warriors, green and distended with disease, they wore rusted scraps of plate and mail. Smiling like mad men, the blightkings pushed on.

Archaon’s chosen held back, despite their eagerness to let loose. Such dread warriors could not be wasted on a wall breach. The cankered and inexorable troops of the Great Lord of Decay were perfect for such a duty. Unrelenting, uncaring sacks of rancid filth that would soak up the worst the Stormcasts had to throw at them, a rancid meatshield advancing before the mounted doom of the Varanguard.

Over the wall, Zuvius could hear movement – the trembling of stone beneath boots and the rattle of plate. The breaching of the south wall had been unexpected but the Stormcasts had hundreds of warriors within the fortress ready to respond and repel enemy invaders. As Bloatus Belch allowed the rusty chains of his flail to fall ready from his meaty, green fist, he filed in with his warriors. There was unremitting death and destruction to be had within and the blightlord wanted to be part of it.

As Zuvius heard the clash of Stormcast weaponry on the corrosion-pitted blightblades of Belch’s soldiers, he knew that the Stormcasts intended on destroying the interlopers without mercy and plugging the breach. With countless warriors inside the courtyard surging towards the south wall, the Prince of Embers knew exactly what to do. The khorgoraths of the Red Death had thus far only been unleashed on the last of the hammer-wielding Stormcasts outside of the walls. Now it was time to set them against the packed ranks of hallowed warriors within.

The hulking creatures of the Red Death enlarged the ragged entrance with their muscular bulk. With them Zuvius sent the daemon bloodletters, the fast and rangy killers being the perfect complement to the destructive khorgoraths.

A Mazarine knight and one of the bloodreavers suddenly disappeared in a flash of celestial energy. Arcs of lightning crackled through the tight ranks of Fleshblessed spawn and blightkings. Looking up, Zuvius saw Stormcast archers on the battlements above, aiming bows and crossbows.

‘More,’ Zuvius growled at the Glass Spire sorcerers. ‘And take care of those.’

As the Tzeentchian sorcerers drew on their powers, spikes and shafts of crystal erupted up through the black stone of the fortress. Crystal-braced holes opened up in the wall, while the ramparts above cracked and sheared away, plunging the Stormcast Eternals earthward.

Above, Zuvius felt the mighty beat of Dorghar’s wings as the daemon steed took Archaon swooping overhead. The Varanguard roared their jubilation. The prince took this as a good sign. The Everchosen was departing to visit his monstrous wrath and that of his daemon upon the other bastions. He was leaving the Ebon Claw in the hands of his Varanguard, having seen them breach its walls.

It was time. The Varanguard needed to overwhelm the defenders with a single, decisive action. They had not landed their hordes and taken the beach to be target practice for the Stormcasts. The enemy held fortified positions and could afford to wait them out. Besides, within the fortress the enemy would think twice about loosing into their own lines.

Archaon was watching. Expecting. Zuvius felt the dark energy about him. It was the seething desire of the Varanguard to see their warlord’s will be done.

‘For the Everchosen!’ the Prince of Embers roared across the ranks.

Archaon’s chosen stormed the breach, clutching monstrous spears, warpsteel shields and hell-forged blades that smoked with murderous expectation.

The air was thick with lung-shredding dust. With A’cuitas held ready for the thrust, Zuvius charged through the breach. Within the fortress, Zuvius saw that crystalline shafts had ripped up through the foundations, burying nearby Stormcasts in rubble.

The Ebon Claw was a pit of unrelenting slaughter. Death waited but moments away for all fighting within its walls. There were Stormcast Eternals everywhere – their plate almost blinding as it reflected the light storm funnelling down from the sky and into the scorched ground of the courtyard. Crackling silhouettes ventured forth from the lightning column, becoming searing realisations as their boots touched stone. It became clear to Zuvius that the God-King’s hallowed warriors had no intention of giving up the fortress. It was carnage – with Stormcasts and warriors of Chaos barely having room to raise their weapons.

As Zuvius rode through the wreckage, hammers came crackling up at the prince’s head. Leaning out of their path, Zuvius evaded them, allowing them to pulverise the petrified stone. The prince cut two of the Stormcasts down. A third leapt into his path, swinging a blazing mace. Zuvius pulled back on the reins. He drew Hellion out of the way of the bludgeoning, angular edges of the weapon before kicking the Stormcast back at the wall. The precarious stone above his foe came loose and buried the celestial warrior while the Prince of Embers dug his heels into his steed’s side, prompting the beast to surge on.

From rock dust Zuvius entered a haze of blood, cooked in the air by the passage of skybolts shot down into the courtyard from the battlements. The prince had been wrong about the Stormcast archers. Confident in their aim, they were unafraid to fire into the seething melee below with the furious energy of their lightning bows.

Zuvius scanned the brutality and bloodshed. Stormcast warriors with mighty warblades were hacking at the Knights Mazarine, battering them back with their sigmarite shields, while the khorgoraths of the Red Death snatched up the golden warriors and tore off their heads. Bloatus Belch was dead, a Stormcast hammer still buried in his plague-swollen corpulence. His Rank and Vile advanced still, soaking up the God-King’s wrath. As hammers knocked sprays of flies from their mouths, stove in ribcages and splattered pus-ridden limbs, the blightkings fought on. They relentlessly hacked and stabbed with their diseased blades, the smiles of Grandfather Nurgle on their maggot-eaten faces.

The Glass Spire sorcerers were held high above the rabble, impaled on the long blades of Stormcast glaives, the last of their number bringing down ramparts and stone stairwells with their crystal blooms to reveal the polished metal of Stormcast towers and fortifications.

Bloodstoker Killian and his bloodreavers, however, hopelessly outclassed by divine warriors in full celestial plate, were fighting rabidly. Driven on by the lash, they rolled fearlessly under the lumbering weaponry of the Stormcasts, despite suffering continuous losses. They came at their foes in gorethirsty throngs: gouging throats, plunging reaverblades into backs and feverishly stabbing Stormcasts in the sides of their helms.

Zuvius caught sight of the Fleshblessed. The monstrous spawn swarmed over the golden paladins like a plague of deranged spiders. Putting their extra limbs to good work, they prized plate from the warriors and tore out throats, hearts and entrails. For their part, the paladins wielded mighty axes that lopped limbs and heads from the wretched spawn. Above the din of clashing blades and battle, the Fleshblessed took their grotesque talents to the ramparts. Leaping from paladin to wall, the abominations clawed, hauled and swung their way up the ramshackle architecture of the fortress. Latching onto Stormcast archers, the plague of spawn tore warriors from their footings. As the Stormcasts crashed down onto the battlements and then fell the distance to the crowded courtyard, the Fleshblessed suffered shafts of celestial energy and crossbow blasts. Those who survived leapt for the armoured archers and began tearing at heads and limbs.

A rogue shaft of celestial energy from a skybolt bow caught Zuvius in the back, causing the prince to snarl his pain. As a hammer landed a glancing blow on his pauldron, knocking him to one side, Zuvius clasped his glaive in one gauntlet and against his arm. Flinging the glaive around in a furious arc from the saddle, the Prince of Embers cut the Stormcast in half.

There was polished plate everywhere. Weapons clashing. Blades thrusting for the kill. Hammers decapitating Chaos invaders. Tzeentchian knights fought side by side with bloated blightkings. Bloodreaver savages died in their droves amongst Slaaneshi spawn thrashing their lives away to defend them. Love and fear of the Everchosen in equal measure pushed the warhorde on to feats of suicidal valour. No-one wanted to be left alive, should the invasion of Cape Desolation be a failure. Not at the mercy of the Everchosen’s boundless wrath.

Through the hordes emerged Archaon’s chosen. Pale reflections of the Everchosen himself in their dark plate, they were almost the opposite of the Stormcast Eternals.

The Varanguard fought like tempests of black-hearted vengeance. Charging through the Chaos ranks and into the enemy with the cold confidence of warriors undefeated, they thrust their fellspears through throats. They battered Stormcasts to smashed armour and bloody pulp with their warpsteel shields. They hacked limbs and immaculate helms from shoulders with tight and ruthless strikes of their daemon-forged blades.

Turning Hellion amongst the mayhem and desperation of battle, Zuvius raised A’cuitas to stab and blast the God-King’s warriors out of his path. Shrugging off glancing blows of polished blades and the sparks of lightning hammers, the prince heaved his steed around to find his weapon raised at other Varanguard. Aspa Erezavant said nothing. Kadence Salivarr spoke for both of them.

‘Hold, brother,’ the knight called, knocking aside the disciplined thrust of a Stormcast glaive. Zuvius could hear the rancid boom of Vomitus Grue’s laughter through the clash of blades as he watched the plague-ridden warrior almost spear one of his own kind.

‘This isn’t working,’ the Unslaked said, riding up between them. ‘As fast as we send these craven filth back to their weakling god, more of them arrive.’

Cutting a Stormcast’s head from his shoulders with an elegant sweep of his blade, Salivarr nodded his agreement.

‘We need to kill all that we can,’ Zuvius answered. He gestured to the column of lightning blazing down into the fort, before bringing A’cuitas brutally down through an attacking herald. ‘But more will follow, while that conduit remains open. Find and destroy their lords. No doubt they hold the key to such sky-rending sorcery. Spread the word. Let us justify the Everchosen’s faith.’

As Zuvius and the Knights of Ruin took the fight deeper into the courtyard, the sky lit up with souls rocketing for the heavens. As the Stormcasts disappeared in blazes of lightning, Zuvius found their comrades to be undaunted.

Seizing a glaive blade that had sliced into his side, Zuvius held the Stormcast who wielded it steady. The prince’s grimace of pain turned into a triumphant snarl as an enraged khorgorath of the Red Death bit the golden warrior’s head off, only to have his prey disappear in a flash of lightning. This seemed to infuriate the khorgorath even more – the thing already stuck with the quivering shafts of spears and glaives. The monster swept the advancing line of Stormcasts aside before settling upon one to beat into the courtyard floor.

‘Feast!’ Zuvius commanded a nearby horde of bloodletters. At the Varanguard’s command they jumped onto the remaining Stormcasts, who were swinging their glaives at the Prince of Embers. The rangy daemons tore at heads and plunged their brazen blades into metal then flesh. ‘Blood for the Blood God…’ Zuvius said in mock gratitude.

The prince’s jubilation was short lived. Although the horde seemed to be soaking up the worst of the Stormcasts’ punishment and Archaon’s Varanguard were intent on cutting a path of bloody death through the enemy, the celestial warriors still came. Reinforced by the lightning column, it was only a matter of time before the battle turned in the God-King’s favour. The forces of the Everchosen had thrown hordes in their entirety at the fortifications along Cape Desolation. With the ability to replenish their warriors within the walls, however, the Stormcasts had the advantage. The day would be theirs unless the dark warriors could even the odds.

Looking up through the bloody mist of the crowded courtyard, Zuvius saw Stormcast reinforcements take their positions. The derelict ramparts of black stone, speared by the silver and gold of sigmarite towers erected through the fort, were crowded with the God-King’s warriors. Silhouetted against the blazing column of lightning, the prince saw a Stormcast lord riding a reptilian beast giving orders to a skull-helmed warrior. Zuvius calculated that his only chance to destroy the conduit was to kill the lord.

‘Varanguard,’ Zuvius called to Archaon’s chosen. ‘There upon the battlements. Let’s take our fight to a foe deserving of our hell-forged steel.’

Zuvius saw Vomitus Grue headbutt a paladin in the faceplate and toss him to the Rank and Vile before urging his powerful steed up the rubble of the south wall. Like Grue, other knights in their plate of black and blood-splattered gold finished their present foes before making for the battlements.

Zuvius saw the Unslaked mount the shattered steps of a half-demolished stairwell. He fought through the axe-wielding Stormcasts holding it from the Knights Mazarine. Meanwhile, Kadence Salivarr’s elegant monstrosity leapt up through the ruin of the south wall, bounding and balancing from purchase to precarious purchase. All the while, the Varanguard warrior stabbed and slashed his blade through surrounding Stormcasts.

The Prince of Embers grunted his derision. Zuvius would be damned anew before offering up such a prize to his brothers in darkness. As he saw an opportunity to reach the battlements ahead of them he raced away, only to be suddenly torn backwards.

A Stormcast hammer had struck him in the shoulder, puncturing the pauldron and hooking him back. Tensing his thighs about the saddle and clinging to the reins, Zuvius held on. As the pull of the hammer hauled him and the steed around, the immaculate gauntlet of a Stormcast smashed him across the face. Zuvius reeled. His face was already a mess but now his nose was broken and blood-splattered.

‘Unholy wretch,’ the Stormcast said through the mirrored finish of a glistening helm. His words crackled like the divine metal of the Stormcast weaponry. Swiping again at Zuvius, the celestial warrior cracked his cheekbone and ripped the thin flesh of his face where the ornate gauntlet caught him. ‘The spawn of corruption. You are a thing of evil.’

‘Indeed I am,’ Zuvius snarled before being savagely hammered in the jaw by the Stormcast’s righteous fist. Blood and teeth went flying, tapping and spattering against the glorious pauldron of a nearby paladin.

‘The God-King comes to claim what is his,’ the Stormcast snarled. ‘Soul, stone and sky. All belong to Sigmar. Do you hear me, creature?’

As the skull-helmed warrior rushed to attack once more, the Prince of Embers was ready. Clutching his glaive close to its crowning blade, the knight used the momentum of the next savage tug to thrust A’cuitas down into the Stormcast’s chest. Zuvius pulled him close and watched as blood streamed from the mouth slit of the skull helm. Zuvius thrust again with the glaive, down through the diaphragm and into the gut. The prince felt his foe tense with every plunge.

‘Yes,’ Zuvius told him. ‘I hear you.’

Zuvius ripped the glaive out of the warrior. The Stormcast staggered back, a bloody hole in his chest that cascaded gore down his beautiful suit of armour. The prince pulled the hammer from his ruined pauldron and dropped it on the ground with disgust. He didn’t like the feel of the celestial weapon.

‘Hear this,’ Zuvius spat. ‘Now I go to ensure that your God-King forfeits his claim.’

Leaving the Stormcast to waver and stagger in his last moments of life, Zuvius rode across the courtyard. Barging Stormcast and warhorde warriors aside with Hellion’s armoured flanks, the prince used the shaft of his glaive to smash a lunging Stormcast aside. As another took a swing at him with his grandblade, Zuvius leant down out of its devastating path. Jabbing the blade of A’cuitas through his faceplate, Zuvius rammed the glaive home in the warrior’s skull. Leaving a trail of vaulting lightning storms in his wake, Zuvius reached the other side of the courtyard.

Jabbing his armoured heels into Hellion’s sides, Zuvius prompted the beast to leap up onto a collapsed section of wall, then from the back of a mortally wounded khorgorath, who roared its blood-gurgling defiance. As lightning shafts scorched the stone about him, the Prince of Embers thrust his glaive up into an armoured archer who fell forwards into the courtyard. Urging Hellion on, Zuvius risked the scrabble up the twisted architecture of the wall. A monstrous leap demolished the structure below. As Zuvius held out his glaive to balance, Hellion’s hooves reached the battlements and carried the knight to stable ground.

At last, the Prince of Embers saw the Stormcast lord. He was backed up onto the steps of a gold, sigmarite citadel. The crowning tower was the tallest of the God-King’s fortifications.

His reptilian mount wore extravagant gold plate like its master. Zuvius was sure that he was the leader of the warriors fighting for the Ebon Claw. He was not alone in that assumption. While the armoured bodies of Archaon’s chosen lay about the battlements where the Stormcast lord and his beast had slain them, the Unslaked, Vomitus Grue and Kadence Salivarr still lived, and they had surrounded him.

Zuvius promised himself that victory would not be theirs. Pushing Hellion on, Zuvius raced for the tower. Leaping the razor-edged crenulations between battlements, he dodged several shield-bearing warriors of the God-King. Hellion cleared a section of wall demolished by a mace-swinging Stormcast just moments before and leapt the opportunistic gladius sweeps of others desperate to put themselves between the Varanguard and their lord. As Hellion leapt back down onto the battlements, Zuvius thrust his glaive through two of the Stormcasts. As their swords clattered to the floor, Zuvius ripped A’cuitas free. With lightning souls erupting about him, the Prince of Embers drove his armoured steed on towards the tower.

Everything hurt. Every twist and turn was agony. Every muscle screamed for respite. But Zuvius would not relent.

As Zuvius reached the ruined tower at last, Vomitus Grue died. The pestilent knight had felt no pain when the great hammer of the Stormcast lord smashed him aside. He had felt nothing as the reptilian beast breathed storm-lightning into his pox-scarred face. Zuvius didn’t know if Grue had felt the beast’s jaws tear his head off and spit it into the courtyard below, but it didn’t matter. The body followed moments after.

Kadence Salivarr and the Unslaked tried to take the Stormcast lord together. With their daemon-forged blades a deathtrap of cleaving and thrusting lethality, the Stormcast reared his beast and smashed the blades aside with the crackling power of his colossal hammer. The lord kicked the Unslaked’s bloody mount back while breaking the back of Salivarr’s beast with a downswing of his mighty weapon.

The reptilian mount backed up the tower steps and leapt clear over the two knights, bounding about them to get into a better position.

As a warrior-herald landed nearby to come to his lord’s aid, Zuvius skewered the Stormcast and kicked in his faceplate, sending him toppling over the sharp battlements. The Unslaked attacked next, and tried to unseat the Stormcast lord. Instead, his horned helm was smashed to brain-dribbling scrap by the Stormcast’s hammer. Kadence Salivarr tried to bring his infamous bladework to bear, but was felled by the thunderbolt blast of a crossbow bolt in the back.

As the smoking shell of the dark knight crumpled before the Stormcast lord, Zuvius drove at him. The Stormcast hauled on his mount’s reins and pointed the head of his hammer at the Varanguard before him.

‘No,’ the Prince of Embers told him. ‘It shall be you to taste oblivion.’

Such words seemed to provoke something in the Stormcast lord. Digging his heels into the scaly flanks of his steed, he urged the beast on.

Zuvius roared his defiance at the Stormcast who stood up in the saddle, his hammer aloft. Hellion wanted to charge but Zuvius kept the reins tight in his armoured grasp as he turned the shaft of A’cuitas about in his other hand.

As the Stormcast lord charged, Zuvius pointed the pommel of A’cuitas at the ground. The metal eye opened and a blaze of dark lightning scorched the stone battlements, turning them from black to a glowing red, melting the stone in the Stormcast’s path. As the reptile’s claws met the molten stone they sank, before becoming trapped as the stone cooled to glass. The beast’s momentum suddenly arrested, it threw its rider from the saddle and over its head.

As the Stormcast lord hit the battlement floor face first and skidded to a halt before Zuvius, Hellion bridled. The golden warrior’s hammer skimmed across the stone and fell into the courtyard. The Stormcast rolled over. Zuvius held the point of his glaive over his scuffed helm.

‘Unworthy,’ Zuvius told him, before stabbing down. A lightning storm raged about him as the Stormcast lord died.

The reptilian beast roared its grief and anger at Zuvius, straining to tear its legs free. It opened its jaws wide to unleash its lightning at Archaon’s chosen.

‘Enough,’ Zuvius told it before spearing it through the mouth.

Zuvius urged Hellion to the edge of the battlement. He looked down into the courtyard. He waited. The warhorde fought on against the Stormcast defenders, while other knights arrived behind them, too late to take their part in the glory and destruction of the celestial lord. Among them was Aspa Erezavant, the silent killer whose blade dripped with gore. The battle had turned. While the wretched warriors of Chaos had to step through a carpet of their own dead, the Stormcasts were being backed up to the column of lightning.

The prince’s smeared lips curled. The celestial lord was dead but the column went on burning and with it came endless reinforcements.

He had been wrong.

Zuvius furiously looked across the battle, across the golden paladins fighting for their God-King and the living corruption attempting to destroy them. He saw the Stormcast Eternal who had been speaking to the Stormcast lord earlier. The indomitable warrior was still alive and deep in prayer.

‘You…’ Zuvius said. He realised this warrior must be controlling the column of light. He lifted A’cuitas up like a spear, took aim and threw it. The Stormcast looked up just as his comrades tried to warn him. The glaive squealed down through the skull-helmed warrior’s armour, impaling him to the ground and silencing his prayer.

As the skull-helmed warrior became a coruscation of surging, spiritual energy blazing for the skies, the column of lightning stuttered and disappeared, leaving only burnt air and a sharp afterglow. Zuvius had severed the conduit. The Stormcasts remaining were as indomitable as ever but the tide had turned. The forces of Chaos fell upon them in droves as the followers of Archaon butchered their way to a crude victory.

The Prince of Embers heard the flap of wings. It was Mallofax, returned after the worst of the fighting. The bird rested on Zuvius’ ruined shoulder guard.

‘You saw?’

‘I saw, my lord,’ the bird squawked.

‘The Stormcast in the skull helm?’

‘Aye, master.’

‘Then fly to the other fortresses, to the other hordes,’ said Zuvius. ‘Tell our Varanguard brothers how to sever the storm. Tell them how the God-King’s warriors can be defeated and driven from this miserable land.’

With the beating of wings, Mallofax peeled off into the sky. Orphaeo Zuvius leant back in the saddle. With his injuries, he almost fell. Aspa Erezavant nodded at him before urging his steed back down the ruined steps leading from the battlements.

Zuvius looked down into the courtyard and to a victory declared in blood and lightning. The Ebon Claw was theirs.

Weary, Zuvius had one more thing he needed to see. He steered Hellion up the glorious steps of the sigmarite tower, to the highest part of the Ebon Claw, and stared out across the dark peninsula. Cape Desolation belonged to the Everchosen. The columns of lightning connecting each of the fortresses were being snuffed out like the flames of distant candles. He could hear cheering, sorcerous chanting and the screams of the dying. They all came together in an unholy cacophony.

Zuvius felt a ravenous pride eat away at him as he looked out across the Varanguard swarming the conquered peninsula. He felt part of something abominable and powerful. He had been a warrior, pledged to Chaos. An acolyte of dread Tzeentch. A blind man leading the blind, without true purpose. Alone among wretches, he had become complacent. Content in personal damnation.

He understood that he would never know the meaninglessness of spawndom or the monstrous powers gifted by the Great Changer. He was not the one but the one among many. Only in service to the Everchosen of Chaos had the Prince of Embers come to know the true power of damnation. Damnation of all for all. The harnessed strength of corruption, the glorious darkness of a fell blade wielded by the greatest of their kind. Archaon was a dire warlord who united not only the Varanguard behind him, but all servants of the Dark Gods as he stormed through the victim realms.

A dark silhouette in the rising dust, the Prince of Embers could see his master. Archaon. A horned shadow in his monstrous plate, his daemonsword and runeshield held in tight as he prepared to take once more to the air. The daemon steed launched into the sky, extending the great expanse of his wings. While Sigmar’s tempest continued to rage across distant skies, over Cape Desolation all was still.

Orphaeo Zuvius watched the Everchosen and his daemon steed fly high over the Ebon Claw. Gliding on Dorghar’s powerful wings, Archaon steered the monster towards the dark lands beyond. Zuvius nodded to himself. There would be more fighting. More killing to come. The arrival of the God-King’s Stormcast Eternals would have given people living beyond the peninsula hope – hope for a realm without the tyranny of a ruinous overlord like Archaon. As the Prince of Embers took up his glaive and turned Hellion back down the steps, he came to realise that hope was a truly terrible thing.

Chapter One

The groaning roar of the arboreal colossus rippled through the ravaged wood. Braying beasts and howling marauders fell silent as the primal fury of the sound came smashing down upon them. It was a rage beyond flesh and bone, a hate at once elemental and remorseless, the last tremendous defiance left in a land violated and despoiled. Warriors who had mocked the defiance of mortal nations, who had butchered entire kingdoms without remorse, now felt dread quiver through their hearts. Almost before they recognised what they were doing, the vanguard of the horde began to fall back, to shrink away from the ferocious bellow and the giant that gave it voice. That roar held within it the wrath of all the victims that had withered on their blades, the curse of vengeance unsatisfied.

The secret vale of Athelwyrd was dying. Its glades had been trampled by boot and hoof, its forests gashed and torn by axe and claw, its meadows scorched by the fires of sorcery. Once pristine streams of crystal water had been transformed into trickles of diseased muck, as black and rancid as the souls of the rampaging invaders. In all the realm of Ghyran there had been no place better hidden, better protected than Athelwyrd, but now even this sanctuary had been discovered. This fortress would fall to the conquerors, but while the rest of the vale was even now being ravaged by the invaders, here alone did one last foe rise to oppose them.

Huge and ancient, the enormous tree-creature lumbered out from the depths of the wood. It stood five times the height of a man, its branch-like arms ending in gigantic talons of blade-sharp bark. Its face was a cluster of knotholes that pitted the creature’s trunk, a sylvan glow shining deep within their depths. The mouth was a jagged gash lined with fang-like splinters, groans of enraged anguish rumbling continuously from within. Roots still clotted with the rich dark soil of Athelwyrd dragged behind pillar-like legs as the creature surged towards the massed invaders.

For only a moment did terror hold the horde back, for fear of the treelord couldn’t eclipse the greater fear that infected each of the invaders: fear of the infernal god they served and the remorseless warlord who bore that god’s noxious blessings. The sylvaneth colossus could, in the end, only kill them. Plaguefather Nurgle could do far worse, and through his mortal general, such retribution would be swift in coming.

Bellowing their own war cries, the legions of decay turned upon the wooden hulk. All across the realm of Ghyran, the diseased hosts of Nurgle had erupted like a plague, ravaging the Jade Kingdoms and despoiling the once vibrant and fecund forests. Step by step, blow by blow, they were transforming the land into a new garden of disease and corruption for their obscene master, but none of those innumerable conflicts could match the duty that had been entrusted to the invaders of Athelwyrd. To them had been bestowed the honour of claiming for their god the prize he desired most keenly. Success would increase their unholy vitality and grant them leprous boons beyond measure; failure would result in shame and endless suffering.

So it was that human warriors in corroded armour and with blades pitted by rust and verdigris flung themselves at the hulking treelord. Bestial gors, their mangy fur peppered with grisly rashes and cancerous blisters, sprang upon the creature with axes of bone and flint. Wizened daemons with leprous eyes and oozing sores prowled towards their foe with blackened swords of raw corruption.

The glow in the pits of the treelord’s face burned with even sharper malignance. Again the creaking groan rumbled through the forest. The forest spirit brought its immense feet crashing down, the trailing roots stabbing into the earth, sinking down to bind it to the ground it defended. Charging foes came howling towards it, weapons raised for the kill.

A sweep of the treelord’s great claw hurled the broken bodies of half a dozen pox-ridden warriors into the air. A downward swipe of its fist burst an advancing plaguebearer like a pimple, the daemon’s foul essence spattering across a herd of beastmen, sizzling against their fur and flesh. A bloated gor, its diseased body swathed in strips of mail and patches of steel plate, was caught in the forest spirit’s hand and raised high into the air. The treelord tightened its grip and crushed the creature to bloody paste.

Scores of invaders were smashed and crushed by the treelord, their corpses heaped around its feet. The attack faltered, warriors drawing back as they wondered whether the death before them was worse than that threatened by their pestilent god. The tribal marauders snarled obscenities at their foe, jeering at the monster, steeling themselves for another attack. The beastmen growled and snapped at one another, trying to force the weakest among them to engage the enemy. The daemons gibbered and muttered, distracted by the fresh corruption spreading through the glade and by the timidity of their mortal allies.

One of the tribal chieftains charged forwards, hubris emboldening him where others quailed. He was mighty in the councils of their warlord, honoured for his ruthlessness and ferocity, and his abject devotion to the decayed glories of Nurgle. For all of this, a single glare from the treelord’s glowing eyes sent the man cringing away in fright, retreating back into the diseased mob.

An awed hush fell across the putrid legion, beasts and men, mortals and daemons falling silent as a grotesque figure pushed his way through their ranks – a huge warrior, his belly swollen with rot and putrescence, a gigantic axe with a blackened blade clenched in his scarred hands. A massive pauldron guarded his left shoulder, through which a clutch of immense bony spines had erupted from his flesh and through the corroded steel. The warrior’s face was locked inside a horned helm, only the eye-slots marring the smooth mask. There were three of these, spaced in the triangular pattern of the fly-rune, the diseased emblem of Nurgle himself. From each of the openings, a blemished eye glowered at the hesitant marauders.

A violent, cough-like cry bubbled up from the horned helm. Without further warning, the huge fighter brought his axe swinging around. The blackened blade sheared the arm off the chieftain who had retreated, pitching the maimed barbarian to the earth. Before the man could even scream, the wound he’d been dealt was a blackened mass of necrotic tissue, the sorcerous pollution of the axe rushing through his veins to infest the rest of his body. Those around the man drew back, gazing at his agonies with a mixture of horror and awe. They glanced from the dying chieftain to the one who’d struck him down with the same regard, for this was no mere champion of the Dark Gods, but the chosen of Nurgle, the warlord who had been granted the distinction of laying waste to Athelwyrd. This was Torglug the Despised.

Brandishing his axe, Torglug advanced alone towards the treelord. He nodded his horned head towards the writhing body of the chieftain he’d cut down.

‘This is being the fate of my enemies.’ Torglug’s voiced seeped from behind his helm. ‘Being through cowardice or defiance, I am sparing none who are opposing me. Be looking upon your destruction, vine-blood, and knowing despair!’

The treelord reared back, its roots still fastened deep in the earth. From the depths of its mighty frame there sounded a cachinnation of primordial hate. The claws tipping its hands appeared to lengthen, darkening into black thorns. The sylvan glow of its eyes blazed ever brighter.

Torglug wasted no more threats upon the monster. His words had been for the benefit of his warriors, a reminder to them that he was the chosen of Nurgle. A warning to them all of what it meant to be the favoured champion of the Crow God.

Storming towards his hulking foe, Torglug brought his axe cracking around in a double-handed strike. He caught the treelord’s claw, shearing through the oaken talon in a spray of splinters and sap. His foe flinched back, more in surprise than pain, stunned that the weapon could inflict such damage. It was only when the severed stump of its claw began to change, began to turn a ghoulish grey, that a moan of suffering rippled through the treelord. Its glowing eyes stared at the ghastly discolouration, watching as it began to spread. Mould, virulent and rapacious as any fever, now infested the creature’s bark.

The treelord’s wail of pain turned to a creaking snarl of fury. Whipping around, it brought its other hand hurtling towards Torglug, intent upon smashing the warlord into the ground. Exhibiting an agility that belied his bloated bulk, Torglug dived under the plummeting hand, rolling past the creature’s guard. As he came out of his roll, he brought his grisly axe chopping into the treelord’s leg, tearing a great chunk from the pillar-like limb and delivering a second infection of mould even greater than that infesting the creature’s hand. The grey contagion spread rapidly through the mutilated leg, crawling upwards and outwards with ferocious speed.

The tree-creature tried to swing around, to withdraw its roots and smash Torglug flat, but the treelord’s crippled leg remained fast, only its left limb obeying. Unbalanced, it teetered for a moment. It was the only moment Torglug allowed it. Charging into the paralysed hulk, he hacked away at its free leg, gouging deep cuts into the trunk where it joined the supporting limb. The grey mould exploded across the colossal sylvaneth with each blow, sinking deeper and deeper into the heartwood beneath the bark. As the infection intensified, the trunk became rotten and brittle, each attack wreaking greater and greater havoc.

A cough of laughter escaped Torglug as the creature’s leg gave out beneath it. The huge treelord crashed to the ground, its momentum tearing its frozen leg from the earth, roots and all. The exultant warlord leaped atop the trunk, hacking away with vicious, vindictive blows of his axe. As he chopped away, gibbering daemon-spawn capered out from the ranks of his legion to gnaw at slivers of heartwood and lap up the sap oozing from the treelord’s wounds. Torglug allowed the hideous, toad-like atrocities their sport. Nurglings were minuscule echoes of the Grandfather, cast in the dreaded god’s image. Even Nurgle’s chosen warlord would not deny the mites. The rest of his warriors, however, knew better than to intrude upon his triumph.

Triumph? The word had a bitter taste for Torglug. As delicious as it was to feel the ancient sylvaneth withering beneath his boots, as much as he savoured the agonies of the treelord as mould and disease gnawed away at its essence, he knew that this wasn’t triumph. This was only a delay, an interlude standing between him and true victory.

Torglug watched the glow gradually fade from the pits of the treelord’s face. How much more satisfying it was to watch these creatures die than the armoured warriors of Azyr. When penetrating the illusions that concealed Athelwyrd, Torglug’s legion had been opposed by a great company of the lightning-men. There was no satisfaction smiting such foes, no delicious transition from the suffering of life to the decay of death. The moment the spark was extinguished, they simply vanished in a blaze of blue lightning. It left Torglug bitter to be cheated of his pleasures. Strange and eerie as they were, at least the wooden creatures of the Jade Kingdoms were real enough to suffer for him while they died.

The last ember faded from the treelord, its spirit finally extinguished by the contagion Torglug’s axe had brought to it. The warlord stared down into its empty face, then brought his boot stomping down again and again into the rotten bark, obliterating the visage utterly. He turned and glared at his waiting legion. All through their march across Athelwyrd they had been drawn into petty battles with the sylvaneth and the lightning-men, meaningless conflicts that delayed them while the real prize threatened to slip out of their reach.

He wouldn’t let that happen. Torglug had fought too long and hard, had endured too much to fail now. It was his horde that had found the vale of Athelwyrd, his warriors who had penetrated into the refuge of their enemy. Victory, true victory, was within their grasp. The enemy had fled – all the protections that had guarded her for so long were falling away. She was in retreat, nothing more than hunted prey. The great prize Nurgle had coveted for so long would soon be rendered up to him.

When the Everqueen, Alarielle, was given to Nurgle, Torglug would transcend the limitations of mortality. He would be free of the frailties of flesh. He would become eternal, a prince of the Grandfather’s blighted empire.

Torglug thrust his axe outwards, pointing it towards the copse from which the treelord had emerged.

‘She is escaped!’ he shouted to his warriors. ‘Be upforming! We are marching and bringing Grandfather Nurgle a mighty prize! You are finding her or Torglug is teaching you all what it is to despair!’

The warlord’s eyes gleamed with murderous ambition as he watched packs of beastkin and barbarians rush into the woods. They would find the trail. Whatever the sylvaneth threw at them, his troops would find their trail.

It was only a matter of time.

Amber light streamed through the soaring canopy, stabbing earthwards through a maze of silvery branches and alabaster leaves. Flowers endowed with the vibrant lustre of emerald and sapphire blossomed from a cascade of hanging vines and spiralling creepers. Great strands of coruscating moss spilled from ancient boughs, alight with faerie brilliance and fey luminance. The groans and creaks of swaying trees melded into a harmonious melody, a sussuration that throbbed through both flesh and soul. The rich loamy smell of fertile soil flowed into the enticing fragrance of petal and bloom. The very air was filled with a warm adoration, a celebration of vitality and the shifting cadence of life itself.

Through this marvellous landscape, a great exodus trod an ancient path. A vast throng of tree-like beings flocked to a trail none had set eyes upon before but which each knew deep within its heartwood. Smaller figures shared the path, armoured shapes mightier yet not dissimilar to those of men. Fewer in number, they kept apart from the tree-creatures, sharing their journey but not their confidence. The Hallowed Knights, one of Sigmar’s great Stormhosts, had shared many of the ordeals endured by the tree-like sylvaneth, but they were still not wholly accepted by their uncanny companions.

Lord-Castellant Lorrus Grymn’s fingers tightened about the grip of his halberd, every muscle in his body growing tense as he spun to confront the faint blur of motion he’d caught out of the corner of his eye. With eerie silence, the bushes on the edge of the path were shifting aside, pulling themselves out of the way of the creature trying to move past them. He caught himself before moving to intercept the inhuman shape that suddenly emerged. The spindly figure, its head crowned by a crest of leafy branches, fixed him with its weirdly luminous eyes before striding off down the path.

‘I sympathise with you, commander.’ Grymn turned to find Angstun beside him, the sheen of the halo that circled the Knight-Vexillor’s helm dulled by the shadow of the forest canopy overhead. ‘It is hard to think of something so cold and inhuman as friendly.’

Grymn watched as the sylvaneth joined several similar beings marching along the forest trail. There were hundreds of the tree-like creatures in the procession, some much larger than the one that had just surprised the Lord-Castellant. Every moment brought another out from the forest and onto the path. They moved with a chilling silence, passing without a trace across the wooded trail. Though he sensed no threat from them, Grymn couldn’t shake an impression of restrained hostility smouldering within them.

‘They are our allies,’ Grymn corrected Angstun. ‘Do not mistake them for friends. If not for our common foe, I don’t know that they would suffer us to be among them.’ He looked ahead, his gaze fixing upon a brilliant light shining far down the path. ‘Certainly we wouldn’t be permitted so near to their queen. Emissaries from Azyr were turned from her court even after the plaguehosts breached the realmgates and descended upon Ghyran. No, they travel a different road than we can follow. For a space, that road may lead in the same direction, but that is all we share.’

Angstun pointed towards the light. ‘She isn’t like the sylvaneth,’ he said. ‘Queen Alarielle is no spectre of bark and branch. Her shape is one of beauty, a visage of wonder and marvel. To gaze upon her is to feel serenity, even with the hordes of the plague god snapping at our heels.’

Grymn stood silent for a moment. He envied Angstun’s serenity. For the Lord-Castellant, even the thought of the Everqueen made him feel as though a great burden was pressing down upon him. Angstun had called him ‘commander’, but it had not been so when the Hallowed Knights entered Athelwyrd. Their commander had been Lord-Celestant Gardus, a courageous warrior and a great leader of men. It was he who had been entrusted with this mission, not Grymn – charged with rescuing Alarielle from the legions of Nurgle. Gardus had fallen in battle against the hordes of Torglug the Despised, his body and soul flung back to the holy halls of Sigmaron. With his passing, command of the expedition had become Grymn’s. Defending a position or building fortifications, these were the duties he was accustomed to, the tasks for which he was best suited. This retreat was something different. The necessity of it was unquestionable, for only in flight could Alarielle be protected, but there was no glory to be had running from the enemy. The other Hallowed Knights could satisfy their honour in the knowledge that they were obeying orders. Grymn had no such recourse, for it was he who issued those orders.

‘Do you think that is how she appears to them?’ Angstun asked.

Grymn shook his head, missing the Knight-Vexillor’s meaning. Angstun pointed to a spindly dryad as it stepped out onto the path. ‘She is a goddess, so I wonder if her appearance changes to suit the senses of those who look upon her. To us, she is a woman of unmatched beauty, an echo of lost wonder. To the trees, perhaps she is a slender willow with golden leaves.’ He paused, glancing down the path at the forest behind them. ‘I wonder how she looks to our enemy?’

‘Like prey,’ Grymn said. He clapped his hand against Angstun’s shoulder. ‘But they will not catch their quarry. Not while a single Hallowed Knight still stands.’

The Lord-Castellant turned away from Angstun and began to make his way back along the trail. Tallon, his gryph-hound and loyal companion, fell into step beside him. The creature’s canine body was tense, rippling with agitation. Its eyes roved along the edges of the path, its sharp eagle-like beak snapping with alarm each time the bushes stirred or the trees swayed.

The eerie sylvaneth were growing in number with every moment that passed, more and more of them striding out from the deeper forest. Some were slight, almost frail-looking things, near human in their proportions. Others were great towering giants, many times the size of a man, their heads bent down so they did not tear the forest canopy above them. Smaller, wispy beings fluttered about the dryads and treelords, glowing shapes with gossamer wings, as phantasmal as a cobweb. Watching the sylvaneth creep out from the forest, Grymn realised he was wrong to describe what was happening as a retreat. This was an exodus, an abandonment of Athelwyrd. The sylvaneth were conceding their last stronghold to the plaguehosts.

A sense of frustration rushed through Grymn. They should stand and fight, should turn right now and meet the legions of Torglug. The path through the forest wasn’t wide. It could be held. The Hallowed Knights could hold it. Even with the sacrifice of Gardus and the warriors left behind as rearguard, there were enough Stormcasts to contest Torglug’s advance. Tegrus and his winged Prosecutors, Markius and his stalwart Retributors, the valiant companies of Judicators and Liberators. They could make a fight of it. They could force Torglug to pay dearly to conquer Athelwyrd.

Grymn shook his head as he watched the armoured warriors of his chamber marching past him. Yes, they could bleed Torglug’s army white, but that wasn’t their task. Their duty was to rescue Alarielle from the grip of Chaos, to protect her until she was safely beyond the enemy’s reach. That was their purpose. Later, when their duty was done, they could think about driving the foe from Athelwyrd and the whole of the Jade Kingdoms.

Still, Grymn lamented the necessity of such a choice. Every hour the plaguehosts were left to ravage and despoil, their filth corrupted more of the forest. More of Ghyran became consumed, distorted into a diseased shadow. Every step back left that much less to save when the time did come for the Stormhost to fight.

A retinue of Decimators, their mighty thunderaxes slung over their shoulders, marched past Grymn, each of the paladins saluting their commander as he drew near. Of all the Hallowed Knights, the sylvaneth seemed to especially shun the Decimators. Early on in the retreat, Grymn had decided to move those Stormcasts to the back of the line so they might avoid the tree-creatures leaving the forest to join the column. A misunderstanding between the paladins and newcomers might be enough to shatter the fragile alliance.

After the Decimators, only a dozen Judicators were left to bring up the rear, each warrior armed with a deadly boltstorm crossbow. The bulky weapons could unleash a vicious barrage of sigmarite bolts in rapid succession. Within the cramped confines of the forest, that quality made them a greater asset than the longer reach of the skybolt bows carried by most of the Hallowed Knights’ Judicators.

Marching alongside the Judicators was a macabre figure. Though he was clad in the same burnished sigmarite plate as the rest of the Hallowed Knights, this man’s helm had been cast in the semblance of a leering skull. A halo of sharpened spikes rose above the death’s head, each metal stake inscribed with invocations and funerary lamentations. This sinister warrior was Lord-Relictor Morbus.

‘The queen’s court grows,’ Morbus stated as Grymn fell in beside him. ‘The sylvaneth rally to her. They leave their secret places to join her in exile.’ He chuckled darkly, the sound echoing strangely within his helm. ‘Let us pray to Mighty Sigmar that her court does not grow so substantial that she finds no further need for us.’

Grymn turned to the Lord-Relictor, shock in his eyes. ‘You think Alarielle capable of such treachery?’ His tone was accusing, bordering on outrage.

Morbus laughed again. ‘Calm yourself, Lord-Castellant. It is naught but a conjecture crafted from observation. The sylvaneth do not like us,’ he said gesturing with the relic hammer he bore, indicating the Decimators ahead. ‘Perhaps we remind them too much of the plaguehosts with their blades and torches. Or perhaps they blame us for bringing the enemy into Athelwyrd.’

‘Ridiculous,’ Grymn scoffed. ‘We came here to defend the vale, not expose it to the enemy!’

‘The Hallowed Knights know that,’ Morbus said, ‘but do the sylvaneth believe it?’ He shook his head. ‘I think you may content yourself that at least the Radiant Queen knows us to be friends. You are right, she will not abandon us, not if every tree and shrub were to uproot itself and march to her banner. However much her subjects may resent us, they won’t–’

Morbus broke off, his attention fixed upon a creature marching towards them from the fore of the column. It was one of the more human-sized sylvaneth, its trunk-like body having more definition about it than the usual dryads, its contours flowing into a woman’s form. Its branch-like limbs were more like true arms and legs than others of its kind had, the moss and leaves that topped the creature’s head approximating the tresses and locks of a maiden’s hair. The echoes of femininity faded around the face, formed from jagged cracks in the bark within which embers of faerie light pulsated. Around the wispy body, great lengths of green vine were coiled, entwined about each limb and every curve, their leaves full and healthy.

Grymn had seen this creature before – it had nearly killed him when first they met – and he recognised it for the handmaiden of Alarielle. The Hallowed Knights had taken to referring to it as the ‘Lady of Vines’. Somehow, the title felt like more than an affectation bestowed upon her by the Stormhost. He thought it was something that belonged to the sylvaneth in fact as well as fancy.

The branchwraith stopped before Grymn and Morbus, her glowing gaze piercing into each man. There was an unmistakable enmity in that gaze, and Grymn felt his sense of guilt swell within him as the accusing stare fastened onto him. Fighting down his own uneasiness, he forced himself to meet the sylvaneth’s glare. The Lady of Vines simply raised one of her branch-like arms and pointed at the forest behind them.

Almost reflexively, Grymn and Morbus turned towards the trees. All that greeted them was the same maze of greenery that had surrounded them ever since their withdrawal. Grymn swung around, to try and get some explanation from the Lady of Vines. The branchwraith was already gone, walking back towards the light of her queen.

‘Are we being dismissed?’ Morbus wondered. ‘Is this her way of telling us to leave?’

Grymn shook his head, his gaze returning to the trees. ‘We’ve sworn to protect Queen Alarielle. No mere handmaiden will relieve us of that duty.’

A low growl from Tallon drew his attention to the gryph-hound. The creature was glaring at the path behind them, its hackles raised. As uneasy as the sylvaneth made it, Tallon had never reacted to them with such hostility. Something wasn’t right. Something was different than it had been only a few moments before. Grymn lifted his halberd as the sound of rustling in the undergrowth reached him.

‘More of the sylvaneth rallying to their queen,’ Morbus said.

‘You’ve been at the rear of the march,’ Grymn told the Lord-Relictor. ‘The sylvaneth make no sound when they move through the forest!’ Spinning around, he called to the Judicators around them. ‘On guard, brothers! The enemy has found us!’

The moment the warning left his mouth, Grymn saw a shaggy, muscled shape leap out at him from the forest edge. He brought his halberd slashing around, striking the beast before its powerful jaws could reach him. The broken brute crashed to the earth, its paws scratching at the dirt as life fled from it. Grymn could spare no more than a glance at the huge mutated hound before a second canine horror rushed at him from the trees. The beasts seemed enraged by the light of his warding lantern, drawn to it like murderous moths. Tallon lunged at one of the monsters, bearing it to the ground, the gryph-hound’s beak clamped about the dog’s throat.

Howls and snarls rose all around Grymn as more and more of the twisted hounds charged out onto the path. The crack of boltstorm crossbows boomed out, the Judicators loosing a fusillade of searing sigmarite into the attacking brutes. Yelps and whines of agony clawed at the air as the barrage brought down a dozen of the beasts. The path became strewn with dead and crippled hounds, yet still more of the monsters came loping out from the darkness.

Lord-Relictor Morbus pulverised the skull of one Chaos hound with his enchanted hammer, the maimed brute’s body flung back into the trees by the force of his blow. Others converged upon him, seeking to drag him down by sheer weight of numbers. Tallon rose from the carcass of his first enemy to lunge at a second, raking it with his paws and slashing it with his beak. A few of the mutant dogs weathered the storm of sigmarite bolts to drag down a Judicator, savaging the warrior in their grisly jaws. Behind the hounds, there now came a shrieking mob of skin-clad barbarians.

Grymn speared the hound snapping at his throat, kicking the dying beast from his blade as he turned to meet the charge of the marauders. They were abominable parodies of men, their bodies pitted with grisly sores and hideous lesions. Every manner of blight and blemish marred their flesh, proclaiming far louder than the cursed fly-rune daubed upon their armour and shields that here were the diseased slaves of Torglug.

Bolts from the Judicators struck down the first wave of marauders. Grymn’s halberd met the second. The Lord-Castellant was a whirlwind of ruin, tearing his way through every foe luckless enough to tempt his blade. A shrieking axeman, his eyes transformed into rheumy pits of pus by his afflictions, was cut in half. A howling savage with an extra arm growing from his neck fell with one leg severed at the knee.

‘Only the faithful!’ The war-cry of the Hallowed Knights thundered above the crash of blades and the crunch of bone. Decimator-Prime Diocletian was leading his paladins into the thick of the fray, energy crackling about the blades of their thunderaxes. Behind the Decimators came a formation of Liberators, their shields locked together to form a moving wall that stretched from one side of the path to the other. Even as he fought the barbarians assaulting him, Grymn felt proud that his warriors were adhering to the plan he had developed. There would be no great rush to the rear to meet the foe. If it were but a ruse, a feint to cover for an attack elsewhere, the enemy would find more Stormcasts waiting for them.

A fearsome howl rose above the cries and screams of fighting men. Through the press of marauders, Grymn saw a mounted chieftain gallop into view. Ghastly sores and profane brands peppered the flesh of both man and horse. The stallion stamped the ground with iron-shod hooves, chomping its teeth at the shrieks of the injured barbarians it trampled. The rider raised a double-headed axe in one fist, then crashed the weapon against the iron shield he held in the other. A challenging howl rose from his mouth.

Grymn met the grotesque jarl’s challenge, smashing his way through the marauders around him to rush at their leader. The stallion reared back, its hooves slamming into Grymn as he lunged at the chieftain. The Stormcast staggered back, his head ringing from the crack of a hoof against his helm.

The chieftain swung at him, his axe flashing downwards in a butchering sweep, all of the warrior’s weight behind the blow. His murderous eyes blinked in shock when Grymn’s halberd blocked the attack, when the Stormcast’s strength defied the malign power behind his assault. A sideward twist, an outward thrust, and the axe was ripped from the chieftain’s grip.

Whinnying in alarm, the stallion backed away, smashing down those marauders too slow to get out of its path. The chieftain glowered at Grymn, his savage face curled back in a feral snarl. From the belt that circled his waist, he withdrew a brutal instrument of chains festooned with blades and spikes. Armed with this gruesome flail, the rider forced the horse back into the fight and circled Grymn at a gallop, lashing at him with the chains.

‘Stay your bolts!’ Grymn ordered the Judicators. ‘Tallon, heel,’ he commanded his gryph-hound as the creature moved towards the chieftain. ‘The villain is mine!’

Even as he declared his intention, the warrior’s flail came whipping across his chest, drawing sparks from the sigmarite plate and slashing the strips of holy parchment fastened to his armour. Grymn swung about to confront his foe, but the rider was already galloping away, circling around to lash out at him from the other side. The fury of the second blow caused the Lord-Castellant to stagger back. A third strike knocked him to his knees.

The chieftain rushed in for another attack, arching down to hit his fallen opponent. It was then that Grymn revealed his deception. Leaving his halberd on the ground, he caught hold of the chains as they struck him. Mustering all his prodigious strength, the Stormcast pulled on the flail. The chieftain was dragged forwards, the flail torn from his fingers. Unbalanced for the instant, the horse wasn’t able to retreat out of Grymn’s reach as it had before. Arms widespread, Grymn rushed the steed, wrapping one arm around its leg while he put his shoulder against its side. Roaring with effort, straining every muscle in his mighty frame, he forced the brute upwards. The animal came crashing down onto its side.

Grymn leapt over the horse’s kicking hooves, pouncing upon its trapped rider. The chieftain tried to fend him off with his shield, but the Stormcast drove the iron disc back into the man’s face. Briefly they struggled, then Grymn pushed the shield down against the chieftain’s head. Now it was he who put all his muscle and weight into his attack. There was a grisly cracking sound as the marauder’s shield-arm snapped under Grymn’s assault. Then there was a garbled shriek as he pressed the iron implement still lower, smashing his enemy’s head beneath it.

The gruesome destruction of their chieftain brought horror to the surviving barbarians. The marauders turned, retreating into the dark forest. To lend speed to their rout, the blazing bolts of the Judicators chased after them until they were lost in the gloom.

Grymn rose from the chieftain’s carcass, marvelling that anything that smelled so foul in life could reek even worse in death. Tallon rushed over to him, nuzzling his head against Grymn’s leg. As he turned away from his fallen enemy, he found Decimator-Prime Diocletian waiting for him, extending to him the halberd he had discarded.

‘Losses?’ he asked.

‘Two Judicators,’ Diocletian replied. ‘One to hounds, the other to the marauders. We’ve claimed over fifty in return.’

Grymn ripped a strip of cloth from one of the dead barbarians, using it to wipe the blood from his blade. ‘Were any of the sylvaneth killed?’

‘Our allies took no part in the fighting,’ Morbus answered. The Lord-Relictor’s armour was scratched and bloodied, but the man within appeared to have suffered no injury beyond a darkening of his mood. He gestured down the path, towards the radiant glow of Queen Alarielle. ‘Perhaps they didn’t feel it was their fight.’

‘No,’ Grymn corrected him. ‘The Lady of Vines brought us warning. They know this is their battle as much as it is ours.’

Diocletian was puzzled. ‘Why then did they not render us aid?’

Morbus considered for a moment. ‘They are uncertain of us. They are putting us to the test, trying to determine our value. Trying to find our quality.’

Though it struck at his warrior’s pride, Grymn could find no argument to contest Morbus. As he turned his own eyes towards the radiant light, he knew the Lord-Relictor was right. They were being tested.

Now it was upon them to prove equal to the test.

Grymn felt the change that pulsed through the air, the flicker of energy that swept through the forest around them. The Stormcasts around him shared the same impression of unleashed power and vibrant energies. He could sense the fountainhead of the weird emanations.

On the path ahead, looming over the trail, was an impossibly gargantuan oak. The tree’s trunk had a great crack running through it, a titanic gash through which a strange coruscating glow was shining. As he watched, Grymn saw the crack widen, stretching outwards to become so incredibly vast that when the tree-creatures began to file into it, they looked to be no bigger than blades of grass. He shook his head, unable to reconcile the uncanny perspective, unable to decide if the crack was widening or if the sylvaneth were diminishing, or perhaps both at once. Whatever the truth, it was certain that the Everqueen and her people were passing into the gigantic oak.

‘There is powerful magic here,’ Morbus stated. He looked to Grymn. ‘Lord-Castellant, what are your orders?’

Grymn couldn’t determine what was happening on the path ahead. All he could be sure of was that Alarielle was taking the sylvaneth through the tree. ‘Our duty is to protect the Everqueen. To do that, we must follow her. Wherever that takes us.’

Chapter Two

In becoming Stormcast Eternals, the Hallowed Knights had transcended many of the limitations of flesh. When they were reforged, they found their endurance magnified far beyond that of even the hardiest man. They were nearly as indefatigable as the sigmarite armour they wore, tireless and unrelenting when they were deployed by the God-King Sigmar.

The sylvaneth showed a similarly formidable constitution. They paused neither for food nor rest, but maintained their steady march along the path. Grymn wondered if it was a quality of their own nature or some effect of the Radiant Queen’s glow that sustained the tree-creatures. Whatever the cause, he was thankful for it. The plaguehosts of Nurgle were many things, but they couldn’t match the tireless march of Alarielle’s protectors. Torglug could push his mortal forces only so far and so long before they would need food and rest. The daemons that flocked to his diseased banners would require spells and sacrifices to sustain them in the realm of Ghyran. These things would slow the enemy, even if the foul hosts had managed to follow them onto the Cascading Path.

The Cascading Path. It was an uncanny manifestation. Even once they had passed into the oak and entered the coruscating light, Grymn wasn’t able to tell if they had dwindled into some miniscule state or if some vastness of unimaginable magnitude had opened itself to receive them. The ground underfoot was at once firm yet constantly in motion, solid as granite wherever a foot was placed, nebulous as aether where nothing touched it. It was like ribbons of light and shadow, constantly streaming away, mocking the eye when it strove to discern shape or substance.

The sky overhead was a pearlescent splendour of throbbing brilliance, pounding with the vibrance of some gigantic heart. Figures seemed to dance across the sky, whirling and capering in phantasmal displays, shades and echoes of things unrealised and unborn. If he concentrated, Grymn felt certain he would be able to discern the nature of those apparitions. At the same time, he sensed that to do so would be exceedingly dangerous, that he could lose himself forever in that sea of undreamed possibilities.

At either side of the Cascading Path, the boles of an incredible forest rose. All around them were the trunks of mighty trees of every shape and contour, every colour and texture. They seemed as stark and vivid as anything Grymn had ever seen, the absolute antithesis of the aerial phantoms and the spectral ground. Yet whenever he looked away and turned his eyes back upon the forest – no matter how brief his inattention – he found that the setting had altered beyond recognition, shifting from silver-needled pines to gnarled beeches.

‘You appear pensive, commander.’ The observation came from the winged Prosecutor-Prime Tegrus. Like the warriors he led, Tegrus was agitated by the lengthy march. The uncanny vista above the path prevented the Prosecutors from taking to the sky and scouting ahead. It was frustrating for them to be grounded by circumstance, denied the opportunity to serve the chamber to their fullest capacity.

Grymn still felt a twinge of surprise when the officers of the Hallowed Knights addressed him as commander. That honour belonged to Gardus, and Grymn was reminded of that every time he tried to think like the vanquished Lord-Celestant. ‘I was trying to put myself in the mind of Torglug,’ he said. It wasn’t an untruth. When the weirdness of the Cascading Path didn’t distract him, it was their foe that was foremost in his thoughts.

Tegrus feigned a shudder, the wings on his back shaking with assumed fright. ‘A vile thing to contemplate,’ he said, though it seemed to Grymn that the Prosecutor-Prime was grateful for any subject that would allow him to forget their present surroundings.

‘Doubtless,’ Grymn agreed, ‘but if I can anticipate the enemy’s next move…’

‘You trouble yourself to no purpose,’ Tegrus declared. ‘Torglug is mad. They’re all mad, those who bend the knee to Chaos.’

‘No, it is too easy a thing to dismiss them as insane.’ This objection came from Lord-Relictor Morbus as he joined the two heroes. ‘It is tempting, comfortable, to damn the enemy as mad and leave it at that, to use madness as an excuse for their atrocities.’

‘What then would you say moves them to such deeds?’ Tegrus asked.

Grymn had the answer. ‘Evil. They are evil. They plan and plot and scheme. Each outrage is towards a purpose, every atrocity has its reason. They aren’t reasons we would understand, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. There is strategy behind Torglug’s campaign.’ He pointed down the path where the bright glow of the Radiant Queen was visible even among the eerie manifestations of the Cascading Path. ‘She is his objective, the prize he would bear back to his abominable god. It is dangerous to think the enemy incapable of planning how to capture their quarry. To hate the foe is to steel the heart, but to underestimate him is to blunt the sword.’ He turned and glanced across the armoured files of Liberators marching along the edges of the path, at the stolid companies of Judicators at the centre of the trail ready to provide support with their bows. ‘Torglug will try again, make no mistake. It will be the honour of the Hallowed Knights to defy him.’

From the path before them, the sinuous shape of the Lady of Vines came striding towards them. The branchwraith’s aspect was still hard and thorny, her eyes little more than smouldering cuts in her gnarled face. She peered from Grymn to Tegrus and back again.

‘Such a meeting may not be as inevitable as you think,’ the Lady of Vines declared. She gestured with one willowy talon at the forest beyond the path. ‘The power of Sigmar sent you here, but His isn’t the only power opposed to Chaos. Ever since we left Athelwyrd, there has been powerful magic at work, the magic of the Everqueen. Yes, a mighty and terrible kind of magic. That it works to aid us is small consolation when one contemplates its magnitude.’

Grymn and Tegrus paused, following the branchwraith’s gaze. All they could see was the forest.

‘I see only the woods, the lands Alarielle is leaving behind,’ Grymn insisted, though the words felt hollow even to himself.

‘That is an illusion,’ the Lady of Vines said. ‘A mirage, woven for your benefit. You are right, Lord-Castellant, Queen Alarielle does have compassion to spare for your kind, even when her subjects don’t. Even in this incredible conjuration, she diverts some slight measure of her power so that servants of the God-King aren’t driven mad.’

‘An illusion?’ Tegrus studied the forest, trying to will himself to see through whatever veil had been woven around the path. ‘What is she trying to hide?’

‘Everything,’ the Lady of Vines said. ‘I am more attuned to the ebb and flow of magic than you. That is how I know what she has done.’ Again, she gestured with her talon, sweeping it from one side to the other. ‘The Jade Kingdoms are out there, and other lands for which you have no name. They rush past us, shifting and fading like waves upon the sea. We march upon this path, yes, but the path itself isn’t a thing to be measured in hours and leagues. It runs not through the places a mortal can travel, but between and around them. This slipstream of magic Queen Alarielle has woven around us, it transcends the very concepts of place and time.’

Grymn found his hand closing about the silver hammer that hung around his neck, the holy emblem of the God-King. Not for a moment did he doubt the branchwraith’s explanation of their situation. Yet it was a daunting prospect, to wander the cracks between existence, to walk the borderlands of time.

‘If she has done this, then Alarielle has placed us beyond the reach of Torglug’s legions,’ Grymn suggested. Even if the plaguelord were to send scouts to find them and skirmishers to delay them, his efforts would be in vain while they marched in this between-land.

The Lady of Vines stared into Grymn’s eyes, seeming to bore into his mind. ‘As you have warned, we cannot afford to underestimate the enemy. Even if he is unable to reach us here, that doesn’t mean he isn’t aware of where we are. Moreover, such powerful magic is taxing. Queen Alarielle has lost much of her power. She will not be able to sustain even we sylvaneth on this path for long.’

Grymn looked towards the warm glow that denoted the Everqueen’s position on the path ahead. He tried to detect any lessening of that divine aura, any weakening of its majestic brilliance. ‘Her magic speeds us away from her hunters. Already we may be beyond their reach.’

‘Perhaps,’ Tegrus said, ‘but what of the things that lie before us? What of the obstacles that lie ahead?’

It was a good question, and one for which Grymn had no ready answer. Torglug’s plaguehosts had breached the vale of Athelwyrd, but the whole of Ghyran was overrun by other armies of the Plaguefather. It would be a miracle indeed if the exodus could escape unhindered by enemies once it did emerge from the protection of Alarielle’s magic.

‘The obstacles ahead are the sole reason I suffer you to linger in the queen’s presence,’ the Lady of Vines declared. ‘Prove worthy of my forbearance,’ she added as she slipped back down the path to rejoin the Everqueen.

All around him was darkness, foetid and rank. Filth squelched under his feet as he tried to move, slogging his way through a revolting mire that was well past his knees. Verminous things squirmed and crawled through the muck, brushing against his naked flesh. Disgust boiled up from his guts as he thought of how those creatures would taste on his tongue. Now, now he was sickened by the thought, but in a few days he would be eagerly pawing through the slime to feast on such noxious fodder. A starving man had neither scruples nor dignity. Pride was forgotten when survival was the only law.

Despair rolled through him as he lifted his face and looked upwards. They’d slid the cover over the pit, blocking his view of the sky. It was the only delight left to him, looking up at the sky. That at least had remained untarnished, uncorrupted by the profane taint of the conquerors. Everything else was gone. The villages, the temples, the strongholds. It was all gone, demolished and despoiled, changed by the very presence of the invaders.

But the sky was still there. The sky they couldn’t take away. Please, if any gods of mercy still lingered, don’t let them take the sky away!

The fallen champion looked up with terror etched across his face. Arms bound behind him, face pressed into the mud, he was a sorry spectacle. He hadn’t submitted easily to capture and his body was a patchwork of bruises and gashes. His armour had been stripped away, the talismans and fetishes cut from around his neck. An iron bit was jammed into his mouth, stifling his voice. Even now, however, there was violence and defiance in his gaze, and more – accusation.

All things considered, Torglug thought the wretch should be grateful. He was going to die beyond the confines of Athelwyrd, out in the diseased lands they’d conquered and ravaged. A place where the Grandfather would have a clear and undisturbed view of his sacrifice.

Torglug stared up into the heavens, watching as the blue sky gradually faded to a scummy green far to the east. That was where the realmgate stood, the great portal through which the legions of Nurgle had poured into the Jade Kingdoms. The miasma of the Grandfather’s gardens was seeping into Ghyran, corrupting the very air with the god’s diseased essence. The whole realm would be transformed in the end, despoiled and blighted to feed the ascendency of the Plaguefather.

The warlord lowered his gaze and met that of his captive. He chuckled at the indignation he saw there, the outraged sense of betrayal. What need had Torglug the Despised for loyalty when fear would serve him just as well! Did this man expect mercy? Did he understand so little of the ways of Chaos? Torglug had learned – oh, how he had learned! Only ability and power were respected by the Dark Gods, the capacity to survive and accomplish. Torglug had earned the favour of Nurgle only because he was strong enough to survive and ruthless enough to accomplish his goals.

Torglug shifted his bloated bulk upon the crude throne his followers had raised to honour him. Crafted from the hewn trunks of sylvaneth, the warlord imagined he could feel the anguish of the tree-creatures flowing through him. Perhaps it was more than imagination, for the life-force of the forest spirits was notoriously stubborn and slow to expire. Fragments might yet linger in the wooden carcasses bound into his throne.

Seven-score sylvaneth prisoners had already been cut down as an offering to Nurgle, sacrifices to whet the Crow God’s appetite and draw His diseased gaze. It needed now only a final morsel, a last offering to complete the rite Torglug would see performed.

The captive struggled, trying to squirm out from beneath the boot that pressed down on his neck and kept his face in the mud. Vargl Fellhand had been a mighty jarl before Torglug had made him leader of his own bodyguard of putrid blightkings. He very nearly upset Goregus Festermaw, the hideously mutated blightlord who stood above him, despite the warrior’s heavy suit of plate and massive weight. The ghastly mouth that opened across Goregus’ exposed belly gibbered wickedly, sizzling spittle falling from its fangs to burn Vargl’s flesh. The champion cried out more from outrage than pain, struggling even more fiercely to be free. The blightkings gripping Vargl’s legs threw themselves upon his limbs as the prisoner kicked and thrashed. Torglug chuckled again. Given even the flicker of a chance, Vargl would try to kill him. His helplessness to act, to lash out at the betrayer who sat only a few feet from him, this would swell the deposed jarl’s heart with despair.

But Torglug wanted more. He needed every last speck of hope and pride obliterated. Vargl’s very soul must shrivel from despair.

‘Be removing the marks,’ Torglug commanded.

At the warlord’s order, Vargl was rolled onto his back. The captive tried to cry out as his bound arms were pressed cruelly against his spine, but the iron bit in his mouth reduced the sound to a whispered moan. Goregus brought his boot stamping down again, this time pressing upon Vargl’s shoulder to hold him in place.

The host of mortal and daemon warriors watching Vargl’s ordeal parted so that a fat, swollen boil of a man could stalk towards the prisoner. He was dressed in a scabrous cloak, horrible enchantments endowing it with a ghoulish echo of vitality. The man’s skin was mouldy, his hands pudgy, with each finger resembling a boiled sausage. His belly was bloated with corruption, protruding through tears in his tattered raiment. His face was flat and almost toadlike, great flaps of loose skin hanging from his cheeks. His eyes were aglow with the sadistic curiosity of a vicious child. When he smiled, worms wriggled from between his blackened teeth.

This was Slaugoth Maggotfang, principal sorcerer in the whole of Torglug’s plaguehost. As he advanced upon Vargl, the sorcerer stabbed the butt of his staff into the mud, leaving the charm-festooned pole standing behind him as he leaned over his victim. A worm fell from his mouth, burrowing into Vargl’s chest. Slaugoth waited until it had vanished completely before drawing an ornate dagger from his belt, a once elegant blade now caked in a patina of filth and decay.

The sorcerer swept his gaze across the assembled plague warriors, relishing the sense of horrified anticipation. Slaugoth chuckled in amusement. Each spectator was eager to see what grisly rite he would perform, yet in the back of each mind was the knowledge that it could just as easily be they and not Vargl who died to feed his magic. The laugh faded into a cough of irritation as Slaugoth spotted the emaciated figure of Vorak of Fell. The cadaverous warlock was watching with an intensity far different from that of the warriors around him. He could almost see the mystic’s mind at work, trying to ferret out the arcane mysteries behind each step of the ritual. Every sorcerer was wary of his fellows, only too aware how eagerly they would steal each other’s secrets – indeed, Slaugoth had included several meaningless ceremonies in this current ritual to frustrate such thievery. He wasn’t certain they’d trick Vorak. The warlock was his chief rival among Torglug’s plaguehosts, guarded by the profane Coin of Thak against even the most subtle hexes and curses Slaugoth might loose against him. Indeed, Vorak made a point of closing his bony fist around the Coin when he saw Slaugoth looking at him.

Forcing a grin he didn’t feel onto his flabby cheeks, the sorcerer turned from his rival and attended to the sacrifice. Slaugoth played the dagger across Vargl’s flesh, cutting away each brand and tattoo, every ritual scar and birthmark that marred the champion’s skin. Anything that displayed the man’s dedication to Nurgle was taken from him, thrown to the onlooking horde in bloodied strips. When he was finished, the sorcerer looked up at Torglug.

‘The Grandfather’s gift must be cut away,’ Slaugoth chuckled. Torglug nodded his consent and he snapped orders to the blightkings holding Vargl. Goregus nodded his armoured head and the prisoner was flipped back onto his belly.

Torglug watched the gruesome process to the end. Vargl would make a fitting sacrifice to the Grandfather now. With the god’s marks removed, with even the mutated claw that was Nurgle’s blessing taken from him, the jarl would feel abandoned not simply by the warlord he’d served but by the god he’d devoted himself to. There could be no greater magnitude of despair than that. His misery would call out to the Grandfather, a succulent morsel to feed Nurgle’s hunger, a diseased capstone to the tower of sylvaneth that had already been rendered up to the Crow God.

Perhaps it would be enough to appease Nurgle’s wrath for a time. Despite his best efforts, Torglug had failed to seize Alarielle in her refuge. The daemonic worm nestled in his gut had made him feel the god’s displeasure by gnawing at his ulcers and lashing its tail against his intestines. Now he had to beg his god for another chance. More than that, he had to beg Nurgle for wisdom. He had to know where the Everqueen had fled and how his legions could still catch her.

Torglug recoiled from his doubts and fears, instead focusing on the grisly ritual Slaugoth was performing at the foot of his throne. He was amazed that Vargl lingered as long as he did when the sorcerer began cutting into him. When he was finished, when the organs were arrayed around Vargl’s body, Slaugoth’s fat fingers curled into cabalistic signs. Slobbering invocations filled the air, soon drowned by the buzzing of flies as swarms of the insects descended upon the offering. Vargl’s remains quickly vanished beneath a crawling blanket, yet still more of the flies flew to his corpse. From a blanket they became a mound; from a mound they grew into a hill. The plaguehost retreated from the expanding heap of flies, even Slaugoth falling back. Only Torglug held his place, staring at the crawling heap, boldly defying it even as it lapped about the feet of his throne.

The buzzing drone of the flies had swollen to a thunderous clamour, drowning out all other sounds. It was like the roar of the sea and the hiss of a volcano, primal in its elemental fury. When it seemed the noise could grow no more deafening, it suddenly began to recede. Rapidly the buzzing clamour died away, and with it died the flies. Droves of the insects dropped from the heap, their tiny carcasses falling away into the mud.

The mound remained, however. As the flies died, they revealed the thing that had grown beneath their crawling feet. It was a gigantic obese bulk, larger in size and proportion than the treelord Torglug had slain. Sores and boils littered its body, and great folds of fat rolled down its ghastly form. Flabby wattles hung from its long arms and dripped from between its clawed fingers. Its toad-like legs were swollen to such extent that they seemed to flow into one another, the feet invisible beneath the flesh that sagged across them. The abomination’s belly was bloated with putrescence, the green skin split to expose the diseased guts within. The monster’s head was broad, massive antlers jutting out from the sides of its skull. The face was hideous in its expression of obscene amusement, spittle hanging from its crooked fangs. The light that shone from the daemon’s plate-sized eyes was baleful and pitiless.

Howls of disgust and adoration rose from the plaguehosts. Some of the most debased of the throng rushed towards the gigantic daemon, collapsing as the putrid emanations spurting from the fiend’s foulness washed over them. Their bodies fell to the earth, writhing in diseased agony as the corruption melted the flesh from their bones. The grisly sight provoked still louder cries of terror and devotion from the army.

Slaugoth laughed boisterously when he saw the way Vorak’s pallid face took on a sickly hue. His rival wasn’t afraid of the daemon so much as he was terrified of Slaugoth’s ability to summon it.

‘Why do you bother your Grandfather with misdeeds, Torglug the Woodsman?’ the daemon’s voice bubbled from deep within its belly. ‘Why have you taken Guthrax Kingeater from his supper?’

Torglug felt the eyes of his army upon him. Though his soul trembled before the awful presence of the great daemon, he refused to bow before it. He would treat with this horror not as its petitioner or even as its equal, but as its master. ‘I am summoning you, Guthrax, so you are rendering service to Nurgle. I am choosing you to grant you the boon of serving your master.’

The Great Unclean One’s bulk quivered as a hacking laugh rippled through it. ‘You have chosen to share some of your glorious failure with me, Torglug the Kind? Even now, the Grandfather prepares a special place in His garden for the gift you were to bring Him.’

The warlord joined in the daemon’s laughter and some of the amusement left Guthrax’s hideous face.

‘Lightning-men are hiding Everqueen,’ Torglug stated. ‘Trouble I am having for finding her again. So I am deciding to invite Guthrax for sharing my labour. When the Grandfather is rewarding me, so He is to be rewarding you. When I am being punished for failure, so is Great Guthrax being punished with me.’

Guthrax reared back, towering over Torglug. It brought one of its immense claws slamming down beside the wooden throne, splattering the warlord with mud. A few inches closer and the daemon would have pounded him into the earth like a post.

‘Simpering mortal whelp!’ Guthrax croaked. ‘You think yourself clever enough to bind Guthrax to your fate!’

For an instant, Torglug stood in stunned silence, even his terrible determination shaken by the daemon’s rage. Then the warlord slowly wiped the mud from his armour, making a great show to his warriors that the Great Unclean One held no terror for him.

‘I am already having done this,’ he told Guthrax. ‘When I am calling you to me, I am saying “Guthrax is sharing my fate. Guthrax and Torglug are now being brothers in same doom.” Is this not being most clever?’ He laughed at the wrath in the daemon’s gigantic eyes. It was aware of the strictures that bound it. Now it knew that Torglug was likewise aware, and prepared to exploit those strictures. ‘The Grandfather is desiring Alarielle as He is coveting nothing before. She is becoming crowning glory in His garden. Without her, His wrath is being enough for making the Blood God trembling. All are being suffering, daemon or mortal.’ He stepped down from his throne and walked around the Great Unclean One. ‘You are sharing in my victory or being partner in my defeat. Those are being only choices, Kingeater.’

‘She is beyond your reach,’ Guthrax said. ‘The path she walks is one you cannot follow.’ The daemon wheezed, choking on the knowledge it now felt compelled to share with the mortal. It disgusted Guthrax to divulge anything that might give Torglug hope, for of all emotions, it was hope that most revoltedhim. ‘She cannot remain upon that path much longer. I know where she must leave it.’

Torglug spun around, staring up into the daemon’s grisly eyes. ‘You are to be leading us there,’ he ordered the fiend.

‘It is not so easy,’ Guthrax said. ‘Her path has allowed her to flee far from Athelwyrd. If we would find her, we must find our own passage across the Jade Kingdoms, a route swifter than that of forest and glade.’

Slaugoth Maggotfang crept towards Torglug, bowing before his master. ‘The daemon plays at riddles, but I know what it means when it speaks of a “passage”. The ratkin have gnawed holes beneath much of Ghyran. With Guthrax to guide us, we could find the one that will lead us to the Radiant Queen.’

Laughter oozed from Guthrax. ‘The ratkin will not meekly stand aside and let you trespass in their burrows. There will be much killing.’

‘Yes,’ Torglug agreed, his voice sharp with anticipation. ‘Much killing.’

The bewildering currents of the Cascading Path rippled and streamed past Grymn. At every step it seemed as though the phantasmal shapes around him grew more insistent, more demanding, compelling him to focus upon them and risk being drawn into the nothingness between existence and eternity. At his side, Tallon whined, his fur standing on end as the eerie apparitions flowed alongside them. He could almost envy the gryph-hound’s distress. The creature lacked the awareness to do more than react to those shadows. The threat of contemplating them, being drawn into them, was beyond his animal mind.

‘Commander, may I speak with you?’ The question came from Retributor-Prime Markius. The paladin, his great hammer slung over his shoulder, fell into step beside Grymn as the Lord-Castellant moved between companies of Liberators.

As commander of their expedition, Grymn had seen it as his duty to encourage his warriors, mingling among them to raise their spirits and gauge their mood. The Stormcasts were as firm as granite when it came to courage and loyalty. In battle their determination was unquestionable. But this was a different kind of ordeal for them, the deranged riot of shapeless shadow and formless light rushing around them, made all the worse by the nebulous passage of time within Alarielle’s enchanted path. Was it hours or days they had been marching? None among the Stormcasts, not even Morbus, could say for certain. All that they could be certain of was that the semblance of forest was becoming ever more illusory, exposing them to the riotous confusion of the unveiled path. The Everqueen’s power was diminishing, Alarielle unable to spare the energy to shield them. How long the Hallowed Knights could endure the full madness of the Cascading Path was a question none of them cared to think about.

Grymn knew what Markius would ask before the first word left the paladin’s mouth. Of all the officers among the Hallowed Knights, Markius was the most eager. In battle he was one of their boldest fighters, but he was also the most impetuous. Gardus had always tried to curb Markius’ excess of valour by assigning him defensive points to keep and hold. In their present situation, Grymn had no such objectives to blunt Markius’ lust for action.

‘I don’t know how long we’ve been on the march,’ Grymn told the paladin. ‘Nor can I say how long we must continue. All I would remind you is that our duty isn’t to fight the enemy but to protect the queen.’

‘My men grow weary. We’ve been marching for Sigmar knows how long without rest or relief. If we had an enemy we could fight, that would be an ordeal we could understand.’ Markius slapped the heft of his hammer, then dipped his head apologetically to Grymn. ‘I speak for my retinue. We don’t know how much longer we can maintain the pace and we worry that if we fall behind then the sylvaneth will leave us on this infernal path.’

‘Our obligation is to Queen Alarielle,’ Grymn repeated. ‘There is no glory without honour and no honour for the Hallowed Knights unless we protect the queen. We must go where our duty takes us.’

Markius slapped his fist against the side of his hammer again. ‘But if we…’ The paladin’s words broke off. He was staring in surprise as the graceful shape of the Lady of Vines came striding down the path. The branchwraith circled between the armoured ranks of Liberators, but not once did her eyes appear to look on them. Those sylvan embers were focused in one direction and one direction only.

She was looking at Grymn.

Grymn found it hard to meet the branchwraith’s gaze. There was resentment there, a reproving judgement that seemed to reach inside him, to tease every doubt and self-recrimination to the forefront of his mind. Yet as she came nearer, Grymn felt a different sensation spinning through his thoughts. It was less than an impulse, more phantasmal than a compulsion, but it was still there, tugging at him and drawing him forwards. He knew he was free to reject or embrace the peculiar sensation. Since it was his choice, he increased his pace and advanced up the path.

‘Commander, what is it?’ Markius asked.

Grymn didn’t turn his head, only watched as the Lady of Vines began to withdraw the way she had come. ‘I’ve been summoned to join the queen,’ he told the paladin. ‘Keep the men here,’ he ordered. ‘Maybe I’m about to learn how much further we have to go.’

The trail ahead was filled with sylvaneth creatures. Slight dryads and gigantic treelords were there in such profusion that it seemed the entire vale of Athelwyrd had uprooted itself and joined their queen’s exodus. Ahead, growing more pronounced and vibrant with each step, was the glowing aura of the Everqueen. Grymn had seen many marvels in his campaigns, had encountered many wonders in his battles across the realms, yet never had he experienced anything like that warm, inviting glow. There was none of the judgement and resentment he had felt emanating from the Lady of Vines. There was only acceptance and appreciation, gratitude for one who had striven to help a dying cause.

The last impression made Grymn stumble. A dying cause? He railed against the sense of defeat, the fatalistic resignation to an inevitable doom. Yet now, as that possibility crept into his awareness, he noticed that a change had come upon the glowing aura of Alarielle. It seemed to him that the light was less brilliant than it had been at the start of the exodus.

The Lady of Vines led him onwards, into the very midst of the Radiant Queen’s glow. It was strange, Grymn thought, that no matter how bright the light became, how near to the source he drew, it never became blinding or hurt his eyes. He could see that he was in the midst of a great company of treelords, mammoth creatures that he instinctively knew were ancients of their kind. The dryads who walked among them were more graceful and enchanting than any he had seen before, their branches filled with the exuberance of spring and the bloom of life. Even Tallon seemed less agitated, the gryph-hound’s instincts taking comfort from the warmth of the Everqueen’s radiance.

In the midst of her court, he found Queen Alarielle.

She was borne upon a living palanquin, a great carriage of intertwined trees, vines and shrubs that crawled forwards upon thousands of writhing roots. The branches of her carriage twisted and curled to form magnificent lattices that rose into a great dome. A dazzling array of leaves, gold and bronze and crimson, framed the carriage, shivering with each creeping step the living vessel took.

Beneath the dome, behind the lattice and the leaves, the Radiant Queen sat upon an amber chair. Grymn’s breath caught as he saw her, such was the transcendent beauty of the goddess. It was a beauty so pure, so perfect, that it couldn’t evoke anything so crude as desire or love. Instead of these things, the beauty of Alarielle commanded devotion. Even a Stormcast Eternal, forged upon the Anvil of Apotheosis and sworn to Sigmar, felt that urge to serve.

‘You will stay behind me,’ the Lady of Vines told Grymn as he approached the palanquin. There was a feeling of wariness about the branchwraith and he noted that she didn’t let her eyes stray far from him. The role of handmaiden had become entwined with that of guardian, he realised. If she decided he was a threat to her mistress, she would attack instantly.

Alarielle turned her face towards Grymn, her regal reserve displaying no sign of the long retreat and the fierce battles behind them. Only in her eyes did he spot any trace of the ordeal, a suggestion of terrible weariness and mournful regret.

‘The Cascading Path has taken us as far as it can,’ Alarielle told him, though Grymn didn’t know if she actually uttered words or if they were simply placed in his mind by her magic. ‘Too much of my realm has fallen to the enemy, too much of the life in it has been destroyed and defiled. As the land fades, so too does the power within this aspect.’

Again, Grymn’s heart recoiled at the suggestion of defeat. ‘The Hallowed Knights are sworn to protect you. Whether you are mighty or helpless, we will not swerve from our duty.’

‘What lies ahead will be more arduous than what lies behind,’ Alarielle warned. ‘The Cascading Path has proven your determination and resolve. But the courage demanded of a leader is a bitter one. For it is not her life she must spend, but the lives of those who have given her their trust and devotion.’ Grymn saw that she was looking past him now, gazing upon her handmaiden. Then the Radiant Queen’s eyes returned to him. ‘Your oaths will be put to the test, Lord-Castellant. You will be called to sacrifice much, and with each sacrifice the blight of doubt will grow within you. Then it will be faith, not honour, that is put to the test.’

The Radiant Queen’s words reverberated through Grymn. At once he felt both pride and foreboding. While he was still in the grip of the conflicting sensations, he felt a pulsation course through the path around him. Stormcasts and sylvaneth alike gazed about them in alarm, disconcerted by the sudden change. Then, ahead of them, for the first time since they’d left Athelwyrd, a light beyond that of Alarielle fell upon them. They were through the Cascading Path.

