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Four Thousand Days – David Guymer

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A Black Library Publication

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Four Thousand Days

DAVID GUYMER

‘The first day began with wrath...’

The Angfyrd Odyssey

The Fyreslayer screamed until his throat was raw and his chest heaved on empty lungs. He gulped down a breath, heaved forwards, but was restrained. Iron clamps around his arms and legs groaned. His seat rocked on triple-bolted floor brackets. The new rune ignited as it took, blazing brilliant gold that flooded his eyes with fire and the thick muscles of his chest with torment. His biceps spasmed, tensing and un-tensing with a fury.

He screamed as no duardin ever should – honestly, terribly, his cries cast back at him by metal and stone.

The walls didn’t care. They had heard and borne witness many times over ten thousand years. His ancestors had endured the same trials as he. Who was he to suffer so visibly under the gaze of their icons?

Who was he?

‘I am Dunnegar!’ His breath was cinders and ash, his voice the rasp of hot coals stirred through a fire. ‘I am duardin. I am a Fyreslayer. I am… am…’

He grunted with recovering sensation as the pain in his chest faded just slightly, diminishing to a level that allowed him to feel again the punishment meted to his belly, his left hand, his thigh, both biceps, his back, several times over. Power and glimmerlust whirled through his mind. Power and glimmerlust. Glimmerlust and power. It hurt, but by Grimnir he wanted more. With a shuddering swallow breath, he blinked away the fire sprites that cavorted behind his eyes.

Runemaster Rolk stood framed by the heat of the forge.

The ancient priest smouldered. Fire licked the gold and magmadroth scale of his ceremonial dress. The deep lines in his thickly muscled forearms were steaming channels of sweat. Master runes of smiting and unmaking burned red against his blackened skin, responding in kind to the power of the forge that had cast them.

A newly forged rune sat upon his fire-wreathed anvil, spitting out golden impurities under the heat. Impassive, the runemaster reached for it, his arm glowing cherry red as he withdrew it with the rune hissing violently against his bare palm. He raised his hammer of runic iron, eyes the white of the hottest fires glowering through the smoke.

‘What is wrath, boy?’

Dunnegar gritted his teeth and jerked against his bonds. ‘Again. More.’

Face set, the runemaster positioned the rune in the centre of Dunnegar’s forehead and stepped back. The rune roasted into place and didn’t slip. Dunnegar forced his eyes open and his mouth shut against the near overwhelming urge to clench them tight and howl.

Then the runemaster swung, and Dunnegar’s mind exploded into embers.

Chipped stone the colour of rust ran away from his hands and knees.

They were his hands, and his knees, even as their weight and strength took him aback. No ur-gold runes punctured them, branching tattoos spiralling in their place, but it didn’t matter. He was stronger than Dunnegar had ever been or conceived. Heat was the common element between that world and this. Fire had been folded into the wind, smoke and air layered and layered until what the fire had forged filled his lungs like tar. The sun was small and red, hazed behind an ash sky, and intermittently sparked with cinders that rained from the mountain’s peak. Motes shot through his savage crest of red hair and sizzled against his skin. For the injury they caused he might as well have been made of metal. The power within him was older and hotter than anything that boiled under Aqshy’s broken surface.

Even as that inner fire gave him no particular pause, the part of him that was a Fyreslayer gloried in the glow of the divine.

A sky-sundering bellow rocked the mountainside and sent scree avalanching past him.

He held firm and looked up into the ash sky, hunting, but immediately recoiled from the searing intensity of the cinder rain. Brighter and brighter it became, the pain in his forehead pounding on his skull until he could see nothing but light and his mind was awash with molten gold.

Tendons standing from his neck like cables, Dunnegar heaved against his restraints and sprayed his knees with spittle.

‘Vulcatrix! I see the ur-salamander. The Godslayer.’

An excited murmur echoed this declaration, but he saw no one in the smoke, heard no words.

‘Not bad,’ Rolk grunted, drawing yet another hot rune from his forge. ‘Perhaps you’ve half the chance your kin think you have.’

Dunnegar began to laugh, panting hoarsely, gasping the air so fast that his lungs could have strained nothing from it. And yet he felt power. His heart raced upon a tremendous wave of it. It was destruction. It was fire and wrath, but it was joy as well, pride in his strength. His biceps bulged against the iron restraints, metal cuffs beginning to bend and hiss as they were heated. From behind him came a gruff warning, and hands gauntleted in fyresteel clamped over his arms.

‘Tell me again, boy, if there’s anything left in that thick skull: what is wrath?’

‘Grimnir is wrath.’