It was somehow not surprising to Grymn that the end of the trail led through a gash in the trunk of some tree as vast and incredible as the one they had passed into when leaving Athelwyrd. Once more he was seized by that strange sensation of enormity and reduction, but in reverse. Was the opening ahead truly as colossal as it seemed or was it the Stormcasts and sylvaneth who dwindled to pass through the gap? To the disconcerting experience was added the almost unbearable eagerness to slip beyond the uncanny environs of the Cascading Path and again stand in the solidity of the Jade Kingdoms.

Tallon sprinted ahead of his master by several paces, an uncharacteristic exhibition of anxiety on the part of the gryph-hound. Like all of them, he wanted to be free of the enchanted trail. A curt command from Grymn brought him to a halt. The creature whined, casting a guilty look back at Grymn before slinking back to his side. He laid his hand on Tallon’s feathered head, giving him a reassuring scratch. He knew the gryph-hound couldn’t understand the necessity of discipline or the restraint that kept the Hallowed Knights marching at the same steady pace when they were just as anxious to see an end to their ordeal. Tallon knew loyalty and obedience, but honour and pride were things he couldn’t be expected to appreciate.

The light that shone beyond the opening in the gigantic oak lacked the mystical glow Grymn had seen filtering through the boughs of Athelwyrd. Here the sunlight had a greenish cast about it, diffused through the veils of scummy haze that stained the skies. That sickly light shone across an endless, rolling landscape of pasturelands and woods.

Grymn’s relief at reaching the end of the Cascading Path withered when he gazed on those lands. Perhaps they had once been filled with vibrant flowers and lush greenery, but now they were pox-ridden and diseased, befouled by the contagion of Nurgle’s legions. The only flowers that grew here were thorny deathblooms, each petal curled into the bleached semblance of a leering skull. The sickly sweet stench of decay smote his senses as a foetid wind drove the stink of the fields towards him.

Tallon bounded out into the field, growling. The gryph-hound’s feathers ruffled in agitation as he whipped his head from side to side. Grymn could tell that the creature’s keen senses had perceived some sort of danger, a threat far more physical than that of the Cascading Path. While the column of sylvaneth and the Stormcasts flanking their march emerged from the enchanted crack in reality, Grymn stood beside Tallon and tried to make out what had so alarmed the beast.

Faintly at first, then more clearly, Grymn picked out the tolling of rusted bells and the howls of brutish men. The fields hadn’t merely felt the touch of the invaders’ malign presence – there were forces of Nurgle here already, waiting for them somewhere across the expanse of deathblooms. Whether they were actively searching for the Everqueen or simply marauding across the countryside, they posed a threat to the sylvaneth exodus.

Grymn signalled to the officers of the Hallowed Knights to join him. He looked towards the sylvaneth, debating for a moment whether he should make an effort to confer with their queen. Alarielle’s palanquin was surrounded by a wargrove of ancient treelords, the huge wooden creatures forming a palisade all around Alarielle’s carriage. Behind this entourage of towering protectors, the Radiant Queen’s glowing aura shone like a lonely candle locked in a distant fortress. There was something both tragic and forbidding about seeing the goddess withdrawn from the rest of her people.

‘It looks as though the sylvaneth consider these lands as perilous as those we’ve left behind,’ Lord-Relictor Morbus commented as he followed Grymn’s gaze.

‘They are wise to be wary,’ Prosecutor-Prime Tegrus said. ‘The Jade Kingdoms are overwhelmed by the hordes of Chaos. If you had gazed upon these lands from above as I have, you would appreciate better the magnitude of the destruction. We may have left Torglug the Despised and his plaguehosts behind us in Athelwyrd, but there are other legions abroad in Ghyran.’

‘Possibly nearer than any of us would like them to be,’ Grymn said, pointing down to Tallon. The other Stormcasts knew the gryph-hound well enough to know it never snarled at shadows. An enemy was out there. How close and how numerous, it was beyond the creature’s ability to convey. ‘Tegrus, I need your eyes again,’ Grymn said. ‘Send your Prosecutors to scout the terrain. Learn where and who our foes are but don’t engage them. Simply return to me and report what you’ve seen.’

Tegrus bowed his armoured head and saluted the Lord-Castellant. ‘After being restricted to the earth while on the Cascading Path, there isn’t a warrior among my Prosecutors who won’t be thrilled at the chance to take wing again. If we spy so much as a sickly spinejackal, you will know of it, commander.’ Turning on his heel, Tegrus hurried towards the column to gather the Prosecutor retinues to him.

Grymn faced Knight-Vexillor Angstun, presenting him with his own set of orders. ‘The strength of the sylvaneth lies more in endurance than speed. They can march longer than we can, but not faster. If there is fighting to be done, the Hallowed Knights must be ready to react with a swiftness to take advantage of that fact. I want the Liberator retinues gathered into three groups, one deployed on each flank and another taking the vanguard position ahead of the sylvaneth. Each Liberator formation is to be supported by attached retinues of Judicators with skybolt bows. Those warriors equipped with crossbows will act as a flying reserve.’

‘What of the paladins?’ Retributor-Prime Markius asked. His fingers tightened about the haft of the huge hammer he bore, as though already swinging the weapon into the skull of an enemy.

‘The paladins will follow behind,’ Grymn said, instantly sensing the disappointment of the eager Markius. ‘There are none better to act as a rearguard, should it be necessary. Our duty is to protect the Everqueen, and it may not be feasible to both support the rearguard and execute that duty. If you are left on your own, I know there are no warriors among the Hallowed Knights who are capable of acquitting themselves better.’ Grymn pointed the tip of his halberd towards the colossal oak that the last of the sylvaneth were emerging from. ‘Torglug can’t use the Cascading Path, but the Despised One may not be as far behind us as we would hope. If his plaguehosts come upon us from the rear, the paladins must keep them from reaching the column.’

Decimator-Prime Diocletian clapped Markius on the back. ‘Honour is where you find it as much as where it finds you,’ he said. ‘Besides, the forest spirits don’t care for we Decimators and our axes. We’ve grown accustomed to bringing up the tail of this exodus. It will be cheering to have some company for this leg of the journey.’

Angstun had a different concern. ‘Forgive me for asking, Lord-Castellant, but to what purpose is this retreat? If it is to simply keep the Everqueen out of the grasp of her hunters, then our situation fares no better here than skulking about in Athelwyrd.’ He raked the end of his standard across the deathblooms, knocking petals from the foul flowers. ‘The enemy is already here and even if he isn’t deployed as numerously as Torglug’s plaguehosts, it can be but a matter of time before word of our presence carries to Nurgle’s warlords and brings them hastening to overwhelm us.’ He looked across the other Stormcast officers. ‘There isn’t one of us who fears to perform our duty, but our minds should rest easier if we were aware of the Everqueen’s intentions.’

Grymn nodded. ‘I cannot command words from a goddess,’ he told the Knight-Vexillor. ‘But I can make her aware of our concerns and the necessity of knowing where she is taking her people.’

He saluted his officers, then marched across the fecund deathblooms towards the walking palisade of Alarielle’s guardians. With each step, the radiant glow of the Everqueen grew more distinct, no longer a lonely candle locked away in a forgotten keep, but a shining beacon that drew him on. He felt a stirring within him, a gentle whisper that wafted through his soul and urged him forwards.

When Grymn neared the lumbering barrier of treelords, the huge creatures parted for him, receding like the gates of a castle to allow him ingress. It was the merest crack, the slightest gap to permit himself and no other. Tallon started to follow him, but instead fell back, a petulant whine rasping from his throat. The audience with the Everqueen was for the Lord-Castellant alone.

Only the Lady of Vines was with Alarielle behind the ring of treelords. The branchwraith fixed him with an inscrutable look when he passed through the guardians, the light in her eyes somehow colder and more withdrawn than he’d seen it before. Grymn noted that her bark had taken on a scaly, brittle appearance, her figure grown more spindly than her martial aspect. He didn’t know why, but he had the impression of a tree in a graveyard, its vibrancy choked with mourning.

‘The Radiant Queen will receive you,’ the Lady of Vines told him in a creaking voice. ‘She would allay some of your misgivings.’

Grymn fixed the branchwraith with a hard stare. There was something unspoken entwined with her words. Something that sent a thrill of warning through him.

‘Your warriors have withstood the Cascading Path,’ Alarielle called down to him from her crawling carriage. Some of the leafy tendrils drew back, revealing the splendour of her divine countenance once more. ‘Such a feat is not to be lightly praised, but there is small opportunity to applaud the resolve that guides your steps.’

‘It is your resolve I must be bold enough to inquire about,’ Grymn said with deep apology in his voice. ‘These lands you’ve led your people into are filled with the enemy. There is no safety for you here.’

‘Our destination lies to the south,’ the Everqueen declared. ‘Beyond these poisoned bloomfields lies the Sea of Serpents, and across those waters we will find places where the enemy cannot follow. Places of old magic that are more resistant to corruption, more resilient in their own right than even the vale of Athelwyrd.’

Grymn took reassurance from the Radiant Queen’s speech. ‘My warriors will fight the harder for being taken into your confidence, highness,’ he said. ‘This sea you speak of. You have plans for crossing it?’

‘All things stand revealed in time,’ the Lady of Vines said. ‘Sometimes it is easy to suspect treachery within discretion. It becomes simpler to forget the dictates of necessity.’ She gestured with her claw and the treelords parted again to allow Grymn to depart. ‘It is easier to understand the tests the enemy places before us than those posed by a friend.’

Grymn pondered the branchwraith’s curious turn of phrase as he marched out from the walking palisade. Was she apologising for her earlier resentment? Repenting the hostility with which she and the other sylvaneth had regarded the Hallowed Knights? The more he thought about her words and the mournful aspect she had assumed, the less he thought her words were an apology. At least not in the way he had thought.

The Lady of Vines was apologising to him, indeed, but not for the past. She was explaining to Grymn something that lay before them. Trying to imagine what the Everqueen and her people were planning was more forbidding than trying to outguess Torglug. However diseased, at least the plaguelord had a human mind. Maybe Lord-Celestant Gardus could have predicted the reasoning of the tree-creatures, but Grymn knew it was beyond his own abilities. He was not an oracle.

Try as he might, Grymn knew he would have to leave the shadows of the future to set upon him in their own course.

Chapter Three

The fields of deathblooms spilled across the landscape far beyond the giant oak that had been their gate out of the Cascading Path. The noxious flowers had spread like a contagion, consuming everything in their path. The Stormcasts had seen clumps of trees covered in skull-like petals, entire woods that were veiled in the parasitic growths. They’d escorted the sylvaneth column over hills heavy with the deathly flowers and across streams choked by the pestilent weeds. Sometimes they found the sorry remnants of human settlements mouldering beneath a patina of deathblooms. Here would be a tribal totem standing forlorn above a vanished encampment, and over there might be the rubble of a tower carpeted by the vile plants.

Wherever they went, the slaves of the Plague God were there. Sometimes entire warherds of braying gors would come tramping across the fields to challenge their passage. With the advance warning of Tegrus and the other scouts, these mass attacks were steadily beaten back. More arduous were the raids and ambushes staged by smaller warbands. Barbaric horsemen would gallop out from the shelter of diseased woods to mount hit-and-run assaults. A host of armoured Chaos warriors sprang upon them from concealed pits, dealing several casualties before they were annihilated. In the wreckage of a village, the vanguard was surprised by a lurking maggoth, the monstrosity sending three Liberators back to Sigmaron before a salvo from the boltstorm crossbows brought the thing to ruin.

The gauntlet of skirmishes posed no immediate peril to the column, but Grymn was deeply concerned just the same. Each attack taxed their strength a little more, wore down their endurance that tiny bit further. On their own, the raids were nothing. Put together, they became an insidious drain on the Hallowed Knights and their allies. They were forced to press on without rest or respite. Never could they let their guard down or relent in their vigilance.

The moment when Tegrus came back to Grymn to report that the land ahead of them sloped down towards a vast sea was the first cheering news he had heard in a long time – surely this was the Sea of Serpents the Everqueen had told him of. His cheer faded when Tegrus couldn’t report any isthmus or other feature that offered some way of crossing the waters, no fleet waiting on the beach to carry the Everqueen and her protectors across. There was only the rocky shingle of the shore and the rolling waves.

Grymn recalled Alarielle’s earlier words to him about peril and faith. The Radiant Queen was neither mad nor a fool. She hadn’t rescued her people from the doom of Athelwyrd simply to trap them with their backs to the sea. She had some plan, even if she chose to keep it from her allies. Grymn felt a shiver pass through him when he reasoned that her plan likely involved another arcane crack in reality, some trail perhaps even more unsettling than the Cascading Path. He kept this concern to himself, however. It served no purpose to have his warriors worrying about something over which they had neither control nor influence.

The sharp briny smell of salt water reached Grymn an hour or so before the column crested a hill and finally gazed upon the Sea of Serpents. It was as Tegrus had reported, a great expanse of rolling waves that stretched out to the distant horizon, its far shore somewhere beyond. The vile deathblooms spread only as far as the rocky shingle, their vitality finally overcome by the combination of barren rock and salt spray.

The sylvaneth marched down to the shingle with what struck Grymn as almost an exhibition of urgency. The Stormcasts in the vanguard parted to let the tree-creatures pass through them. With the sea in front of them, it was certain that if an attack came, the plague warriors wouldn’t be charging from that quarter. The primes of the displaced retinues redeployed their Liberators with the paladins in the rearguard. At Grymn’s command, the Judicators fell back and took up formation on the hill overlooking the shore. From such a vantage they’d be able to both support the column and rain volleys upon any foe moving along the shingle.

Lord-Relictor Morbus waited while Grymn dispatched Tegrus and his scouts back into the air. Now that they had the sea blocking their way, it was more vital than ever to know where the enemy was and how great his numbers. Once the Prosecutors were airborne, Morbus addressed the Lord-Castellant.

‘Unless we build ships from our allies, we seem to be at an impasse,’ Morbus said. ‘We can’t go forwards and with the plaguehosts all around us, we can’t go back.’

Grymn looked towards the sylvaneth column, watching the glowing form of the Everqueen as her carriage crawled ahead with its ring of treelord guardians. ‘I think your true worry is that she will set us upon a road even stranger than the Cascading Path.’

Morbus nodded. ‘Such a worry was in my mind,’ he confessed. He gestured at the shore, at the rolling waves. ‘This place has its own power, but I don’t sense the same potential as when we were in Athelwyrd. If there is a gate such as we passed through before, it is well hidden indeed.’

‘Such may have been her purpose in bringing us here,’ Grymn said. ‘Any magic that hides from friend is able to hide from foe as well.’ He patted Tallon’s head. ‘Sometimes faith is needed,’ he said, echoing the advice Alarielle had given him.

A querulous bark from the gryph-hound had him looking again towards the sylvaneth. The tree-creatures were on the shore now. He watched as the ring of treelords parted. The radiant glow of the Everqueen shone more brightly as she emerged from behind her protectors. To Grymn’s eyes, it appeared that the deathblooms wilted wherever that light reached them, that even the ghoulish stain in the air was diminished.

The sylvaneth hung back as their queen’s carriage crawled out onto the shingle. Only the Lady of Vines remained to attend the Everqueen, the handmaiden gliding alongside the palanquin. It made Grymn anxious to see Alarielle exposing herself in such a manner. With all deference to her power and authority, while he was responsible for protecting her he felt obliged to demand greater caution. He started to march towards the shingle when Morbus caught him by the arm.

‘She’s weaving some kind of spell,’ Morbus told him. ‘Something of enormous potential.’

Grymn felt that shiver pass through him again. ‘You said this place wouldn’t lend itself to any great conjuration.’ He looked towards the beach. While he watched, Alarielle descended from her carriage. The moment her feet touched the earth, the palanquin began to shrivel and wither, crumbling into a dried mess of wilted foliage. She stood poised where the waters crashed upon the shingle, the transition from one element to another. Her arms were outstretched, her head tilted back and gazing away to the east. Now even the Lady of Vines kept herself at a distance, standing well up on the beach and away from her mistress’ conjuration.

‘It isn’t the land she is drawing power from,’ Morbus said. He pointed at the Radiant Queen. ‘Observe,’ he told Grymn.

Alarielle was standing at the edge of the sea, the waves rippling just ahead of her feet. While he looked on, Grymn noted a change. It took him a moment to understand it was the fading of her radiance. The brilliant aura was collapsing, compressing closer and closer around her.

‘Her light is dying,’ Grymn said.

‘She’s using her own energies to power whatever enchantment she’s trying to invoke,’ Morbus said.

Grymn recalled the mournful aspect the Lady of Vines had assumed during his last audience with the Everqueen. He remembered the branchwraith’s words about discretion and concealing things from friends. It was this she had been trying to prepare him for: the sacrifice of the Radiant Queen.

‘We can’t permit this,’ Grymn told Morbus as he hurried down towards the shore. ‘Our duty is to protect the Everqueen, not stand idle while she destroys herself. Whatever her reasons, it must be stopped.’

They raced towards Alarielle, yet even as they did so Grymn could see that they were too late. The mighty conjuration the Radiant Queen had evoked was too much for her dwindling energies. Her light was vanishing, drawing tighter and tighter around her. He didn’t know what would happen when the radiance pressed against Alarielle’s body, when glow and form became one. He was determined not to put that question to the test.

Ahead of them, Grymn saw the Lady of Vines prowling towards him, putting herself between him and Alarielle. The branchwraith paced like a hungry lion, her bark transformed into a black, scaly wood. Thorns projected from the coils of vines now, poison dripping from each needle. Her hands had elongated, her fingers hardening into great claws. The glow within her eyes was fierce and threatening, the glower of a wolf protecting its pups.

‘This doesn’t concern you, Stormcast,’ the branchwraith declared.

‘Step away,’ Grymn ordered the Lady of Vines. He waved his halberd at the collapsing radiance. ‘Whatever her purpose, I can’t allow her to sacrifice herself!’

For just a moment, Grymn thought he saw a flicker pass through the branchwraith’s burning gaze, a lessening of that threatening glower.

‘You cannot stop what must be,’ she warned. The Lady of Vines stretched her hand towards him. A spray of splinters and thorns shot out at Grymn, blinding him momentarily. He took a staggering step back, but the branchwraith made no move to press her attack. Instead she turned towards the dwindling light of her queen.

‘It’s too late,’ Morbus told Grymn. ‘The damage is done.’

The glow of the Radiant Queen was collapsing now, rapidly vanishing. Alarielle’s power was expended, but it was more than that. To his horror, Grymn could see no body behind the light – she was vanishing with her power! Before his eyes he saw the glow shrivel and wither, becoming ever smaller and smaller.

The skies overhead darkened, great storm-laden clouds boiling outward from the horizon. The warm, almost foetid air grew cold. Life itself seemed to be draining out of the land. Snow fell from the grey skies, carpeting the fields and glades in a deathly mantle.

‘Why?’ Grymn asked himself. ‘What was worth such a sacrifice?’

As if in answer to his question, Grymn saw far away to the east a shudder of motion. One of the distant mountains started to tremble, great avalanches of rock and snow crashing down from its peak. While he looked on in wonder, the terrain lurched upwards with a mighty heave. He could feel a tremor pass through the ground under his feet.

It wasn’t his imagination. The mountain was moving.

Tall as a man, yet cast in the revolting shape of a rat, the monster bled sickly black blood across Torglug’s axe. In its death spasms, the verminous creature snapped at the warlord with its yellowed fangs and raked at him with its clawed fingers. Torglug pressed the ratkin against the earthen wall, putting his immense strength and bloated bulk behind his blade. There was a delicious sound of crunching bone as the axe chewed its way deeper into the skaven, polluted blood jetted from severed arteries and torn veins. The creature’s anguished flailing became even more frenzied, its thrashing causing the axe to saw even deeper into its flesh.

When the light of suffering drained out of the ratman’s eyes, Torglug ripped his axe free. The body of his foe clung to the wall, plastered there by its own gore. He spun around, hewing through the shoulder of a second skaven seeking to strike at his back. The vermin squealed as the blighted axe ripped through it and sent its carcass spinning through the air. A pack of scrawny spear-armed ratkin abandoned their charge towards the bloated warlord as the mangled body crashed among their ranks. Squeaks of fright and a musty reek rose from the skaven as they turned tail and scurried back down the passage.

Torglug looked around for something to kill, but there was only the pile of dead ratkin strewn about his feet. The tunnel was monumental in its dimensions, stretching hundreds of yards across, and of such height that even Guthrax didn’t need to crouch as it waddled down the corridor. The walls were like black stretches of solidified shadow, pitted and scratched with the marks of shovels, picks and drills. Crude supports of onyx and malachite propped up the blackness of the roof in sporadic fashion. Beams of grey crystal leaned against walls where they’d started to sag inwards, or lay toppled to the ground where the entropic miasma had come spilling in anyway.

Skaven infested the tunnel, scurrying from tiny side-passages, popping up from rents in the floor or dropping down from tears in the ceiling. Cloaked in filthy robes, froth bubbling from their mouths and frenzied madness gleaming in their eyes, the ratkin swarmed to confront Torglug’s legion. Squealing mobs of plague monks wielding staves of diseased wood and daggers of polluted metal charged into herds of goat-headed beastmen, the ringing of profane bells and the snarls of obscene chants goading them onto the horns of their enemies. Packs of decayed monsters with their fur sloughing away from their putrid bodies rushed into the armoured ranks of Chaos warriors, exploding in bursts of burning pus when their foes struck them down. Grisly ratmen, their twisted bodies hidden in crusty robes, waved smoking censers at tribes of marauders, the vile fumes causing armour to rust and rot off the stricken men. Chittering their shrill war-cries, the hordes of the Clans Pestilens fought to drive the plaguehosts back up to the surface.

The legion of Torglug, however, wouldn’t be denied so easily. His tribesmen trampled the bodies of their own dead to reach the vermin waving the censers, dragging the plague monks down one after another and hacking them apart with cruel axes and serrated swords. Enraged gors carved a path through the mobs of ratmen, rending them to pieces in their fury. Vengefully, the Chaos warriors pursued their tormentors, ignoring the scores of tribesmen they left writhing on the floor in their determination to cut down the slinking ratkin. Cyclopean plaguebearers and swarms of nurglings scrambled towards the sorcerous gongs the skaven were striking, their daemonic essence immune to the diseased magic of the ratmen.

Across the tunnel, Torglug saw a plague monk cowering in front of Guthrax, apparently overcome by the monstrous daemon’s aura. Its squeaks turned into wails of terror as the obese monstrosity fixed its malignant gaze upon the ratman, hideous lights blazing from its rheumy orbs. The skaven shrieked as its body was engulfed in Guthrax’s magic, fur sloughing away and flesh breaking out in black sores and red boils. The sorcerous plague leapt from the shrieking chanter to infect the monks around it, spreading its virulence to dozens of the vermin before its malign impetus was expended.

Nearby, a hunched plague priest was locked in an arcane duel with Slaugoth Maggotfang. The skaven magician sent tendrils of withering energy leaping from its paws. Ratmen and marauders fighting in the space between the plague priest and Slaugoth were struck down by the corrosive magic, the spell making no distinction between friend and foe. Yet when it came rushing towards the sorcerer, the spell fizzled into a cloud of greenish vapour. While the plague priest was snarling in frustration, Slaugoth retaliated, laughing as he sent a bolt of putrid fire exploding from the head of his staff and streaking towards the skaven. Some spell or charm preserved the ratman from the worst of the sorcerer’s fury – while the vermin around it were reduced to puddles of slime, the only effect upon the plague priest was a green tinge to its mangy fur and a layer of muck upon its robes.

Torglug left Slaugoth to settle the contest on his own. The warlord had spotted a more immediate problem much closer at hand – a large swarm of skaven warriors sweeping around to smash against the right flank of the plaguehost. Unlike the other ratmen, their robes had been fashioned from flayed hide, foul symbols inked into the leather, and in their hands were filthy swords that blazed with fell and corrupt energies. They moved with a confidence and discipline absent from the rest of the horde. At their fore was a white-furred chief bedecked in a rathide cloak and robes. Guthrax had told him that this was the leader of the vermin infesting the tunnel, a high priest of Pestilens named Poxmonger Kriknitt.

The threat to the flank of his army was enough motivation to send Torglug running towards the fight, but he also had an idea to bring the fray to a quick end. Each warrior he lost fighting his way past the skaven was one less fighter he could bring against the Everqueen’s protectors. Skaven were slinking, cowardly creatures, bold only when they were confident of victory. There were two ways to break that confidence – butcher most of their horde or kill their leader.

Torglug reached the Threespine tribe securing his right flank just as the skin-robed plague monks thrust their way through an intervening pack of smaller skaven warriors and struck the front ranks of the barbarian fighters. The fell energies of their filthy blades smouldered against the steel mail of the humans, shearing through what armour they wore. Cruel hooks on the heads of the blades caught in flesh, dragging warriors from the midst of their comrades to be hacked apart by opportunistic skaven.

The Threespine were faltering when Torglug joined them, but the presence of their warlord fired their determination and made them redouble their assault against the ratkin. Torglug pushed his way through the press of warriors, shouting for his enemy. ‘Kriknitt! Be facing me, prince of vermin! Be facing me, digger of holes!’

Thrusting his way to the front of the battle, Torglug brought his axe chopping down into the head of a plague monk, splitting both the ratman’s manskin cowl and the skull beneath.

‘Kriknitt! Torglug of the Twelve Plagues is for challenging you!’ the warlord bellowed as his blade hacked through the arm of another plague monk. Off to his right he could see the skaven leader, its white fur standing out in stark contrast to the mangy pelts of the vermin surrounding it. Kriknitt looked in Torglug’s direction, its ears curling close against the sides of its head and its eyes going wide with fright.

‘Be facing me! Be facing the favoured son of Nurgle!’ Torglug butchered his way through the intervening skaven, leaving the Threespine tribesmen to finish those foes he merely maimed and injured in his vicious advance.

The poxmonger fled, slinking back through the ranks of its warriors, pushing hapless ratmen into Torglug’s path, squeaking angrily at those of its minions that tried to protest their leader’s retreat. It appeared that Kriknitt wanted nothing to do with Torglug or the diseased axe that could wreak such carnage among its warriors. With unabashed cowardice, the ratman left its fellows to face the warlord’s onslaught. Soon, despite the murderous fury of Torglug’s assault, Kriknitt had withdrawn from the pack of skin-clad monks and was scurrying down one of the side passages. Frustrated, Torglug flung the head of a decapitated skaven after the fleeing ratkin.

Squeals of fright now rang out all across the tunnel. The air became rank with the stink of musk, smothering even the necrotic reek of Torglug’s followers. Clutches of ratkin followed the example set by their high priest, abandoning the fight to slip down holes and scramble into side passages. Swifter even than the sorcerous plague Guthrax had conjured against the skaven, terror spread among the ratmen. The retreat of a few became a general rout, swarms of vermin fighting and clawing at one another as they sought to flee.

Torglug cut down the plague monks near to him, carving a gory trail through them. The broken skaven retreated before him, but their flight was blocked by other packs of routed ratkin. The fight had left the vermin, but Torglug’s legion was of no mind to offer them mercy. They pursued their enemy, massacring them as they tried to climb over one another in their eagerness to escape.

Torglug the Despised drank in the cries of panic and pain. However many of the ratkin managed to escape, they wouldn’t rally for another attack. They’d make no move to interfere with the plaguehost’s march through the tunnels.

Dismissing the skaven from his thoughts, Torglug anticipated finding his quarry and how he would steal her from her protectors.

Impossibly vast, a living mountain lumbered out from beyond the horizon. Every step of its craggy legs made the earth shiver and sent a tremble rolling across the landscape. Its stony shoulders seemed to scrape the clouds, and veils of mist and fog spilled down the cliffs of its chest. Mighty boulders ground against one another as the giant’s rocky arms swung at its sides. Slabs of granite and limestone clashed together, groaning with the deafening bellow of an avalanche. As the titan slogged across field and stream, an atmosphere of bitter cold and driving snow swept ahead of it. Frost seized the vegetation, ice grasped at the waters and gales of pallid snow blanketed the land.

The animate mountain trudged along the edge of the sea to the south, each step cracking the earth. Snow came swirling across the fields of deathblooms now, smothering the diseased growths under a white blanket of oblivion. The giant, oblivious or indifferent to the destruction it provoked, lumbered on, making towards the great expanse of water ahead of it. It seemed impossible to Grymn that such a gargantuan being could exist, and much less that it could be summoned by even the mightiest of magic.

It was the thought of magic that broke the awed fascination that held him. Alarielle! The Everqueen had sacrificed herself to call this titan, expending the last of her essence to work her spell. Grymn might have stopped her if not for the interference of her handmaiden. He tore his eyes from the awesome sight of the walking mountain to glare at the Lady of Vines. The branchwraith still had her back to him, turned instead to the spot where Alarielle had stood. A keening harmony sounded from the handmaiden, a melody of both loss and promise.

‘In any language, that sounds like a song of mourning,’ Lord-Relictor Morbus told Grymn.

‘She kept us from stopping Alarielle,’ Grymn snarled, clenching his halberd tight. ‘We’ve failed in our mission, and I’m going to find out why.’

Grymn marched towards the Lady of Vines, Morbus following behind him. He could hear Retributor-Prime Markius and his paladins coming up behind them. It wouldn’t be long before the warriors and their lightning hammers were available to support him. He risked a glance at the vast gathering of sylvaneth that had accompanied their queen on her final journey. If the tree-creatures supported the Lady of Vines, Grymn knew his small group of Stormcasts would be overwhelmed before the rest of the Hallowed Knights could reach them. The sylvaneth, however, were silent, as still as the trees they resembled. There was an expectant quality about that silence, like the quiet before a storm.

As he walked towards the Lady of Vines, Grymn noted that her aspect had changed once again. Her bark had lightened, taking on a rich amber colour and becoming smooth as a river rock. The vines twined about her lithe shape had lost their thorns, the leaves becoming rich and full with little clusters of berries hanging from them. Her hands had lost their claws, shifting into delicate fingers that were curled around–

Grymn looked in confusion at the object the branchwraith held. At first he thought it was some kind of jewel, so brilliantly did it sparkle. Then he appreciated that the shine wasn’t the play of light upon the object but rather a glow that emanated from within it. A few steps more and he realised that the radiance was familiar to him, exuding that same atmosphere of comfort and invitation he’d felt in the Radiant Queen’s presence. Peering closer, he could see something beneath the light, an ovoid shape about the size of his fist.

It was a seed!

The observation spurred a thousand questions in Grymn’s mind. Was this what Alarielle had intended, to expend her energies until all that was left of her was this seed? Did she think this was the only way she’d be able to escape Torglug’s legions? What was the power of this remnant, this relic? Was it simply a talisman, a legacy left to the sylvaneth, or was it something more than that? A promise for the future?

The Lady of Vines closed her hands protectively around the glowing seed. Still singing her keening song, she turned from Grymn and walked towards the massed sylvaneth. When she was only a few feet from the edge of the exiles, she held her arms out to them, showing them the relic she held. A sound rolled through the living forest, a great thrum unlike anything Grymn had ever heard before. There was a sense of both adoration and praise in that sound. The sylvaneth were swearing a vow, but the nature of that promise was something Grymn was unable to fathom.

‘Leave her be,’ Grymn told Morbus as the Lord-Relictor moved towards the branchwraith. He looked across the masses of sylvaneth, struck by the reverent sense of loss and promise that rose from them. For the Hallowed Knights, the Everqueen had represented honour and duty, but for the sylvaneth she had been everything. ‘Leave them to their sorrow while they have the chance to indulge it.’

The Stormcasts withdrew, falling back from the shingle and letting their allies pay respect to their queen.

Grymn turned his attention back to the lumbering mountain. Many of the Stormcasts were gazing in awe at the colossus. The behemoth was nearer now, though the pace of its quaking steps had slackened. It was still circling around the edge of the sea, though Grymn noticed its path wasn’t one that would bring it towards the sylvaneth but rather out into a bay a league or so away.

‘It is a jotunberg,’ Morbus said, giving name to the giant. ‘They are supposed to be few in number, stewards of Ghyran’s seasons, heralds of the dying time.’ He pointed at the immense titan; at each step, boulders and slabs of rock tumbled away from its body, smashing to the ground in an avalanche of destruction.

Grymn watched as the jotunberg stumbled onwards through the haze of snow and fog spilling from its body. Had the giant truly come in response to Alarielle’s magic? If so, to what purpose had she called this behemoth, and why did it now turn from the sylvaneth? He shook his head. Puzzles without answer and of little consequence now that the Radiant Queen was unable to answer them.

‘Forget the giant,’ Grymn said. ‘Our purpose here has changed. Queen Alarielle–’

Before the Lord-Castellant could finish speaking, a blast of icy air rushed past him, turning his breath to frost. He looked as the jotunberg stepped out into the sea. A quaking groan boomed across the land as the behemoth stumbled. Then the living mountain pitched forwards, slamming down into the sea in a cataclysmic crash that set the earth itself shivering. The water displaced by its impact flashed outwards in mighty waves, then hardened into crests of ice. The chill raced outwards from the fallen giant, coursing through the sea and freezing its surface. In the matter of only a few heartbeats, a distance of several hundred yards around the giant had been turned to ice, expanding outwards quicker than Grymn’s eye could follow. The skies unleashed their fury in earnest now, great swirling gales of icy snow whipping across the land.

Heralds of the dying time, Morbus had called the jotunberg. The giants were the bearers of winter.

As the ice spread towards their piece of shoreline, Grymn saw the sylvaneth start forwards. The tree-creatures stepped out onto the ice, making their way across the frozen sea. It was a strange sight, a walking forest marching over the frozen waves. Grymn was solemn as he watched that exodus, wondering where the sylvaneth would go, what it was that awaited them on the other side. Would they find the refuge towards which the Everqueen had been leading them? Was there indeed anywhere in the realm of Ghyran that could be called safe from Nurgle’s corruption?

Grymn looked down when he heard Tallon start growling. The gryph-hound’s fur was on end, his feathers ruffled. He knew the creature well enough to recognise it sensed the nearness of enemies.

‘Tegrus!’ Grymn shouted. ‘Get your Prosecutors into the air and scout for the enemy. Numbers and disposition. I want to know how long we can buy for our allies to cross the ice. Angstun, gather the Liberator conclaves and form a shield wall along the beach. Judicators on the flanks to provide supporting fire.’

Even as Angstun started deploying the Stormcasts, the clatter of armour and the snarls of beasts reached the Hallowed Knights. Plague warriors were indeed close, nearer than Grymn had feared them to be.

‘Commander, what about us, do we follow them?’ Markius asked, pointing at the sylvaneth.

With the sylvaneth marching out onto the ice, the Hallowed Knights Grymn had deployed to guard the flanks and act as pickets were falling back towards the stony shingle lining the shore. He started to answer Markius, to tell him there was no reason to follow the sylvaneth, but then he noticed that the Lady of Vines was standing at the edge of the ice, hesitating to join the march. Still singing her eerie song.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, her eyes fastened upon Grymn’s. The branchwraith held her hands towards him, her fingers parting to show him the seed. Deftly she reached to a hollow in her breast, carefully setting the seed into the recess. Then she turned, quickly disappearing into the moving forest of sylvaneth, her keening song drifting away with her as she walked out towards the ice.

No words had been spoken, for the Lady of Vines couldn’t allow her song to falter, but Grymn understood the meaning the branchwraith had tried to convey. She knew the duty that the Hallowed Knights were sworn to. They had been sent to protect the Radiant Queen. Grymn had thought they’d failed in that purpose, but now he understood he was wrong. The seed was more than a relic or a legacy: it was Alarielle herself, the Everqueen’s essence collapsed into a soulpod, waiting to be reborn.

‘Join the sylvaneth,’ Grymn told Markius. ‘We must protect the Lady of Vines and guard the seed she carries.’

‘You think Alarielle lives on in the seed?’ Morbus asked.

‘I do not think it, I know it,’ Grymn said. ‘The Lady of Vines has told me it is so.’ He saw the uncertainty in the Lord-Relictor’s eyes. ‘We still have a chance to fulfil our duty here and deny the enemy his victory.’

‘It is true no man can every fully understand the ways of magic,’ Morbus said. ‘But to believe the Radiant Queen lives on as a seed…’

The sound of wings brought the eyes of the Stormcasts skywards. Tegrus and his Prosecutors came swooping down, diving towards Grymn and his companions. At the last instant, the winged warriors pulled back, arresting the momentum of their dive. Ordinarily the daunting exhibition would be accomplished with an air of bravado and showmanship. Now, however, it was laced with an air of urgency.

‘Lord-Castellant,’ Tegrus addressed Grymn with a bow. ‘We’ve sighted a vast throng of enemy warriors advancing in this direction.’

‘A confederation of scavenging warbands?’ Markius suggested.

Tegrus shook his head. ‘They are too many to be mere scavengers,’ he reported. ‘We flew low enough to see the banners they bore. I recognised the emblems of Torglug the Despised.’ His tone grew still darker. ‘There is an enormous daemon with them, some gigantic obscenity spat out by Nurgle himself.’

Morbus clenched his fist. ‘Then the Radiant Queen’s magic was for naught,’ he snarled. ‘She sped us away from Athelwyrd only for the enemy to catch up to us just the same.’ A grim laugh sounded from behind his skull-like mask. ‘At least we can make Torglug regret finding us.’

‘We still have our duty,’ Grymn told Morbus. ‘We protect the queen-seed. That is more important than killing the enemy.’ He looked back to Tegrus. ‘How far away would you say Torglug is?’

‘If not for the snow-storm, they’d already have seen us,’ Tegrus said.

Grymn nodded. He turned and faced towards the ice, studying the shoreline and the march of the sylvaneth. The chilling effect of the jotunberg’s fall had been capricious in its action. There were gaps in the ice, great expanses of frigid water sloshing around the frozen crests. A hundred yards out from the shore the ice narrowed into a bridge between two stretches of icy water.

‘Tegrus, take your Prosecutors and watch Torglug’s legion. Any change, fly back here and report it to me.’ Grymn saluted the Prosecutor-Prime as he climbed back into the air with his warriors. Turning, he addressed Markius. ‘Take your Retributors and form up around that bridge,’ he said, pointing at the span he’d noticed. ‘When Diocletian comes up, I’ll send his paladins to join you.’

‘What is it that you have in mind?’ Morbus asked.

‘Once we’re out on the ice, if we break that bridge there’ll be no connection to the shore,’ Grymn said. ‘Torglug’s warriors will be trapped on this side of the sea.’

‘A sound plan,’ Morbus said, ‘but I think it will need more than lightning hammers and thunderaxes to split the ice.’ He waved at the snow falling around them. ‘The enemy has his own magic to call upon. I don’t think we can rely on this flurry to hide us from Torglug for long. There may not be time to crack the ice by force of arms.’

Grymn felt cold inside. Morbus was right, of course. He couldn’t depend upon the enemy giving him the time to execute his plan. But what was the alternative? What would Gardus have done if he were here? How would he have made use of the assets at his command?

‘Morbus, breaking the ice is your job,’ Grymn told the Lord-Relictor.

Morbus patted his hammer’s head like it was a gryph-hound. ‘I’ve shattered the bones of troggoths and broken the backs of daemons with this,’ he said. ‘It would be shameful if I told you I could be beaten by a little ice.’

The last of the sylvaneth were crossing the bridge when the vanguard of Torglug’s horde emerged from the snow-storm. Even from his position out on the ice, Grymn could see the look of surprise on the first marauder’s face as he suddenly found his quarry in front of him. Before the barbarian could shout to his fellows, one of the Judicators loosed an arrow into him, knocking the man back into the oblivion of the storm. Tallon growled at the fallen enemy, his hackles raised. Grymn quieted the gryph-hound with a curt command.

It was only a momentary respite. More of Torglug’s warriors appeared, loping out of the storm like ravening wolves. Now there were too many for the Judicators to put down before their cries of discovery reached the ears of the horde. Through a rain of sigmarite arrows and bolts, the enemy pressed forwards, rushing out onto the shingle in a howling mob of men and monsters.

The line of Liberators bringing up the rear were just crossing the bridge. Grymn scowled as his mind turned over the distance between them and the foe. It was going to be close. Closer than was comfortable. The same thought must have come to Morbus. The Lord-Relictor started back towards the bridge. Grymn laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

‘Wait,’ Grymn told Morbus.

The Lord-Relictor looked at him, but didn’t offer an objection. Morbus had a penchant for seeing the dark side of everything, of always finding the worst possibilities. Grymn prayed to Sigmar that this time the dour warrior was wrong.

Packs of beasthounds loped out from the storm, rushing past the enemies already on the shingle. The mutated beasts howled and snarled as they pursued the scent of the Hallowed Knights, moving with such speed that only a few of them fell to Judicators’ arrows as they came. Their claws raking the ice, the hideous brutes charged after the Liberators, baying in triumph as they came rushing onto the bridge.

Grymn felt a chill rush through his heart. If the Liberators turned to face the beasthounds, then the enemies on the shingle would gain the time they needed to reach the bridge. The Judicators couldn’t loose their arrows directly into the dogs because their own comrades were in the way. Grymn had to depend on the inability of the brutish creatures to realise that fact.

‘By volley… loose!’ The command was given by Angstun, the Knight-Vexillor. The Judicators with him raised their skybolt bows and sent a rain of arrows arcing into the air. The missiles came hurtling downwards, a dozen yards behind the withdrawing Liberators. Many of the beasthounds were caught in the descending volley, their thick hides pierced over and again by the sigmarite shafts. Yelps of pain rang out as the injured creatures writhed on the ice, others toppled into the icy slush to either side. Panicked by the whines of the other beasts, even those hounds that had charged ahead of the volley turned around and fled back towards the shore.

Now Grymn motioned Morbus forwards. The Lord-Relictor marched past the Liberator rearguard and raised his relic hammer high. Invoking the divine power of Sigmar, he called out to the God-King. Even as the first marauders and gors ventured out onto the ice, mighty blasts of lightning came hurtling downwards. Where the bolts struck, the ice was vaporised, steaming craters gouged out of the bridge by each strike, exposing great pits of icy water and slush. The main span of the bridge was fractured and fragmented, but the aftermath left behind dozens of smaller, slighter spans.

For once, Morbus’ pessimism had missed a possibility. The relic hammer’s power had failed to crack the bridge completely and there was no guarantee another lightning-strike would accomplish what the first had not. When the enemy recovered from the shock inflicted on them by Morbus’ magic, they’d come swarming across the spans that remained. If only a few of them held, it would be a disaster.

The creaking groan of marching sylvaneth drew Grymn’s attention away from the bridge. He watched as a file of towering treelords came striding back across the ice, their branches heavy with snow from the storm. The huge sylvaneth walked past him, converging upon the near side of the bridge where Morbus stood.

As the first of the Chaos warriors came charging out onto the battered bridge, the treelords slammed their massive feet against the seaward edge. Roots snaked out from their feet, burrowing into the ice. A tremor rushed through the frozen waves, and the sharp crack of splitting ice rang out. The enemies rushing onto the span shouted in horror. Not a man or beast lingered; almost as one they turned and fled back towards the shingle.

The cracks caused by the treelords widened, catching the slowest of the enemy warriors and pitching them into the icy slush of the sea. Still the sylvaneth roots burrowed, causing the spans to split and collapse into the water. Only when the gap between the frozen sea and the shore was too wide for even the most agile beasthound to leap did the treelords relent. Glaring at the men and monsters on the shore, the huge sylvaneth strode back the way they had come, vanishing into the swirling flurries of snow.

Grymn looked over the vast expanse of water that now lay between him and the shore. It would take Torglug’s forces hours to throw a bridge across that span. By then, the Hallowed Knights and the sylvaneth would be far across the ice. With the snow-storm to hide their trail and conceal their position, they just might be able to slip away entirely.

‘Withdraw,’ Grymn called out to his warriors, turning a deaf ear to the jeers and curses of the foes clustered along the shoreline. The Hallowed Knights turned at his command, falling back across the ice. As with the treelords, it wasn’t long before the storm hid them from the eyes of their foe.

Torglug the Despised looked down at the corpse of the beastlord. Rakthor had been one of his chieftains ever since it had slaughtered its own leader in single combat. Vicious and cunning, it had been a capable enough lieutenant. Still, at the moment, Torglug didn’t need a lieutenant. He needed an example.

‘I am not being cheated of my prize!’ Torglug bellowed, pointing his axe at the rest of his champions. ‘I am not being denied my destiny!’ He kicked the horned head at his feet, causing blood to slosh out of the gaping wound in Rakthor’s neck. ‘Whole of Ghyran can be falling to Grandfather, but it is being nothing to Him without Everqueen!’

The warlord’s minions were silent. They knew Torglug’s rages and knew that the best way to survive them was to escape his notice. Only a brave man, or a foolish one, would tempt the anger of Nurgle’s chosen. Walking out across the shingle and diving down into the icy slush would be preferable to falling foul of their master. Guthrax alone seemed to find humour in the situation, chuckling darkly at the warlord’s distress and the fright of his chieftains.

The Great Unclean One’s mockery vexed Torglug. Guthrax was a formidable ally, but an obnoxious one. Whirling around, the warlord pointed his axe at his most powerful sorcerer. Slaugoth Maggotfang muttered a nervous laugh when he felt the warlord’s eyes on him. The chieftains around him edged away. If Slaugoth was due a tortuous doom from the warlord, then let the sorcerer suffer alone.

‘You are boasting always of your magic. You are telling always how mighty your sorcery is being. Now I am to be putting your magic to test. You are knowing what I am offering those who fail me,’ Torglug warned. He settled back into the seat of the throne that had been raised for him on the shingle, a chair crafted from the corpses of warriors who’d failed to cross the ice before it cracked.

‘I can get your army across,’ Slaugoth grinned. ‘But the cost will be high.’ He raised his swollen hand to fend off the fury he saw blazing in Torglug’s blemished eyes. ‘It is not a reward I seek,’ he hurried to explain. ‘This particular sorcery is dangerous and demanding. It will need the lives of many of your followers.’

‘To be dying in my service is a glory all who are serving me should be happy to embrace,’ Torglug said, threat bubbling behind each word.

Slaugoth came closer to the throne. He thrust one hand towards Torglug, while the other he held before his own mouth. When he spoke again, only the warlord could understand him – the rest of the chieftains heard only the buzz of flies. ‘I will need the Coin of Thak. It is in the possession of Vorak of Fell.’

‘Agreed,’ Torglug said.

The sorcerer smiled, worms dripping from between his teeth. ‘I will also need Vorak himself. I will need another twenty sorcerers from among your legion, drawn from the strongest of your shamans and warlocks.’ Slaugoth let a note of mock severity slip into his tone. ‘I must warn that it is unlikely they will survive the ritual.’

‘Be careful, Woodsman,’ Guthrax advised, the daemon’s vast gut quivering with amusement. ‘Wormteeth intends to eliminate all of his rivals. He’ll make himself even more vital to your ambitions.’

One glance at the face of Slaugoth was proof enough that the daemon, for once at least, was speaking the truth. It was a gamble, but the plaguelord felt the risk was worth the stake. Besides, if Slaugoth forgot his place, he still had Guthrax to put him down again. Torglug chuckled, the sound slobbering up from the depths of his bloated bulk.

‘Be getting me to my prize and I am letting you kill any that are surviving.’

The putrid blightkings were dispatched to subdue the needed materials for Slaugoth’s ritual. Some of the more recalcitrant required Guthrax to convince them to cooperate, the daemon’s power easily swatting aside the wards and protections they tried to use to preserve themselves. It was as well that the rite needed intact minds rather than intact bodies. Torglug himself secured Vorak’s participation, ignoring the warlock’s assurances that he could perform the rite just as adeptly as Slaugoth could. When Vorak was dragged before his rival, he was missing the Coin of Thak as well as his left leg.

The sorcerers chosen by Slaugoth were dumped along the shingle, facing out towards the ice – three great circles of witches, warlocks and shamans, the rock about their feet stained with cabalistic sigils and the profane runes of Nurgle. A few of the most powerful among them, such as Vorak, had some inclination of what was coming, but their wisdom only made them appreciate that there was no escape.

Slaugoth stood at the centre of the three circles, the speck in the middle of the fly-rune. With the Coin of Thak hanging about his neck, he was certain he’d be able to protect himself from the hazards involved in such a hasty ritual. He raised his arms high and began an invocation to his diseased god. Nurgle’s armies infested the whole of Ghyran, and it was here that the god’s attention was fixed. It wasn’t strange then that the Grandfather heard Slaugoth’s appeal and answered his cry.

The diseased might of Nurgle poured into the gathered sorcerers. Slaugoth felt his bloated belly churn and quiver with the boiling corruption of his god. Crying out in agony, he disgorged the filth growing inside him. A stream of foul water, stagnant muck from the swamps of Nurgle’s own domain, vomited from his mouth, flowing out across the shingle, towards the distant ice.

From each of the other sorcerers, a stream of putrescence erupted and cascaded towards the ice. The diseased fluid merged with the other streams, gathering into a single rancid river. As the flow struck the frigid air, it began to harden, congealing into a mire of corruption. Gallon upon gallon spewed from the sorcerers, channelled from the Grandfather’s garden. Horned shamans and bloated witches perished as the malignant spell ripped them apart from the inside out, yet even death didn’t end the foul discharge spilling from them.

More and more of the corruption streamed across the gap. From a mire, the flow hardened into an icy mush. The swampy substance grew thicker, concentrating into a ghoulish mass. By the time the streams of filth died out, a putrid glacier stretched across the gap.

Slaugoth fell to his knees as the sickening spell petered out. He wiped residue from his face and ripped the corroded Coin of Thak from his neck. The talisman had served its purpose. Glancing towards where Vorak had been dumped, he saw that his rival hadn’t survived the spell, his belly ruptured by the enormity of Nurgle’s power. It was odd to see that the minor witch next to Vorak had survived, but the ways of Chaos were capricious.

The sorcerer laughed as he heaved himself back onto his feet and watched the plaguehost charging across the bridge he’d conjured. Torglug was certain to catch the enemy now, to seize the prize Nurgle coveted so dearly. The warlord would be exalted by the Grandfather for such a triumph, and when he was, Slaugoth would share in that glory.

Chapter four

As he hurried his men across the ice, Lord-Castellant Grymn kept looking up at the stormy sky. He depended upon Tegrus and his Prosecutors to monitor the enemy, to keep him informed of Torglug’s movements.

If Tegrus couldn’t keep watch on the enemy, the Hallowed Knights were deprived of their most vital advantage over the plaguehosts. Grymn could hear the keening song of the Lady of Vines drifting back to him on the wintry wind. Alarielle might have called the jotunberg, but he felt it was her handmaiden who was shaping the living mountain’s primal powers, focusing them into the snow-storm that raged across sea and shore. There was an elemental magic in the branchwraith’s song, an arcane force that flowed from her into the atmosphere, twisting the environment itself to suit the needs of the sylvaneth exodus.

The storm was now their greatest defence. The veil of icy mist hid the Stormcasts and their allies from the eyes of their pursuers, rendering them nearly invisible unless the observer was within a few hundred yards of them. If Tegrus and his Prosecutors couldn’t find the enemy, then it was doubly certain that the enemy couldn’t find them.

Or was it? Grymn remonstrated himself for falling into the trap of underestimating the foe. Perhaps he needed a touch of Morbus’ dour outlook; maybe the Lord-Relictor’s bleak opinions were something every leader had to take into account when making his plans. ‘Believe in victory but have a strategy for failure,’ had been one of Lord-Celestant Gardus’ maxims. At the same time, Gardus had also advised that it was better to be mistaken than hesitant.

Grymn’s focus turned from his inner thoughts to the men around him. Once more he’d deployed the Stormcasts so that they covered the flanks and rear of the sylvaneth march. The human warriors were faster and more agile than the lumbering tree-creatures and treelords who made up the bulk of the retreat. They would be more capable of reacting to a sudden threat than their allies. Moreover, he noted with a sting of guilt, a Stormcast who fell in battle would be reforged in Sigmaron. The sylvaneth killed by the enemy were simply dead. It gave him pause to consider how the tree-creatures regarded their own mortality. Some of the treelords were so ancient that the Jade Kingdoms had literally bloomed around them. The Lady of Vines, it was said, was even older still and had been handmaiden to the Everqueen even before she came into the realm of Ghyran. When such beings perished, it was so much more than the death of a man. It was centuries, even millennia, of life and experience extinguished, knowledge beyond the ken of scholars and sages.

That was why the Stormcast Eternals had been forged, why they had devoted themselves to an existence of unending war. Sigmar would turn back the outrages of the Dark Gods, would redeem the realms from the desecration of Chaos. For Grymn, for all the Hallowed Knights, there could be no mightier or more noble cause, no greater purpose a man could serve. Throughout the realms there were many who struggled to oppose the spread of the Ruinous Powers, men who fought only with their own courage and conviction to turn back the darkness. Truly blessed were those chosen by the God-King to continue the war in armour of sigmarite and with weapons forged in the armouries of Azyr.

His hand reached to the icon of Sigmar he wore. The silver hammer was small in Grymn’s gauntlet, but it represented something more powerful than thunderaxes and boltstorm crossbows. It was faith, trust in the God-King’s power and the God-King’s beneficence – the knowledge that however dark and dire things became, Sigmar wouldn’t abandon His servants.

Something flashed across the snowy sky overhead. For just an instant, Grymn thought it was a flash of lighting, a token of the God-King’s vigilance. Then the phenomenon was repeated and Grymn was better able to see what it was that sped through the air. It was one of the Prosecutors, silver armour gleaming, great wings outstretched as he rode upon the winds. A mighty cheer rose from the Hallowed Knights, a shout of welcome to their airborne brother. The Prosecutor saluted them then wheeled away, climbing high into the sky until he was lost from view. A few moments later, he descended once more. This time he wasn’t alone but instead was accompanied by the rest of the winged Stormcasts. Tegrus, the plumes of his helm fluttering in the chill breeze, spotted Grymn and wheeled away from his troops.

Grymn returned the Prosecutor-Prime’s salute as Tegrus landed beside him, cheered by the scout’s return. When he noted the severe expression in the warrior’s eyes, he found his relief dulled by a sense of foreboding. ‘You were able to keep watch on Torglug through the storm?’ At the moment, his greatest concern was that the Prosecutors had lost contact with the enemy. What Tegrus had to report was far worse, graver than any prediction Morbus could have made.

‘We found them, commander,’ Tegrus said. ‘They have already crossed onto the ice.’

‘How many of them?’ Grymn asked. He’d anticipated that Torglug would get a few troops across as quickly as possible in order to harass and delay their retreat.

‘The whole legion,’ Tegrus reported, his voice graver than Grymn had ever heard it. ‘Their accursed sorcerers worked some abominable magic to bridge the sea, an arch of filth spanning from the shore to the ice. The entire horde is across by now, sped by Torglug’s threats and barbarities.’

Other officers of the Hallowed Knights drew near to hear Tegrus’ observations and to attend whatever orders Grymn had for them. It was Angstun who expressed the most immediate concern.

‘How long ago did the enemy get onto the ice and how far away are they now?’

Tegrus shook his head. ‘The storm hindered our efforts to keep watch on the enemy. We were forced to fly low to make our observations. When we saw that they were conjuring a bridge with their magic, we tried to speed back to make our report. The storm made it difficult to locate the column again. It’s covering your tracks, so there is no trace of the march upon the ice. We were forced to disperse and glide closer to the surface than we should have liked to find you.’ The Prosecutor-Prime spread his wings with a frustrated twitch. ‘I fear my report has been delayed some hours now because of the storm.’

The news brought uneasy murmurs from the other officers. If the plaguehosts had been loose upon the ice for hours then the enemy might have covered considerable distance. With the storm to hide their advance, they might be anywhere. The cold had chilled the sylvaneth and slowed their advance, even if it hadn’t diminished their prodigious endurance. Torglug would not allow similar setbacks, even if it killed his warriors.

‘If the storm has hidden us from the Prosecutors, then surely it will hide us from the enemy,’ Retributor-Prime Markius said.

‘The enemy counts more than mere men among their ranks,’ Morbus stated. ‘There are any number of strange beasts and monsters among them that might be able to pick up our scent and chase us down. Some of the daemons Torglug has conjured from the pits of Nurgle could track us by the light of our souls.’

‘Or the light of the queen-seed,’ Grymn added, turning his gaze towards the sylvaneth marching ahead of them. Though he could still hear the Lady of Vines singing her spell-song, he couldn’t see the branchwraith through the mist, nor the radiant glow of the soulpod she carried. For all that he had been reforged in body and soul upon the Anvil of Apotheosis, his senses were still those of a man. Would the snows conceal the presence of the Lady of Vines and the treasure she bore from the profane malignance of daemons? Grymn decided they could take no such chance. Alarielle lived on in the queen-seed and it was their duty to protect her.

‘Our purpose remains the same,’ Grymn told his officers. ‘We will protect and defend the Radiant Queen.’

‘What are your orders?’ Angstun asked.

‘For now, we continue our march,’ Grymn told him, ‘but I want the Retributors withdrawn from the flanks and brought to the rear. Those Judicators armed with crossbows will likewise fall back. I want a double-rank of Liberators behind the last of the sylvaneth and a tightening of the forces deployed to either side at the back of the column.’

‘By strengthening the rearguard, you weaken the rest of the formation,’ Morbus cautioned. ‘What if the enemy moves parallel to us and intends to fall upon us from the sides?’

Grymn shook his head. ‘I do not think Torglug would show such restraint. He is too keen on catching us. The moment he finds us, I think he will attack.’ He paused for a moment, reminding himself that underestimating the enemy was a mistake he couldn’t afford to make. ‘Still, we must guard against that possibility. Remove only every third retinue from the flanks. Angstun will be in command of the forces to the left of the column, Lord-Relictor Morbus of those to the right.’ He turned and faced Tegrus. ‘Do you think your scouts could find their way back to us in this storm?’

‘Only if we flew in a straight line from this point to our objective,’ Tegrus answered. ‘That would necessitate the column remaining while we were gone.’ There was worry in his tone, regret that his Prosecutors might cause the retreat to be delayed.

‘We’ll leave a relay of pickets to guide you back,’ Grymn said. He glanced over at Angstun. ‘We detach a warrior to hang behind and wait. The moment the mist starts to obscure him from view, another man falls back to keep him in sight.’

‘It could be done,’ the Knight-Vexillor said. ‘The only hazard would be if the storm grows worse and reduces visibility.’

‘That is a chance we’ll have to take,’ Grymn said. Again he turned to Tegrus. ‘I need to call upon your eyes once more. Deploy scouts to our left and right, but most especially I want you to retrace the trail behind us. I think it is from that direction the possibility of pursuit is greatest. Each of you will scout a distance of three leagues, then return.’ A note of apology sounded in Grymn’s voice. ‘I fear I’m going to abuse the stamina of your Prosecutors. Each time you return to report, you’ll be sent out again. Until we either find the enemy or–’ He hesitated, looking again to where the sylvaneth column was marching. ‘Or until we get wherever the Lady of Vines is leading us.’

Grymn watched as Tegrus and the other Prosecutors rose back into the sky. He didn’t like to put the scouts at such risk. They’d have to fly low over the surface and though the slaves of Chaos weren’t known for fielding companies of bowmen, there was always the potential for a lucky spearcast or dark witchcraft to bring down the scouts. Moreover, even with the line of pickets left in the wake of the column, it would be an easy thing for the Prosecutors to miss them and lose their way in the storm. Still, the risk was necessary, however burdensome to Grymn’s conscience. They had to know where Torglug’s legion was.

Angstun was just deploying the second picket when Tegrus and three of his Prosecutors came flying back. The winged warriors didn’t circle above the column to slow their speed but instead came diving down straight towards Grymn, their boots digging into the ice and snow as they hastily arrested their momentum. Tallon growled at them, upset by the haste of their return. Tegrus shouted to his commander, ‘Torglug’s legion is less than a mile behind the column and moving fast!’

‘Morbus, Angstun, you have your orders,’ Grymn told the two officers. ‘Keep the column moving. As you march, bring a mixed force of Liberators and Judicators to guard the rear. If it’s possible, we’ll rejoin you, but I’ll send a Prosecutor to alert you first. If you see anyone coming out of the storm without warning, cut them down.’

Grymn busied himself with bringing the rearguard back. The frozen bulk of what must have been an island loomed off to their right, presenting a natural impediment to assault from that direction. Some of the more agile creatures among Torglug’s horde might be able to climb the frozen shingle that surrounded the snow-covered mound, but his heavier troops would find it tough going and it would be next to impossible for his cavalry.

‘Form the line adjacent to the island,’ Grymn told the officers of his rearguard. Half of the Hallowed Knights were dropping out of the column – a double-rank of Liberators, their massive shields locked together to form an unbroken wall of sigmarite and steel. Behind the second file of Liberators was the Annihilation Brotherhood, the Retributors under Markius. Most of the hammer-bearing paladins were deployed at the exposed left side of the shield wall, ready to crush any foe seeking to lap around the formation; others were staggered along the wall itself, a reserve to deal with any enemies strong enough to smash their way through the Liberators. Finally, there were the Judicators. Grymn had left the archers equipped with skybolt bows with Morbus and Angstun, withdrawing only those retinues bearing quick-firing boltstorm crossbows. Their role in the coming combat would be the deciding factor, even more vital than the Liberators and their shield wall.

‘Did you see much cavalry?’ Grymn asked Tegrus as the Hallowed Knights moved into position.

The Prosecutor-Prime nodded. ‘From what I saw, it seems largely infantry and light cavalry.’ He followed Grymn’s gaze as the Lord-Castellant gave the left flank of the Hallowed Knights a concerned look. Swift-moving enemies would be able to roll around the exposed flank before the Stormcasts could react. Chaos hounds and other brutish beasts would simply circle around and attack the wall from behind, their predatory instincts oblivious to any strategic advantage. Horsemen, however, would recognise the opportunity to bypass the rearguard.

‘If they get around us, they’ll catch the column,’ Grymn said. His hand closed around the icon of Sigmar he wore. ‘If we only had more troops, if we could just extend the line more–’

Even as he spoke, a yelp from Tallon caused Grymn to turn his head. The column had withdrawn behind the veil of the storm some time ago, vanishing into the snow and mist while the rearguard took up its position. Now, however, vague figures were moving towards them, monstrous shadows stalking through the fog. For a hideous moment, Grymn’s heart darkened. Had the enemy somehow already managed to get behind them?

A swelling of wonder and relief rushed through Grymn when the shapes started to emerge from the obscuring veil. Inhuman, yes, but they weren’t the monstrous horrors of Torglug’s legions. It was the sylvaneth, a great body of tree-creatures marching back to help the Hallowed Knights in their holding action. Gigantic treelords with strong branches and ironbark trunks, nimble dryads with sharp talons and fanged mouths, and other less distinct tree-creatures strode across the ice to join the Stormcasts. As though answering Grymn’s concerns, the sylvaneth placed themselves along the exposed left flank, almost doubling the length of the line.

‘They look to be adopting your tactics,’ Tegrus observed, looking at the massed tree-creatures that had assembled into a wall of bark and branches. The mighty treelords kept place behind the smaller sylvaneth, ready to react to any break in the line. The swifter dryads took a post that appeared to mimic that of the Judicators, though Grymn was certain their role would be far different than what he’d planned for his bowmen.

‘The Lady of Vines must have sent them,’ Grymn said. Studying the mass of sylvaneth, he estimated that almost a tenth of the column had been sent back to support the rearguard. It was tempting to believe the action indicated some expression of acceptance and fellowship between Stormcasts and sylvaneth, but he doubted the branchwraith was concerned about the men. Her focus was on keeping the queen-seed away from Torglug, and she was intelligent enough to understand that the longer Grymn’s rearguard could hold, the better her chances of escaping. He didn’t begrudge her such pragmatism. All of them, man and sylvaneth, had obligations far greater than themselves.

‘Sigmar grant that their aid is enough,’ Tegrus said. He pointed away from the shield wall. More dark, shadowy shapes could be seen behind the veil of mist and snow. This time the tense anticipation Grymn felt was justified. These would be no sylvaneth allies; only the plaguehosts of Torglug the Despised would be coming from this direction.

‘Sigmar grant us victory,’ Grymn prayed. His strategy was about to be put to the test.

There is a point at which the pain of flesh reaches its end. Flesh can only withstand so much before it can suffer no more. The mercy of flesh is the dulling of the senses, the numbness of indifference as agony breaks the last boundaries.

The spirit, however, the mind and heart of a mortal, these are things for which the only relief from torment is madness. Bit by bit, all that a mortal believes and trusts is eaten away by suffering. What oppression, what degradation can eclipse the futility of faith betrayed? In hope there lurks the greatest of all pain, for when it is extinguished, nothing is left behind but darkness. The mockery of treacherous hope is the most malicious of tortures, for it is a torment that stabs to the very depths of the soul.

How long can one be abandoned to the darkness before the only thing left is to curse the light?

Torglug’s blemished eyes squinted as he shook away his thoughts and focused on the captive who had been brought before him. It was a rare accomplishment to subdue one of Sigmar’s accursed lightning-men. Far easier to destroy them outright, to slay them and send their bodies crackling into nothingness. He was more impressed that Guthrax’s daemonic bile had taken the winged knight alive than he was at the abomination’s skill in shooting the flying spy out of the air.

Torglug peered closely at the captive scout, appreciating the remarkable resistance he exhibited. Only those as favoured and blessed by the Grandfather as himself could endure the diseased emanations exuding from the Great Unclean One. Clutched in one of Guthrax’s immense claws, encased in the daemon’s congealed bile, the lightning-man should be a mass of boils and buboes, his armour reduced to a corroded mess of rusted scrap. To be certain, there was the stink of decay, the mark of contagion. The spy was resistant, but hardly immune. In time, the dread might of Nurgle would consume his body as it did everything else. The knight would die, his body disintegrating in the blaze of light that devoured all vanquished lightning-men.

Yes, the rot of Nurgle would kill this man’s flesh, but could it destroy his spirit? Torglug’s fingers curled around the haft of his axe, twisting the metal out of shape. Destruction was so much more difficult to achieve than death. Any brute beast could bring death. Destruction demanded far greater finesse.

‘You are being abandoned by your God-King,’ Torglug gloated. He waved his blackened axe, gesturing at the huge throng of warriors and monsters marching across the ice. ‘Sigmar is fleeing Ghyran. This realm is being Nurgle’s dominion. For you there is being no victory here, only illusion of purpose. You are giving your loyalty to a dream, a myth. To what end? To what good is sacrifice of your comrades serving when battle already is being lost? What you would be saving is already belonging to Nurgle.’ As he spoke, Torglug studied the inscrutable helm of his prisoner.

A mighty cough of laughter rippled through Guthrax’s obese enormity. ‘The pup’s thoughts turn to your prize, Torglug Treefell,’ the daemon chortled. ‘It seems in conjuring this winter, the Radiant Queen expended too much of herself. Her body has withered away, leaving only a seed behind. It is carried now by one of her sylvaneth, a branchwraith called the Lady of Vines.’

Torglug’s face curled into a greedy smile beneath the mask of his helm. ‘This seed is to being planted in Grandfather’s gardens, to be sprouting amidst the deathblooms and corpsevines, to be flowering beneath the leprous boughs of widow-oak and beside the stagnant pools of Blightreach.

‘Shall I be telling you a secret?’ Torglug said, his blemished eyes fastened upon those of the lightning-man. ‘Are you knowing what is putting victory within my grasp? After so much fruitless searching, I am finding way into Athelwyrd. I am telling you,’ the warlord chortled. ‘Lightning-men who are finding refuge for me. You are uncovering door I am not finding. You are coming here seeking audience with Alarielle, to be promising her aid of your Sigmar. Instead, you are breaking spells that are hiding her from me. Belonging to you is glory of exposing Radiant Queen’s redoubt.’

Guthrax’s swollen belly shook with laughter. ‘The whelp tries to seal his mind against my power, to hide his thoughts from the Kingeater,’ the daemon declared, ‘but the truth of Athelwyrd’s fall has sown disorder within him. There is doubt there.’ The Great Unclean One shrugged its cancerous shoulders. ‘Not enough to corrupt or consume,’ it admitted, ‘but enough to show me what he would hide.’

‘And what are you seeing?’ Torglug asked, still gazing into the eyes of his prisoner. He was disappointed that there was still so much defiance there, that the rot of despair had failed to take root even now. He wanted to see that moment when faith died and hope withered inside the lightning-man.

‘I have seen their line of retreat,’ Guthrax announced. ‘I have seen the sylvaneth and the shiny knights traipsing across the ice, as though they have any real chance of escaping the Grandfather’s power.’ The daemon lowered its head, leaning closer to Torglug. ‘Their leader turns to confront you,’ the daemon said. ‘He would bring battle to your horde, to win through force of arms what he can’t through retreat. He thinks to prove the valour and might of those who serve his simpering godling.’ Feeling a flicker of devotion stir within the captive clenched in its fist, the daemon sought to snuff out the warrior’s defiance. ‘The leader’s name is Grymn and he is but the replacement for the warrior you vanquished in Athelwyrd. Ill-suited and ill-prepared to oppose the triumph of Torglug the Despised.’

‘My legion is meeting your comrades in battle,’ Torglug assured the prisoner. Despite all the information that Guthrax had ripped from the man’s mind, despite the sickening revelation that it was the lightning-men who’d exposed the way into Athelwyrd, despite the ascendency of Nurgle across all Ghyran, the warrior’s faith refused to break. ‘They are not keeping me from claiming queen-seed for Grandfather,’ he promised. Still failing to see despair in his enemy’s bearing, Torglug turned away in disgust. ‘Fanatic,’ he hissed, disgorging the word with revulsion. It was simple for a fanatic to be brave. Madness couldn’t destroy what it had already claimed.

Torglug turned from the prisoner. His bodyguard, the putrid blightkings, stood ready to attend their master, safely beyond the pestilential aura of Guthrax.

‘We are learning nothing more from him,’ he told the daemon. ‘Be sending him back to Sigmar. Be letting his spirit tell his god that I am crossing blades with lightning-men and after I am cutting my way through them, I am claiming my prize.’

Marching away to join his warriors, Torglug heard the shriek of metal and the crunch of bone as Guthrax crushed the prisoner in its claws. What he failed to hear was a scream. Right to the last the lightning-man strove to defy him.

Fanatic, Torglug thought. There was no power that could long deny the might of Nurgle. Experience had taught him that. Everything else was delusion, the mocking lies of deceitful hope.

Out of the mist and snow they came, a mongrel host of men and beasts. Herds of braying, goat-headed monsters stampeded towards the Hallowed Knights, grotesque banners of flayed skin fluttering above them. Tribes of barbaric marauders slowly marched forwards, banging their axes against their shields and snarling hymns to the Father of Crows. Swarms of tiny daemons, like bloated toads, hopped and slithered across the ice, insane giggles of vicious anticipation spilling from their fanged mouths. Looming above the beastmen and marauders, diseased ogors slogged through the snow, huge clubs torn from fallen sylvaneth now clenched in their murderous fists. Ghastly troggoths, their scaly hides slimy with decay and fecund growth, loped among the warherds, their dull minds hearkening to the call of battle.

As he watched the horde advance, Grymn prayed that Sigmar’s blessing would guard his Stormcasts and their sylvaneth allies. The numbers of Torglug’s vile legion were daunting; with every breath more enemies came marching out from the icy fog. Yet there was a terrible comfort in watching the host descend upon the rearguard. By holding the army of Chaos here they would be giving the Lady of Vines her chance to escape and carry the queen-seed beyond the reach of Nurgle’s abominable slaves.

The first of the warherds crashed into the Hallowed Knights. The slavering gors hurled themselves against the stalwart warriors with savage abandon. Bone clubs and stone axes shattered against sigmarite shields. Clawed hands raked futilely across silver helms. Bony hooves kicked at armoured legs without avail.

For a moment, the Stormcasts held their shields high, absorbing the impact of the charging beastmen. Then, at Grymn’s shouted command, they retaliated in kind. Swords flashed out from between the heavy shields, stabbing and slashing the hairy hides of the gors. Hammers smashed into horned heads or slammed into branded chests, shattering skulls and splintering ribs. Soon there were bleats of pain and cries of fear mixing with the murderous braying of the warherd. Monstrous foes crumpled at the feet of the Liberators, dead and dying alike trampled into the bloodied snow as enemies rushed forwards to the attack.

To the right, diseased tribesmen slammed into the battle line, striving to pull aside the shields with hooked axes and whipping flails. Liberators from the rear rank stepped forwards each time a comrade’s guard was overcome by such tactics, stabbing their blades into the faces of startled barbarians. Following an order issued by Grymn, the Liberators beset by the diseased marauders brought their shields cracking into the howling mass, a violent wave of shining sigmarite that knocked the tribesmen back, flinging them into the faces of the enemies following behind them. The momentum of their rush broken, the rage of the Chaos worshippers swelled. They lunged back to the attack with the disordered fury of a mob. Disciplined, steady, the Stormcasts met the assault with precision and unity, cutting down scores of the enemy in only a few heartbeats.

Near the left flank, where the line of Hallowed Knights met the sylvaneth formation, a bellowing bullgor accomplished what masses of beastmen and marauders had failed to manage. Ploughing through its own comrades, the hulking monster smashed through the double-rank of Liberators. Stormcasts were flung aside by the bull-monster’s horns while others were cut down by the beast’s enormous axe. The flash and clamour of vanquished Hallowed Knights rose from the battlefield as the rampaging brute broke through the shield wall.

Survivors closed ranks behind the charging bullgor, blocking the rush of snarling ungors that came loping forwards to exploit the gap. The Liberators devoted themselves completely to the foes before them, sparing not so much as a glance for the bovine monster that had won through to their rear. Settling with the bullgor would be for others to attend to. Paladins ran towards the blood-crazed beast, Retributor-Prime Markius bringing his heavy lightning hammer crashing against the creature’s leg, pulverising the bone beneath. As the brute pitched towards the ground, Markius delivered another brutal blow to its head, cracking its vicious horns. A pained groan rose from the stricken beast, then it collapsed against the ice as life fled from its mutated flesh.

Wheeling around the assaulting infantry, a host of barbarian horsemen charged into the sylvaneth position. Dressed in skins and furs, their leather helms adorned with antlers and iron spikes, the mounted marauders roared their tribal cries as they thundered towards the tree-creatures. Those at the fore of the attack gripped blazing torches in their fists, swinging the brands overhead to stir the flames as they galloped closer. Snarling in defiance, they hurled the torches at their enemy, then spun their chargers to the right, making way for the horsemen following behind them.

The marauders had intended to throw the sylvaneth into disarray. After their long campaign to conquer Ghyran, the Chaos warriors had learned how to fight the tree-creatures and come to appreciate that the only thing which could sow fear in their wooden hearts was fire. In their attack, however, the barbarians failed to appreciate the effect of the snow storm. The trunks of the tree-creatures were slick with frost and ice, wearing the chill of winter like a layer of armour. The blazing brands struck against them only to glance off without taking light, crashing to the ground and fizzling at the feet of the sylvaneth.

Charging onwards, the mounted axemen found an unbroken wall of foes waiting for them. There were no holes in the line, no burning forest spirits to rush past or cut down with their blades. Instead the marauders struck an enemy boiling with inhuman rage. The effort to set the sylvaneth alight had only succeeded in stirring their fury. Claw-like hands and spear-like branches stabbed out at the cavalry, impaling men and horses, ripping shrieking barbarians from their saddles, tossing screaming chargers through the air. Hissing dryads darted beneath the boughs of the larger tree-creatures, raking their talons across the bellies of frightened steeds and dragging down dismounted fighters. Havoc and carnage had indeed been the result of the cavalry attack, but it was visited upon the forces of Chaos rather than the defenders.

The snow-storm had lost much of its fury over this part of the frozen sea and from where he stood atop a spur of rock, Grymn could see almost the entirety of his battle line. Everywhere the enemy was throwing himself upon the ranks of Stormcasts and sylvaneth, but it was rare the slaves of Chaos managed to force their way through and each of these brief incursions was swiftly put down by lurking dryads and the flying squads of Retributors. For every enemy the defenders struck down, however, it seemed two more came marching out of the storm.

‘They will have to try much harder if they want to break us,’ Tegrus told his commander. The Prosecutors had been held back among the Judicators, waiting as a reserve or to serve as messengers should Grymn need to communicate with Morbus and Angstun in the main column.

‘If ferocity was enough, they might prevail,’ Grymn observed. ‘But these creatures lack the strength and valour to accomplish their purpose. Inside all but the most degenerate minion of darkness there is buried an awareness of its own wickedness. That self-loathing is what denies them the fortitude of those with righteousness in their hearts.’

‘They’re stubborn,’ Tegrus said, pointing to where the remnants of a warherd were leaping over their own dead to reach the Liberators. ‘If this keeps up, we’ll bleed Torglug’s legion white before nightfall.’

A cold that had nothing to do with snow and ice shivered through Grymn’s mind as he listened to Tegrus’ words. It was true, the Hallowed Knights were butchering the Chaos warriors by the bushel. Yet nowhere amidst the carnage had Grymn spotted any of Torglug’s heavy troops. There were no dark knights in black armour or packs of gors clad in chain and plate. He had yet to see the bloated, diseased hulks of the putrid blightkings or hear the murderous drone of rot flies. Except for the diminutive nurglings, none of the obscene daemons that marched under Torglug’s diseased banner had taken part in the attack.

‘By nightfall, the enemy will be cutting a path through the column,’ Grymn cursed, sick realisation coursing through him. Beside him, Tallon snarled in sympathy with its master’s alarm. ‘We’re not holding them here, they’re holding us! Torglug’s sending the chaff to pin us down while his best troops bypass us.

‘He’s trying to reach the column!’

Chapter five

‘Hounds! Hounds at our heels!’

The shout of warning rose from Decimator-Prime Diocletian. Their presence disturbing to the sylvaneth, the paladins and their immense thunderaxes continued to maintain a place at the rear of the column. With black humour, they whispered among themselves that with axes following behind them, the tree-creatures would be encouraged to maintain a hearty pace. Now it was the Decimators who found it necessary to lag behind.

Lord-Relictor Morbus dashed towards the rear of the column, warning the Stormcasts he passed to keep a wary eye upon the flanks. As he rounded the vast gathering of sylvaneth refugees, he spotted Knight-Vexillor Angstun rushing out from the icy mist that obscured the other side of the column. Ahead of them, both of the Stormcasts could see Diocletian and his paladins. The silver warriors were locked in vicious combat with a slavering pack of mutant hounds. The beasts charged out from the storm, baying and snarling, foam flecking their fangs. With a thunderous crack, the Decimators would bring their enormous axes hacking into the putrid hides of the diseased dogs, but such was the rabid frenzy of the pack that the gory destruction of their fellows did nothing to dissipate their ferocity. Angstun and Morbus hurriedly called for Liberators to redeploy at the back of the column and form a shield wall to protect the sylvaneth.

‘One could almost feel sorry for the beasts,’ Angstun told Morbus. ‘Claws and fangs will never pierce sigmarite plate.’ He looked at the standard clenched in his hand. ‘There is no glory in cutting down a dull brute corrupted by the Dark Gods.’

Morbus shook his head, pointing his gauntlet at the embattled Decimators. ‘It is not glory but necessity that must rule us here,’ he said. Already, more packs of Chaos hounds were loping out from the storm. Catching the scent of combat, they hastened to pounce upon the Decimators. ‘The beasts have found us. That means Torglug has already overwhelmed Grymn’s rearguard.’

‘No,’ Angstun objected, shaking his sword at the heavens. ‘The enemy couldn’t have overcome so many Hallowed Knights so quickly.’

‘Then they found a way around them,’ Morbus declared. He watched as one of the Decimators brought a gigantic mace swinging down. From between the weapon’s metal flanges, a withering blast of energy streamed out, engulfing a horned hound as it leapt towards him. The beast’s body dissolved into a burst of gore and ash. Even as it died, a dozen more of the animals came rushing out of the mist. ‘Diocletian’s paladins could make short work of these curs if they came upon them all at once. Staggered as the attacks are, the Decimators can neither wipe them out nor disengage.’

Angstun scowled at the cruel purposefulness of the enemy. Somewhere behind the veil of mist and storm was Torglug’s horde – and the beastmasters who controlled these warhounds. Knowing the mutated dogs couldn’t harm the Stormcasts on their own, the villains had decided upon a more callous use for them. They were being expended like shafts loosed from a bow, flung at the Hallowed Knights in volleys. Not to kill, but to delay, to keep them tied down while the full might of the plaguehosts drew closer.

‘Bring up Osric’s retinue,’ Angstun called out. Morbus caught at the Knight-Vexillor’s arm. ‘You’ll weaken the right flank if you withdraw them. That will leave Justinian’s retinue as the only Judicators to defend that side of the column,’ the Lord-Relictor warned.

‘You said it yourself,’ Angstun declared, ‘the hounds are meant to delay us here. We’ve got to free ourselves of them and I’m not about to leave Diocletian’s warriors behind. We’ve left too many of our brothers behind us already.’

Osric’s retinue took up position ahead of the shield wall. Each of the Judicators took careful aim, fastening his keen eye upon the loping shapes emerging from the mist. They ignored the beasts already engaged with the Decimators, confident that the paladins were more than equal to the dogs. It was the waves of warhounds that had yet to close upon their comrades which posed the true menace. At Angstun’s command, they loosed their arrows into the charging brutes. Yelps and whines sounded from the stricken creatures as one after another crashed into the snow.

‘Brothers, fall back!’ Diocletian shouted to his paladins, bringing his own thunderaxe sweeping around in a crimson arc that tore the head from one dog and split a second in two. A third beast, its muzzle distorted by insect-like mandibles, sprang at him, the nails on its paws raking at his armour as it struggled to reach his throat. Diocletian slammed the butt of his axe into the hound’s ribs, shattering its bones and sending its infected carcass sliding across the ice.

With the Judicators and their skybolt bows keeping fresh packs of hounds from closing upon the Decimators, the axemen were able to withdraw, joining the massed ranks of the Liberators. Diocletian saluted Angstun, quickly reporting to the Knight-Vexillor.

‘I do not think it will be long before the enemy finds us,’ Diocletian said. ‘The dogs must have caught our scent even on the ice, but what follows them needs a stronger trail. Each of the beasts we fought was already cut before our blades so much as scratched them. They’ve left a track of putrid blood behind them, straight from us back to their masters.’

Angstun cast a glance at the Judicators. The bowmen were still picking off hounds charging out from the mist. He realised that deploying Osric’s retinue hadn’t improved their situation much. True, he’d enabled the Decimators to withdraw, but they still had the mongrels snapping at their backs – with the promise of worse to come. Now it was the Judicators he had to think about leaving behind. The prospect revolted him.

‘We have to keep the column moving,’ Morbus said, seeming to reach into Angstun’s thoughts. ‘Our duty is to protect the Lady of Vines and the seed she carries.’

‘If we let the enemy pick away at us piece by piece, we’ll be incapable of executing that duty,’ Angstun countered. ‘We have to conserve our strength. If we stage two companies of Judicators and pull them back in relays…’

Shouts from the right flank of the column drew the attention of the officers away from the hounds behind them. While they were combating the foe at their back, other enemies had slipped around to assault them from the side. Snapping orders to the Liberators and Judicators to defend the rear, Angstun, Morbus and the Decimators rushed to the new conflict.

A sickly sweet smell, a stench he could only liken to decaying honey, smashed into Angstun’s senses at the same time as a cacophony of buzzing struck his ears. Through the mist he could see Stormcasts with shields upraised, guarding themselves against some threat from above. Then, out of the storm, a vile shape descended, a gigantic fly with a monstrous rider astride its back. Well did he know these abominations, the obscene plague drones, daemons of Nurgle. These then were the fiendish foes that had followed the trail of diseased blood, enemies with the intelligence to strike not at the first Stormcasts they had found, but against that part of the column that seemed weakest.

‘Sigmar’s hammer,’ Angstun growled. ‘They strive to split the column!’ More of the enormous flies and their monstrous riders were dipping out of the storm now. They swept across the Hallowed Knights, slashing at them with plague-infested swords and chitinous claws. A Liberator was lifted into the air as a disgusting barb at the end of one fly’s abdomen pierced his chestplate. Another Stormcast lost his shield when the slobbering proboscis of a winged daemon latched onto it. However, as vicious as the attack against the Hallowed Knights was, the monsters were more interested in striking the sylvaneth. The bloated horrors buzzed about the branches of treelords, ripping away great chunks of bark with their claws while the plaguebearers riding them chopped at the trunks of smaller tree-creatures, each cut delivering a white scum of rot to the wounded wood.

Justinian’s retinue strove to shoot down the diseased daemons. Sigmarite shafts slammed into the bloated rot flies, rupturing their swollen abdomens and piercing the membranes of their wings. A few of the monsters succumbed to the arrows, but many more flew on, oblivious to the wounds inflicted upon their rotten bodies.

‘The daemons seek to use the storm against us,’ Morbus said. ‘That is their mistake.’ Holding his relic hammer high, the skull-helmed warrior prayed to the God-King for a small measure of His divine might. Light flashed within the overhead clouds, crackling and booming with an elemental indignation. A lance of lightning came streaking down, sizzling into the grotesque shape of a plague drone. Rot fly and rider exploded in a burst of green muck, spattering across the snow in steaming drops. More spears of lightning came searing out of the clouds, blasting the flying daemons with vindictive wrath.

Their aerial assault dissolved in the fury of Morbus’ invocation and, driven downwards, they found themselves victim to the flashing hammers and swords of the Liberators and the branchclaws of the vengeful sylvaneth. One after another the fiends were struck down, their loathsome essence steaming away in bursts of corruption as their putrid vitality was extinguished.

Angstun watched as a handful of the flying daemons vanished into the snow squall.

‘Casualties,’ he called out to the Primes.

‘One of mine and two from Ishiro’s,’ Judicator-Prime Asterion reported. ‘Our skybolt bows were enough to keep them from closing with our warriors but not enough to keep them from reaching the sylvaneth.’

Angstun nodded, feeling the weight of his decision to withdraw Oscric’s retinue. With more of the Judicators on the right flank, perhaps they could have kept the daemons back entirely. He glanced up at the standard he bore, the forked lightning bolt of Sigmar’s Stormhosts. When he left command to Angstun, Lord-Castellant Grymn had done more than entrust the honour of their chamber to him; he’d made the Knight-Vexillor responsible for it as well.

Angstun turned towards the sylvaneth. The visages of the tree-creatures were inscrutable, but there was no mistaking the pained movements of those that had been struck by the daemons or the malignant mould that encrusted the noxious wounds the plaguebearers left behind. A sickening appreciation for their condition filled him with regret. They had to keep moving, had to get the Lady of Vines beyond the reach of Torglug’s pursuing legion. They couldn’t slow the retreat for the sick and wounded. How could he make these strange creatures understand that? Could he make them understand? Without Alarielle to mediate for them, the Stormcasts were without any firm method of commanding their allies, relying on the vagaries of shared purpose and common enemy.

‘Let me attend them,’ Morbus said as he stepped towards the sylvaneth. The Lord-Relictor held his relic hammer before him, both hands wrapped about its leather-bound grip. He bore it not as a weapon now but rather as a symbol, the standard not of the Hallowed Knights but of Sigmar himself. ‘I have called upon the God-King’s power to destroy, now may His beneficence grant me the power to heal as well.’

A golden glow slowly began to suffuse the hammer, extending from the relic to engulf the man who carried it. While he moved among the sylvaneth, the tree-creatures drew back, uncertain of the power they could sense flowing through Morbus. Then a dryad, hideously stricken by a daemon’s plaguesword, found itself unable to draw back. The golden light washed across the sylvaneth and as it did the mould withered away, and the gashes in its trunk and branches began to close up. When the small dryad was restored, the uncertainty of the other tree-creatures was banished. One after another they lumbered towards Morbus to bathe in the healing light his prayers had invoked.

Angstun looked on in fascination for a moment. He’d seen Morbus heal wounded Stormcasts, humans and even duardin before, but he’d never seen the power used on creatures as strange and uncanny as the sylvaneth. It was a relief to him that there would be no need to leave any injured allies behind. He even fancied that there was a change in the keening song of the Lady of Vines, a quality of appreciation that hadn’t been there before.

Casting aside his interest in Morbus’ power and the branchwraith’s song, Angstun turned back to the rear of the column. From the sound of things, it seemed Osric’s retinue had dropped the last of the hounds during the fight with the plague drones. He hoped such was the case. They had to get moving again. The daemons that had escaped would certainly return to Torglug and try to guide the plaguehosts back.

By then, if the Hallowed Knights were to fulfil their mission, the Lady of Vines would have to be far away.

Lord-Castellant Grymn felt cold certainty pulse through him. The more he looked at the nature of the enemy attacking them, the more convinced he was that they’d been tricked. Torglug had recognised Grymn’s strategy and taken measures to bypass them entirely.

‘Tegrus, you’ve seen Torglug’s horde,’ Grymn stated. ‘He has troops under his command far worse than herds of beastmen and barbarians. Why hasn’t he brought them against us? He knows the warriors he’s using can’t break through.’

The Prosecutor-Prime followed Grymn’s gaze. ‘Perhaps he thinks he can tire us and then deploy his best warriors?’

‘No,’ Grymn disagreed. ‘He’s fought Stormcasts already.’ The image of Lord-Celestant Gardus and all the fallen Hallowed Knights flashed through his mind. ‘Torglug knows he can’t wear us down. What he can do is pin us down, hold us where our strength is no longer an obstacle for him.’

Raising his warding lantern high, Grymn called out to the Stormcasts. ‘Hallowed Knights! They aren’t trying to break through! They’re just keeping us pinned. We need to pull back. All save the Annihilation Brotherhood retreat in good order.’ He looked across the ranks of Judicators with their boltstorm crossbows. They would be called into action soon. Swinging the lantern from side to side, he gave them the signal they had been waiting for. He glanced across to where the sylvaneth fought. It seemed the tree-creatures were following the example set by the Stormcasts. The beastmen pursued them every step, just as they did the Hallowed Knights. The difference was that the sylvaneth didn’t have the Judicators behind them.

‘Liberators! Stand!’ Grymn shouted the command. Following upon his call for retreat, the order meant something far different to all the Hallowed Knights. The squads of Retributors pulled away to the sides, leaving no one between the Liberators and the Judicators. The shield wall, almost like a single creature, arrested its slow backwards march. The warriors fell to one knee, holding their shields upward to fend off the fury of blows unleashed upon them by their foes. Savage in their bloodlust, the beastmen failed to notice the ranks of crossbows now aimed at them.

The crack of the boltstorm crossbows was like the rumble of thunder as the Judicators loosed a barrage of bolts into the monsters. Shooting above the heads of their comrades, the missiles slammed into the gors and ungors, hurling their bloodied bodies into the beasts following behind them. Only some of the human marauders had sense enough to throw themselves flat as the Judicators continued to rake the Chaos horde. Scores of beastmen were killed outright, and dozens more lay gasping and bleating as rancid blood pumped from their wounds. Again and again, the crack of crossbows sounded until at last Grymn’s voice cried out. ‘Recover!’

Instantly the Liberators were back on their feet, the shield wall ready to defy the mob of snarling beasts that charged at them across the litter of their own dead and wounded. While the Stormcasts absorbed the crushing impact of the enraged gors, the Judicators readied themselves for another salvo.

Grymn started down from his vantage. His place now was with his men. Turning, he gave one more order to Tegrus. ‘I need your Prosecutors back in the air. Find out if the plaguehost are outflanking us or if they’re simply chasing Alarielle.’

Stepping back, Tegrus spread his wings and climbed into the sky. Seeing their leader ascend, the rest of the Prosecutors followed him, pausing to hurl a few stormcall javelins into the massed Chaos horde below. The winged warriors circled the battlefield once, then flew off in different directions to scout the storm-wracked terrain.

The slow, steady withdrawal of the Liberators continued, the Stormcasts cutting down swathes of beastmen at every step. Beside them, the sylvaneth gradually fell back as well, their own ranks exhibiting as much order and discipline as their allies, leaving behind the few tree-creatures dragged down by the pursuing gors so as not to break the pace of their retreat. It took Grymn a few moments to appreciate the cold and inhuman strategy of the sylvaneth. The tree-creatures left behind were abandoned deliberately, sacrificed so the rest could gain ground while the beastmen hacked apart the lost sylvaneth in an orgy of violence.

‘Liberators! Stand!’ Grymn called out as he marched out to join his men. Once again, the tactic was repeated, but this time with a twist that further surprised the beastmen. After the initial salvo, the Liberators rushed at the bedraggled survivors, slamming into them with sword, shield and hammer. Grymn’s warding lantern cast its holy light across the fray, blinding and tormenting the diseased gors while invigorating and revivifying the Stormcasts. The Lord-Castellant’s halberd slashed at the goat-headed monsters, gouging their mangy pelts and branded hides. Tallon snapped and savaged any foe that strove to slip past his master’s guard.

Soon the gors were routed, stampeding back into the faces of the warherds following behind. When the enemy was entangled in a confusion of retreat and advance, Grymn shouted a command and the Stormcasts turned about. The shield wall disintegrated as the Liberators withdrew towards the Judicators.

The beastmen behind howled in fury and smashed down their routed kin, leaping forwards in pursuit. The smell of blood broke any semblance of restraint; those few human marauders near the crazed warherds were butchered, the ancient hate of the gors for mankind overcoming their common allegiance and mutual master. The rest of the barbarians fled, hurrying away lest they share the fate of their comrades.

The great crush of beastmen came charging after the Liberators, determined to pull them down and slake their thirst for carnage. The Hallowed Knights met their rush. Swords and hammers struck down scores of the howling herd. Grymn’s halberd pierced the brutish bulk of a snarling chieftain, lifting the monster off the ground and flinging it back into the masses of its herd. ‘Only the faithful!’ the Lord-Castellant shouted as he pressed forwards, driving the beasts back. Twice he gave voice to the war cry, each time driving his warriors to greater effort. Then, a new cry rang from his silvered helm, a signal to Judicators and Liberators alike.

‘Sigmar’s wrath!’ Grymn roared. As he did so, the Liberators crouched down, shields upraised against the press of foes before them.

The Judicators were ready for the command. Arranged in a double file, half of them standing while those in the front rank knelt, they unleashed a devastating barrage into the charging beastmen. Dozens of the monsters were struck down by the murderous fire, pierced over and again by powerful bolts of sigmarite. Those in the front ranks pitched and fell, exposing those coming behind to the rapid salvoes cycling through the boltstorm crossbows.

One murderous fusillade and the Judicators on the flanks stopped shooting. At the same time, the Liberators ahead of them stood and advanced against the beastmen, shields locked together in a wall of sigmarite. The process was repeated all down the line, the crossbows falling silent while the Liberators regained their feet and their position. Soon, an unbroken shield wall again faced the horde, only now it was a horde in retreat, fleeing across an ice field heaped with their dead. Grymn knew it was but a momentary respite. The beastlords would soon have their warherds on the attack again. The threat of Torglug’s rage, if nothing else, would goad them onwards.

Grymn signalled Retributor-Prime Markius to join him on the battle line. ‘I fear I need to call upon the Annihilation Brotherhood for a dangerous duty,’ he told the mighty paladin.

‘Your word is my command,’ Markius vowed. ‘Whatever sacrifice you would ask of us, it is yours.’

The loyalty of a paladin was forged in sigmarite, an asset no commander could afford to squander. Grymn knew what he was asking might cost him the Retributors – he only hoped it was to good purpose. If what he felt in his gut was true – that this attack was but a ruse concocted by Torglug to hold them while he brought the main body of his force against the column – then it was worth that risk.

‘Break the ice and fall back to join us,’ Grymn told Markius. He returned the paladin’s salute, then cast his gaze out towards the swirling eddies of the storm. More beastmen were loping out from the snow, grunting and snarling at the wretched survivors of the initial assault. It was a doubtful prospect that Markius would be able to break the ice in time to prevent the gors from reaching them. If that was the case, the Retributors would find themselves surrounded by hundreds of merciless enemies.

Yet the alternative was to have the beastmen dogging them all the way back to the column. Time was a commodity that Grymn didn’t have in such abundance that he could waste it driving back the harassing attacks of warherds. They had to reach the column before Torglug’s main force and prevent the warlord from overtaking the Lady of Vines and the queen-seed.

‘Hallowed Knights, fall back,’ Grymn shouted to the Stormcasts as he climbed down from the icy rise, Tallon loping ahead of him. The sylvaneth appeared to understand his meaning, and leaving a small number of their tree-creatures to hold the beastmen still attacking them, they withdrew to join their allies. He wondered if it was genuine initiative on their part or orders they had been given by the Lady of Vines to follow his example and support his warriors. Whichever way, he knew the sylvaneth would be a tremendous asset if they found Torglug before they rejoined the column.

Casting his eyes skywards, Grymn prayed that Tegrus and his scouts would return soon. He needed to know if he’d seen through Torglug’s ploy or if he’d played right into the warlord’s diseased hands.

Lord-Relictor Morbus raised his relic hammer high, calling down the divine lightning. Ice split and cracked, dropping into the frigid waters below. Jagged gashes snaked across the frozen sea, a spider-web of fissures and crevices. Stunned by the devastation wrought by the Stormcast’s magic, the barbarian horsemen were thrown into complete disarray. Charging stallions pitched and fell as the ice buckled or crumbled, smashing their riders beneath them. Men and steeds were sent hurtling into the icy sea as holes opened before them or the fractured ground shattered under their weight.

Morbus, however, was less impressed with the damage he had caused. The ice was thicker here, stronger than it had been near the beach. It was tougher to break, more difficult to split. He wondered if they were straying too near to the jotunberg and if the giant’s wintery emanations were strengthening the ice.

Angstun held his standard high, using it to signal the Judicators defending the flanks. Poised at the rear of the column, standing well behind the marching sylvaneth, the Knight-Vexillor was in an exposed position, but it was the best place from which to issue commands to all of the Stormcasts. Only Diocletian’s Decimators stood with him as a bodyguard, their presence close to the tree-creatures still proving a strain upon the strange alliance of men and sylvaneth.

As the shrieks of crippled and drowning horses rang out over the howling storm, Angstun felt regret. It was an easy thing to kill marauders and beastmen, but he loathed the necessity of destroying simpler creatures like horses and hounds. There was a quality of innocence about animals, even those twisted and mutated by Chaos, that made them tragic to Angstun. While the men and monsters that goaded them to war had come to revel in their corruption and praise the very powers that plagued their bodies, the horses were merely victims of the contagion. Death was the only release for them, but that did not make Angstun revel in the deed.

Tipping the standard towards the left, Angstun directed a volley of arrows across a split that Morbus’ lightning shower had caused. As the Judicators loosed against their target, the crack widened, creating a fissure large enough to thwart the marauder horsemen trying to close upon the sylvaneth exodus. Cursing the Stormcasts, the cavalry wheeled away from the crack, galloping off back into the icy fog.

The crash of blades against armour rose from the column’s left flank. Turning about, Angstun saw a mob of unspeakably vile mutants throwing themselves upon the Liberators and their shield wall. The flesh of the attackers rippled with disgusting energies, hideous growths erupting from them in spurts of spontaneous mutation. One raider’s head collapsed into a nest of spiny tendrils that whipped and lashed at the Hallowed Knights, while another had his arms slough away to be replaced by great crab-like pincers. Each attacker’s form descended into horrors more grotesque than the last, great spears of horn and bone stabbing out from their skin or massive claws exploding from their hands. It was a sight of such concentrated madness and terror that any warrior less stalwart than the Stormcasts would have lost heart against such foes.

For all their monstrous aspect, Angstun could see at once that these mutants wouldn’t be able to break through. They fought like wild beasts, lone madmen. They lacked the cohesion and discipline to force a way past the Liberators. The Hallowed Knights, by contrast, fought as a single body, supporting and guarding one another as they defied their attackers.

No, it wasn’t the claws and fangs of the mutants caused Angstun to be uneasy – it was the very presence of such enemies that troubled him. Horsemen, hounds and flying daemons had been one thing – swift foes who could range far ahead of Torglug’s legion – but these were infantry, however abominable of aspect. Even sent ahead as scouts or skirmishers, they couldn’t have strayed too far from the plaguehosts. The main enemy force had to be getting close.

Even as he made that realisation, Angstun felt a change in the air. It took him a moment to determine that the Lady of Vines had altered the timbre of her song in some fashion. What that meant, he didn’t immediately know. What he saw at once, however, was the sylvaneth marchers fall still. They’d stopped their retreat. The tree-creatures shifted and swayed, the creaks and groans of their wooden bodies mixing into a weird harmony as they came to rest.

‘They’ve stopped?’ Decimator-Prime Diocletian couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Don’t they know the enemy is close?’

Angstun shook his head. ‘It must be the Lady of Vines. She’s told them to stop. Maybe she is weary of running.’ He wondered if that was the meaning of the branchwraith’s changing song, but somehow he thought there had to be some deeper purpose. Some glimmer of understanding came to him as he saw a group of towering treelords lumber out from among the sylvaneth, pressing their way past the Liberators and out across the ice field. They cast their inscrutable gaze across the cracked and pitted terrain, studying the fissures Morbus’ lightning had caused.

Morbus! With his affinity for things arcane, perhaps he would have some understanding of what was happening. Angstun looked towards the left flank, trying to find the Lord-Relictor. He couldn’t see him among the Liberators or the Judicators as they picked off charging mutants as they came lunging out of the fog. The absence puzzled Angstun; Morbus was always the first to take up a fight.

Then Angstun recalled Lord-Castellant Grymn’s words. Their duty wasn’t to fight, but to protect Queen Alarielle – even if it meant protecting her from herself. That same injunction would apply to the Radiant Queen’s retinue. He knew where Morbus had gone. The moment the sylvaneth stopped, the instant the keening song had changed, the Lord-Relictor had withdrawn. He was going to speak to the Lady of Vines herself and find out why she’d brought her people to a stop and put the queen-seed she carried at jeopardy.

Morbus was going to demand an accounting from the Lady of Vines.

Lord-Relictor Morbus ran through the midst of the sylvaneth. The great tree-creatures parted before him, shifting and twisting aside to allow him passage through their ranks. Though they were silent, he could sense the resentment that smouldered within each wooden body. It wasn’t by their own volition they allowed him to move among them, but a command from a higher authority. He knew that command could only have issued from the Lady of Vines, perhaps woven within the melody of her shifting song. It seemed she knew his purpose and had prepared the way for their meeting.

Behind him, Morbus could hear the sounds of battle. If the sylvaneth resented the Stormcasts, then they had good company with his own offence. His place was back there, helping Angstun fend off Torglug’s raiders, not wasting time urging the branchwraith to get moving again. Whatever madness had caused her to stop the column, he was of no mind to listen to it. Their mission was to keep Alarielle from the grasping hands of Chaos and that was precisely what they were going to do, with or without the help of the sylvaneth.

A copse of towering treelords stepped aside as Morbus dashed around their root-like feet. He could feel the incredible age of these creatures, could see the ancient wisdom glowing within their eyes and scratched across their knotted faces. Unlike the other sylvaneth, these primordial creatures didn’t exude a feeling of resentment, but instead evoked a sense of profound disappointment. Even Morbus felt a flicker of guilt as he passed the treelords, as though he himself were responsible for some grave tragedy.

His resolve, his obligations to faith and duty, made Morbus crush down the sliver of doubt. The Stormcasts were the holy warriors of the God-King Sigmar. Whatever they did, wherever they fought, it was by His design and towards His purpose. The nobility of such service couldn’t suffer the pollution of doubt.

Emerging from the shadow of the treelords, Morbus found he had reached the fore of the sylvaneth column. Before him, her legs folded beneath her arboreal body, was the Lady of Vines. In her lap, the brilliant radiance of the queen-seed cast its glow, bathing the branchwraith in a magical light. In another place, another time, the sight would have been wondrous and enchanting. With the plaguehosts snapping at the rear of the column, it instead provoked only disbelief and frustration.

‘Lady,’ Morbus called out. ‘Why have your people stopped? Why do you sit here when Torglug’s army is almost upon us? We must keep moving!’

The branchwraith turned her head, fixing Morbus with her inscrutable gaze. The eerie song continued to wind from her wooden mouth, but no words disturbed the harmony. Instead she raised one of her slender arms and pointed a sharp finger at the relic hammer clenched in his hands. In the same motion, her finger dropped towards the ice.

Morbus felt a slight quiver in the ice beneath his feet. Looking aside, he saw several of the ancient treelords leave the column and step towards the Lady of Vines. The gigantic sylvaneth turned towards Morbus. He could sense the tremendous effort they made as tendrils snaked out from their feet and tried to burrow into the ice. Strain as they might, they could do no more than bore holes to the churning sea beneath. The ice pack here was too thick for their roots to dig in and fracture.

The tactic they’d used to escape the plaguehosts before, cracking the ice and leaving Torglug’s warriors stranded on the shore, wouldn’t work here. The pack ice was too tough for either the roots of the treelords or Morbus’ relic hammer. The Stormcast scowled within his helm. The Lady of Vines had reached the same conclusion that the Hallowed Knights had – they couldn’t outrun the enemy.

The branchwraith pointed her clawed hand off towards the horizon. A lessening of the storm’s fury allowed Morbus to see what lay in that direction. Huge and monstrous, the craggy body of the jotunberg rose from the frozen waves like some impossible island. Their retreat across the Sea of Serpents had brought them close to where the giant had fallen. This close to the giant, he could see the mossy growths that pockmarked its body, the ugly lines of corruption that snaked through its enormity. Sections of rock sloughed away and went crashing down into the ice. The jotunberg, like so much of the Jade Kingdoms, had been poisoned by Nurgle’s contagion. At first he thought the thing must be dead, but then he saw a slight stir shudder through one of its legs, a faint motion crackle along one of its arms. Even such faint movements sent a noticeable shiver through the ice.

Morbus held the branchwraith’s gaze. He knew her intention now and it stunned him with its sheer magnitude.

‘It’s impossible,’ he declared. ‘No one could command such a behemoth. You can see for yourself that it is infected with Nurgle’s rot.’

Before he could move forwards to try and intervene, Morbus was struck from behind. The warrior pitched forwards, slamming into the unyielding ice. Before he could recover, he felt fibrous coils winding around his body, lifting him into the air. He was in the grip of one of the treelords, caught in the web of sinuous branches creeping from its beard. The mighty sylvaneth’s clawed hand closed around Morbus’ arm, trapping his hammer within a fist of wood.

Morbus could have drawn upon the hammer’s power to shatter the treelord’s grip, but it sat ill with him to strike this ancient creature without first trying to reason with it.

‘Whatever she’s told you, your first duty is to protect your queen!’ he shouted at the treelord. This time there was no denying the feeling of regret that emanated from the treelord. The creature adjusted its hold on Morbus, allowing him to see what was unfolding around the Lady of Vines.

The other treelords Morbus had passed, the most ancient of their kind to guard the vale of Athelwyrd, had formed a circle around the Lady of Vines. Their heavy, creaking voices joined in her song, forming an eerily mournful accompaniment to her magic. The queen-seed blazed even more brilliantly; the light surrounding the branchwraith became almost blinding. Even in his captor’s grip, Morbus could feel a tremor crackle through the ice and knew that the jotunberg was stirring.

How the Lady of Vines fed such a vast conjuration Morbus soon discovered. The ancients of Athelwyrd were withering before his eyes. Strips of bark sloughed away from their trunks, branches yellowed and snapped as their wood rotted from the inside. The face of one treelord crumbled away in a mass of dust. The arm of another fell from its shoulder to explode into splinters as it struck the ice. She was drawing upon their primordial vitality to feed the colossal magic she was evoking.

The tremors rumbling through the ice became more violent. Through the lessening flurry of snow, Morbus could see the jotunberg lurch back onto its feet. The gargantua took one quaking step and then another, forcing its way out across the frozen sea and creating a shattering wave of elemental fury through the ice already packed around it. The pack ice shattered and crumbled, unleashing a flood of surging waves that reared high into the sky before splashing down in pulverising cataracts of destruction. Even as the tidal waves slammed down and splintered great swathes of ice, the frigid emanations surging from the giant’s body froze them once more, creating weird crests and valleys upon the again unmoving sea. The formations shattered and collapsed as the giant took a second quaking step and sent new tremors through the ice and fresh tides of rolling waves spraying across the sea.

But the giant didn’t take a third step. With bits of its diseased body crashing away in an avalanche of stone and snow, the jotunberg toppled back into the Sea of Serpents, throwing up one last great sheet of water from the depths that froze around its wintry mass like an icy shroud.

Around the Lady of Vines, the last of the ancient treelords crashed to the ground, its body little more than a hollow log. The rest of the circle had fared even worse, some reduced to only a few scattered twigs and a heap of dust. They’d sacrificed their immense vitalities, their untold centuries of existence, and all the branchwraith had been able to gain was a few shuddering steps out of the jotunberg.

The Lady of Vines looked solemnly at the residue of the sacrificed treelords. She rose to her feet, the queen-seed’s glow clenched in one of her hands. Her eyes looked up at Morbus, then shifted away from him, gazing out across the sylvaneth column. It seemed to him that she peered through the tree-creatures, looking instead at the battle unfolding behind them.

‘It wasn’t enough,’ the branchwraith said. ‘The spell took too much from them, but it wasn’t enough.’ She returned the glowing queen-seed to the hollow in her chest, then raised her voice in a dirge for those who had sacrificed themselves for a desperate effort.

No word or gesture passed between the Lady of Vines and the treelord who held him, but Morbus found himself lowered to the ice and released. He could see the jagged crack that ran through it and wondered if the jotunberg’s violence had managed even greater havoc closer to the giant.

Morbus saw the Lady of Vines turn and begin moving onwards once more. Many of the sylvaneth followed after her, but Morbus noted that many more were turning and marching in the other direction. Her magic had accomplished less than she’d hoped. The Lady of Vines was leaving some of her followers behind to help the Hallowed Knights fend off Torglug’s legion.

The Lord-Relictor hurried to reach his warriors. If the Lady of Vines was moving on, then some of the Hallowed Knights had to accompany her. To do less would be to forsake their duty.

Chapter six

To struggle against Chaos is to embrace pain. It is the misery of hope, the mockery of fading dreams and the anguish of vanquished tomorrows. Defying the Ruinous Powers is but hollow vanity. What triumph can there be, opposing the Dark Gods? Win one battle or a hundred, the war will end the same way. The enemy grows stronger while the valour of men withers and fades.

In the stinking darkness, in the black pit of despair, the captive looked up. Faint and fragile, a tiny light beckoned, offering comfort and solace. Trembling hands, weak from abuse and neglect, reached up from the filth, desperate to embrace whatever respite the light might give him. To his starving soul, even the smallest scrap of compassion would be a feast.

Ugly, brutish shapes loomed above him, blotting out the feeble light. The rank stench of their evil wafted down upon him, the slime of their festering sores dripped onto his body. In his ears their hacking laughter roared. It was a laughter that transcended mere flesh and mortality. It was the jeering viciousness of monstrous gods as they snuffed out the dying embers of resistance.

Torglug’s boots crunched across the bloodied snow. The warlord had stood in silence while Slaugoth Maggotfang cut open the sacrifice. There had been a distant, detached quality in his three eyes, as though he already gazed upon some unseen vista without the benefit of the sorcerer’s magic. Even the closest of his retainers, the fearsome putrid blightkings, knew better than to intrude upon their master’s reverie.

‘The spleen is spotted with the black crab and its offspring,’ Slaugoth giggled, lifting the organ from the butchered body. ‘The stomach is pitted with ulcers and I have found seven stones in the kidneys. Most auspicious, Abominable Torglug.’ The sorcerer raked his dagger across the exposed belly, pulling a parasitic worm from the ruptured flesh. He held it before his face, examining the spots along its slimy, mottled skin. Then he popped it into his mouth and swallowed it in a single greedy gulp.

Torglug was unmoved by the revolting spectacle of Slaugoth’s auguries. There was nothing the sorcerer could do that might match the horror of simply knowing a being like Guthrax Kingeater was nearby. The Great Unclean One had offered its own prophecies, devouring seven tribesmen and then extruding their still screaming skulls from its gargantuan gut. The daemon claimed the shrieks of its dissolving victims foretold the path before Torglug, offering a confused medley of promises and warnings. Mortal or daemon, prescience, it seemed, was an arcane art riddled with evasiveness and ambiguity.

‘Enough,’ Torglug coughed, clapping his hand against the blackened edge of his axe. Flecks of rust and clotted gore crumbled away at his touch, sizzling as they struck the snow. ‘You are weaving victory and failure in every utterance that is slipping from your tongue. I am seeking answers, not looking for more questions.’ A baleful malignance shone in the warlord’s eyes as he turned his horned head towards the storm-swept horizon.

He could see the beckoning glow, the radiant flicker of Alarielle, shining behind the veil of mist and falling snow. There were many among Torglug’s plaguehosts who could feel that radiance even if they couldn’t see it, men and monsters in which the corruption of Nurgle’s blessings was great.

The warlord’s forces were closing in upon the prize now. It would have been easy to surround and exterminate the rearguard of lightning-men and tree-creatures that had tried to bar his path. A less determined warlord might have succumbed to the temptation to massacre his enemies. Slaughter, however, wouldn’t be enough to exalt Torglug in the eyes of his god. The offering Nurgle demanded was Queen Alarielle; nothing less would satisfy Him. Though many of his chieftains and champions demurred, Torglug had driven them onwards, bypassing the rearguard, leaving behind the great brayherds and some of the smaller marauder tribes to tie down the lightning-men and use their own strategy against them – trappers caught in their own snare.

Overhead, a few plague drones came buzzing back to rejoin the horde. Torglug had sent advance elements of his army to harass and delay Alarielle’s guardians at every stage of the hunt. Relays of warhounds, flights of plague drones, howling packs of forsaken, herds of centigors. Anything that could hit the enemy fast and even if only for a few minutes throw their retreat into disorder. It was a sacrifice of resources, but while Torglug’s army bled warriors, the enemy was bleeding time. Of the two resources, Torglug’s losses were the easier to bear.

Scratching the boils along his neck, Torglug glowered at his followers. Infested with superstitions and tribal atavisms, the barbarians would fight harder now that they’d seen Slaugoth perform his divinations with sacrificial innards.

‘Nurgle is smiling on me,’ Torglug declared, pointing his thumb at the butchered body. His legion didn’t need to know the particulars of Slaugoth’s divinations, only what their warlord told them. ‘Be serving me, and you too are being granted Grandfather’s favour.’ He raised his blackened axe high. ‘None are escaping us! All are sharing in our contagion and discovering glory of decay!’

Torglug brought his axe chopping down, pointing the blade at the swirling snow behind which he could see the light of Alarielle shining. At his gesture, a chorus of shrieks and war cries rose from his diseased legion. The vast horde surged forwards, marching towards the unseen enemy.

Through the snow gale a dark outline could be distinguished. As the horde continued to advance the shape resolved itself as a wall of trees before which stood a line of tall warriors in shining silver armour. Expecting their enemy to be fleeing before them, the sight surprised the Chaos host. For just a moment, their onward rush lost its impetus. In that moment, arrows came flying out at them from the ranks of silver warriors, each missile transforming into a bolt of lightning as it came searing down to pierce a marching tribesman or strike down a galloping Chaos knight.

The smell of blood, even that of their own comrades, goaded the plaguehosts forwards once more. Again the tolling of rusted bells and the pounding of primitive drums echoed across the ice, the bubbling cacophony of men and monsters invoking the favour of the Plaguefather. Black armoured knights charged through the swirling snow, mobs of tribesmen marched with sinister determination across the ice, and clutches of half-reptilian dragon ogres clawed their way over the frozen sea. Daemons waddled on batrachian legs or slithered on slug-like bellies. The putrid blightkings, the greenfly guard, the pox-bringers and all the other chosen of Nurgle moved towards the enemy.

Torglug chortled in delight. Alarielle’s guardians had surprised him in the most pleasant way. They’d come to appreciate that there was no escape for them. Instead of trying to run, instead of fleeing further across the frozen Sea of Serpents, they’d turned to make a fight of it. Some noble and delusional notion that they might accomplish something by giving battle to their pursuers. The warlord wasn’t certain if it was mad or pathetic. The whole of Ghyran was being devoured by Nurgle – did these fools think they truly stood any chance? There would be none who would remember their last stand as anything but an impotent absurdity.

More arrows fell into the advancing horde, striking down dozens of Torglug’s warriors. They were small losses in the grand scheme of things. Final martyrs rendered up in anticipation of Torglug’s ultimate victory. The archers of the lightning-men couldn’t stem the tide of Chaos. A wave of axes and swords, fangs and claws would soon come crashing down upon them. Against the might of the plaguehosts, the silver warriors would be crushed to nothing, the sylvaneth behind them utterly annihilated. From their carrion, Torglug would seize the queen-seed and deliver to Nurgle the prize He demanded. Nothing would stand between the warlord and his destiny.

Suddenly, the storm began to abate, blue skies emerging from behind the clouds. Torglug could hear a strange keening song. As he listened to the eerie melody, he noted a change in the harmony, a shift in pitch and tone. Ancient and inhuman, there was something threatening in that song, something that made him feel like a bird caught in a snake’s gaze.

As the snow gale ebbed and some of the storm faded, Torglug’s blemished eyes looked upon an impossible sight. A gargantuan shape rose up from the frozen waves, incredibly colossal in its proportions. It was big as a mountain, its craggy body locked in the ice, pained shudders rumbling through its frame as it languished. An almost forgotten sense of dread swept through Torglug as he looked upon the living mountain and realised that the ancient song he heard was calling out to the trapped behemoth.

A moment before, Torglug had believed victory within his grasp, that he’d trapped Alarielle’s guardians. As he looked upon the stirring jotunberg, he wondered who it was that had been trapped.

Angstun raised the standard of the Hallowed Knights high, pouring new determination into the ranks of the Liberators. The Stormcasts had been fending off wave upon wave of Torglug’s diseased minions, littering the snow with the ruined husks of putrid daemons and black-armoured Chaos warriors. Again and again the forces of darkness crashed against the shield wall, pushed back only by heroic effort. Behind the Liberators, the Judicators loosed volley after volley of sigmarite arrows into the oncoming horde, shafts of crackling lightning slamming down into the barbaric legion.

Shouts of alarm rose from the left flank of the shield wall. Angstun turned to see several silver-armoured warriors flung into the air, swatted aside by a monstrous creature. It was a hulking beast of chitinous plates and reptilian claws, massive horns curling away from its savage face. A nest of tongues stabbed out from between its fangs jaws, punching through the sigmarite armour of the Stormcasts they struck. The beast’s great forepaws hurled aside those who moved to close the gap, tossing them as though they weighed nothing. Smaller paws slashed and tore at those warriors who were able to slip past the mangling swipes of its forepaws, crumpling armour and shattering bone.

When he saw the daggers protruding from the beast’s back, Angstun knew what sort of beast his warriors faced – a Slaughterbrute, a diseased atrocity created by the corrupt energies of Chaos, a living engine of carnage and destruction.

Lightning crackled about the head of his standard as Angstun called out to Agrippa’s retinue, praying they would catch his signal. Liberator-Prime Agrippa lifted his own sword high, alerting the Knight-Vexillor that he was ready for his orders. Angstun paused. It was no easy thing, what he contemplated. Left alone, the beast would open a gap in the shield wall that other foes could widen. If they let the monster through, the Liberators would be able to close ranks behind it, slamming the door in the face of Torglug’s legion.

It would also leave the monster free to rampage among the sylvaneth, perhaps even force its way to the Lady of Vines.

There was no other choice.

‘Preserve the wall and let the big one through!’ Angstun commanded. The Liberators disengaged, allowing the slavering brute past, then reformed the shield wall before the Chaos warriors could come pouring in. The Knight-Vexillor could hear the monster’s howl of ferocious glee as it sprang past Agrippa’s men and rushed towards the sylvaneth.

Spinning around, Angstun snapped orders to the paladins he had kept in reserve – Diocletian and his Decimators.

‘Bring down that monster we let through,’ he ordered. ‘Stop it before it can get to the Lady of Vines.’

Diocletian saluted the Knight-Vexillor, then hastened to lead his paladins after their quarry. The beast wouldn’t be hard to follow. Exhibiting the same primitive ferocity it had at the shield wall, the beast was hacking its way through the sylvaneth, leaving the ice littered with broken tree-creatures and shattered dryads.

Angstun could spare no more time for the Decimators and their hunt. Cries of alarm rose from the ranks of tribesmen and Chaos knights assailing his part of the shield wall. The attackers parted, falling to the wayside as they hurried to clear a path for the forces now stalking into battle. An oily, reptilian stink accompanied their advance, the musky reek of dank caves and forsaken grottos. The creatures that now moved against the Hallowed Knights were huge brutes with grotesque lizard-like lower bodies, from which sprouted hideous humanoid torsos. Their leering faces were twisted with pitiless hate and their eyes burned with an almost elemental fury. In their hands, they carried massive axes, fell runes etched upon the blackened blades.

Leading the dragon-bodied monsters was a gigantic specimen of their breed. The fly-rune of Nurgle was branded upon the creature’s chest, a filthy mix of blood and pus oozing from the loathsome scar. Strips of armour, bent and distorted from the plate of human warriors, covered the huge beast’s arms while in its clawed hands it carried an enormous axe that seemed fashioned from obsidian. The monster’s face had a crude resemblance to that of a man, but blotted with a mire of boils and lesions, the dubious blessings of the Plaguefather.

The Judicators loosed a volley of arrows from their skybolt bows at the huge dragon ogre. As the sigmarite missiles changed into bolts of lightning and crashed down upon the reptilian monster, it threw its head back and bellowed. It was a cry not of agony but of exultation. Far from being harmed by the lightning, the creature was revelling in it.

‘Stand down!’ Angstun cried to his archers. ‘Do not shoot the dragon-beasts!’

Across the din of battle, the immense dragon ogre seemed to hear him, a grisly smile twisting its already hideous face. Hefting its huge axe, the monster charged towards the shield wall, dozens of its smaller kin rushing behind it. Without the Judicators to hold them back, the reptilian brutes would slam into the Liberators with the intensity of an avalanche.

Angstun pushed his way to the fore of the battle line, ready to confront the hulking leader of the dragon ogres. Their one hope, fragile as it might be, was to slay the huge chieftain quickly. That might break the courage of the others – if indeed such inhuman foes were capable of fear.

When he felt the ice trembling beneath his feet, Angstun thought it was the fury of the charging reptiles provoking it. Then the violence swelled, increasing steadily. The pack began to shudder and shake, jagged fissures snaking through the ice. Great chunks went crashing into the suddenly exposed water below. Crevices opened up beneath bands of Chaos warriors, sending them plummeting to the bottom of the icy sea. Pits swallowed mobs of daemons, plunging them beneath the waves. Knights were thrown from their saddles and tribesmen were sent sliding across the pack.

Angstun marvelled as the ice ahead of the shield wall split apart, a great gash opening up in the pack. The huge dragon ogre, rearing up on its hind legs, ready to bring its gigantic axe slamming down, was swallowed by the gap. The massive creature vanished beneath the surface, sucked down by its own weight. A dozen of its fellows, unable to arrest the impetus of their charge, were likewise sent crashing into the sea, floundering for a moment on the slippery surface before being dragged under by their prodigious bulk.

It was more than accident that directed the tremors which had split and shattered the ice. Angstun could see at once that the quake’s force was focused against Torglug’s legion, sparing the Stormcasts and their sylvaneth allies. The plaguehosts were thrown into disarray, retreating before the elemental wrath that had been turned against them. Where but a moment before their diseased claws had been closing around the refugees, now the horde was flung back, sent reeling back into the mist.

Looking out upon the ice-field, Angstun felt his relief tempered by cold realization. The fissure that had swallowed the dragon ogres, the pits that had consumed bands of marauders and daemons, were scattered and disparate, leaving several bridges across the churning sea. Torglug’s attack on the column had been disrupted, but the plaguehosts still had an avenue to resume their assault once their warlord rallied them.

Through the fog, Angstun sighted huge figures approaching the nearest of the ice bridges. It seemed some of Torglug’s horde had rallied already. ‘Judicators!’ he called out, raising the standard high. ‘At my signal…’

Before Angstun could give the command to loose, a figure came hurtling down from the stormy sky. The Knight-Vexillor was shocked to see Tegrus descending towards him. Moments before, the skies had belonged to Torglug’s daemonic plague drones. One glance at the blood and ichor staining the Prosecutor-Prime’s silver armour told him that the winged warrior had had to fight his way back to the column.

‘Stay your arrows,’ Tegrus told Angstun, pointing towards the men advancing towards the ice bridge. ‘That is Lord-Castellant Grymn’s command you would loose against!’

Quickly, Angstun warned the archers to hold their fire. A moment later he recognised the glow of Grymn’s warding lantern shining through the mist. Seldom had he seen a more welcome sight.

‘I must alert you,’ Tegrus reported. ‘Torglug’s horde bypassed the rearguard. His main force could be upon you at any moment.’

Angstun laughed and shook his head. ‘I fear your warning is late, my friend. But I am happy to say you’re still in time for the fighting.’ He turned and gestured to the sylvaneth column at his back. The tree-creatures were moving again, but the trail of carnage left by the Slaughterbrute was still visible. ‘One of Torglug’s monsters broke through. I sent Diocletian and his Decimators to attend to it, but I’m certain they wouldn’t mind your help.’

Tegrus opened his wings. ‘I will leave you to welcome the commander then,’ he said as he climbed back into the sky. He circled above the Liberators, then peeled away to pursue the Slaughterbrute.

Angstun turned his attention back to the advancing force of Stormcasts and sylvaneth. Even with Grymn’s warriors to bolster their strength he wondered if they would be powerful enough to hold back Torglug’s legion.

The murderous roar drowned out the sullen creaks and groans of the sylvaneth. The Slaughterbrute lashed out with its vicious claws, snapping limbs and splitting trunks with each swipe. The monster’s stabbing tongues pierced the heartwood of dryads, provoking a frustrated growl from the beast when it found not blood but only sap within the bodies of its victims. The mutant clamped its jaws around the trunk of a knotted tree-creature, shaking its prey with such rage that branches were shorn away with each twist of its neck.

‘Only the faithful!’ The war cry of the Hallowed Knights rang out as Decimator-Prime Diocletian brought his thunderaxe chopping into the chitinous hide of the monster. The Slaughterbrute snarled, a spasm of pain causing its jaws to clench tight and crack the body of its last victim. The severed halves of the sylvaneth crashed to the ice, limbs twitching as vitality slowly faded away.

Diocletian glared at the mutant, vowing that the tree-creature would indeed be its last victim. The rest of the Decimators were following close behind their leader, but for the moment it was he alone who held the Slaughterbrute’s attention.

The monster snarled at him, its claws slashing out at him. Diocletian dodged from the raking talons and struck out once again with his axe. This time the blade slashed deep into the beast’s hide, drawing a spurt of greasy blood. The Slaughterbrute shuffled backwards, sniffing at its own wound. When it looked back at Diocletian, the fury in its eyes was even more malignant than before.

Even as the Slaughterbrute made ready to spring at him, the beast’s body quivered. Diocletian could see weird, eerie lights flickering around the daggers embedded in the monster’s back. Without so much as a snarl, the brute swung around, hurling itself against the sylvaneth, once more trying to claw its way through the tree-creatures and dryads. Slowed by the cold, they couldn’t match the berserk magnitude of the assault.

Diocletian rushed after the crazed monster. ‘How dare you ignore me!’ he growled, hacking at its hind leg with his axe. The weapon crackled against its scaly flesh, crunching through one of the bony plates that protected it. Shrieking in pain, the Slaughterbrute swung around once more. This time the paladin wasn’t swift enough to dodge its paw. He was sent tumbling across the ice, landing in an armoured heap among sylvaneth crippled by the brute. He expected to feel the monster’s weight slam down on him as it pounced on its fallen foe. Instead he saw the beast again turn and charge into the sylvaneth ahead of it.

‘My prime, are you hurt?’ The question came from Brother Scipio, one of Diocletian’s paladins.

Diocletian waved aside the warrior’s concern. He pointed at the starsoul mace Scipio carried. ‘The beast thinks it can ignore us. It is time we taught it otherwise.’ Recovering his axe, Diocletian led the paladins after the Slaughterbrute. Whatever sorcery controlled the monster, he hoped the magic of the mace would act as a countermeasure – at least enough to disrupt the beast’s rampage so the Decimators could surround and kill it.

The sylvaneth might be unable to thwart the Slaughterbrute’s advance, but they were able to slow its progress. It was a gruesome exchange, splintered carcasses littering the monster’s path. The sight encouraged the Decimators to greater speed, knowing each moment lost would bring death to more of their allies. When they caught up with the monster, it was smashing its way through a nest of dryads, trying to win its way clear.

‘Only the faithful!’ Diocletian shouted as he charged the Slaughterbrute. The other paladins took up his cry, rushing to the attack. They spread out to engage the beast from every side. Thunderaxes hacked into its chitinous hide while Scipio’s mace sent a blazing starblast scorching through the brute’s body. The monster retaliated with its massive claws and snapping jaws, its tongues whipping around to swat at the Stormcasts. Its wrath was unfocused, however, for the eldritch glow surrounding the daggers in its back was becoming more persistent. The beast kept turning back in the direction it had been pursuing, goaded onwards by a force as irresistible as that of the thunderaxes and starsoul mace.

‘Don’t let it escape,’ Diocletian told his warriors. He could guess what it was that compelled the Slaughterbrute on despite the wounds the Decimators visited against it. The sorcerer controlling it was after the Lady of Vines and the queen-seed she carried. That made stopping the monster’s rampage even more imperative.

The Slaughterbrute spun around as one of the paladins chopped at its leg, and its tongues stabbed out, puncturing the warrior’s helm. There was a crack of thunder and a flash of blue lightning as the vanquished Stormcast was drawn back to Azyr. A sweep of the beast’s claws knocked Scipio across the ice, his leg folded almost double beneath him.

Howling at the remaining Decimators, the monster looked ready to exploit its attack, but again the persistent glow of the binding daggers made it turn away. Diocletian cursed and rallied the rest of his men. Whatever it cost them, they had to bring the monster down.

Before it could hurl itself against the sylvaneth once more, the Slaughterbrute was confronted by a lone warrior. Darting down from the sky, Tegrus wheeled around the beast’s head, smashing his hammers into the berserk abomination. Lightning crackled against its horns, slicing through one of its barbed tongues, smashing into its fangs. The monster reared back, clawing at the air with its forepaws, vainly trying to drag the Prosecutor-Prime from the sky.

Tegrus continued to torment the Slaughterbrute, allowing Diocletian and the other Decimators to close with it. Chopping at it with their axes, the paladins gouged hideous rents in its bony plates and scaly flesh. The brute flopped against the ice as one of its mangled legs crumpled beneath it. The paladins were moving in for the kill when a commanding voice arrested their attack. They turned to find the macabre figure of Lord-Relictor Morbus marching towards them from beyond the sylvaneth host.

‘It is not by axe and arrow that this beast must be finished,’ Morbus told the perplexed warriors. Raising his relic hammer high, he called down a shower of lightning. The bolts seared into the crippled Slaughterbrute, striking the binding daggers embedded in its hide. The monster cried out, clawing at the ice as the storm seared its flesh. Smoke rose from the cooking beast as it struggled to reach Morbus, either instinct or the commanding force of the daggers drawing it towards its tormentor.

The Slaughterbrute rallied, lunging for Morbus with outstretched claws. Before it could reach him, however, the beast was swatted down by the gnarled fist of a treelord. The same ancient that had held Morbus while the Lady of Vines roused the jotunberg now stood between the monster and the Lord-Relictor. Its glowing eyes flashed vengefully as it surveyed the carnage already wrought by the Slaughterbrute.

Uttering a groaning bellow of rage, the treelord lumbered towards the Slaughterbrute. The maimed monster sprang at it, sinking its claws into the ancient bark of its trunk. The treelord gave no notice to the blood-sap spurting from its wounds, but simply reached down and seized hold of the monster’s head. Wooden claws pierced deep into the beast’s hide, then with a savage wrenching motion, the treelord tore the head from its neck. Spurting foulness too rancid to be called blood spilled from the wound as the Slaughterbrute’s abominable vitality drained away.

Tossing the head aside, the treelord used both of its mighty talons to pull the beast’s body from its trunk. Morbus waited until the sylvaneth had divested itself of the Slaughterbrute’s claws before using his magic to minister to its wounds. Only when the huge tree-creature’s blood-sap stopped dripping down its trunk did the Lord-Relictor turn back to his fellow Stormcasts.

‘Some dark sorcerer guided that monster here,’ Morbus stated as he met Diocletian and Tegrus. He gestured at the dripping remains of the binding daggers. ‘Through those he was able to guide the beast. By striking at it through the daggers, it is just possible that the sorcerer himself has shared his creature’s fate.’

‘Sigmar willing,’ Tegrus said.

Morbus nodded, then turned towards the fallen Scipio. Moving across the ice, he knelt beside the injured paladin, drawing upon his healing powers to mend the leg shattered by the Slaughterbrute. While Morbus attended the wounded Decimator, Tegrus reported the return of Lord-Castellant Grymn and the rearguard.

‘We will need every warrior we can get,’ Diocletian said.

‘Some will be needed here,’ Morbus stated. He pointed to the sylvaneth. Many of them were moving onwards, joining the Lady of Vines as she resumed her retreat.

‘That role must be left to others,’ Diocletian observed. ‘The tree-folk don’t regard my Decimators with favour.’

‘It is your axes they distrust,’ Morbus told him. He nodded at the steaming carcass of the Slaughterbrute. ‘After your heroic stand against that monster, I think perhaps they regard you with less suspicion.’

‘We will be of more use fighting than running,’ Diocletian protested.

Tegrus was quick to support the paladin. ‘Lord-Castellant Grymn left Retributor-Prime Markius and the Annihilation Brotherhood behind to contain Torglug’s delaying force. Without their hammers, the axes of the Decimators will be most welcome.’

‘Then I must entrust the duty to others,’ Morbus said, turning towards Tegrus. ‘Speed back to Angstun and tell him to dispatch a unit of Liberators to accompany the Lady of Vines. Impress upon him that the Hallowed Knights must maintain a presence among the sylvaneth. It is our duty to safeguard Queen Alarielle against all dangers that threaten her. Whatever shape they take.’

They had spent so long under storm clouds and moving through fog that the light pouring down from the clear sky was almost dazzling to Grymn and his warriors. The view afforded by the light, however, was anything but reassuring. They could see the cracked and broken ice, the litter of bodies left by Torglug’s assault. The very magnitude of the destruction bespoke both the might of the plaguehosts and the violence of the jotunberg’s movements. Both were forces that yet hung over the ice fields. Somewhere beyond the veil of fog, Torglug’s legions lurked, while the rumblings and shudders that crackled through the ice told them that the jotunberg’s agitation wasn’t so easily pacified as it was to evoke. Any moment might see a catastrophic ice quake send all of them sinking into the Sea of Serpents.

There was nothing Grymn could do about the jotunberg except to trust in Sigmar that the giant’s throes wouldn’t bring ruin to the forces of order. Against Torglug, however, he was already formulating his plans. To advance and continue his pursuit of Alarielle, the warlord would have to bring his army across the ice bridges that spanned the churning sea. If the Stormcasts and their allies could control the bridges they could frustrate Torglug’s ambition. However vast his horde, only a small number of them could strike out across the bridges at one time.

‘If we can hold them here we can give the Lady of Vines time to make good her escape,’ Grymn told Angstun.

‘Lord-Relictor Morbus worries that Torglug will use some ploy to slip past us and catch up with her,’ Tegrus said. The Prosecutor-Prime had brought word back from Morbus and forwarded his request for warriors to accompany the branchwraith. Angstun had sent Gault’s retinue and those of Agrippa to act as escort for the Lady of Vines. Both retinues of Liberators had been badly mauled throwing back the plaguehosts and so were the easiest to remove from the line.

‘Morbus always sees the dark side of everything,’ Angstun declared. ‘For all of that, I hope he and Diocletian return before the enemy attacks again.’

Grymn shared the sentiment. The thunderaxes of Diocletian’s Decimators would be vital right now. He had it in mind to use them to break the bridges and restrict Torglug’s horde to the other side of the gap.

The cheers of his comrades and Tallon’s excited barks brought Grymn turning around. Emerging from the fog was a sight he’d never expected to see – Retributor-Prime Markius and the Annihilation Brotherhood. The paladins had fought their way clear and against all odds had managed to find their way back even without the light of Grymn’s warding lantern to guide them.

‘Sigmar be praised,’ Angstun exclaimed as he spotted the Retributors.

Even as the Knight-Vexillor’s words reached his ears, Grymn felt a chill rush through him. Tallon’s barks turned into angry growls. There were other figures emerging from the mist now, shapes far less welcome than those of the paladins. ‘Assign Markius to one of the bridges,’ Grymn told Angstun. ‘Have his men start breaking it at once.’

Angstun needed no explanation as he followed Grymn’s gaze. Torglug’s legion was marching out from the fog once more – rank upon rank of armoured warriors and slavering monsters, a seemingly numberless horde of putrescence. Among the throng he could see the putrid bulk of a greater daemon, the slithering loathsomeness of slug-like monsters, the banners of flayed skin that were carried by Nurgle’s chosen.

Marching at the fore of a mob of bloated, mutated warriors in rusted armour was the warlord himself. Torglug the Despised. Torglug Treecutter. Torglug, the favoured son of Nurgle. He was marching out with his army. The Stormcast understood what his presence meant. This attack would be an all-out effort. There would be no retreat, no compromise. The plaguehosts would either conquer or be destroyed.

Gazing across the magnitude of Torglug’s forces, Grymn prayed to Sigmar that the Hallowed Knights would be worthy of the ordeal before them. If it was their destiny to fall before the plaguehosts, then he hoped they would at least delay the enemy long enough to cheat him of his prize.

Chapter seven

‘Much is demanded of those to whom much is given.’

Lord-Castellant Grymn recited the First Canticle to himself as he watched Torglug’s legion charge towards the bridges. They were the words upon which the Hallowed Knights had been founded. In them was written the promise of woe and struggle, but also the promise of triumph. Grymn took solace in such solemn wisdom. The greater the test of faith, the darker the ordeal, the brighter and more magnificent the glory to be gained.

Grymn felt pride as he heard the shouts of the Hallowed Knights ringing out all across the ice. ‘Only the faithful!’ they cried, reaffirming their devotion to their chamber and to Sigmar, the God-King. Even faced by the onslaught of Torglug’s hideous horde, the Stormcasts were without fear. To lay down their lives in service to their god was the noblest purpose to which they could aspire. Before that resolve, the horrors of Chaos had no power.

The sylvaneth were ranged across the gap, dispatched by the Lady of Vines to support their efforts against Torglug’s plaguehosts. Commanded by the mighty treelords, the wargroves glared across the gap at their foes, vengeance blazing in their eyes. A terrible groaning litany rose from the tree-creatures, a horrifying paean promising merciless retribution for those who had despoiled their lands.

Judicators loosed volleys of arrows into the Chaos legion, each sigmarite missile descending as a shaft of crackling lightning. Armoured knights sizzled in the saddles of their mutated steeds, howling tribesmen fell to the ice as smoking husks, hopping daemons burst in showers of ichor and corruption. Yet for every foe the archers brought down, it seemed a dozen more came boiling out from the fog. They trampled their dead and dying underfoot, concerned only with reaching the bridges and the prize that awaited them on the other side.

The grotesque daemons, the hideous knights, the warlord’s elite troops – the advance of so many formidable enemies told Grymn that Torglug had taken the bait. The warlord was impatient to capture Alarielle, casting aside prudence in his dash to seize the bridges. Now was the moment to frustrate the villain’s ambition. With his army committed to the assault, Torglug would lose valuable time withdrawing and reorganizing if he failed to capture the bridges and cross the gulf.

While the Judicators continued to whittle away at the horde with their arrows, Grymn raised his warding lantern high. It was the signal to the paladins deployed at the ends of the bridges. Lightning hammers and thunderaxes smashed into the ice, chopping deep into the frozen spans. Chips and slush exploded beneath each blow, but Grymn could tell the Retributors and Decimators were making little progress. The pack was too thick. Even the lightning called down by Lord-Relictor Morbus failed to do more than sink smouldering pits in the surface of one bridge, the energy diverting away to crackle across the open water beneath. Towering treelords shambled towards several of the spans, trying to crack them with their burrowing roots, but even this effort proved futile.

‘Tegrus,’ Grymn called to the Prosecutor-Prime. ‘The ice is too thick on our side. I need your brethren to assault the bridges from above and try to crack them from the middle.’

‘By Sigmar’s will, it shall be done,’ Tegrus vowed. Spreading his great wings, he climbed into the air, the rest of his command rising up to join him. Their silver armour glistened in the sunlight as they soared above their fellow Stormcasts, then they were speeding away towards the churning waters.

The Prosecutors hadn’t gone far before abominable shapes dived at them from the stormy skies. Obscenely bloated, their membranous wings caked in frost, the daemonic rot flies flew at Tegrus and his warriors with ravenous abandon. Upon the back of each droning insect, a cyclopean plaguebearer shrieked its own slobbering battle-cry, waving its rusted daemon-blade overhead.

‘Sigmar be with you,’ Grymn prayed as he watched the aerial combatants close. The task he’d set the Prosecutors would be doubly difficult now. He remembered Gardus’ admonition about always having a plan for failure. Swinging his warding lantern across his body, he signalled the other Hallowed Knights. The Liberators closed ranks at the end of the spans the paladins were chopping away at, forming a shield wall to block any enemy trying to get across. As if following the example set by the Stormcasts, dryads and larger tree-creatures marched into tight-knit formations behind the bridges being attacked by the treelords.

It had been his intention to hold Torglug on the other side of the gap, but now Grymn had to prepare for the eventuality that the plaguehosts would reach at least some of the bridges. Their objective now was to keep the diseased legion from securing a foothold on their side of the ice. Every moment they could delay the hordes of Chaos was one more chance for the Lady of Vines and her precious burden to escape.

Wind whipped across Tegrus’ body as he banked before the murderous dive of a plague drone. The serrated claws of the rot fly scraped across his armoured leg but failed to seize hold of him. The coroded plaguesword of the insect’s rider came much closer to knocking him from the sky, the foul blade blackening the bright aura of his arcane wings. The Prosecutor-Prime arched around his attacker, bringing his hammer cracking against the fly’s swollen abdomen. A vile spray of ooze and putrescence spilled from the ruptured insect. It floundered in mid-air, the plaguebearer hurtling from its saddle to splatter on the ice far below. Tegrus dived down upon the wounded rot fly, smashing his hammer into its head. Already dead from the blow, the monster plummeted from the sky to join its rider.

Tegrus was buffeted by the fierce winter winds, thrown through the air by a wave of driving ice and snow. It was a struggle for him to correct the spin he was thrown into, diving and juking in an effort to tear himself from the gale’s grip. Around him, he could see other Prosecutors sharing his struggle, fighting to win free of the howling winds. Some of the plague drones were sent down towards the ice, but more of the fiendish creatures managed to get away. They circled around, rising above the driving force, ready to dive back at the winged Stormcast.

‘Prosecutors, our objective remains the bridges,’ Tegrus called to his brethren. It was an onerous order to inflict upon them. To strike at the bridges would mean exposing themselves to the plague drones. Even so, the havoc the flying daemons could wreak was inconsequential beside the utter carnage that would result if Torglug’s legion was able to cross the gulf. Firming his grip upon his hammers, Tegrus swooped towards the bridges.

The hammer-strikes exploded with a thunderous crack as Tegrus hurled his weapons against the bridge, blasting chunks of ice into the air. He darted through the flying debris, risking a glance back at the damage he’d managed to inflict. A section of the bridge had crumbled away, slamming down into the churning water below. He could see sleek, sinuous sea serpents striking at the sinking ice, lashing out in blind retaliation against the wreckage. Anything of flesh and blood falling into those waters would be quickly devoured.

The span across those waters, however, remained intact. The gouge Tegrus’ hammers had inflicted against it wasn’t enough to break the bridge. Even now, Chaos warriors and marauders were marching out, goaded onwards by threats from their chiefs and champions. Wheeling around, drawing another hammer from Sigmar’s storm, the weapon crackling into his armoured fist, Tegrus dived down to try again.

Around Tegrus, the other Prosecutors tried to follow his lead. Several of them were beset by the plague drones, slashed by the claws and mandibles of the rot flies or else cut down by the plagueswords of their riders. He saw one of the Prosecutors dip beneath the onslaught of two adversaries only to be impaled by a spear cast at him by the barbarians rushing across the bridge. The injured Stormcast spun towards the water, his armoured body snapped up by one of the gigantic serpents when it lunged at him from beneath the sea. An instant later a blue flash of light shot up from the churning waves.

Another set of plague drones dived at Tegrus. The plaguebearers were taking charge of their brutish steeds now, restraining the rot flies’ mindless aggression and turning them towards more disciplined methods of attack. The daemons that pursued him were co-ordinating their assault, supporting one another as they sought to knock the Prosecutor-Prime from the sky.

The daemons little guessed the enemy they now faced. Tegrus was in his element, exulting in the thrill of diving and weaving around his foes. Far more nimble than the rot flies, he was able to soar around and behind the vile creatures. Casting his hammer at one of the daemons as he climbed above it, Tegrus had the satisfaction of seeing its thorax cut in half by the missile. The bisected monstrosity crashed into the bridge below, pitching a clutch of screaming marauders into the hungry maws of the serpents.

The other plague drone tried to capitalise on the distraction of its companion’s destruction, whipping so close to Tegrus that some of the acidic slime drooling from the rot fly’s proboscis splashed across his armour. The Stormcast threw himself into a downward spiral, wings folded close against his back. The icy air rushed past him as he hurtled straight towards the open water. He could sense the plague drone pursuing him, refusing to abandon its prey.

Lower and still lower Tegrus plummeted, then at the last instant he unfurled his wings and propelled himself skywards once more, speeding himself upwards with the momentum of his fall. It was a manoeuvre the bulky creature couldn’t match. The ghastly daemon and its fiendish rider slammed into the churning sea, the impact ripping limbs from the bloated insect and sending its one-eyed rider vanishing into the depths.

As he rose back into the storm-swept sky, Tegrus could see his warriors were sorely beset by the plague drones. Valiantly, some of them continued to make sorties against the bridges, but they were too few to bring any concentration of force to bear against the spans. Though their javelins sent many of the enemy falling into the water, they weren’t enough to complete the demolition. More and more, the Prosecutors were compelled to use their weapons against swarms of plague drones, annihilating them before they could close with the Stormcasts.

Tegrus drew another hammer from Sigmar’s storm and looked for the gouge his earlier cast had inflicted. It might be a desperate hope, but if the first hammers had weakened the span enough, a second impact in the same spot might be enough to break it. Desperate or not, he was determined to try. Whatever the risk.

‘Sigmar guide my hand,’ Tegrus cried out as he dove past the circling plague drones and towards the bridge below.

Grymn felt as though the snow swirling down from the sky had closed around his own heart. He saw the Prosecutors being attacked by the pernicious rot flies. The daemons were too numerous, the elements too capricious and the target too formidable. One of the winged warriors swooped down with a stormcall javelin in each hand. Though he hurled both missiles into one of the bridges, though he himself was caught in the resultant explosion and hurtled into the icy sea, the span remained standing.

It needed more strength to crack the bridges. A more direct approach than what Tegrus and his Prosecutors had so valiantly attempted. Perhaps some of Morbus’ dour perspective had infected him, but Grymn had planned for this possibility from the first. Much as he disliked to give the command.

Angstun knew what troubled the Lord-Castellant’s mind. ‘We can try to hold them,’ he suggested.

Grymn shook his head. ‘No, my friend, our only chance to hold them is to force them into a bottleneck. They have to be driven into a killing ground where we can bring our full strength against them. If we let them come at us across a broad front, they will prevail simply through force of numbers.’ He turned to Markius, Diocletian and the primes of the other paladin retinues. Quietly he gave them the command. The Stormcasts gave the Lord-Castellant a grim salute, then hastened to the bridges.

Retributors and Decimators sprinted out onto the spans and began to attack the ice beneath them, the Liberators closing the shield walls behind them as the paladins ranged onto the bridges. Here, out over the churning water, the pack was far thinner and at once the terrifying crack and creak of the weakening bridges snapped across the battlefield.

The reckless action of the paladins sowed confusion among the oncoming plaguehosts. Some of the barbarians and mutated monsters tried to retreat while others attempted to redouble their rush across and fall upon the Stormcasts before they could achieve their purpose. Turmoil erupted between the panicked and the determined, and along several of the spans fratricidal conflict broke out between the factions – the dead and dying of both sides cast into the sea and the hungry maws of the giant serpents.

Upon one of the bridges, a squadron of Chaos knights trampled their craven compatriots and charged for the far side. In their path stood the Retributors, their lightning hammers digging great gouges in the ice. Grymn could see Retributor-Prime Markius among the paladins, a massive hammer gripped in his armoured hands. ‘Only the faithful,’ Markius cried out as he raised the weapon overhead and brought it smashing down into the bridge.

The span shattered beneath Markius’ blow. With the Chaos knights only a few yards away, the entire bridge crumbled. Shrieking horses and shouting men were sent pitching into the roiling waters below. The same destruction that reached out to drag down the plague riders also claimed the Retributors. The ice upon which they stood tilted upwards for an instant, then dropped away in a great sheet, knifing down into the sea. Flares of blue lightning streaked up into the sky after the paladins sank into the icy waters.

‘Sigmar take you into His keeping,’ Grymn whispered, bowing his head in tribute to Markius’ sacrifice.

Similar scenes unfolded across several of the other bridges. Often the defenders were successful in their demolition. Diocletian and his Decimators were snatched from the verge of destruction by the intercession of a pair of treelords, who caught them as their end of the bridge began to pitch down into the sea. After the fall of the Slaughterbrute, its seemed the sylvaneth had decided some axes could be used for good instead of ill.

Grymn’s plan was to funnel the plaguehosts down three specific bridges, spans positioned so that his Judicators would have the enemy in a crossfire as they advanced and where the defenders on the other side would be able to form a unified front. Instead, the enemy was able to capture a few bridges not in his calculations.

The first was seized when a unit of Retributors was obliterated by plague drones soon after the dramatic sacrifice of Markius and his men. The flying daemons swarmed down onto the paladins in a frantic mass of slashing claws and stabbing proboscises. The fiends following behind the first assault attacked their own, ripping open abdomens swollen with acidic putrescence to coat the Retributors in caustic filth. Whenever a Stormcast faltered, a rot fly was quick to seize him in its claws and dive with him into the sea. By the time the loathsome attack was finished, the Retributors had been exterminated and the bridge belonged to Torglug.

A second span was seized when three mighty treelords attempted to destroy it by sending their roots burrowing into the ice at the middle of the bridge. Before they’d proceeded far, a marauder chieftain unleashed a mob of hideously mutated Chosen against the sylvaneth. The howling Chosen, their bodies twisting and changing at each step, hurled themselves upon the great tree-creatures. Though many of them were crushed in the hands of the treelords or impaled upon their branches, too many won through to attack the sylvaneth with bronze axes, iron swords, and their own grisly claws. The Chosen hacked and hewed until the mighty treelords were overcome. Roaring in victory, the mutants pushed the splintered carcasses over the side. Though their triumph was short and the arrows from Judicators’ bows soon avenged the treelords, the damage was done. As they had with the other bridge, detachments of Stormcast Eternals and wargroves of sylvaneth removed themselves from the main formations to guard these crossings.

‘We can defend twelve,’ Angstun assured Grymn.

The Lord-Castellant nodded. ‘We will defend twelve,’ he said. Glancing away from the plaguehosts striving to cross the sea, he looked behind their own defensive line. He could just see the Lady of Vines and her last bodyguard slipping away behind the concealment of another snow flurry. If not for the radiant glow of the queen-seed, he doubted he would have been able to spot her at all. The branchwraith had left half of her people behind to aid the Hallowed Knights. Grymn was uncertain if it was a reflection of the growing unity between their factions or a dire testament to the gravity of the situation. Either way, he was certain she hadn’t made such a decision lightly. She had to know that those she left behind were unlikely to return.

Grymn turned his gaze back upon Torglug’s diseased horde. He could see the warlord himself, bloated with corruption, his horned helm caked in filth and decay. Survival didn’t matter here. Their only purpose was to hold for as long as they could. To hold and deny Torglug the prize his infernal master coveted.

‘By Sigmar’s grace,’ Grymn said. ‘We will hold them back.’

There was a man once. He fell into a hole and thought he would die there. He prayed he would die there – how he begged and pleaded. But he didn’t die. He suffered on and on and on. Hours became days became weeks became months. He was lost and he was alone, and even the company of his enemies was denied to him. How he would have savoured their taunts and jeers! How he would have welcomed their abuses! What torture could compare to being alone, abandoned even by those he hated?

There was a man once. He dared a god to do its worst and that was just what it did. The sweet relief of death was denied him; the blissful release of madness eluded him. The sicknesses that consumed his flesh refused to fully destroy him. They left him just enough coherency to appreciate the pain they brought. They withdrew and faded, only to return, easing his agony only so that the relapse would hurt so much more. Dread hounded his mind when pox and plague relented, terror tightening around him as he anticipated their return.

Those whom the gods destroy they make mad. A far worse fate beckons those whom the gods covet. Flesh, spirit and mind alike must be broken. Broken and formed anew. Changed into the vessel that can best serve its new master.

Torglug’s blemished eyes fastened upon the hateful light shining from the enemy leader’s lantern. He forced himself to look upon it, grinding his teeth against the pain it provoked. Another of Sigmar’s pathetic champions, another delusional fool who trusted in a power mightier than Chaos. Right to the end, Lord-Celestant Gardus had believed in the God-King’s power. That hadn’t saved him from the might of Nurgle. That hadn’t stopped Torglug from adding the vale of Athelwyrd to his long list of conquests.

Now this one thought to oppose him. Torglug could appreciate the craft his adversary displayed. He was trying to negate the strength of the plaguehosts by funnelling them across the few bridges still standing. The warriors of Chaos had lost hundreds when the lightning-men and sylvaneth started demolishing those bridges. Torglug’s legion was suffering further casualties as his forces tried to advance across the narrow spans. Beastmen savaged human marauders in their feral bloodlust, impatient to close with the enemy that awaited them on the other side. Crazed forsaken, their bodies erupting with grotesque mutations, ploughed through ranks of tribesmen in their berserk fury. Scores of his diseased followers were hurled into the churning sea by their own comrades, lost to the icy waves and the ravenous serpents undulating through the water. Overhead, the last of his plague drones were overcome by the winged lightning-men, their broken husks splattering as they crashed into the snow. The flying daemons had served their purpose, however. Only a handful of the airborne enemy remained – too few to pose a threat to Torglug’s army or to menace the remaining bridges.

The strain of gazing upon the holy lantern at last made Torglug close his eyes and look away. It was a gesture of weakness that stirred in his guts, the daemonic rotworm that dwelled there recoiling from the holy light. He would make the lightning-men suffer for that indignity. It was said to be impossible to make one of Sigmar’s champions feel fear, but he wondered if they could recognize despair when it stretched forth its claws to claim them? What was fear for oneself, after all, compared to the knowledge that your own failure had brought damnation upon those who depended upon your strength?

‘Guthrax!’ Torglug’s slobbering call bellowed from the rusted face of his helm. His putrid blightkings retreated from their master’s presence as the enormous daemon waddled towards him. Only Slaugoth Maggotfang stayed by his side, potent charms and talismans guarding him against the Great Unclean One’s pestilent aura. Torglug had no need of such fetishes to protect him. The favour of Nurgle was stronger than any daemon’s malignance.

‘Your command, Torglug Ice-walker?’ Guthrax croaked, steaming spittle falling from its rancid tongues.

Torglug studied the bridges, crowded now with his warriors. He turned over in his mind the warbands that belonged to each tattered banner, the warherds that marched behind each primitive totem. He put a value to each, estimated how many men and monsters might be committed to each crossing. Finally he pointed his axe towards the largest of the bridges. ‘There you are finding your road,’ he told Guthrax. ‘You are crossing there and bringing destruction for my enemies.’

The huge daemon clapped its hands together in a gesture that would have suggested childish excitement had it come from anything less grotesque. ‘It seems there are many who will grow closer to the Grandfather,’ it gobbled. ‘Are you so certain you would feed so many of your own to me? Your warriors already on the bridge will have the choice of drowning or being in my way.’

‘That is being your road,’ Torglug repeated. He knew the daemon meant to horrify him with the thought of how many of his own followers would be destroyed when Guthrax crossed the bridge. The monster had no appreciation of his ambition. If it cost the life of every mortal that bent their knee to him, he would spend them. Once he captured the Everqueen and gave Nurgle the prize he coveted, Torglug would be rewarded with armies so vast as to make this legion seem a rabble of brigands.

Slobbering and chuckling, Guthrax shambled off towards the bridge. The Great Unclean One’s advance was noted by friend and foe alike. The Chaos warriors near the bridge scattered, those already on the span fleeing back to the closer shore. Some made it, but others were caught between Guthrax’s advance and the shield wall of lightning-men at the other end. A few of these wretches leapt into the sea rather than being crushed under the daemon’s waddling bulk. Many more hurled themselves against the shield wall, fighting with desperate abandon. The archers on the far side stopped loosing arrows and bolts into Torglug’s mortal warriors and instead directed their shots at Guthrax. The warlord laughed at their futile attempts to bring down the greater daemon.

‘Is it wise to commit Guthrax by himself?’ Slaugoth asked the warlord. ‘The enemy may call on the power of their own god. The lightning that–’

‘Against Guthrax, we are letting them be doing their worst,’ Torglug said. ‘More attention daemon is drawing to itself is being better for me. More resources enemy is setting against Guthrax, less they are having to be bringing against real threat.’

Slaugoth looked puzzled, the worms between his blackened teeth even growing still. ‘The real threat?’

Torglug brought his blackened axe down, hacking a sliver from the ice at his feet. ‘Me,’ he said. ‘While lightning-men are committing themselves against Guthrax and other bridgeheads, I am leading my best warriors against them – only we not be using one of bridges they are leaving us. We are making own bridge.’

The sorcerer’s stomach tightened. To defy Torglug was to invite death, but trying to repeat the ritual he’d performed before would certainly destroy him. He didn’t have the legion’s warlocks and shamans to exploit this time – indeed the only resources he could draw upon were his own acolytes. Trying to repeat the spell with so little energy to syphon would reduce him to a withered husk.

Looking back at Guthrax, an idea occurred to Slaugoth. He couldn’t cross the gap as he had before, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other ways to accomplish the feat. Among Torglug’s legion were the disgusting Slothcrawlers, a pack of daemonic beasts. The immense, slug-like monstrosities would serve the sorcerer’s purpose.

Removing from the head of his staff one of his most potent talismans, Slaugoth began his spell. The sickening Slothcrawlers slithered towards the frozen wave on which Torglug stood. ‘The daemons will build your bridge,’ he told the warlord.

‘Then be building it,’ Torglug commanded, pointing to the spot where he would make his crossing.

Gibbering in crazed jubilation, the first of the daemonic creatures sank its claws into the side of the ice shelf, leaving its body to dangle over the edge. The second beast slithered down the body of the first, its tentacles biting into the flesh of its companion. Viscous ooze drooled from each of the ropey tendrils, fusing the hideous beasts together. A third monster soon followed, repeating the process. Daemon by daemon, Slaugoth was creating a living bridge across the gap. The serpents beneath the waves poked their head up from the waters, but recoiled from the diseased essence of the loathsome daemons.

Torglug laughed at the gruesome novelty of such a passage, then summoned his putrid blightkings to him. Once the daemonic bridge was set, they would follow the vile path to the other side. Already he could see the enemy reacting to Slaugoth’s ploy, a wall of lightning-men forming up where they judged the living bridge would stretch across.

Torglug laughed when he caught the flash of the holy lantern. It seemed the enemy commander was going to personally receive him when he staged his crossing. Destroying him would be an enjoyable appetiser before he seized the queen-seed.

‘It will need more than courage to stand against that obscenity,’ Angstun told Grymn, pointing to the hideous bulk of the Great Unclean One as it waddled across the bridge, drawing ever closer to the formation of Liberators at the other end. The daemon chortled hideously as it crushed marauders and Chaos knights under its bulk or grabbed hapless beastmen from the ice to drop into its gash-like maw. The abomination’s mere presence caused the ice to become blemished, crusted with a leprous foam.

Lord-Relictor Morbus added his agreement to Angstun’s words. ‘Like the claw of Nurgle himself,’ he said. ‘A trial to test even the most stalwart.’ Tallon snarled as though to add his own support.

‘We must hold,’ Grymn swore. ‘The daemon can’t be allowed to break through. Every heartbeat we keep them here increases the chance for the Lady of Vines to escape.’

‘You’ll need the reserves to meet Torglug when he crosses that damnable bridge he’s made,’ Angstun said. He looked to Morbus, waited for a nod from his skull-shaped helm. ‘Let us stop the daemon for you, commander.’

Grymn hesitated. Angstun could appreciate the Lord-Castellant’s dilemma. The risk was enormous and if they failed, the Hallowed Knights would be deprived of two of their leaders. To do nothing, however, would see the daemon break through. Alone the monster would be capable of holding the bridgehead, and the plaguehosts would pour across. Whatever his reservations, Angstun knew Grymn would do what was necessary to protect the queen-seed.

‘Sigmar watch over you,’ Grymn said, laying his hand upon Angstun’s shoulder. ‘Whatever it takes, hold the daemon.’ He looked back to the living bridge and the advancing mass of Torglug’s champions. ‘I will keep the plaguelord from crossing here.’

Angstun saluted Grymn and hurried towards the span threatened by the greater daemon. Morbus lagged just behind him, the Lord-Relictor’s stamina drained by the lightning storms he had called down from the skies. Some fell power was interceding on behalf of the plaguehosts, distorting the bolts as they came crackling down and denying them the precision and power they usually possessed. Efforts to bring the fury of the heavens raining down on Torglug and his monstrous bridge had only sent slivers of electricity sparking across the surface of the sea.

‘Nearer to the enemy I may be able to defy the magic that strives against my powers,’ Morbus told Angstun as they ran, giving voice to the Knight-Vexillor’s concerns.

‘What can be done will be done,’ Angstun replied. ‘Sigmar grant that it is enough.’

The obscene bulk of the Great Unclean One lumbered nearer to the shield wall. Arrows from the Judicators continued to slam into the daemon, but without effect, provoking only a glottal cough of amusement from the fiend. As it trudged along, a string of bones and slime oozed out from one of the monster’s hands, hardening until it became a gigantic flail. The daemon dragged the loathsome weapon behind it, cracking it from side to side in its impatience to close with the Liberators.

Morbus stopped as they approached the defensive position. Holding his relic hammer high, he tried to call down the celestial fury of Sigmar upon the Great Unclean One. Divine power suffused the head of his weapon, but at once he realised something was wrong. A discordant vibration was burrowing its way into the energies he was summoning.

‘Torglug’s sorcerer strives against me,’ he growled through clenched teeth. ‘But he shall not prevail.’ Crouching down, he set the heft of his hammer against his knee. Ancient prayers of appeal, entreaties to the God-King, issued from behind the skull-faced helm.

For an instant, Angstun saw the celestial glow surrounding Morbus’ relic hammer intensify. The Hallowed Knights nearby, reserves waiting to support the shield wall, gasped in awe at the power the Lord-Relictor was calling upon, but awe gave way to revulsion as a sickly green luminance began to infect the divine glow. The grisly taint cast eerie shadows across Morbus, lending his aspect a sickly and perverse quality.

‘The daemon lends its power to the sorcerer,’ Morbus hissed, his voice creaking with the strain of defying his arcane foes. ‘They turn the foulness of their Crow God against me.’ He raised his head, staring at Angstun. ‘Leave me! All of you!’

The Hallowed Knights might have demurred, reluctant to abandon a leader in such distress, but Angstun could hear the strain in Morbus’ voice. It wasn’t fear for himself, but concern for his warriors that tore at the Lord-Relictor. Better than any of them, he knew the malignity of the magical forces the enemy was bringing to bear and what havoc might be unleashed. Raising their standard, Angstun called the Hallowed Knights to attend his command, ordering them back, leaving Morbus alone among the ice and snow.

It pained Angstun tremendously to leave Morbus, but almost at once his decision saw validation. The pestilent green glow continued to grow, expanding into a cloud of diseased miasma. Ice steamed within that noxious fog, falling snow sizzled and sparked as it struck the foetid vapour. Just visible within the veil of sorcerous contagion, Morbus struggled on, trying to defy the atrocious evil that was turned against him. Smoke rose from his armour as even the sigmarite plate began to corrode beneath the aura of decay.

Ghastly shapes leapt into being all around Morbus, rising up with the foul vapours. Daemonic creatures conjured by the magic of the Lord-Relictor’s foes, the monsters converged upon him, dragging him down onto the ice. From the midst of the grisly melee, Morbus’ voice reached Angstun. ‘Forget me! Stop the greater daemon!’

Angstun forced himself to turn away. He had to concentrate on the daemon and prevent it from crossing. With the Lord-Relictor gone, there was no chance to stop the beast before it reached the shield wall. He looked across the warriors acting as reserves for the Liberators. A retinue of Judicators with boltstorm crossbows, a wargrove of sylvaneth and, most formidable of all, Decimator-Prime Diocletian and his paladins.

‘Diocletian, your men will support me. I’m going for the daemon.’ He looked to the Judicators and cast a hopeful glance at the tree-creatures. ‘If we fall, it will be left to you to turn back our enemy.’

The daemon’s lumbering steps finally brought it to the shield wall. Even as sigmarite arrows rained down upon it, the Great Unclean One struck at the Liberators barring its way. The obscene flail lashed out, whipping across the stolid ranks of Stormcasts. Some of the armoured warriors were flattened by the heavy, skull-shaped bludgeons fixed to the ends of each ropey chain. Others were snagged on the spikes and spurs that thrust out from the surface of the flail, hooked on the putrid barbs and dragged out of formation by the daemon’s prodigious strength. Before the reeling Liberators could recover, its clawed hand swept out, swatting them over the edge of the bridge.