‘Ur-gold is what Grimnir left us of his power and will,’ said Rolk, staring into the complex geometry of the rune in his palm, his hard face appearing to express something like veneration in the shifting light of the flame. ‘By harnessing its might we do him glory in the manner in which he approves.’

Then the runemaster closed his hand over the rune, and Dunnegar growled to see it taken away from him. Rolk gave a knowing smile, a narrow thing of craggy lines and gold-capped teeth.

‘Glimmerlust. He’s had enough.’

The voice was that of Horgan-Grimnir. Rarity made his words precious, and imbued them with a power far beyond their worth. Even Dunnegar seemed to understand, though his attention remained locked on the runemaster’s closed fist.

The Trial of Wrath had but three possible outcomes: survival, gold madness, or death.

To the minds of those in attendance, no outcome was favourable. Survival meant embarking on the path of the grimwrath – gold madness and death by another name.

‘The flameling’s soft, as flamelings are wont to be,’ Rolk scoffed. ‘He’ll have had enough when he makes it to the top. If he makes it.’

‘Enough,’ the runefather spoke again. ‘There is a long journey ahead, and he already bears more runes than I.’

‘Are you jealous, lord?’ Opening his hand brought a golden flush to the runemaster’s face, and he chuckled at Dunnegar’s immediate reaction to the rune’s brilliance.

‘Again,’ said Dunnegar, straining to be nearer. ‘I will see the mountaintop.’

‘That’s the gold talking, lad,’ came the level wheeze of one whom Dunnegar felt he should remember, but just then, just there, could not.

‘And through it, Grimnir.’ Eyes glowing, the runemaster pressed the scalding rune to Dunnegar’s shoulder, hammer swinging even as Dunnegar drew breath to scream.

The blow knocked him sideways, body and mind.

It came at him from nowhere. He struck it aside on the back of his axe, sending a sword-length chip of talon spinning off into fiery oblivion. A howl of primal suffering shook the mountaintop as if the force of a thunderclap had been pressed into the rock face and unleashed against it. Everything was scales and claws, his twinned axes a blur as despite the exertion burning his every muscle. He somehow countered the great wyrm’s every blow. He laughed uproariously, the sound extinguished by the rush of flame as fiery twisters leapt up from the ground. An infernal glow lit up a reptilian head some thirty feet above him – wide mouth filled with spine teeth, horned ridge, serpentine neck – then billowed out into a fireball that rocketed down and smashed apart his guard.

Dunnegar/Grimnir was slammed down, each of his axes thrown a separate way. With an exhausted rumble, Vulcatrix’s sinuous upper body crashed onto scaly forelimbs. It drew back, neck coiling like a spring. Flame flickered around its hanging jaw as its colossal torso heaved up and down with every breath.

The wyrm was as badly hurt as he was. The next blow would belong to the victor.

Grinning, Grimnir found his feet, Dunnegar urging him on, or perhaps back, for every duardin child knew how this battle ended.

‘I am Grimnir!’ they roared in unison. ‘I am vengeance.’

Howling without words, Dunnegar threw his punch.

And it was his punch. The fist was bruised and glittered bloodily with ur-gold, driven only by a mortal’s strength, but was enough to shatter the front teeth of the half-armoured karl standing in front of him. The warrior’s ornate wyrm helm and twinned plumes of vibrant red hair revealed him to be a champion of the runefather’s hearthguard. A warrior second to none.

The duardin staggered back, stunned, before another punch bent his nose and spun him on his way to the ground. Dunnegar fell on top of him, furious beyond reason, when another duardin threw his arms around his chest and dragged him off. Fyresteel gauntlets pushed up under his ribs and locked as the duardin fired a stream of curses into his ear. Dunnegar heard none of it. The karl was strong, but Dunnegar had tasted real strength and had his opponent’s measure.

Every muscle in his body seemed to flex at once, drawing back his neck and forcing the air from his chest in a scream of golden fire. The ur-gold riven into his shoulder muscles ignited like the head of a match.

The hearthguard grunted in surprise, but held on. With the burning of the rune came a fraction of Grimnir’s strength, and little by little Dunnegar peeled open the karl’s lock. With a throw of his shoulders, he knocked the straining duardin’s arms wide. He tossed back an elbow and felt the hearthguard’s forehead crack under it. Then he turned, followed up with a quick step, and smashed the dazed warrior down into the now-broken iron chair with a headbutt that painted both of their faces with blood.

‘I will not be tamed!’