The Hallowed Knights held fast, closing together where the daemon’s attack had claimed their comrades. Swords and hammers flashed as they struck back at the abomination, but the monster would not be denied. From its plague-infested innards, a bilious stream of corruption spewed across the silver warriors. Shields lowered, weapons faltered as the searing slime boiled against sigmarite plate. Again, the Great Unclean One surged forwards, its flail cracking down to annihilate a dozen Stormcasts. The daemon drove its decayed enormity full into the shield wall, crushing more warriors beneath its waddling obesity. Swarms of diminutive nurglings erupted from the Great Unclean One’s exposed gut to fall upon the injured.

A bubbling cry of malicious triumph rattled from the daemon’s toad-like maw as it slaughtered the Liberators and reached the far side of the bridge. Its grisly humour only increased when it found Angstun and the Decimators moving to block its path. Clearly the daemon considered this small group of adversaries an insignificant obstacle.

Angstun could see the flashes of vanquished Hallowed Knights flaring behind the daemon, testimony to the carnage it had wrought. He was determined that it would pay for what it had done. He would make it pay for the loss of Morbus. He would show it the divine might of Sigmar, the God-King.

‘Only the faithful!’ Angstun cried out. The Knight-Vexillor brought the standard slamming down into the thick pack ice. From the great icon at its top a shaft of blue light leapt skywards. The bolt vanished into the stormclouds.

Obscene laughter slobbered from the daemon’s maw as it reached for Angstun. Whatever power the Stormcast had called upon, it seemed it wasn’t answering. Before it could close its flabby claw around its prey, however, a blazing ball of fire came hurtling down from the heavens. A twin-tailed comet, the manifestation of Sigmar’s godly wrath.

The comet slammed into the ice, fracturing the thick pack, sending great slabs crashing down into the sea. The bridge the greater daemon had crossed collapsed, pitching dozens of Chaos warriors and beastmen into the churning waters below. The daemon lord itself stumbled, sliding back towards the gap behind it.

Bellowing in rage, the Great Unclean One tried to escape the crumbling shelf. Angstun and the Decimators still stood in its path, however. The Knight-Vexillor struck at it with the end of his standard while the paladins brought their thunderaxes chopping at its flanks. Something akin to panic seized the daemon as the ice continued to collapse behind it.

Angstun thrust the end of his standard into the Great Unclean One’s grasping claw. Puncturing the rancid flesh, the weapon became embedded in the daemon’s palm. Snarling in wrath, the monster jerked its arm upwards, pulling Angstun into the air. The monster stared hatefully at the dangling warrior, then its frog-like tongue shot out, wrapping around its helpless enemy. Angstun struggled against the daemon’s grip, but was unable to break the crushing embrace of the slimy coils.

Decimator-Prime Diocletian cried out to his paladins. Together they hurled themselves against the hulking daemon, hacking at it with their thunderaxes. The daemon swatted at them with its flail, trying to drive them back, while its tongue retracted into its sickly maw.

Angstun felt his armour crumpling under the mounting pressure of Guthrax’s tongue. His very soul recoiled in disgust as the daemon’s maw loomed before him. Death was the sacrifice every Stormcast was ready to accept, but this would be a terrible end. If only he could content himself with the knowledge that he’d succeeded in thwarting the daemon’s assault and prevented it from continuing its pursuit of the Lady of Vines.

As if in response to the Knight-Vexillor’s entreaty, the ice around Guthrax rumbled. The cosmic violence of the comet had weakened the shelf terribly, but the daemon’s own efforts with its monstrous flail had finally decided the matter. In trying to ward off Diocletian’s warriors, the Great Unclean One had sealed its own fate. Angstun sneered as he saw Guthrax react to the groan that shuddered through the ice.

‘Darkness cannot prevail against faith,’ Angstun spat, even as he felt his bones breaking in the daemon’s coils.

With a monumental clamour, the ice crumbled away. Guthrax was sent plummeting into the sea, but with it the daemon dragged Angstun and the Decimators to destruction. The Great Unclean One’s push had been thwarted, but not without sacrifice.

From where he stood at the end of Torglug’s living bridge, Grymn watched Angstun and the Decimators die as they followed the greater daemon down into the sea. He saw the bright flashes of light as they were sent hurtling back to Azyr and into Sigmar’s keeping. Tallon whined sadly, but the gryph-hound’s master could afford no sorrow. There was no time to mourn their loss or even to salute their valour. Grymn had his own battle to fight.

The grotesque figure of Torglug the Despised advanced across the abominable bridge formed from the bodies of his slug-like daemons. With the warlord came his mightiest and most depraved fighters, his bodyguard elite. Hideous warriors, their bloated bodies spilling out from rents in their armour and splits in the corroded mail that straddled their frames, all Torglug’s entourage bore the ghastly fly-rune branded upon their flesh. Gigantic cleaver-like axes and obscene swords were clenched in the fists of each man, vile talismans and trophies tied about their hafts or hanging from their guards. A diseased, slobbering cough dripped from the barbarians, a paean to Nurgle himself. Behind the warlord’s retinue, careful to keep their distance lest they trespass upon Torglug’s victory, packs of skin-clad marauders and one-eyed plaguebearers marched.

Grymn knew only too well how little he had to oppose Torglug and defy the plaguelord’s attack. A pair of treelords and a retinue of Protectors armed with stormstrike glaives were all that stood with him to hold the enemy back and buy more time for the Lady of Vines to make good her escape. Perhaps Lord-Celestant Gardus would have taken different measures, adopted a better strategy to oppose the warlord, but Grymn had done all he could. His mission wasn’t to destroy the enemy, but to keep him from capturing Alarielle. To achieve that, he needed something the Stormcasts couldn’t provide.

His greatest weapon in this struggle wouldn’t be the Hallowed Knights, but Torglug himself. Grymn held his warding lantern higher, letting its purifying light shine into the faces of the warlord’s bodyguard. Pained snarls and foul curses sputtered from the lips of the advancing foe. The divine energies of the lantern acted as a restorative to the Stormcasts, but for the slaves of Chaos they were a withering affliction. They were not enough to destroy villains steeped in such infamy as Torglug’s elite bodyguard, but they could still weaken and distract these diseased foes.

Grymn hoped to provoke a further reaction from Torglug’s retinue. He wanted to enrage them, to fan the flames of fury in their corrupt hearts, goad them into a reckless attack that would be fought not with a mind towards strategy but simply with the raw instincts of berserk beasts.

Torglug hung back as his bodyguard spurred themselves forwards at a run. The first of the hideous plague warriors were snatched from the bridge just as they reached the ice, caught in the wooden talons of the treelords. The huge sylvaneth flung their diseased captives from them in an almost human display of revulsion, sending the warriors hurtling into the sea.

Other warriors followed, rushing at the treelords as the sylvaneth threw the first wave into the icy waters. Many of these were confronted by the Protectors, the mighty paladins skewering their corpulent enemies upon their glaives, ripping apart the plague-infested warriors with the searing energies bound within their weapons. Over and again the silver-armoured Stormcasts sent a cursing adversary crashing to the ice, rancid blood spurting from severed limbs and ruptured organs.

Yet Torglug’s bodyguard were no normal enemy. Their bodies infested by the most virulent of Nurgle’s diseased blessings, their souls corrupted by the sting of the daemonfly, they fought on despite their wounds. A hulking warrior, his face lost in a mass of pustules and sores, crawled down the length of the stormglaive that impaled him so that he could smash the skull of a paladin with his spiked mace. Another monstrosity crawled out from under the stomping foot of a treelord, chest collapsed and splintered ribs tearing through his flesh, so that he might slash at the sylvaneth’s roots with a crescent-bladed scythe.

The filth encrusting the blades of Torglug’s elite troops brought ruin to the treelords. From each cut and gash, a vile stream of contagion crackled through their wooden bodies. Bark whitened and split, falling away in wormy strips. Blood-sap bubbled up from ruptured roots or dribbled from withered branches. Even as they smashed their enemies underfoot or crushed them in their mighty hands, the treelords were being destroyed by the noxious wounds dealt to them.

With death coursing through their bodies, the sylvaneth struggled to push through Torglug’s bodyguard and reach their ghastly leader. Though their language was alien to him, Grymn knew the treelords recognised Torglug, and with that recognition came a terrible rage. To destroy the plaguelord, the sylvaneth were willing to trade their lives. Unfortunately such a bargain wasn’t in the offing. The plague warriors brought down their towering opponents, hacking them apart with ugly axes and splintering their trunks with brutal mauls.

The treelords were the first to fall before the warlord’s elite troops, but they weren’t the last. As more of Torglug’s bodyguard charged onto the ice, the Protectors found themselves overcome. One after another the paladins were cut down, ravaged by the sorcerous contagion bound within the diseased blades of their enemies.

At the centre of the fray, Lord-Castellant Lorrus Grymn continued to hold his ground. Bearing the warding lantern, he had become the target of choice for the enraged servants of Chaos. His halberd had ripped the head from one of Torglug’s bodyguard, shorn the clawed arm from a second and pierced the heart of a third. Tallon ripped at the vile enemies, savaging their diseased flesh with his beak and claws. A heap of mangled bodies lay strewn about him, yet still they came, determined to extinguish the hurtful light and the one who bore it. The assault only abated when a vicious snarl cut through the howls and shrieks of the plague warriors.

‘This man being mine! He is belonging to me!’ The voice was like the gargle of a bog and the death rattle of a toad, an auditory stench of corruption and obscenity. The warlord’s troops withdrew from Grymn, making way for their master’s advance. Grymn commanded Tallon to keep back. If the plaguelord wanted a duel, then he would oblige the fiend.

Grymn had only seen Torglug at a distance before. Closer now, he could appreciate the horror of this monstrous servant of Nurgle. He was a huge man, powerfully muscled despite the bloated, corrupt swell of his gut. What little armour he wore was pitted and stained with corrosion, though each segment looked solid despite the patina of decay. Upon his vambrace the fly-rune had been daubed in a crust of filth, glowing with a foetid vitality. A single horn curled outwards from the helm that encased his head, only three holes affording a glimpse of the monster within.

Grymn looked through them into Torglug’s blemished eyes, studying their spoiled depths, seeking some clue as to the mind behind them. Through the infestation of depravity, he saw a pitiless hate. A hate now directed against him.

Torglug hefted his massive axe, specks of foulness spilling from its blackened blade. ‘God-King is abandoning you,’ he told Grymn. ‘He is leaving you alone to be facing wrath of Torglug.’

‘Sigmar has blessed me with the honour of ending your atrocities,’ Grymn snarled in the warlord’s face.

‘Too late is fanatic learning despair,’ Torglug laughed. ‘First I am killing your light. Then I am killing your faith. When you are begging for death, then, perhaps, I am killing you.’

Exhibiting a speed Grymn thought impossible for a man of his size, Torglug rushed at him. The Lord-Castellant whispered a prayer to Sigmar. Not for victory in this fray, but that he could hold the warlord long enough for the Lady of Vines to slip beyond his reach.

Chapter eight

Torglug’s axe swept towards Grymn’s side. The blow was brutal and vicious with the might and malignity of the plaguelord’s bulk behind it. What the attack lacked was discipline and finesse, skill to complement strength. Grymn twisted away from his enemy’s strike, catching the blow on the haft of his halberd. The collision of blighted steel against holy sigmarite sent a metallic trill ringing out across the frozen sea. Grymn rolled with the impact, turning his block into a sliding parry. Before Torglug was aware of the manoeuvre, the Stormcast drove the blade of his halberd into the warlord’s ribs.

Grymn felt his weapon pierce the diseased warlord, heard the blade slice deep into his corrupt flesh. A soupy broth of blood and maggots streamed down his halberd as he drew back. Against a normal foe, it would have been a mortal wound. Torglug, however, didn’t even seem to notice. Instead he lunged at Grymn once more, chopping at him with a downward sweep of his axe that would have split the Lord-Castellant from crown to hip had it connected. Again, Grymn exploited his enemy’s rage, using Torglug’s own fury and impatience to provide an opening for retaliation.

It wasn’t long before the warlord left himself exposed. Torglug’s axe was a blur as he delivered a blizzard of attacks, trying to cut down Grymn. The assault fell into a rhythm before long, a pattern a more controlled warrior would never have allowed himself to slip into. Grymn followed that pattern, blocking and dodging until he found the opening he was waiting for. When Torglug swung his body around to strike at Grymn’s leg, the Stormcast plunged ahead, driving the edge of his halberd against the warlord’s hip. The sigmarite blade slashed through Torglug’s armour, leaving a jagged strip flapping against his knee. The body beneath was no less savaged, bile gushing from a wound in which the white of bone glistened.

This time Grymn knew better than to trust the severity of the injury to cripple Torglug’s counter. Instead he raised the warding lantern, shining its light into the cluster of blemished eyes. More than his wound, it was the stinging rays from the lantern that caused the warlord to stagger back.

Grymn glanced past Torglug. The way was clear for the warlord’s blightkings to range out across the ice and resume their hunt for the Lady of Vines. Instead the hideous throng stood idle, diseased spectators to the fray betwixt their master and the commander of the Hallowed Knights. The warbands crossing the living bridge displayed no desire to press onwards while the fate of their warlord was in question. By holding Torglug here, Grymn was delaying the strongest and fiercest fighters in the warlord’s entire legion.

A moment before, Grymn had cursed the abominable vitality that preserved Torglug and allowed the warlord to keep fighting. Now he was thankful for the dark blessing that hung over his enemy. Alive and fighting, the warlord would make the greater part of his legion tarry here, waiting to learn his fate. Grymn had to draw out their duel for as long as possible.

For a third time, Grymn’s halberd slashed into Torglug’s body. This time the blade gnawed at the plaguelord’s swollen gut, slicing across his skin. The instant the blow landed, Grymn pulled back, blunting the impetus behind the stroke.

He had no need of the warding lantern to fend off Torglug’s retaliation. The warlord withdrew of his own accord, retreating several paces. As Grymn’s halberd cut into his body, Torglug had felt the sudden lack of force behind the blow. Now Grymn could see the gleam of suspicion in his foe’s eyes. Taking another step back, the warlord called out to his men.

‘Worms of Crow God!’ he shouted. ‘You are being across crevice. Path is being clear for you. Be finding Radiant Queen!’ Torglug raised his axe, catching Grymn’s halberd on its haft and pushing the Lord-Castellany back.

Grymn fought in earnest now, his gambit for delaying the plaguehosts undone. While he fought Torglug, diseased warriors streamed out across the ice, charging into the snow as they tried to find the Lady of Vines. He couldn’t hold back that plague-addled tide – all he could do was try to hurt the enemy as dearly as he could before he was overwhelmed. If he could cut down Torglug then the slaves of Nurgle would be thrown into confusion, plunged into bickering among themselves while they decided upon a new warlord to lead them.

Now it was Torglug who fought with cold detachment and steely discipline. Gone were the reckless, brutal assaults. Instead the warlord fought with insidious craft, exploiting to the full his monstrous strength and uncanny speed. Grymn found himself giving ground to his foe, hard-pressed to fend off the relentless string of attacks with his halberd in one hand and his lantern in the other.

One advantage yet remained with Grymn. The light of his warding lantern continued to vex Torglug, nettling the warlord and causing him to instinctively flinch from it. It was a slim advantage, serving only to blunt some of the precision and ardour of the warlord’s blows.

Torglug abandoned the heavy-handed attacks he’d been inflicting. Taking up his monstrous axe in one hand, he swung the weapon with horrifying ease, trading the sheer strength of his double-handed strikes for the speed of single-handed chops. Grymn found it harder to intercept the swifter blows, but far less arduous to parry. After a minute or so of falling into a pattern of strike and block, it was Grymn who became the victim of settling into the rhythm of battle.

With shocking abruptness, Torglug suddenly tossed his axe from one hand to the other. In almost the same motion, he brought the blackened blade slashing upwards. The diseased axe clove across the face of the warding lantern, quenching its holy light. The blade swept on, crunching through the broken lamp to hew into the hand that held it.

Grymn cried out in agony as his hand was severed by Torglug’s axe. He saw it go spinning away, sliding across the ice. The stump burned with the putrid bite of the unclean blade, sending pain lancing through his body. Blood bubbled up from his torn flesh, spraying across the ice and snow. Even his endurance struggled to overcome the agony of his mutilation; only his devotion to Sigmar and to the duty entrusted to him by Gardus kept him standing.

As he was struck, Grymn heard Tallon snarl. The dutiful gryph-hound lunged at Torglug, his beak snapping shut around the warlord’s arm, savaging his putrid flesh with sidewise twists of its head. Torglug howled in pain and brought his armoured boot slamming into Tallon’s side. The hound cried out in pain and was thrown back, ripping a grisly gash in its enemy as its beak was torn free.

Grymn cried out in rage, flinging himself at the warlord. Torglug swatted the Lord-Castellant aside, mocking him. ‘I am killing the master then his dog!’ he chuckled.

Torglug was back to swinging his axe with both hands again. The warlord expected his crippled foe to be easy prey. A snarl of surprise and aggravation rattled from behind his helm when Grymn refused to be slaughtered. ‘Fanatic is not knowing when to quit,’ he spat at Grymn.

Grymn chopped at Torglug with his halberd, nearly striking the plaguelord’s leg. ‘Duty ends only in death,’ he told the diseased monster.

‘I am being ending your duty,’ Torglug snarled. The warlord spun his bloated bulk, putting all of his weight behind a murderous blow that slammed into Grymn’s side. Sigmarite plate stove in as the axe smashed into him. He felt ribs splinter, slivers of bone stabbing through his flesh. The impact knocked him from his feet, sent him hurtling across the ice.

For an instant, Grymn tried to regain his feet, unwilling to concede the field to Torglug. He’d failed in his mission, such was the thought that tormented him as darkness began to blot out his vision.

As the darkness settled over him, a prayer tumbled from Grymn’s lips. ‘Mighty Sigmar... do not forget the faithful.’

Surrounded by his acolytes, Slaugoth Maggotfang peered at the entrails he’d removed from a slaughtered rot fly. The omens he read in the cancerous organs were anything but reassuring. For a moment he tried to tell himself that the calamity he read there represented the fall of Guthrax into the Sea of Serpents.

The adepts of the Plague Coven called out to the sorcerer as their rotten familiars came flying back to them, buzzing and cawing as they reported Torglug’s victory over the leader of the lightning-men. The way ahead was open to the plaguehosts now. Entire tribes and warherds were charging across the bridge Slaugoth had formed from the Slothcrawlers. The frozen sea would soon be rife with hunters seeking the Lady of Vines. The Everqueen’s guardian might elude them for a time, but she wouldn’t escape.

How to explain the ominous portent he saw in the guts of the rot fly? Should he seek out Torglug and warn him of the ill omens? Slaugoth was at a loss for an answer until a peal of thunder drew his eyes skywards. At once he could see the change in the clouds. They had become even darker and more violent than during the worst of the snow-storm, and to his witchsight there was an unmistakable glamour shining behind the clouds, an aura that was as hateful as it was familiar. It was the same brilliance that burned within each lightning-man, the despised light of Sigmar.

Slaugoth watched as the storm descended, sending sheets of hail splattering down upon the frozen sea. Lightning and thunder hurtled down from the sky. It was no coincidence that the storm’s fury struck in the path of Torglug’s hunters. The sorcerer chided himself for his arrogance. He had felt the pestilent hand of Nurgle reach out to help his followers when they needed to cross onto the ice. Now a different god had intervened to aid the enemy. Slaugoth should have anticipated such a possibility and taken whatever steps he could to offset it.

As the lightning crashed downwards, Slaugoth caught hold of a worm-eaten vulture, the consort of one of his acolytes. Wringing the creature’s neck, he sent its spirit soaring into the sky, seeing in his mind what it saw with its spectral eyes. Where the lightning had struck there now stood dozens of warriors, lightning-men arrayed in armour of white and gold rather than the silver and blue of the enemies they’d been fighting. Sigmar God-King had answered the prayers of his followers and sent them reinforcements from Azyr.

The Plague Coven sensed the sorcerer’s alarm. They began to murmur among themselves, fright pulsing through their veins. Slaugoth quietened them with a threatening glare. By calling upon Nurgle, he had drawn the Grandfather’s attention to himself. If Torglug failed it wouldn’t be the warlord alone who suffered their god’s wrath. The sorcerer was determined to escape such a fate. A second Stormhost was a formidable obstacle, but one that might be offset by summoning allies of their own.

From the crest of a frozen wave, Slaugoth and his acolytes could see the churning waters of the Sea of Serpents. They could see the marine reptiles that feasted so greedily upon the warriors who fell within their reach. Slaugoth could feel the contagion that polluted those mighty monsters, the diseased infestations that had altered them when the Jade Kingdoms sickened. Already they were changing, becoming creatures of the Plaguefather. All it needed was a comparatively simple ritual to make them servants as well, to bind their ophidian minds to the will of Nurgle.

At a gesture from the sorcerer, his acolytes fell upon one of their own, dragging the weakest of the adepts into the circle within which the rot fly had been butchered. Slaugoth drew his dagger across the man’s throat, silencing his screams and sending a spray of arterial blood shooting across the snow. With his staff, the sorcerer dragged the blood across the ice, pulling it into sinuous shapes and sigils. Old magic coursed through his body as he drew upon arcane forces ancient beyond imagining. The bloody shapes began to writhe and wriggle in a noxious semblance of life. In the water, the vast serpents copied the movements of the pictures Slaugoth had drawn from the acolyte’s blood.

‘Go,’ Slaugoth hissed to the sea monsters. ‘Go. Find. Seek. Kill.’ A black-toothed smile crawled across his face as he watched the serpents submerge and slip beneath the ice. The Stormcasts might intercede with Torglug’s hunters above the ice, but there was precious little they could do to oppose the serpentine hounds the sorcerer had sent to stalk the Lady of Vines from below.

The sylvaneth could feel the thinning of the ice beneath their feet, sense the flowing waves underneath them. They were closing upon the far shore of the frozen sea. The Lady of Vines would soon be on firm ground again and much closer to the ancient places where she hoped to take the queen-seed.

Suddenly, the ice split open only a few yards from the branchwraith. A gigantic serpent boiled up from the rent, hissing and snapping as it struck at her. The creature’s grey hide was mottled with foul red growths, and clumps of black mites scuttled between its scales. The mark of Nurgle was upon it, shining in its eyes.

The Lady of Vines leaped from the path of the striking reptile, its jaws slamming into the ice at her feet. Before it could strike again, the last of the Hallowed Knights in her retinue rushed forwards to engage the monster. A mixed force of sword-armed Liberators and Judicators with skybolt bows, they harried the monstrosity, pinning it down while shouting to the branchwraith to press on without them.

It was a scene that had been repeated several times since the Lady of Vines had left so many of her defenders behind to guard the bridges. Rushing up from the depths, the mammoth serpents had shattered the ice in their vicious efforts to stop the branchwraith’s escape. Some of the snakes had ripped open their own hides when they smashed through the frozen surface, striking at everything around them in agonised fury. Others had displayed an eerie craftiness, smashing a series of holes from which to surprise and confuse their prey.

With each encounter her retinue was lessened until all that was left to her now was a bodyguard of dryads. Even these might have been enough if the branchwraith could have crossed the frozen sea faster.

The sea serpents conjured from the depths of the sea were but one obstacle. Another was the mounting tremors caused by the jotunberg. The giant hadn’t relapsed into a deathly sleep as it had when summoned by Alarielle. The jotunberg shivered and quaked as its body was slowly consumed by the rot of Nurgle. Each movement sent a rumble through the ice, fracturing and splitting the surface, causing the dryads to sink their roots down lest they pitch and fall. The very storm that concealed them from the plaguehosts wrought its own toll, chilling the blood-sap flowing through the sylvaneth and slowing their bodies.

The Lady of Vines refused to waver from her cause. The queen-seed cradled in her hands spurred her onwards. Nothing could make her abandon the task before her. The radiant light of Alarielle could not be allowed to depart from Ghyran.

Ahead, the Lady of Vines could just see the shore, which was lined with statues, their huge forms rendered shapeless by age and decay. The race was nearly won. Beyond the statues were the ancient places where benevolent enchantments could still hold sway.

This near to the shore, far from the fallen jotunberg, the ice was thin, crackling beneath the probing steps of the dryads. Cautiously, the sylvaneth tried to advance, but a mighty worm-like horror erupted from beneath the ice, gulping down a pair of dryads in its quivering maw. The Lady of Vines and her court retreated before the revolting monstrosity, watching for it to sink into the depths.

Suddenly, the Lady of Vines turned, the glow of her eyes dipping into a baleful light. On the verge of escape, the enemy came for her once more. Out of the swirling snow and ice she could see hideous figures marching towards her. At their head was one no sylvaneth could forget – the one-horned figure of Torglug Treecutter.

Caught, cornered between the gigantic worm and the advancing warriors, the Lady of Vines altered her song once more. The keening wail became an angry screech. The slight aspects of the branchwraith and her dryads darkened, their hands lengthening into dagger-like talons. The time for running was over. Now it was time to fight.

Torglug roared at his warriors, goading them on through the raging storm. He cared not for the driving rain or the crashing thunder. His attention was fixed upon the radiant glow of the queen-seed, the prize he would capture for Nurgle. He alone could see the glow of the seed through the fog and snow.

It was enough that he could see it. His role was to lead; it was for others to follow him to glory.

That glory was near enough to taste when Torglug stalked out of the fog to see the Lady of Vines standing before him. The branchwraith had stopped running and had turned to confront her pursuers. Torglug smiled when he saw the gigantic worm lashing about the shallows behind her. The last stand hadn’t been her choice then, but rather a gift from Nurgle. He didn’t feel cheated to find his quarry already trapped. After such a long campaign, nothing could spoil the taste of victory for him.

Torglug motioned his putrid blightkings to stay back while he approached the Lady of Vines. His armoured boots crunched across the ice as he closed upon his prey. He was disappointed that even now he was incapable of detecting anything like fear or despair in the branchwraith’s visage. The sylvaneth were an eldritch breed. The eight realms would be better once their kind were exterminated.

The warlord forgot about the branchwraith when he saw the glowing object nestled in the hollow of her trunk. He could feel the vital energies that pulsated from the queen-seed; the parasitic rotworm nestling in his gut writhed in response to that invigorating aura. The light shining from the seed was different than the harsh glare of the warding lantern, though unsettling in its own way. The warding lantern had felt hard and condemning, while the radiance of the queen-seed was mournful, redolent of disappointment and regret. Torglug could recognize the entreaty, even if it had no power over him. He had been damned long ago. It was too late for mercy.

A spasm from the distant jotunberg caused the ice between Torglug and his prey to fracture. Lunging forwards with a grace that belied his bloated bulk, the warlord leapt across the crevice and balanced himself upon the broken ice. His trio of eyes fixed once more upon the Lady of Vines.

‘You are giving her to me,’ he said. ‘I am knowing just the Garden where that seed is being planted. The Grandfather will be growing something special there…’

Torglug knew the sylvaneth would never surrender Alarielle to him without a fight. His words were but a cruel barb to spur them into reckless action. The foolish lightning-man with the lantern was to thank for giving him the idea.

With a wailing shriek, several of the dryads attending the Lady of Vines charged at Torglug. He leapt towards them, abandoning his precarious stand on the ice. Slamming down, he brought his axe slashing around, hewing through the trunk of one dryad with a single blow. The creature’s severed halves crashed into the charging figures of its companions. Before they could recover, the warlord was among them. A chop of his blade split the face of one tree-creature; a driving blow ripped the leg from another and sent the mangled sylvaneth tumbling into the water.

It was only a matter of moments before Torglug had dispatched his enemies. He looked across at the Lady of Vines and the rest of her entourage. He could feel the hate rolling off them. To the sylvaneth he was the Tree-cutter of Thyrr, most hated of all Nurgle’s warlords. Now he could style himself the Annihilator of Athelwyrd. Soon he would be the Sorrow of the Sylvaneth.

Torglug pressed his thumb against his vile axe, slicing his blubbery skin and drawing a bead of yellow pus from his diseased veins. ‘You are surrendering her to me, or I am taking her from your splintered corpses.’

The warlord was ready to make good his promise when the sounds of battle rang out from the fog behind him. Enemies had engaged his putrid blightkings – lightning-men and sylvaneth trying to rescue the Lady of Vines and her charge. Well, his warriors would hold them off, keep them back until it was too late. This close to victory, there would be no escape.

Rushing forwards, Torglug brought his axe chopping towards the Lady of Vines. The branchwraith leapt back, just beyond his reach, then stunned the warlord by darting in to rake him with her claws. Grey-brown filth slopped from his flabby flesh, as his skin was shredded. Torglug tried to smash down his antagonist, but again she slipped past his assault.

Hefting his diseased axe, Torglug moved to press his attack. Before he could take more than a few steps, the rest of the dryads flew at him with their claws outstretched. Indescribable fury seized the warlord. All the frustration and impatience of the campaign boiled up inside him, spilling over in a paroxysm of savagery. Torglug swept his axe across the plunging bodies of the dryads, splitting trunks and severing limbs with each blow. He didn’t even feel the talons that slashed his flesh, despite the ragged wounds they left. What injury could compare to the plagues Nurgle had visited upon His favoured champion?

Torglug stalked across a litter of dead and dismembered dryads. He glared in disbelief as the fallen sylvaneth began to rise, sprouting new limbs to replace the ones he’d cut away, glowing with a new vibrancy that echoed the light of the queen-seed.

The queen-seed! The miraculous restoration must be Alarielle’s doing, an exertion of her divine powers. Torglug would have that power. He would make a present of it to Nurgle, use it to buy him the respite and relief that was his due.

Ignoring the claws of the revived dryads, Torglug strode towards the Lady of Vines.

‘You are standing between me and my destiny,’ he told her. ‘That is being bad place for standing,’ he added, raising his axe.

Even as Torglug moved to attack, burning pain flared through his bloated body. A wave of searing light spilled over him, throwing him across the ice. Smoke rose from his charred flesh and strips of melted armour dropped from him as he struggled to his feet. Through a haze of smouldering agony, he turned to face his assailant.

His foe was another lightning-man, this one clad in white armour with a radiant crest bolted to his helm. Wings of shimmering light spread from the warrior’s back and in his hand he held a lantern more terrible to the plaguelord’s eyes than the one he had cut from Lord-Castellant Grymn. Torglug’s adversary pointed a golden sword at the warlord.

‘Face me, monster,’ the white warrior said. ‘I am Knight-Azyros Diomar and I bring you this message – your time is over.’

The lightning-man’s beacon opened once more and from it another surge of searing light slammed into Torglug’s diseased bulk. The warlord was sent reeling, smoke rising from his scorched flesh. The stink of burst boils filled his lungs and his ears rang with the deafening echoes of the blast. Struggling once more to his feet, Torglug shook his horned head. He could see Diomar turn towards the Lady of Vines. Faintly, he could hear his words to her.

‘Flee, Lady – I will hold them.’

Torglug wondered at the lightning-man’s choice of words. Then his eyes strayed to the ice at his feet. He could see the vast, worm-like shape slithering just below the surface. He looked back towards Diomar and laughed.

‘I am thinking not for long,’ he hissed.

Grymn knew he was still alive by the pain that surged through his body. It felt as if liquid fire had been poured into his veins, searing and scorching every speck of his being. The memory of Torglug’s axe smashing his warding lantern and hacking through his hand flared across his vision. As he slowly opened his eyes, he expected to see the ghastly warlord standing over him, ready to finish the job with another swing of his blade.

What he saw instead was the angry sky above the Sea of Serpents. The storm had intensified, lightning and thunder joining the downpour of freezing rain and snow. Grymn gasped as he realised how familiar the storm was to him. No natural tempest, not even a magical snowburst conjured by the Lady of Vines – this was one of Sigmar’s storms, a manifestation of the God-King’s power. It was upon such storms that the Stormcasts descended to the realms to confront the slaves of Chaos.

The dismay of a moment before vanished. Grymn had felt at a loss when Torglug saw through his ploy and sent his vile warriors hunting after the queen-seed. His failure seemed complete when the enemy struck Tallon, cut off his hand and left him for dead on the ice. Now, however, he was filled with a new determination. Sigmar had not forgotten the Hallowed Knights. Contrary to the mocking suggestions of Torglug, the God-King hadn’t forsaken His faithful warriors. There was still hope. While there was life, the prospect of victory was never impossible.

He heard a whine and turned his head to see Tallon sitting beside him, guarding his body and his halberd. Grymn was heartened to see the gryph-hound had survived the fight, though the creature looked the worse for wear. He needed his weapon now, not to strike down his enemies but to help him back to his feet. Standing the halberd upright, he pulled himself along its haft, gradually lifting himself until he was off the ice. Every motion brought a surge of agony rushing through him. The ghastly wound in his side opened up again, blood dribbling out to spatter in the snow. Drawing a deep breath made his ribs ache and jostled the splintered bones piercing his flesh. Grymn realised that he would need to be judicious about how much he taxed his mangled body. Without the warding lantern, he couldn’t call upon its healing light to restore himself. He searched across the ice, finding the lamp lying on its side. It had been badly damaged by Torglug’s assault, but he could feel the faintest flicker of enchantment still smouldering within it. Carefully he lifted it off the ice and fastened it to his belt.

Reluctantly, Grymn looked to the ragged stump where his hand had been. Compounding the horror of his mutilation was the diseased crust that discoloured the wound. It was that filth which had prevented him from bleeding out, but he knew it was no mercy it offered him. He could almost see the corruption from Torglug’s axe gnawing away at him, polluting his body with its purulent influence. It was no mundane contagion that could inflict itself upon a Stormcast.

Sounds of battle made Grymn forget his own pain. Tearing his eyes away from the gory stump, he looked out across the frozen sea. He couldn’t see any of Torglug’s warriors, but just behind the swirling fog he caught the distinct flash of skybolt bows loosing arrows. It was from this direction the sounds of conflict rose. Whether the embattled warriors were Hallowed Knights or from another Stormhost, it was enough that they were enemies of Torglug. Steeling himself against the pain, Grymn limped towards the fighting, Tallon following faithfully after him.

When he emerged from the fog, Grymn found himself behind a chamber of Judicators and a wargrove of dryads. Hallowed Knights and sylvaneth had come against a tribe of marauders, striking at the barbarians from behind. He recognised the foul banners the enemy carried as belonging to the accursed Threespine tribe. The marauders had been caught in the valley between two frozen waves. Had they retreated or regrouped, they might have come around and surrounded their attackers. Instead, with the viciousness of their breed, the Threespines had simply turned about and charged into their tormentors.

The Judicators and their allies had adopted a simple but effective deployment. While the dryads barred the gap between the waves, the archers loosed volley after volley into the massed barbarians. The resultant slaughter was considerable, the shafts of lightning falling with such frequency that pits had opened in the ice to drop luckless marauders to a watery grave.

A fierce cheer rose from the Judicators when they spotted Lord-Castellant Grymn emerge from the fog. ‘Only the faithful!’ they shouted. Despite the pain it caused him, Grymn returned their cry.

The shouts had a profound effect upon the Threespines. Thinking their adversaries had received substantial reinforcements, the barbarian attack faltered and then broke. The marauders turned to retreat back the way they had come. Grymn was surprised when the dryads didn’t pursue them, even more surprised when the Judicators sent no arrows against the reeling enemy.

It was then that he spotted a lone figure standing upon the crest of one of the waves. Garbed in silver armour, the apparition raised his hammer skywards. In response, a crackling storm of lightning came smashing down. The ice towards which the Threespines fled was shattered. Fissures snaked away, opening beneath the very feet of the marauders. Howling in shock and terror, the barbaric warriors were sucked down into the icy water. In the space of only heartbeats, the entire tribe was obliterated.

‘Morbus,’ Grymn laughed. He had thought the Lord-Relictor destroyed along with Angstun and the Decimators. It was a relief beyond measure to find his friend still alive.

By the time Grymn reached the Judicators, Morbus had climbed down from the icy summit. The Lord-Relictor’s armour was scorched and blackened, and half of his skull-helm was melted away, looking as if it had been torn apart by monstrous claws. Grymn shuddered to think what Morbus’ wounds must have looked like before he turned his healing powers upon himself.

From the expression he saw on the exposed half of Morbus’ face, Grymn imagined it would have been similar to the injuries he’d been dealt. The Lord-Relictor studied him closely, shaking his head when he came to examine the infected stump.

‘My power can mend the gash in your side,’ Morbus told him. ‘I may even be able to mend your lantern, but cleansing your hand – or where your hand should be – is another thing.’

Grymn glanced away, looking over the Judicators. He could see the hope in their eyes, the hope that he knew his presence as their commander inspired. He was surprised to find even the dryads displaying an interest in him, something perhaps more profound than simple curiosity. After all they had endured upon the ice, maybe even the sylvaneth had come to depend upon him.

‘Can you mend me enough so I can fight?’ Grymn asked, lowering his voice to a whisper.

Morbus nodded. ‘The stump will torment you,’ he warned. ‘If you can ignore the pain, you might hold your own.’ He stared hard into Grymn’s eyes. ‘But I wouldn’t advise it. We’ve lost too many already. If they see you fall…’

‘And if they see me fight it will inspire them,’ Grymn objected. Things were dire enough already without Morbus’ bleak perspective to further darken them. ‘They need that more than anything right now.’

‘I’ve said my piece.’ Morbus shrugged. He pointed to the sky above. ‘You saw the thunderstrike. Great Sigmar has dispatched reinforcements to aid us. I saw some of them from a distance, Prosecutors soaring above the ice. They bore the colours of the Knights Excelsior.’

Grymn digested this information. He must have been insensible during the thunderstrike, but to know their reinforcements were from the Knights Excelsior gave him comfort. They were a fierce and determined Stormhost, a formidable ally and a daunting enemy.

‘I didn’t see how many descended in the storm,’ Morbus said. ‘The numbers of Chaos warriors I’ve seen prowling the ice makes me think there can’t be many. Not enough to simply brush aside Torglug’s legion.’

Looking again at the angry sky, Grymn felt the bite of the Lord-Relictor’s words.

‘Then it is still up to us to protect the Everqueen,’ he said. ‘Minister to me as best you can, old friend, for we must find the Lady of Vines and keep her from Torglug’s grasp.’

Morbus gave Grymn another severe look. ‘Which concerns you more? Protecting the queen-seed or getting a chance to cross blades with that scum again?’

‘Sigmar willing, both are in my future,’ Grymn told him.

The enormous sea worm burst through the ice pack, sending great chunks flying in every direction. An undulating wail rippled from its heaving bulk as it angrily lashed about trying to find prey. Nearly blind, all but mindless, the monstrous thing posed as much of a threat to the servants of Nurgle as it did to Diomar.

Clutches of Torglug’s minions came stalking out of the fog while he battled the lightning-man. Blightlord Goregus Festermaw had rallied some of the putrid blightkings. The diseased warriors rushed out of the fog like crazed beasts, charging towards the winged Stormcast. The abruptness of the assault made Diomar climb into the air and turn his beacon against the blightkings. Torglug forced his battered body into action, seizing upon his foe’s distraction to close the distance between them.

Before he could reach Diomar, the sea worm struck. Torglug had seen it swimming beneath the ice for some minutes, but the monstrosity had kept its distance. Perhaps even its brute instinct was intimidated by the lightning-man’s beacon. Whatever the cause, the howls of battle as the putrid blightkings rushed towards Diomar had lured the leviathan up from the deeps.

Ice split and fractured as the wormy titan snapped its ghoulish jaws in search of prey. Blightkings were pitched into the watery depths as the surface shattered under their feet.

Torglug fought his way across the splintering ice, hurdling the pits that the worm’s ferocity opened, sprinting across crumbling ledges before they could finish disintegrating. The warlord heard the worm slip back beneath the water. What eerie senses guided the obscenity, he could not say, but somehow the blind beast felt his presence on the ice. He saw its grisly shadow start towards him from below. Torglug raised his voice in a defiant shout, hurling insults up at the hovering Diomar. ‘Are God-King’s dogs being afraid to be crossing blades with Torglug?’

‘Worms of Nurgle aren’t fought,’ Diomar declared. ‘They’re purged.’ Swooping downwards, he turned the beam of his beacon upon the bloated plaguelord.

Torglug’s body was wracked by agony as his flesh cooked under the searing light. Every nerve in his body spasmed at once. Only a caprice of chance kept his fingers locked about the haft of his axe, only the abnormal vitality Nurgle had gifted him kept his heart from bursting or his lungs from collapsing. His mouth tightened in a rictus grin, his teeth severing the tip of his tongue as they bit down.

Diomar dived towards the smouldering warlord. He raised his glistening starblade, its ancient symbols glowing with power.

‘Too long has this realm suffered your presence,’ he snarled.

Through the searing pain that ravaged him, Torglug managed to laugh. He could see his enemy coming towards him, but he wondered if Diomar noticed the shadow writhing under the ice.

‘Glory I am finding here, dog of Sigmar,’ Torglug spat, blood dripping from the mask of his helm. ‘But you are finding only death.’

The warlord brought his blackened axe swinging upwards, blocking Diomar’s blade and pushing the winged warrior back. At the same time, the sea worm erupted from below, rising in a leprous column of quivering flesh and snapping jaws. The creature’s maw chomped at the lightning-man, narrowly missing him as he plunged back towards the ice. He crashed hard against the pack, the fragile surface cracking beneath his weight. Cautiously he regained his feet, starblade gripped in one mailed fist, the beacon clenched in his other. Torglug could feel the righteous outrage of his enemy as Diomar turned towards him.

‘You will pay for that, monster,’ Diomar snarled.

‘Be having dinner with worm of Nurgle,’ Torglug sneered as he tossed a chunk of ice thrown up by the sea monster towards Diomar. It landed on the already cracked surface, sending a spider-web of fresh splits snaking away in every direction. Pops and groans rose from the impact, presaging the collapse to come.

Before the surface broke beneath his feet, Diomar was in motion. The lightning-man leapt forwards as the ice gave way completely, flinging himself at Torglug.

Plaguelord and Knight-Azyros collided, their armoured bodies rolling across the ice. More cracks and creaks accompanied their struggling figures, the weakened surface unable to support both their weight and their violence. At last it split under them, dropping both into the frigid water. Torglug lunged for one side of the pit, his axe hooking the edge before his armour could drag him down. Diomar floundered on the other side of the pool, forced to let his beacon sink into the depths while he pulled himself back onto the ice.

The two adversaries glared at one another from opposite sides of the pool. Diomar glanced at the weakening storm and at the shore behind him. Torglug understood his enemy’s mind. Somewhere, beyond the ice, the Lady of Vines was even now hurrying away from her hunters.

‘She is not escaping,’ Torglug sneered. ‘Jade Kingdoms are belonging to Nurgle. All Ghyran is being his domain! I am finding her. I am claiming my destiny.’

Diomar glared back at the warlord. ‘Only when you get past me.’

‘As you are saying,’ Torglug laughed. The warlord circled around the pool at a run, ice creaking and cracking beneath his every step. Across from him, Diomar did the same. The two enemies reached one another in moments, starblade pitted against the diseased corruption of Torglug’s blighted axe. Slivers of corroded steel flew from the black axe as Diomar blocked his enemy’s assault. Streaks of filth marred the purity of the lightning-man’s blade as the noxious enchantments of Nurgle sizzled against it.

At last the furious struggle came to an end. The smallest spot of rot gained a hold upon Diomar’s starblade, the slightest pollution in its sanctity. This flaw gave way beneath Torglug’s axe. The blackened blade slipped through his guard to chop down into the crest of his helm and then into the sigmarite mask itself. Diomar’s free hand caught at Torglug’s wrist, striving to push the warlord back. Against the bloated bulk and tremendous strength of Nurgle’s favoured champion, he was unable to prevail. Inch by inch the axe sank lower, hewing through the metal and into the flesh and bone beneath it. Diomar could feel the fiery sting of the axe’s plague-infested edge racing through him.

‘She is not escaping,’ Torglug promised as he pushed the axe deeper and watched the light start to fade from Diomar’s eyes. ‘I am claiming prize that the Grandfather is demanding. Be letting that truth speeding you back to Sigmar.’

Torglug pulled away as Diomar’s dying body blazed into light and the Stormcast’s spirit departed the Sea of Serpents. He shielded his eyes against the holy flare, finding its momentary brilliance even more painful than Grymn’s warding lantern. Yet he took comfort from this hurt, for with Diomar’s destruction there was nothing to keep him from running down the Lady of Vines.

The rotworm nestled inside him began to twist and writhe, undulating with such a frenzied spasm that Torglug fell to his knees in pain. The torment wracking his body was unspeakable, yet at the same time there was a strange sense of comfort bound within that agony. This wasn’t a punishment being meted out to him by Nurgle, but rather the Plague God’s expression of delight and appreciation that his favourite had vanquished the mighty Knight-Azyros Diomar. The torture that crawled through Torglug wasn’t a curse, but a blessing.

From the slits in his helm, Torglug’s three eyes watched as the many boils and pustules scattered about his skin began to slither across his flesh, oozing down his limbs or across his swollen belly to clump together in triangular clusters that echoed the shape of the despicable fly-rune which was Nurgle’s sacred sigil. The pain was incredible, the horror of watching his skin ripple with sores. Yet as each of the clusters of boils gathered together, a thrill surged through Torglug’s entire being. He could feel Nurgle’s malign essence pouring into him, strengthening him, infecting him with still fouler corruption and disease.

When it was finished, Torglug could see wisps of necrotic smoke drifting away from his mutated flesh. The rotworm in his belly grew still once more, no longer feeding Nurgle’s power into its host. He had received his god’s blessing, had been rewarded for the destruction of Diomar. It was but a taste, a sampling, of the even greater gifts that would be his once he captured Alarielle for his master.

Filled with the pestilent power of the Plaguefather, Torglug was re-energised. He looked towards the shore, trying to pierce the veil of mist that clung about the beach. Dimly he could perceive the radiant glow of the queen-seed ahead. Raising his voice, Torglug shouted for Goregus and the rest of his bodyguard. The Lady of Vines was close, and only her entourage of dryads remained to defy them.

As he called out to his putrid blightkings, demanding them to brave the crumbling ice and head for shore, Torglug heard the keening song of his prey. Again he felt the commanding tones of her harmony, the appeal in her wordless melody. Somewhere, far across the sea, he knew the jotunberg was stirring once more.

Torglug hastened towards the shore, but he was too late. The giant’s agitation sent tremors across the frozen sea. The surface crumbled away, pitching his followers into the deep. Torglug clutched at a sliver of broken pack ice as the world around him descended into catastrophic upheaval.

In the very moment of his triumph, Torglug could only watch helplessly as all his plans fell into abject ruin.

Chapter nine

For Lorrus Grymn and his companions – Stormcasts and sylvaneth alike – the trek across the frozen sea was a seemingly endless gauntlet of skirmishes and battles. With the fog and snow to conceal them, the first they were aware of enemies was when they were almost upon them. Warherds of beastmen, tribes of marauders and packs of diseased daemons infested the ice, prowling among the frozen waves in search of their prey. One after another, Grymn’s warriors struck out against the scattered warbands of Torglug’s legion, cutting down many of them and routing the survivors.

Not all they encountered were foes, however. Several times Grymn discovered clutches of sylvaneth or retinues of Hallowed Knights. Some had been separated from the entourage that attended the Lady of Vines, others were survivors from the battle at the bridges. Grymn was especially pleased when Prosecutor-Prime Tegrus and two of his winged warriors dipped down out of the storm-wracked sky to join his disparate company. He had thought all of the Prosecutors slain in their aerial battle with the plague drones. It cheered him to find that Tegrus had endured.

A greater discovery lay ahead, however. As he led his followers across the ice, he heard a friendly horn-blast. It was the trumpet of a Knight-Heraldor, a call to arms for all Stormcasts. Grymn led his small army through the dips and valleys of the frozen waves, urging them towards the sound. As the sound grew louder, other noises rang out above the moaning winter wind – the crash of blades and the roar of battle. Rushing onwards, Grymn finally saw figures moving within the fog. A few yards more and they changed from misty shadows to shapes of flesh and metal. Some were the grotesque minions of Torglug, a horde of half-naked tribesmen with a few of the hideous Chosen mixed among them.

It was the foes these disciples of disease fought that gave Grymn new hope. They were Stormcasts, but not of the Hallowed Knights. The armour they wore was white, blue and gold; the symbols they displayed on their shields were those of sun and moon. These were warriors from the Knights Excelsior. As Morbus had postulated, another Stormhost, or at least elements from one, had descended upon the Sea of Serpents to aid them in defending the Lady of Vines and protecting the queen-seed of Alarielle.

There were scores of Stormcasts, a mixed body of Liberators, Judicators and paladins, struggling to turn back hundreds of Torglug’s warriors. In their midst, resplendent in his elaborate armour, stood a winged Knight-Venator, a deadly realmhunter’s bow clenched in his mailed fists, a shrieking star-eagle sweeping out to rake its master’s enemies with vicious talons. At the Knight-Venator’s signal, the Knight-Heraldor raised the horn to his mask and blew again the rallying call, inflaming the hearts of his comrades as they strove to turn back the pestilent tide of Chaos which crashed against them.

The Knights Excelsior were more than equal to overwhelming their enemy – given time. Foot by foot, yard by yard, they were trying to fight their way clear. Like the Hallowed Knights before them, they’d been dispatched to Ghyran with a purpose far greater than simply slaughtering the slaves of Nurgle. They were trying to guard Alarielle, but to do so they had to break free of Torglug’s barbarians.

Reflexively, Grymn started to raise the stump of his hand, to signal his warriors with the warding lantern he’d carried into battle so many times before. Instead, he turned and shouted to his followers, ordering them to the attack. Falling upon the marauders and Chaos warriors from the rear, they would either drive them full into the shield wall of the Knights Excelsior or else throw them into complete panic. The mortals who marched under Torglug’s banner were both determined and depraved, but they didn’t adapt well to surprises on the battlefield. Without a firm hand to throw them back into the fray, once they scattered it would take them a long time to regroup.

‘Only the faithful!’ Grymn cried out, signalling his warriors to charge. The sylvaneth joined in the assault, a wargrove of tree-creatures slamming into the marauders with the fury of an avalanche and hurling the wreckage of broken barbarians far into their own ranks. Grymn’s Liberators struck next, slashing and bludgeoning dozens of marauders before they were even aware the silver warriors were there. When a fly-headed champion tried to rally his tribesmen and mount some sort of reprisal, the Hallowed Knights locked their shields and presented an unbroken wall of sigmarite to the pestilent throng. An arrow from the Knight-Venator struck down the mutant leader, searing through his body and leaving him a smouldering husk on the ice. The shrieking star-eagle dived down with raking claws to tear at the faces of the diseased marauders. As the barbarians tried to batter and slash their way through, the Liberators struck them down with overhand smashes of their hammers and stabbing thrusts of their swords.

Judicators joined in the assault, protecting the flanks of Grymn’s attackers with deadly volleys of arrows. Confusion and panic reigned among Torglug’s warriors as they found themselves being inexorably squeezed between the Knights Excelsior on one side and Grymn’s mixed force of Hallowed Knights and sylvaneth on the other. The pressure was finally too much for the disciples of disease, their putrid courage failing. As the barbarians broke, the sylvaneth fell upon them with vengeful ire, tearing into them with their wooden claws and spear-like branches.

The Stormcasts kept back, allowing their inhuman allies to slake their need for retribution. Across the heaps of enemy dead, the Hallowed Knights greeted their fellows of the Knights Excelsior. Their commander, the Knight-Venator, bowed his head in salute as he approached Grymn.

‘Well met, Lord-Castellant,’ the Knight-Venator said. ‘We were sent to the Jade Kingdoms to render aid to your Stormhost, but it seems that you have helped us instead.’

Grymn returned the Knight-Venator’s salute. ‘It is the fortune of battle that few plans unfold as they are designed. But your intervention is timely. The fighting has drawn us far from the one whose protection is our duty. It is imperative that we find her before the enemy. If your Knights Excelsior would help us in that purpose, Knight-Venator....’

‘Giomachus,’ the Knight-Venator said, providing his name. ‘I am acting commander, Lord-Castellant. Our leader, Knight-Azyros Diomar has gone to detain Torglug’s vanguard. My assignment was to prevent reinforcements from reaching the warlord.’

Moving to Grymn’s side, Lord-Relictor Morbus shook his head, a scowl twisting the exposed part of his face. ‘Diomar should have brought his full strength against Torglug. It is dangerous to underestimate that diseased scum.’ He waved his hammer, indicating the battered condition of the Hallowed Knights, the many wounds they had already suffered. Giomachus took a step back when he noted the grisly condition of Grymn’s disfigurement.

‘We should hasten to my lord’s side then,’ Giomachus declared, his star-eagle shrieking in sympathy with its master’s agitation.

Tallon reflected the bird’s agitation, whining in turn. ‘None here has greater desire to see Torglug brought down than I,’ Grymn said, calming the gryph-hound. ‘But such isn’t our duty here. We are charged to defend the Radiant Queen, and right now that means protecting the one who carries Alarielle’s soulpod, the Lady of Vines.’

‘You would leave my lord Diomar to fight alone?’ Giomachus asked, a steely edge to his voice. The other Knights Excelsior drew back from the Hallowed Knights, their meeting suddenly chilled by the agitation of their commander.

‘It isn’t a choice,’ Morbus told him. ‘It is our duty. We must find the Lady of Vines. If we lose her and what she carries, then it will count for nothing if we kill a hundred Torglugs. The victory will belong to Chaos.’

Grymn came close to Giomachus, every step sending pain rushing through his body. ‘I know exactly what this burden is to you. We were forced to leave our own Lord-Celestant, Gardus. What we fight for is greater than any of us. The God-King has charged us with preserving the Radiant Queen. While Alarielle lives, there is hope that Ghyran can be reclaimed. If she falls, then the blight of Nurgle will never be expunged from this realm.’

The Knight-Venator shook his head. ‘However wise the words, it doesn’t change the shame of leaving a comrade behind.’

‘Nor should it,’ Morbus told him. ‘Let that feeling drive you on. Let it sustain you when you would falter. Let it goad you to the supreme effort. Prove yourself loyal to Sigmar, no matter how onerous the burden.’ As he said the last, Morbus looked across the white-armoured warriors. He could see that his words made an impact upon them. ‘Fight to win the war, not simply the battle.’

A tremor suddenly rumbled through the ice, cracking the pack and causing fissures to ripple across the surface. Spouts of frigid water lashed upwards as the violent sea erupted through gashes and crevices. Stormcasts were thrown down by the quake, clawing at the ice as huge slabs split and rose. Knights Excelsior and Hallowed Knights rushed to one another’s aid as the terrain tore itself apart.

Beneath the groaning, popping clamour of the breaking ice, Grymn could hear the keening song of the Lady of Vines. The branchwraith was near, or at least near enough for her melody to reach them. That fact, however, brought him little solace. She was rousing the jotunberg once more, goading the winter giant into catastrophic agitation. He was certain only grave duress could have driven her to such action. Perhaps Torglug had already vanquished Diomar and was closing upon his prey. It wasn’t her willingness to sacrifice all the Stormcasts and sylvaneth still upon the Sea of Serpents that unsettled him. He knew such an act, callous as it might seem, might be necessary to preserve the queen-seed. No, it was the drain upon the fading energies of Alarielle that such action would demand that concerned him. He had heard from Morbus the toll it had taken for the Lady of Vines to rouse the jotunberg before.

Morbus, as though reading Grymn’s mind, caught hold of the Lord-Castellant.

‘The song is different,’ he told him. ‘I can sense the soothing enchantments woven into the harmony. She isn’t trying to rouse the jotunberg, she’s trying to put it back to sleep.’

Grymn shook his head. ‘Why would she do that?’

Tegrus had an answer. ‘We must be near the other shore by now.’ He pointed towards the fog on the horizon, indicating its relative thinness. Dimly, the Stormcast could see shadowy shapes behind the misty veil – the outlines of massive statues. ‘She is trying to give us time to get across the ice.’

‘Her duty is to protect her queen,’ Grymn almost growled.

‘Maybe that is what she’s doing,’ Morbus observed. ‘Maybe she needs us to help her do just that.’

Grymn swung about, stabbing the butt of his halberd into the shivering ice to steady himself. ‘Tegrus, I must call upon you to take wing once more. Into the storm. Try to seek out the Lady of Vines.’

Grymn could feel the tremors running through the ice growing worse. Right or wrong, they couldn’t stay where they were. He had no choice – they would strike out for what they hoped was the shore while Tegrus went aloft to locate the branchwraith.

Sigmar willing, they would all find what they sought.

The Lady of Vines stood amidst the ancient menhirs. The great standing stones had been raised long ago, before even the Jade Kingdoms were realised. The earliest inhabitants of Ghyran, the first to rise from the soulpods grown by the Radiant Queen, had raised these megaliths. The massive pillars acted as a capstone, a fulcrum for the magical vibrations flowing through the realm. With the right rituals and the proper alignment of stars, the menhirs would harness those arcane energies and allow them to be tapped by those wise and powerful enough to wield them.

The branchwraith’s distress didn’t allow her the time for lengthy rituals or propitious celestial alignments. Her need was immediate, and therefore she was forced to desperate measures. Using a small portion of the force within the queen-seed, the Lady of Vines began to syphon the residual energies that had seeped into the stones themselves. The ancient megaliths cracked and fractured as she drew the magic out of them, great slices of stone sloughing away as the rock began to crumble.

From the branchwraith’s entourage of dryads, a harmony somewhere between moan and song rose into the air. The tree-creatures clasped their wooden hands together, forming a ring around the Lady of Vines. Wisps of light streamed from their trunks and branches, weaving themselves around the branchwraith and forming an ethereal skein about her.

The magic the Lady of Vines conjured now was of a more reserved and restrained sort than the mighty enchantment that had roused the jotunberg. There was no necessity for sacrifice, no need to drain the essence of her followers. It was enough for them to surrender themselves to the radiance of the queen-seed, to lose themselves for a moment in the sacred vibrations of the Everqueen.

Bit by bit, a change began to occur within the circle of menhirs, a shifting of the air that wasn’t unlike the distorted shimmer of a heat haze. Through that phantom veil, the shades of a distant landscape began to take shape. Instead of the grey moorland over which the menhirs loomed, it seemed the boughs of some great woodland were becoming visible.

With shocking abruptness, the Lady of Vines silenced her song and let the energies she’d tapped into flow back into both menhir and dryad. The phantom landscape winked out, evaporating back into nothingness. The radiant glow of the queen-seed flickered, but quickly began to burn with a greater light. The branchwraith cradled the soulpod in her clawed hand as she turned from the standing stones and gazed back down towards the shore.

There, making their way through the piled tumuli of tribal kings and the windswept statues of a forgotten race, a file of shapes was making its way towards the stone circle. A gladness flared within the branchwraith’s being when she saw some of the sylvaneth from Athelwyrd marching towards her. She’d thought them lost on the ice, condemned to destruction by the jotunberg’s tremulous anguish. To see them again eased the burden of guilt she bore for commanding them to stay behind while she fled with the queen-seed. Her cheer soured when she saw how few were left. Many had fallen to the blades of Torglug and his warriors, many had been thrown into the sea by the dying jotunberg.

Others marched with the sylvaneth – the silver Hallowed Knights and other Stormcast Eternals wearing the white armour that Knight-Azyros Diomar had worn. The Lady of Vines was surprised by the sense of relief she felt when she saw Lord-Castellant Grymn leading them. She was even more surprised by the concern she felt for his condition. Grymn’s armour was rent in several places, scarred and dented by vicious blows. His battered warding lantern hung at his side and even his gryph-hound was limping. More, she saw the grisly stump where his hand should be. Her arcane senses told her of the ghastly putrescence that afflicted the wound, filth of such malignity that even the Stormcast’s vitality was being sickened by it.

In all the ages of her existence, the Lady of Vines had never felt sympathy for anything human. She considered the quick-bloods to be too rash and impetuous, too individualistic to ever be trusted. They were too brief, their lives vanishing with such rapidity that they soon faded from memory. The Stormcast Eternals were a different breed, she understood that well enough. Perhaps they truly did enjoy an existence as lengthy as that of the sylvaneth. Perhaps they could focus upon needs and goals that took centuries to achieve. Yet, for all of that, they had seemed to her as kindred to the tribesmen of the Jade Kingdoms.

Now, as she looked upon Grymn, as each step nearer the circle made his injuries and suffering clearer to her, the Lady of Vines repented her earlier disdain. The Hallowed Knights had suffered and sacrificed much to protect Alarielle; they had fought harder even than the sylvaneth to defy the Treecutter. Their ordeal was nowhere more manifest than in the battered shape of their commander.

The Lady of Vines stepped away from the ring of dryads, motioning to them to remain where they were. With rapid steps, she climbed down to the tumuli of the old kings and met the advancing survivors.

‘Fortune favours you,’ the branchwraith greeted Grymn. ‘I had just begun the rite that opens the gate to the Path of the Purified. Had your arrival been much later, you could not have crossed the doorway.’

Lorrus Grymn looked up at her, his gaze grave. ‘My lady, if there was the least chance of slipping away, you should have taken it.’ He groaned and leaned against his halberd, trying to suppress the cough that shuddered through him. ‘Our lives don’t matter. The only thing that does is keeping the queen-seed safe.’

‘The Treecutter has been left behind us on the ice,’ the branchwraith declared. She pointed at the winged Stormcast in white armour who marched in Grymn’s party. ‘Your Diomar met the plaguelord in battle and gave me the chance to escape.’ Her tone dipped with reverence. ‘I don’t think he prevailed, but he did keep the enemy from pressing his pursuit. With the jotunberg’s throes splitting the ice, the plaguehosts will need another way to cross. For the moment, we are beyond their reach.’

‘All the more reason why you cannot delay,’ Grymn said. ‘Torglug cannot have the queen-seed.’

‘He will not touch my queen,’ the branchwraith hissed, her branches shifting angrily. ‘But keeping her beyond his reach is a duty I share with Sigmar’s chosen.’ She pointed up at the circle of menhirs. At her gesture, the sylvaneth began climbing towards the stones to join the ring of dryads already there. ‘Your warriors must join my people,’ she told Grymn. ‘All of you must stand within the circle, that I may bring you to the Path of the Purified.’ She hesitated, then pointed to Grymn. ‘And you must stand with me at the centre of the ritual.’

Bidding Tallon stay behind, Grymn let the Lady of Vines lead him up to the stone circle, allowing her to help him when his step faltered and he had to use his halberd as a crutch. She kept looking at the stump of his hand, at the crust of filth that was sending streams of plague into his veins. She tried to hurry him, recognising the bite of Torglug’s axe and remembering much too well how swiftly its foulness had brought low even the oldest forest spirits. It was astounding to her that Grymn had endured this long.

Drawing Grymn into the middle of the ring of dryads, the Lady of Vines took his hand in hers. She saw the look of awe and shock that filled his eyes when he felt the warmth of the queen-seed pressed into his palm.

‘You have given much to defend our queen,’ the branchwraith told him. ‘Now let her give something back.’

She had no more words for Grymn. Again the enchanting song rose from her, drawing out the energies of the menhirs and the sylvaneth. The skein of power surrounded her, spilling down into the queen-seed, reaching out through the ley lines to once again summon a phantom landscape, to create a gateway between distant places.

The branchwraith only partially observed the opening of the way. Another part of her watched the effect of the Everqueen’s power upon the warrior who now held her soulpod. Her arcane sight could see streams of emerald fire racing through his body, burning away the black rot of Nurgle. Grymn was being purged of the contagion, scoured of it in both flesh and soul.

Then the Lady of Vines saw something even she hadn’t anticipated. The healing power of Alarielle was doing more than simply burning away the infection. A green stalk spread from the mangled stump of Grymn’s wrist, thickening and expanding until it became an entirely new hand. Even the battered warding lantern hanging from Grymn’s belt was shining once more, its lingering enchantment restored and revitalised by the Radiant Queen.

As the ritual continued to gather force, Grymn’s entire being was bathed in the glow of the goddess. The Lady of Vines became anxious, wondering how much of the divine power he could withstand. Carefully she retrieved the queen-seed from his hand. Just as carefully she raised a gnarled finger and pointed to the shimmering forest beyond the stone circle. The sylvaneth began drawing away from the ring, filing out into the phantasmal forest.

Grymn hesitated, but a gesture from the Lady of Vines had him shouting orders to the Stormcasts and the warriors followed after the sylvaneth. As her followers and the Stormcasts withdrew, the gateway began to close. The branchwraith braced herself for one last effort. Drawing only upon her own power and that of the queen-seed, she forced the slightest crack to remain open. With a bounding leap, she threw herself through the magical slit, hurling herself from the stone circle to the forest beyond.

The sylvaneth waited for their mistress, standing sombre and stolid among the slender trees of the woods. The Stormcasts were gathered around Grymn, marvelling at his regrown hand. He turned from them when he saw the Lady of Vines appear.

‘You have worked a mighty magic,’ he said, flexing the fingers of his new hand and gesturing at the forest around them.

The branchwraith reached to her breast and replaced the queen-seed in its hollow. ‘We will need mightier magic still,’ she said. ‘We must set upon the Path of the Purified and cleanse ourselves of any trace of Nurgle’s taint.

‘Where we would go, we must bring nothing of the enemy with us.’

The ice cracked and spluttered all around them as Torglug led the last of his putrid blightkings towards the shore. Only seven of them had braved the cataclysmic upheaval of the sea to reach him. The warlord was dismayed that so few of his minions had proven themselves so devoted, but he took solace in the auspicious aspect of their number. Seven, after all, was the sacred number of Nurgle. For seven of his bodyguard to endure was an omen, a sign that the Grandfather was guiding his favoured vassal.

Small groups of battered, bloodied figures emerged from the fog, drawn towards the noxious presence of Torglug like iron filings to a lodestone, called to him by the noxious blessing Nurgle had bestowed upon him, the diseased mark of the Plague God’s touch. Remnants of marauder tribes and beastman warherds, lone Chaos knights and mutants, clutches of armoured warriors and clumps of squirming nurglings, the survivors of the plaguehosts returned to their warlord. To the very last they had fought against their enemy, but in the end the elemental fury of the jotunberg was too much to endure. Now they were falling back to the deathbloom fields where at least the giant’s wintry hold wasn’t so fierce.

The decimation of his legion didn’t disturb Torglug. He would have expended all their lives to secure for Nurgle the queen-seed of Alarielle. That they had died by the hundreds without accomplishing the task he’d set them was what worried the warlord. It would take time to enslave and recruit the warriors to rebuild his army – time that would allow the Lady of Vines to slip away and carry the faltering essence of the Everqueen beyond his reach. He couldn’t allow his enemy such respite. He had to resume the hunt, maintain the pressure and drive his enemies to destruction.

Out from the snow, the ghoulish shapes of Slaugoth Maggotfang and the remains of his plague coven emerged. The sorcerer leaned heavily upon his staff and even the eldritch glow in his eyes seemed faded. Torglug didn’t know what magic Slaugoth had worked to aid his legion or what spells had exacted such a toll from the man. All he knew was that however great the sorcerer’s exertions, they hadn’t been enough to bring him victory.

‘You are daring to come creeping back to me?’ Torglug snarled at Slaugoth. He raised his axe, pointing the blackened blade at the sorcerer. ‘Your vaunted magic is failing me, spell-spitter! You are letting Radiant Queen be slipping through my fingers!’

Slaugoth drew back, his hands grasping at talismans blackened by Morbus’ lightning. Better than any of the plague warriors, he could sense the might of the blessing Nurgle had bestowed upon Torglug. Fear fought with anger for mastery of his features as he spoke. ‘The Grandfather offered you the glory of securing His prize. The Grandfather gave you this chance to show your devotion to Him. The victory would have been yours, so don’t presume you can escape the blame for failure. You have come far, but the higher you rise the further you can fall.’

A roar of inarticulate rage bubbled up from Torglug’s bloated bulk. The warlord lunged at Slaugoth, seizing the weakened sorcerer in his fist and lifting his obese frame off the ground. Blightlord Goregus and the other putrid blightkings converged upon the plague coven, cutting two of them down in a heartbeat. The adepts retaliated with a skein of spells that reduced one of the bodyguards to a smouldering heap of mush and left the rest reeling.

Torglug drew Slaugoth towards him, holding the sorcerer so close that the warlord’s horn stabbed into his cheek and drew a trickle of brown sludge from his pierced flesh. ‘You are being useful in past. What are you doing for me lately? What are you doing for me now?’

A cruel smile flashed across Slaugoth’s face, exposing the masses of worms wriggling between his teeth. ‘I can keep the rats from gnawing your miserable bones.’ Drained as he was, Slaugoth exhaled a blast of noxious wind, sending the sorcerous gale smashing into the fog. The veil of mist and snow rolled back, revealing the shingle of the shore. Hundreds of bodies were strewn across the beach, cast there by the turbulent currents that raged beneath the ice and through the great rifts created by the jotunberg’s spasms – the dead of Torglug’s legion, both beast and man, spat up by the Sea of Serpents as though the very waters were disgusted by them.

Others were far less discriminating. Swarming over the dead, tearing weapons from cold fingers, stripping armour from icy flesh, cutting hunks of meat from bloated bodies, was an army more loathsome than even that which Torglug had led. A mass of humanoid rats had descended upon the wreckage of the plaguehosts, scavenging off the carrion. The warlord recognised the horns and white pelt of the vermin who led the swarm of skaven. It was the same plague priest he had beaten down in the tunnels. Poxmonger Kriknitt had rallied its routed minions and driven them in pursuit of Torglug. The vermin had intended to simply plunder the leavings of his army, but finding the legion so weakened he knew it wouldn’t be long before they exacted a far more vicious retaliation for the invasion of their tunnels.

‘Kill me and they will pick their fangs with your bones,’ Slaugoth said.

Torglug threw the sorcerer down. ‘Same fate is being hanging over your head,’ he snarled. ‘Whatever magic you are having left, it better be good.’

Across the ice, Torglug saw the skaven pointing at the plague warriors, squealing in their shrill voices. The white-furred Poxmonger Kriknitt leapt atop the shoulders of a massive ratman and began shrieking commands to the scavengers, who dropped their loot, glancing around in uncertainty. The increasingly vicious harangue from their priest made them draw weapons and form a rough battle line along the shore. Torglug sneered at their cringing display of bravado. It was seeing how few his warriors now numbered that was giving the vermin courage. Driven by the prospect of more plunder and the promise of an easy victory, the skaven rushed out onto the ice. A squealing, squeaking tide of gnashing fangs and rusted blades charged towards the decimated legion.

Torglug’s fist tightened about the haft of his axe. He could see Kriknitt goading a pack of frenzied plague monks straight towards him. Like its minions, the skaven priest was eager to slake its vengeance. ‘If you are doing something, be doing it,’ the warlord snarled at Slaugoth.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ Slaugoth chortled, eyes agleam with ghoulish mirth. ‘My spells have hidden the blessing the Grandfather has bestowed upon you. Too late will they discover what you’ve become.’ He pointed at the white-furred plague priest. ‘You will need to take that one… alive.’

Torglug nodded. Some of the skaven were now reaching the survivors, hurling themselves at the warriors with rabid ferocity. More and more of the vermin were rushing onto the ice, lured by the smell of blood and the din of combat. Thrusting their way through the swarm were Kriknitt and its rabid retinue. Torglug noted that the filth kept well behind its troops, content to let others finish the warlord for it.

The sight and smell of Torglug caused the skaven to falter. Closer now to the plaguelord, they could sense the terrible power that squirmed within his flesh, the awful might of the Plague God. A censer bearer, more frenzied than the rest of its ilk, scurried towards the warlord, poisons billowing from the weapon it bore. Torglug waded through the noxious cloud, withstanding fumes that would corrode iron and melt flesh. His axe came chopping down, tearing through the ratman and splitting it from crown to groin. The bisected halves of the skaven flopped onto the ice. Torglug laughed as he trampled the corpse underfoot and charged towards Kriknitt’s plague monks.

A squeal of horror rose from the skaven as their glands spurted the pungent musk of fear. The easy prey they had hoped to overwhelm now looked far less appealing to them. Kriknitt raised its voice in a panicked screech, torn between the urge to run and the fear that it would be trampled by its own bodyguard should it turn its back to them. Torglug eased the plague priest’s dilemma. Calling to his putrid blightkings, he drove into the mob of skaven, his black axe shearing through them in a riot of gory havoc. The ice steamed with the rank black blood of slaughtered ratmen, verminous carcasses strewn in his wake. Each step, each cut, brought him closer to his enemy.

The plague monks broke before the malign fury of Nurgle’s champion. Shrieking in terror, the robed ratkin fled back towards the shore, but there was to be no escape for Kriknitt. Cutting down the last robed vermin between them, Torglug rushed the priest. Cornered by its enemy, Kriknitt lunged at him with its sword, faking a slash at the champion’s neck before treacherously stabbing at his belly. The serrated blade pierced Torglug’s gut, eliciting a squeak of triumph from the skaven. The squeak ended in a choked gargle as the stricken warlord seized Kriknitt by the throat.

‘If it is being so easy to be killing me, I am being dead long ago,’ Torglug snarled at his terrified prisoner. Carrying the struggling ratman as though it were no more than a child, he marched back towards Slaugoth. He wasn’t certain what use the sorcerer had for Kriknitt, but he trusted it would be something unpleasant.

The sorcerer bowed before his master, touching his head to the ice in a show of abject devotion. ‘The Grandfather has truly shown you His pestilent favour!’ he gasped in delight. Slaugoth could feel the bilious energies seething within Torglug’s flesh and spirit, energies which he could use to work mighty spells for his master.

‘Your plaguehosts have been diminished,’ Slaugoth told Torglug. ‘We will need a new army to settle with the branchwraith and her guardians.’ The sorcerer laughed, one of the worms tumbling from his teeth. ‘Fortunately it is in my power to summon the troops we will need. Have your men gather up the dead – our own and those of the ratkin. Pile them upon the shore. I will call upon the Grandfather’s own household to provide us the warriors we need.’

Torglug nodded, unable to doubt that the sorcerer could do exactly what he promised. The frightened whimpers of Kriknitt recalled to him the existence of his captive. He held the trembling plague priest towards Slaugoth. ‘And what am I doing with this?’

Slaugoth picked the worm that had fallen from his mouth off the sleeve of his robe. He stared at the writhing creature. ‘I will commune with the Grandfather, seek His wisdom. Learn from Him where the branchwraith has gone.’ His eyes narrowed as he leaned down to stare into Kriknitt’s face. ‘When I learn where she is going, we will use the skaven tunnels to get there first. I am certain our ratty friend will be happy to help.’

Torglug shook Kriknitt by its neck. ‘If he isn’t helping then he is learning death comes slow to those who are defying me.’

Chapter ten

The Sea of Serpents was leagues behind them, or at least so it seemed to Lorrus Grymn. The same uncanny distortion of space and time that had characterised their exodus from Athelwyrd had once again settled over the refugees. It was difficult to determine the direction in which they travelled and equally hard to decide how long they’d been marching. The lands through which they wandered were both hideously twisted and wondrously beautiful, places blighted by the corruption of Nurgle and ones yet undefiled by the Plague God’s grasping hand. Their trail led them through copses of loudwillows, their leaves whispering in the breeze, and across despoiled fields strewn with the wreckage of war. Meadows of vibrant flowers and swordgrass where only the first noxious deathblooms had taken root and glades where the last pines withered in the clutch of gnawing creepers.

Grymn wondered if the other Stormcasts shared the eerie divorce from his surroundings that he felt. He wondered if it was an aspect of the miraculous change that flowed through him. The glowing energies of the queen-seed pulsed through his body, scouring him of the rot left by Torglug’s axe. He could feel the last of the filth being purged, burned away in the radiant vibration. The same vibration throbbed inside his mind, sharpening his senses, expanding them to a keenness he’d never known before. He imagined it was similar to how Morbus perceived the world, the Lord-Relictor’s mystic connection to the God-King granting him a degree of perception inconceivable to most men.

The most astonishing change worked by Alarielle’s soulpod was that which had occurred to his hand. True, it had a strange, fibrous feel to it and there was a distinct greenish tinge about the skin, but it was a thing of flesh! He could feel his blood pumping through it. He could move the fingers, manipulate them as easily as he had his old ones.

Ahead of him, Grymn could see the Lady of Vines guiding the other sylvaneth into a forest path. Giant petrified toweroaks loomed above the trail, casting their imposing shadows across the wood. He was struck by the solemn majesty of these trees and the aura of incredible antiquity that emanated from them. If Morbus were to tell him these stone trees had stood since the Age of Myth he would have been hesitant to disbelieve the claim. They might have been brought down with Alarielle when the Radiant Queen descended into the realm of Ghyran.

The Branchwraith turned towards the Stormcasts, her eyes passing across each warrior before fixing upon Grymn. ‘We pass through Greengyr now, upon the Path of the Purified. The foulness of the Plague God will be burned away by the enchantments of the ley lines that flow through this place. All will be cleansed,’ she said. ‘Even the most vile of infection cannot withstand the old magic for long.’

Grymn looked across the masses of stony trees that loomed all around them. Each was pitted by wind and rain, scoured by an eerie atmosphere. Each of the Stormcasts felt it, as though his valour and determination were being balanced against the contagion they’d been exposed to. They were being judged, not by the sylvaneth but by Greengyr itself. It was testament to the strength and devotion of the Stormcasts that each was permitted to proceed upon that path.

‘Your presence here does credit to you,’ the Lady of Vines told Grymn. ‘It proves your soul is firm and your devotion to the Everqueen is true. An unclean spirit would be cast from the Path of the Purified, expelled into the forests beyond. Few who are rejected by Greengyr emerge with mind and spirit unmarred. They prowl the deep woods, crazed and alone.’

Grymn clenched his regrown hand, letting it close about the roof of his restored lantern. ‘Is that why you allowed the queen-seed’s magic to heal me? Is that why you paid me such honour, so that the Path of the Purified wouldn’t reject me?’

There was a warmth in the Lady of Vines when she answered him. ‘Long has it been since any of the quick-blood displayed such courage on behalf of the Radiant Queen. Yours has been the most arduous burden of all, for of you is demanded not only that you place your life in jeopardy, but also the lives of those who follow you.’ The last was said with a sorrowful note. Since the passing of Alarielle, the branchwraith had become leader of the sylvaneth. Many of the tree-creatures had perished on the Sea of Serpents. Morbus had told Grymn how heavily the sacrifice of the ancient treelords had affected her, but he knew that all of the lives lost were equally painful to her. The onus of command was a burden not easily shouldered.

The branchwraith had gone only a little way into the petrified forest when huge figures emerged from the maze of frozen trees, stepping out onto the path and blocking her progress. Tallon snarled at them, his hackles raised. The Stormcasts brought their weapons to the ready, only marginally eased in their minds by the realization that the force ahead of them was sylvaneth rather than more warriors of Chaos. Though their shared ordeal upon the frozen sea had instilled some sense of camaraderie towards the tree-creatures that had made the journey with them, the Hallowed Knights couldn’t forget the hostile resentment that had been their reception when they entered the vale of Athelwyrd.

Grymn could feel the anger boiling off of the sylvaneth that stole out of the petrified forest. Many of them bore the cuts and burns of battle, their trunks marked by the bite of axe and claw. It wasn’t their encounters with the plaguehosts that stoked their ire, however. He could feel the glowing gaze of tree-creatures and dryads fixing on him, the beings glowering at him with an outraged regard. Nowhere was the sensation more pronounced than when he looked up at the creature who led these wargroves. He was a colossal treelord, stouter and grander than even the most ancient of their kind that had accompanied Alarielle’s court into exile. Grymn felt the incredible age of the huge sylvaneth when it met his eyes, the incalculable centuries that lay behind its threatening stare. He could feel the treelord’s consciousness pressing against his own, pushing its name into his mind. He was called Haldroot and he had become shepherd of the sylvaneth that yet lingered on this side of the sea. They had marched to answer the call issued by the Lady of Vines. They had expected battle, anticipated death. Instead they discovered something they hadn’t been prepared to face.

Haldroot raised one of his arms, pointing an accusing claw at Grymn. An angry murmur rustled through the wargroves that followed the treelord. Grymn wasn’t sure exactly what the new tree-creatures were angry about – that the Lady of the Vines and the Stormcasts were so obviously allied, or some deeper concern?

Morbus came up beside Grymn, hands closed tight around the haft of his relic hammer. ‘They should know that we’re friends. After all we’ve endured on the ice, it would sicken me to have to fight sylvaneth.’

Grymn glanced back at his mixed command. Warriors in both silver and white armour were slowly regrouping, gathering into formations that would be ready to support one another if fighting broke out. Tegrus and Giomachus were eyeing the stony branches overhead, seeking the best perches from which they could rain missiles down upon their opponents.

The Stormcasts were ready to fight, but they weren’t eager. The sylvaneth weren’t minions of Chaos. It would be necessity not justice that forced them against the tree-creatures. There would be no glory to be found here, only the absurd waste of fighters who should have been turned against Chaos, not one another.

‘Stand back,’ Grymn told Morbus. ‘It seems I am the centre of their anger. If I give myself to them, perhaps it will ease their rage and make them see reason.’

‘There will be no need,’ the Lady of Vines stated.

The branchwraith stepped towards Haldroot, her fiery gaze matching his own. The two sylvaneth conversed for a time in the rumbling, rolling speech of the forest. Ancient and mighty, the treelord nevertheless bowed his head in respect, acknowledging her authority even over him. However hot his rage, it didn’t eclipse devotion to his queen or to the handmaiden who ruled in her stead.

Whatever communion passed between the Lady of Vines and Haldroot, Grymn couldn’t say. Maybe the treelord was offended that the branchwraith had allowed a mere human to touch the queen-seed – the sylvaneth might well see this as tantamount to sacrilege. Haldroot’s anger was causing strips of bark to split and crack from his body, some of the branches growing from his head to snap and break. The roots from his feet stabbed down into the earth, gouging the ground in a manifestation of suppressed fury.

The Lady of Vines was unperturbed by Haldroot’s rage. She gestured only once towards Grymn. She pointed at his regrown hand, something that seemed to particularly agitate the treelord. Her position was clear enough: if what she’d done was truly the outrage Haldroot held it to be, then the Radiant Queen’s power wouldn’t have healed Grymn’s wounds. The giant tree-creature looked towards Grymn, the hostility in his eyes dimmed by the branchwraith’s reprimand.

When the treelord turned back to the Lady of Vines, there was something suggestive of contrition in his demeanour. The roots that had so angrily raked the earth now took firm hold upon the ground. More tendrils uncoiled from his hands, securing his arms.

‘I have reminded Haldroot and his companions that there are many who fight Chaos as fiercely as the sylvaneth,’ the Lady of Vines told Grymn. ‘It will take them some time to cool their anger, but it will drain away. When it has, we will be ready to march once more.’

The Lady of Vines walked towards Grymn. Her glowing eyes stared down at his new hand. He was struck by the weird sense of kinship he experienced, as though he’d somehow become a part of the branchwraith. No, that wasn’t quite right. Deep in his memories long-buried emotions flickered, the bond between brother and sister. Once, long before he’d been reforged upon the Anvil of Apotheosis, such a connection must have existed, though he couldn’t remember names or even faces. All he did know was that Alarielle’s handmaiden evoked this forgotten regard.

Grymn thought he understood. In some way, the branchwraith too had grown from the fertile magic of the Radiant Queen. He didn’t know if it was in part or in whole, but like his new hand, the Lady of Vines had been shaped by Alarielle’s power. It created a sympathy between them, a connection at once detached from his kinship to his fellow Hallowed Knights, yet in some ways even stronger.

The branchwraith nodded, sensing the turn of Grymn’s thoughts. She beckoned to him. ‘Come, step into the flow of the ley line. Then you will understand.’

Slowly Grymn advanced onto the path Haldroot and his followers had blocked. As he did so, strange lights filled his vision. Weird emanations he hadn’t been aware of now became visible to him. He could see a bright green glow suffusing the sylvaneth, blazing brightest around Haldroot and the oldest of their kind. The Stormcasts too were aglow, radiating a pristine white light. When he looked towards the Lady of Vines, he saw that she was engulfed in an aura of jade-coloured energy, shining with an almost blinding brilliance. The same aura spilled from the queen-seed.

Grymn’s own body didn’t quite radiate the same white light as his fellow Stormcast. There was a faint greenish tinge to it, and when he looked at his regrown hand, he saw it burned with the same glow as that which surrounded the Lady of Vines and her sacred charge. He had become more than an ally of Alarielle and the branchwraith – he had become something almost kindred to them. From that kinship, he sensed the mighty purpose towards which the Lady of Vines was striving.

‘It is so,’ the branchwraith said, answering the question he would have put to her before he could ask it. Sombrely, Grymn bowed his head in respect to her decision.

Morbus caught at Grymn’s arm, puzzled by the uncanny rapport he sensed between his leader and the branchwraith. ‘What was that about? What is it she expects you to understand?’

‘She remains devoted to her queen,’ Grymn declared. ‘After the fight on the ice, she’s come to appreciate that we’re the best hope of restoring Alarielle’s power.’

Morbus shook his head. ‘Restoring Alarielle? Is that what she intends?’

Grymn hesitated, wondering how to put into words the thoughts and visions that trickled into his mind from the arcane link between himself and the branchwraith. ‘The queen-seed must be planted, cultivated to revive Alarielle’s power. The aspect Alarielle bore before was benevolent and nurturing, devoted to growing the lands of Ghyran. The time for growth has passed, however. Now this realm needs a more martial goddess to hold dominion. The Lady of Vines aspires to give the realm what it needs.’ Grymn gestured at the petrified trees around them. ‘All of this was once the Kingdom of Blackstone, where men fought the first intrusions of Chaos. Their long war to cast out the Ruinous Powers has left its legacy written upon the very soil of their vanished nation. The Lady of Vines will plant the queen-seed in ground steeped in valour and sacrifice, rich in a heritage of heroic deeds. She hopes the courage and determination of the past will shape the Radiant Queen’s new aspect.’

An awed expression gripped the exposed half of Morbus’ face. ‘Growing a goddess,’ he muttered. ‘I have seen many wonders and incredible magics during this campaign, but to believe it is within anyone’s power to shape the gods themselves is–’

‘Impossible?’ Grymn suggested.

‘Frightening,’ was Morbus’ answer. Grymn noted that the Lord-Relictor had one hand closed about the icon of Sigmar he carried. ‘Gods give men their form. Men, or sylvaneth for that matter, don’t give the gods form. To even contemplate such disorder, such confusion, is a greater heresy than Chaos itself.’

Grymn looked at the glowing soulpod nestled in the Lady of Vines’ breast. ‘It is the mystery of choice,’ he said. ‘Do we act of our own volition, or do we act because it is what the gods would have us do? When the Lady of Vines plants this seed, is it her decision or Alarielle’s design?’

‘Your new hand is planting strange ideas in your brain,’ Morbus cautioned. He waved his hand towards the sylvaneth clumped further down the trail. ‘How long do we wait for them?’

‘As long as they need,’ Grymn said. He could see that his decision wasn’t what Morbus had been hoping for. ‘Don’t mistake the delay as an indulgence. This halt is a needful thing. These are lands new to us, if not to the sylvaneth. We cannot assume them to be free of the enemy’s presence. We need to know if some new danger lies ahead of us.’

Morbus nodded. ‘You want Tegrus and the Prosecutors to scout ahead?’

‘Giomachus too, if the Knight-Venator is agreeable,’ Grymn said. ‘If the enemy is lying in wait for us, I want to know.’

The Lord-Relictor saluted Grymn and marched back among the Stormcasts to relay their commander’s orders. Grymn turned back, peering through the stony trees. Drifting between them he could see the rippling energies of the ley line, the magical pulse of the Path of the Purified. For all the power he sensed there, he knew it was but a trickle beside the putrid might of the Plague God.

The closer the Lady of Vines came to her goal, the more desperate the enemy would become and the more vigilant her protectors would need to be. Once more, he cast his gaze skywards and asked Sigmar to guide their course.

It was some time before the winged scouts returned. Grymn marvelled at their aerobatics, the effortless manoeuvrability with which they dropped down through the petrified branches. Tegrus, never the one to shy from daring, plummeted straight down like a stone, then arrested his momentum with a billowing sweep of his wings. The Prosecutor-Prime saluted as he walked towards Grymn. Knight-Venator Giomachus, though he outranked Tegrus, deferred to his position within the Hallowed Knights and waited until he was given permission by Tegrus to make his report.

‘There is a stone circle ahead,’ Giomachus said, bowing his head to the Lady of Vines, acknowledging the mighty conjuration she had effected on the shores of the Sea of Serpents. ‘There the ground is pitted and steaming, as from recent battle. But we saw no signs of friend or foe, and there were no fallen.’

Grymn shook his head, puzzled by the strange report. What was the meaning of what the scouts had discovered? Was it some deception woven by Chaos? If there had been a battle, then who were the combatants and what were their motives? More importantly, if the fighting had been as fierce as Giomachus said, where were the dead? ‘You are certain there weren’t any bodies?’ Grymn asked.

‘We searched thoroughly,’ Giomachus replied. ‘We could find no dead.’

‘This is an ill thing,’ Morbus said. ‘It may mean that other powers as malignant as those of Nurgle have taken an interest in our plight.’ The Lord-Relictor left unsaid what it was that he feared, but Grymn knew his meaning. A necromancer of some sort, one of the infamous disciples of Nagash, would leave no corpses on the field of battle but would revive the fallen of both sides as undead horrors.

The Lady of Vines looked keenly at Giomachus.

‘In the craters,’ she asked, ‘were there broken fragments of a strange shimmering rock, as if something had hatched from within?’

Giomachus removed his plumed helm and stared at the branchwraith. ‘Aye, my lady, it was just as you say.’

Turning towards Grymn and Morbus, the Lady of Vines explained her strange question. ‘I have seen such long ago. There are others who fight against Chaos, though to us they are as cold and distant as the stars. I do not doubt these strange allies have helped us, but we should expect no further aid.’

Morbus was comforted by the branchwraith’s explanation.

‘Seraphon,’ he said, giving a name to their enigmatic allies. ‘If they have struck and departed, then it can only mean whatever foe they opposed has been vanquished. The reptiles will not relent from their purpose once they are committed.’ He uttered a relieved laugh. ‘It eases my mind greatly not to think a corpse-caller is haunting the path ahead of us.’

‘The legions of Nurgle are enemy enough,’ Grymn agreed. He turned to the Lady of Vines. ‘Should we bypass the battlefield my scouts found? Is there a way around it?’

The Lady of Vines waved her slender claw towards the petrified trees about them. ‘There will be no danger from that quarter. The last stretch of the path lies before us. We must take the goddess atop Blackstone Summit.’ The branchwraith’s voice dropped to a worried hiss. ‘Unless I am mistaken, our foe will find us ‘ere journey’s end.’

Chapter eleven

The Victory Fields stretched before Lord-Castellant Grymn in a broad expanse of black soil. Old bones, petrified like the trees and menhirs that lined the Path of the Purified, protruded from the ground. Encrusted snags of metal suggested the husks of armour and shield, stalagmite spikes stabbing up from the earth evoked images of swords and spears, and ovoid lumps echoed ancient helms and breastplates – the vanquished of a near-mythical confrontation, left to the embrace of the land they had fought for and ultimately died for.

A strange feeling of oppression swept through Grymn as he marched across the blackened earth. Leaving the Path of the Purified, he’d felt somehow diminished. Having satisfied the judgement of Greengyr, the enchantment of the path had become almost comforting in its way. To leave that comfort behind for this morbid expanse made for a shocking contrast. Even Tallon felt it, keeping close to his leg as he led the Stormcasts forwards.

Ahead, a great stairway rose upwards. Megalithic in its construction, it was a reminder of the vanished Kingdom of Blackstone. The immense steps spiralled around a colossal rise formed from the boughs of three enormous trees. In ages past, the three trees had grown together, fusing into a single growth. Like the rest of the forest, however, their greenery had turned to grey, hardening into solid stone. Whether the stair had been raised around them before or after their petrification was a question Grymn couldn’t answer. The summit itself was wrapped in green clouds that crackled with eldritch emanations.

Grymn could see the queen-seed pulsing within the recess of the Lady of Vines’ trunk. He looked down at his hand, aglow with the nurturing power of Alarielle, and wondered what that power would be transformed into. What would it truly mean for the Radiant Queen to alter her aspect from guardian to avenger? He had seen for himself the terrible nature of the sylvaneth when they became enraged. The prospect of such fury endowed with the might of a goddess was daunting. The Radiant Queen had been tolerant, even indulgent of the Stormcasts when they intruded upon Athelwyrd. Her court hadn’t been so accommodating. Even the Lady of Vines had met them with barely restrained hostility.

‘Only the faithful,’ Grymn whispered to himself. The Hallowed Knights had been sent to find Athelwyrd by Sigmar for a purpose. It wasn’t for him to question the strategy of his god. Whatever lay ahead, he had to have faith that it was according to the God-King’s design. He had to have faith that the benevolence he’d sensed in Alarielle, the compassion that had replaced his missing hand, would endure no matter what aspect the Radiant Queen took on.

Grymn gazed back at the Blackstone Summit, at the great stair up which their path must lead. So close, yet he felt now was the time of their greatest danger. Again he recalled the warning Lord-Celestant Gardus had so often given. Never underestimate the enemy. The Plague God had to know how close the Radiant Queen was to escaping his pestilent grasp. Even if Torglug’s legion had perished on the Sea of Serpents, Nurgle had other warlords and other armies scattered across Ghyran. Surely that foul deity would send one of those armies to try to stop them.

‘Tegrus, Giomachus,’ Grymn called out to the winged warriors. The two Stormcasts hastened to their commander’s side. Grymn gestured at the Victory Fields and the petrified forest that surrounded it. ‘I have need of your eyes again,’ he told them. ‘Take the rest of the Prosecutors and scout the Blackstone Summit. Watch for any trace of the enemy.’

‘Can they have anticipated our goal?’ Giomachus asked, his star-eagle fluttering its wings angrily as he spoke the last word. Tallon barked at the raptor, unsettled by its show of ire.

‘We can’t dismiss that threat,’ Grymn decided after a moment of thought. ‘They have powerful magics of their own to draw upon. Desperation may have moved them to take chances with their sorcery no sane mind would consider. It is too risky to believe their evil cannot strike at us here.’

‘Would you have me see what waits ahead of us?’ Giomachus asked.

Grymn shook his head. ‘You are the ranking officer of the Knights Excelsior,’ he told the Knight-Venator. ‘Your place is here with your warriors. I know the valour in their hearts, but I also know they will fight the harder with you leading them.’ He turned towards Tegrus. ‘I fear the burden of this task must rest with you, my friend.’

‘Then it will be our honour to scout the way and bring you warning if the plaguehosts appear,’ Tegrus said. He motioned to the surviving Prosecutors. One by one they spread their wings and rose into the sky.

Grymn watched the scouts ascend. They were so few now. Tegrus and the Prosecutors were all resilient warriors, but even the most heroic could be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

The Lord-Castellant turned towards Lord-Relictor Morbus. ‘Send Agrippa’s retinue to act as the vanguard as we climb the stair. I want the rest of the warriors on the flanks.’

‘Once we are on the stair, shall I have the paladins and the rest of the Liberators fall back as a rearguard?’ Morbus asked. Like Grymn, he was worried about the prospect of the plaguehosts rushing them from the forest and trying to overrun them as they climbed the Blackstone Summit.

Grymn nodded his agreement. ‘Have the Judicators form up on the exposed flank as we go up the stair. Their angle might be limited, but I think they’ll be more adaptable if we keep them out of the rearguard.’

Grymn looked across the retinues of his mixed command. Leading the Hallowed Knights had been an honour, but taking responsibility for the Knights Excelsior was an even greater one. Giomachus and the other officers of the Knights Excelsior had deferred to him without question, accepting his leadership as though it were the most natural thing in the world. He would prove himself worthy of that confidence in his skill.

Morbus pointed to the towering figure of Haldroot. The treelord had gathered the largest of his kindred to act as a bodyguard for the Lady of Vines. The sight evoked comparison of the walking fortress that had surrounded Alarielle’s palanquin as they marched from the Cascading Path. It wasn’t a comforting reminder.

‘Even with such powerful allies, we have lost much,’ the Lord-Relictor said.

The statement was one that made Grymn reflect upon how much it had cost them just to get this far. There were just under fifty Hallowed Knights left, and only slightly more Knights Excelsior. A handful of dryads and other tree-creatures had escaped the ice, and Haldroot’s wargroves, though more numerous than the Lady of Vines’ escort, were hardly a great host. Warrior by warrior, the strength was bleeding away from their cause.

Grymn looked again at his new hand. He could still feel the invigorating energy of the queen-seed flowing through him, strengthening him in both body and spirit. Leaving Morbus to attend to the deployment of the remaining Stormcasts, Grymn made his way through the masses of sylvaneth marching towards the stair. The tree-creatures exhibited a marked deference to him; even Haldroot didn’t oppose him as he approached the Lady of Vines.

‘My lady,’ Grymn said, ‘the honour you have shown to me by allowing me to hold the queen-seed is one that I will never forget, but I am unfit to decide our course now. I cannot shake the warning you’ve given, that the enemy may yet come upon us. There is risk in taking the queen-seed to Blackstone Summit, but if that is your decision I will see it done. It is you who were Alarielle’s handmaiden, you who know her best. You who understand how she can be restored and what must be done to ready her for this war.’

The Lady of Vines stared at him, a questioning light in her eyes. He sensed the branchwraith’s sympathy. ‘It is here that the Everqueen can be replanted. Here is the soil in which the queen-seed will blossom. The enemy will try to thwart our effort if he can,’ she said.

‘Then the Stormcasts will see this done, my lady,’ Grymn vowed.

Reaching to her breast, the branchwraith let her fingers caress the radiant soulpod of her queen. ‘This place is rich in the valour of past battle and the courage of fallen heroes. Those energies will nurture the seed as it grows. I cannot say what change that may have upon her aspect when she is reborn. Before Alarielle wore an aspect of beauty and wonder, nurturing and vital. She was the embodiment of the growing season. Now it is a season of claw and blade. She may assume a more warlike aspect, a form better suited for the trials of conflict.’ The Lady of Vines bowed her head to Grymn. ‘It may be that in her new aspect she will be less tolerant of outsiders than she was in her old one.’

‘What must be, must be,’ Grymn said, recalling Morbus’ words about gods and mortals. ‘If it is the goddess’ will that she be reborn in a form of wrath and retribution, then it is my duty still to stand beside her.’ He flexed his regrown hand, feeling the echoes of the Everqueen’s power within his flesh. ‘If there were only me, I would stand between her and the foe and give my last breath to keep her from harm.’

‘Let us pray it does not come to that,’ the Lady of Vines said.

Tegrus soared high above the black earth of Victory Fields, climbing towards the immense tower of Blackstone Summit. Closer to the ancient structure now, he could see the incredible details of the colossal spire. Indeed, he wondered if the titanic stone trees were things of nature or constructions of man. Certainly the men of Blackstone had brought tools against the trunks and branches of the trees at some point, reshaping them into a chronicle of the battle that had unfolded before their very roots.

The enormity of such labour, whether with chisel or knife, was almost beyond belief. The trees, together, were the size of a hill. A small city could have fit atop their branches. Yet as far as Tegrus could see, every inch of them had been worked, carved to provide a pictorial record of the battle. Across the length of one outstretched branch he could see strange chariots bearing warriors in crude armour against warherds of slavering beastmen. Upon one stretch of trunk, druids clad in animal hides pitted their magic against the pestilent daemons of Chaos. Everywhere, the struggle of men against the monstrous invaders was depicted, rising upwards along with the spiral stair, ascending towards the top of the interwoven trees. Climbing to the Blackstone Summit.

Tegrus neared its top now. He could see the great stone branches of the trees arching outwards to surround the plateau like the battlements of some mighty fortress. Even these had seen the attentions of artisans, each branch displaying some facet of the battle that had unfolded below. He recognised some of the daemonic creatures that had been part of Torglug’s legion, monstrosities that hadn’t changed in form or foulness for all the ages since their likeness had been carved into the trees. Recalling how formidable the fiends had been on the ice, Tegrus was impressed that the ancient tribesmen had been able to prevail with only their own valour and the magic of their druids to drive the daemons back. Even for the Stormcasts, such manifestations of Chaos were a challenge to vanquish.

The three trees, fusing together in their growth, had created a great plateau where their trunks merged. The same ancient craftsmen who had carved the rest of the colossal trees had been at work here as well, smoothing the surface until it resembled a vast courtyard. Cloud obscured all but the borders of that courtyard, leaving the rest of its expanse veiled in mystery.

Around him the remaining Prosecutors wheeled through the immense branches, scouring the summit for any trace of the enemy. Below them, like a great shroud, lay the green cloud with its flashes of energy. The weird manifestation forced the fliers lower, drawing them down into its mists. Tegrus could see no great distance once he was in the cloud. Twice he nearly collided with a stony branch, mustering all of his aerobatic skill to swing away from the obstruction.

His vision obscured, Tegrus keyed his other senses to the task before him. To his ears there came only the groans of the wind flashing between the branches. In his nose there was only the smell of stone. And those other senses, those inner impressions that shifted mood and emotion – they felt strangely dull, as though smothered by a heavy cloak. It was a peculiar, uncanny affliction, one that Tegrus couldn’t quite convince himself was merely a manifestation of Blackstone Summit’s magic.

Hammers at the ready, Tegrus swooped through the clouds. If there was danger here, he was determined to find it before it found Grymn and the Lady of Vines.

The steps wound around the colossal stone trees, climbing higher and higher above the Victory Fields. As they ascended towards the top of Blackstone Summit, Grymn kept looking earthwards. He expected any moment to hear the war cries and howls of the plaguehosts as Nurgle’s diseased armies tried to steal victory from them. Sometimes he caught the gleam of a Prosecutor’s armour as they circled above the tower searching for enemies, but such sightings became increasingly rare. The closer they came to the top, the thicker the veil of green cloud became, settling around them like fog. Still, the horn of the Knight-Heraldor and the light of his own warding lantern would lead the scouts back, however thick the mist grew. Every moment that didn’t see them streaking back to the column to give the alarm seemed like a gift from the God-King to Grymn. The higher they climbed, the more confident he became that they’d be able to hold the stair against any attackers. The closer the Everqueen was brought to their goal, the more he began to believe they had managed to escape the Plague God’s minions.

Still he was tense with alertness. The plaguehosts were everywhere, waging their campaign of conquest against the inhabitants of Ghyran and the other Chaos powers that would try to steal those conquests from them. Grymn couldn’t see Nurgle abandoning his hunt so easily after all the time his minions had searched for Alarielle’s refuge. Having driven the Radiant Queen into the open, having caused her to expend nearly all of her power, it was too much to hope that the Plague God had relented.

No, there had to be something. Grymn was certain of it. If Gardus were still here, they could have discussed the matter, and perhaps together come up with some new insight into what course of action the Plague God might be attempting. But he had to live in the present now, and rely on his own faith and wisdom.

Grymn noted their ascent to the Blackstone Summit more by instinct than conscious thought. His attention wasn’t on the terrain, but the hideous fog that occupied it. As they reached the top, the clouds suddenly diminished, drawn back as though they’d breached some illusory wall. He understood now why there had been no diseased army to meet them as they emerged from the Path of the Purified or to come charging after them from the petrified forest. Tallon growled as the enemy stood revealed before them.

Torglug and his legions, hidden by the green cloud and the illusions of their sorcerers, had gained Blackstone Summit first.

A nauseating reek struck Grymn as the spells that had concealed the presence of the army evaporated. There was no further need of such sorcery. The prey had already walked into the trap. There could be no retreat now. All the advantages Grymn had intended to hold on the stair would belong to the enemy if they tried to withdraw back to the Victory Fields. The plaguehosts were certain to pursue them, enjoying the high ground at every step.

It was a doubtful prospect. Grymn knew how few his Stormcasts were, how slight the sylvaneth contingent. Arrayed against them was a monstrous horde. Ranks of Chaos warriors in blackened armour. Tribes of skin-clad marauders, their bodies daubed in the sickening runes of their vile god. Mobs of abominable Chosen, their mutations twisting their corrupt flesh. A great swarm of ratmen pushing a rotted carriage from which swung a smouldering censer of pestilence. A slavering warherd of armoured beastmen, their hides falling away in mangy strips.

Most numerous of all, however, were the daemons. Flocks of rot flies, buzzing above the heads of the warriors below, their abdomens bloated with corruption and disease. Slug-like plaguebeasts, clutches of tentacles and eye-stalks writhing from their slimy bodies. Companies of cyclopean plaguebearers, filthy swords clenched in their clawed hands. Masses of toad-like nurglings, hopping about in the foulness dripping from the larger daemons.

Looming above them all, like great mountains of festering meat, were three Great Unclean Ones. Each of the greater daemons was an obscenity of loathsomeness, its hide blotched and broken with disease and decay. For Grymn, however, it was the centremost of that gigantic triumvirate that was the most sickening of all. He recognised it as the fiend that Angstun had sacrificed himself to destroy on the frozen sea. To see the daemon here was an obscenity, a cruel mockery of the Stormcasts who had been vanquished on the ice bridge.

Grymn’s focus shifted away from the daemons to the mortal warlord who commanded this sea of corruption: Torglug the Despised, his body swollen with the vile blessings of his abominable god. He could actually see a haze of green vapour rising from the villain’s pockmarked flesh, a miasma of decay that caused even the bodyguard around him to break out in weeping sores and blackheaded boils. Torglug’s eyes blazed with an unholy light, burning like putrescent lamps behind the rusted mask of his helm. In that gibbous, ghoulish luminance was the promise of ruination and torment, the lingering tortures of sickness and decay.

Torglug raised his cleaver-like axe. The warlord favoured him with a mocking salute, gesturing with the filth-encrusted weapon as though to promise the Lord-Castellant that this time he would lose more than just his hand.

Grymn heard the Lady of Vines raise her voice in a song of enchantment, the radiance of the queen-seed spilling from her outstretched hand and flowing across the trunks of her followers. This time the melody was harsh, rolling like the tramp of marching feet and the crash of war drums. The sylvaneth joined in her song and as their deep groaning voices rose, their bark began to darken, hardening into steely armour. The claws of the tree-creatures lengthened into spear-like talons, their branches sharpened into sword-like barbs. With an eerie unison, they closed around the Lady of Vines, surrounding her in a wall of arboreal fury. They would protect the queen-seed to the last, a living bastion against the enormity of the plaguehosts.

Grymn ordered his warriors into formation, drawing up the Liberators to form a wall of sigmarite, grouping the Judicators where their skybolt bows could be concentrated into murderous volleys. The stamina and conviction of his Stormcasts would be tested sorely, for the enemy outnumbered them by several orders of magnitude.

A lesser man would have been smothered beneath the burden of leadership in such grisly circumstances. The overwhelming enormity of the enemy, the frustrating closeness of their destination. These would have crushed even the noblest king with despair. It was not in Grymn’s nature to despair, however. The God-King Sigmar had brought him to this place. Grymn was the instrument Sigmar had chosen to lead His warriors into battle. This was all Grymn needed to know. Whatever courage and valour could accomplish here, the Stormcasts would see it done. Hallowed Knights and Knights Excelsior, they would stand before Torglug’s legion of daemons.

‘Only the faithful,’ Grymn whispered to himself. He looked across the ranks of his warriors, his brothers in arms. Raising his halberd aloft, he roared a wordless battle cry that echoed across the plateau.

The Hallowed Knights repeated the battle cry of their Stormhost: ‘Only the faithful!’ The words rolled like thunder across the Blackstone Summit. The mortal warriors of Torglug’s legion drew back a pace, glancing anxiously at their warlord as the ferocity of the shout cracked against their ears.

‘For Sigmar!’ The cry filled the voices of the Knights Excelsior as well as the silver-clad Hallowed Knights. This time even some of the daemons drew back in anxiety.

Grymn felt his heart swell with pride at the courage of his warriors. Whatever happened here, of one thing he was certain. The plaguehosts would not win this battle easily.

Torglug laughed when he saw how few the sylvaneth and their meddlesome allies were. It almost seemed embarrassing to him that after the long search for Athelwyrd, the hunt through the Cascading Path, the numberless battles on the Sea of Serpents, that it should all end like this. Not that he had anything against a massacre – it just felt anticlimactic.

Some of the plaguelord’s hubris faltered when the Lord-Castellant who led the motley assemblage of lightning-men and sylvaneth raised his halberd and shouted his battle cry. Torglug realised he should find such foolish defiance amusing rather than threatening, but he couldn’t still the trepidation that stirred in his gut. The rotworm nestled there was warning him against overconfidence.

Torglug could feel the uncertainty that surged through the daemons and monsters around him. The stink of skaven fear-musk seeped into the air as the ratmen chittered in fright. He refused to share in their trembling. Like a rotten mountain, the champion of Nurgle stood unbowed and unconquered. He knew his hour had come. It only remained to teach the enemy how futile their resistance was.

‘Be killing their leader,’ Torglug snarled at Slaugoth Maggotfang. He pointed at the ranks of lightning-men. ‘From these fools be cutting out the heart.’

The sorcerer raised his staff, words of power crawling onto his tongue. Like an arcane parasite, he drew upon the miasma of power exuded by Torglug’s blessing, weaving it into his own magic.

Even as he began his incantation, Slaugoth’s spell faltered. The worms in his mouth retreated behind his teeth, curling up into little coils of fright. His eyes strayed upwards. Beyond the green fug of pollution rising from the plaguehosts, past the stony branches of the summit, storm-clouds swiftly gathered. Thunder growled and lightning flashed with divine ire. Stone branches were blasted asunder as a boiling lance of lightning came smashing down to strike Blackstone Summit. Chaos warriors and daemons howled in pain as hail came pelting down at them from above.

The tremulous impact of the stormstrike shook the plateau as though it were in the grip of an enraged colossus. Thick smoke billowed from the impact crater, flaring embers shining within the black drift. Then, from behind the angry clouds above, a blinding light hurtled downwards.

Smoke evaporated in that descending brilliance. As it cleared away, a mighty figure was revealed. It was the armoured shape of a lightning-man, great wings of light stretching out from his back, a golden halo framing the stern and unforgiving mask of his helm. In one hand the warrior gripped a long sceptre tipped with a fiery twin-tailed comet. In the other he bore a massive warhammer, its head engraved with runes of such arcane might that Torglug thought they would burn themselves into his eyes as he gazed upon them.

Only the three Great Unclean Ones could bear to look upon the winged lightning-man. The rest of the daemons hissed in pain, turning their faces at the sight of the hammer the hero bore. Many of the nurglings squealed in agony and burst into foul puddles of slime and ichor simply from chancing to look upon the warhammer.

Torglug had been disappointed to think the hunt for the Radiant Queen would end in a simple massacre. Now he regretted the arrogance that had made him look askance at the good fortune the plaguehosts had enjoyed so briefly.

Grymn looked on in amazement as a twin-tailed fork of lightning smashed down in the space between the two armies. The mighty peal of thunder that roared across Blackstone Summit was unmistakably that of a stormstrike. For an instant he dared to believe that Sigmar had sent an entire Stormhost to reinforce them, that when the blinding flash faded from his visions he should see rank upon rank of stolid warriors arrayed against Torglug’s vile legion.

Instead, what he saw was a single warrior. Engaged in conflict throughout the realms, the God-King’s resources were committed to the struggle against the Ruinous Powers on many fronts. To draw even a single warrior chamber out of battle would have been to jeopardise whole campaigns.

Blazing wings of light supported the armoured warrior as he hovered above the plateau. Flickers of lightning snaked across his armour of blue and silver, the roaring lion sculpted upon his breastplate picked out in gold. The halo of golden spikes that framed his helm formed a solar nimbus around his head. In his left hand he held a mighty sceptre, celestial power pulsing through its enchanted sigmarite.

Gripped in the hero’s right hand was a weapon mightier still. It was nothing less than the godhammer itself, Ghal Maraz, forged in the dim mists of time in the world that was. Now the God-King had entrusted the warhammer to his mightiest champion, the one hero worthy of such honour. The Hallowed Knights had heard rumours of such a hero, but never before had they beheld his awesome manifestation.

The Celestant-Prime.

Almost without realising what he did, Grymn fell to one knee and bowed towards the divine champion. Around him, he was dimly aware of the other Stormcasts doing the same. Hallowed Knights and Knights Excelsior, all were in awe of this legendary hero. None of them had felt the presence of Sigmar’s champion before, had experienced the divine aura that surrounded him and radiated from him with a fiery intensity. Grymn felt his heart gripped by a righteous wrath, the clarion call of justice and retribution. Many were the outrages and atrocities of Chaos, sins unnumbered that cried out for vengeance. The Celestant-Prime was that vengeance manifest, the great avenger who would set to right the offences of the Ruinous Powers.

As the Celestant-Prime turned the stern visage of his helm towards the plaguehosts, he raised Ghal Maraz high. The heavens themselves roared in answer, booming with divine rage. He glared at the sea of daemons and monsters that had flocked to the banner of Torglug the Despised. For the Stormcasts and sylvaneth, his avenging presence carried the promise of triumph. For the pawns of Nurgle, it held only the inevitability of destruction.

Chapter twelve

Long had Tornus struggled against the malign might of Nurgle. He’d led his people again and again onto the field of battle. By the score, by the hundred, by the thousand his armies had diminished. The noble dead, lying upon a field of honour, fighting to the last to turn back the fiends of Chaos. The cowards who fled, seeking to hide from the invader and preserve their own worthless lives. Most vile of all, however, were the traitors, those who abandoned hearth and home to bow before the abominations of the Plague God.

Tornus fought through the bleak tarns and across the desolate moors. In the fog-shrouded forests and in the craggy hills, he met the enemy with axe and sword. Battle upon battle, he led the tribes, pitting mortal flesh and mortal courage against all the monstrosities born of Nurgle’s diseased corruption. Daemons and beastkin, sorcerers and mutants, all had been set loose against the steadings of his people. One after another the villages burned. One after another the castles were torn down. One after another the temples were defiled.

The tribes lost heart as the legions of Nurgle claimed victory after victory. They cried out to the gods for deliverance, prayed for mercy from the divinities that had watched over their people since the dim ages of myth. The only answer was silence, the cold indifference of oblivion.

Time after time, Tornus led his people into battle against the forces of Chaos, until, in the end, he was the only one left to fight. The only one who still dared to hope that the gods would not abandon them.

Outrage boiled in the bloated body of Torglug the Despised. When he saw the shining figure descend with the lightning strike, he at first thought Sigmar Himself had come to Blackstone Summit to take the field of battle. He thought the God-King was personally intervening to preserve the queen-seed and its guardians. Bitterness welled up inside him, a spiteful rage that eclipsed any fury he’d ever known before. Sigmar had left nations to be destroyed and enslaved, forsaken entire peoples to the cruelties of Chaos, abandoned even the most innocent to the savageries of beasts and daemons. Torglug had presided over the slaughter of kingdoms, yet Sigmar had failed to rescue so much as a single life. For the God-King to reveal Himself now was an insult to all Torglug’s victims.

The warlord’s massive gut rolled in amusement when he realised his mistake. The figure who hovered before him was no god, only another of Sigmar’s lightning-men. Torglug should have known the God-King wouldn’t show Himself, staying safe behind the fastness of Azyr while others fought and died in His name.

Sapphire flame blazed from the head of the sceptre the winged champion bore as he raised it high. Far overhead, in the swirling storm-clouds, a shimmering light appeared. Swiftly the light grew in size and intensity, plummeting down through the heavens. A fiery ball of celestial fury crashed into the sea of diseased daemons, immolating scores of plaguebearers in a blinding flash of annihilation. As the deafening clamour of the impact shuddered across the plateau, another sound rose to overwhelm it.

‘Only the faithful!’ The battle-cry of the lightning-men was like a clap of thunder. The silver warriors surged forwards, weapons and shields held before them as they charged across the plateau. At their head was the warlord Torglug had fought on the ice, the blade of his halberd shining in the glow of the Celestant-Prime’s blazing wings. Across from the silver warriors, the white-armoured lightning-men shouted their own battle-cry as they swept out to strike the plaguehosts on their left flank.

Inspired by their winged hero’s arrival, the lightning-men were committing themselves to the attack, charging into the plague horde. Torglug scowled behind the rusted mask of his helm. He had savoured the notion of dismantling the tiny retinue that clung to the Lady of Vines. He’d relished the vision of plucking Alarielle’s soulpod from the branchwraith’s dead clutch, of trampling the carcasses of her defenders underfoot as he celebrated his triumph. The last thing he’d expected was that these fools would have the temerity to steal the initiative away from him. The absurdity of it caused his swollen gut to roll with laughter.

Raising his blackened axe high, Torglug bellowed to his followers. ‘Be killing them all!’ The cry was both command and threat.

Mortal and daemon alike, those who marched under the decayed banner of Torglug understood that the warlord would spare none who failed him in this battle.

In a seething, bubbling wave of corruption and decay, the plaguehosts rushed forwards to meet the oncoming lightning-men.

Grymn brought his halberd shearing through the horned helm of a Chaos warrior, splashing the barbarian’s brains across the shield of his comrade. The foeman raised a flanged mace to retaliate, but Grymn’s blade struck down the second warrior as readily as the first, punching through both shield and breastplate to leave the enemy impaled. He shook the dying warrior free, casting his body into the howling mass of madmen and monsters. Each blow he visited against the enemy was delivered with righteous fury. Now that the Hallowed Knights were in battle with the minions of Nurgle once more, his warding lantern crackled with energy. An echo of Alarielle’s radiance glowed from the lamp, a nimbus of green light that shone about Grymn like a beacon to both friend and enemy alike. Stormcasts rallied to his side, drawn by the jade light. Tallon snapped at the foe with frenzied viciousness. Daemons and Chaos warriors converged upon him, lured by the eerie luminance.

Inspired by the presence of the Celestant-Prime, Grymn fought with a ferocity unmatched by any of the diseased disciples of Chaos. That Sigmar would dispatch His mightiest champion to aid them in their moment of greatest need was a blessing beyond measure in the Lord-Castellant’s mind. To him it was vindication of his leadership over the Hallowed Knights since the fall of Lord-Celestant Gardus. All of his uncertainty, all of the doubts about the choices he’d made and the paths he’d taken, had been extinguished the moment he’d seen Sigmar’s living avatar emerge from the stormstrike. His efforts had brought his warriors to this place, his protection had kept the Lady of Vines and her sacred charge safe until this moment. He had achieved all it was possible to achieve. Now the God-King would help them to reach their journey’s end.

Torglug’s obscene throng was far from defeated, however. Rot flies swept down from the green miasma overhead to assault the sylvaneth formation. The foul daemons were ripped out of the air by the defiant tree-creatures, impaled upon arms that were like pikes and mangled by rending talons of wood and thorn. The immense Haldroot caught one of the bloated monstrosities in his hands, squeezing it in a tremendous grip until the abomination burst like a rancid pustule. Such injuries as the aerial attackers visited upon the sylvaneth began to mend almost immediately, torn bark knitting together as the energies of the queen-seed swirled around them. Above it all, the warlike song of the Lady of Vines sounded.

The Knights Excelsior were charged by a troop of grotesque Chaos knights, their armour pitted with rust and decay, their steeds branded with obscene runes. As the riders ploughed towards the Stormcasts, Giomachus lifted himself into the air above his warriors. Blazing arrows flew from his bow, striking down several of the foremost riders while his star-eagle shot forwards to claw the face of the leading knight. The charge faltered as the riders following behind stumbled upon the bodies of their own fallen comrades. Before they could regain the impetus of their attack, Giomachus ordered the white-armoured line forwards, rushing at the diseased knights with hammer and sword. Judicators from the Knights Excelsior sent a volley of sigmarite arrows searing down into the routed cavalry as they tried to flee.

As the Hallowed Knights smashed their way through the motley assemblage of marauders and plaguebearers that hurled themselves upon the Stormcasts, new enemies swarmed forwards. A fume of poison billowed across the formation of Liberators as the grotesque ratmen scurried to the attack, pushing their rotten carriage ahead of them. The noxious cloud boiling from the swinging censer smothered several of the valiant warriors, seeping inside their sigmarite armour to choke the men within. The skaven were swift to leap into the gap their insidious weapon created, chittering and squeaking with despicable glee.

Grymn swung around to meet the skaven surge. His halberd slashed and chopped at the fiendish vermin, cutting them down like weeds. A driving blow from his blade hacked through an entire file of the creatures, tearing through their mangy fur and rotten robes. The ratkin who found themselves pitted against him squealed in fright, their eyes round with terror, but the pressure of their own frenzied comrades pushing at their backs forced them forwards. Black ratkin blood steamed against his armour and his boots slogged through a morass of skaven dead, yet still the monsters came.

A white-furred ratman arrayed in leathery robes appeared before Grymn, thrusting at him with a notched sword and a curved dagger that dripped with arcane poisons. Flecks of foam dripped from the plague priest’s fangs and its beady eyes gleamed with bestial frenzy. It slashed and hacked at him with inhuman speed and craven cunning. When Grymn parried a feint of its sword, the rat-chief would stab at him with its envenomed dagger, gouging his sigmarite plate as the enchanted poison burned the metal. Tallon flung itself at the crazed ratman, but the vermin struck the gryph-hound down with a swat of its blade, leaving the creature stunned and bloodied on the ground.

The larger conflict raging around Grymn faded to the edge of his awareness as his fury fixed itself on the skaven leader. In strength and skill, the vermin was laughably outmatched by the Stormcast, but its devilish nimbleness and contemptible dearth of scruples rendered it more dangerous than a more refined opponent. Its long, scaly tail slapped at his legs, trying to trip him and leave him vulnerable to the creature’s blades. Spittle flew from the ratman’s mouth, spattering across the mask of Grymn’s helm as the skaven tried to blind him.

Dirty tricks, abominable speed and crazed ferocity weren’t enough. All it needed was one instant of opportunity for Grymn to bring about the ruin of his foe. The skaven’s own frenzy provided that chance. Slashing at Grymn’s neck with its poisoned dagger, the ratman tried to slice the tendons of his arm with a backhanded cut across the Stormcast’s shoulder. Grymn dropped and twisted, dancing away from the weeping dagger, letting it scrape across his pauldron. At the same time, he brought his halberd spinning downwards, catching the skaven as it pushed forwards. The cleaving blade struck the vermin’s snout, crunching through flesh and bone to leave the better part of the rat-like visage lying on the ground.

Although mortally stricken, the cocktail of courage-bolstering potions rushing through the plague priest’s veins continued to lend it an atrocious vitality. The creature flung itself at Grymn, black blood gushing from its severed face. In its crazed state, the skaven dropped its weapons, instead scratching at its enemy with its claws and snapping at him with what was left of its mouth. Slowly, the horrific energy drained out of the white-furred maniac. With a whining gargle, the skaven conceded the fact of its death and slipped to the ground at its killer’s feet.

Grymn had only a moment to stare at his vanquished adversary before a seething stream of corruption swept down upon him. Raising his arms, trying to fend off the boiling filth, the Lord-Castellant staggered back. The halberd fell from his grasp, slipping into the gory heap at his feet. Agony lanced through every nerve in his body. It was all he could do to remain on his feet.

It was no natural assault, this searing torment. Grymn knew he was beset by the malignant conjuration of a sorcerer.

Watching Poxmonger Kriknitt perish was deeply satisfying for Slaugoth Maggotfang. The plague priest had been Torglug’s captive, subjugated by the warlord, yet it had continued to try to wheedle and connive to gain some advantage for itself. It had brought hundreds of its warriors to join the plaguehosts, happily guiding the legion through its reeking tunnels. All the while it insisted the arrangement between them was one of alliance rather than enslavement. Slaugoth had come to despise the ratman’s whining intrigues as it tried to insinuate itself into Torglug’s confidence.

The spew of corruption that boiled from Slaugoth’s mouth was like the breath of the Plague God Himself. Under that withering blast of virulent magic, steel would corrode, flesh would bubble and blood would be reduced to sludge. True, the enchanted stamina of a lightning-man might endure a bit longer and sigmarite plate might resist a few more heartbeats than simple steel, but the final result would be the same. A slow and agonising dissolution within the corrosive juices of Slaugoth’s sorcery.

When the leader of the lightning-men began to falter, when the halberd fell from his grasp, Slaugoth exulted. Triumph over his foe seemed assured. A few moments longer and the fell magic would finish his enemy and reduce him to a smouldering husk.

Even as he anticipated this annihilation, Slaugoth became aware of a change in the aether, a familiar disruption of the tides of magic, the evocation of a power he recognised as belonging to the hated God-King. Hurriedly, the sorcerer swept his hands in arcane passes, strengthening the phantasmal barriers and eldritch wards that guarded him. To be doubly certain of protection, he tightened the soul-bond between himself and his acolytes. Whatever hostile magic did penetrate his defensive wards would be passed along to the survivors of the plague coven, working its belligerence against the witches and warlocks instead of Slaugoth.

From the sky overhead, a barrage of lightning lanced downwards into the Chaos horde. The ratkin’s decayed carriage was smashed into splinters, the smouldering censer upset and its burning contents splashed across scores of the verminous skaven. Slithering, slug-like daemons were immolated in the shrivelling blasts of electricity. An entire tribe of marauders was routed as their jarls and champions were transformed into charred husks by the celestial fires.

Slaugoth could see the skull-helmed lightning-man mystic rushing to his leader’s aid. The relic hammer clutched in the enemy cleric’s fist pointed once again at the stormy sky, drawing down the elemental might of the God-King’s wrath. The sorcerer could feel the death-screams of his acolytes as the destructive energies rippled from himself to the plague coven. His black soul shuddered to contemplate the nearness of his own dissolution.

Tightening his arcane protections against the lightning, Slaugoth began to evoke the most powerful spell known to him. He would channel power from the daemons into nearby mortals who bore the Plague God’s mark. The stream of energy would swell the bodies of its victims, bloating them with noxious gases and corrosive acids. Eventually they would burst, spilling a fog of death across Blackstone Summit.

A web of lightning crackled all around Slaugoth. The sorcerer laughed as he imagined the skull-helmed mystic’s frustration. There seemed something desperate about the concentrated storm. Perhaps his enemy had some suspicion as to the magic Slaugoth was working and was trying everything in his power to thwart him. If so, then the futility of the lightning attacks was doubly delicious. He would have to listen for his enemy’s scream when the death fog rolled across the battlefield.

Slaugoth watched the lightning crash harmlessly around him for a moment, savouring the spectacle. Then he sensed a shift in his eldritch protections. The surviving acolytes of his plague coven were trying to defend themselves, severing the link between their master and their own rotten souls!

Too late Slaugoth tried to refocus his protections, to shift the magical shells around him, but a final crackling shaft of lightning crashed down upon him from the sky. Slaugoth heard the worms in his mouth explode as the bolt seared through him, and smelt his own flesh boiling off his bones. He could see the smoke rising from his charred body. The sorcerer tried to summon a last effort, a last spell.

In a burst of noxious foulness, Slaugoth Maggotfang was gone.

Torglug watched as the avenging figure of the Celestant-Prime smashed into the monstrous ranks of his legion. A sweep of the godhammer Ghal Maraz and a score of daemons were obliterated, destroyed so completely that not even a splash of ichor or a drift of greasy smoke marked their passing. Troops of plaguebearers, packs of daemon-beasts, swarms of rot flies, mobs of atrocities for which even Torglug had no name – all were cut down by the divine avenger. The Celestant-Prime was an army unto himself, single-handedly negating the numerical supremacy the plaguehosts had enjoyed only moments before.

The warrior’s heart buried deep within the bloated corruption of Torglug’s body burned with anticipation. It had been a long time since he’d faced such an enemy, a worthy foe to pit his skills against. The lightning-men he’d vanquished, the sylvaneth treelords, the tribal kings and heroes – these were all nothing and less than nothing! In a year, in a decade, Torglug wouldn’t even remember their names, much less the ease with which he’d overcome them. But here, here was a foe of such legendary stature that even mighty daemons quailed before him. Here was an enemy Torglug could be proud to cut down with his axe. This victory would be no hollow, shallow thing, forgotten in the bleak morass of unremitting carnage and contagion.

Torglug started to call to Goregus Festermaw, to urge the putrid blightkings forwards, to command them to carve a path for him through the line of white-armoured lightning-men so that he wouldn’t sully himself against such wretches before pitting his might against that of Sigmar’s champion.

As the command formed on Torglug’s tongue, ripping pain shot through his swollen gut. Entombed within the foulness of his innards, the warlord knew his daemonic rotworm was angry. In its violence, the parasite communicated to its host the displeasure of his god. When the rotworm writhed it was a warning to the Grandfather’s favourite that Nurgle was watching him.

Pain ripping at his insides, Torglug fought the desire to plunge his hands into his own abdomen and tear the rotworm loose. There would be no relief from such madness, not even in death. Nurgle had many ways of both inflicting and prolonging the suffering of His victims. No, there was but one respite and that was to submit to the Grandfather’s demands.

Tearing his eyes from the Celestant-Prime, Torglug looked across the plateau. There was only one thing that Nurgle desired more than besting Sigmar’s champion on the battlefield. It was there in the gnarled hands of the Lady of Vines, glowing with the ethereal radiance that had drawn Torglug through the snow and fog – the queen-seed, the soulpod of Alarielle, the prize Nurgle would sow in His own pestilent gardens. It was to capture this prize for the Plague God that Torglug had been granted such power, and given authority over such a host of mortals and daemons. The Grandfather cared nothing about the scraps of martial pride that yet persisted in the septic flesh of his slave. All that concerned Nurgle was the treasure he’d coveted for so long.

Choking on his own bitterness, Torglug turned and glowered at the colossal Great Unclean Ones. Guthrax and his infernal brethren had held themselves back from the fighting, content to let the Celestant-Prime expend his energies slaughtering wave after wave of plaguebearers and Chaos warriors. The threat of the greater daemons was one Torglug had intended to hold over the heads of his foes, keeping his mightiest weapon as a reserve, letting the lightning-men and sylvaneth know that however many of his minions they killed, the trio would be waiting for them.

The havoc wrought by the Celestant-Prime and the demands of Nurgle changed all of that. Now Torglug would throw the greater daemons into the fight. Their might would test even Sigmar’s champion, and while the enemy was occupied, Torglug would have a free hand on the battlefield.

Uttering a foul word of power given to him by Nurgle Himself, Torglug ordered the Great Unclean Ones to the attack. Slobbering and laughing, the immense fiends waddled towards the thin line of lightning-men, careless of the lesser daemons and corrupt mortals they smashed under their ponderous immensity. Guthrax bore once more the grisly flail of skulls he had wielded upon the Sea of Serpents. Each of his brother daemons carried a titanic sword caked in diseased filth. Swarms of nurglings, each the tiny image of the Great Unclean Ones, scampered in the wake of the grotesque goliaths.

Torglug didn’t linger to watch the greater daemons attack the lightning-men and the Celestant-Prime. Though its agitation had diminished, he could still feel the rotworm wriggling inside him, reminding him that Nurgle’s gaze was fixed upon him.

Between the armoured ranks of the lightning-men, Torglug could see the sylvaneth. He could see what the Lady of Vines intended. She was trying to reach the obelisk at the centre of the plateau, the memorial erected ages ago to honour those who had fought against the first incursions of Nurgle’s forces against the Jade Kingdoms. Though twisted and eroded by the continuous assaults of Chaos against the ruins of Blackstone, the obelisk still retained its aura of power.

Standing in the branchwraith’s way, of course, was Torglug the Despised. ‘Be forgetting the lightning-men,’ he growled at his bodyguards. ‘While they are being busy with Guthrax and his kin, the way is being clear for to be striking tree people.’ He glared at Goregus, fingering his blackened axe when he saw the scowl on the blightlord’s loathsome face. ‘Be forgetting them,’ he snarled again. ‘Once I am taking queen-seed, Grandfather will be destroying them all!’

Torglug waved his axe overhead, pointing the corroded blade at the tree-creatures. The putrid blightkings formed up behind their master, following him across the plateau. The daemons and marauders in their path hurried to clear the way for the ghastly entourage. Those who had rushed forwards to engage the sylvaneth were the ones without the courage to face the Celestant-Prime and the lightning-men. They had no stomach to interfere with the blightkings either.

From the masses of sylvaneth, the towering shape of Haldroot and lesser tree-creatures lumbered out to block Torglug’s advance. The huge arboreal beings hurled chunks of stone knocked from the petrified trees at the plaguelord’s retinue. Several of the blightkings were pulverised under the enormous shards of rock, their bodies popping in greasy bursts. Other forest spirits stomped forwards, swinging their massive arms like bludgeons. Two more of Torglug’s companions were crushed by the sylvaneth, their rusted armour crumpling under the titanic blows of the forest spirits.

Then the blightkings swept forwards, their fearsome axes hacking into the bodies of the sylvaneth. Torglug’s blighted blade chopped through the leg of one treelord, then split the toppling creature’s trunk in half as it slammed to the earth. Well had he earned the infamous sobriquet of ‘Treecutter’, and as he plied his axe, the stench of blood-sap filled the air. Mighty as they were, the sylvaneth were no match for the murderous fury of Torglug and his bodyguard.

The warlord’s eyes glistened with gruesome anticipation. Past the dwindling ranks of the forest spirits, he could see the Lady of Vines and her dryads. He could see the radiant light of the queen-seed, the prize Nurgle demanded as tribute from His favoured champion. Ultimate triumph was within Torglug’s reach.

A thunderous roar shook the plateau. Torglug looked away from the last foes standing before him, turning his blemished eyes to the sky. Through the storm-clouds, he could see the vengeful glow of a comet hurtling downwards.

Aware of the threat to the queen-seed, the Celestant-Prime had ignored the oncoming Great Unclean Ones and the swarms of lesser foes all around him. Raising his sceptre, he had called another comet down from the heavens, loosing its celestial fury against Torglug and his bodyguard.

In a blast of blue fire, the warlord was hurled skywards, blown back by the calamitous impact.

Grymn brought his halberd shearing through the diving rot fly, severing the daemon’s thorax and abdomen. The crippled abomination crashed to the ground, crushing several marauders under its diseased mass. A quick stab to its chitinous head extinguished the monster’s stubborn vitality.

Turning from his late foe, Grymn braced himself to meet the rush of another horrific opponent. Instead, he found the daemons and barbarians drawing back, retreating from the line of Hallowed Knights. Any ideas that their withdrawal owed anything to the valour and tenacity of the Stormcasts quickly faded as a tremor shuddered through the plateau, swiftly followed by another and still another. The quakes were like colossal footfalls and when Grymn raised his gaze to look past the enemies nearby, he saw that the impression was justified. The Great Unclean Ones, the titanic daemons that had made even the Lord-Castellant’s confidence falter, were waddling forwards to join the battle.

Alarm pulsed through Grymn’s mind. He knew there could be but one adversary on the field against which Torglug would unleash these daemonic obscenities. He had seen the awesome power of the Celestant-Prime, but the memory of Guthrax’s assault against his forces on the frozen sea was a vivid one. Now there were three such horrors. Against such a concentration of festering evil, he feared even the avenging angel of Azyr would be swept aside.

Concern for the Celestant-Prime galvanised Grymn’s thoughts. Tightening his grip about his halberd, he raised his voice in a fierce shout. ‘For Sigmar!’ he thundered, hurling himself against the foe once more. Even if they all were to fall, all that mattered was aiding the Celestant-Prime in his moment of need.

All around Grymn, warriors in armour of silver and white struck down plaguebearers and beastmen with hammer and sword. Arrows from the remaining Judicators arced upwards to come crackling down into the massed slaves of Chaos. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Stormcasts were cutting their way through the horde of enemies and to the embattled Celestant-Prime. If the winged hero could hold his own against the Great Unclean Ones for even a short time, then the Hallowed Knights and Knights Excelsior would be at his side.

The Celestant-Prime, however, was unable to focus upon the threat to himself. He had been vigilant in his fight against the plaguehosts, and when Torglug’s bodyguard charged towards the sylvaneth in a rush to reach the Lady of Vines, it was his actions that had blunted the warlord’s scheme. Evoking the might of his sceptre, he had sent a fiery orb searing down from the heavens to strike the diseased warlord and his entourage.

The measure, however, left the Celestant-Prime exposed to the colossal daemons waddling towards him. While he loosed the magic of his sceptre against Torglug, the Great Unclean Ones unleashed their own noxious powers against the avenging angel. Two of the bloated monstrosities opened their cavernous maws, vomiting a spume of sizzling filth against the warrior. The Celestant-Prime reeled against the attack, trying to shield himself against the boiling corruption with his wings. Steam billowed about the Celestant-Prime as the daemonic foulness splashed across him and evaporated in his holy aura.

The monstrous daemons had anticipated the limitation of their corrupt spew against a hero as sacred and mighty as the Celestant-Prime. All their vile assault could really do was occupy their enemy’s focus and keep him distracted. The real attack came from Guthrax. While its brother daemons spat their bile, Guthrax whipped its flail of skulls through the air, swinging it faster and faster in an ever-widening ring above its horned head. When the spinning flail had reached the peak of its momentum, Guthrax brought it lashing against the Celestant-Prime.

The flail struck the Celestant-Prime with an ear-splitting crack. The incredible momentum of the blow sent the hero hurtling high into the sky. The bloated daemons guffawed with obscene glee as they watched their foe vanish into the clouds.

An inarticulate shout of rage and disbelief ripped its way from Grymn’s throat. Redoubling his efforts, he butchered his way through the cheering masses of the plaguehosts. Damned mortal and diseased daemon alike perished upon his blade as he waded through the foul army. He gave no thought to his own protection or even to the impossible task he’d set himself. The only thought in Grymn’s mind was the awareness that he’d seen two mighty heroes vanquished by Guthrax. First Angstun and now the Celestant-Prime. If it cost him his own life, he was determined that the daemon would pay for its outrages. It would have no chance to savour its crimes.

Just as Grymn fought his way through a warherd of pestilent gors and found his path to the Great Unclean Ones clear, the slobbering laughter of the daemons died away. He could see the horned monsters turning their heads from side to side, trying to spot the Celestant-Prime’s battered body as it came crashing back to earth. When no such vision rewarded their search, the fiends craned their fat necks back and stared up at the storm-swept sky.

From those turbulent heavens, a winged shape appeared, darting down out of the clouds. Only for a heartbeat did Grymn mistake the figure for that of the Celestant-Prime; he quickly realised it was in fact Giomachus. His white armour gleaming with the lightning of the storm, the Knight-Venator hurtled downwards. He had an arrow nocked, his powerful arms holding the weapon taut against the winds that buffeted his plunging form. Lower and lower he descended, his aim never wavering. At last, the archer took his shot.

One of the greater daemons howled in agony as its leprous eye was pierced by a blazing arrow. Purifying magics surged from the star-fated arrow, pulsing through the obscene corruption of the daemon’s bulk. The Great Unclean One wailed and writhed, pawing towards its brother daemons in search of aid. Still calling to its brothers, the bloated daemon began to dissolve, its horrible essence collapsing under the purging force of the arrow. Soon all that was left of the monstrosity was a pond of bubbling muck and slime.

Other winged warriors dived down through the storm. Grymn could see his old comrade Tegrus, a hammer gripped in each hand. He dropped down towards the Great Unclean Ones, casting his crackling hammers into one of the swollen abominations. After him came the rest of the Prosecutors Grymn had sent to scout Blackstone Summit. They had seen the stormstrike from which the Celestant-Prime descended, and now they were lending their strength against the obscenities that had attacked Sigmar’s champion.

Trying to drag the Prosecutors from the sky with gouts of acidic vomit, Guthrax brought himself nearer to Grymn’s vengeful blade. Despite the hideous stench and sight of his enemy, regardless of the festering aura of sickness and death that swirled about the daemon, Grymn lunged at the putrid bulk. Shouting the war cry of the Hallowed Knights, he swung his halberd into the monster’s knee.

Sludge oozed from the wound Grymn visited against his foe. Guthrax’s bulk shuddered under the halberd’s bite. As the hulking daemon swayed around, he brought his flail crashing against the earth. Grymn dodged the pulverising smash of the hideous weapon. Lifting his warding lantern, he shone the holy light full up into the blemished eyes of his abominable foe.

Guthrax roared in agony, blinded by the divine light. Furious, he leaned downwards, trying to seize Grymn in a flabby claw. The Lord-Castellant braced himself. ‘Only the faithful,’ he vowed as he saw his opportunity. Firming his grip about the haft of his halberd, he thrust upwards with the weapon. Rotten flesh parted before the blade as he drove it deep into the Great Unclean One’s breast and impaled the diseased triple heart that throbbed within the obscene enormity.

Grymn ripped his weapon free and withdrew from his stricken foe. With a slobbering groan, the abominable bulk of Guthrax slammed face-first into the dirt. A final shudder and the daemon’s vitality abandoned his rapidly decaying carcass.

Grymn had no time to savour his triumph. A powerful blow sent him tumbling across the ground. Flat on his back, he looked up as the last of the Great Unclean Ones came waddling towards him, its blackened sword raised for a killing blow.

Before the daemon could strike, something flashed down from the sky above. Grymn felt his spirit soar as the Celestant-Prime hurtled back to the fray. Sigmar’s champion was returning to the battlefield. His wings seemed as if they were threads of lightning. His armour looked as though it were sheathed in flame. The head of Ghal Maraz burned with the brilliance of the sun, blinding in its majesty.

The Great Unclean One followed Grymn’s gaze. It was afforded the merest glimpse of its own doom in the instant before Ghal Maraz struck it down. Supercharged in the middle of the storm, the godhammer’s impact evaporated the daemon’s horned head, reducing it to naught but a steaming sizzle of pollution. The decapitated monster slammed down, decaying with the same intensity as the corpses of its brothers. The Celestant-Prime hovered above the vanquished abomination, his blazing wings fanning the air.

Shrieks of panic rose from the surviving daemons. With Guthrax and its kin destroyed, without the bindings of Slaugoth’s magic to hold them, the plagued throng began to dissipate, receding into the shadows rather than face the wrath of the Celestant-Prime.

Grymn looked up at the victorious hero, but already the Celestant-Prime was in motion. His fight with the daemons had been brief, but in even so slight a delay, the powers of darkness had been active. While they were destroying the Great Unclean Ones, the Stormcasts had presented an opportunity for their enemy to snatch a still greater victory from them.

Once there had been a great hero named Tornus, warrior-guardian of the Everdawn tribe, defender of the Lifewell upon which the very existence of his people had depended. He had been heralded as a scion of human perfection by his people, worshipped as an aspirational paragon to inspire the dreams and ambitions of king and druid alike. The desires of Tornus had been neither for wealth nor for glory. Improvement, the achievement of a greater and purer kind of perfection: this had been the vision that ruled his heart.

When the plaguehosts descended upon his people, Tornus had fought them to the very last. He had endured within the Pit of Filth, surviving upon the basest and barest of essentials. For a time, he had continued to cling to his ideals, his vision of perfection of body and spirit. Within the pit, however, his flesh began to decay, his body corrupted and defiled. With the contamination of his flesh, seeds of despair were sown in his mind. Through that despair, his soul was enslaved by Nurgle. Tornus the hero became Torglug the Despised.

In the depths of his hopelessness, Torglug reviled his old aspirations as naivety. There was no such perfection of body and soul as that which he had struggled to find. All a man could wrest from his existence was power. It was in might alone that a mortal exhibited his worth. Power, raw merciless force, was the only reality. Only through his capacity to conquer and destroy did a man prove his value to the gods.

Such were the truths Nurgle whispered to Torglug as he fell into despair. How long he had lived by the diseased mantra of the Plague God, he couldn’t remember, but there were times, moments of doubt, when a flicker of the man he had once been stirred within him. In such moments he looked upon the bloated, ghastly horror he had become, considered the atrocities he had exacted as tribute to the very power that had inflicted this fate upon him. He recognised the stubborn pride that drove him on for the madness it was. He understood how low he had fallen.

Seeing the Celestant-Prime, Torglug knew everything he’d been told was a lie. It was impossible to deny the majestic perfection of Sigmar’s champion as he struck out against the daemonic hosts of Nurgle. The aspirations that had stirred the heart of Tornus were possible. It would have been better for him to have perished in the Pit of Filth than to lose the hope that had once ennobled him.

Torglug staggered back to his feet, his body blasted and broken by the comet hurled down upon him by the Celestant-Prime. The warlord’s physical injuries were nothing beside the doubt that roared through his spirit. His fealty to Nurgle flickered, withering before the divine might of the Celestant-Prime.

The eye of Nurgle was yet upon His favoured champion, however, and He would not allow His slave to slip free of His domination so easily. The queen-seed was within Torglug’s grasp. All that was needed was a slight push, a tiny infusion of power, and the plaguelord would prevail.

From the heavens, malignant power once again descended upon Torglug, but this time it was to strengthen rather than destroy. A bilious shower rained down upon him from the poisoned sky, a stream of toxic contagion that seeped into his corrupt flesh. Broken bones were infused with abominable vitality and scorched skin hardened into leathery endurance. The thousand pains that wracked the warlord’s body were transformed into naked, brutal power, saturating his mind with images of carnage and destruction. Snatching his ghastly axe from the scorched earth, Torglug lifted his horned head and slobbered a renewed oath of fealty to his grisly god.

Around Torglug, the putrid blightkings likewise rose from the dissolution that had threatened them. Wherever the spark of life lingered, the profane infection of Nurgle’s obscene baptism revived flesh and corrupted soul. A gibbous light shone from the eyes of the warlord’s entourage as they surged once more to the attack.

The sylvaneth were before them, the wounds visited against them by Torglug’s first push regenerated by the healing radiance of the queen-seed. Limbs hacked away by the axes and swords of the blightkings had regrown, and bark gouged by the disciples of decay had knitted together. The decimated wargroves were restored, ready to defend the Lady of Vines and the sacred burden she bore.

It was an eerie battle as Torglug drove his retinue against the sylvaneth. Flushed with the obscene power of Nurgle, the putrid blightkings were walking engines of destruction. The wounds caused by the forest spirits regenerated as swiftly as the cuts they dealt in return. Two unkillable forces locked in merciless battle. Haldroot seized Goregus in his gnarled hands, lifting the blightlord high before applying a tremendous pressure that threatened to rend the warrior to pulp. Goregus, even as his body was tortured out of any semblance of shape, hacked away at the treelord, stripping away slivers of heartwood that were restored the instant his blade pulled free.

The malign might of Nurgle was invested too heavily in Torglug to be defied by the diminished energies of the Everqueen. Where Torglug’s axe struck the sylvaneth, a crust of corruption was left behind. Limbs shorn away by his blackened blade regrew as weak, twisted things, devoid of the strength to oppose him. While his bodyguard languished in futile conflict, Torglug was able to press on, driving a wedge deep within the ranks of the tree-creatures.

At last the warlord found himself cutting down the file of dryads surrounding the Lady of Vines. A guttural laugh drooled from behind his horned helm as Torglug found himself alone with the branchwraith. His three eyes focused upon the radiant glow of the queen-seed she clutched in her hand.

‘That is mine,’ he hissed. ‘Too long are you keeping it from me. You are cheating me of my prize no longer!’

Rushing forwards, Torglug brought his axe swinging around. The Lady of Vines expended some measure of her power, conjuring a web of thorns that erupted from the ground to ensnare her enemy. The vines wound about the warlord’s body, stabbing his flesh with their spines, but the impetus of his charge was barely blunted. He drove his swollen bulk through the thorns, defiant of the ruin wrought upon his body. This close to the prize he’d promised Nurgle, Torglug would not be denied.

The filthy axe of the Treecutter slammed into the branchwraith, ripping deep into her trunk. The Lady of Vines slashed at him with her claws, but even with the power of the Radiant Queen to empower her assault, it wasn’t enough to overcome Torglug. Gloating, the plaguelord brought his axe hewing down once more, chopping into the crown of branches atop the Lady of Vines’ head. Lifesap sprayed from the grisly wound. Propelled by the infernal might that rippled through Torglug’s polluted frame, the axe dug deep, splitting the branchwraith’s head, gouging a ruinous cut down the middle of her visage.

The Lady of Vines crumpled at Torglug’s feet. Down came the blackened axe once more, shearing through her arm and sending it rolling across the ground. Again the foul blade chopped into her, ripping through her trunk in a spray of gooey lifesap. Splinters of wood flew from her mangled body as the plaguelord hacked away at his beaten foe. All the frustration of his long hunt was visited upon the branchwraith. Each gash, each cut, was delivered with vengeance. When he had finished, the Lady of Vines had been reduced to a heap of kindling.

Torglug bellowed with delight as he reached down to rip the glowing queen-seed from where it lay amid the hewn remains of the Lady of Vines.

Before he could seize the prize Nurgle had coveted for so long, Torglug heard the rumbling fury of the remaining sylvaneth and the enraged shout of the surviving Stormcasts. Even as his pestilent fingers stretched down, doom descended upon Torglug the Despised.

Storming from the sky, the Celestant-Prime dived upon the bloated warlord. Crackling with the vengeful wrath of the God-King, Ghal Maraz came hurtling downwards at Torglug. He raised his fell axe to parry the two-handed blow, but the iridescent fury of the avenging angel would not be denied. The warhammer shattered Torglug’s foul axe, exploding the weapon in a spray of black sorcery and rusted shards. Ghal Maraz drove onwards, its momentum unimpaired by the destruction of Torglug’s blade. The plaguelord’s horned helm shattered like an egg as the hammer crashed down upon it, the head within reduced to a mire of diseased pulp. A filthy miasma of green vapour spilled from the carcass, sizzling and steaming as it stained the earth around the body.

Torglug slopped to the ground. From his ruptured head, a bright blue light leapt into the stormy sky, vanishing into the celestial tempest of Sigmar’s justice. A single peal of cosmic thunder boomed above Blackstone Summit. Nurgle’s favourite had found his doom.

Lord-Castellant Lorrus Grymn led the last of the Hallowed Knights towards the broken husk that had been the Lady of Vines. Giomachus and the surviving Knights Excelsior maintained the battle line, falling back towards the ruined sylvaneth formations while keeping the remaining plague warriors at bay. The Celestant-Prime, after defeating Torglug, returned to the battle, hurling the awesome might of his vengeance against the enemy ranks.

The sylvaneth stood around their lost leader, mourning her in their sombre fashion. Strangely, none of the tree-creatures had moved to take the queen-seed from the branchwraith’s hand. Instead they were forming into a defensive ring around the body of their fallen mistress. The great treelord Haldroot noted the approach of Grymn. There was a look of acceptance in the creature’s gaze now, a mark of respect for how keenly Grymn had tried to fight on their behalf.

Grymn looked down upon the fading light of the queen-seed, and wondered whether Alarielle could ever be safe here. What if another and mightier plaguehost descended upon Blackstone Summit before her powers were replenished? Could the Ruinous Powers be defeated a second time?

Grymn cast his questioning gaze across the faces of Lord-Relictor Morbus, Prosecutor-Prime Tegrus and all the other Hallowed Knights who had survived the long campaign. Tallon, limping to his master’s side, turned and growled at the battle yet raging on the plateau.

The Lord-Castellant was happy to see his companion again, but he took more than comfort from the gryph-hound’s simple display of devotion and service. Tallon didn’t question the shadows of the future. For him, the demands of the moment were all that mattered.

‘Liberator-Prime Agrippa!’ Grymn called out. ‘Form a shield wall ahead of the sylvaneth! Judicators, take position at the flanks! Prosecutors, support the Knights Excelsior!’

As his warriors hastened to carry out his commands, Grymn took his place among the Liberators, the light of his warding lantern shining upon them, reinvigorating them. This was their purpose, to defend the innocent against the ravages of Chaos. They would not stray from that purpose. For as long as Sigmar asked it of them, they would hold back the tide of darkness and keep safe the ember of hope than shone within the Everqueen’s soulpod.

Victory was measured in moments, but enough moments bound together would build the future.

The Unending Storm

Nick Kyme

Ghaar’eth, called Warson by his followers, beheld the storm in rapt silence.

His rivals were dead, reduced to blood and viscera at his feet and the feet of his warriors. A modest host, they had still prevailed. The hacked-up bodies of the Arcanites littering the Gargantua Ridge were testament to the Bloodwrought’s and Warson’s growing power and ambition. Soon, all of the Beastplains would be his, would be Khorne’s.

Until this. Until the storm…

It struck the sky with such vehemence, a storm without cessation that burned with furious azure lightning.

‘Skarku, what does it mean?’

The slaughterpriest paused in the flensing of skulls to crane his neck and look upon the darkling sky. An eldritch gloaming had fallen upon the ridge, throwing shadows across the huge, ancient bones from which it took its name.

‘It is a portent,’ he hissed between knife-sharp teeth. ‘A summons. Khorne calls us to further battle, Warson.’

Ghaar’eth felt it in his blood, the violent urge never sated. A strong wind ghosted across the ridge, ridding the air of the stench of blood and replacing it with something else. Rain… steel… lightning.

Grunting, Ghaar’eth put on his helmet of dark iron. A snarling effigy of Khorne formed its nosepiece and eye slits, rising into a crown of twin horns. It matched the brand seared into his face. Other brands marred his naked flesh – kill tallies and carved imprecations to daemons.

‘Leave those morsels,’ he growled to his warriors, reaching for his hellbladed axe, which stood embedded in the corpse of the Arcanite sorcerer-king.

His Bloodwrought reavers left the carcasses of the Arcanites and took up their weapons. Some murmured their displeasure, but the killing urge at the prospect of battle soon quelled any serious discontent.

‘The dark feast can wait,’ he told Skarku, who was tying a ruby-red skull to his belt. He had taken the Arcanite’s feathered war-mask too and used it to hide its former bearer’s rictus grin.

‘Khorne calls again,’ said Skarku.

‘Let the blood flow…’ Ghaar’eth replied, his eyes on the lightning cascading from the heavens.

After climbing down the ossuary path of the Gargantua Ridge and crossing the floating bone mesas of the Abyssal Bridge, Ghaar’eth and his warband reached the Varnagorn Valley.

Four immense totems rose from the red earth of this deep valley basin, so high they breached the clouds. None who climbed them was ever seen again. Rumours abounded that the totems, which were carved in the monstrous visages of leviathan beasts too large to have been wrought by mortal hands, were a gateway or bridge between worlds.

Such talk roused Ghaar’eth to anger, and he had slain all of the rumour-makers who had ever strayed into his path. But when he saw the golden warrior stood between the four beast totems, as if having come from the very sky itself, he began to wonder if the fools whose skulls now arrayed his trophy rack were indeed speaking the truth.

It did not matter. As the golden warrior turned, his face an impassive mask and his movements suggesting strength, Ghaar’eth knew he had found a worthy warrior to match his wrath against.

Skarku bellowed incoherently at the golden one, spitting blood and phlegm as a fury overtook him.

Ghaar’eth cut through the slaughterpriest’s frenzy and cooled the boiling blood of all his warriors with the vehemence of his command.

‘Take heed,’ he uttered, his gaze never leaving the golden one who brandished a hammer and a shield struck with images of the celestial heavens the likes of which Ghaar’eth had never seen before. ‘This one is mine.’

He had fought and enslaved many other warbands, killed those too belligerent to submit to his yoke… the Three Eyes, the Serpentine, even those Fleshchanger Arcanites still wet on his axe blade. Never had he seen a warband with markings such as this. It burned his blood to imagine the martial contest this warrior now presented.

None would gainsay him – Ghaar’eth had killed all of his rivals in the Bloodwrought, so when he stepped forwards into the arena of the totems, he knew he would fight this champion alone.

‘Are you watching, my lord Khorne?’ he whispered, before gesturing to the golden warrior with his axe. ‘Stormrider…’ he shouted into the wind and the tempest, which had risen a beat since he had approached, ‘my axe craves your blood. Your skull shall adorn my temple of victories.’ With the lightning of the heavens coruscating across his golden armour, Ghaar’eth could think of the warrior only as Stormrider, and when he spoke, he did so with a voice of thunder.

‘And lo, did Sigmar see the foulness of Chaos and all it wrought in its manifold evil.’

Ghaar’eth frowned, ‘Sigmar?’ He laughed uproariously as the stormrider pointed his hammer at him and met the challenge. ‘Sigmar is dead! Khorne cut him down, sucked the marrow from his bones, and drank his blood ’til naught remained but a shrivelled corpse. Ha! You are not of Sigmar, wretch. Let me show you why…’

He hurled himself at the golden warrior, his axe swinging. Ghaar’eth’s first blow struck the warrior’s shield, releasing a clangour that seemed to resonate with the storm.

Leaping aside to avoid the return hammer swing, Ghaar’eth punched his fist spike into the golden warrior’s unprotected flank and was rewarded with a grunt of pain. The stormrider struck back, landing a blow against the Chaos champion’s shoulder guard that burned with the fury of lightning. Ghaar’eth recoiled, but shook off the pain to examine the rich wet fluid on the blade of his fist spike.

‘So you are flesh beneath all that gold. You bleed.’

Breathing hard, the golden warrior charged, shouting, ‘Azyr!’ He led with his shield, a crack marking the boss where Ghaar’eth’s axe had bitten deep, but the Warson turned just before the charge hit. He kept turning – legs bunching, axe swinging – in one seamless motion until he felt a satisfying crunch of plate and then bone.

‘You must realise something, Stormrider…’ Ghaar’eth told the golden warrior, who tried to stagger away. He couldn’t go far. The hellblade was embedded in the golden warrior’s back and Ghaar’eth clenched the haft like a leash.

A fount of blood erupted from the golden warrior’s mouth, and Ghaar’eth heard it spatter the inside the mask before it oozed down the warrior’s neck. The stormrider tried to reply, but fell to his knees instead.

‘These are Khorne’s lands,’ said Ghaar’eth, wrenching free his axe and eliciting a wail of agony from his foe, ‘and he has made me their keeper.’

‘Now…’ he added, taking the haft of his weapon in both hands and eyeing the golden warrior’s neck, ‘I shall take your–’

A blinding flash of light stopped the oath from being fulfilled as a lightning bolt streaked into the turbulent heavens, taking corpse and trappings both.

Ghaar’eth followed its path and saw that it led beyond the totems.

‘I smell war in this storm,’ he told his followers, who had gathered to witness his victory.

Sheathing his axe, he placed one booted foot against the totem, took a firm grip and began to climb…

The Lavasand writhed in agony as the maw-wyrm devoured the Bloodreavers who had slipped into its cavernous jaws and set the desert churning. They had sailed too close to the pull of the great beast, their oarsmen too slow and too weak to escape as the sand bled away into its mouth.

Their fellow Bloodbound laughed uproariously at this misfortune, the bellows of the Bloodwrought hiding their fear.

The maw-wyrm was a giant gullet, a pulsing, burning maelstrom that sucked in the hot sand only to belch it forth again in towering spumes of iridescent fire.

Not only a beast, though – it was also a gate into another place, another realm. Ever since he had climbed the totem and left the dark canyons of the Gargantua Ridge to emerge in the fiery hells of the Lavasands, Ghaar’eth knew the opportunities such a crossing could grant.

Followers, skulls, the favour of the Blood God.

A great many warriors had joined his warhost since he had defeated the stormrider and ascended the totems without fear or hesitation, but like Khorne, his yearning for blood and power were never sated. He wanted more.

Ghaar’eth rode the rust-metal hellbarge with the arrogance of a king, one foot on the deck and the other on its bladed prow. Keen to avoid the same fate as their eaten comrades, the oarsmen drove the ironclad hard, trusting to the blood-furnace at its heart to fuel the bone paddles at its aft and further their efforts at evasion.

They had to kill it before they could pass through it, this much Ghaar’eth had garnered since the fight had begun. Killing was in his marrow. It was like breath to one such as he, as his appearance would attest. Ghaar’eth’s armour, a gift from his lord Khorne, glinted in the red glow of the cinder-sun, and he brandished a cleaving-spear in one hand.

‘Here,’ he bellowed to the throng of warriors at his command, ‘see how the beast is tamed!’

As he threw the spear, shearing off one of the maw-wyrm’s tusks, he noticed a faint speck on the horizon.

A storm front.

‘Other warriors seek to keep us from our prize, Skarku,’ he muttered to the skull lashed to his belt. Skarku’s portents had been useful, his challenge to Warson’s rule less so. None would challenge him and live. He had sworn it to Khorne.

Eyes narrowing, Ghaar’eth walked to the very end of the prow, the hot and foetid breath of the maw-wyrm washing over him as the hellbarge circled the pit of flame. Another eruption threw fire and ash, some of it burning Warson’s armour, but he brushed it away as if it were a minor irritant. His attention was on the horizon. In the seconds that had passed, the speck had grown.

Somehow, it had become a cohort of winged warriors, blazing with the brilliance of a gilded sun. They came fast, armed with javelins. The one who led them carried a crackling trident. Ghaar’eth’s eyes narrowed as he recognized the leader, despite his unfamiliar shape.

His curse almost caught in his mouth, emitted as a breathless rasp.

‘Stormrider…’

Turning to his skullgrinder, he soon found his rage again. ‘Yaargen – bring them down!’

Lightning struck six times as the winged ones swooped upon the hellbarge, clutching spears of celestial fury. Five of Ghaar’eth’s blood warriors died instantly with those heavenly shafts impaling their bodies.

Only Yaargen survived, evading the blow before hurling his chained anvil. He struck one of the winged ones in the back, who crumpled and fell like a blazing comet. The warrior hit the deck of the hellbarge, but crackled back into the ether before any Khornate knives could fall upon him.

Ghaar’eth sprang off the prow and ran to the other side of the deck as the ship turned in the maelstrom and the winged warriors followed, eager to avenge their fallen comrade.

Yaargen reeled in his anvil, the metal steaming from the sheer heat of the Lavasands, and began to swing once more. He finished three arcs before a trident came screaming from the blood-red sky and ended his wrathful bellowing. Ghaar’eth called out to the skullgrinder’s killer.

‘Stormrider!’ he said. ‘It is you, isn’t it? Khorne has seen fit to send you to die by my blade once more.’

‘I am reforged,’ said the stormrider in reply, his lightning wings holding him level so he could look down upon Warson, ‘by Sigmar. It is by his hand that you and I meet again.’

Ghaar’eth laughed. So amusing, so arrogant, this golden one.

‘Then come, Stormrider,’ he said, stepping back and gesturing to the deck, ‘or will you fight me from the skies like a coward?’

A rivulet of power that might have been anger flared behind the eyeslits of the stormrider’s mask. He was momentarily distracted, having strayed too close to the maw-wyrm, and had to fly swiftly to avoid a pillar of flame spewed from the beast’s gullet. He was still turning when Ghaar’eth flung his cleaving-spear. Hurled with almost daemonic strength by an arm encased in blood-red metal, it pierced the stormrider and tore him open.

As the golden warrior wheeled erratically towards the gaping maw-wyrm, streaming blood and light, Ghaar’eth called out to him again.

‘Return to your feckless god, Stormrider.’

He watched as the dying warrior plummeted into the maw-wyrm’s gullet and smiled as the lightning burst of the stormrider’s death sparked violently beneath the sands. Smoke rose in a pall from the beast, its fiery undulations having now ceased.

The maw-wyrm was dead and the gate to another realm was Warson’s. It didn’t matter where it led, only that his crusade of slaughter could go on.

‘Row!’ he roared to the reaver oarsmen. ‘Take us down into the belly of the beast where the unending favour of Khorne awaits!’

Though the cold nullified most of the stench of the corpse-titans, it could not rob the air of its sulphurous reek.

Ghaar’eth snarled behind the daemon-mask of his war-helm, ignoring the hissed invectives of the creature bound within it. They only served to irritate the beast upon whose back he now rode, an armoured brute of blood and brass – another gift from Khorne.

Acid snow stung the few places where his bare flesh lay exposed to the elements. It hissed and scored his new blood-wrought armour, which was already notched from days of battle. The Corpulents were slain, rotting in the stinging tundra of this icy waste as he and his vast army marched across the backs of the corpse-titans. If these ur-gargants had ever lived, there was no sign of awareness in them now, other than their slow moaning tread as they crawled endlessly across the landscape through the shawls of snow. At the end of this journey lay another realm. Ghaar’eth had but to ride upon their backs to reach it.

‘Glory to Khorne…’ he murmured, exulting in his latest triumph, until he saw the causeway…

The route of the corpse-titans took them into a ravine across which lay an ice bridge, high and wide enough for them to pass beneath. An army of golden warriors stood upon the span, weapons held fast in their gauntlets, so still and apparently unyielding that for a brief moment he thought they might be statues. The illusion would have held were it not for the clarion of a trumpet.

Ghaar’eth roared as he realised the golden paladins were about to leap down in attack. His raised his axe high, bellowing to his men. ‘Turn this ice crimson and lay your offerings at the feet of the Brass Throne!’

Suddenly, the backs of the corpse-titans became undulant battlegrounds as the golden warriors descended. A thunderous cacophony shook the wretched shells of the ur-gargants, resonating through scabrous flesh and bone as the paladins landed and immediately formed up into ranks.

Spurring his beast, Ghaar’eth charged into the enemy’s ranks, his Bloodwrought hordes hard on his heels. A paladin died when he was gored by the Juggernaut’s brass horn. The horn punched through the warrior’s back with such violence it sent a spray of blood across the masks of his fellows directly behind him. With a snarl, Ghaar’eth cut the golden paladin’s head from his shoulders just before the lightning took him.

He rode on, heedless of the actinic fury roiling around him, and drove a second paladin under his beast’s ironshod hooves. As the squeal of crushed and yielding metal sounded over the battle din, Ghaar’eth’s eye was drawn to a figure with an arcing blue helmet plume and a lightning-forked facemask.

Ghaar’eth’s heart stopped as he realised who it was through the bloody melee.

‘Impossible…’ he breathed, as the ice in his veins melted into boiling wrath. ‘Impossible!’ he roared.

It could not be.

‘Stormrider…’

A mighty hammer, as long as he was tall, crackled in the paladin’s fist. He had already taken a fearsome toll upon the army of the Bloodwrought, and now, he turned his steely attention to its leader.

‘I see you, despoiler,’ he uttered with a voice as deep and resonant as a thunderhead. ‘You shall never be rid of me.’

He seemed colder now, the warrior of gold, as if an avatar of lightning were encased in that armour and not a man at all.