He turned back to see a fist like a cannonball studded with jewelled rings flying towards his face just before it hit his temple. He corkscrewed twice, then slammed face-first into the flagstones. He groaned. The rune was sapped, and he no longer felt the berzerker rage he needed to awaken the others.

Horgan-Grimnir cracked his knuckles and walked away. The runemaster smiled at the both of them, his ancient face telling a clearer tale than the finest of Battlesmith Killim’s chronicle banners.

The Angfyrd lodge had its first grimwrath berzerker in a generation.

Dunnegar felt no pride in that: just the cool of the inert rune in his shoulder where the might of a god had once raged.

He hadn’t yet tried to push himself off the ground when someone proffered him a grubby oilcloth.

Killim crouched over him, sadness and pity like dust in his eyes.

The look on the smith’s face hurt more than any number of blows from the runefather’s fists ever could. All Fyreslayers of a lodge were bound closely together, but his bond with Killim was stronger than most. Like all his age, Karl Huffnar of the Cannite Fyrd had taught him how to handle an axe, but it had been Killim who had forged his blade. His earliest memory was of the smith – old even then – sitting him on his knee to teach him to read the common runes.

Now, his old mentor searched his eyes as if looking for someone he knew was lost.

‘Will he be strong enough to travel?’ said Horgan-Grimnir, broad back turned. ‘We have a journey of four thousand days, and Grimwrath or no, the magmahold empties at dawn.’

‘He’ll be stronger than you,’ Rolk grinned. ‘Has the messenger in the fire told you anything more about our quest?’

‘That Fyrepeak calls its daughter-lodges home, to war against Taurak Skullcleaver and his two lieutenants.’

‘And of the Fyrepeak itself? Yesterday it was a myth.’

Horgan-Grimnir snorted and shook his head. ‘Tend to what is yours, runemaster. My son and I will keep what is ours.’

‘On the seven hundred and nineteenth day, the Angfyrd lodge was reunited with its distant cousin. The fire is always warm, but a duardin welcome is frosty...’

The Angfyrd Odyssey

With a supreme effort of will, Dunnegar held back the deathblow. A ripple of muscle tension ran through his arm in protest against his efforts to lower his axe.

‘Get up.’

The armoured warrior pushed aside the corpses that had fallen over him and looked up at Dunnegar with a baleful stare of his own. From that alone, Dunnegar saw that the figure was no Bloodbound. He was duardin, a Fyreslayer no less, albeit a ghoulishly presented one.

In contrast to the vibrant oranges and purples worn by the Angfyrd Fyreslayers, this one’s wargear was black, fluted and moulded into the appearance of bone. His face had been painted with white powder, except for the eye sockets where the brazen red of his skin showed through. His beard was an unnatural grey. The twinned plumes of his helm designating him a karl of his fyrd might have been a reassuring point of commonality, but the likeness crafted into the black helm was that of a skeletal wyrm and the plumage itself was short, white, and brittle.

‘Or just lie there, if you like it,’ Dunnegar growled when the strange Fyreslayer neither spoke nor stood, and made to take his axe back to the fight. ‘More for me.’

The Fyreslayer regarded him hollowly, then in a voice that was even and yet carried well enough over the cry of metal said, ‘Behind you.’

Dunnegar heard the manic breathing behind him, bare feet slapping on rock. With a snarl, he spun on the spot and hewed his greataxe through the sprinting bloodreaver’s belly. The blood barbarian was practically on top of Dunnegar when the axe carved through him, launching his torso up over the Fyreslayer’s helm.

More were coming, pelting down the slope that marked the continuous descent from the peaks in the blood-misted distance. Dunnegar counted twenty. Baying their blood-cries they poured in a wave over the bodies that littered the rocks. They were sinewy, lightly armed with knives and clubs and clad in little more than the blood of their victims and the knapped bone that pierced their bodies.

Advancing apace with a languorous stride was a muscular giant half their size again. Blood painted his physique in sharp, grotesque designs. Hanging beads in the form of blood droplets or miniature skulls jangled as he ran, his big black mouth open in a running chant that seemed to drive the savages about him into a preternatural fury.

The slaughterpriest turned on Dunnegar with a look of murder.

Under that gaze he felt the bloodlust that was never far from the surface begin to simmer. His skin prickled, eyes hardening, but Dunnegar shook off the foreign impulse to charge up the hill and soak himself in human blood with a grunt.

Rage was a force of nature that was true under its own terms. It needed no battle to stoke it, nor blood to slake it. He had endured the Trial of Wrath. There was nothing the priests of blood could teach him about fury.

Seeing him shrug off his influence, the blood shaman thrust his long glaive into the air and howled. Aping their master’s cry, the bloodreavers surged past him with redoubled zeal.