‘Not a man…’ breathed Ghaar’eth. ‘No man could live…’ He thrust his axe skyward, an imprecation to his wrathful lord. ‘Be thee immortal or some conjuring of the hated Changer, I shall have thy head, Stormrider!’

Swinging his axe in a wide, sweeping arc, Ghaar’eth spurred his beast through the battle towards his nemesis. None could impede him, and paladins and Bloodwrought both fell to his blade or his steed if they came into his path.

The clash, when it came, shook the ice scabs from the corpse-titan’s back where they fought.

Stormrider swung his lightning hammer, and where it met the haft of Ghaar’eth’s own hellforged blade, a storm was unleashed that turned the air white. Frenzied abandon met implacable vengeance as Khornate warlord and celestial paladin fought each other to an impasse. A cordon of the dead grew around them as their comrades sought to intervene but were destroyed. Bloodwrought warriors killed by the paladin piled so high they formed a wall of the slain, whereas a blackened ring of scorched flesh remained where Ghaar’eth had sent the paladin’s allies back to the heavens.

Soon, none dared the wrath of either fighter and they were left to duel between themselves.

Discarding all notion of defence, Ghaar’eth drew deep of his lord’s wrath and smashed his axe against the paladin’s upraised hammer haft.

‘Stormrider…’ he spat like a curse, breathless with exertion, ‘why… won’t you… die!’

The last blow split the haft of the paladin’s hammer in half, and the axe blade kept going until it embedded in the warrior’s chest. Even injured so grievously, he fought on, beating Ghaar’eth’s unprotected flank with what remained of the hammerhead. It lacked the potency of a blow delivered with both hands, but wrenched a cry of pain from the warlord.

Tearing his axe free, Ghaar’eth struck again and again, hacking the paladin apart, splashing his face and armour with blood until there was nothing left of his nemesis.

For a moment, the brutalised corpse remained on the back of the corpse-titan, and Ghaar’eth began to exult as he thought he had finally achieved a victory. But then the lightning came and, even as Warson tried to grasp the stormrider’s mangled faceplate, the paladin was delivered back unto the heavens.

The battle was almost over and, though the golden warriors had taken a heavy toll, the Bloodwrought had triumphed again. As the last of the paladins fell, the corpse-titans’ great pilgrimage neared its end and a new world beckoned. But as he held his burnt hand close to his body, Ghaar’eth’s eyes were on the sky.

‘Until we next meet,’ he hissed, ‘Stormrider…’

The clarion of hunting horns carried on the foetid air of the Endless Sump. The Bloodwrought, or what was left of them, had been running for days. Bloodied, battered, their will had almost broken.

‘Unkvar, are they close? Speak!’ Ghaar’eth asked his returning Gorechosen. Twenty had gone out, led by the deathbringer, but only four now stood before him.

Swathed in the rotting filth of the sump and a dozen red, festering wounds, Unkvar opened his mouth to answer when a forked trident speared through it from the back of his head. The words died in gargles and spewing blood before the last of Warson’s deathbringers expired.

‘To your blades!’ he cried, urging his men into a defensive circle, but moving was difficult. Not only was the sump a festering marsh that stretched as far as the eye could discern through its wretched miasma, it was also a charnel pit. Corpses of the unquiet dead writhed and rotted in its depths. They clawed at the Bloodwrought, too weak to overwhelm them but eager for their flesh and company all the same.

A deeper pit had claimed Ghaar’eth’s brass mount several leagues back, so he was up to his waist in the filth just like his men as he bellowed at them.

The Warson’s chosen blood warriors closed protectively about their lord, warily eyeing the shadows at the edge of their sight. A bile-yellow fug clung to this part of the marsh, having closed in around the Khorne worshippers with a malign sentience. Even the plague flies seemed less agitated, as if they knew what was abroad.

For a few moments nothing happened. Unkvar sank into the mire, devoured by the dead as his comrades hacked desultorily at the creatures to keep them at bay. A greater threat lurked beyond, and all eyes sought it.

As the buzzing of the plague flies ceased, Ghaar’eth knew the quietude was about to be broken. His prediction proved accurate as lightning bolts arced down through the fog and into the midst of the Bloodwrought.

Bodies flew burnt and broken into the air, the corpses of the sump rising with them as the crackling storm smote the ground so intensely it turned the marsh water into steam. As the lightning strikes ebbed, only a corona of blackened earth remained, and within it, a phalanx of golden warriors. An armoured shield wall stood in a perfect ring around a core of lightning archers, at their centre a lantern-bearer whose beacon seared the Bloodwrought, robbing them of their fury.

Seconds passed as both sides, separated by only a few strides, regarded each other with wary hatred, until Ghaar’eth held his axe aloft.

‘Kill them all!’

The crush of battle was savage and bloody. Ghaar’eth glared through the burning light, his skin blistering around his eyes where it reached him through the eye slits of his helm.

‘Stormrider!’ he roared, seeking out his old foe, but the lantern bearer was not the one.

He cut down a golden warrior who strayed too close, but drove deeper into the enemy’s ranks, trying to catch a glimpse of the one who haunted his nightmares.

‘Where are you, dog?’

He hacked down another foe, splitting the shield and sending a bolt arcing back into the filth-choked sky. For a moment, the yellow clouds parted to admit the lightning and Ghaar’eth caught a glimpse of a mesmerising firmament. As the darkness closed again, a shadow flitted across the stars so fast that Ghaar’eth almost missed it.

He blocked a hammer blow with the haft of his axe almost nonchalantly, dispatching its bearer. Seizing a nearby blood warrior by the shoulder, he hissed. ‘He is here. He has come for me at last.’

A foaming frenzy was upon the disciple of Khorne, but Ghaar’eth was heedless of the incoherent raging. His attention was on whatever roamed the skies above. He could feel it, feel him. His presence…

‘Where are you…’ he rasped, scarcely aware of the fact his warriors were doomed, ‘Stormrider?’

A great winged creature descended through the miasma, the tendrils of filth burning away from its refulgent touch. As he turned to face the creature, it took Ghaar’eth a moment to realise it was not a creature but another armoured warrior.

And as their eyes met, Warson knew his end had come at long last.

‘I’m here,’ uttered Stormrider coldly as he loosed the glittering arrow already notched to his bow.

Pain like a thousand knives coursed through Ghaar’eth as the arrow struck him, and he might have laughed at this tragic doom were it not for the agony.

‘You are dead,’ he spluttered as the lifeblood left his body and began to pool in the filth. Cold, dead fingers grasped at his armour but he fought them off blindly, unwilling to turn from his foe.

No triumph or exultation registered in the eyes of the stormrider, and Ghaar’eth could see them well enough through the gilded mask.

‘You are dead…’ he hissed, his last breath, his last words.

The stormrider gave him the last words he would ever hear.

‘I was.’

The Knight-Venator soared high above the Azure Plain, his star-eagle by his side. The rat-kin had been brutally routed, but their black-clad assassins had escaped during the carnage and now he and his companion sought them out amongst the fallen crystal statues of Azurite.

Just as the history of the city was now lost to time, the Knight-Venator had forgotten much of his provenance, even his name. Sigmar had given unto him the power of life immortal, but in return, he had lost what it meant to remember, his empathy and even emotion.

He thought of himself only as Stormrider and could not recall why.

It was only as he spied the warband advancing through the ruins, Chaos worshippers seeking easy prey in the aftermath of a battle, ignorant of the Knight-Venator’s watchful presence, that the faintest stirrings of a memory returned.

With a glance at his bird, the two speared down through gathering clouds. Drawing back his bow string, a celestial arrow forming at the gesture, he paused. Amongst the throng, a beast was staring directly at him. Such a foul creature. Half man, half monster. Scraps of rough hair like a mane patched its overly-muscled and mutated frame. Its skin shone red raw and spines protruded from beneath the flesh.

Incredibly, it alone had seen him, and though it was a mutated and malformed spawn, Stormrider saw the recognition in its single eye.

Rising up on its hind legs, ignoring the savage goading of the corpulent bloodstoker at its back, a long, black tongue slithered from the beast’s maw and it spoke in a tortured ululating bellow…

‘Stormrider!’

Eyes narrowing in the briefest moment of remembrance, the Knight-Venator took aim and loosed…

By the Horns

Rob Sanders

To Chrysaor, lord of Slaanesh – known to his victims as ‘the Wanton’ – the land was a glorious cacophony of sensations. Beneath his dark plate, the Wanton had skin of cracked alabaster and his eyes were glazed a blood red. He saw nothing with such eyes. He appreciated the world through the splendour of his other senses. To Chrysaor, everything was the screams of the suffering. It was the caress of final breaths on his face and the tang of death on the breeze. It was the taste of ruinous victory.

The day Chrysaor’s sight was taken from him, a pair of great, ribbed horns erupted from his temples. Chrysaor savoured the exquisite agony. Through these, the Wanton experienced the realms anew. Sensitive to every quiver, quake and vibration, the horns allowed the blind warrior to build a sensory picture of everything around him. He could feel the quickening thud of his enemy’s pulse. While eyes had only shown him escaping victims within his field of vision, the sensitivity of the horns – like the antennae of creepers and crawlers – revealed to him so much more. He felt the reverberation of panicked footfalls, the ragged breathing and the muffled quake of a heart stilled in a place of hiding. He could sense these things not only nearby, but leagues away. He could feel fear through a thousand and one betrayals of a victim’s body. He could feel it now.

Lord Chrysaor allowed the blizzard of sensations to wash over him. A groan of satisfaction escaped his albino-white lips. He enjoyed the dread darkness behind his blood-blank eyes. He could hear the terrified shrieks of the fleeing Ashqanti-Bas nomads being tortured and dying about him. Their beasts of burden and roving lifestock were being butchered in squealing horror. He revelled in the thunder of his own marauder tribesmen, as they ran down their prey on hardy, hook-fleshed steeds.

The Sybariss, as his warband were known, were the very embodiment of ruinous depravity. Each saddle-bound savage honoured Chaos through his ignorance. They had no concept of mercy – only indulgence. They searched for their dark god Slaanesh, not only across the ever-changing lands but in the pleasures of their flesh and the resulting agony of their victims.

Beyond the screams of the victims, the Wanton heard the laughter of madness. It was the jubilance of babbling insanity. The moans of willing victimhood. He smelled the bitterness of the hallucinogenic miasma that clouded the butchery. As the Sybariss’ steeds circled their victims and trampled them, cursed vapours poured from the beasts’ snouts. The slaughter became a crowded miasma, the victims’ deep and fearful breaths taking the fragrant fog down into their lungs. Within minutes, fleeing victims were returning. Those who had hidden revealed themselves in a mindless daze. They begged for torment, cackling to themselves and offering their flesh to the marauder savages.

Walking through the horror, the Wanton tapped the end of his hellforged glaive across the ground before him. He found the fallen. They were stripped of flesh and cut to ribbons, quivering with ecstatic agonies. Chrysaor grinned to himself. To hear the horror, anyone would think that the Ashqanti-Bas nomads had been granted their wildest fantasies.

The Wanton felt the approach of a victim, some stumbling, confused wretch coming at him through the vapours. Something weighed down the victim’s step on the left side. The weight of a weapon, Chrysaor concluded. It was an Ashqanti-Bas warrior. He listened. He heard the weapon’s passage through the hallucinogenic murk, the whisper of the razored edge on the air. A blade.

With blistering speed and confidence, Chrysaor turned his glaive about in his barbed gauntlets and chopped down through the nomad. Despite being blind, his strike was perfection: gauged to cause maximum suffering and sensation, while at the same time nullifying the threat. The enemy warrior gasped. The Wanton smelled blood. He felt its warm speckle on his bone-white face. He had opened his victim up from the jaw to the thigh. Shock and hallucinogenic mumbling set in. Chrysaor heard the warrior crash to the ground before him, the rude weapon clattering nearby.

Feeling another figure at his back, Chrysaor turned the glaive about him. Swishing it around across his shoulders, he took the top of the unseen victim’s skull off. He heard the figure scrabble and fall. Chrysaor tried to imagine the delicious rush of horrific sensations he had visited upon her. One of the nomads’ shaggy beasts of burden trumpeted dreamily through the mind-altering fog. It stumbled back and forth, heavy on its splayed hooves. The Wanton thrust his weapon deep into the thing. Feeling it crash. Feeling it suffer. It died slower than it wanted to but quicker than he anticipated. It must have already been ailing.

Chrysaor savoured the euphoric woe about him, its vibrations reflected back at him from the surrounding slopes and rock faces of the mountain plateau. Echoes bounced back at him from towering peaks. Like many other tribes, the Aqshanti-Bas had made their home in the region known as the Plinth. The Plinth was a strange and volatile land. It was a place at odds with itself: a broad expanse of constant, rapid change. Rumbling mountains rose and fell, sometimes within the space of a day. Rivers felt their way through the transforming land. Deep canyons and crevasses ripped their way through the tumultuous terrain before becoming flash-flooding lakes and, sometimes, inland seas with waters that climbed the sides of the reaching peaks. Forests and vegetation grew with the alacrity and speed of mould, before being swallowed by rock, earth and water in the next regional flux. Such lands were not affected by sorcery. They were not corrupted by the power and mutability of Chaos. The constant re-sculpturing of the Plinth’s terrain – sometimes swift and violent and at other times moving with a slow inevitability – was a natural volatility of the realm.

The Wanton loved it. The relentless quake and change of the landscape was like a sensory symphony. The peoples of the Plinth, wanderers by necessity, often walked into the Wanton’s waiting ambushes. With his marauder horsemen sweeping down mountainsides, sealing off valleys and crossing shallow rivers, Lord Chrysaor had spilt so much blood in the changing lands that he half expected the next erupting peak, or river gushing from a sprouting spring, to be tinged crimson in honour of the Dark Prince.

‘It ends, Lord Wanton,’ an infernal voice hissed beside Chrysaor’s ear. ‘The vapours thin.’ He had heard his daemonette concubines approach. Leaping from steed to steed, and running with predacious grace, the three lesser daemons had no problem keeping up with the marauder horsemen. The Travestite Maidens, as they were called, slinked up around their master, weaving themselves through his cloak and nipping playfully at his plate with their obscene pincers. He knew their true names but he only used them in their summoning.

‘Tell me,’ Chrysaor ordered with a gasp. Just because he couldn’t see didn’t mean that he couldn’t relish the visualisation of horrors unleashed in his name.

‘A child wanders,’ a second daemonette said. ‘Lost in the carnage and mutilation. His face is a contorted mask. At once both scarred of mind and barely resisting the urge to join in.’

‘Prey-things, cut in half,’ the third daemonette whispered seductively into Chrysaor’s other ear. He felt one of the Travestite Maidens leave him for a moment, stalking off after the child. ‘They squirm through a sea of shock and the ground-soaked butchery of livestock still alive.’

‘Yes…’ the Wanton said.

‘Dying nomads,’ a daemonette told him. ‘Laughing. Crying. Enduring. Living for our entertainment only. Lying broken. A flesh-mess on the plateau floor. One peels what skin remains from his carcass, wondering what it is he is feeling.’

‘What is that?’ Chrysaor asked. He could hear the tinkle of bone and the delicious sound of suffering. He could not find it in his depraved heart to enjoy the pain and sorrow. Something was off about it.

‘A woman approaches,’ one of the Travestite Maidens told him. ‘Her face buried in bloody hands.’

‘Peeled off,’ another suggested, savouring the anticipation.

‘Describe her,’ the Wanton commanded.

‘Her hair is as long as she is tall.’

‘A feral thing that jangles with bone charms.’

‘One who fancies herself a soothsayer,’ a daemonette cackled.

‘She did not see this coming,’ another joined in, drawing a cacophony of evil laughter from her sisters.

‘You are wrong,’ Chrysaor told the daemons. The sobbing ceased. In its place, the Wanton could hear the creak of bones. The tightening of muscle. The woman shrieked as she came at him. Chrysaor had known her suffering to be fake. No true deviant of the Dark Prince could savour a show of false agonies.

The Wanton heard the soothsayer snatch something from the ground. Something that sat in the quivering carnage at his feet. He heard the slurp and hiss of a blade, pulled from its scabbard of flesh. By the sound of it being torn from its victim, Chrysaor suspected it was something short. A knife. It was curved, by the sound of its clearance. It sounded serrated, by the way it sawed at a rib on its way out.

The lord of Slaanesh lived the anguish of his attacker. It was all there in her shriek. A battle cry. A roar of futility. A suicidal expression of doom and fear. Chrysaor wanted to soak it up, like the ground claimed her tears. The blade sang for his throat. He waited for a death he knew could not come. The Travestite Maidens would not allow it.

There it was. The grunt of defeat. Raw defiance. The agony of the daemonettes’ cruel pincers seizing limbs in their barbed grip. The Wanton knew that the Maidens could shear the soothsayer’s arms and legs off at both elbow and knee.

‘Hold,’ the Wanton said. ‘Her face?’

‘Still there,’ one of the Maidens twitched, ‘but not for long.’

‘Damn you, daemon,’ Chrysaor said. ‘I said hold.’

Like a horrid cage of infernal flesh, they held the woman there. Chrysaor could feel the quiver of the blade near his face, still trembling in her death-determined grip. She had got close. He had to give her that. No, the Wanton decided. He could give her more. Darting his face forward, he allowed the serrated blade to slice through the skin on his cheek. Blood streamed down the side of his cheek. Sticking out an obscenely long tongue, the Wanton lapped at the deep gash. He heard the knife thump to the ground, having tumbled from the soothsayer’s grip. He could feel her eyes on him and the disbelief in those eyes. She mouthed something in her own Ashquanti tongue. He felt the spittle of her hatred and harsh syllables on his face.

‘Sister,’ Chrysaor said. ‘If you would.’

‘Why entertain the witch’s babbling when you could be enjoying her screams?’ the daemon said.

‘For much the same reason I entertain your own,’ the Wanton told the daemonette. ‘Though you make a compelling argument. Perhaps I should set your infernal kindred on you. I know they thirst for your agonies.’

‘Her speech – ’tis madness, my lord.’

‘Which you shall translate,’ Chrysaor said.

‘She says that your hordes may swallow her people,’ the Travestite Maiden said. ‘That your claws may hold her down – but that you are trapped between the land and the sky.’

‘And you with me,’ Chrysaor said, leaning in.

The soothsayer spat in the warrior’s face. He smiled and let it run down his face. More savage words followed.

‘She says that she has appealed to all the powers of the realm,’ the daemonette told him. ‘That she has pledged her unbeating heart to the spirits of land and life, the gods of spite and sky, in return for a glimpse of your doom.’

The soothsayer suddenly tensed. Her eyes flashed open and her face strained with an agony that, moments before, she could not have imagined. Chrysaor enjoyed her suffering and the subsequent slackening of her limbs. He had thrust the wicked tips of a gauntlet into her flesh. She coughed, the surprise softening on her face. The witch’s blood spattered across the Wanton’s face, mixing with his own. He pulled his dripping gauntlet from her chest. In it he held the soothsayer’s still-beating heart. He held the grisly trophy up before her. Together they felt it beat its last.

‘Then you sold it cheaply, witch,’ Chrysaor lamented, feeling the soothsayer die before him.

The daemonettes let the victim’s corpse fall to the ground with the others. Chrysaor’s alabaster smile faded slightly. For some time now, he had felt the rumble of rock moving beneath his boots. While his tribe of savages had sprung their trap and indulged themselves in the protracted horror of the nomads’ end, the lands of the Plinth had been in monstrous motion. Now the Wanton felt the drop of temperature on the sensitive skin of his face. He heard the peal of distant thunder getting closer and could taste the metallic trace of a lightning storm already building.

‘Where are we?’ he said. He could feel the landscape transforming about him.

‘The surrounding mountains remain,’ one of the Travestite Maidens told him. Chrysaor already knew this. He could feel the panic of screams and thudding hooves bouncing back towards the torturous slaughter.

‘But the plateau continues to rise,’ another daemonette whispered, ‘and us with it. High above the peaks about the Plinth.’

With the mountains of the plateau growing ever taller, reaching for the heavens, the Slaaneshi forces were trapped. In remaining to enjoy the Ashqanti-Bas, they had become trapped on a towering, mountainous island whose sides were too tall and sheer to descend. This kind of thing had happened before. It was a danger of the mutable region. Sometimes, progress or withdrawal was cut off by some new realm-sculpted feature finding shape across the Plinth. Chasms always closed, however. The mighty rivers drained and the mountains shrank.

Chrysaor wandered the fields of desecration and murder, tapping the floor with the end of his glaive. The Travestite Maidens remained nearby, stalking off briefly to disembowel a fallen victim with their pincered appendages or help the Sybariss finish some pain-fevered enemy warrior. The Wanton could sense the thunder before it boomed across the plateau. He could feel the brief blaze of warmth from lightning striking the sky-piercing peaks. The air was thin in his lungs. His breathing grew more rapid. The mountains were still rising and it seemed that they were never going to stop.

As time passed, the last of the suffering nomads died. Their horror and hilarity no longer echoed about the plateau. The tribe of savage horsemen, no longer distracted by carnage or their victim playthings, realised how high they were above the rest of the realm. They shivered in the plummeting temperatures and began to feel the physical effects of the altitude. It was disquieting.

‘The clouds,’ a daemonette said. Chrysaor felt the temperature drop further and droplets of water speckle his skin. Water vapour roiled about him. Thunder crashed through him and the surrounding mountains while lightning cracked and hummed in the darkening murk. The peaks had risen so high that they had poked through the underbelly of the storm, taking the plateau and the trapped Slaaneshi forces up into the tempest.

Horses stamped and whinnied. Sybariss marauders began to jabber to one another in their ugly dialect. Even the daemonettes hissed their unease.

‘My Dark Prince,’ the Wanton said. ‘Are you here?’

Chrysaor would give all for one glimpse of his exquisite god. To find dread Slaanesh… He reached out with his senses beyond the hideously abused corpses, his circling horde of horsemen and the mountain peaks. He listened and felt. He heard the ghostly rattle of plate and armoured boots. An army on the move. He felt the distant clang of mighty hammers in the distance grow closer with each doom-ridden strike.

The Wanton heard the savages of the Sybariss call. They could make out ranks of armoured figures wielding crackling hammers of unearthly design, marching from the swirling gloom of the storm. Sigmar’s Storm. The daemon concubines encircled their lord, hissing and snapping their wicked pincers.

‘Interlopers,’ a Travestite Maiden said. Chrysaor’s heart fell.

‘Describe them,’ the Wanton ordered, as he had asked them to do on a thousand gore-soaked battlefields. She did, and Chrysaor came to understand their doom.

‘The Knights of the Aurora,’ Chrysaor said, identifying their foe. He nodded. His face was a mask of madness across which the shadow of fear passed. His long search for the Dark Prince was over. He knew that now. Slaanesh was not with him and never would be. ‘The witch was right. The lands of the Plinth have had their fill of blood and suffering. They raise us up as examples – an offering to the God-King. Sigmar has answered, sending his Stormcasts. We are caught, my deviants: between heaven and earth. Between the hammer and the anvil.’

Chrysaor knew what they all could not. Feel what they could not know. Behind the silhouettes of armoured Stormcast Eternals were many hundreds more. The God-King could crush them with a fraction of their fielded might. An example would be made. Amongst the boom of thunder, the slash of lightning and the monstrous ranks of soldiers closing on the Slaaneshi horde with every flash.

A crooked smile broke the tension of Chrysaor’s white face. He gave himself, body and soul, to the circumstances. It was all he could do. It was all he had left. His maniacal laughter cut through the storm and the choreographed crash of armoured boots. He lost himself in the certainty of doom, the bombast and the abominate excess. It would not be a lingering death, slow with the suffering that Chrysaor had granted his many thousands of victims. It would be cold. Sudden. Utterly annihilating, like heaven’s hammer strike.

He was the Wanton. He roared it out. The madness was infectious. Spilling through the Slaaneshi horde like the last thing that they might ever feel, hysteria became an invitation accepted. The invitation to their doom.

Chrysaor turned his hellforged glaive about in his gauntlets. His horns burned with sensory overload. He felt the rumbling mountains, the sky-splitting thunder and the storm. He sensed the Knights of the Aurora closing, with mighty hammers raised and their marching ranks all around the horde like the jaws of a metal trap. The lord of Slaanesh could hear the righteous bellow of the Stormcasts, celestial warriors bent on the utter annihilation of their sworn foes.

The Wanton felt his barbarian horde falter. Horses stamped and whinnied in uncertainty and fear. Sybariss marauders called out to the enemy, but their voices were reedy and as dry as their lips. They were not the battle cries of Chaos savages, ready to dine on the woe of their enemy. They were hollow theatre. The lies men told themselves in the face of death.

He heard the whoosh of javelins, hurled from the saddle. The lord of Slaanesh measured the distance before the weapons pranged and splintered against hallowed plate. The celestial warriors were close. Like thunder rolling down on them, they would not be stopped. Chrysaor felt the quake of hooves on the ground. Sections of the horde were breaking away. Some barbarian wretches were fleeing before a doom-laden spectacle that their master could not see. Others had urged their protesting steeds into a half-hearted charge, their axes and shields held high.

The Travestite Maidens hissed their infernal spite at the marauders but Chrysaor did nothing. He could have told them that the Dark Prince was with them in their final moments but that would have been an empty lie. Slaanesh wasn’t with them. Slaanesh was nowhere. There were no dark words or calls to deviancy that would rally the horde now. Not in the face of heavenly annihilation. They were in a circling storm of havoc and horseflesh. Chrysaor heard the first engagements and the deaths that swiftly followed. The rattle of flails across plate. The sparking glance of marauder axes, their blades stained red with past torture and butchery. Cowards and crusaders both were then lost in the searing crash of metal and lightning.

Horses made the most appalling sounds as hammers smashed through flesh and bone. Limbs were knocked out from under them. Ribcage, muscle and splattering insides became craters in the sides of annihilated animals. Backs were broken and skulls were shattered under the descending force of mighty hammers.

Sybariss warriors tumbled from their saddles to share similar fates. Their shields were like nothing before the blinding path of celestial weapons. Hammers decimated the darkwood, sending a storm of splinters through marauder flesh. The horsemen felt nothing, however, for the crackling passage of the hammer heads had already broken them in two. Chrysaor heard warriors on their knees praying. Begging. Calling for the intervention of the Dark Prince. For the God-King. It could not save them. Heads were smashed from shoulders and pleading marauders were pounded into the ground. The Wanton heard the squelch of armoured boots through blood-soaked earth.

The sight of such obliteration seemed to steady the rest of the horde about the Chaos lord. They held their ground, a wall of terrified steeds and Sybariss warriors, feeling that their only chance lay in their barbaric numbers. But they were wrong – so wrong. And Chrysaor knew this.

As the Stormcasts marched on, the heads of their hammers swung like crackling comets through the sky, and the marauder horsemen died. It was fast. Economically ruthless. In a moment of blinding light and celestial brutality, it was over. It was more than the deviants deserved.

Horses broke and were knocked back through the horde by the smashing hammer strikes of the advancing Stormcasts. Like a tidal wave of burnished armour and crackling weaponry, they would not be denied. The marauder horsemen of the Sybariss died knowing a calamitous certainty. They were mere savages. They were no match for the Stormcast Eternals’ numbers or divine ferocity. The decimated corpses of marauders flew past where the Wanton stood.

The Travestite Maidens would not wait. Their daemonic nature hungered for the brilliance of such souls. Chrysaor could feel their abyssal ache. They wanted to tear plate and flay celestial flesh. They wanted to feast on the scalding essence of Sigmar’s warriors. They leapt at their foes, intent on shearing helms and heads from shoulders and plunging pincers through breastplates into noble hearts.

The Wanton soaked up the desperation. He loved and hated the Travestite Maidens in equal measure. He felt expectation in the back of his throat. The desire to hear things suffer in the daemonettes’ wicked claws. To hear the creatures’ own pain filled him with an undeniable thrill. They shrieked their ecstasy. They moaned their agonies away. Sizzling hammers broke the Maidens, the Stormcast Eternals smashing the daemons between them like broken dolls.

Chrysaor sensed the death of the first. The quake of a mighty hammer, plunging down through dread flesh and bone before thudding into the ground. The second called out for its lord but the remorseless smash of a hammer haft knocked her jaw off. The Wanton heard the Stormcast warrior pivot, his boots crushing grit underfoot, before hammering the Travestite Maiden back into his own indomitable ranks. Enveloped in a flashing maelstrom of mist and storm, the daemonette was gone. He felt the monstrous filth of the third smatter across his face as her head was hammered clean off her svelte shoulders. The shrieking of the daemons echoed away through the heavens, the horrors bludgeoned from existence.

Chrysaor the Wanton, lord of Slaanesh, readied himself for death. He moved his glaive about him, his world a glorious sensory apocalypse to lose himself within. He waited for his doom, for the obliterating hammer-storm to come. He did not look for foes. He did not search for signs of impending attack. He felt their desire to destroy him. He heard the tightening of righteous gauntlets about the hafts of crackling hammers. The creak of immaculate plate. The divine hatred of the warriors within. He could taste the God-King’s vengeance.

Smashing hammers aside with the haft of his glaive, Chrysaor leaned and weaved out of the obliterating path of swung weapons. The crackling energies of the storm danced across his skin from hammers narrowly missing his face. He felt the whoosh of a mace glide down beside him. The splintered stone and tremor of hammers striking the ground.

Thrusting the blade of the glaive through their closing ranks, Chrysaor struck like a scorpion. His weapon punched through the face plate of the nearest Stormcast warrior. Wheeling the glaive about him like a scythe, he sent the weapon’s crowning blade shearing through throats. He skewered Stormcasts through their breastplates, burying the blade in pure hearts. He thrust it up into armoured abdomens before tearing it out of his victims’ sides, allowing innards to spill free of the ragged openings.

Chrysaor moved through the blizzard of sound and sensation. He knocked sigmarite hammers aside with the haft of his weapon. Kicking bludgeon-hungry Stormcasts back with his boot, he spiralled his cloak about him. Thrusting through the impalpable ranks closing in around him, the warrior stabbed celestial warriors through their helms, before dropping down to avoid the sweeping path of a mace and chopping through the armoured ankles of closer foes.

He felt the explosive blast of death about him, the souls of Stormcast Eternals sent rocketing back to their God-King on blazing trails of lightning. The Knights of the Aurora closed in through the maelstrom of shrieks and soulfire. Chrysaor felt the first of the hammers reach him. It smashed down through a pauldron to shatter his shoulder. The blunt, crackling force of another crunched into his chest, mangling plate, flesh and bone. He felt his heart almost burst with the pulverising impact. Armoured boots stepped on his cloak, dragging him down, while Stormcasts towered above him, their weapons held high.

A hammer came down on his head, knocking the sense from it. One of his horns shattered, sending a torrent of agony and warped sensation through him. Energies from the hammer head coursed through his mind. A madness contorted the features of his alabaster face. He forced himself back to his feet, clutching the glaive just below its crowning blade. Using the weapon like a dagger, he thrust it up savagely, plunging the steel up under the chin of a Stormcast warrior. As the glaive skewered skull and brain, the Stormcast vanished in a soul-vanquished blast of energy. Chrysaor attacked the next warrior and the next, his wicked gauntlets clawing, his face fixed in a mad grin of slaughterhouse satisfaction.

A hammer blow from behind broke the lord of Slaanesh. Like workmen gathered about a fence pole to be hammered into the ground, the Stormcast Eternals intensified their coordinated attack. Bone-breaking, horn-shattering, skull-smashing impacts knocked Chrysaor back onto the ground. There would be no getting up. No mad defiance. The time had come. Agony became everything. The messy embrace of death beckoned.

As the celestial warriors obliterated Chrysaor’s body and he became a sacrificial altar of divine vengeance, he thought on the terrible things he had done. The obscene life that he had led. His delicious fall to Chaos. He thought on the nomad witch who had predicted his doom. She had indeed prayed to all gods and powers of the realm. Together, they had answered her entreaties. The land. The ruthless God-King.

Hammers smashed the lord of Slaanesh into the land he had desecrated with his horrific deeds. In those final moments, Chrysaor knew that he would never find his Dark Prince. Slaanesh was not with him. He never had been. The warrior was alone.

Chrysaor died as he had lived – in a sea of thrilling sensation. His end was like a crescendo. A mountain peak achieved. A dread destination reached. For those final seconds he was a living contradiction. Perversity incarnate. He was both pain and pleasure. He was thwarted satisfaction. He was everything and nothing. The Wanton savoured his last moments, sucking the marrow from the bones of his very existence. Then, like his dark god, he was lost.

The Gift of Khorne

Guy Haley

They called him Gigante, which in the tongue of Barruscuna meant ‘The Giant One’. For three hundred years he had terrorised the people of that remote kingdom, yet Barruscuna persisted, warded by stone and magic. The land around withered, poisoned by the evil of Chaos. Behind its enchantments, Barruscu’s broad hinterland of emerald farms and placid, sapphire lakes remained unchanged, and in the city peace reigned. The skies lost their mad tints over that realm, the rain that fell there remained of water, not blood. A heaven survived within the walls, even as hell raged without.

No longer. For too long the white stone of Barruscuna’s walls had stood in the face of Khorne, and he decreed that it should burn. New gifts had been given to Gigante. New pacts made. A battery of daemonic cannons with brass mouths vomited fire and iron at the walls of Barruscuna. Masonry cracked under the barrage. The cerulean dome of magic shielding the city skies shimmered uneasily.

Soon the walls would crumble, the dome would fail, the bright pennants atop the towers would fall, the countryside about the city would burn and wasteland would take its place. So it had been throughout the reign of Chaos. All that would remain of the Barrus people would be the name, born of scorn and fear, that they had given their killer.

A final barrage from the cannons. Eighty-eight skulls of screaming iron bit into the fortifications. With a rush, the walls tumbled. The sky-dome flickered and gave out with a sigh.

A hush fell over the horde. The rumble of the collapse petered out to a handful of isolated clacks as shattered rock slipped down over rubble. The peppery smell of broken stone spiced the reek of old blood coming off the horde. Dust clouds drifted away, revealing the unspoiled land of Barruscu’s countryside.

With a great roar, Gigante’s horde ran for the breach. A torrent of missiles pelted down on them from the towers to either side. Darts, bolts, arrows, spears and stones slew the followers of Khorne by the hundred. An inconsequential tally for an army that numbered in the tens of thousands.

Gigante was among the first to the breach, his clawed feet gripping the loose stone and propelling him through the gap. He leapt high, falling among the blocks of pikemen ranged upon the fields. Gouging and rending, he smote them, his axe never still. Warriors flooded after him and crashed into the lines of the Barrus.

The sight of Gigante struck terror into the Barrus as much as his wrath. The cannons were only the latest of the gifts bestowed upon Gigante, if gifts were the appropriate word for the changes to his body.

On the morning after the many painted spires of the holy city of Mirana fell, his spine had writhed its way free of his lower back, snapping outward and splitting, becoming twin tails tipped with knobs of bone whose cracks wept acid ichor. Being the first, this gift he treasured the most. Thereafter, humanity’s shape was no longer Gigante’s. Change after change had followed this first gift, until he looked like no man that had ever lived. For the destruction of the Singing Mounds, Gigante was remade to tower over his warriors, his stature swollen by Khorne. He was given power until he was bigger than an ogor. Outsized muscles rippled all over his back and arms, so large they tore his crimson skin when he moved. Following his victory at the duel of Fifteen Lords, his left arm had branched at the elbow and sprouted an extra hand. After killing his rival, Gorebull the Bloodkine, he had been granted mastery of the bullgor’s warherds and crowned with five spreading horns.

His gifts came not only from victory. Such was Gigante’s favour that Khorne changed him no matter the outcome of his battles. When he had first been routed from the walls of Barruscuna, his eyes had melded into one, the most painful of his gifts. When it was over, he had opened his single, cyclopean eye to find everything tinted red. Further attempts at the wall led to further defeats. More gifts followed. Teeth, once even and white, became vicious fangs sprouting from blue gums that bled milky blood. His nose rotted until the holes of his nostrils were exposed, and around them the bones of his cheeks, brow and chin thickened, sprouting curved spurs.

The slaughterpriests roared out their praises to Khorne in thanks of his transformations, demanding worship of their monstrous lord as an avatar of Khorne himself. The horde’s deathbringers watched carefully as Gigante moved further from humanity. The gods are fickle. Where the slaughterpriests saw approval, the deathbringers scented opportunity.

Victory, defeat, his own death or relentless mutation… these things held no meaning for Gigante. He revelled in his gifts even as his thoughts dulled. He burned his foes with the acid of his tail. With his horns, he impaled his enemies. With his eye, he sought out fine skulls for his lord. With his doubled hand, he gripped his great axe all the better. With his teeth, he bit. It was of no consequence to Gigante that he struggled to speak, his tongue swollen too large for his mouth. He had long since given up addressing his warriors before battle. His orders were grunts and gestures. The sole clear statement Gigante could make was ‘Blood for the Blood God!’. Those were the only words that mattered, and he repeated them with an idiot’s persistence.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ Gigante roared. The warriors of the Barrus cowered as he swatted their comrades to paste with the flat of his axe. Every stamp of his clawed feet was accompanied by animal growls. Gigante ran amok through the defenders of Barruscuna. Their peacock-bright uniforms were bloodied and trampled into the mud, mashed indivisibly into the bodies of their owners. Such little soldiers, their spear tips wavering with fear. The line of the Barrus bowed backwards under Gigante’s assault, their ranks pushed closer and closer to the edge of the nearest mere. Again he roared ‘Blood for the Blood God!’, striking to the left and the right, carving his enemies apart. None could stand before him.

Warriors swirled through the broad gap Gigante opened up, rushing to claim the worthiest foes. There were so few fine opponents in the Lake Kingdoms now that they came to blows over who should slaughter the officers and champions of the Barrus.

The Barrus reached the edge of the lake, and were trapped. Gigante raised his voice in a bellowing shout, no more human-sounding than the frenzied lowing of Gorebull had been before Gigante had ended him. Their formations disrupted, the pikemen’s long weapons became a hindrance, and red blood flowed into the lake.

Feeble Barruscuna militia broke at the flanks, falling backward from the onslaught. What had started as an embattled crescent became a stream of running soldiers. So it had always been, since the time Khorne’s armies had come into Ghyran. His warriors were fully engaged with their foe to the front. Victory was at hand. Khorne would reward him again, Gigante was certain.

A silver clarion rang out behind him. Others answered. Such a pure sound was anathema to one so tainted as Gigante. He snorted in pain as the note pierced his skull. Another call. He carved a bloody swathe through his own warriors as he swung around to confront the source.

The gates of the wall towers opened. A new foe emerged from hiding within Barruscuna’s lofty defences. Their wargear jangling, they assembled at the flanks of Gigante’s horde. Warriors tall and proud, armoured in gleaming silver, high shields upon their arms, mighty warhammers and stout swords in their fists.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ Gigante shouted. A worthy foe! He pushed his way back, desperate to close with this new challenge, to offer up choice skulls to Lord Khorne.

To the fore of the silver warriors stood one who was taller than the rest, clad in raiment of stars. His face was a stern mask of metal, mouth downturned with scorn. In each hand he carried a weapon, a hammer and a sword, and he raised them high. A blazing shower of missiles arced over the front line of the warriors, bringing death to the creatures of Chaos.

Parts of the horde died, but Khorne’s warriors were blood-mad and fierce. They screamed prayers to their god and slammed into the walls of locked shields. Order calls sounded from the trumpets, despicably sweet. Together, the two lines of shining warriors advanced, forcing the Chaos reavers into a tight press. A group of champions bearing long-bladed spears hacked their way through the frenzied tribesmen pouring through the wall’s breach. They clambered the rubble, their blurring blades preventing reinforcement from without the surrounding countryside and cutting the horde of Gigante in two. More of the warriors marched from the towers onto the parapets on either side of the gap, opening fire with deadly mechanisms that rained a thick cloud of bolts and blazing arrows into the Chaos warriors outside. By the lake, the remaining soldiers of the Barrus regrouped. In open combat, they stood little chance against Gigante’s horde of monsters, but that was not their purpose. Gigante huffed and snorted – the soldiers were bait to lure the horde into ambush. How clear it was now! The horde wavered. His rallying calls died in his throat. The words would not come, his tongue flopped uselessly behind the cage of his teeth. He tried harder to voice his warning, straining his muscles. He opened his mouth to shout, the skin tearing all down his neck as tendons flexed.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ he said.

Wracked with frustration and bloodlust, Gigante shoved his way through the melee until he stood before the champion in silver. He levelled his axe at the warrior, his lesser left hand plucking at the haft.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

The champion raised his sword to his face in salute, and attacked.

Gigante had slaughtered every great hero the Lake Kingdoms had to offer. Mortal lords had fallen before him by the score. He had burned their cities. The warlord chiefs that had risen up in the ashes he had also bested, and then those who had thrown in their lot with Chaos, and their lords also. Daemons, men, monsters – none had been a match for Gigante.

The stranger flicked his shining cloak outward. Small hammers hung heavy from the fringe, and these whipped free, magically transformed into roaring thunderbolts which flew unerringly for Gigante’s face. Gigante raised his arms to protect himself, and the thunderbolts burst on his hands, burning his flesh. Under the cover of this distraction, the silver stranger leapt, warhammer and sword drawn back to strike. Gigante barely caught the movement in time. With a clangour like the bells of fate, the stranger’s hammer crashed into the axe of Gigante. The axe, black as old blood and tempered in the souls of the damned, blazed white as a star’s heart, and shattered.

Gigante and the champion were thrown back, the warriors fighting around them blasted from their feet. Shaking his head, Gigante faced his foe again across clear ground. The silver warrior waited, hammer held to strike, sword held to guard. The sight enraged Gigante. How dare this tiny creature in silver defy him?

Gigante dipped his horned head. Howling wordless praise to Khorne he charged, his claws ripping grooves in the bloody earth. The sword flashed down, severing one of Gigante’s horns. The hammer shattered his right shoulder. Gigante ploughed on, knocking the warrior reeling. His twinned left hands plucked the warrior from the ground and shook him. The warrior’s sword fell from his grasp, his head and limbs snapped back and forth. Gigante lifted him high, the better to show his god in his red heaven. In the full sight of Khorne, he squeezed. Armour cracked. Flesh split. The warrior scrabbled at the Chaos lord’s hands, his impassive mask a ridiculous contrast to his panic. With one final roar, Gigante crushed him, and the champion sagged dead in his hand.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ he bellowed.

No shouts came to echo his triumph.

Rain plashed upon his skin. The sky opened. Thunder boomed. Gigante blinked cold water from his single eye. He was surrounded on all sides by the silver warriors. The last of his horde were being hewn down. Rage burned in him as he saw them throw aside their weapons and plead for clemency, abandoning mighty Khorne. Helpless, he offered the corpse of the silver warrior higher, and begged one last gift from his lord.

Khorne’s favour was granted. It began as a bubbling sensation in Gigante’s feet, radiating upward until his body tingled from horn-tips to toes. Gigante laughed, for the feeling was familiar to him. He held his arms high and roared his thanks at the storm. Daemonhood was upon him!

A single moment of triumph was his to enjoy, then his legs gave out beneath him, pitching Gigante into the bloody mud of the lakeside, and the giant knew his final defeat. He rolled onto his back and pushed himself up on his left hands in time to see his feet disappearing in a writhing mass of tentacles, thick as grass roots and horribly mobile. The flesh of his legs ran together, wax in the furnace of Khorne’s wrath. The bones within them cracked loudly, reforming into spreading branches that grew rapidly before collapsing into mush. Gigante’s chest heaved, his skin sloughed away. Red muscles crawled and flopped over each other, moving into agonising new positions. His left hands shrivelled back into themselves, vanishing into a stump that withdrew into his shoulder, losing form and function. Unsupported, he fell. His rib cage collapsed into crawling gore. All below his neck became a heaving mat of matter, studded with chitinous limbs. His jaw sagged, the bones of his skull softened and his head flattened. His prized horns fell from their sockets.

As his single eye floated free of its mooring, he saw the corpse of the champion in silver transmute to bright lightning and leap up into the storm. What little thought remained to him became thick and sluggish.

How Gigante wanted to attack the warriors crowding around him. His new form flopped and heaved but would not obey him. A tall lord appeared in his dimming view. At a word of power, the shutters of the lantern he carried opened. An unbearable light shone out.

Gigante squirmed under the light’s searing rays, the flaps of muscle fringing his body burrowing under the mud. But Gigante could not escape.

The champion made one last appeal to his master. Mouths opened up all over his shivering, protoplasmic body.

‘Blood for the Blood God,’ they gurgled.

Gigante burst into flame, and was consumed.

So perish all who displease mighty Khorne.

DAEMON OF THE DEEP

Rob Sanders

Even the storm was beautiful.

The churning clouds were lined silver, and lightning streaked across the sky in pastel blues and pinks. The thunder was a melodic boom and the Glass Sea a smashed mirror, the metallic waters reflecting the tempest above. From the bountiful ocean to the Shattered Isles with their jewelled beaches, all was fair to look upon. The islanders, too, were a handsome people. All but Silas.

Silas sat hunched on his bed watching the pretty patterns of the storm through the window. Lightning flashed colour across the room. His chambers were situated in the highest tower of Castle Sheldrac. His window commanded the best view on Ersatz Island. This was not because he commanded such respect – although he was the old chieftain’s youngest son. The view served as a reminder of the beauty of the realm. A contrast to the hideousness of his own form. Silas wore no chains and the chamber doors were not locked, but they might as well have been, for the chieftain’s son never left the tower. He could not bear to see the shame in his brothers’ eyes or the averted gaze of his aged father. He could not walk the clinking beaches of the gem-lined shore for the startled screams of fishwives, the pointing of fine children and island clansmen who shook their heads.

For a few horrible seconds, there was no lightning. The darkness of the casement became a momentary mirror and Silas had his appearance reflected back at him. Anyone would think that the chieftain’s son suffered from a horrific deformity of the face or that a disfiguring disease had ravaged his body. This was not the case. He was an islander. A son of the Shattered Isles. A Sheldrac, well bred. He was as handsome as his brother Rodric. His hair was a lustrous bronze, like his brother Hearn’s. He had his departed mother’s striking green eyes and the noble features of the old chieftain. But for the hump on his back and the curvature of his spine, he was as handsome as any noble son of Clan Sheldrac.

Silas heard shouting from the banquet hall below.

‘You cannot do this,’ a voice cried out. ‘You must not do this.’

It was Teagan. Lady Teagan had come to Ersatz Island from the small kingdom of Tesseraq. Like Ersatz, Tesseraq was a wondrous paradise of precious stone and fine people. The Shattered Isles were an assorted patchwork of dominions, held together by marriage alliances. While the people of Ersatz worshipped the Everqueen and local deities of the depths that blessed their island with bounty, the God-King was popular in civilised Tesseraq. Norvik, a priest of Sigmar, carried the word of the God-King to Ersatz. He had also brought one of King Tynarch’s one hundred daughters – noble maidens that carried his name and were used to forge alliances with distant dominions, like Ersatz.

‘Get out of my way, woman!’ That was Rodric, Silas decided. His brother’s steps echoed up the stone staircase.

‘You must not do this, my lord,’ Lady Teagan implored.

‘This is none of your concern,’ Hearn rumbled. Silas could hear his heavy step also. ‘This is clan business.’

‘But I am to be part of the island clan, am I not, my intended?’ she said to Rodric.

‘Get off me, girl,’ Rodric snapped back. ‘Know your place.’

‘Master Norvik, please,’ Teagan begged, her father’s imperiousness creeping into her voice.

‘It is the will of the God-King,’ Norvik told her in his cracked and aged voice. ‘If our kingdoms are ever to be part of the heavenly realm, we shall need noble men, worthy of Sigmar’s divinity. The healthy. The hardy. Men of clean limb. Men who are a reflection of His own perfect form. We dare not anger the God-King, my lady. Now step aside. This must be done.’

‘Somebody, help,’ Teagan called. ‘Your island prince is in danger.’ Nobody would come, however. No servant would act against their master on Ersatz. Every islander knew their place. Fishermen and seafarers were kings in their coastal cottages and aboard their own boats. They adorned their sharkskin vestments with gem and pearl, dining only on the finest fish the ocean had to offer. They took pride in hard work, married and were happy. They would do nothing to upset a paradise of their own making. They would not speak against their masters – and certainly not for one of the malformed like Silas.

The door burst open. Once more, lightning flashed through the window, casting the room in stark blue. Rodric entered. Silas could see righteous determination in his brother’s eyes. The hulking Hearn stood behind, framed in the doorway. Master Norvik, a bag of bones in a set of robes, leant upon his staff. His mouth might have been full of platitudes for Lady Teagan, but his bearded face was hard and uncompromising.

‘Well met, brothers,’ Silas said nervously, stepping down from the bed. ‘What troubles you on this stormy night?’

Teagan pushed past the men, putting her slender form between the hunchback and the brothers.

‘You would do this to your own kindred?’ the lady said. ‘What kind of monsters are you?’

‘My lady,’ Silas said, his head low and his eyes looking up at the interlopers. ‘My brothers mean me no harm. We are clansmen. We are blood.’

His words were delicate and full of false confidence. He felt Rodric waver. Hearn looked away.

‘Rodric,’ Teagan said. ‘Don’t do this. The gods abhor the spilling of brotherly blood.’

‘Not when it is in their service,’ Master Norvik said, the priest attempting to bolster Rodric and Hearn’s resolve. ‘The God-King demands it. He asks you for a pure bloodline and descendants worthy of the heavenly realm. Do not disappoint him, my lord. Think of your people. Think of yourself.’

‘Rodric?’ Silas said, his words atremble. ‘Hearn?’

‘This…’ Rodric said, ‘must be done.’

‘The net,’ Hearn called back down the staircase, his voice a faltering boom.

‘No,’ Teagan said, grabbing Silas and hauling him back towards the window. Servants of the coastal castle rushed in with a fishing net. As Rodric pulled Teagan away, the lady fought and shrieked. Silas couldn’t believe what was happening. He fell to his knees and begged for his life. He looked for a compassion in his brothers’ eyes that simply wasn’t there anymore. He felt the hands of servants on him and the net across the hunch of his back. As he resisted, the castle servants beat him down with marlinspikes.

Clawing and rolling within the net, Silas was dragged from his chambers. He was hauled past the turtleskin boots of his brothers and the skirt tails of Norvik’s robes. Out through the door and down the staircase. He cried out as he bumped down the harsh, stone steps, feeling his bones crack. Near the bottom, Silas’ temple was dashed against the stone. He felt blood in his eyes and the terrifying ordeal his life had just become faded in and out of focus. He could still hear Lady Teagan held back by servants, while his older brothers and their priest followed him down the stairs.

The servants hauled him across the polished, pearl floors of the castle chambers, through archways and by ancient furniture. In his panic and confusion, Silas became aware of light and heat. The great fire of the banquet hall was raging. Before it, in a whalebone chair, was his father. The islanders called the chieftain Old Lundal. With his years catching up to him, it had been Lundal who had accepted King Tynarch’s offer of an alliance and set in motion the events that would make Rodric chieftain.

‘Father!’ Silas called out. ‘Father, help me…’

Old Lundal was a dark blur before the fire. He turned his head slightly, before fixing his gaze back on the roaring flames. Charms and talismans jangled about his neck. Icons of his faith. The symbols of the Everqueen and the deities of the deep that were worshipped about the Shattered Isles.

‘Father! Father, don’t let them take me.’

As he was dragged through the banqueting hall, the net cutting into him, he heard the boots of his brothers pause by their father. Nothing was said. As Silas was hauled out of the great castle doors and across the rough stone bridge leading from the castle to the island, the brothers followed, out into the storm.

Above, the clouds swirled and churned. The path was lit up by bolts of blue and pink lightning, cutting up the sky. The servants crunched through the sand. Instead of tiny grains, the path – like the beach – was made up of tiny slivers of gemstone. Instead of pebbles, jewels lined the trail, slicing at Silas’ netted form. It was raining. The drizzle created a polychromatic sheen and faint rainbows in the gloom. Norvik and the brothers crunched up behind, soaked to the skin in the storm.

As Silas was dragged through the fishing village surrounding the castle he called out for assistance. His voice, full of disbelief and terror, was largely lost to the bombast of the storm. Those fishermen and their wives who did hear him opened their doors, not to help their clansman but to look on in silence. Children came to their windows to get a glimpse of the hunchback being dragged away.

Silas’ voice trailed miserably off to nothing. The people of Ersatz would not help him. Theirs was an idyllic existence. They did not want it tarnished by one whose presence only reminded them of its potential for ugliness and imperfection. Even fish that displayed the slightest hint of a flaw in their scales or fins were discarded. Those whose taste did not meet expectation were dumped. The islanders wouldn’t blemish their jewel-encrusted cottages and silver shoreline with rotting fish and the stench of decay, however. Children were sent across the island to throw rejected morsels and leftovers into a collapsed sea cave called the Grotto. Silas had even heard dark stories of islanders taking ailing or disfigured newborns across to the Grotto and pitching the disappointments into the depths.

As he was dragged across the island’s rocky interior with Rodric, Hearn and master Norvik striding through the rain behind, Silas Sheldrac came to the heart-scalding conclusion that he was about to die. He moaned the pain of his broken bones and gashed head. Finally, his lips found their way back to his wretched entreaties. To his brothers’ names. To prayers. The path became bumpier and more rugged on the approach to the Grotto, bare of the island’s vegetation, where islanders had come for generations to dispose of things unwanted.

‘Rodric,’ Silas sobbed as the servants heaved the net to a stop at the craggy edge of the Grotto. ‘Hearn. Brothers, I beg of you. Do not listen to this godless priest. Look at me. I am your clansman. Your kin. I am Silas.’

As the lightning flashed above them and thunder fell like song from the sky, Silas saw his brothers. Drizzle dripped from their taut features. They were steeling themselves but they were resolved. Master Norvik stabbed his staff into the ground. He looked to the pair and then to Silas.

‘You are a thing unfinished,’ Norvik said. ‘Unfit for this realm. We are destined for the heavens, to sit by great Sigmar’s side. You will not hold us back.’

Knowing that the brothers would struggle to give the order, the priest nodded to the servants. They picked up the net on both sides with Silas rocking like an infant in a cradle between them. He shrieked as the net swung back and forth over the lip of the collapsed cave. Even the flashing lightning could not illuminate its foul depths. For a moment, Silas entertained the thought that this was all some terrible jest or nightmare. That the priest, the servants and his brothers might break out in laughter or that he might wake up in his chambers, the sun flooding through his casement.

And then he was plummeting. Plunging into darkness. The collapsed opening, and the men who had pitched him to his death, flashed before his eyes as he tumbled down through the cavernous Grotto. He could not even flail, for the net entangling his limbs. He readied himself for the end.

Silas Sheldrac fell.

The light of the storm faded.

Darkness became everything.

Whatever Silas hit, it wasn’t rock. It wasn’t seawater either. Still wrapped in the net, he bounced off something soft and wet. Liquid fountained up about Silas. Broken ribs grated inside his chest with every tumble. It was dark and disorientating, but he definitely got the feeling he was rolling down some kind of slope. His ears were filled with the buzzing of disturbed flies. It was difficult to breath, but when he did, he wished he hadn’t. He gagged and retched. The stench was overpowering. With clouds of fat, black flies swarming and cold slime whipping about his rolling form, Silas endured the descent until he finally levelled off, the momentum carrying him into cold water.

He lay there for a moment, in the stinking shallows. He blinked his disbelief. It was a miracle he was alive. The Grotto was thick with putridity and gloom. Silas could hear the whoosh of stormy waves and the hiss of spray. Flashes of lightning found their way into the cavernous chamber from the collapsed entrance above and from a cave entrance, half-submerged by the sea. They gave the momentary impression of a large, craggy chamber. A rancid, forgotten place.

The light of the storm also revealed to Silas the reason that he had survived. He had plummeted down through the cavern only to land on the rotting mountain of fish and detritus thrown into the Grotto by the islanders over the years. He was soaked through with oily spoilage and dripping with entrails. He reeked to the heavenly realm but still he was thankful for the colossal heap of decomposing flesh.

Silas untangled himself from the fisherman’s net and crawled out of the shallows. He sat on the rocky floor of the Grotto, clutching broken ribs and a shattered arm that ached with agonies to come. Still, he was alive, and the ironic circumstances of his survival were not lost on Silas. Looking up at the mountain of rot that he had been due to become, he chuckled to himself. An expression of hysteria that escaped his pain-lined lips. It died in his throat as the mountain chuckled back.

Scrabbling back through the rock pools and the filth of the chamber, Silas sensed great movement. Towering above him and edged in the light of the storm, the huge mound of decaying flesh seemed to turn. Its outline was suddenly a deafening swarm of flies, while an avalanche of maggot-infested fish tumbled down it, almost burying Silas. Beneath the carpet of insects and crustaceans feeding off the rot, a monstrous creature was revealed. Kicking away from the living mountain, Silas found his feet slipping on the slimy cave floor.

Framed in the flash of lightning, Silas got a measure of the thing, its true dimensions and the horror of its form. Beneath the rot pile was a green monster – hunched like him. Its leathery hide could barely contain its own diseased flesh. A huge belly was ripe with infection and dribbling pus, while its pudgy arms and legs were leprous and scaly. Its skin was encrusted with coral blooms, barnacles and anemones. Its form was draped in seaweed and swarmed with scuttling crabs. Shattered horns of dead coral sprouted from its fat head, while hooded rolls of fat all but obscured the searing intensity of the creature’s blood-bright eyes. The corners of its grotesque mouth retracted in a horrific smile that revealed rows of needle-like teeth. Its body quaked with an infernal chuckle that built to a cavern-shaking laughter. Its monstrous form throbbed with sour malevolence.

Silas lay there, at the mountainous creature’s mercy, under the baleful scrutiny of its gaze. It waited until he built up the nerve to part his lips.

‘What are you?’

‘I am the unwanted,’ the monster told him, its voice echoing horribly about the Grotto. ‘The waste. The dread and detritus. The rot forgotten. I am ugliness itself. The devourer of every imperfect thing.’

‘How can this be?’ Silas marvelled with his heart in his throat.

‘How does anything come into being?’ the diseased mountain asked him back. ‘Through industry or neglect. I am the product of both. Your wasteful people have dumped all that is unworthy of their lips and loins in this dark place. Like a bottomless pit. Except, this isn’t a bottomless pit. I am. For generations, the flawed flesh has been my meat and the sacrificial soul my drink. Souls like your own. A soul I chose to spare.’

‘Then I live no less at your mercy than I did at my kindred’s,’ Silas spat.

‘Careful, boy,’ the monster warned him with a grotesque grin. ‘You need not live at all. Besides – I can help you with that.’

‘Help me?’ Silas said.

‘In time,’ the monster told him. ‘Time is a powerful thing. It turns the most glorious warriors of the realms into feasts for maggots. The most savage creatures to legend. Kingdoms to dust.’

‘Why would I want your help?’ Silas said, shaking his head. ‘You are the darkness that infects my lands. That poisons the people. That afflicts my brothers with a fever of the mind – for they know not what they have done.’

‘They know,’ the repulsive creature insisted. ‘Just like every hollow parent and spiteful sibling to have pitched some broken unfortunate into these depths. We are the same, you and I. We are the afflicted. The forsaken. There are many forms of darkness. Some split the sky with their power. Some worm their way into hearts and homes. And some fester in piles of rotting flesh. You would know if my darkness had benighted your tiny island. Let me help you, hunchback, and it will. ’

Silas held his broken arm to his smashed ribs. He looked wretchedly about the cavern, at the sea water washing in through the entrance of the Grotto and at the colossal daemon before him. His brothers had thrown him to his death. The islanders had stood by and done nothing. And the monster had saved his life. Hiding in the Grotto, with only the flies and the creature for company, Silas had few options. Still, he knew this thing that offered to help him must be an infernal servant of the Dark Gods. A dread entity of the beyond.

‘You can trust me, mortal,’ the daemon said. ‘There is an evil sweeping your land, with its hooks in your family and clan. I am not that evil, but I can help you purge it.’

‘How?’ Silas shouted, his pain-threaded voice echoing about the Grotto. He lifted his broken arm. ‘I am a brother betrayed. A hunchback, broken of body and spirit.’

‘I can teach you to reach beyond such limitations,’ the daemon said. ‘To harness strengths you never knew you had.’

Silas found himself nodding slowly. A dreadful decision had been reached.

‘You seem to know me by my woes,’ Silas said. ‘How should I know you?’

‘Like all monsters,’ the daemon told him. ‘By my name and the doom that walks hand in hand with it. I am Hergustagrue.’

‘Silas… formerly of the Clan Sheldrac.’

The daemon brought forth a slimy claw. In it he clutched a dribbling handful of rotten fish.

‘Eat, Silas,’ Hergustagrue said. ‘You shall need your strength for the trials ahead.’

The sun rose over its reflection in the silver waters of the Glass Sea, as it came to do many times thereafter. The tides came in and out across the bejewelled beaches of Ersatz Island. Life went on. The seasons passed, and with them, returning fishing boats – first with bountiful nets of fish, then seabed traps, before finally hauling in the carcasses of speared glitterskin sharks. Seaweed turned from green to brown. Squalls came and went, and the days got shorter. The years went by unnoticed, until one morning in the long season. It was high tide, with a mirror mist coming in off the silver waters.

Silas Sheldrac broke the surface. His sorcerer’s staff of dead coral and skull reared up out of the perfection of the shallows – waters in which the clanspeople of Ersatz Island admired themselves every day. His hood rose above the waves, and with it, his ghoulish face. His skin was waterlogged and white, like something long dead that had drifted down into the depths for shelled, spindle-limbed nightmares to pick apart. His body was bloated and his back hunched. Sea lice crawled across his pallid flesh while serpentine hagfish squirmed through it. The sorcerer’s grotesque form was covered in a cloak and ragged robes, fashioned from a mouldy black canvas sail: some remnant of a shipwreck brought in on the tide. The tattered fishing net in which he had been thrown into the Grotto still clung to his form, a reminder of his former treatment.

As he strode up out of the shallows and onto the beach, gemstones crunched beneath his feet. He opened his mouth to utter the dread words of a sorcerous curse. Black fluid leaked from his pincer-plucked lips and a small crab scuttled from his mouth and up one nostril. Silas’ words sounded like the hiss of the surf. As he spoke them, the water about his feet started to foam and thrash with fish. Thousands and thousands of fish. The fish flipped and flopped at the water’s edge, throwing themselves up onto the beach in some kind of diseased madness. All along the island’s coastline, fish threw themselves from the water, flapping and squirming across each other’s bodies, their mouths and gills gulping for air, until they died.

The silver mist rolling inland blackened about Silas like a besmirched mirror. Fishermen and their sons walked down the shore towards a small fleet of boats that sat beached and ready to launch. Even men such as these revelled in their simple finery. Sharkskin jerkins. Scaled boat-cloaks. Jewels glittering in their long hair. They were up at the crack of dawn, priding themselves on their work. Repairing their nets, shearing barnacles from their boats’ hulls and bringing in only the very best the sea had to offer.

Silas did not allow the fishermen to see him. They saw only what they expected to see: dark reflections of themselves in the mirrored mist. That was, until they saw what waited for them in the surf. Their catch, already dragged from the sea and lying dead along the beach. Such a spectacle drew consternation from such simple folk, with calls for brothers, fathers and grandfathers from the village. Questions hung without answers, for no man of the Shattered Isles had seen the like before.

With a few more damned words falling from his diseased lips, fat maggots began to writhe and wriggle between the scales of the fish, out of eyes and the mouths of the dead creatures. As Silas visited a new plague upon the island, fishermen stumbled back in revulsion.

Stabbing his staff into the gemstone beach, the sorcerer made his way up the shoreline, cloaked in the silver vapour. As the sun rose, he saw islanders going about their business. Old women slaved at garment and sailcloth with ivory needle and thread. Wives prepared veritable breakfast banquets for their hard-working husbands. Children played games of petty supremacy between the cottages, the treatment of their peers nasty and merciless. Silas moved through the village unnoticed, looking into the open doors of cottages. Inside, the fishermen’s homes were decorated with pearl, dead coral and pretty shells. Fires roared before scrimshawed furniture of whalebone, while the plumage of colourful seabirds served as curtains and the covers for beds and tables. Jewels sat in the glass of the windows, allowing light of many colours to flood into the rooms.

The cottages were small, merely the beachside hovels of common clansmen, but they were palaces compared to the horror Silas had called home for the last few years. The Grotto had been cold and wet. With only the crabs and Hergustagrue for company, he had dined only on the islanders’ rotting leftovers. There was little to do but listen to the great daemon speak on the strength and cankerous virtues of his Dark God and of Silas’ revenge. To learn the dread arts of summoning and sorcery. To become one with the darkness and the deep.

‘Mungo,’ a woman called, a comely fisherman’s wife with an armful of driftwood for the fire. ‘Wherever are you going boy, in such a hurry?’

A young lad with a mole on his chin – one of the fisherman’s sons Silas had seen on the beach – was running up the track between the cottages. He ran past Silas, who was unseen in the silvery mist. The sorcerer’s powers drew the reflective haze to him, hiding his grotesque form but revealing to him, in its swirls and billows, the presence of others.

‘Pa says to run to the castle,’ the boy called back at his mother, breathless. ‘Something’s happened on the beach.’

‘What?’ his mother called back, but Mungo was gone. Tapping his staff along the track, Silas followed the boy.

Above the cloud bank, Silas saw the towers of Sheldrac Castle. It was a rough sort of fortification. Not like the fine palaces he had heard about on the larger and more central kingdoms of the Shattered Isles. Ersatz Island had no need of a palace or citadel. Constructed hundreds of years before from dark coastal stone, threaded with gemstone, it barely qualified as a castle. Its walls had never had to withstand an enemy attack and no soldiers stood on its roughly hewn bridgeway. It had stood indomitable, however, before the wrath of storms and all the Glass Sea could throw at it.

The boy Mungo crossed the bridge and pushed his way tentatively through the great doors. Silas followed him in, the mirror mist pouring in with him to fill the chambers and banqueting hall beyond with a reflective haze.

In the great hall, the fire burned as brightly as ever. Mungo moved around the figure sat before the flames. He went to say something before thinking better of it and moving on. Silas approached the figure, the creatures crawling across his diseased flesh retracting from the heat of the fire. There Old Lundal sat. The former chieftain was but skin and bone, barely alive but for the transfixed stare of his misted eyes on the intense flames. Gone were his myriad trinkets of faith. Instead, the old man wore the heavy chain and hammer-styled medallion of Sigmar, like some kind of penance. Silas laid his fat, pallid hands on Lundal’s shoulders and leant his lips in towards the old chieftain’s ear.

‘Worry not, father,’ the sorcerer said. ‘It is me, Silas. The answer to unspeakable prayers. It will all be over soon.’

‘But my lord,’ Mungo implored, re-entering the banquet hall. Silas turned. His brother Hearn had entered the room. As tall and strapping as ever, his face was a mask of savagery. He was followed by some of the same household servants that had helped carry Silas to the Grotto.

‘Damn you,’ he spat at one of them, showing them the stitching on his sharkskin cloak. ‘Don’t you think to cross me. Look at it. Look at it! You dropped a stitch man. You think that good enough for Clan Sheldrac, do you? You think a man can serve his God-King thus? I should have you whipped, dog.’

‘My lord,’ Mungo called, the urgency evident in his voice. ‘My father sent me. There’s something you should see…’

Hearn turned angrily on the boy. The back of his hand came around, striking Mungo savagely across the face and sending the boy to the floor in a heap. He was too shocked even to sob, and kicked away from Hearn across the polished floor.

‘You impudent pup,’ Hearn glowered. ‘How dare you interrupt me?’ He looked from the boy back to the servants. As he grew ever more incensed, he tore the cloak from his shoulders and threw it at one of the servants before snatching a whip from where it was coiled over a whalebone chair. ‘This isn’t worthy of my shoulders. Insult me with your efforts, will you? Well you’ll never do it again, damn your hides. I’ll flay the flesh from your own backs,’ he told them as they backed from him.

As Mungo scrambled for the stairs, Silas followed him, the sorcerer at one with the silver mist. Making his way with difficulty up the stone steps and remembering how they had broken him as he had tumbled down them, Silas found the boy outside the chieftain’s chambers. The rooms had belonged to his mother and father once. Now they housed Rodric, his children and whatever island woman he was favouring that week.

As Silas stood there, obscured by the reflective mist, he watched scores of children swarming about the landing. They were lean and fine-limbed, yet their eyes betrayed the glint of hunger. Not for food but for attention. They had been raised in an atmosphere of competition: their father’s love the prize. Like a pack of predators, they had sought to weed out the weakest among their number to improve their chances. Their mothers being the daughters of fishermen and island folk, they were bastards all. Rodric had been seeking perfection amongst his children, hoping that each one would be more worthy of his bloodline and the God-King than the last. They lived, however, to be made Rodric’s heir.

As Mungo moved through their number, the eyes of the girls and boys glinted with vicious intent. They closed in on the boy, who was still clutching the side of his face, red where Hearn had struck it. Mungo stopped, his eyes wet with tears. He was unsure of himself around the mob of children. They just stared at him like a piece of meat in the offing.

Suddenly, one of the chamber doors opened. Silas could hear the wailing of women inside, though knew not the cause. The chieftain walked out onto the landing. Rodric was bare to the waist, the extravagant length of a seal-fur cloak trailing across the polished floor behind him. His mouth was fixed in a cruel grin, showing perfect teeth. His eyes were glazed and his gaze distant, as though he were reliving terrible things that he had done.

‘Father!’

The children forgot about Mungo and swarmed in on the chieftain, clamouring for his vacant attentions. Rodric seemed not to see them, striding through their number, knocking several of the youngest over. They pulled at his cloak and clawed at his muscular torso.

‘My lord…’ Mungo said tentatively. Silas watched from the silver swirl of the mist that was feeling its way up through the castle. Rodric reached out for the handle of a door further down the landing. As he heard the boy’s voice, he stopped. It was not the sound of his own brood, cawing as they were around him like baby birds for attention. He stared right through the boy.

‘My father sent me, my lord chieftain,’ Mungo told him. ‘On the beach, my lord. There are events that demand…’

‘…my attention,’ Rodric said, his voice a silky whisper. He smiled as though he found humour in the words.

‘Will you come down, to see for yourself, lord chieftain?’

In answer to Mungo’s question, Rodric’s mad smile widened further. Almost as though he had forgotten the boy’s report and himself, the chieftain turned the handle and opened the door. From within, Silas could hear the sobbing of different women. As Rodric disappeared inside, his children turned their attention to Mungo, but he was gone, a boy-shaped hole in the silvery mist.

Silas found him on the floor above, knocking furiously at a door upon which a hammer of Sigmar hung crooked, its metal dull and tarnished. Mungo kept looking behind him for any sign of the children. Instead, he found the landing lost in the depths of the mirrored haze. Silas watched as Mungo pushed at the door and entered the darkness of the chamber beyond.

‘Master Norvik,’ the boy called. The chamber beyond was thick with candle smoke. Silas followed the boy in. The rooms had been fitted out as some kind of ghastly chapel. Norvik had brought with him from Tesseraq the trappings of his God-King and decorated the chapel. It had been his hope to bring Sigmar’s word to Ersatz Island. To bring the chieftain and Clan Sheldrac into the faith before converting the rest of the islanders. This had never happened, however. The tapestries hung in tatters, and icons of the God-King lay unceremoniously against walls. Everything was buried in dirty scrolls and nameless tomes. The room smelled of old blood.

About the chamber, there were sigils that Silas recognised. Dread shapes made up of orbs and crescents, painted onto the stone of walls, cut into rough altars and crafted in the metal of standing icons and hanging talismans. They were not symbols of Sigmar.

Hergustagrue had told them that they were the sign of the Prince of Excess – an enemy god. The darkness that had long eaten away at his people and enslaved Silas’ family. The prideful hearts of each and every islander now beat with devotion to the long-lost god, and in some ways, always had done. It was there in the rise of the Sheldracs and the clan’s history. It had travelled with the priest Norvik from Tesseraq and the Shattered Isles. In turn, several fishermen had left the island. They set off across the ocean in their boats, in search of Slaanesh in the great silver emptiness – never to return. Meanwhile, those left behind transformed Ersatz into an island paradise, awaiting the Dark Prince’s return.

‘Master Norvik,’ Mungo said. He found the terrible old man, hunched over a table, scribbling madness into parchment with a barbed quill: plans for the dread deity’s return. Turning, the priest regarded the boy from the darkness of his hood.

‘Master Norvik,’ Mungo said. ‘There are strange happenings on the beach.’

‘What happenings?’ the priest said, plucking the barbed quill from his bloody fingers.

‘Fish throw themselves from the water to die along our shores,’ the boy told him. ‘They are diseased, my lord. Rotting at our feet and crawling with maggots.’

The priest got down from his stool and hobbled towards Mungo. He nodded as the boy described the bizarre events on the beach. There was something in the way Norvik approached the boy, his eyes gleaming within the hood, that prompted the boy to step back, but he found the stone altar behind him. Norvik reached for a curved blade that sat in a filthy sheath on his belt. The dagger’s blade was stained red.

‘How long have you had that mole, boy?’ Norvik said, drawing the blade. Mungo reached for his chin. Terror crossed the boy’s features as the priest hobbled towards him.

Like oil on water, the silvery mist dissipated to reveal the sorcerer Silas in his disgusting robes. The sudden appearance attracted Norvik’s attention. The priest was surprised to see the figure standing there with his staff, and turned the wicked blade of the sacrificial dagger on Silas. Norvik looked from the sorcerer to Mungo and then back again.

‘Who are you?’ Norvik asked, drawing back his hood. The priest’s parchment skin was stretched across his perfect skull. He flashed Silas file-sharpened teeth and milky eyes.

‘Go, boy,’ Silas said, his words like a snake sloughing off its skin. Mungo ran from the chapel.

‘Speak,’ the twisted priest demanded.

‘I am but a man,’ Silas told him. ‘Unworthy before the gaze of the gods. I am flaws long forgotten. I am something returned from nothing.’

Norvik licked at his sharp teeth with a crescent-forked tongue. The sacrificial dagger came up with sudden violence. The priest stuck Silas with the blade. The sorcerer felt the blood-stained steel puncture his robes and slip into his diseased flesh. Norvik stabbed him again and again, expecting the robed figure to fall to the ground, clutching his stomach. Instead the blade sank into the waterlogged flesh, doing little to the diseased blubber. Silas could barely feel the presence of the knife in his gut.

The sorcerer put his lips to Norvik’s pointed ear.

‘I am Silas,’ the sorcerer told him, ‘of Clan Sheldrac. And I have come home.’

Silas grabbed Norvik by his chin with a hunchback’s strength and held him there. A stream of sorcerous corruption poured from his lips, into the priest’s ear. Norvik struggled and screamed, filling with the warping filth. Silas held the priest to him as he bubbled, blistered and wept puss. Silas left Norvik there, a steaming mound of diseased flesh.

Climbing the steps of the castle tower, the sorcerer came to a familiar door. It had been his own, the door belonging to his former chambers. It was barred and locked. Tapping his staff against the wood, he rotted the door on its hinges. As the soggy pulp fell aside, Silas walked in. There he found Lady Teagan, sat on his bed. Her face was thin and drawn. She was a frail shadow of her former self, but her eyes still burned bright with regal defiance. As the sorcerer crossed the chamber, she moved back across the bed as far as her chains and manacles would allow. Lifting her hands she made fists, suggesting that she would lash out if Silas got too close. Unwilling to be part of the inhumanity and abuses of the castle, she had fought Norvik and the brothers to become more trouble than she was worth. She had ended up imprisoned in the tower and all but forgotten.

‘I have come for you,’ Silas told her. He reached out for her chains but Teagan retreated. Her nose wrinkled at his stench. She took in his disgusting form. His ragged robes. His rotten face. His hunched back.

‘Silas?’ she said, not quite believing what she was seeing.

He laid his diseased hands upon her chains. At his touch, the metal links became tarnished. They rusted over before disintegrating into a red mulch on the bed. Teagan rubbed her raw wrists and backed towards the window. He reached out for her but, with fear and revulsion, she climbed into the casement. It became obvious that the lady would rather throw herself from the tower than be touched by the sorcerer’s cold, drowned flesh.

‘I… I thought you were dead,’ she said.

‘I thought that myself for a while,’ the sorcerer told her, standing before the window, ‘but it seems that there is a world of difference between being almost dead and actually dead. And I have brought that world with me.’

The two of them heard it at first. A distant drone, building. The horrid buzz of fat flies. The sound was everywhere. Then they saw it. Like a filthy stain, it spread. Maggots had squirmed from the dead fish with sorcerous speed. Their pupae had encrusted the mounds of rot that had lined the beach. From these, an infernal plague of flies had crawled, dried their wings and taken to the air. They swarmed the fleeing fishermen and swirled up the beach. They blanketed the cottages with their filth. Silas and Teagan watched the black swarm grow and swallow the village, the insects covering everything and everyone. Cottage windows were closed and doors locked, but there was nowhere to hide. Islanders thrashed and ran out onto the beach, covered from head to toe in fat, black flies.

‘No,’ Teagan said, backing from the window. ‘This is your doing?’

Silas nodded with rancid pride, watching his unfolding plague claim Ersatz Island. Lady Teagan retreated towards the doorway. Away from the horror. Away from Silas. Down the stairs, she heard the maddening drone of flies and the sound of screaming. The plague had reached the castle. She moved away from the doorway. It had no door.

‘You are safe,’ Silas told her. ‘But you are the only islander who can claim that.’

Lady Teagan slid her back down the cold, stone wall and hugged her knees to her chest. All that she had endured and the hopelessness that she had resisted seemed to crash down on her in that moment.

‘What have you done?’ she said, her voice a harsh whisper. ‘What have you become?’

‘I am what I have always been,’ Silas told her. ‘I am the ugly truth that must be faced.’

The two of them waited there, until the drone died away and the screams became whimpers and moans. ‘It’s time,’ the sorcerer told her, turning suddenly. He grabbed her by the hand. Teagan barely noticed the rotten fingers clasped about her own. She had retreated to the only place she could. The dark warmth of her own thoughts. A place where the horror around her wasn’t happening.

Tapping his staff down the steps, the hunchback dragged Teagan along with him. The silver mist was gone, as had the swarm of flies. The pair of them crunched down through the black carpet of dead insects. As they moved down through the castle, Silas found his brothers, their prisoners, servants and the bastards of Clan Sheldrac, all wallowing in their agonies.

Silas stopped, holding Lady Teagan to his side. He watched Rodric and Hearn stagger about their halls. Eaten alive by the flies, their perfect forms and handsome features were now a mess of infection and flesh swollen with laid eggs. Maggots squirmed beneath their diseased skin and the brothers groaned at the monstrosities they had become. The chieftain saw Silas and fell to his knees before the sorcerer. A moan of physical agony turned to spiritual torment as Rodric clawed at his disgusting features.

Flesh came away from his form like crusty pupae. Strings of pus dribbled between the pieces, and maggots rained to the ground. Rodric roared as Hearn and the other unfortunates started similarly tearing at themselves and the ugliness they had become. What was waiting beneath was not the Sheldrac brothers.

Teagan screamed.

Beneath the oozing shell of fly-savaged flesh was a daemon entity. Stubby, single horns erupted from their heads. Green, otherworldly flesh barely covered their grotesque skulls, while a single eye burned with murky malevolence. Sloughing off the diseased shell of the brothers with their filthy claws, the daemons revealed spindly limbs and pot-bellied forms.

Teagan was beside herself as she was surrounded by plague-infested monsters, all emerging from the clansmen and islanders.

‘Come,’ Silas Sheldrac said, dragging Teagan towards the door. The daemons followed with their diseased gait and indomitable step, leaving all that they had been behind. As the fire burned bright in the banquet hall, the sorcerer thought he smelled roasting flesh. The whalebone chair before the great hearth was empty. Within the flames, the sorcerer fancied he could see Old Lundal – the old man having thrown himself in the fire to escape the flies. Silas let a sickly smile cross his face before leaving Castle Sheldrac once and for all.

Lady Teagan’s sobs and moans accompanied their walk down to the beach. Followed by lengthening columns of infested daemons, Silas made his way through the village, his staff tapping the way. Islanders groaned from their afflictions, tearing at the corruption visited upon their fine flesh by the fly swarm. Plaguebearing daemons of different sizes and horrific appearance emerged from the flesh of fishermen, their wives and their children. None were spared. Falling in behind the sorcerer, they crunched their way down the beach to the silver surf.

There, Silas and Teagan found a mountain of rotting fish waiting for them in the shallows. The creatures flung themselves out of the water, creating the mound before dying and rotting on the bone. Festering disease and decomposition turned the mountain of rot into a monstrosity of one flesh. A tooth-lined mouth smiled through the corruption and eyes opened in what became a horrible face. The daemon Hergustagrue had arrived to admire his acolyte’s work.

Teagan’s mind was broken. She was beyond such horror now but stifled her sobbing as the daemon fixed her with his malevolent gaze. Silas bowed before his infernal sponsor.

‘In the morning, the Dark Prince’s acolyte had this island in his clutches,’ Silas told his master. ‘By the afternoon, it belonged to the Great Lord of Decay.’

‘You have done well, Silas,’ Hergustagrue told him, settling his foul bulk in the silvery shallows. The water about him turned black with his polluting form. ‘You have avenged yourself and pleased our foetid master. Now it is time to bring his rank glory to the rest of these damned isles. To seek out sorcerers like yourself to sustain our presence in this realm.’

Silas bowed his hooded head, before turning to his daemon horde.

‘Come, my tallymen,’ he called. ‘There are souls to weigh and measure beyond these shores. Dark powers to harness and realmgates that await our corruption.’

In unison, the plaguebearers marched forth, setting their disgusting forms against the fishing boats that lay beached on the bejewelled beach. Some vessels were grander still, fat transports Master Norvik had intended to use in the ocean-going search for his dark god. With diseased brawn, they pushed the boats into the shallows and launched the small fleet, raising their black sails. As a rancid daemon helped Silas up the side of the largest boat, the hunchbacked sorcerer dragged Lady Teagan with him. She tried to pull away from his foetid grip, but Silas hauled her back to him. As her face almost touched his rancid own, she cried the last of her tears.

‘Silas,’ she sobbed. ‘Please… please.’

‘Worry not, Lady Teagan,’ Silas Sheldrac told her. ‘We are done with this wretched place. Now I am going to take you home.’

The Last Gift

Josh Reynolds

Ompallious Zeyros swept his silvery glaive out in a wide arc, removing the Rotbringer’s flabby sword-hand at the wrist. The obese warrior gave a grunting sigh and reached for Zeyros with his remaining paw.

‘Too slow, my fat friend,’ Zeyros said as he twisted aside and thrust the edge of his glaive through a rusty join in his opponent’s fungus-covered cuirass. Warm pus spurted from the wound and the Rotbringer seemed to deflate, even as he toppled forward. Zeyros tore his glaive free and spun it deftly, cleansing the blade. It had been a gift from a daemon of his acquaintance, and was as light as one of her feathers.