‘A lot of them,’ observed the stranger.

‘Always,’ Dunnegar returned.

His teeth were bared. His pupils had constricted to pinpricks flecked with gold. The blood priest had wanted him to charge.

And he charged.

He hit the first wave of bloodreavers like a fireball. Bodies flew aside simply from the force of impact, and then he set to work with his greataxe. Its blade was volcanic glass and dense with runes that rendered it almost transparent with heat. It was a weapon worthy of a grimwrath berzerker, and in his hands it was murder cut from obsidian.

Carving arcs of fire through the air, he hacked the first marauder in half from shoulder to groin. He tore his axe back, turning and arching under the haft, and smashed the butt across a warrior’s jaw. The two Bloodbound fell almost at the same time. His axe spun, taking off the hands of a bloodreaver that tried to jump him with two knives upraised.

With a roar, he dropped his head and cannoned deeper into the melee.

A bloodreaver with a crest of spikes broke through the after-glow of Dunnegar’s axe work and thrust a dagger into his side. The notched blade bent. The bloodreaver dropped the knife from broken fingers and Dunnegar took his head with a single sweep. Blood rained. Through the crimson fountain, he saw the blood shaman.

The man – once a man – was more than twice Dunnegar’s height and almost as heavily built. Spinning his glaive one-handed until his body was blurred by it, the shaman clawed at the heavens and called for the attention of his god.

With a hum of fine-edged steel, a throwing axe splintered the blood priest’s ribcage. The giant looked at the blade for a moment, coughed blood over the handle, and then, losing muscle control in stages, folded indelicately to the ground.

‘No respect for the dead,’ muttered the stranger, relaxing his throwing arm as Dunnegar finished off the last of the rabble. The rest broke and fled for their precious mountains. Dunnegar turned to glare at his unwanted saviour.

‘You could have made him yours if you had truly wanted him,’ the duardin stranger said.

He was referring to the ur-gold runes hammered into Dunnegar’s slowly cooling flesh, added to many times since the day of his trial and shining dully now. Dunnegar grunted acknowledgement. Indeed he could have, but the power of ur-gold was precious and finite and not lightly tapped.

To his slim credit, the other duardin nodded and extended a hand.

‘I am Aethnir, of the Sepuzkul lodge. Thank you for the help.’

A strange name. And strange words.

‘Talkative for one of the Grim Brotherhood,’ Aethnir murmured sarcastically, a smile parting his beard.

Ignoring the stranger, Dunnegar looked across the blasted foothills that Killim’s ancient lore had brought them to.

A mist of gelid gore hung thinly in the air. It clung to the rocks and to the handful of forsaken trees that persisted here, and glazed the standards of the diverse war bands to a common, glistening crimson. While a few of those bands were still battling willingly against the Fyreslayers pushing into the highlands from the plains, the majority were ever-reddening shades disappearing back into the mountains.

Dunnegar squinted into the scarlet dampness.

The fog made it impossible to make out the peaks themselves, but something about their too-smooth contours imparted a frisson of unease. Looked upon directly, as now, the mountains were a jagged haze in the far distance, but caught side-on by an accidental glance, those ill-defined shapes became something other. Statues. Hard warriors whose horned helms broke the sky and whose broad shoulders were cloaked in snow.

The blast of a horn called his attention back, dragging his gaze over a satisfyingly long and deep trail of Bloodbound dead.

Marching at the head of a fyrd of hearthguard elite, Killim held the battle standard of the Angfyrd lodge aloft. The old battlesmith had forged the standard expressly for the great odyssey, and the fyresteel icon depicted Grimnir in his aspect as the Wanderer. The differences to Grimnir the Vengeful, or the previous standard of Grimnir the Destroyer, were subtle, and Killim had captured the ancestor god’s form masterfully.

‘What have I told you about… charging ahead?’ Killim wheezed.

The hearthguard – never the most forgiving of companions – tactfully ignored the battlesmith’s exhaustion. The incline was shallow, but over many leagues taxing, and while they had merely marched it the old smith had spent the last three days and nights through hostile country reciting the five thousand year-long Angfyrd Chronicle to the rhythm of their boots.

The battlesmith struck his standard into the rocks.

Dunnegar offered a conciliatory mumble, Killim huffed something that suggested he was appeased, and on such a foundation their friendship would make it to the seven hundred and twentieth day of the odyssey.

The hearthguard closed ranks around their standard, regarding Dunnegar and Aethnir with equal suspicion.

‘What did you mean about disrespecting the dead?’ Dunnegar asked of the stranger, ignoring the hearthguard as they would rather ignore him.

The dark Fyreslayer pointed up into the hill country. There, under a pall where blood and smoke mingled, a great pyre burned. Dunnegar had assumed the fire to be some phenomenon related to the presence of the Goresworn.

It turned out that he was wrong.

‘Come with me,’ said Aethnir solemnly. ‘I will take you to the runefather.’

With bone weariness, Killim dragged up his standard once again and the duardin fell in behind their cousin.

As far as anyone knew, all Fyreslayers cremated their dead. It recalled the origins of their cult in Grimnir’s demise, the infernal twinning of destruction and rebirth. It reminded the living that power could never be annihilated, only dispersed.

The Sepuzkul’s funeral pyre burned high and hot on a mound of their fallen, tapering in the copper-tasting wind that came in off the highlands. A gathering of grimly attired duardin stood to one side, approaching the flames one by one to cast gold scavenged from the battlefield into the fire. Watching through half-lidded eyes was a magmadroth so worn and ancient that its life could only have been drawn out through some uncanny means. So far beyond its physical prime was it that the heat in its belly wasn’t even enough to clear the rime from its gums. It appeared to be in mourning for its master.

‘We stopped to send on our fallen,’ Aethnir explained. ‘We had not expected the dogs of Khorne to regroup so quickly.’

‘They ambushed you,’ said Rokkar, karl of the hearthguard, casting a weighted look over the rugged, open landscape.

‘They recovered quickly. The Lord of Khorne here calls himself the Griever. I do not know why, but perhaps you will soon have cause to rue the name as we do.’

‘Griever,’ Dunnegar muttered, turning to Killim. ‘A lieutenant of Taurak Skullcleaver, perhaps?

Aethnir looked taken aback. ‘You know that name?’

‘Aye,’ said Killim, forgetting for a moment that his voice had gone three days without respite. With palpable excitement, he reached out and grasped the foreign duardin’s wrist. ‘What brings your lodge to this place?’

‘I suppose the same as you. We have received the call home.’

‘But if both our ancestors came from Fyrepeak,’ said Dunnegar, looking the macabre duardin over with a sick feeling in his belly. ‘That would make us…’

‘Related?’ Aethnir finished, parroting Dunnegar’s actions exactly, but with an added tincture of black humour. ‘You think you are a disappointment.’

‘How far have you travelled?’ Killim interrupted. Dumping Grimnir the Wanderer into Dunnegar’s unsuspecting hands, he unslung his pack and rummaged about in it until he found what he wanted. He withdrew a thick book. The pages were a dull silver, the ancient binding clad in orruk tusk ivory.

Muttering excitedly, he cracked open the tome.

The first page was – like all of the books Dunnegar had once lost himself in as a flameling – given to a highly detailed map drawn by the lodge’s founders. A large circle in the centre depicted the region known to the Fyreslayers of the Angfyrd lodge. Smaller circles depicting other places overlapped the first, joined by realmgates that were indicated by a runic marking. Civilizations had fallen and risen and fallen again since that map was drawn. Many of the cities it marked were rubble, but mountains, oceans: they could but hope that time and Chaos had not altered those.

Killim stabbed his finger onto the map. ‘We took the first gate here, to the Ferroussian Sea, then followed the Orran upriver to these mountains.’

‘Titan’s Edge,’ Aethnir confirmed.

‘Then we are on the ancestors’ path.’ Killim looked upward with a relieved sigh, closed his eyes and muttered his thanks to Grimnir. ‘And you head for the same realmgate as we do.’ Dragging his finger towards the centre of the page, Killim tapped a spot within the mountain range where the silvery-coloured region they occupied overlapped another wreathed in fire.

‘According to our Founding Saga, the journey from Fyrepeak took four thousand days to complete.’

Aethnir nodded. ‘Ours has taken longer.’

The stranger turned his gaze towards the mountains, and the pyre.

Dunnegar’s fingers flexed and tensed around the standard’s steel pole. No one knew what made the grimwraths special amongst their kin, but even though he could endure the amount of ur-gold in his body, the erratic flow of power made him restive, impatient at best, violently ill-tempered at worst. It was one thing to be aware of that. To act before he snapped and somebody lost blood was another.

He took a deep breath, and tried not to think of the battle waiting in those mountains.

‘Have you been told why we’ve been called home?’

‘The message flame spoke of war. What other reason is there?’ With a shrug, Aethnir nodded towards the pyre. ‘Beyond that, you would have to ask the runefather.’