All around him, his servants finished off the last of the pestilential defenders of the crag-fortress known as the Rot-Horn. Cackling, pink-limbed horrors, their chest-faces twisted in manic amusement, hurled daemonic fire as oath-sworn warriors clad in armour of amethyst and lapis lazuli hacked down bloated blightkings with ensorcelled blades. The Rotbringers had sought to bar their entry to the inner chambers of the keep that clung like a stony boil to the highest peak of the mountain range.

‘But they have failed. Do you hear me, Ephraim Bollos? Or is it Lord Rotskull?’ he shouted, casting his words into the mould-shrouded corridors which spread out around him, echoing strangely. ‘Whatever you call yourself, I am here, as is your hour of reckoning.’

He received no reply. He had expected none. Still, a worm of doubt wriggled within him. ‘Is he here, Tugop? Is my foe here, or has he already fled, as he did at the Black Cistern?’ he asked, glancing at the blue-skinned horror crouched on a nearby statue. Tugop was little more than a collection of lanky limbs and a monstrous head twisted in a sullen grimace, but he was loyal, in his way. As loyal as a daemon bound in chains of ritual and blood could be.

‘Or as you did at the Pallas Ghyredes, Ompallious Zeyros?’ the daemon murmured dolefully. ‘He is here, for all the good it shall do thee,’ he added quickly, at Zeyros’ glare.

‘And what does that mean, daemon?’ Zeyros demanded.

‘Only that thy fate is come, and all possible paths have narrowed to but one, Ompallious Zeyros,’ Tugop said, as he extended one impossibly long arm and patted Zeyros’ shoulder in apparent sympathy. ‘Tread carefully, and stay to that path which the King of Manifold Paths hath chosen for thee.’

‘And victory will be mine?’

The blue horror gave a sad chuckle. ‘Who can say? Not I, not I.’

He…llo…ol…d…frie…nd.

The old familiar voice echoed up out of the fungal growths on the body at his feet. They flexed like the mouths of fishes gasping for air, causing the corpse to shudder.

‘Ephraim,’ Zeyros said. ‘Where are you?’

Wai…ting…for…you.

A stinking breeze whipped past him, drawing him towards an archway curtained in foulness. A single slice of his glaive revealed the corridor beyond. He hesitated. He looked at Tugop. ‘The path?’ he asked, softly. The blue horror spread his oversized hands and shrugged. Zeyros shook his head in disgust. ‘Burn this sty to ashes. I will deal with its master.’ His warriors murmured their assent, as Tugop bowed.

As he stepped into the corridor, he heard daemons giggling behind him as they began to slap the damp stones with burning hands. There was little the servants of Tzeentch enjoyed more than destroying the bastions of rot beloved of Nurgle. That was why he had sworn himself to the iridescent banners of the Changer of Ways that day, so long ago. The day Ephraim Bollos had broken his oaths and cast down all that they had once served.

He strode along heavy flat foundation stones carpeted with bunches of mould. Humps of toadstools clustered between the flags, and wherever he stepped, clouds of spores billowed up. They clung to his armour and robes, staining them an ugly hue. The walls around him bulged with mushrooms and furry streaks that blended in hideous harmony to give shape to faces and hands and other, less identifiable things – crusted convolutions which resembled things no mortal eye should see.

‘Until, out of corruption, horrid life springs,’ Zeyros murmured. It was an old saying, folk wisdom from a people and a land lost to the foetid tide of history. His land. We were closer than brothers, you and I, he thought. We rode to war side-by-side. How many lances did we each break on behalf of the other, before you threw it all away?

Before they both threw it away, a treacherous part of him countered. He shied away from the thought. Whatever he’d done, he’d done in the name of necessity. But Bollos… Bollos had sold his soul for power. Life. Survival. The Jade Kingdoms drowned in filth, and Bollos had chosen to join it.

A familiar laugh, deep-throated and full, echoed out around him. That laughter had followed him, haunted him, for centuries. He stopped. The corridor had expanded, widening into a round chamber, full of ghastly life. Great toadstools and hummocks of fungus stood like courtiers before a heavy slab of a dais, surmounted by a crude throne.

‘Hello, my old friend… Come to see me at last?’ Ephraim Bollos wheezed. He had seen better days. His bloated, toad-like form lolled on the throne, armour creaking as it struggled futilely to contain the hideous shape within. By the light of phosphorescent fungus, Zeyros could see that the living corruption that filled the keep originated from Bollos and his throne. Webs of fungus and mould stretched from his limbs and horned skull to spread across the walls and floor, where they had thickened and flourished into a garden of filthy creation. ‘Welcome to my garden. I can feel the heat of your hate from here, Ompallious.’

‘As I can smell the stink of you, Ephraim,’ Zeyros said. His voice carried strangely in the chamber. The doughy fungus which clung to the walls seemed to absorb all sound, as did the spongy carpet of fluted shapes which squelched beneath his feet. ‘Then, you never were very clean. Even in better days.’

Bollos laughed. ‘Better days? Is that a hint of yearning I hear in your voice?’

‘Unlike you, my brain is not shot through with rot. My memories are as vivid as ever.’ Zeyros slashed a particularly unpleasant clump of fungus apart and was rewarded by a tiny scream. Bollos sighed.

‘Do stay your hand, Ompallious. I cannot bear their pain,’ he grumbled. ‘They are a part of me, and I, them. I am in every blossom and lump.’

Spitefully, Zeyros thrust his glaive into the trembling clump and gave it a savage twist. Thin squeals of agony, or perhaps simply escaping air, reached him. Bollos twitched on his throne. ‘Once, you would not have done that,’ he said.

‘Once, we would have traded blows, rather than words,’ Zeyros said. ‘Once, you would have welcomed this. But now…’

‘Now I am older and less inclined to bestir myself for petty displays,’ Bollos said.

‘Petty, he says,’ Zeyros said. ‘Do not mock me, Ephraim. We have known each other too long to play such games.’ He took another step towards the throne. The fungus seemed to shift and bulge, as if following him. ‘Ghyran, the Jade Kingdoms… they shudder beneath the star-shod heels of a new power. The fires of Azyr rage in the forests of rot, and your patron reels in agony. Nurgle loses his hold on this realm. It is a time of change.’

‘So it is.’ Bollos gestured with a wide, warty hand. ‘And so I am. All of this… it is me, my friend. Every toadstool, every cilium, born of my flesh, culled from my rotten bone. Behold, I give a gift of myself to the future. Life begets life. It was ever Grandfather’s way.’

Zeyros looked around, a queasy feeling in his gut. Bollos truly had become one with the filth of Nurgle’s garden. ‘It was ever your way to wallow in your own filth,’ he said.

‘You should not mock me, my friend,’ Bollos said, watching him approach.

‘We are not friends, Ephraim. Maybe once, but no longer, and not for many centuries. An ocean of blood separates us, and I would see you drown in it.’ Zeyros took another step. And another. The carpet of toadstools stirred beneath him.

‘Yes. And you sold your soul for the chance, did you not?’

Zeyros said nothing. Bollos’ wide, toad-like face split in a brown grin. His teeth were broken and mossy, and something that might have been a tongue moved behind them. ‘What price a man’s soul, eh?’

‘You tell me,’ Zeyros said. ‘Was it worth it, Ephraim? All that you’ve done, to me, to the others… was it worth it?’

‘Worth has a different meaning for every man, Ompallious. You taught me that. I sold my soul for life, eternal and without end, in one form or another. What did you sell yours for? That iridescent armour you wear? That glaive you carry? Or something else?’ Bollos sighed, his round eyes half-shut. ‘Did you bargain all of your tomorrows away for today?’

Zeyros paused, his foot on the bottom step of the dais on which the throne sat. The air was thick with spores and mould, and he coughed, trying to clear his lungs. Everything in the chamber stank of Bollos. ‘I did what was necessary, and no more,’ he said, harshly.

Bollos frowned. ‘Necessity and worth are often determined in the aftermath, I have found.’ He sat back with a ponderous groan. ‘In truth, I had hoped you would come. I can no longer leave this place, for I am as much garden as gardener now. What have we made of ourselves, my friend?’

‘We stopped being friends the day you…’ Zeyros fell silent. He shook his head, and raised his glaive. ‘You are a monster. And I am a monster. But only one of us will see tomorrow, Ephraim.’

‘And then what?’ Bollos said. ‘What of tomorrow, Ompallious?’

Zeyros stopped. He was but a glaive-strike from Bollos. ‘What?’

‘What of tomorrow, when I am dead? What then, for you? What shall you do without me, my friend?’

Zeyros stared at the loathsome countenance of the creature he had once called his friend. Memories, long buried under days of blood and regret, rose briefly to the surface and then sank once more. He had chased Bollos across the Jade Kingdoms for centuries. Is he right? What next, for me? The thought was not a pleasant one.

‘We stand on the precipice of greatness, you and I,’ Bollos rumbled. ‘I made you, Ompallious. I gave you the gift of life, as I give it to this place. I gave you a reason to live, when all hope was lost.’

‘If not for you…’ Zeyros began.

‘If not for me, you would have drowned in rot and the last memory of our people drowned with you. But you survived…’

‘For vengeance,’ Zeyros said. But still, the doubt was there.

‘Yes! I kindled the fire in you. And now, you are so much more than you were. We both are, cousin. The gods favour us, Ompallious. Why do you not thank me for my gift?’

‘Thank you? Thank you?’ Zeyros said incredulously.

‘You’re welcome,’ Bollos said, smiling cheerfully. ‘Without me to feed it, your flame will gutter out and become ashes. I would not see that happen to you, my friend. I will live on, in one form or another, and you will thank me…’

Zeyros snarled and flames of every colour and none flared to life along the curved blade of his glaive. ‘Here is your thanks,’ he hissed, as doubt gave way to anger. His glaive swept down and hacked into Bollos’ shoulder. Ephraim jerked and groaned. Spores billowed from the wound and crisped in the flames. A vast sigh, of sadness, perhaps, or satisfaction, rolled through the chamber.

Bollos made no attempt to defend himself. Zeyros hacked at him, tearing great wounds in the sagging body. As he hewed, flames spread hungrily across the ligaments of fungus, devouring them. And Bollos… Bollos laughed. Zeyros staggered back, breath rasping in his lungs. ‘Stop laughing,’ he said. ‘I will burn this place. Burn you!’

‘Burn it all, brother. Such is the cycle of it: life begets fire, fire begets ash, ash begets soil and soil begets life. Burn my garden, so that it might flourish,’ Bollos wheezed. Uncomprehending, Zeyros snarled and spat a single, incandescent word. The chamber was filled with light and heat and ash. Soon, the whole of the crag-keep would be the same. It would all burn, and his memories of Ephraim Bollos with it. The memories of his betrayal, the laughter which had haunted him, it would all be ash.

And then… and then…

He shook the thought aside and leaned forward, to watch as Bollos’ skull crumpled in the fire. The body twitched, and then a hand snapped up, catching him by the arm.

‘One… last… gift, my friend,’ Bollos whispered, holding tight to Zeyros’ wrist, breathing into his face. ‘I bequeath unto you… a future. Nurture it, as I have.’

Then, with a contented sigh, Bollos sagged back and surrendered to the flames. Shaken, Zeyros left the dais, backing away as his fire filled the chamber, and the fungus screamed. As he left, he idly scraped the filth from his armour. It clung stubbornly to the metal, and he wondered if he would ever get clean. He coughed suddenly, and felt a strange weight in his lungs. The smoke, he thought. He looked at his hand, covered in char… and spores. Bollos’ spores. He coughed again, and remembered Bollos’ breath in his face, and the things moving behind his mossy teeth. He remembered the air, thick with… what?

All of this, it is me, he’d said. Ompallious Zeyros coughed again.

And somewhere, Ephraim Bollos laughed.

The Prodigal

David Annandale

The cave was a spiral through darkness, a narrow coil through the core of the mountain. To reach it meant finding a path through a maze of fissures. An impossible task, a barrier to anyone not native-born to the city of Lykerna. The route had been unused now for an age, for who would willingly leave the sanctuary in these terrible days? The people of Lykerna rested secure behind their walls, their city hidden within its mountains, its light concealed from the monsters on the plain. They rested easy. There was no one who would lead the monsters to them.

Except the monster who knew the way.

Graunos had not been a monster when he left Lykerna. Then he had been a victim, doubly cursed because no one but he had acknowledged his plight. Blessed by Tyrion, they had said. Blessed to share his burden.

‘There is light ahead, lord,’ said Therekal.

‘I can see that perfectly well.’

The slaughterpriest bowed his head in a quick apology before Graunos could strike it from his neck.

I can see, he thought. I will see Lykerna.

He would behold its spires for the first time in his life. And this day would be the last they would be seen by anyone.

Graunos rounded the final curve of the spiral. Behind him, the walls of the tunnel echoed with the dread rhythm of thousands of marching boots. The warband of the Brass Gaze had come to Lykerna – at its head, the weakest son of the great city, returned now in strength and wrath.

The cavern ended. Stretching from the precipitous mountainside to the gates of the city was a narrow bridge. There were no ramparts. Though it was wide enough for three warriors to march abreast, it traced a sinuous path through the air. Centuries before, when Graunos had crossed the other way, he had crawled its length on hands and knees, lest his blindness send him plummeting off the edge.

Now, with Khorne’s gift, he gazed upon the bridge, the gate, and the spires. His helmet was fused with his skull. No flesh remained between bone and brass. Graunos and his armour were one. His body was the strength of plate and spikes. His blood was the acid of the Blood God’s rage. His eyes were the graven stare in his helm. Khorne had rewarded him with sight, but it was vision with a purpose. Graunos saw only what must be destroyed, and how to bring it down.

And so he saw all of Lykerna.

The city was built of stone and light. Carved into the mountainsides surrounding the city were vast mirrors of polished marble. They were concave and convex, hemispheres and bowls, their slopes and angles and shapes as varied as the beams of light that struck them. Refracted, reflected, divided and magnified, the rays of Lykerna were a lattice of creation. They were the foundation of the city, suspending it in the air between the mountains, leagues above the distant ground. Lykerna was built upon light, and it was built with light. Every wall, every square, every tower and every palace was a shining composite of resplendent gold, marble and worshipful illumination. Soaring in its heights of pride and glory, the city exalted Tyrion in the totality of its being.

Graunos’ helm covered the top half of his skull. Below it, his face was stripped of its skin. It was exposed muscle, scarred and knotted, pierced with hooks of brass. It was the face of his pain and his hatred. It was a face of thorns. His sharpened teeth parted in a snarl of anticipation as he looked upon the meaning he would destroy and the meaning he would shape.

Meaning. It was the wealth of Lykerna. It was the reason the priests of the city had declared Graunos blessed. They had given thanks for his agony. They had held him up as proof of Tyrion’s favour. Graunos’ blindness had been no simple thing. Because he could see only darkness in the realm of light, his mind could not perceive the play of light. It could not see the symbolism inherent to the material of the world. Instead, all meaning shouted at him at once. Until Khorne had found him in his hate, his darkness had been an endless clamour, a pounding avalanche of significance. Everything had meant everything. There had been no peace, no surcease, no space for his own thoughts until, at last, his hatred had grown so large as to swallow up everything else.

Now he saw only what must fall and the new form that his rage would create. That was more than enough.

He walked onto the bridge. The light trembled beneath his tread. Darkness spread from every footstep, a contagion of night streaming through the veins of the span. It rushed ahead, greedy for the gates. Graunos began to run, charging toward the fulfilment of his vengeance and the preparation of a greater battle to come.

The war horns of the Brass Gaze blasted. Their howl was triumphant in its violence.

‘The towers sway at the sound of our horns,’ said Therekal, awed.

‘But they do not fall,’ Graunos said. ‘Not yet. It is our blows that will topple them.’

The bells in the spires rang out in alarm. The impossible was happening. The hidden city was under attack.

The bridge widened in the final approach to the gate. Here, Graunos paused. He threw his head back and bellowed. ‘Hear me, Lykerna! Your sacrifice has returned! I am Graunos, and I have come to cast you down!’

The bells still rang, yet it seemed to Graunos that a kind of silence fell for a moment over the city when he uttered his name. The Lykernan nobility revelled in the richness of symbols. He had brought them more meaning than even they had wished.

The gates were turning black from the contagion of his rage, becoming brittle. They opened, and the defenders of Lykerna marched to meet the Brass Gaze. Pennants of light and silk flashed in the wind. The warriors of the city were clad in silver armour and white robes. A fine backdrop for the blood to come. At the head of the phalanx was a luminark. Pulled by a brace of armoured horses, it was a reliquary as much as it was an engine of war. The ornate frame waited for Graunos to shatter it. Mounted on its roof was a cannon of light, a cone-shaped assemblage of lenses. An acolyte of Tyrion sat beneath the lenses and guided the horses. A wizard stood beside the largest lens. He was an old man, though his frame thrummed with contained power.

‘Graunos!’ he called. ‘Repent! It is not too late!’

Graunos recognized the voice. Ahnavias, the wizard who had urged him to accept his calling. Urged him to accept the curse of Tyrion.

‘It is too late for your city,’ Graunos hissed. He launched himself forward. Behind him came the thunder of his horde of wrath.

Ahnavias turned to the lens, chanting and casting his hands at its centre. The fire of purest illumination burst from the luminark. The beam sought Graunos. It came to turn his soul and being into an incandescent flash. Instead, it struck the blade of his axe of Khorne. The weapon’s name was Darkfall. The Blood God’s rune glowed crimson against metal of absolute black. The axe devoured the light.

Graunos pushed against the force of the assault. Ahnavias shouted. The beam intensified. Darkfall grew hot, burning through his gauntlet. Yet it took the light, the hunger of the daemon within it goaded by Graunos’ own hunger for revenge.

Then he reached the luminark, and with a single sweep of Darkfall, he shattered the forward lenses. The light dispersed with an explosion. A wind of glass shredded the skin of the acolytes. Graunos leapt aboard. He decapitated the first acolyte, then wrapped his armoured fingers around Ahnavias’ throat.

‘You will watch,’ he said.

He hurled the priest to the warband. Bloodreavers bound him in chains. They dragged him along. They made him see.

The struggle was brief. The Brass Gaze smashed through the defenders of the city. The blood of slaughtered warriors flowed along the bridge and dripped over the edges. And this was a mere prelude, a rivulet that soon vanished in a deluge. Graunos sent his legion through the city. He unleashed butchery so vast, cascades of blood plummeted from the windows of the spires. The light of Lykerna was submerged in waves of crimson. Thousands died, tens of thousands. The blood filled the streets. It covered the plazas. It coated the walls of the palaces and towers. It submerged the light.

The foundations crumbled.

And the city fell.

The drop was not rapid. It was a slow descent into the dark majesty of wrath. Lykerna collapsed in on itself like a closing fist. The towers smashed into each other. Stained glass shattered and became maws of jagged teeth. The city struck the stony ground of the valley, and towering, curved obelisks of brass thrust through the ruins, the gripping claws of Khorne’s domain.

Graunos stood in the centre of the city. He saw the change. He saw the new meaning, and though his work was good, his wrath was not assuaged. It never could be, perhaps not even if the day came at last when he drove his blade into the skull of Tyrion himself.

To the west, the sky flashed with lightning. The greater battle was coming.

Graunos looked down at Ahnavias, the last survivor of Lykerna, kneeling on stone. The wizard looked to the west.

‘Hope is coming,’ he said.

‘It is coming too late,’ Graunos told him. The warriors who thought to bring that hope would find instead ruins in the shape of gargantuan jaws.

‘Light is coming,’ Ahnavias insisted.

‘Then it will show me the shape of the doom I will create,’ said Graunos. With a dismissive blow, he severed the wizard’s head. He picked it up and turned its eyes toward the lightning. ‘Can you still see what is coming?’ he asked. ‘No? I can.’

War was coming. And it would find wrath waiting.

The Crystal of Fate

Guy Haley

Duke Phostrin, lord of the Sky Shoals, spoke. ‘Are you sure this will work, wizard?’

‘Yes, yes! Of course.’ The sorcerer Chalix clasped his long hands together in front of his chest and hunched in a manner that might have been a bow, had he ever shown any sort of deference to Duke Phostrin before. Phostrin contemplated the scrawny sorcerer for several hostile seconds. Chalix responded with a sharp-toothed, servile grin.

‘Do you have it, or do you not?’ the sorcerer asked.

Phostrin beckoned. His Chosen, five warriors almost as lordly as he, stepped into the chamber.

‘Vulcris, Barthon, Hurios, Dweft and Magazzar,’ said Chalix, naming them. All in the tower chamber were blessed by their god, but the gifts that Tzeentch had bestowed on the warriors were different to those given to the seers. Chalix was small, emaciated, his bones sharp through his blue skin. The Chosen of Phostrin were massive, swollen far beyond their natural size by magic, clad in gleaming armour of metallic purples and greens, featureless helms hiding their faces.

Vulcris and Dweft came forward, bearing a wriggling bag, which they dumped on the floor in front of the sorcerer. A pained whimpering came from inside.

‘Don’t hurt it!’ said the sorcerer. ‘How is it? Is it beautiful? Is it a fine offering for our lord?’

‘We chased the damn thing all over the Russet Isle,’ said Phostrin. ‘We nearly had it when the tribe there dared defy us. Too many of them grow rebellious as the news of Sigmar’s invasion reaches them, and these were no different. Once they were dealt with, Vulcris here nearly fell to his death when the creature tried to escape up the Marrond Cliffs. It cost us a lot of effort, so it had better be right.’

‘Well then, well then, let me see!’ said Chalix impatiently. Vulcris hauled the sack upright and tore the cloth open. He and Dweft tugged the sack down, revealing the head of the misshapen thing inside, and stepped back.

The sex was impossible to tell. Its head was a distorted ellipse, thicker and heavier at one end than the other so that the creature held it to the left. At the thinner right side, the lips of three small mouths smacked and squirmed over misshapen teeth. Seven eyes, two of them milky with blindness, were situated at random around its lopsided face. Only the nose was in the place nature intended, and it was twisted severely.

‘Exquisite!’ said Chalix. ‘Beautiful, beautiful!’ To admire his prize in full, he yanked the sack down and away. The mutant wore a tunic of rough cloth. It had three arms, very thin, tipped with three-fingered hands. Wiry hair covered the scalp, shoulders, and legs. The legs were well formed and muscular, but the feet were over-large for the body. The mutant flinched as Chalix wrapped his long fingers around its warty chin and tilted its malformed head upwards.

Behind the wizard was a tall mirror framed in glittering silver, a thousand representations of Tzeentch’s holy servants moulded into the metal. It caught the light shining through the chamber’s colonnade, so pure and sharp at the summit of the tower, and cast it up into the domed ceiling. Ripples of light moved around the frescoes there, as mobile as the reflections cast off Anvrok’s silver rivers. Phostrin avoided looking at the ceiling, wary of what the patterns might say to him. Instead, he took in his own reflection, large behind the simpering wizard. The patterns with which Tzeentch had marked his skin were bright upon his face.

Chalix stepped aside so that the mutant might see itself.

Fearfully, it blinked and made a sorry moaning. Thick yellow tears trickled from one of the blind eyes. Chalix grinned maliciously at its woe.

‘Oh, oh, do not cry! You are much blessed by our lord Tzeentch,’ said Chalix. ‘You are perfect! Such random change wrought upon you, you will be a very fine offering to the Changer of the Ways.’

The mutant mewled at him and tried to pull away. Chalix would not let go.

‘We have all we need, Lord Phostrin. We may begin!’ Chalix said. The mutant cowered as Chalix released its face. The sorcerer reached into his long sleeves, and drew his hand out as a closed fist. ‘See, see!’ he said to the mutant. ‘See! I will not cause you pain. Look!’ The mutant frowned, twisted nose sniffing.

Chalix opened his hand, revealing a handful of glittering powder. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ Chalix nodded encouragingly, and the mutant bent closer.

Chalix blew hard, sending a cloud into the mutant’s face. It spluttered, its eyes rolling back in their many sockets, and it fell to the marble floor.

‘Yes, very good!’ chuckled Chalix. He shuffled to a chest in the corner of the room and took out a small box full of coloured chalks. ‘You have done well, Duke Phostrin. I shall pay you handsomely, yes, just as we agreed. Much armour and weaponry will be yours.’

‘Just see it is so. How long is this going to take, Chalix?’

‘Patience, patience!’ said Chalix. He knelt on the marble by the mutant and opened his chalk box. ‘Before sundown, yes. Then we will be ready.’

Phostrin glanced at Vulcris. The leather of the warrior’s gloves creaked as he shifted his grip on his weapon.

‘Enjoy, sit! Eat, drink,’ said Chalix. An alcove lit up, and inside was a table stacked with fruits and flasks of wine. ‘You eat, while I work.’

Phostrin jerked his head to the side. His warriors left the food alone. They went to the door and took up guard. Two set themselves to watch on the nine thousand stairs of the tower. The others stayed within, fixing their featureless masks on Chalix. The sorcerer hummed to himself, arrogance rendering him immune to their hatred. Phostrin went to the windows, with their many telescopes, to survey the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok.

Chalix’s tower reached thousands of feet from a small island at the edge of the Sky Shoals – Phostrin’s duchy. Away from the great lands of Anvrok, Denvrok and Kantruk, the Hanging Valleys broke into smaller pieces shot through with rich veins of metal that formed a vast archipelago in an ocean of limitless sky. The islands were fuzzed with vegetation all over, for the circular track of the sun brought it to shine on both the top and underside of the islands. A mighty continent could be seen thousands of leagues away as a grey, featureless bar, but it was to the three chief lands of the Hanging Valleys that Phostrin’s attention was drawn. He put his eye to one of the wizard’s instruments and squinted through a crystal lens.

Storm clouds boiled with fury over the three larger countries. Anvrok was ramparted by the towering peaks of the Vaulten Mountains where, in ages past, watchtowers had been established. They had been long ruined, but now they were rising anew. Tiny flakes of colour blinked upon them, bright pennants streaming in the wind. The distance was too great to make out their emblems, but their presence spoke their message clearly enough – these lands belong to Sigmar.

Phostrin panned the telescope along the ridge until it lighted upon Argentine, the celestial drake. The fires that warmed the metal sea of the Great Crucible were at war with themselves, the old scintillating colours lately twisted through with pure white flame. The beast was unquiet, its gargantuan body coiling and uncoiling in silent agonies as Chaos and Order fought for his soul. It was but a matter of time, thought Phostrin. The crystal cockatrice, Vytrix, would doubtless be next. All the lands about the great serpent had been taken or were contested. Over Argentine’s gaping jaws, the rim of the Great Crucible also sported the banners of the God-King.

‘Anvrok fallen, the Crucible taken. Denvrok under assault,’ said Phostrin. ‘Maerac and King Thrond dead, Kairos banished, Ephryx destroyed... Our turn will come soon enough.’

‘If we are successful, that will never happen,’ said Chalix, intent on the circle. ‘Have faith, Duke Phostrin. The Great Changer’s plans are many layered. Now hush! I work quicker without interruption.’

Phostrin returned his attention to the conquered lands, scanning them for any glimpse of Chaos’ resurgence. He could find none, though he stared until his eyes were weary.

The sun sailed to light the underside of the Hanging Valleys. Darkness came to the tops of the larger lands, but the isles were too small to block the sun and so true night never ventured to the Sky Shoals. The strange lucidity of the lowered sun shone up around the islands, casting tall cones of darkness skywards. Chalix’s chamber took on the hue of blue shadow. Only the mirror shone bright, as if still caught in full sunlight.

‘There!’ said Chalix. He stood, dusting off his hands, and surveyed his handiwork; a series of ornate circles interlocking across the floor.

‘So your drawing is done. How much longer until we can enter the Oracle’s sanctuary?’ grumbled Phostrin.

‘Not long. The spell itself is relatively simple,’ Chalix said. ‘It is the preparation that takes the time.’

‘And this will open the way to the realm of Kairos?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Chalix. He returned his chalk box to the chest and took out a long knife. He unsheathed it, holding its length up to his critical eye. It was slightly curved, half an inch wide, thin as a cruel whisper and many times sharper. Satisfied, he went to the mutant and rolled it onto its back with his foot.

‘The Great Oracle was careless. It is natural one so high in Tzeentch’s esteem would not consider defeat, but he should have, oh yes. Now he is gone, his lair is open to all who have the appropriate offering, the right equipment and the correct expertise. You provided the two material ingredients, whereas in my humble personage resides the most important component of all – knowledge!’

Chalix knelt and drove the knife into the chest of the mutant. The creature was so stupefied it managed only a single gasp to protest its death. Blood pooled on the floor as Chalix pulled a dark heart from inside, cutting away connective tissue until it was free. He bent over this misshapen organ to whisper something Phostrin could not make out but that hurt his ears to hear. Chalix finished his crooning, drew back his arm and hurled the heart with all his might at the mirror.

‘A twisted heart for a twisted heart, great Tzeentch!’ he shouted.

The heart vanished with a bang. Glass exploded out into the room. Phostrin raised his hand to protect his face, but the glass never struck. It stopped in midair then flew backwards, the moment of explosion reversed. The glass did not fit itself back into the frame, but formed into a faceted arch, glittering with tainted rainbows.

The mirror became a door. A corridor of glowing crystal lay beyond, going up a series of uneven stairs. Cool, dry air blew outwards. A horn winded somewhere far away.

Chalix nodded happily at his efforts. ‘The gate is open, yes!’

Phostrin put on his helmet and drew his sword. Chalix passed through the portal fearlessly, lifting his robes as he stepped over the pool of blood. The Chosen followed, Phostrin coming last.

A cracking and tinkling filled the tunnel.

‘It is as if we are inside the remains of the mirror,’ muttered Vulcris. ‘And the shards of glass shift under us.’

‘You are closer to the truth than you realise,’ responded Chalix. ‘This is the outer edge of Lord Tzeentch’s Crystal Labyrinth, part of, but separate from it. Nothing is as it seems here, all is illusory, a perverted reflection of a shadow of a thought. We must not tarry in finding Lord Kairos’ lair, we will be noticed before long. The Realm of Chaos is no place for mortals.’

Chalix set off up the stairs, Phostrin and his chosen men following. The way forwards and the way back looked identical, the direction of travel impermanent and tricky to judge. Phostrin could not tell if up was up and down was down, or whether the party had been turned about and were returning again to Chalix’s lair. In the walls, a million images rippled. More than once, Phostrin felt eyes on him, and turned quickly to find his own reflections moving independently of his actions. Dark shapes moved behind the treacherous images, creeping under the glassy surface to suddenly shoot past, leaving draughts of perfumed air in their wake. The Chosen became wary, mighty though they were. Unlike them, the mage sallied forwards indefatigably, unworried.

Time became elastic. Phostrin could not gauge how long they climbed before the way divided into dozens of tunnels that shifted position when not watched.

‘Which path is it, wizard?’ said Phostrin.

‘Wait,’ said Chalix. ‘All is in hand.’ He reached into his robes, and pulled a chain out. On the end was a small blue feather. He cupped his hand protectively around it. ‘A single plume from a Lord of Change. It will show the way.’

‘It will trick us,’ said Magazzar.

Chalix clucked and shook his head. ‘It is enchanted. Much blood was shed to gain it, and very terrible bargains I struck to learn the secret of how to perform this magic. But know the secret I do.’ He watched as the feather swung to stillness. It turned so that the quill indicated an otherwise unremarkable tunnel.

‘This way!’ he said, and forged on without hesitation.

The stair levelled, opening into a cavern whose dazzling walls stretched up and down until they were lost in a haze of glaring light. A slender bridge of glittering crystal leapt up from the tunnel’s end, crossing to the far side where another way opened, a blue blemish on the glow.

‘Ah yes, all is as described!’ said Chalix eagerly. ‘Come!’ he waved them onwards as he mounted the bridge. ‘Be wary here, it is slippery.’

Magazzar went at the rear. As he stepped upon the bridge, a single, ringing note chimed from the crystal of the cave. The light turned from bright white to a deep red. From the depths built a shrieking scream.

‘Hurry now!’ said Chalix. He picked up his skirts and increased his speed to a trot. Duke Phostrin and his Chosen followed, their heavy tread shaking the fragile bridge. There was barely space for Phostrin to place his feet side by side. The screaming grew louder. Magazzar looked over the edge, then yelled out a warning to his comrades at what he saw. Phostrin turned to see Magazzar’s head torn off by a blur of colour. Blood sprayed from his ragged neck and he toppled from the bridge. More of the shapes followed. They screamed, raking at the travellers with whipping tails. Vulcris lashed out with his axe, chopping into one of the creatures. Damaged, the creature tumbled away, unbalancing the Chosen warrior. He wavered at the brink but Phostrin grabbed his cloak and hauled him back, his own feet slipping on the glassy material.

‘Daemon beasts, Kairos’ guard dogs,’ said Phostrin. The creatures sped past the bridge in a tight shoal, their dire screams echoing endlessly through the cavern.

‘They are coming again!’ said Hurios.

‘Stand ready!’ commanded Phostrin. The chosen planted their feet firmly apart on the length of the bridge, weapons up. This time they were prepared. The screamer shoal dived at them, broad bodies undulating eagerly. The Chosen hacked out, slaying several, dodging the lashing tails of those that sped on overhead. Then the creatures were past, streaking for the far side of the cave.

‘Run!’ shouted Phostrin. They ran as fast as they dared. The wizard was nearing the end of the bridge.

Twice more they stopped to cleave screamers from the sky. As the beasts passed them by again, they ran on. In this manner they reached the far tunnel. Phostrin passed through first, then Vulcris, Dweft, Hurios and finally Barthon. As Barthon came through the entry, the screams grew loud for the final time. Barbed tails punched through his chest, jerking him backwards.

‘Aid me!’ he shouted. Dweft dived to grab his hand but Barthon was yanked from his feet and hauled skywards before their fingers could connect. The creatures’ flight slowed, and they formed a mass around the doomed warrior. They cruised around and around, darting in to snatch morsels of their struggling prey.

‘Barthon cannot be saved,’ said Dweft.

‘Why does the mage not use his magic?’ asked Hurios.

‘It will bring more doom on us,’ said Phostrin. ‘Swords and martial might are all that will serve us here.’

Barthon had ceased moving. Blood drizzled from the writhing mass of screamers as they fed.

Vulcris shrugged. ‘More pillage for the rest of us, then.’

They travelled for days, or so it seemed, and yet they needed no food or water, or other comforts of the body. Chalix led them through a forest of shivering stone, into a place whose sky was the surface of a placid lake where strange, glowing things swam. They climbed staircases that did not end but joined top to bottom. They spent days in a labyrinth where their own voices mocked them from afar. From there, they passed into a freezing wasteland of salt spires, where they were assailed by capering pink daemons, each one slain splitting into two lesser, miserable blue creatures. These things were numerous but cowardly and fled when Phostrin slew their champion.

Time and mind were warped. Phostrin lost track of the order of events. Days lasted seconds, seconds took years. When it was they came to the end, Phostrin could not tell. A day or a century might have passed. All he knew was that he blinked, and they were done, standing at the opening to a mean cave set into a soaring yellow cliff. Outside, a plain of flawless green glass stretched away in every direction, giving out a lurid light.

‘We are here, the lair of Kairos,’ said Chalix. The sorcerer seemed older. He had a haunted look.

‘I see nothing,’ said Vulcris. He stepped forwards. Chalix put out an arm to stop him but the Chosen pushed it aside. ‘I am tired of waiting, destiny is here.’

‘Wait! There are final wards that must be dealt with!’ called Chalix.

‘I am tired of waiting,’ said Vulcris. ‘Destiny is here.’

‘Hold him back!’ ordered Phostrin.

Hurios and Dweft moved to stay their comrade, but their efforts made no effect, and they were pushed before him across the slick glass.

‘I am tired of waiting,’ repeated Vulcris, his voice hollow and leaden. He pushed onwards, as if Hurios and Dweft were not there. ‘Destiny is here.’

Phostrin ran from the cave entrance to join his men, leaning between them to push against the chest of Vulcris.

‘He is bewitched!’ shouted Hurios.

‘I am tired of waiting,’ repeated Vulcris.

‘Too late! Back, back off the glass!’ called Chalix. ‘Something comes!’

‘Destiny is here,’ said Vulcris.

Phostrin looked over his shoulder. A dark shadow was emerging from the numbing light of the glass plain. A warrior, coming towards the cliff and the cave mouth.

‘Heed the wizard. Leave him,’ Phostrin said. ‘Get off the plain.’

Hurios fell as he let go of Vulcris. Dweft stumbled away. Phostrin threw himself out of Vulcris’ path. Vulcris marched forward steadily, no faster and no slower than when the others had made their futile attempt to arrest him.

Phostrin made it back to the edge of the glass plain and took refuge in the cave. They watched the warrior approach Vulcris. Phostrin squinted against the light. The warrior was familiar.

‘It is Vulcris also!’ he exclaimed. ‘He has been doubled!’

The warrior was garbed exactly as Vulcris, identical in every respect saving only that what was left on Vulcris was right on his doppelganger, and vice versa.

‘A mirror image,’ said Hurios.

The warriors stopped a sword’s length apart. They raised their axes, and attacked.

Eight times they swung identical blows at each other, eight times the hafts of their twinned axes knocked together. On the ninth, the axe heads sailed past each other, burying themselves in the chests of Vulcris and his double. They threw back their heads and screamed, exploding into roaring pillars of light that shot away on far horizons before becoming one with the unvarying glow.

‘Look! Blood is spilled, the final key,’ said Chalix.

Reality blinked. The plain was gone. A chamber, as many-planed and angular as the interior of a diamond, was there in its stead. Every facet held a staring, avian eye. A golden statue of Lord Kairos occupied the middle of the chamber. Floating above the spread wings was a thumb-sized crystal, black as midnight. Chalix hurried towards it greedily. The eyes in the walls narrowed in scrutiny.

‘The heart of Kairos Fateweaver, the Crystal of Fate! See, it has nearly reformed. We are here in the nick of time,’ he whispered.

‘Where is the treasure, wizard?’ demanded Hurios. ‘We were promised enchanted weapons, devices of great power.’

Chalix snatched the crystal from the air. ‘Wait! With this, anything is possible.’

Hurios and Dweft angrily paced the shining space. Their search was short. Apart from the crystal and the statue, the chamber was empty.

‘How will you pay?’ demanded Dweft. ‘There is nothing else here!’

‘Speak, wizard,’ said Phostrin. He raised his sword. The three warriors surrounded the sorcerer. ‘What of our bargain?’

Dweft and Hurios tensed, ready to fight. Chalix smiled wickedly.

‘Here is the payment you so desire!’ he shouted. He held up the crystal. Lines of jagged darkness stabbed out, transfixing Dweft and Hurios. They were transformed instantly into crystal statues rooted to the chamber floor.

‘Such fools,’ Chalix scoffed. ‘Do you think I would share any prize with the likes of–’

Chalix’s eyes widened. His mouth dropped open. With a tearing noise, Phostrin’s sword emerged through his stomach, the point dripping coppery blood. Phostrin reached round and took the crystal from Chalix’s weakening fingers.

‘Chalix, I thank you for bringing me this.’

Phostrin wrenched the sword free. Chalix fell to the ground with a cry. As the sorcerer’s life fled, Phostrin held up the crystal, captivated by the lights glinting from its surface.

‘You... You were not transmutated?’ gasped Chalix.

Phostrin threw his helm to the floor with a clatter and looked down at the dying mage. ‘Thanks to my great-grandfather.’ He tapped a ring upon his gauntlet, a simple silver band. ‘He passed this down, and a certain scroll bearing grave secrets. You thought to trick me, Chalix, trusting to my ignorance to ensnare me. You sorcerers are all the same, dismissive of your betters. I know what this can do.’ He held up the crystal and smiled. ‘The soul of a daemon, and now it is mine.’ He closed his hand around it.

‘Give it to me... Phostrin... Before it is too late!’ gasped out Chalix. Blood slipped from his mouth. He reached out his shaking hand.

‘I think not. You and your ilk have had your own way in the Anvrok Valleys for too long. It is time for a new order, comprised of men of substance.’

‘You do not know what you are doing!’

‘Oh, but I do,’ said Phostrin. ‘I have a plan. The daemons of our lord are the only ones who hold any fear for you, are they not Chalix? I have seen you creep and fawn over them. I have seen you plead for their favour. I intend to become one myself. I will consume this heart and be made anew. Then I shall return to Anvrok and deal with your filthy kind. I will speak directly with Tzeentch himself, without intermediary. I will reign supreme over the lands in the name of the Great Changer, and the lords of the isles and the valleys will return to their rightful position as rulers, not slaves to a wizard’s whims.’

He held the crystal high. The eyes in the cave’s facets peered at him intently. ‘When that is done, I shall gather all their armies and drive Sigmar’s hosts back from our lands, for the greater glory of Tzeentch.’

Chalix coughed up a welter of dark blood. Phostrin saw that he was laughing.

‘You are a fool. You know nothing of the true nature of Chaos. A daemon cannot be a lord of men. You know nothing of what–’

Phostrin’s sword swept down, splitting the sorcerer’s forehead. Chalix fell back and said no more.

‘I am a fool but you are dead. Who is the winner?’ Phostrin held up the crystal between finger and thumb. Power radiated from it, distorting the air as rising heat shimmers. ‘If only I had mead to wash it down with, it would go more easily,’ he said.

He placed it into his mouth. His tongue sizzled, but he felt no pain. With great difficulty, he swallowed it down, feeling its sharp edges scrape his gullet all the way to his stomach.

For a few seconds, he stood unaffected. Then, sudden agony gripped him. He bent double and howled. A fierce tingling took hold of his body, sharp and painful as a million needles driving in and out of his skin. He screwed his eyes shut, and the world became a timeless sheet of white pain.

An aeon passed, or so it seemed, and then was gone.

Phostrin found himself balled into a low crouch. Carefully, he unfolded his new self and raised huge arms before wondering eyes. His flesh had become a dark, mottled purple. Long talons tipped his fingers. A strange sensation troubled his shoulders, and he shook. A pair of great bat’s wings snapped open. In the crystal of the cave, his new face was reflected, long and spurred, crowned by a trio of scimitar horns. A smile exposed broad teeth. He explored his new face with his hands. Power cracked at the contact of flesh, and he laughed. On muscular legs he stood tall and breathed deep. Using the crystal wall as a mirror, he surveyed the new cage of his spirit from top to bottom.

He was well pleased by what he saw.

‘Power, power!’ he roared. ‘Let us see the petty sorcerers of Anvrok defy their new emperor! I will slay any who refuse my rule.’

He turned about, seeking the way out so that he could return and begin his reign. Thinking he had mistaken the placement of the door, he turned again. With a dawning horror, he realised it had gone. Every facet of cave was the same as before, each framed its peering eye, but where the entrance had been was a smooth panel of crystal. He went to it and beat on it. It did not yield. Screaming, he pounded harder with his fists, raging until something caught his eye.

He pressed his face close to the surface. Beyond the reflections and the staring eyes, he could see through the glass-like material.

On the floor of the space outside was Chalix’s body, as huge as a gargant. Phostrin’s head darted to the side. There were the contorted glass statues of Hurios and Dweft, also seemingly enlarged. Beyond them was the darkness of the door, made cavernous and distant. His prison was an exact replica of Kairos’ lair in miniature.

With ultimate realisation, he looked down. Through the distorting effects of the crystal floor, he could make out the golden statue.

He was trapped in Kairos’ heart.

A rustle of robes and a dry, doubled chuckle came from outside. The eyes in the crystal’s walls blinked, and then there were only four. These too vanished, replaced by an enormous claw that gripped the crystal and lifted it high. Phostrin staggered as the crystal tipped and he was brought to the scrutiny of two wrinkled faces.

Kairos Fateweaver looked within.

‘He does not see what I see,’ said one head. ‘What his fate shall be.’ It clacked a massive beak in mirth.

‘Shall I tell it? He did not know his fate when he set out, he does not know it now,’ said the other. Both heads regarded the trapped Phostrin with amusement. ‘Or shall we leave it for a surprise?’

‘Kairos!’ said Phostrin. His new hands spread on the crystal, not mighty, but tiny, the hands of a homunculus. ‘Release me!’

Kairos tutted and shook the crystal. ‘Lord Kairos I am! I am your master. You will address me correctly.’

Phostrin was flung about the chamber and crashed into the wall painfully. Kairos finished his shaking.

‘You are dead, my lord,’ Phostrin said.

‘It did not listen to its sorcerer. I cannot die, little one.’

‘I never do,’ said the other head. ‘I have seen.’

‘I am eternal, I have ever been, and ever will be.’

‘But you have to reform,’ said Phostrin. ‘Chalix said, he–’

Both heads croaked with laughter. ‘How can a constant be unmade? I have no beginning.’

‘And I have no end,’ concluded the second head. ‘How can a circle be made a line?’

‘I am a daemon, I am your equal! I consumed your heart. You have no right to imprison me,’ said Phostrin.

The heads laughed uproariously.

‘You misunderstand,’ said the first head. The larger cave began to dissolve into streamers of prismatic light, taking the dead Chalix, Hurios and Dweft with it.

‘As there are orders of precedence and of degree for men, so there are orders of precedence and degree for daemons.’

‘You saw our kind in your world, and misunderstood. They were lone ambassadors. This is our domain,’ explained the other head.

The last vestiges of the cave vanished. Kairos beat his mighty wings and soared over a landscape of hard angles and dazzling light.

‘Behold!’ he cawed. ‘The Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch!’

A pane cleared in Phostrin’s prison. An endless landscape of twisting crystal caves greeted his eyes, teeming with the daemonic servants of Tzeentch. They spread away, filling the labyrinth, spilling out of the Realm of Chaos, out of the Mortal Realms and beyond into eternities uncountable. They plotted, setting themselves against mortal worlds, the servants of other gods, and each other. He recoiled from what he saw, but he could not unknow it. He was of their number and their concerns were now his. Their knotted plans whispered in his mind. Here was hell for him, an eternity of scheming, worse by far than the hegemony of mortal sorcerers.

‘No! No! Release me!’ begged Phostrin. ‘I have no wish to be part of this, I will rule over the Hanging Valleys of Anvrok, and take them back for Lord Tzeentch! This is my service! I swear it will be done!’

‘Tsk tsk,’ said Kairos. ‘I do not foresee that for you. Such a petty patch of reality you offer the Great Changer. You insult him.’

‘Our dreams oft lead us to ruin,’ said the other head to Phostrin. ‘It is not entirely your doing. You may thank your great-grandfather. He was most diligent in holding the gifts we gave him, passing them from son to son. Now this scheme is done, a fresh one begins. I have need of a new servant. You will suffice. Your place is here, forevermore. You are reborn a daemon, but you achieved your position by trickery,’ said one head.

‘Lord Tzeentch approves, but there are rules,’ said the other.

‘Rules all in the Labyrinth must obey!’

‘For nine eternities and one day must you serve me,’ said Kairos. ‘Only then will you have earned the power you stole. Now, first to the Whispering Pandemonium. There shall we begin your education. Only when you have experienced pain and madness beyond the ken of mortals shall you be ready to proceed to the next torment.’

‘Little by little, we will tear your soul away until you are wholly Tzeentch’s,’ said the second head.

Laughing, Kairos brandished his staff and swooped away over the infinite intrigues of Tzeentch’s realm, carrying the screaming Phostrin away.

Gorechosen

Andy Clark

The sky was streaked with falling stars. Blazing meteors roared overhead, punching crimson trails through churning black clouds. Akhagor watched them for a time, their furious fires reflecting in his black eyes. The slaughterpriest admired the meteors, their singular purpose, their strength. They tore across the heavens to their own fiery end, and never once turned aside. The Blood God left messages in all things, thought Akhagor. One needed only the wit to see them.

He turned his attention back to his surroundings, to the burning ruins and the dirt road that had become a bloody quagmire. Bodies lay everywhere, the carrion remains of these pitiful tribesmen, whatever they had called themselves. How long the vermin had scratched a living from the rocky soil, Akhagor neither knew nor cared. Despite the passions of Aqshy that should have coursed through their veins, these wretches had been barely worth the trouble of slaughtering. The tribe’s meagre crops had burned, their homes had been cast down, and their severed heads sat in a bloody pyramid on the altar of their desecrated shrine. Still, it was a poor offering to Khorne, for they had given little fight.

Footsteps squelched in the bloody muck, and Akhagor turned to see Vorhak approaching. The aspiring deathbringer was caked in gore, the black plates of his armour turned ruddy brown with it. He rested his massive axe easily upon one shoulder, and within the visor of his skull-painted helm, his eyes burned a fiery red.

‘Swift butchery,’ growled Vorhak, squaring up to Akhagor as he always did, ‘and far too easy. There’s no glory to be found lopping such worms.’

Akhagor growled his assent.

‘That is true.’

The aspiring deathbringer’s eyes locked with Akhagor’s, his stare a challenge, as though he awaited more. Frustrated by the slaughterpriest’s silence, Vorhak turned and began to pace back and forth.

‘Then tell me this, priest: why do we tarry here? Why do we insult our blades with this weak gruel they call blood? We should abandon our mindless wandering and answer the summons of Korghos Khul!’

‘We go where Khorne commands,’ rumbled Akhagor. ‘We follow the visions that the Blood God sends. Do you question his will?’

‘Never!’ snapped Vorhak. ‘Khorne’s will is absolute! But it can be misinterpreted by the weak…’

Akhagor felt his daemon-tainted blood churn at the deathbringer’s insult, and he bared his fangs in a dangerous smile.

‘Always you dance around this, Vorhak, but you don’t strike. You know you are not strong enough to defeat me, and one day soon I will prove it. But not today. My destiny lies ahead. Follow.’

The slaughterpriest strode away through the ruined village, showing his back to his rival’s axe in a gesture of contempt. After a moment, he heard Vorhak give an annoyed grunt and follow. The two champions of Khorne strode through the remains of the lives they had ended, ignoring the bloodreavers who feasted upon the corpses of the slain and the skullreapers cursing the lack of worthy trophies this place had yielded. Soon, they came to the outskirts of the settlement and the perilous rift that lay beyond.

‘This,’ rumbled Akhagor with an expansive gesture, ‘this is where the Blood God sends us. This is why Khul can wait.’

At the champions’ feet, the rocky ground dropped away, a cliff-face plunging downward until it vanished in sulphurous mists below. The edge arced off for mile upon mile into the distance. Sweeping their gaze out along it, Akhagor and Vorhak could see that it was but one edge of a kingdom-sized crater. Below them, the mists churned, underlit by flickering flames and pierced by the peaks of towering blackpines. Occasionally, a roiling geyser of flame would leap high amid the vapours, spending its fury skywards with a whooshing roar. From down there, faintly audible even over such great distance, came the clangour of battle.

‘What is this place?’ Vorhak’s awe was such that, for a moment at least, he forgot his antipathy toward the slaughterpriest.

‘It has been in my visions for many days,’ replied Akhagor with relish. ‘It is the Scorchpit, and Lord Khorne commands that we descend into its depths. Down there we shall find battle worthy of the Blood God. Down there you will find your glory, and I shall find my destiny.’

Vorhak snorted in disgust.

‘Your destiny. This again. You are no more worthy than any of us, slaughterpriest. Khorne cares not about you. Down there, I will prove it, and either you will end your days under my axe or follow on my heels like a whipped cur as I soar to true glory.’

Akhagor laughed scornfully, while fighting down the temptation to plant one hand on the deathbringer’s back and aid his soaring with a good hard shove.

‘More words, Vorhak? Did you talk all your previous rivals to death?’

The deathbringer span with a growl and raised his axe. In response, Akhagor spat at his feet.

‘Not now, Vorhak. We will serve Khorne better in the Scorchpit. You will see I am right.’

For a second time that day, Akhagor strode away and left the aspiring deathbringer bristling in his wake. For all his posturing, Vorhak would not strike yet. Not until he was sure he had turned enough of Akhagor’s warband to his side. Vorhak thought dominance and rulership would win him Khorne’s favour. He thought commanding an army showed faith. Akhagor’s monstrous features twisted into a savage grin at the thought. Soon enough, he would show the deathbringer just how wrong he was.

A short distance from the slaughtered village, the Bloodbound warriors of Akhagor’s Ironskull Tribe found a narrow roadway that twisted down into the Scorchpit. Forced into a marching column, over a thousand of the Blood God’s chosen warriors made their way down the perilous cliff-path with drums thundering and horns braying. Barbarian cannibals daubed in ashen war paint marched in ragged bands behind hulking, armour-clad killers whose fury shimmered like a heat-haze in the air. Spike-wheeled brass cages, each packed with panting, twitching lunatics too battle-maddened to follow even Akhagor’s lead, were hauled along by lumbering beasts. In the vanguard, cruel-eyed knights in dulled steel plate sat astride daemonic juggernauts, the living-brass steeds so heavy that the path cracked and crumbled beneath their monstrous hooves. They raised their heads and roared every time a meteor thundered overhead, until the skies were too lost in sulphurous mist to be seen.

Akhagor breathed deep of the brimstone air and knew that this was a place of unholy power. What road there was had become scattered flagstones, then nought but dirt shortly after the Bloodbound reached the floor of the gargantuan crater. Now the warband was swallowed by the shadows of the ominous blackpines that carpeted the Scorchpit. The dark trees rose hundreds of feet into the air, their boughs laden with soot-black needles and flickering with sparks and embers. Some strange sorcery kept the blackpines always on the edge of bursting into flames, yet ever strong and tall. The ground beneath the trees was carpeted with fallen needles that crumbled into thick drifts of ash, while the curdled yellow mist swirled between their looming trunks.

As the Ironskull warriors advanced fearlessly into this strange landscape, they found their footsteps crunching old bones or clanging upon rusted weapons and shields. Amidst the ashes there lay evidence of war fought here for centuries untold. Strata of slaughter. Layers of death. Newly slain corpses bloating and rotting amidst the bones of the ancient slain. From the screams and distant clash of weapons that echoed weirdly through the mist, the battle still went on.

‘Is this not a place fit for true warriors of Khorne?’ bellowed Akhagor to his followers, to an answering cacophony of battle cries and thundering drums.

‘It is a place of killing,’ replied Vorhak, ‘but where are the enemies? Where the battlefield? Where does this mystical destiny of yours lie, priest?’

Akhagor favoured the deathbringer with a steady glare. He raised his axe and pointed on, through the trees, toward the middle of the crater.

‘All the way across the pit, deathbringer. It is a road of battle and bloodletting that we must walk with our heads high. The worthy will reach the other side, and there we will find Khorne’s blessing. The rest will give their skulls to him.’

Aware of the warband’s eyes upon him, Vorhak didn’t hesitate. He turned and strode into the trees with morning star swinging and axe in hand.

‘Then let us not keep the Blood God waiting,’ he shouted back over his shoulder, ‘or do you wish to stand here and preach all day, priest?’

The beastmen came at them in a stampede. Croaking war cries and bestial roars accompanied their charge, while the pound of cloven hooves raised a swirling cloud of ash that billowed before them. Akhagor drew himself to his full height and bellowed out a war cry of his own, hefting his axe as he watched their bestial shapes draw closer. Around him, bloodreaver tribesmen clashed their weapons together as they worked themselves into a frothing battle-frenzy.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ bellowed Akhagor.

‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ they howled back at him, and with a mad roar of laughter, the slaughterpriest led his warriors into battle. It had been hours since they had entered the Scorchpit, he thought. It was about time.

Smouldering tree trunks whipped past and bones splintered underfoot as Akhagor sprinted forward. Ash billowed across him, and then malformed bestial warriors were all around. A hulking, goat-headed thing swung a pick at his neck. Akhagor wove aside from the blow, bringing his axe around in return and hacking the beastman’s head from its gnarled shoulders. Another foe lunged at him, its eyes wild, but before it could reach the slaughterpriest, a muscle-bound bloodreaver slammed headfirst into the beastman and they both vanished into the swirling ash.

‘Kill for Khorne!’ roared Akhagor at the half-seen tribesmen pressing forward around him. ‘Kill for Khorne!’

Off to the right, the slaughterpriest could hear Vorhak screaming praise to the Blood God. The deathbringer would be fighting at the head of his Khorbadakk, the elite band of blood warriors that made up his personal guard. Short-sighted berserkers, thought Akhagor contemptuously, but the carnage they were wreaking right now was bound to be spectacular. If he was to keep his followers loyal long enough to seize his destiny, he must make a spectacle of his own.

All around him, cannibal tribesmen hacked and battered at braying beastmen amidst the swirling ashes and curdled mist. The enemy were using the blinding conditions to their advantage, slipping between the trees to volley arrows into the Bloodbound or strike from unexpected angles. Akhagor strode forward into the madness, swinging his axe right and left to split torsos and lop off heads. As he advanced, he chanted, a slaughterer’s mantra of praise to Khorne that filled the limbs of his followers with manic strength. A copper-scented gale began to rise around the slaughterpriest, whirling into a vicious cyclone that screamed amid the trees. The unholy gale blasted outwards, staggering friend and foe alike as it swept the battlefield clear of blinding ash and fog.

The warriors of the Ironskull tribe roared their approval at this display of Khorne’s favour and set about their revealed enemies with renewed fervour. Juggernauts smashed blackpines from their path as they charged, splintered wood and clouds of cinders filling the air as the trees toppled. The blood-mad knights that rode the daemon-beasts swung their axes, hacking down those beastmen fortunate enough to avoid being trampled beneath the crushing weight of the juggernauts themselves.

The next moment, darts of black light screamed through the air, punching riders from their saddles and piercing the eyes and joints of the daemons they rode. Akhagor span in time to see a hunched, bestial shaman jab its bone-hung staff in his direction. A smothering cloud of gloom burst from the weapon’s end, flowing over Khornate warriors and leaving smoking skeletons in its wake.

‘Sorcery!’ bellowed Akhagor. ‘The tool of cowards! Lord Khorne, hear my prayer! Turn your contempt upon this weakling!’ Then the flowing darkness spilled across Akhagor, smothering his massive form in its tar-like coils. For a second, the slaughterpriest felt a searing cold burning against his flesh, and then his blood roared with fire and the spell sloughed away harmlessly. The beast shaman was not so fortunate. Its harsh cries of victory turned to agonised screaming as the fury of Khorne descended upon it. The shaman writhed and convulsed, crashing to the ground as steam rose from its broiling flesh and scalding blood jetted from its eyes and muzzle. Akhagor strode through the swirling battle, swatting aside those few beastmen foolish enough to bar his path, until he loomed over the shuddering shaman. Defiant to the last, the beast wizard pushed itself up onto its hands and knees, and spat a frothing wad of boiled blood across Akhagor’s feet. The slaughterpriest laughed, raised his axe, and brought it hurtling down.

In the battle’s wake, the Ironskulls set their camp. No sentries were posted, for the fear of attack was a weakness. No aid was given to the wounded; the enemy were decapitated and left to rot, while those Bloodbound too maimed to go on had their heads hacked off before their bodies were thrown onto the flesh heap for the dark feast.

What sparse daylight could penetrate the mists faded swiftly beneath the boughs of the blackpines, but Akhagor’s followers chopped down several trees and set a great fire burning in the ragged glade they had made. By the twisting light of the flames, they howled praise to Khorne, feasted upon the scorched flesh of the fallen and brawled savagely with one another. Those skullreapers who had failed to claim a worthy skull during the day’s fighting duelled one another amidst the firelight, and the watching warriors cheered and roared as the worthy lopped the heads from those who were not, then flung their offerings into the flames.

Akhagor sat atop a heap of beastman corpses, drinking from a heavy brass chalice as he watched the fights play out. Within the unholy vessel swirled the heartsblood of the brayherd’s champions and their shaman, whose head now hung, tongue lolling, at Akhagor’s belt. Spiced with warpstone, daemons’ ichor and a concoction of alchemical powders, every sip of the thick gore made the slaughterpriest’s head swim with visions of carnage. So did Khorne speak to his chosen priest. So did he promise a destiny.

Akhagor smiled mockingly down at Vorhak as the deathbringer strode to the foot of his carrion throne. The Khorbadakk stood behind their master, axes in hand.

‘The murder was good today, was it not, Vorhak?’

The armoured warrior inclined his head slightly.

‘An acceptable skirmish, priest. Skulls were taken. Blood was shed.’ Vorhak kicked the corpse heap. ‘But still we fight beasts. In a meaningless hole. Right now we could be earning our place as Gorechosen to Khul himself!’

Hearing the challenge in the deathbringer’s tone, the nearest warriors turned their eyes to the sudden confrontation.

‘We fight those the Blood God wishes us to fight,’ replied Akhagor in a tone of dangerous good cheer, ‘and we fight them where he wills.’

‘So you keep saying, priest,’ snarled Vorhak, ‘but whose word do we have for this? Yours?’

Akhagor rose slowly to his feet, the grin falling from his blood-stained face. He raised the brass chalice so all could see.

‘I am a slaughterpriest, a true devotee of Khorne. I drink the heartsblood of our greatest foes and through that sacred liquid, our lord and master speaks to me.’ Akhagor’s voice rose in volume as he spoke, building to an angry shout. ‘I am the conduit of the will of the Blood God himself! If ever I have spoken a single lying word about what he has shown to me, may Khorne’s wrath strike me down this very moment! Blood God, I beseech it!’

Through the mists came the thunderous roar of flame geysers erupting. The Bloodbound watched transfixed for long moments as they waited for the curse of spawndom to twist Akhagor’s body and blast his mind. Even Vorhak took a wary step back, his armoured back clanking against the breastplate of the nearest Khorbadakk warrior.

And then the moment was past, and Akhagor gave a booming laugh. He raised the chalice to his lips and gulped down the rest of its contents in a single swig before dropping the vessel. It clanked and rolled down the carrion heap, coming to rest against Vorhak’s armoured foot.

‘It seems that Khorne is satisfied with my interpretation of his word. Do you dare gainsay the Blood God himself, Vorhak?’

Conscious of the eyes of the warband upon him, the deathbringer stood his ground.

‘A fool takes silence for proof, priest. Khorne respects only those who take victory for themselves, and I mean to rip it from your sundered corpse’.

Looping his morning star in circles upon its heavy chain, Vorhak took a step up onto the slaughterpriest’s corpse heap. Akhagor gave a bass rumble of anger, and the warriors of the warband reached for their weapons as they scrambled to their feet.

The next moment, the ground bucked furiously. The firepit roared as whole treetrunks were dislodged to roll blazing through the camp. Warriors were thrown from their feet as the ground shuddered madly beneath them, and both champions found themselves half-buried in bodies as the corpse heap collapsed in a grisly avalanche. There was a moment of near-total silence before the edge of the camp erupted in a thundering column of fire. The geyser immolated blackpines, corpses and Bloodbound alike as it surged skywards. Blazing rocks rained down upon the camp like the comets that Akhagor had admired only that morning. Where they struck, they exploded with vicious force. Flames leapt from tree to tree, transforming the clearing into an inferno, while the ground around the eruption sagged and fell away, dragging more of the Ironskull tribe to fiery deaths.

As the column of flame finally flickered and died, Vorhak kicked the corpses from himself and made to rise. He stopped as he found Akhagor’s blade at his neck.

‘This,’ snarled the slaughterpriest, face smeared with ash and blood, ‘this is the sign of Khorne’s displeasure. This is what happens when you question him. When you question me.’ The Khorbadakk staggered to their feet, their axes gripped ready to fight, but Vorhak raised a hand to stop them.

‘Very well, priest,’ he grated, ‘your point is made. We all serve Khorne. None of us wishes his curse to fall upon us. What would you have us do?’

Akhagor turned his furious stare upon the warband, panning his black eyes across their fire-thinned ranks.

‘We march on. Now. We have tarried long enough, and there are skulls to be taken. Blood for the Blood God!’

‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ they raised the ragged chorus, before scattering to gather up their few belongings and prepare to march. Akhagor nodded, removing his axe blade from Vorhak’s neck and striding out to lead the advance into the gloom. Behind him, Vorhak clambered angrily to his feet while the blackpines crackled and burned.

The days that followed were a whirlwind of bloodletting. Above the fumes of the Scorchpit, the heavens wheeled in a dance of day and night. Down amidst the murk, there were only varying shades of gloom. Through that fog-choked limbo marched the Ironskulls, drums thumping and axes slick with blood.

They soon realised that the Scorchpit was a land contested by countless warbands. Petty kingdoms rose and fell beneath the blackpine boughs, as beast-kin fought skaven fought cultists fought barbarian tribes. What riches these peoples sought in such a hellish place, Akhagor had no clue. Nor did he care. To the slaughterpriest, the presence of such a wealth of foes upon which to test his blade proved only that he had Khorne’s favour. One battle followed another, chaotic and murderous amidst the close-packed trees. Each conflict saw more of the Ironskull tribesmen fall, but for every Ironskull that died, they slew ten times that many enemies.

On the sixth day, the Ironskulls entered a ragged gorge whose walls were veined with glittering red crystals. Down in those bloodlit depths they smashed their way through a skaven stockade. They butchered the screeching ratmen even as infernal warpflame weapons and poisoned gas launchers reduced luckless bloodreavers to bubbling gruel, and Akhagor claimed their warlord’s head.

On the ninth day, a monstrous horde set upon the Khornate tribesmen as they were fording a charcoal-black river. Most of the warband was still halfway across the turgid flow when gargants and dragon ogors burst from the trees on the far bank. More gargants lumbered into view atop the promontory overlooking the river and hurled boulders that slammed down upon the warriors still crossing. Akhagor, up to his chest in the river’s midst, could only watch as Vorhak led his Khorbadakk up the bank and into the enemy. While the Blood Warriors hacked apart one towering monster, Vorhak spun between the legs of another, deftly avoiding a ponderous kick that would have flattened a castle gate. With his victim still on one foot, the deathbringer swung his axe straight through the gargant’s ankle. The monster bellowed as it toppled sideways, crushing half a dozen bloodreavers. Vorhak leapt astride its chest and hewed its massive head from its neck. By the time Akhagor waded ashore, the deathbringer had led his followers up the promontory and butchered the last of the gargants.

Many of the warband looked at Vorhak differently after that day, and Akhagor felt his grip slipping. So the bloody road ground on, and Akhagor and Vorhak’s rivalry with it. Atop a craggy mesa, the slaughterpriest bested a raging manticore. During a frantic clash through the ruins of some ancient city, Vorhak slew a festering plaguelord of Nurgle. Akhagor won a great victory on a skull-hung bridge over a nameless chasm, boiling the blood of the Slaaneshi cultists who held it against him. Vorhak led his Khorbadakk into the heart of a clash between orruks and beastmen, leaping from one fire-ringed island of stone to the next and slaughtering as he went.

Day by day, the warband shrank as more warriors gave their skulls to Khorne. Day by day, the two champions grew in power, while their followers’ loyalties divided ever more firmly between them. And finally, after days uncounted beneath the trees, the land sloped sharply upwards once more.

Akhagor grasped for handholds, scree scattering from beneath his feet to rattle away below him. Gripping a gnarled blackpine root, the slaughterpriest hauled himself upward, and through the thinning mists he at last saw the lip of the pit. Akhagor redoubled his efforts, conscious of his surviving followers swarming up the slope all around him, and Vorhak some yards to his right. The slaughterpriest did not intend to find Vorhak’s axe biting into his neck as he reached the top. Putting on a burst of speed, Akhagor scrambled up the last stretch and hauled himself over the craggy rim of the Scorchpit.

Rising to his feet, the hulking priest raised his axe above his head and bellowed to the night skies. Behind him lay the Scorchpit, fire still leaping amid its mists. Above, the cold stars looked down with indifference upon his moment of triumph. Akhagor knew his destiny now. He had seen the signs Khorne sent, and he understood.

The Ironskulls were gathering now, the few dozen that remained. Every warrior was immeasurably stronger than when they had marched down into the pit. Most showed signs of their god’s favour, curling horns, glowing blades, flesh armoured in scales or bulked by slabs of muscle. Flensed skulls hung from their belts and harnesses, and pure murderlust burned in their eyes.

Through their midst strode Vorhak, his three remaining Khorbadakk at his side. The warband parted for him, watching warily as flames flickered within his helm and at the joints of his living armour.

Vorhak advanced to stand before Akhagor and, for all that Khorne’s blessings had made the deathbringer mighty, he still had to tilt his head back to look up at the monstrous thing the slaughterpriest had become.

‘Why do you cry victory, priest?’ growled Vorhak, his voice a caged inferno. ‘We followed your road. We crossed the pit. Where is this mystic destiny of which you spoke? Nowhere.’

A murmur passed through the Ironskulls, some warriors scowling with anger, others nodding and cursing.

‘There are none so blind as he who will not see,’ replied Akhagor scornfully. ‘My destiny is all around us, in the warriors who still live to reap more skulls for Khorne. My destiny is to take skulls for him in a place of endless battle ’til either my blood is spilled, or immortality be mine. My destiny is not to cross the Scorchpit, Vorhak. It is the Scorchpit.’

A cold wind blew across the barren plateau, and for a moment, all was silence amongst the Ironskulls.

‘Korghos Khul battles the Stormcasts of Sigmar,’ growled Vorhak, voice dangerously soft. ‘Eternal glory is carved from one battlefield after another. New Gorechosen step up to take power with every magnificent battle. And you would have us crawl back into this hole?’

Angry stirrings passed through the tribesmen, and some moved to stand at Vorhak’s back while others prowled to Akhagor’s side, weapons held ready.

‘I would have us follow Khorne’s will,’ rumbled Akhagor, ‘I would have us pile a mountain of skulls before his throne. I would claim my destiny.’

‘You would have us waste our might battling for some meaningless ditch!’ Vorhak was shouting now, flames rising from his words to dance upon the air. ‘I cannot tell, priest. Are you mad, or just stupid?’

With a cry of anger, one of Akhagor’s followers lunged for the deathbringer. Vorhak backhanded his assailant across the face, snapping his neck and sending his broken body skidding off the edge of the pit.

With a great roar, the two halves of the warband fell upon each other. Axes rose and fell. Hulking berserkers hacked at each other in an orgy of butchery. Blood-mad warriors howled as they slew, claiming the skulls of their kin and exulting in the slaughter.

In the midst of the fight, Akhagor and Vorhak met. The Khorbadakk came at Akhagor first, and the slaughterpriest laughed as he fought them off. The first took his axe to the breastplate. The second and third were beheaded not by Akhagor, but by Vorhak himself.

‘Presumptuous curs, he is mine!’ bellowed the deathbringer, before launching himself at Akhagor.

Vorhak’s morning star rattled out and smashed into Akhagor’s shoulder, mangling flesh and breaking bone. With a furious roar, the slaughterpriest responded by stepping in close and swinging his axe at Vorhak’s neck.

The deathbringer brought his own blade up to block the strike, staggering from its force.

‘How does it feel to be so wrong?’ snarled Vorhak, spinning on his heel and lashing his morning star at his rival again.

‘Wrong?’ spat the slaughterpriest, ignoring the agony in his shoulder and snatching the chain of Vorhak’s weapon.

‘Wrong?’ he laughed, wrenching the morning star from the deathbringer’s grip and hurling it away.

A pair of armoured warriors stumbled between them, one ripping at the other’s throat with his wolf-like muzzle. Vorhak smashed them both aside and charged at Akhagor again.

‘Wrong!’ he bellowed, battering his axe into the slaughterpriest’s guard and forcing him back towards the edge of the pit. Vorhak hewed at Akhagor like a demented woodsman as he screamed at his hated rival.

‘Can’t you see it even now, priest? Have you even fooled yourself?’

Axe blade met axe haft in a shower of sparks.

‘There is no special destiny for Akhagor!’

Again the weapons smashed together. Again the slaughterpriest gave ground.

‘There is only this shameful death, while I take your warriors and earn my place in Korghos Khul’s Gorechosen!’

With a resounding clang, Vorhak’s weapon met Akhagor’s axe haft again, splitting the weapon in two and forcing the priest back until rock crumbled beneath his heels. With a howl of triumph, Vorhak lunged.

Akhagor moved fast as a snake, shedding false exhaustion and swinging both halves of his weapon. The haft he used to smash Vorhak in the back, propelling him forward with battering-ram force. The blade he used to sweep the deathbringer’s head from his shoulders.

Flaming gore jetted from the stump of Vorhak’s neck as body and head tumbled away, down the slope of the Scorchpit and into the mists below. With that single, spectacular kill, the fight was over. The last of the Ironskulls stopped, chests heaving with exertion, blood dripping from their weapons. They stared at Akhagor as his eyes burned with exaltation.

‘Vorhak did not understand,’ he intoned, as blinding firelight burst upon his brow. ‘Vorhak lacked faith.’

As the cinders scattered, a fresh rune of Khorne was left, seared into Akhagor’s forehead. The last of his warband dropped to their knees at this sign of Khorne’s favour.

‘Khorne cares not where wars are fought, or beneath whose banner. Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows.’

Turning, Akhagor stood upon the lip of the Scorchpit and spread his arms.

‘Our god cares only that we fight, and kill, and claim blood and skulls until we too fall slain! In the Scorchpit, we will find war unending. In the Scorchpit, we will become Gorechosen, but not to some mortal lord.’ Akhagor turned back to his awed followers, a mad smile twisting his features. ‘We will become the Gorechosen of Lord Khorne himself.’

With that, the slaughterpriest picked up Vorhak’s fallen axe, discarding the shattered halves of his own. Then he vaulted over the edge, back down the steep slope and into the Scorchpit’s maw. His warband rose and followed him. As they vanished into the mists below, the blood of their former comrades spilled over the edge, running red in their wake.

the eighth Victory

Graeme Lyon

‘For the glory of the Blood God, death comes to you!’ Krev Deathstalker’s voice rose above the clamour of battle as he brought his great axe down on the gleaming silver armour of the Stormcast Eternal at his feet. The warrior rolled away and the axe bit into blood-soaked earth. Krev roared and pulled it out, batting away the Stormcast’s strike.

He took a step back and looked at the warrior. His armour was ruined, the shining silver plates dented and scuffed, mud and gore obscuring the symbols of the hated God-King that adorned its surfaces.

The Stormcast raised his sword and hammer and readied himself for Krev’s attack. The impassive gilded mask he wore gave no emotion away, but Krev would have sworn the warrior was smiling.

‘Death seems to be keeping his distance,’ the Stormcast said, his voice echoing strangely from behind the mask. ‘Maybe he waits for you.’

Krev swung his axe, and the Stormcast deflected it with his sword and brought his hammer round in a smooth arc that missed Krev by a hair’s breadth. The silver-armoured warrior pressed on, and Krev was forced back, step by step, desperately parrying the Stormcast’s blows. He kicked out, his boot catching the Stormcast’s shin. The warrior fell, giving Krev a moment’s reprieve. He circled the Stormcast and hefted his axe.

The silver warrior got back to his feet and spun around. His cloak flared and bolts of magic in the form of shimmering hammers flung themselves at Krev. He battered one away with his axe, but the others struck home, and he grunted in pain. The Stormcast pressed forwards again, and a punishing blow knocked the axe from Krev’s hands. Then he felt pain as the sword sliced into the meat of his leg and forced him to one knee. The Stormcast dropped his hammer, kicked Krev’s axe away and took his sword in both hands.

‘Thus will end all tyrants,’ he intoned, his voice sepulchral. ‘Sigmar decrees–’

He was cut off as a huge beast barrelled into him, knocking the sword from his grip and him to the ground. Krev smiled and pulled himself to his feet.

‘Well done, my pet,’ he said. The flesh hound howled, then bounded off in the direction of more enemies. Krev stooped and picked up the Stormcast’s fallen sword.

‘Sigmar decrees, does he?’ he hissed down at the mud-caked armoured warrior. ‘When you see him, tell him Krev Deathstalker spits on his decrees.’

Krev swung the sword and parted the Stormcast’s head from his shoulders. The head rolled for a moment, then both it and the warrior’s body dissolved into shimmering particles of light. Krev threw down the sword as it too discorporated. There was a flash and a sound like thunder, and the Stormcast vanished.

Krev looked around for more foes, but it seemed that the battle was all but won. He saw Garsa battling a knot of winged Stormcasts. The skullgrinder’s anvil swung in wide arcs on the end of its chain, catching the Prosecutors and pulling them from the air. Elsewhere, twin deathbringers fought back-to-back, axes whirling and shields parrying the huge lightning-wreathed hammers of a handful of Retributors.

Most impressive of all was Koroth, the tribe’s head deathbringer. The horned champion led a group of blood warriors against a line of Stormcast Liberators. Wherever his great ruinous axe fell, a Stormcast died.

‘Truly, Khorne favours him,’ said a voice behind Krev. He turned, axe raised, and saw the tall, rangy form of Drane, his remaining slaughterpriest. The old man’s axe was bloodied, and gore streaked his face and chest.

‘We are all favoured, Drane. We have now won seven mighty victories in the Blood God’s name against these celestial invaders. We are all exalted in His sight.’

‘We are, my lord,’ agreed the slaughterpriest. ‘And none more so than you. But even so… He is powerful indeed.’

‘And he serves me, priest. Does that not make me more powerful still?’

Drane said nothing for a time, eyeing Krev carefully. Finally he nodded. ‘As you say, my lord.’

The battle was over and the victory celebrations were in full swing. There had been feasting around the funeral pyre, the survivors feeding on choice meat from the fallen. Warriors now boasted of deeds performed in combat, compared fresh scars and competed in contests of martial skill.

But Drane was troubled. He sat apart from the revelry, considering the number of the dead compared to those left alive. He watched Krev, and he wondered what was to come.

Eventually, the warlord stood up to address the throng. All went quiet, and every eye was on Krev. He walked around the fire, gazing into its depths, and then looked around at the gathered warriors.

‘Seven victories have we won against Sigmar’s servants.’

There was cheering from drunken bloodreavers. Krev ignored it and raised his voice. ‘Seven mighty armies have they sent against us, and seven times they have been sent back to their heavenly home to answer for their failure before their God-King.’

He paused and looked around, catching Drane’s eye. The slaughterpriest saw something in Krev’s gaze, and looked away.

‘We stand on the edge of destiny, my Deathstalkers. Seven great victories… aye, that is the stuff of legends. But eight…’

He paused again.

‘Eight is a holy number, as we all know. We walk the eightfold path. Eight champions follow me and lead you into battle. Eight warbands make up our tribe. So what power will be ours when we have an eighth victory against this foe? How will Khorne reward us for honouring Him so?’

There were more cheers and chanting of the Blood God’s name.

‘I will tell you how, my friends, for the Blood God has spoken to me. He demands one more victory, one more great slaughter in His name. And when we secure it, I shall ascend to immortality. I will become a daemon prince and bestride the Mortal Realms like a colossus!’

As the cheering reached a fever pitch, Drane’s eyes sought out the other members of the Gorechosen, Krev’s champions.

The four deathbringers sat together. Each was newly ordained as a member of the Gorechosen, replacing heroes killed in the seven battles the tribe had fought over the past months. They were young and believed wholeheartedly in Krev’s vision for their future. Even now, they gazed at the warlord with rapt attention.

Garsa the skullgrinder sat amidst a knot of blood warriors. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes were fixed on Krev. Near him was Cheren, resting his broad back against the great icon of Khorne he carried into battle. The bloodsecrator looked as though he were asleep, though Drane was sure he was taking in every word.

Finally, he looked over at Koroth. Like Drane, he sat alone, at the very edge of the circle of flickering firelight. He was running a whetstone over the blade of his ruinous axe and glaring at the warlord with undisguised contempt.

‘That bodes ill,’ whispered the slaughterpriest to himself. ‘That bodes ill indeed…’

‘This cannot continue.’

Garsa’s voice cut above the tumult. The rest of the Gorechosen fell into silence as they turned to look at him. The celebration was over and the tribe had returned to their tents, save those who lay slumped unconscious, worse the wear for drinks or headbutting contests. Only the Gorechosen remained, drawn together by the need to discuss what would happen next.

‘Krev is our lord, Koroth. What would you have us do?’ said Drane calmly. The tall, lean slaughterpriest stepped forwards into the firelight and looked Garsa up and down. ‘Would you challenge him?’

Koroth was silent. Drane snorted dismissively and turned away.

‘I thought not. None of you would dare to test yourselves against him. You would not have done so months ago, and now, as he nears his apotheosis, you are even less likely to. Cowards, every one of you. You speak and speak, moan and complain, but will not act.’

‘You call us cowards, old man?’ demanded Koroth. ‘You, who can barely lift an axe, so far are you in your dotage?’

Drane laughed and turned to Koroth. ‘Do you care to test me, deathbringer? You fear to challenge our master, so you take out your frustrations on an old man?’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ the deathbringer growled, knuckles whitening as he gripped his axe.

Drane turned away from Koroth and addressed the rest of the Gorechosen.

‘Krev has led us to victory after victory, and he is not wrong about the reward that awaits him.’

‘What of the rest of us?’ asked Cheren. ‘Our numbers are few. Would our lord throw our lives away in pursuit of his own destiny?’

‘If we are to sacrifice ourselves to secure Krev’s ascension, then I will willingly give my life,’ declared Jiang. The young deathbringer’s eyes glowed with the light of a true fanatic, and Drane didn’t doubt that he meant what he said.

‘What of the rest of you?’ he asked. ‘If our lord’s victory requires you to lay down your lives, will you do so?’

There was a long silence.

‘No,’ growled Koroth eventually. ‘I will not. We have won these battles for him, and we will share in his victory, or take it from him for ourselves. I will challenge him. And I will defeat him.’

Krev emerged from his tent in the harsh morning light to find the eight warriors of his Gorechosen awaiting him. They were arrayed in a semicircle, with Koroth at the apex.

‘What is this?’ he asked. ‘What do you want, my champions?’

‘The course you are taking us on is madness,’ said Koroth softly. ‘I will have no further part in it. The battles we have fought have reduced our numbers to almost nothing. We need new blood if we are to shed more in Khorne’s name.’

‘We are on the verge of greatness, deathbringer,’ said Krev. ‘Surely you see that?’

‘I see that you care only for your own fate,’ the deathbringer replied. ‘As a warrior, that is fitting. As a leader… it is not. And so I challenge you, Krev Deathstalker. Face me in single combat for the leadership of the tribe.’

Krev stared into his champion’s face, and smiled. ‘Very well. We fight to the death.’

‘To the death,’ agreed Koroth.

Krev spread his arms and gestured to the gathered Gorechosen. ‘Well? What are you waiting for, deathbringer? You want my head… come and take it.’

Koroth lifted his axe and nodded. ‘Aye.’ He leapt, axe raised over his head, and brought it down in a scything arc that would have split Krev in two had it connected. The warlord sidestepped it calmly.

‘You are mighty, deathbringer. Exalted indeed. But you will not win this battle.’

Koroth snorted and lashed out, swinging the ruinous axe one-handed at Krev’s neck. The warlord ducked beneath the blow and punched the deathbringer in the stomach, knocking him backwards. The champion growled in anger.

‘Draw your axe and face me properly, Krev!’ he roared.

‘I have no need of my axe,’ Krev said calmly. ‘I have the favour of the Blood God.’

‘You are a fool, drunk on your own power and convinced of your immortality. I shall show you the lie of that!’ Koroth swung his axe again, catching Krev with the flat and knocking him flying. He rolled and swiftly rose to his feet. The pair circled one another, and Krev noticed that the rest of the Gorechosen had moved to surround them. He smiled and threw back his head, shouting to the heavens.

‘My lord Khorne, master of war, taker of skulls, spiller of blood, hear my prayer. Aid your devoted servant, prove to all present that I am in your favour. Strike down this upstart, and bring me victory.’