A duardin in ossified ceremonial robes bearing the runic iron of a runemaster called out in an ancient tongue, and a gang of pall-bearers set to withdrawing a scorched iron pallet from the fire. From the quantity of smouldering ur-gold on the pallet and the wealth of the helm, gauntlets and belt, the crisped bones rattling inside their wargear could only have belonged to the runefather of the Sepuzkul lodge. The priest inspected the remains as they passed him, spoke some manner of blessing over them, and sent them for burial by a company of hearthguard. With their red, rune-studded torsos and powdered faces, they looked strange and unearthly.

‘You are burying his runes?’ said Dunnegar in surprise.

After it was spent, ur-gold reverted to an inert state, but so far from his home and forge it would be a rare Fyreslayer who would risk using his final rune. Surely some of Grimnir’s power still lingered in those fragments.

‘They are his, and his soul faces more battles if he is to pass through the Underworlds,’ said Aethnir as though this should be obvious to anyone. ‘Do you not?’

‘We definitely do not.’

The duardin all turned as Runemaster Rolk strode towards them with Horgan-Grimnir, his hearthguard, and a trio of grimly armoured warriors of the Sepuzkul lodge behind him.

Walking with the aid of his runic iron, which he stabbed into the ground ahead of him, the priest glowered at all he passed. Bits of glimmering metal banged against his armour on chains, trinkets of presumably of priceless ur-gold that he had picked out from amongst the jewellery of the enemy dead.

From the steady stream of muttered asides and the way they appeared to compete with each other for the right to be first in the line, the three Sepuzkul were likely the sons of the late runefather. Their wargear was black, ribbed, and hatched with runes that looked like tally marks. One wore a magmadroth skull as a helm and simply by the short shrift with which he put down his brothers he clearly held himself as the favourite to succeed.

Horgan came last, trailing his long cloak of gold-etched steel. As was his way, he allowed his molten stare and weapon arm to do his talking. His immense latchkey grandaxe rested across his shoulder and dripped a trail of blood behind him. None met that gaze, even Dunnegar, though a part of him had longed to try it ever since the day of his trial.

‘A waste of a bloody blessing is what it is,’ Rolk scowled.

‘Your assistance was timely and appreciated,’ said the skull-helmed prince, leaning into his barbed spear and huffing out his bleached cheeks into a grimace. ‘But we’ll send off our own as we always have. I suggest you head on your way and do whatever it is you do with yours.’

‘We’d be better off together,’ said Dunnegar, earning a sharp stare from everyone for his lack of propriety. ‘A lot more Bloodbound where these came from.’

‘Always,’ Aethnir echoed with a thin smile.

‘We have a way around them,’ said the helmed Sepuzkul runeson. From the pride with which he said it, it was plain that if there was a way it was because he had found it. ‘It took us years to explore the trails up in those mountains, but we have found one that leads almost all the way to the gate.’

Killim grinned, closing his book with a tink of metal. ‘You’ll show us?’

‘And why should I? Has your lodge bled itself for the Griever to find this trail? No. Find your own way and to the Lord of Undeath with you all.’

With a rumble of exasperation, Rolk rounded on the Sepuzkul runeson.

‘And if I swear an oath to avenge that lost blood with the life of the Griever, would you let us join you on your trail?’

The four Sepuzkul Fyreslayers looked aghast at the suggestion.

Aethnir explained. ‘Such oaths we swear only for gold.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Rolk muttered. ‘The rate you throw it away.’

‘You would… do this?’ said one of the other runesons.

The runemaster merely crossed his arms, offended at having his conviction questioned and sincerity doubted.

‘I won’t allow it,’ rumbled Horgan-Grimnir. Slowly. Finally. ‘Your skills are needed.’

‘Aye,’ said Dunnegar, voice rising. ‘If it’s to be done at all then it should be me.’

‘Bah! I was wringing the necks of the blood-crazed before your grandfathers grew out of wooden axes.’

His gaze was fire, and even Horgan-Grimnir met it uneasily.

But Runemaster Rolk was harder than the magmadroth scale he wore and just as hot on the inside. It was a miracle he had restrained himself this long. Horgan-Grimnir shook his head, but did not argue the point again. None present doubted that the ancient Fyreslayer would and could do exactly as he vowed.

‘On the one thousand and forty-second day, the realmgate came within our grasp at last. A mighty battle it was to be, a red day, a grim day…’

The Angfyrd Odyssey

The Lord of Khorne who called himself the Griever thrust his lance into the tumbling snow and bellowed his challenge. His voice cracked with the sound of impacting skulls and echoed hollowly from behind the fused teeth of the metallic skull that encased his head as a helm. The skins of Rolk and those duardin that had gone after him fluttered from poles mounted in the harness of the brazen juggernaut the Chaos warrior rode as a mount, while the hell-steel of his armour was fused with the gaping skulls of duardin and countless others.