For a moment, there was silence. Koroth stopped pacing and just stared at Krev.

‘Is that your plan, warlord? Call upon Khorne to kill me because you cannot?’ He laughed. ‘You die now.’ He stepped forward, swinging his axe underarm, and caught Krev on the chest, tearing a long cut into his flesh. The warlord staggered back, and Koroth turned to the Gorechosen.

‘You see? This is what we follow. A coward who knows he cannot defeat me and in desperation calls for aid that will never…’

He trailed off as a rumble of thunder sounded, like the laughter of a god, and a shadow passed overhead. He looked up and saw a vast crimson cloud. As he watched, it began to rain. Thick drops of bright red blood fell, staining the earth where they landed. Krev stretched out his arms to welcome the shower.

‘You were saying, Koroth?’

The deathbringer shook his horned head and snarled. ‘Trickery. And how is this supposed to...’ His words became a strangled scream as the first drops of blood hit his flesh, which sizzled and burned. ‘What is… How did you…?’ The shower became a deluge and Koroth screamed as he was consumed, burned to ash by the downpour.

Krev stepped forwards and gazed at each of the seven remaining Gorechosen in turn. He gestured to the pile of ashes that had been his deathbringer.

‘Would anyone else like to challenge me?’

In the days that followed, the tribe prepared for their greatest battle, the one that would raise their lord to daemonhood and exalt them all in the Blood God’s eyes. Word of Krev’s victory over Koroth spread quickly, and it seemed that none now doubted that he was favoured by the Blood God, or that another victory would be theirs. Yet Drane was still troubled.

The deathbringer had been vital to the battles over the past months. Without his might, and with their reduced numbers, they would struggle against another Stormcast host. Krev knew that, so why had he let the deathbringer die? The slaughterpriest had tried to raise the matter with the warlord, but Krev had brushed his concerns aside with more talk of destiny.

Now the scouts had brought word of an army of Stormcasts marching from the shores of the Barren Sea, and there was no more time to ponder the question. Battle would be joined in a matter of hours, and the outcome was uncertain.

He looked along the battle lines. Once, there had been thousands. Now, there were mere hundreds, most of them unarmoured, ill-disciplined bloodreavers. Here and there stood knots of blood warriors, their axes notched and shields dented. Even smaller groups of wrathmongers daubed themselves in blood and offered prayers to Khorne. The remaining members of the Gorechosen were stationed along the line to lend their skill at arms and leadership to the warriors around them.

‘It won’t be enough,’ he said aloud.

‘It will, Drane,’ said Krev behind him.

‘My lord, we are too few. I have tried to ignore this fact and trust to faith, but my faith is in steel and my worship to the Blood God is done in battle. And I look at this army and know that steel will not be enough against Sigmar’s chosen.’

Krev shook his head. ‘You understand so little, slaughterpriest. Khorne’s favour is with me. I will ascend. And nothing else matters.’

Drane opened his mouth to reply, but Krev held up his hand. ‘You and I shall watch the battle from behind our lines,’ he ordered.

Horror engulfed the slaughterpriest. ‘My lord,’ he protested, ‘with so few warriors, our strength will be required. And to not fight–’

‘My word is final, Drane. Trust that I know what I am about.’

The warlord turned and stomped away, leaving Drane to his dark thoughts.

Battle was joined at dawn. The Stormcasts’ army was small, just a few hundred warriors, but each was huge, clad in near-impenetrable armour of a turquoise hue, and the power of the storm played about them and their weapons. At their centre was an immense figure, swathed in a crimson cloak and riding upon the back of a great armoured reptile. The figure gestured with his hammer and the Stormcasts began to march.

A mob of howling bloodreavers was the first to engage. They charged into the Stormcast shield wall, axes swinging. Stormcasts fell, but too few. For every one of the armoured warriors that returned to the heavens in a bolt of crackling lightning, five bloodreavers were gutted and left dying in the dirt.

The twin deathbringers were the first of the Gorechosen to die. They drove too far into the enemy lines, with too small a warband at their back, and were surrounded. They fought bravely and well, taking a score of Stormcast Liberators with them, but eventually they were cut down. Drane delivered the news to Krev. To his surprise and consternation, the warlord smiled.

‘They died well,’ he said. ‘What more could they ask?’

Cheren the bloodsecrator was the next to fall. He had planted his icon in the earth and defended it fiercely, a cadre of blood warriors around him. He called upon the power of the icon, invoking the wrath of Khorne. Around him, reality had split open and the Realm of Chaos had merged with the mortal world. The Stormcasts attacking him were immense warriors with axes the size of a man, which could dismember several warriors with one mighty strike. As the ground became brass and the air filled with sulphurous fumes, their progress had slowed, but it was not enough. They struggled forwards, cutting down blood warriors with every step, and eventually Cheren was overwhelmed. He died with his axe in hand and Khorne’s name on his lips. With his death, the left flank of the Deathstalkers crumbled and victory looked increasingly unlikely.

Drane returned to Krev’s side.

‘My lord, I beseech you, let me join the battle. We face defeat unless–’

‘You will join the battle when I tell you to and not before, slaughterpriest.’

‘My lord, I do not understand your strategy.’

Krev turned on him, eyes blazing. For the first time, Drane noticed the nimbus of power that surrounded the warlord. He bowed and stepped away as dark suspicions began to form about what Krev was doing.

On the right flank, the skullgrinder and his small warband of wrathmongers came up against the leader of the Stormcast host. Garsa’s first swing of his anvil was a good one, caving in the skull of the beast on which the Lord-Celestant rode and throwing him to the ground. A follow-up strike met the Stormcast’s hammer, giving the warrior time to rise to his feet. He threw off his cloak and faced the skullgrinder, while his bodyguard, armed with rune-inscribed polearms, duelled with the wrathmongers.

The battle between the Lord-Celestant and the skullgrinder was long and gruelling. With each swing of his anvil, Garsa caved in sigmarite armour plates and broke bones, but the Stormcast stayed standing. Where his hammer struck home, crackling lightning burned the skullgrinder’s flesh. Both warriors slowed as the fight dragged on, and eventually, Garsa dropped his weapon and launched himself at the Stormcast with a roar of inarticulate rage. He tore the turquoise helmet from the warrior’s head and grabbed his throat, lifting him bodily from the ground, squeezing. Even as bones popped and his throat was crushed, the Stormcast used the last of his strength to strike one more time, and the head of his hammer obliterated the skullgrinder’s torso in a discharge of celestial power.

Both warriors fell to the ground. The Stormcast’s body disappeared into a crackling arc of energy that shot skywards, and Garsa was trampled into the dirt.

The remaining two deathbringers fell as the Stormcasts overran the rest of the Deathstalkers. Their deaths were not glorious, but they were bloody.

‘Do you understand now, slaughterpriest?’

Drane turned to see Krev standing behind him, axe in hand. The warlord appeared larger than ever, and the power that had played around him now seemed to infuse his entire body. The priest shook his head slowly.

‘No, my lord. This is no victory. And yet, the power around you is palpable. Whatever your plan was, it has succeeded.’

‘Almost, my old friend. Only one last thing remains to be done.’ The warlord raised his axe, and suddenly Drane understood.

‘This battle was never going to be your eighth victory,’ he said. ‘We were.’

Krev nodded as he advanced. ‘Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, as you know well. He accepts the deaths of his followers as readily as his foes. And sometimes they are preferable. He thirsts for skulls, Drane, and they are one thing he cannot get from these Stormcasts.’

‘The battles we won were to draw Khorne’s attention to you,’ the slaughterpriest said. ‘The real sacrifice was the skulls of your champions.’

‘Eight skulls of worthy heroes, given in battle. The first he claimed for himself when I asked. That was when I knew for sure.’

‘The duel,’ Drane said.

‘Yes. And now he has another six. Only one remains, slaughterpriest. Yours. Will you give it willingly, or will you fight me?’

Drane took a deep breath and raised his axe, gripping it tightly in both hands.

‘I will fight you, Krev Deathstalker. My honour will allow me to do nothing else.’

‘Good,’ smiled Krev. ‘Die well, Drane.’

Meros Oathkeeper, Lord-Relictor of the Celestial Vindicators, held up a hand to halt the advance of the Judicators around him.

‘Hold,’ he ordered. ‘What is happening up there?’

On a ridge behind the shattered remnants of the Chaos force, two figures clashed in single combat. Both were huge, one thin and rangy, the other bulky and glowing with barely suppressed power. Both fought with impressive skill, swinging huge axes with speed and grace, dodging and weaving like pugilists.

‘They turn on one another,’ scoffed Iator, the Judicator-Prime. The warrior raised his bow and nocked an arrow. ‘Shall I finish one of them, my lord?’

Meros shook his head. ‘No. This feels like something in which we should not intervene.’

He would live to regret that decision, though not for long. As he watched, the bulkier figure gained the upper hand, lashing out with a blow that cut through the haft of the other’s axe and knocked him back a step. It was followed by an upwards strike that split the thin figure from groin to collarbone. He fell to the earth and the victor threw down his axe and began to laugh.

The aura of power around him grew blinding, and Meros was forced to look away. He could feel a change in the air, and his senses screamed danger.

‘Shoot him,’ he screamed. ‘Kill him before–’

It was too late. The figure’s laugh became a scream, of pain and rage and… triumph? The light faded and Meros looked back. The warrior’s skin was sloughing away, muscles melting and veins unravelling, forming a cloud of bloody matter around the figure. His bones stretched and warped, growing and becoming coated with what looked like brass. The bloody cloud grew and closed back in on the enlarged skeleton, clothing it once again in muscle and flesh, slick and blood red.

‘Daemon,’ Meros breathed. ‘Daemon! Take it down!’

The Judicators took aim and fired, but their arrows melted as they came close to the figure. It laughed again, and now the sound was booming and inhuman. The newly birthed daemon prince turned to Meros and grinned, revealing rows of sharp fangs in a bloody maw. It gestured, and an immense axe coalesced in its hand.

The daemon prince raised the axe into the air.

‘Come forth, children of the Blood God!’ it roared, and from nowhere stepped creatures of blood and brass, lean and long-limbed and carrying barbed swords. Rank after rank of them materialised, brought into the Mortal Realms through the thinned barrier between reality and Chaos.

‘This battle is lost,’ Meros yelled. ‘Fall back, brothers. Fall back!’

They retreated, but Meros couldn’t tear his eyes from the daemon prince. It rose into the air, carried by great black wings, and swooped down towards him.

Meros Oathkeeper was dead in an instant. He didn’t even have time to raise his hammer.

Krev Deathstalker, daemon prince of Khorne, pulled the Stormcast’s head from his body and cast it aside as it dissipated. Around him, a horde of daemons poured from the Blood God’s realm, laying into the celestial warriors with their hellblades. They fought bravely, but the daemons were too many and the Stormcasts too few after their conflict with the Deathstalkers. All too soon, the battle was won.

The eighth victory was his.

Godless

David Guymer

Then

‘How long has it been, Jago?’

The old hermit that the Darvish hillmen called the Daemon Oracle wore a cloak of tamed shadow and spider-silk with the hood pulled close, obscuring his face but for the tip of his nose, the crescent-moon of his chin, and the dolorous timbre of his voice. The skin was scale-dry and blueish. He was cross-legged in the cave’s corner, the shadowed bowl of his hood drinking up the eerie fire. It gave off no warmth, no light. It wavered like a plant in a dark wind, a thing of oil and Ulgu.

‘How long has it been since such colour walked into the Tattered Lands?’ the Oracle asked.

Shahleah waited restlessly on bent knee, one arm lain across her armour’s golden lacquer. The sculpted piece depicted birds in flight, beasts at play, men and women in passion. The Oracle’s odd fire found every depression and crack, every lustfully staring eye and gluttonous mouth, and filled it with shadow. What was gold became brown, what was silver, tarnished, what was purple, deeper than black. The fine detail work was crusted with the grit of a long road, but it was once and always fine. Her ornate longsword rested point down, held in her other hands by the meandering fuller.

As was her way, she – and though verbal language lacked the nuance to describe, much less define, her gender, of late she felt like being a she – thought long and carefully before answering.

‘I’ll ask them, Jago,’ the Oracle muttered to the shadow-flame while Shahleah considered. Then he stopped whispering and appeared to listen. The fire flexed and flickered. Following the eerie exchange, she felt the dull, familiar absence in her heart. The Oracle looked up, eyes hidden, a row of pointed teeth catching the non-light and glinting. ‘What power brings you here, pilgrim?’

‘My own,’ Shahleah returned at once.

‘You misunderstand, you misunderstand. She misunderstands, Jago. This is perilous country for Seekers to walk without favour. To whom do you pray is what I mean. We are curious. When you are sore-pressed, when the road is run, when enemies abound and you wish with all your being for hellfire upon them, on whom – or on what – do you call?’

An ursine grunt rumbled from the cave’s entrance as Cruciax of the Blunted Knives stirred. ‘You are the Oracle. You should tell us.’

‘And if I cannot?’

‘Then we have other uses for those that have none. More… pleasant uses.’

Again that shadowed flash of grin under the cowl.

‘And when you call upon such powers?’ Shahleah interrupted. ‘Do they answer?’

‘Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t,’ came the Oracle’s reply.

‘Perhaps I have less need of such aid. Perhaps I would refuse it were it offered.’

The Oracle leaned forward and emitted a hiss of laughter. ‘And yet you search for Him.’

‘That is how the game is played. It runs its course and at the end it is won or it is lost.’

The ache that beat beneath her breast pained her again for a moment. It detested the stillness, the quietude. It urged her with its palpitations to scour these mountains on hands and knees and never be still.

‘I know games, Seeker,’ said the Oracle, ‘Jago and I play them often, and we know our part in yours, oh yes we do.’

An eerie whistle broke the Oracle’s meandering flow, and the hermit drew a spouted black iron pot from a tripod set up over the ivory flames. The scream gurgled away as he poured a turgid soup into a spidershell cup, thick steam hissing out to cloy at the cave’s walls.

‘This is a waste of time,’ Cruciax growled again.

Shahleah turned to glance over her sculptured pauldron.

Three of her most exalted champions hung just in from the wind under the cave’s craggy mouth, with Cruciax at the front. He was moodily tattooed in purples and blues that looked like bruises, clad half in ringed mail and half in the belts, buckles and straps that held it up and from which spikes of various different lengths and types protruded both outward and in.

Behind him and to his right, Prefuria stood straight and silent as the exotic, pincer-bladed lance in her hand. A fine dusting of gold around her face and her fingernails elevated her flawless good looks towards a personal apogee of perfection.

The third champion would surely, in other company, have been the first to catch the eye. Hel’ein’s beauty was staggering, but of a desperate, clutching kind. Her eyes drowned in yellow kohl. Her spiked hair razored back and forth in the wind. Her delicate short swords she held tight to her breast, and her cloak fluted over a suit of mirror-scales with hundreds of furtive, self-hating little caresses.

In any warband devoted to the Chaos powers, a leader governed by fear and respect, with patronage bestowed in divine favour and bought with glory. Not her. She led because no one else cared to. It wasn’t even apathy. They had their passions, their own ways of giving praise, but none like hers.

Cruciax’s eyes bulged from his hairless, painted face. They were full of pain, the memory of it and the hope of it, as he implored her. ‘He is a schemer. He won’t help us.’

‘The search has led us here,’ said Shahleah over her shoulder, and turned back to the Oracle. ‘We followed the flight of a one-winged raven into the high lands and across the river, and thence slaughtered the Darvish in a night of revels that turned the sky pink with omens, like a sunrise in a land of shadow. That trail we took, and it led us here.’

‘Can you help us?’ said Hel’ein, her whisper mouse-like.

‘We can,’ said the Oracle, slapping dry lips and slurping on his steaming spidershell. ‘I have seen the nightworld and spoken with shadow. I have mastered the ways of the not-yet-been. But such aid is not without price, and even with my guidance, you will need to call upon my aid. The Tattered Lands are deadly, doubly so for your kind that goes alone.’

‘Our kind?’

Shahleah asked the question, but she knew the answer already – both were steps of a long, arduous, but ultimately glorious game that had to be followed through if she was to keep on playing.

The Oracle cackled and took a slurp of broth. ‘The Godless.’

Now

The Tattered Lands were a place of vast, jagged peaks that shredded the clouds into inky rags and ripped them across a dim moon. The highest peak had no name – it was enough to know simply that it was the highest, and had taken the Seekers no more than a week of hard walking to reach from the Darvish Highlands and the abode of the Daemon Oracle. Weathered lumps of ancient stonework clawed up from the black grasses like the fingers of the anguished dead, the outskirts of what had once been a sprawling temple. For any of those features might the place have earned the name ‘the Tattered Lands’, but the epithet was for the torn, ragged souls that lingered in its ruins.

At first, Shahleah had thought they were shadows. Shahleah had led her Seekers from the mountainside and through the cracked frame of the long-rotted city gates, and from the moment they had stepped inside, they had been followed. They clung to walls, slipped around corners, had no faces. Many were shaped as men, but just as many, on furtive inspection, were not. They were hulking shapes, horns and tusks and plates, bodies out of all proportion to anything that could cast such a shadow.

There was no light. No sun, no moon, no stars. And yet they were all around them, inside every ruin and under every buried street. Before Shahleah had realised that they were more than mere shadows, they were surrounded.

And without a sound, they had struck.

The sword that came for her was as black as an eclipse, as difficult to place as a ghost’s hatred. It projected a chill, a bitter sharpness that required no physical edge with which to cut.

Shahleah bent back until her gauntlet knuckles caught her on the black marble flags. The blade whispered across her. She arched back up with a push of her supporting arm, spun away from a second darting sliver of chill, and stabbed back. Her undulating blade opened up the revenant’s chest and tore its shadow into the wind. She shrieked with satisfaction.

‘Come to me, shadow of mine!’ cried Hel’ein, somewhere close.

If asked before today, Shahleah would not have been able to say how you killed a shadow, but the conventional tools seemed to apply, and it was too late to think about it now. The second was still on her, and more slid silently in as she backed away from it.

These were all similarly man-shaped, but hunched and powerful, their shoulders armoured and spiked and their jaws heavy. Their weapons were similarly massive, the dark mirror of implements made for bludgeoning rather than aesthetic cutting. A dozen or more of them came at her at once, and she fended them off with a beguiling sequence of parries, each one a masterstroke rendered in gold.

The thrill of her situation made her heart beat fast. She was alive. Whatever value that life had, she favoured it over the only alternative. Even now.

Especially now.

A great blade wrapped in monstrous hands plunged towards her shoulder. She turned it aside on her vambrace and clasped her sword two-handed. With a word of power, the serpentine blade flickered into purpled flame. She filigreed the air with it. Shadows melted into ecstatic puddles as their constituent substance surrendered itself to the blade’s lust.

Each time the weapon’s daemon was unleashed, the effect it provoked was lessened. One day it would just be a sword, but that very impermanence was a gift that made it burn all the hotter.

With a sigh of sympathetic elation, she leapt onto a crumbling fountain and looked around. The decrepit marble monument was the centrepiece of a crossroads about two-thirds of the way up into the fallen city that the Oracle had sent them to. Rubble highways bore off onto streets lined with crumbling glories and packed with shadow. Cracked walls and gaping roofs spiked the mountain slope for several miles all around, the occasional tower or temple spire rising up to the tattered clouds. This place had once been great.

‘More!’ Cruciax bellowed. ‘More!’

Great sweeps of his bloodied chain smashed through the tide of shadow, but every so often he paused, as if on purpose, took the hit to his unarmoured quarter that his abrupt halt invited, then let rip a howl of agony and plunged back into the fray. His followers fought in the same bruising style. They were as tough as any blightking, vicious as any Goresworn berserker, but many were already dead or else crying out for the Dark Prince to reveal Himself for their final suffering.

On the other side of the fountain, surrounded by the pants and yells of her acolytes, Hel’ein’s twin swords clove shadows as if they were rags unbecoming of a queen. Her thralls screamed desperate praises, loud as mortal throats could – they cried their joy at the aural revelation that was steel on cold night and the symphonic grind of boots over marble. Hel’ein herself issued a moan, tongue pressed against the back of her teeth, and practically begged absent Slaanesh to come forth and witness her orgiastic fury.

The last road, which wound further up into the mountains, was held by Prefuria and her warband, Shahleah’s brilliantly armoured elite – the Godless.

Individually and collectively, they were perfect. Every warrior was a thing of beauty, clad in gold that had been etched, fretted, enamelled, and damascened to within an inch of its base utility. Together, they were collective worship through the perfection of form and action, the collaborative exigency of holy violence.

Shahleah brought up her sword and shouted a prayer. In the heat of the moment, it no longer mattered that no one heard. She picked her target.

A forked tongue of virile incandescence lashed across the crossroads and obliterated a pack of shadows that had been circling around behind the backs of the Godless through the skeletal frame of an ancient structure that leaned into the square.

At the same moment, a shade circled behind Cruciax and struck.

The warrior cried out and gasped as the shadow-knife passed through his back and erupted from his chest in a spattering of gelid gore. He looked at her, his eyes thanking her for not intervening. She returned it with a smile. They all had their own parts to play, and she would deal with the consequences as they came. That was the game.

Cruciax’s cry turned to bubbling laughter as the blade was withdrawn. It became a howl of unsatiated torment as one of his warriors cut the shadow down before the task was complete. The furious cry spread throughout his followers, and then into Hel’ein’s – the so-called Exendentals – as the shadows slowly broke off their attack and slunk back into their city. Hel’ein herself wept at the shallow and short-lived pleasure.

Prefuria pointed up the road she had defended. She didn’t speak. There, beyond the steepled black rooftops, the plated bronze minaret of the Astrosanct shone gloomily against the pervading dark.

Then

‘The shadows keep their own secrets,’ said the Oracle, waving a scaly hand over the lightless fire. The flickering shadows it gave off coiled about his fingers like worms pulled wriggling out of the ground. ‘That was why the Astrosanct was placed here in the Tattered Lands.’

‘Will we find Him there?’

Cruciax brooded by the cave’s near wall, at times appearing to admire the atavistic cave art, but always edging ever closer to where the Oracle sat behind his fire. The length of chain he carried rattled as he fed it through his hands, looped it, pulled it taut, let it go. Nothing so painless as a blade for Cruciax.

‘Do you think He could be so close and you would not feel it? Perhaps you would not, at that. How can we imagine what it is like to be like you?’

Cruciax growled, his chain taut. The Oracle sipped noisily at his broth.

‘Who built it?’ asked Shahleah.

‘An astute question, eh, Jago? She shows promise, this one.’ He looked up from his shadow-bound fingers and found Shahleah. He seemed amused. ‘Perhaps when your soul tires of your search, you might offer it to a master who values such qualities in his servants.’

‘I said who.’

‘I do not know,’ said the Oracle, as though ignorance was a rare gift. ‘It was already long ruined when I came here in search of solitude, and that was before the Age of Chaos. The talk of the wind is that it was here long before a world was raised beneath it. But the wind tells tall tales, is that not so, Jago?’

The shadow he addressed shifted but did not answer.

‘What is it for?’ asked Shahleah.

‘It is an observatory.’

‘Of what?’

The Oracle cackled. ‘Of everything. This is the darkest corner of a very dark realm. What light is here is light that you bring with you, and little of it escapes.’ He wrapped scaly fingers around his steaming spidershell and looked up into rapt, desperate faces. ‘The old priests viewed things from across the realms and from times long before the realms were made. The shadows of those things are in the Astrosanct still. That is what it is for. Nothing escapes.’

‘You mean–’

‘I mean that even I do not know where Slaanesh is, and you will not find him in the Tattered Lands, but if you can say with certainty that he existed at all, then you may yet catch his shadow.’

Now

The Astrosanct occupied the temple-city’s highest promontory; only a few hundred feet of shadow-weathered rock climbed further above the hemispherical courtyard that housed the observatory. The strange apparatus of the Astrosanct dominated the site. It was a minaret, comprised of brass plates assembled into interlocking spirals. Each plate was rendered with impenetrable pictographic script, beautiful in its complexity. Shahleah wondered how this awesome instrument must have appeared in use, crowded by priests and scholars, those spirals clanking past one another like the gear wheels of a world clock.

The impression faded and what she saw instead were shadows. She readied her blade, but these did not move. They were the shadows cast by the Astrosanct itself – the moon and stars, though skeined by this world’s layering shadow, were free enough above the cloud layer to shine.

The Seekers spread out over the courtyard, following the circumference of the boundary walls, as Shahleah and Cruciax made a line for the Astrosanct.

Those walls were also of brass and also beautiful. Shahleah caught sight of one of the Exendentals staring, entranced, at one such segment depicting a bulky saurian in a golden headdress.

‘I could imagine the Prince of Pain residing in such a place,’ Cruciax muttered grudgingly. Even he was intimidated by the spiritual oppression that hung over the observatory.

Shahleah nodded and continued on to the Astrosanct.

The base of the apparatus was a puzzle of rings and cogs and ideograms that seemed to hark to some other world entirely. A place of sun and jungle and reptilian monsters. In several places there were depressible panels marked with hieroglyphic designs. She pressed some at random. Nothing happened. Cruciax joined her, picking dried blood from his chain with the fingernail of his un-armoured hand.

It had not acquired the blood in this mausoleum city, Shahleah knew.

Not all of Slaanesh’s followers sought after their lost purpose as she did. Did Cruciax or Hel’ein know that their own despairing efforts to rouse their absent god might have cost them this chance? Who could say? The game was unpredictable – that was the glory of it. Shahleah suspected that the Prince of Excess would have had it no other way, and another opportunity lost would give her little sorrow.

‘We should have brought the Oracle,’ Cruciax grunted.

‘Maybe next time.’

Turning around, she looked over the twilit courtyard for any further sign of how the Astrosanct might be operated, or where the shadows it had collected in aeons past might be found.

Shapes twisted and coiled around the wall that circumscribed the courtyard, but always on the other side, as though the pictograms upon the walls somehow prevented them from passing. It was then that Shahleah noticed that even her own shadow had abandoned her. She shivered deliciously.

All around the courtyard, seeing that there was nothing for them here, her warriors dropped to their knees in lamentation. Some celebrated, revelling in the sensation of denial.

‘Be alert,’ she hissed, eyes on the shadows and the walls that held them back. She had the uncanny sense that they were not alone.

There was a throb in her temple, a flex in the penumbral skein, and a section of the boundary wall appeared to turn semi-molten and bulge as though pushed at from the other side. A wave of starlight breached the weakened barrier and a hulking saurian warrior, clad in bone and silver plate and wielding a feathered spear, stepped through.

The wall sealed seamlessly behind it in a snap of interlocking brass. At the same moment, a cold-blooded consciousness pressed its way into hers. There were no words, just pictures and sensations, a string of hieroglyphs etched in brilliant, brilliant pain into her mind. She saw searing light, tiered ziggurats of gold peopled by feathered priests, their servants, and their warrior cohorts. She felt isolation. Abandonment. Silent suffering. A final icon appeared. Two symbols, one of sun, one of moon, that she intuitively put together into a name.

Eclipse.

She snapped out of the communion with a stumble and slid her blade from its scabbard. Two-score more of these seraphon had emerged from the wall at intervals around them. Surrounded. With gut-wrenching roars, the glittering saurus warriors lumbered into a charge that crushed the grieving Seekers before them.

Cruciax turned with a cry and sprinted to meet the nearest saurian. Hel’ein called for her warriors. Prefuria did both with the hum of her pincer-barbed spear.

Shahleah ignored them. She had marked their leader, as he had marked her.

Amongst the first to have emerged, he was a head taller than his warriors, as they were a head taller than her. His scales were a pale, time-worn grey. Heavy plates of platinum inscribed with the phases of the moon encased his powerful body. The mace in his huge, sledgehammer fist was silver with spikes radiating from it like coronal filaments.

Eclipse, too, was beautiful in his way.

The ancient saurus built up speed as he charged, barging down first one of Cruciax’s warriors, then another, and then Cruciax himself, beaten aside like a leaf against the armoured prow of a ship as the oldblood swept up his mace. Only once Cruciax was down, his turn expended, did Shahleah act.

The saurus was still several sword-lengths away as she struck down with her blade and spoke the word to awaken its lingering daemonic essence. A pink ribbon of energy tongued forwards. Eclipse dropped a shoulder and raised an arm, his war-plate clearly hardened against magic in some way as the lash splattered against his vambrace.

It affected him though, even if only slightly, the potent wards almost overcome by the inimicality of the sensations being forced on his cold-blooded body.

‘It is a daily torment, is it not, to be left alone?’ she said, as she drew up her sword, taking the last thunderous second to set herself to receive the charge.

With a roar of rage the silver-clad juggernaut slammed into her. For a moment, it felt as if the layers of her armour had been pressed together and driven into her chest like a hammer. She felt her feet leave the ground. For a second she flew. She landed on tiptoes, already back-pedalling, bleeding off the unwanted momentum. She whipped up her sword and smiled.

‘You must take pleasure where you find it.’

The heat taken out of his attack, Eclipse launched his mace at her instead, a swing that would have taken her head had she not been deft enough to step away and nudge it over. She turned with the parry and countered. Her blade scratched along the outside of the seraphon’s vambrace. Eclipse elbowed it contemptuously aside and delivered a punch in the mouth that sent her staggering backwards with a red smile.

She felt giddy, as though if she were killed now, she might just float away. Then, maybe, she would find Him. Her heart beat so hard she could barely hear.

The saurus came on with an overhead sweep intended to turn her into paste. She angled her blade across her shoulder and knocked the blow aside, creating the space to land a blow of her own. Her free hand made a lurid series of gestures as she punched the saurus’ armoured gut.

The aethyr blast erupted against Eclipse’s belly, lifted him off the ground and hurled him back. He smashed into the Astrosanct, the ancient apparatus buckling under his enormous mass and pinning him in place. Eclipse gave a roar of frustration, and the other saurus echoed it. Throwing caution aside, they hurled themselves at the remaining Seekers with an uncaring, empty fury.

They fought more like the Seekers themselves.

Shahleah strode towards the trapped oldblood as his warriors were cut down by blade and chain, dying in bursts of light. He struggled and bellowed, but the bent metal plating held him fast. Cruciax stumbled over to join Shaleah, wiping blood off his face and carrying what appeared to be a broken shoulder to add to his ruptured lung and dozen-or-so other slights. He eyed the struggling saurus with the same self-destructive hunger she saw in them all. His voice broke as he turned to her.

‘It is over. How much must we suffer for Him before He will stop denying us?’

Shahleah shrugged and beheaded the still-defiant Eclipse with a sweep of her blade. Starlight fell for the final time on this holy place, forgotten by its gods, as his corpse dissipated wispily into the sky.

Then, as ever

‘Which brings us to what we want.’

The Oracle drew himself up until he sat almost upright, down-curved nose and up-curved chin pincering the fire’s non-light like a scaly blue claw. ‘What I want. We will be the first to converse with Slaanesh when you find him.’

‘No,’ said Shahleah, firmly, without wanting or needing to explain why.

‘No,’ growled Cruciax at almost the exact same time.

Prefuria tightened her grip on her spear until it squeaked, and from beside her, a moment later, the fragile echo, ‘No.’

‘Can you speak with the shadow?’ asked the Oracle. ‘Have you spent two full ages of this world learning their secret ways? I would ask them the answer, but this is no secret knowledge and I fear that they would laugh.’ He hissed. ‘I despise their laughter.’ He snapped his hooded gaze to where Cruciax moved towards him around the edge of the cave wall. ‘Do not think me alone, Seeker. Do not think me vulnerable. I am not like you. I am never alone.’

‘No,’ Hel’ein repeated softly, unnoticed.

‘Try me.’ Cruciax’s chain was garrotte-wire tight. ‘Your pain or mine, do you think I care?’

‘I care,’ said Shahleah. ‘The decision is mine.’

Cruciax bared his bloody gums and snarled at her from the corner of his mouth. ‘You do not find the Prince of Pain by looking. He does not lie in some temple waiting to be found. He must be invoked. He must be appeased.’ His eyes appeared to expand as his neck took the tension in his chain. Punishment spikes bit into his swelling musculature until its powerful definition was made red with blood. The metal links groaned one against the next. ‘Your pain or mine, Tzeentchian.’

For a moment, the Oracle said nothing. The air grew cold. Shahleah felt a throbbing in her temple, and frost began to pick along the grime crusting her plate. Vapour billowed from Cruciax’s mouth.

‘What say you, Jago: our pain…’ The fire set in front of him shivered and began to mutate, taking on the shape of something spine-tailed and avian, like a one-winged raven. ‘Or his?’

The shadow familiar flashed across the room like an arrow. Cruciax swung at it but it took him under the chest, picked him up and pushed him back against the wall. He struggled and cursed, but the shadow pinned him there. The Oracle cackled.

‘No!’

Shahleah turned towards the scream. Hel’ein was already halfway across the cave. By the time the Oracle had turned as well, the woman had her swords drawn.

‘He is my flesh, my passion,’ she said. ‘He is my Dark Prince. He will not heed callow words.’

The Oracle choked and brought up a scaled hand. ‘Changer, here my pr–’

Hel’ein cut it off at the wrist, then impaled him through the heart with the follow-through of her other blade. ‘No,’ she hissed, and stabbed him again in the belly, lifting him off the ground. ‘No.’ She withdrew both blades and he fell in a heap. He gurgled wetly, smearing the stump of his arm on the ground, and Hel’ein dropped down to straddle him, fending off his hand and raising her swords. ‘No. No. No.’

‘Wait,’ wheezed Cruciax. The tattooed man staggered towards them. Bits of residual shadow clung to him and claw-marks hatched the unarmoured quarters of his torso. He brandished his chain. His hands were so slippery with his own blood that he had it wrapped around both fists to keep it held. ‘Let him suffer.’

Shahleah took a deep breath and quietly sheathed her sword.

‘Are you going to stop them?’ spoke Prefuria haltingly, her voice deep and imperfect.

‘The game will play as it plays. It has happened, and we will face what consequences we must.’

‘And what if he is right? What if we need him to find Slaanesh’s shadow?’

A slow and pleasant smile spread across the Godless’ face as she gave the question due consideration. ‘Then we will keep on looking.’

The Sacrifice

Graeme Lyon

The vampire screamed as the dagger struck home.

Arioso chanted as he pulled the weapon out of the creature’s flesh and brought it down again. Nine times he cut, each slice carving part of an arcane sigil into the vampire’s chest. Dark blood slowly welled up from the wounds, filling the cramped chamber with a rich coppery smell.

‘You will regret this,’ the vampire croaked. Arioso ignored it and continued chanting, the syllables of power echoing around the ancient fane.

‘Your gods have no place in these lands,’ it continued quietly. ‘The only master of Shyish is Nagash.’

‘Nagash,’ repeated Kaemria, Arioso’s acolyte. ‘An old power, long since defeated. The Everchosen destroyed your master long ago.’

Arioso glared at Kaemria and she quieted. He made the last cut in the vampire’s chest and ended his chant. He looked down at his victim. It resembled a human, though its features were twisted and bestial. It lay on a stone slab, naked. Its arms and legs had been broken to prevent any escape attempt, and its pathetic form lay nearly still, other than involuntary twitches of pain. Even now, as it faced its own destruction, it sneered at the Chaos champion.

‘What have you to say, fool?’ it asked. ‘Do you believe that you can defy my master’s will here, in his realm? In a temple dedicated to him?’

Arioso considered the question. Nagash was one of the gods of myth, a being whose power had been broken alongside that of Sigmar, Alarielle and the rest of their ridiculous pantheon. The Mortal Realms no longer belonged to them. They belonged to Chaos, and so did this temple. The atrocities he and his warband had committed here in Tzeentch’s name had seen to that.

This was the last of many sacrifices – eighty-one to be precise – dedicated to the Changer of Ways in this place. The others had been the vampire’s servants, debased flesh-eaters, and the survivors of the battle Arioso had won days before. Each of the victims had been killed in a slightly different way, each sacrifice used to dedicate this place to Tzeentch in preparation for this moment.

Did Arioso truly believe that this was going to work?

‘Yes,’ he said, and brought the dagger down into the vampire’s heart.

‘In the name of the Changer of Ways,’ he intoned. ‘By the nine paths to knowledge, the nine mazes of mind and the nine forms of wisdom, I invoke the creatures of the Outer Dark. Nine times nine souls have I delivered to Thee, Lord Tzeentch. In return, one boon would I ask. Give me knowledge. Show me my path. Tell me my destiny. Send Your servants to light my way.’

A sudden wind ruffled Arioso’s robes and he heard Kaemria gasp. The light in the chamber, dim as it was, vanished, and Arioso was plunged into a darkness greater than he had ever experienced, a darkness that was not merely the absence of light, but its opposite. He could feel a presence within the darkness, like a creature with many eyes viewing him from a thousand angles at once. It was as if the universe itself was looking inside him, laying his soul bare and devouring all his secrets. He wanted to scream, to cry, to curl up in a ball and soil himself.

He would not.

‘I am Arioso of the Midnight Sages,’ he said, each word an effort. ‘I am a child of the Benighted Enclaves. I was born and raised in darkness, and I fear it not. My will is inviolable. I have summoned thee, and thou wilt do my bidding, daemon!’

He forced his will out and the darkness receded, replaced with a sphere of blinding light. Something was at its heart, but he could gaze at it for only a moment before he was forced to look away.

‘Very well, mortal,’ said a voice. It was ancient and otherworldly, and it echoed strangely through the fane, as though the echoes came before the words. ‘You have performed the correct rites, and your will is strong. Your soul will remain your own, and I will grant you the boon you seek.’

A thrill ran through Arioso. ‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘Show me my destiny, daemon. Show me the dark deeds I am to perform in Tzeentch’s name.’

Visions filled his mind. An army stretched across a valley of black volcanic rock, littered with great statues, their features worn away by time. Vast mountains stretched into a blood-red sky, their peaks disappearing into turquoise clouds that partly obscured a moon in the shape of a leering skull. Banners fluttered in a light breeze, each one marked with the twisting sigil of the Changer of Ways and the other Ruinous Powers. The army was the largest the champion had ever seen, tens of thousands of warriors… and it was his.

Arioso was at the army’s head, held aloft by a floating disc, golden and bladed. He was clad in robes of many colours over shining golden armour, and he held a flaming halberd in both hands. He gestured with it and his army surged forwards, heavily armoured warriors and bare-chested marauders all chanting his name as they charged.

The vision changed, and Arioso saw the enemy, a vast horde of green-skinned savages, outnumbering even the Tzeentch champion’s army. They wore furs and skins, and carried stone clubs and crude spears. Some hefted huge wooden bows, and volleys of arrows sped towards Arioso’s charging army. The savage war-chant of the orruks drowned out the Chaos host.

‘There are so many…’ Arioso breathed. ‘What is this, daemon? Are you showing me how I die?’

The daemon’s mocking laughter filled his mind. ‘No, Arioso,’ it said. ‘This is not your death, but your apotheosis. In the Valley of Fallen Gods, your army will be broken but you will pass beyond life and death. You will mix the ashes of the sacrificed with the blood of the ever-living and receive a reward beyond your imagination. You will become eternal, Arioso of the Midnight Sages.’

A thrill passed through Arioso. Eternal life. The power he could gather. The loss of an army would be nothing compared to what he would gain.

‘Where will I find this Valley of Fallen Gods?’ he asked.

‘It lies within the borders of Shyish,’ the daemon said. ‘Follow the signs that will be laid before you, and you will come to the place you seek, though the road will be long and arduous, and your trials many.’

‘And the greenskins?’

‘Watch…’ said the daemon.

Arioso watched. Time lost all meaning as he watched the battle unfold. He saw the strategy behind the orruk assault, the savagery of the primitive beasts belying the keen tactical mind that commanded them. As he watched the flow of the battle, he memorised every detail, knowing that it would be to his advantage when this vision became reality.

At the height of the battle, he saw his own shimmering form descend upon the orruk leader. He focussed on the huge warlord, who was riding a creature that resembled a great drake, long-bodied and with a pot belly. It had thick scales protecting its carapace, and great horns emerged from its head, above eyes that glittered malignly. Nestled between its swept-back wings was the orruk leader. He was thickly muscled and carried an axe the size of Arioso, which looked carved from a single immense bone. The greenskin issued a challenge in its guttural tongue, and…

…the vision faded. Reality returned. Arioso stood once more in the small chamber of the temple, and the stench of blood filled his nostrils again. The flickering light still danced at the heart of the chamber, even brighter than before.

‘What happens next, daemon? I must know how to defeat the creature,’ he demanded.

‘You have been shown what you asked, Midnight Sage. Now release me.’

‘No. You will show me more.’

The light flared, and the daemon’s voice grew to a deafening boom.

‘Release me, mortal, or I shall strip the living flesh from your bones and devour your soul, and destiny be damned.’

Arioso hesitated. Could the bound daemon do what it threatened?

‘It’s not worth the risk,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I release thee, daemon,’ he intoned. ‘By the ninety-nine words of power inscribed on the scrolls of the Midnight Sages, I send thee back to the outer dark.’

‘We shall speak again, Arioso,’ the daemon’s voice whispered.

The light flared again, momentarily blinding Arioso. Then all was dark, and silent.

‘M… master,’ said a voice eventually. Kaemria. ‘What was that?’

‘What did you see, my acolyte?’ he asked her.

‘A blinding light, my lord. I heard a voice, offering me power and secrets, if I…’ she trailed off.

‘If you betrayed me?’ Arioso asked.

‘Yes, master. But I would never–’

‘No, and you never shall,’ said Arioso, pulling the dagger from her chest. She fell backwards, a stain of bright red spreading across the brilliant blue of her robes.

He looked back to the altar on which the vampire had been sacrificed. The creature’s body was gone, leaving only a vaguely man-shaped pile of ashes.

‘The ashes of the sacrificed,’ Arioso mused. Drawing an empty vial from his robes, he gathered the ashes. He was going to need them.

It took nine years.

Nine years of searching the length and breadth of Shyish for the Valley of Fallen Gods.

Nine years of gathering warriors to his banner with promises of glorious battle.

Nine years of delivering on those promises.

There were battles beyond count, against all the foes that the Realm of Death could provide. Half-mad necromancers and their shambling hordes of zombies fell like wheat before the scythe of Arioso’s army. Bloodthirsty vampires with servants both human and undead were put to the sword and magical flame. Vast forces of bleached skeletons, animated by dark powers and wearing the raiment of long-dead cultures, were cut down, the bones broken to stop them rising again.

It was not only the walking dead who stood in Arioso’s way. As was ever the case, the forces of Chaos, in their victory, turned upon one another, for sport or glory in the eyes of the gods. His army clashed with servants of the other great powers, and even other followers of the Changer, eager to prove themselves against the legend that Arioso was becoming.

As he crossed the Realm of Death, he gained power such as he had never imagined. On a mountaintop on the fringes of reality, he had engaged in a magical duel with a daemon, which ended when he bound it to his service in the form of a gleaming golden disc like the one in his vision. Beneath the Plains of Frozen Breath, in the treasure vaults of an abandoned duardin stronghold, he found a halberd that burst into golden flame at his touch and consumed the souls of those it killed. At the heart of the Crimson Labyrinth, he had claimed a suit of golden armour from its previous owner. From horned helm to rune-marked buckler, it had protected him against the mightiest of heroes and most devious of traps.

He had become known as the Golden King, and warriors flocked to his banner, servants of not just Tzeentch, but all the Dark Gods. Even the verminous ratmen followed him, and their knowledge of the secret ways beneath the worlds had helped the host more times than Arioso could count.

In all that time, no one had known the location of the Valley of Fallen Gods. All Arioso’s attempts to summon the daemon once more had failed. In the end, it was the God-King Sigmar who pointed him in the right direction, in an odd way. In the final year of his quest, a storm had broken. A tempest raged in the skies above Shyish, and with it came a new enemy.

The Stormcast Eternals were something… different. They were an unstoppable force, sent to the Mortal Realms to liberate them from Chaos. Those in Shyish seemed to be on a mission, but that didn’t stop them from attacking Arioso’s army on sight, and they could never be fully defeated.

On their first encounter, Arioso had killed the leader of the army they fought, a towering warrior in turquoise armour who rode a great lightning-spitting drake. The figure had dissolved into light when his head and body parted company, and months later, he had returned, nearly killing Arioso in a duel high above a bottomless canyon. Arioso had survived only by fleeing, and in his flight, he had inadvertently found his goal, recognising the mountains from his vision.

So, at last, he came to the Valley of Fallen Kings. His army filled the valley, rank upon serried rank of Chaos warriors next to baying hordes of beastkin and warbands of hundreds of eager mortals. Bloodbound servants of Khorne rubbed shoulders with pox-ridden Rotbringers, and hunched skaven marched next to warriors dedicated to the Changer, clad in gold-coloured armour in imitation of Arioso’s own.

They chanted his name, ten thousand voices raised in worship of him. He was the next best thing to a god, and with the power that would be his when the battle was won, he could challenge the gods themselves.

At his command, the army began to march. In the distance, the greenskin horde roared and surged forward. Arioso climbed into the sky and looked down upon the battlefield as the vanguard of the armies met. The savage orruks crashed like a wave against the cliff of Arioso’s Chosen. The smaller creatures – grots – were the first to hit the enemy. Arioso recognised that the greenskin commander was using them to test the mettle of his foe.

Movement from the walls of the valley caught his eye, and Arioso turned to see gigantic spiders, hundreds of them, crawling down the mountainside and into the flank of his force, where the skaven lurked. The cowardly ratmen broke in the face of this unexpected threat, and the spider-riding grots pushed forward. Arioso swept down towards them. As he did, he painted mystical symbols in the air and muttered ancient syllables under his breath.

Reality split, and a host of daemons came forth. Multi-hued screamers swept in to surround Arioso, while gibbering horrors and fire-spewing flamers fell upon the unsuspecting spider-riders, driving them back. A shadow loomed over them as they fled, and a gigantic spider, its back crawling with grots holding on for dear life, leapt from the mountainside into the midst of the daemons.

The arachnarok tore daemons apart with its immense legs, and the grots jabbed with spears and fired crude bows. The daemons were implacable, but they were few, and the sheer size of the arachnarok took its toll. Arioso gestured, and the screamers peeled away, swooping down into the beast’s flank, their lamprey-like jaws taking hold and biting deep into the creature’s flesh.

It squealed and reared up, and Arioso struck, diving down and driving his blazing halberd into the arachnarok’s exposed belly. It burst into flames, and grots jumped from its back, also ablaze. The massive creature thrashed and shook, and was eventually still.

Arioso turned to survey the battle. His forces continued to push on. A wing of knights had charged into a knot of spear-carrying orruks and were pushing through towards the chieftain on his immense reptilian steed. Arioso followed them.

‘If I kill the leader, victory will be ours,’ he told his golden disc, and it sped up in response, as eager to engage the foe as he was.

And so it was that at the heart of the battle, the Golden King and the orruk warboss fought. It was a duel that lived on in legend long after the battle was won, the survivors of Arioso’s army carrying tales of it across the Realm of Death and beyond.

Arioso swept down on the orruk’s steed, halberd raised to strike. He was ready for the orruk to parry his blow, or attempt to hit him first with his huge axe. Instead, the warboss reached up and grabbed Arioso’s disc mount, pulling it from the air. Arioso fell and rolled, pulling himself to his feet in time to see the orruk throwing the disc into a mob of rampaging greenskins who stabbed at it with their crude spears. He turned his attention back to the warboss, who gestured to him and spoke in his primitive tongue. Arioso couldn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear. The creature leered at him and laughed, and Arioso nodded. Gripping his halberd in one hand, he slipped his buckler over his left forearm and leapt onto the head of the orruk’s mount. It thrashed and bucked, but Arioso stabbed his halberd down through the bony plates that covered its skull. The magical weapon pushed through chitin, flesh, bone and brain. The creature reared up, and the orruk chieftain was thrown from its back. He hit the ground and rolled, but Arioso didn’t see any more of him as he held on to the haft of his halberd, riding out the winged reptile’s death throes.

When it finally stilled, Arioso pulled his halberd free and turned, looking for the warboss. He found himself enclosed in a circle of savage greenskins, and with him, their leader. Close up, he was one of the largest beasts Arioso had ever seen, the muscles of his arms the size of the Chaos champion’s torso. The orruk stank of blood and sweat and savagery. It roared something at Arioso and battered one huge meaty fist against its chest.

‘I have no idea what you said, but assuming it’s a challenge, let’s finish this,’ Arioso replied, sending a surge of magical power into his halberd. It blazed with flame, and the orruk laughed. Faster than Arioso would have believed possible, the greenskin stepped forward and brought his huge axe down in an overhead blow that could have split an ogor in half. Arioso sidestepped it and lashed out with his halberd, which glanced off the orruk’s thick hide. The creature swung the axe in a scything motion, and Arioso ducked below, jabbing the halberd at the orruk’s midriff. It slid home, and stuck. The orruk jerked back, and the halberd was pulled from Arioso’s hands, the flames playing around it guttering out. He fell to his feet, and suddenly the axe was coming down at him. He rolled to the side and pulled himself up, glancing around for a weapon as the orruk charged towards him.

The greenskin roared again, hefting his axe. He swung around, and the haft of Arioso’s halberd, still embedded in the orruk’s belly, knocked into the sorcerer. He grabbed it, and it burst into flame again. The warboss reared back, roaring in pain, and Arioso saw his chance. He planted his feet firmly on the ground and pushed. The burning halberd burst from the orruk’s back, and the brute fell to his knees, dropping the axe. With a heave, Arioso pulled the halberd back out of the gaping wound in the warlord’s stomach and swung at his neck. The orruk’s head hit the ground.

From that point, the battle was all but over. A mob of orruks charged at Arioso, bent on revenge or proving themselves worthy to succeed their fallen leader, but none could match him, and eventually, the Chaos forces caught up with their master and drove the orruks back, breaking the horde and sending them fleeing, to be cut down like the animals they were.

In the aftermath, Arioso sent scouts to find what was at the valley’s other end. They came back with reports of a temple carved into the mountainside, decorated with arcane sigils and friezes of ancient warriors. After setting a guard to watch for any sign of the orruks returning, Arioso walked to the temple, a group of his Chosen around him, and entered it alone.

It was dark, as black as night, and the only illumination came from the flames of Arioso’s halberd. He walked through the structure, the only sound the echoing of his footsteps on the stone. At length, he found a door carved with an image of a chalice, and rising from it a creature of darkness, a nimbus of power playing about it.

He pushed at the door and it opened easily to his touch. Stepping through, he saw a simple altar, on which sat a chalice of black metal. The stink of blood hit him, and he smiled.

‘The blood of the ever-living…’ he murmured. From his robes, he retrieved a small vial. ‘I have kept you safe for nine long years,’ he said. ‘At last, the time has come. My apotheosis. From this day onwards, I will be changed. Immortal. My power will be beyond doubt.’

He pulled the stopper from the vial and held it above the chalice. His hand was shaking.

‘It’s funny. I feel like I should be saying something profound right now, but nothing comes to mind.’

He poured the ashes into the chalice.

For a moment, nothing happened, and then a cloud of blood began to coalesce. It rose up from the black chalice and formed into the outline of a man. Tissue began to grow around it, forming bones, capillaries and veins, then muscles, flesh and deathly pale skin. Black robes came into being around the body, and features grew on its face. Hideous, bestial features, yet with a hint of humanity. It stretched, with the crack of bones, and the creature smiled, revealing sharp white teeth.

‘I told you that you would regret sacrificing me,’ the vampire croaked.

Arioso was speechless, and paralysed by disbelief.

‘Were you expecting something else?’ the vampire asked, its voice mocking. ‘Perhaps you expected to become… eternal, Arioso of the Midnight Sages.’ The vampire’s voice changed on those last words, perfectly matching the voice from the cavern so many years before.

‘How…?’ Arioso managed, his tone incredulous. The vampire laughed.

‘I warned you, little conjurer. The Dark Gods have no power in Shyish. This is Nagash’s realm, and both life and death obey his commands, and his alone.’

‘Nagash is a dead god!’ Arioso screamed, panic rising in him. He looked for a way out, but darkness filled the chamber now, and his mind reeled from the vampire’s revelations and terror. ‘A relic from an age of myth!’

‘What is death to the lord of the underworlds?’ asked the vampire. ‘Nagash has returned from death a hundred times. Even now, he sits on his throne beneath the world and awaits the time when he will once more stretch out his hand and claim what is his.’ The vampire smiled again. ‘But you will do him for now.’

The vampire leapt, a sword appearing from nowhere in its hand. Numbly, Arioso parried the blow and swung his halberd in response. The vampire dodged and struck again, catching him a glancing blow on one leg.

‘How did you do this?’ he asked. ‘Why send me on this quest? Why here?’ Everything he had done, nine years of questing and conflict… It was for this?

The vampire shrugged and pressed forward with a flurry of blows that Arioso was hard-pressed to fend off. ‘Fun, maybe,’ it replied. ‘It was certainly the fastest way for me to return from death. The chalice contained my own blood. Mixing my ashes with it brought me back from beyond the veil. On my own, it would have taken decades or longer. I will confess though, that I thought you would find this place a little quicker.’ The vampire chuckled and stepped back.

Arioso screamed, a wordless articulation of his rage, and swung his halberd wildly. Before he knew what was happening, it was pulled from his grasp and he was in the vampire’s grip. The creature ripped the helmet from Arioso’s head and gripped his neck.

‘You will get what you were promised, Arioso of the Midnight Sages,’ he whispered. ‘Eternal life will be yours. Or, at least, eternal existence.’

The vampire started to chant in a language Arioso didn’t recognise, though he knew the cadence of a spell when he heard one. He tried to speak, but the vampire’s grip on his throat tightened and the words were choked to nothingness.

The spell ended, and Arioso’s vision began to fail. He realised that he couldn’t draw a breath and panic seized him.

‘Remember,’ the vampire whispered, ‘this was your own doing. Your thirst for power and your arrogance caused this. Such will always be the fate of your kind, for your gods care not whether you live or die. You are but pawns in their game. My god lives in every one of his servants. Nagash is the dead, and the dead are Nagash. You will see that soon, at least for a moment. You will serve me, and you will serve him. You will serve us forever, Arioso…’

Then there was only darkness and echoing laughter, and the chill of the grave.

Lord of the Cosmic Gate

Gav Thorpe

‘And unto the ninth positional lies the gradient of the damned, invested by the decayed septet of the incongruent ratio…’ muttered Rikjard of the Many Numbers. He consulted his grimoire of archaic formulae, flicking through the tattered pages with fingers tipped with bird talons. Though his claws made it easier to gouge the faces from the foes of all-blessed Tzeentch, the clarity of Rikjard’s notations had suffered since the All-seeing Master had seen fit to gift him with such digits. ‘Ah, here it is, with the Conglomerations of Aesthetics. Aelf-lore, ripped from the mind of their great calculist himself, Narruthias of Telemor.’

Beside him, its head no higher than his waist, Rikjard’s thautomaton familiar buzzed and clicked. The lensed eyes looking up at him reflected a moon-round face and scalp feathered in a rainbow of colours. Innards composed of tiny, ratcheted wheels whirred as the thautomaton raised its four dagger-tipped arms and tipped its head to one side. Black sparks of corrupted energy flashed along wire-veins and sparkled on the edges of its serrated killblades.

‘Yes, soon enough,’ Rikjard told his artificial companion. ‘The field of battle awaits.’

The sleeve of his robe slid back as he raised a hand to encompass their surrounds, the material like fish scales, tinkling gently with the movement. His gesture swept across a landscape of polygonal hills and valleys, curving upwards without a horizon to form the inner surface of a sphere. At the centre, far above his head, eight small stars revolved around each other in complex orbits. If he could but align them he would open the Cosmic Gate, the fabled Panoramicon that led into the heart of Tzeentch’s domain.

Walls and towers of many-coloured crystal littered the lands of the Thousand Portals, refracting, reflecting and channelling the light of the Chaos suns to create bridges of rainbows, shadow-gates and half-seen castles of chromatic power.

In the far distance, if it could be called such in a self-enclosed globe of reality, another shape lingered on the edge of vision – an immense vista of endless curtain walls and bastions, glass-sided towers and crystalline monoliths. The Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch, abode of the Great Architect itself, to which the Thousand Portals had once been a mere outer bastion.

Rikjard stepped to one side, just a few paces, but his view changed completely in those steps. The juxtaposition of light and dark, the play of illumination through the prismatic landscape shifted everything, creating forests of ruby-leaved trees and lakes of shimmering gold fed by a river that frothed over angular rocks of marble-like stone. The vision beyond changed also, revealing a new facade of the Crystal Labyrinth that lay beyond the Halosphere – the mystical boundary that both powered and imprisoned the energies of the Thousand Portals.

‘Beautiful…’ murmured Rikjard. The thautomaton juddered slightly, its part-mechanical, part-magical brain unable to process the concept.

With a simple incantation, Rikjard drew forth his army from where they waited in the Cascading Rocks in the realm of Chamon. The tramp of many feet and the jingle of war harnesses accompanied their arrival. Knights riding steeds armoured in shimmering silver scales led the vanguard, their lances tipped with nine-tailed pennants in red and purple. They wore all-enclosing plate, black as granite, decorated with curlicues of gold and studded with gems that glowed with inner fire. Full helms, topped with crests in the shapes of dragonets-rampant and rearing serpents, hid their faces, the gleam of red and blue lighting the shadows within their visors.

The heavy cavalry wheeled as a single regiment towards Rikjard, while the mounted warriors behind broke into smaller groups, fanning out across the ridgeline and into the steep-sided valley in front. They wore brightly patterned tunics strengthened with hexagonal scales or tight-ringed mail. Their horses snorted vapour in the cold of the Thousand Portals, leaving trails of mist in their wake.

The infantry came next, a seemingly unending line of men and women dedicated to Tzeentch. Clad in myriad styles of armour and costume, they were drawn from across seventeen regions of the Realm of Shadow and the Realm of Metal. The homes they had left behind were now no more than blasted wildernesses in the wake of Rikjard’s infernal crusade. Some were hulking fighters wholly devoted to the service of the Great Architect, but many others were tribal warriors sworn to Tzeentch only by their allegiance to Rikjard.

With them came beasts, some nearly recognisable, others monstrously mutated caricatures of their former bodies. Strange things squawked and lumbered, flapped and shrieked before the goads and whips of beastmasters, flanked by the rumbling scythed wheels of chariots whose drivers wore masks fashioned in the likeness of golden hawks.

Every fighter, whether smooth-limbed, armoured behemoth or twisted spawn, was bound in loyalty to Rikjard. Upon their brows or set into their chests, each being sworn to Tzeentch was marked by a fist-sized gem, many-faceted, glinting with every colour of the spectrum. Each stone emitted a wisp of black smoke, as though it still seared the flesh with which it had been magically fused. Legend from Rikjard’s birthplace, the Chasms of the Endless Pyre, said that the gems were blood drops from the cosmic serpent itself, shed when Tzeentch duelled with the titanic star-beast. Each one turned into a stone when it fell into the Mortal Realms, and they were scattered far and wide through time and space. They were both reward and threat, granting the boon of Tzeentch to the bearer, yet bidding them to obey the will of the Great Architect’s chosen lord.

To prove his dedication to the Ever-Changing Overlord, Rikjard had laboured for half a lifetime. Recovering so many drakestones from the ashes of his homeland had been an arduous task, for which he had been rewarded with Tzeentch’s mark. Yet this task had been just the first of many near-impossible feats Rikjard had achieved to earn his current status.

Rikjard did not like the term ‘minions’ – it demeaned the great conquests and accomplishments of his subordinates – but in truth that was their role. Many thought they might accompany him through the veil of the Halosphere and into the Night of Eternal Knowledge, but such belief was a delusion – one that Rikjard had not spent any effort to dispel, it was true.

Only one could make that journey. The mystical formulae were singularly specific in that respect. All calculations returned with a value of one – no more, no less, no fraction or multiple thereof.

And Rikjard would stand in that place and look upon the wonder of all the realms and know the last piece of the Eternal Equation set forth by Tzeentch to bind the universe together. With such power, Rikjard believed even Archaon and his possession of the Allpoints would be rendered inconsequential.

‘We risk much,’ Rikjard told his uncomprehending mechanical bodyguard. ‘The gods themselves have elevated the Everchosen above us. They have tried already to thwart my ambition, but their resistance only strengthens me, for is not all ambition the sweetmeat of glorious Tzeentch? To climb above Archaon is to stand directly in the gaze of the Great Powers. My patron, my saviour, cosmic Tzeentch shall be preeminent, all others laid to slavery before the all-consuming will of the Ultimate Arbiter, and I shall be the Right Hand of Illuminated Destiny.’

A crackle of flames and a flicker of colourful shadows betrayed the presence of another creature arriving at Rikjard’s shoulder. He did not turn immediately, but continued to admire the view as the glorious construct-world resolved into new forms with the slightest tilt of the head or sway of the body.

‘How do you see it? Is it as magnificent to your daemon eyes?’ he asked, finally glancing back at Tzarathoth, the Tzeentchian herald that commanded Rikjard’s immortal allies. It was almost humanoid in appearance, an ever-shifting form of multicoloured fire and wreathing magical vortices. When the daemon replied, its voice sounded like a distant shriek echoing through a small space.

‘It is anathema to us,’ said Tzarathoth. ‘The reviled star-crawlers have broken it. When they took the Thousand Portals from beneath the gaze of All-Seeing Tzeentch they cursed it, damned it to this perpetual darkness of unillumination. This is not the light of the Universal Inconstant, but the burning of the stars of benighted Azyr.’

‘When the Panoramicon is open, all shall fall beneath the gaze of the Great Changer once more,’ said Rikjard. He consulted a different page in the Metamathicron. ‘According to my Theory of Interstability, declining Azyr and ascendant Chamon with a partial revealing of Ghur is the perfect moment to strike. When the Celestial constellations are dispersed, their power will be weakened and the Starmasters will be sluggish and slow to respond.’

Blinking slit-pupil eyes, Rikjard surveyed the landscape with a more dispassionate gaze. He calculated the inclines and vectors of the converging light rays, triangulating the intersections in a nine-dimensional mystical framework. The Cosmic Gate was no simple realmgate; it was not merely a bridge between two locations. It was a hallway that led between any realm, and into the domains of almighty Tzeentch. Like its godly creator, it was ever-changing – by the time one knew the direction from which it might be entered, its orientation had changed. The Eternal Equation held the answer to predicting the infinitely complex sequence required to ensnare the energies of the Halosphere and force open the Cosmic Gate.

‘There! From that focal point I can make the breach.’ Rikjard indicated a shimmering hill of sapphire above them and to the right, topped by a seven-walled keep. He smiled at Tzarathoth. ‘Summon your daemonic legion – we march to glory!’

The herald nodded, the black orbs of its eyes moving from the sorcerer to the objective. A wisp of flame parted in a grotesque approximation of a grin.

‘Praise Tzeentch!’ Tzarathoth raised its incorporeal arms in supplication, its voice becoming an ululating cry that grated on Rikjard’s hearing and throbbed in his gut. The air around the daemon moved like a glitter of particles that coalesced around its form, first manifesting into a long staff of fire in its upraised hands and then cladding its body in sliding plates of daemonic armour with surfaces that glistened like red oil. It rose into the air and beneath its feet emerged a great disc edged with curving blades and jutting spines. It bore Tzarathoth into the sky on a trail of sparkling fire.

Where the sparks fell, the ground set alight, each flame growing into a new form, reality splitting with a crackle and hiss with each arrival. The first to break through into the Thousand Portals were more heralds – on foot, riding upon their discs, or carried through the air on flaming chariots pulled by howling sky-sharks. These Tzeentchian champions from the Silvered Sands added their calls to those of Tzarathoth, bringing forth daemons in their hundreds, in every manner and form that Rikjard had ever known, and several more he had never before catalogued.

Ranting and shrieking, burning figures and swooping predators ripped through the boundaries between realms. Arcane conjurations spilled across the sky in streamers of multi-coloured flame while pink and blue droplets fell in fiery rain, every Tzeentch-blessed globule bringing forth a new cackling horror.

Rikjard did not pay much attention to the unfolding daemonic spectacle. In his mind he reconfigured his calculations with each new appearance. He tracked and assimilated the Chaotic legion’s multitudinous warriors, estimating the impact of so much magic on the diverging mystical currents that swirled around the Thousand Portals, finessing his predictions.

‘It’s all a matter of mass, balance and trajectory,’ he explained to the thautomaton. ‘Actions and reactions. A tipping point. When all is in motion, that will be the key that unlocks the Cosmic Gate.’

The daemons were gathering about their heralds, moving effortlessly across the ever-shifting landscape in a purple, pink and blue tide. Rikjard’s army was still streaming through from beyond, but he could delay the advance no longer. The Star-spawned Ones would wake soon, and he had to be in position to take advantage of their response.

Lifting a clawed hand, he waved his mortal army forward. Ten thousand jewels glittered like stars as his mental command throbbed into the minds of his followers. Drums rolled, horns blared and trumpets sounded the advance.

Rikjard felt the change before he saw or heard anything. His host had crossed less than a quarter of the distance to the focal point where he would later be able to align the facets of the Panoramicon. The gibbering and mewling of the daemons, the crunch of boots and rattle of armour hid the subtle ripples spreading through the magic-saturated air of the Thousand Portals. He sensed the disturbance as a hundred tiny perturbations in his calculations, minute fractal cascades giving rise to improperly disproportionate divergences.

Change.

He knew it so well. The Master of Change was his lord and guide, but it was not the hand of Tzeentch that extended over the Thousand Portals. It was the touch of the Star-crawlers, the thieves that had taken the Cosmic Gate from the Great Architect in the distant eons of prehistory.

They had a name, a mortal appellation that did nothing to convey the wholly interdimensional horror of their antithetical nature. The Slann. Starmasters. Heavenly lords dedicated to the purging of all that was and could be. A cleansing blandness that would stop the worlds in their orbits and split the realms from each other for eternity, trapping all in the cosmic amber of stasis.

All around him the lands were changing again, trenches and walls springing into life, towers fading and new fortifications and great shimmering bastions emerging from the mists. His attention was drawn to a newly-revealed wall of faceted opal a few hundred paces ahead, in which another of the Thousand Portals was revealed, and beyond it a maelstrom of swirling energy. Light from no mortal star spilled across the entangled landscape, polluting the rays of the region’s own miniature suns. Shadows wove complex shapes against this white illumination, quickly resolving into a phalanx of blue-scaled saurus.

These warriors-dreamed stood as tall as Rikjard’s most powerful fighters, lizard-like with yellow eyes and bright fronds along their bone-flanged skulls. They bore curved shields of scaled hide furnished with sharpened bones and gold edging. They wore more celestite star-gold upon their limbs in the form of torqs and anklets, vambraces and necklaces, decorated with sharp fangs and portentous glyphs. They advanced in unison, clawed feet scratching at the hard rock of the Thousand Portals.

Rank after rank entered through the gate, forming from the light itself by the will of their slann commander. Rikjard had been expecting their arrival – his success depended upon it, in fact. All the same, he was taken aback by the sheer ferocity of their presence. The impact of their appearance on the swirl of concentric computations forced the sorcerer to make swift and radical adjustments to his calculations.

Other wells of light were erupting as more of the Thousand Portals opened, each producing a fresh cohort of fanged, horned warriors. Around these tight regiments of brutes darted smaller skinks, rapid and nimble, their bows, javelins and blowpipes at the ready.

Looking over his shoulder, Rikjard witnessed more of the slann’s host bursting into reality through portals behind his army. Their appearance did not shock him, for he knew well the reputation of the Cosmic Warriors and the ways of their Starmasters. He was prepared for his foe’s ability to arrive unfettered by geography – not that, here in the Thousand Portals, such physical considerations were really necessary. Nothing here was permanent, all was reflection, distortion, shadow and light. Rikjard raised his silver-wrought wand, its head gleaming yellow. The gems set into the helms of several regiments of his most heavily armoured warriors responded with their own ochre glow as the Chosen turned towards the rear to defend against the unfolding seraphon assault.

‘Where are you?’ Rikjard whispered, scanning left and right across the prismatic landscape. Behind the advancing regiments of saurus warriors, a nimbus of golden light became a streaming river of silver-and-blue starlight, coiling about itself like an endless serpent. Larger shapes shifted in the chromatic oscillations, metamorphosing from indistinct shadows to immense beasts of war as they crossed the boundary threshold between realities.

Bellowing and snorting, a pair of tower-sized bastiladons stomped through the breach. Upon the bony plates along their backs they carried arcane celestial engines – one bore a device wrought with the sigils of the long-dead ancestors of the seraphon, the other a gold-shimmering gem as large as a man, with edges that glittered in the light of a unseen star. They were flanked by teams of skinks that were herding bright-skinned salamanders and spine-encrusted razordons.

Screamer-pulled chariots and daemon-fire flamers led the counter-attack, soaring over the heads of streaming columns of horrors with ecstatic leaps. Spurts of blue and pink flames engulfed the front ranks of the saurus, spattering from the reptiles’ raised shields in drops with tiny, laughing faces. War clubs and swords studded with celestite roundels and shards tore at the screamers as they swooped through the dream-warriors, slashing with spiked tails and running barbed fins through the scaled flesh of their foes. From the first of the flaming chariots, Tharkziz the Undenying unleashed bolts of daemonic power, creating a whirlwind of fire that seared through the assembled ranks of the slann’s soldiers.

Tharkziz was followed by more daemon chariots, each carrying a hulking flamer that spat pink fire from maw-tipped arms. The blue horrors that accompanied them jabbed down at the saurus with spears forged of solid flame. The saurus snarled and leapt, using their teeth-edged shields to tear at the undersides of the screamers, their jagged mauls and axes crashing against the bodies of the daemonic chariots. In the wake of Tharkziz’s attack, fire crawled across hide shields and gilded armour, eating into blue scales and muscled flesh. With shrill whines and bestial snarls Chaos daemon and seraphon fell to each other’s attacks. Horrors, screamers and flamers exploded into fountains of dissipating energy, while the saurus returned to the Celestial Realm in flashes of polychromatic light that were reflected and distorted over and over by the mirrors and prisms of the Thousand Portals.

With another thought, Rikjard despatched a portion from the left wing of his army through one of the nearby portals. Savage horsemen and ambling, many-limbed spawn disappeared beneath a rainbow-like arc of black, blues and purples, to emerge from a half-seen gateway beyond the salamanders and razordons. Skinks scattered like leaves before a storm as riders fell on them with whooping battle cries, while misshapen spawn thrashed into their bestial charges with clubbing blows and whipping blade-appendages. Acidic fire and volleys of deadly spines greeted the marauding cavalry and bloated mutants, but Rikjard cared nothing for the deaths of his followers.

‘Show yourself,’ he muttered, signalling for Tzarathoth to split his host in an attempt to encircle the seraphon still streaming from the first celestial gateway. ‘This is not a battle you can win from afar.’

Hooves thundered and claws scraped on unyielding marble as the Tzeentchian knights charged at a wave of saurus mounted atop reptilian cold ones. Lances shattered bloodily against scaled skin while celestite-tipped spears pierced plates of ensorcelled armour. Steeds that were not wholly equine, canine or feline sank steel teeth into the exposed flesh of the cold ones, ignoring the raking claws that scattered the gilded mail coats of the knights’ mounts.

The interplay of attack and counter-attack was unfolding quickly, every movement and manoeuvre, every small victory and defeat changing the parameters of success. Rikjard’s wand left silver trails as he moved his forces with the deftness of a Domination player. His uncle had taught him the strategies of the game even as he had instructed Rikjard in the secret wisdom of mathemagics. To Rikjard, the Thousand Portals were the board on which he played, each regiment of friend or foe a piece to be positioned exactly, every loss an alteration to the complex equation scorched through the thoughts of the Lord of Many Numbers. Possibilities came and went with each passing moment, and all the time the Thousand Portals shifted and turned, air becoming rock, rock becoming air, hills becoming valleys and walled castles becoming yawning chasms. In places, the ground opened to swallow up entire regiments, only to deposit them seemingly at random across the enclosing spheroid landscape.

But this was not random. There was purpose and design behind every displacement. Tzeentch was the Emergent Phenomena, the pattern within the pattern, the predictably unpredictable integer. Rikjard was so close to mastering the Eternal Formula, but he needed the Starmaster that commanded the enemy to show itself. Only then, with the input of the celestial spawn, would he be able to fully unlock the marvels of the Thousand Portals.

Screeches from above drew Rikjard’s attention away from the converging, intermingling lines of Chaos followers and seraphon. From within the orbit of the captive infant suns, a new celestial rift had opened, spilling forth a flock of reptilian flyers. The terradons followed a storm of glittering javelins hurled by their riders, each missile a deadly thunderbolt as it crashed into the heaving daemon horde.

Rikjard heard a peculiar noise over the cacophony of war. He turned, seeking the source of the strange croaking. Sensing his unease, his familiar clashed its dagger-hands, eager to kill. The discordant shrieking of ripperdactyls grew louder as a squadron of the winged beasts circled closer, nostrils flared, the tips of the riders’ spears glinting with captured moonlight.

Something small hopped past the sorcerer’s foot – a toad no bigger than his fist, a pungent smell drifting up to Rikjard’s nostrils from the warty intruder. He had not noticed its arrival, but now recollected the barely-felt pop of magic that had heralded its summoning.

He looked at the innocuous amphibian and then back at the ripperdactyls. The vicious reptilian flyers, their hunting cries cutting across the clash of armies, arrowed down through clouds of golden mist directly towards him, as if drawn by the presence of the strange toad.

Grimacing, Rikjard swept out his wand and unleashed a blast of magical flames that incinerated the leading beasts and their riders. Fire crawling across its wings, another dived through the onslaught and snatched up the thautomaton, ignoring the rasp of its blades along its long beak as it lifted the animated machine and carried it away.

Rod in one hand, blade in the other, Rikjard fended off the spear-thrust of the next rider and dodged the snapping of its mount’s sharp beak. An instant later, the sky filled with blinding sparks as a flight of screamers swept into the ripperdactyls. Celestial predators and daemonic sky-sharks whirled and snapped around each other, ascending in a mass of fangs, barbs and talons, showers of blood and ichor spilling down onto Rikjard like rain.

He pressed on, mentally commanding his army to follow, despatching more and more of his forces through the interlaced portals to divide and surround the enemy. The seraphon likewise manoeuvred through the ever-changing pathways, coming together in knots to baulk his advances, using the portals to charge into the flanks of his warriors or retreat from the assaults of his knights and their monstrous companions.

He checked his position, now unable to see the castle towards which he had set out, but confident that he was close to the location from which he would be able to align the Thousand Portals and open the Cosmic Gate. The equation burned brighter, codifying and solidifying like congealing blood, becoming a thing of raw substance yet possessed of naked power.

The ground bucked, toppling mortal and daemon alike. The captive stars spun wildly about each other and a fresh star burst into existence in their midst. Rikjard looked away, temporarily blinded. Blinking away the after-image, he looked at the new orb of white fire. He could see with his wizard’s gaze that it was not truly in the region of the Thousand Portals, but burned at the end of an infinitely long tunnel, its energy forming a funnel into the space between the celestial domain and the Realm of Chaos where the Thousand Portals were trapped.

The Starmaster appeared instantaneously, with a crack of pressurised air and a boom of thunder that rolled around the sphere of the Thousand Portals, echoing and distorting in an impossible fashion. The slann’s bulbous form, so like a gigantic amphibian, belied the near-infinite knowledge and power Rikjard knew it possessed. It floated upon a palanquin forged from the corpses of dead stars, inlaid with glyphs of pure celestite that surrounded the star-spawn with a halo of deadly and protective light.

The daemons howled and bayed at the arrival of their aeons-old foe. Abandoning all pretence of adhering to Rikjard’s plan, they threw themselves towards the slann, desperate to slay the Harbinger of Order. The seraphon responded with equal ferocity, spurred by the cold intellect of their creator-summoner.

All appearance of subtle interplay vanished, the delicately brutal game replaced with a frenzy of bloodletting and ceaseless carnage. Warriors and daemons fell beneath the celestite-shod feet of rampaging monsters while beams of celestial energy scythed along the rows of daemon and mortal, turning bodies to ash, hurling the inhuman back into the void of their creation. Skink priests borne aloft by feathered cloaks became fulcrums for the magic of the Starmaster, coruscating pulses of energy and coronas of protective power turning the crystal lands into a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting energy.

Daemonic infernos engulfed regiments of saurus guards and storms of mutating power swept aside skink skirmishers, turning them to quivering blobs of flesh. Subjected to the battery of Tzeentchian curses, touched by Chaos-born fires, skin became glass, muscle become stone, metal became writhing flesh. Tree-like growths sprouted from the solid ground to impale and tear with jagged crystal branches.

Into the maelstrom pushed Rikjard, his knights charging again and again, bludgeoning a path through the seraphon, their numbers rapidly dwindling. The Lord of Many Numbers did not care for their fates – their purpose was to die for him and nothing more. The equation shortened as he drew closer to his goal. The possibilities and endless permutations dwindled as destiny and reality converged to the single point he sought.

Buoyed up by the death and destruction, the power surged and frothed around Rikjard like surf on a rocky shore. The slann had been both the lock and the key, as he had known it would be. It was the anchor that tied the Thousand Portals to their prison between realms and Tzeentch’s will was the blade that would cut them adrift again.

Triumphant, head buzzing with the near-complete formula, Rikjard ascended the flat slope of the hill, seeing again in the corner of his vision the edifice he had first spied on entering the Thousand Portals. His feet left the ground. Rikjard seemed to step on air, but from another viewpoint he ascended on steps of light, spiralling up to the heights of the insubstantial tower. He felt close enough to reach out and touch the slann’s gate.

Instead he raised his silver wand, making the last adjustments to the disposition of his servants.

With these final movements, and accompanied by the death throes of stegadons and the cries of wounded warriors, the Thousand Portals aligned.

At first there was light, white and blinding, It separated, splitting again and again, dividing into every shade of the spectrum both visible and beyond. Like glass shattering, the light fell away, leaving an abyssal blackness, the darkness of the utter void.

Rikjard felt the Cosmic Gate open, sensed it with every part of his being – the unfolding of dimensions, the ripple of energies spreading away and then returning, converging on a central point inside his skull.

He saw the star at the far end of the slann’s gateway and the last piece of the equation resolved into his thoughts, its secret ripped from the heart of the alien sun.

‘I know it!’ Rikjard cried, his voice echoing through time. ‘The power is mine!’

The star grew brighter, hotter.

Closer.

Rikjard had the sensation of movement. Falling. More than that, he was being dragged, pulled toward the slann’s star-home. From within, he would shatter the barriers between realms and take his place at the right hand of Tzeentch.

Formless took on form and the solution to the Eternal Equation made itself known to him.

0 = ∞

He considered this for a moment.

∞ = 0

There had to be some mistake. There could not be infinite nothing. What could that mean?

The star pulled him in, and the answer came to him as its fronds lapped at his dissipating body and soul, scattering the particles of his form and thoughts.

Infinite nothing. More than death. Less than life. Oblivion.

He had been wrong.

Rikjard of the Many Numbers felt a sense of utter failure, but only for a moment, and then he was no more.

The slann Xalanxymanzik blinked once and sent a telepathic signal to its skink-manifestations that the battle was to cease. The Thousand Portals fell silent as the seraphon disappeared, their memory-forms collapsing back into celestial potential as Xalanxymanzik returned his thoughts to the domain of his origin, leaving behind the trappings of mortal, constructed thought.

Abandoning the Chaos daemons and men to their self-defeating machinations and conflicts, the Starmaster folded itself back through the dimension bridge to the celestial void. The battle against the one called Rikjard had taken much effort, and the solution to unlocking the Cosmic Gate had almost been revealed.

But not this time.

So to age-long slumber Xalanxymanzik returned, its drifting thoughts moving towards ever-more esoteric domains as physical concerns faded. A dream-shard split from its near-dormant musing and fell like an insubstantial feather, borne far upon cosmic winds until it descended into one of the Mortal Realms and touched upon the mind of a human. There it nestled, awakening thoughts never before conceived.

Perhaps this time the mystic formula would unravel itself and the Cosmic Gate would open, revealing the innermost power of Tzeentch, and laying the heart of the Great Architect exposed to attack. Nurtured by its human host, the Eternal Equation started to grow again, fuelled by a hurried, desperate, mortal ambition that the slann could never possess. The essential component, the missing variable.

The Chaos factor.

About the Authors

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Scars, the novella Brotherhood of the Storm and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and the short story collection Wolves of Fenris, as well as the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and Battle of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

Josh Reynolds is the author of the Blood Angels novel Deathstorm and the Warhammer 40,000 novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt, all three featuring the White Scars. In the Warhammer World, he has written the End Times novels The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen, and the novels Neferata, Master of Death and Knight of the Blazing Sun. He lives and works in Northampton.

Guy Haley is the author of the Space Marine Battles novel Death of Integrity, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Valedor and Baneblade, and the novellas The Eternal Crusader, The Last Days of Ector and Broken Sword, for Damocles. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in Warstorm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deathfire and Vulkan Lives, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio drama Censure. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Time of Legends novel The Great Betrayal. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.

Darius Hinks’s first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he has carved a bloody swathe through the Warhammer World in works such as Island of Blood, Sigvald, Razumov’s Tomb and the Orion trilogy. He has also ventured into the Warhammer 40,000 universe with the Space Marine Battles novella Sanctus.

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax, the End Times novel Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.

David Guymer is the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novella Thorgrim and a plethora of short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Awards for his novel Headtaker.

Rob Sanders is the author of The Serpent Beneath, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius and Tech-Priest, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken. He has also written the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos along with many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novels Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. He has also written several short stories set in the Age of Sigmar. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Andy Clark has written the Warhammer 40,000 short story ‘Whiteout’ and the Age of Sigmar short story ‘Gorechosen’. Andy works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham, UK.

Graeme Lyon is the author of the Space Marine Battles novella Armour of Faith and the Warhammer 40,000 short stories ‘The Carnac Campaign: Sky Hunter’, ‘From the Flames’ and ‘Kor’sarro Khan: Huntmaster’, along with the Warhammer tales ‘Bride of Khaine’ and ‘The Hunter’. He hails from East Kilbride in Scotland, but now lives and works in Nottingham.

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Deliverance Lost, as well as the novellas Corax: Soulforge, Ravenlord and The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs. He is particularly well-known for his Dark Angels stories, including the Legacy of Caliban series. His Warhammer 40,000 repertoire further includes the Path of the Eldar series, the Horus Heresy audio dramas Raven’s Flight, Honour to the Dead and Raptor, and a multiplicity of short stories. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. He lives and works in Nottingham.

A Black Library Publication

The Gates of Azyr first published in Great Britain in 2015.
War Storm first published in Great Britain in 2015.
Ghal Maraz first published in Great Britain in 2015.
Hammers of Sigmar first published in Great Britain in 2015.
Call of Archaon first published in Great Britain in 2015.
Wardens of the Everqueen first published in Great Britain in 2015.
Call of Chaos Quick Read Collection first published in Great Britain in 2015.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Cover illustrations by Paul Dainton, Kai Lim, Stepan Alekseev, Aleksey Bayura, Dave Greco and Catherine O'Connor.

Mighty Battles © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Mighty Battles, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-193-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.