His horde took up his cry. They coated the mountain like a blood slick. Fifty thousand warriors armoured in crimson and draped in the dead skins of men and beasts stamped their feet, rattled weapons above their heads, and gave vent to a single wordless howl that would surely have brought the mountains down upon them all had the Titan’s Edge not been firmly under the heel of the Lord of Skulls.

Looking across the gully from halfway up the facing mountain, Horgan-Grimnir wordlessly sat back on the violet-scaled shoulders of his magmadroth and raised his grandaxe high. The challenge was accepted.

The Fyreslayers of both lodges, diminished as they were, swore new oaths.

The preceding year had taught them why this dark champion was known as the Griever. The Sepuzkul Fyreslayers set up a great lament to see their dead so mistreated, but none brooded on the insult more than Horgan-Grimnir.

He stared across the chasm with a look that could have soldered fyresteel. Affected by its master’s anger, the magmadroth scratched its claws into the rock and bellowed. The runefather had always preferred to lead his warriors on foot as one of them, but since the snowy night that his son’s mount, Caldernorn, had returned alone he had sworn that they would not be parted until both had vengeance.

Aethnir knelt in front of his fyrd of vulkite berzerkers, who silently joined him on one knee to pray. Their words were strange but still directed towards Grimnir. Beside them, Killim hoisted the icon of Grimnir the Wanderer and in a hoarse voice recounted tales of ancient triumphs over the chosen of Khorne. The auric hearthguard cheered the saga, stamping their feet faster, harder, as if to drown out the thunder from across the gorge.

Dunnegar looked across the gully. The mountain was a totem to the Dark Gods on an infernal scale. From its snow-swirled lower reaches to its majestic heights, it had been hewn into the idolatrous likeness of the Griever.

Its peak was a terrifying replica of the Chaos champion’s skull helm, a mile high, and through sweeps of snow, Dunnegar saw the realmgate they had sacrificed hearth and kin to find. It was inset into one of the eye sockets, ripples of fire shimmering apparently at random below its smooth, metal arch. The Griever and his chosen few stood by their banners on the top of the cheekbone, his horde spilling as far out and down as far as Dunnegar could see.

The Fyreslayers were on a higher, secondary peak, the two lodges occupying a long rump of stone a thousand feet wide.

It was a thumb.

Behind them were more rocky bumps, and an incredible stone lance rising precipitously into the dark sky.

The snow was starting to come down more heavily, and Dunnegar shook it from his beard.

A sour-faced runesmiter of the Sepuzkul lodge stood at the ledge. The duardin spread bare muscular arms wide as if to draw the gulf to him, a latch-axe in one hand and a forge key of pure ur-gold in the other. The Sepuzkul Fyreslayers ended their prayers with a dirge-like hum. Dunnegar and the Angfyrd lodge joined them until the mountainside resonated with deep duardin voices.

Chanting around, under, and against the dirge, the runesmiter smote the ferrule of his weapon on the rock and thrust his forge key out over the gully.

It flared into sudden life in his hand, and the entire mountain shook.

With a great tearing and spitting of rock, the runesmiter began to rise. The ground where his axe touched was a turgid, molten orange, and the glow spread until all but the ring of stone around the chanting duardin’s feet had been swallowed by it. Shouting now over the roar, he pointed his forge key to the realmgate and the spur grew at his command.

The rock behind him cooled quickly in the snow, hardening into a bridge that could bear the weight of an army.

‘Haaaaaggh!’ roared Horgan-Grimnir, thrusting his grandaxe high and kicking Caldernorn forward. The beast responded with a low, lingering roar of its own. The cadaverous magmadroth of Nosda-Grimnir, severe with skull-helm and grandaxe, followed. The bridge crunched under the combined weight, but held. Killim and the Angfyrd hearthguard ran fearlessly after the two monsters and then – at last! – went Dunnegar.

The snow took its free hit with a sadistic flurry. Knuckles dusted by metal and ice, the wind pummelled him from every direction. His beard and hair, driven into a crest through the tall flutes of his helm, pulled him sideways and dragged him down. Emptiness swelled to fill the world but for the spit of still-smouldering rock beneath his feet. He clenched his teeth, narrowed his eyes, and held them firmly ahead as he ran.

The impact, when it came, would forever settle any doubt as to the primacy of stone over wind.

The Griever’s mountain trembled under the strike of the molten rock-bridge and the world seemed to suffer with it. Men were shed by the thousand as their footing shook or simply slid away from under them. Others were dashed from their feet, tumbling down the unforgiving monument to godlike hubris, or flattened under the avalanches that came crashing down from the horned peaks.

The Sepuzkul runesmiter dropped into a braced position, knees bent, fists hard and white around the haft of his axe, as duardin sure-footedness and strength kept him standing. The magma glow receded from the rock beneath his feet and fed back into his axe. For a moment, the fyresteel glowed like the soul of a volcano, then blasted forth a cone of seismic wrath that immolated the shaken few still standing.

The death toll in those opening minutes was astounding. That there was a single Bloodbound still on the mountain was miraculous. The advantage of numbers was still theirs, however, as was the formidably contrived terrain of the mountain itself.

Before they could think to exploit either, Horgan-Grimnir and Caldernorn crashed through.

Under the runefather’s stern direction, the magmadroth slammed sideways into a band of muscle-bound barbarians that came rushing in to assault the duardin’s beachhead, flattening most before they had time to swing their axes and goring the rest on its horns. Into the ensuing carnage rode the Sepuzkul runefather, Nosda-Grimnir, on his cadaverous grey mount. The magmadroth swung its wizened, shovel head from side to side, flaming bile streaming from its maw in a ribboning inferno. With a triumphant yell, Killim hammered his rune standard home as the hearthguard ran past to secure their lords’ bridgehead.

On an explosion of rune-propelled acceleration, Dunnegar burst through their formation and straight towards a sweeping rock face.

It was a wall of ice, almost vertical, rising a hundred feet to near the orbit of the mountain’s accursed eye. The Bloodbound hurled rocks and curses. The sky hurled snow. The hearthguard split into two to go around. Dunnegar charged straight at it. His bare feet drew sparks from the frozen rock.

Blistering speed and a confidence that even he could see might be blind bore him up the incline and in amongst the bewildered Bloodbound.

The mountain disappeared. The battle was gone. There was no duardin with him but Grimnir.

He hacked and he killed, surrounded by screams he only half-heard as wounded Bloodbound were pitched over the cliff behind him to their deaths. A blood warrior in full plate dripping red ran at him under the drone of a swinging chain. Dunnegar held up his forearm and in a roared entreaty called on Grimnir’s strength. The chain wrapped around an arm that was suddenly golden-red, and blistering under the heat. A yank brought the god-touched warrior staggering into range of the headbutt that split his visor and threw him to the ground.

Dunnegar felt another rune awaken, then another.

It was glorious. It was divine.

‘Dunnegar!’

He parried a bloodreaver axe, spun his greataxe so it was horizontal to his chest and punched it forward. The long haft took out half a dozen charging warriors, buying him a second that he spent to look back the way he had come.

Blizzard aside, the clifftop vantage granted him an unimpeded view of the battle. A column of Fyreslayers four across and two-thousand long was still trouping across the rock bridge. Frothing Bloodbound launched themselves into the fray in a suicidal push to hold them there. It might have worked, but to their evident dismay the Fyreslayers were more than their equal in savagery. In that quick glance, Dunnegar saw the flashes as the Sepuzkul runesmiter turned his attentions to awakening individual Fyreslayers’ runes, mushrooming beacons of auric brilliance followed by the cannonball-like devastation wrought by empowered duardin steaming ahead of their kin. It made him ache for more of the same.

Teeth bared in punishing self-restraint, he cut down a spear-wielding barbarian that jumped in from his left. The warriors closed, sensing his weakening, his reluctance to exploit the few runes he had left. He hacked open another, kicked one to the floor with a shattered ribcage, then fell to grappling with a hugely muscled skullreaper that bulled into him from the right. Their arms knotting about one another’s, they ploughed across the ridgeline, knocking men screaming from their path.

‘Ho there, Dunnegar! Here!’

Killim. Through the tangle of limbs and snow, Dunnegar saw the smith at the foot of the bridge. He was waving furiously for Dunnegar’s attention and, seeing that he had it, immediately directed it back uphill.

Caldernorn was tackling the mountain, bounding from ledge to ledge, claws driving into sheer rock while its tail lashed bloodreavers to their deaths. This was the ur-salamander’s environment, more than all the blessings of Khorne could ever make it man’s.

And then, in an avalanche of hellishly animated brass, the Griever joined the battle.

Caldernorn was gigantic even by the standards of its kind, but the juggernaut ridden by the Griever was a daemon of solid brass, and was charged with a power far in excess of its size. The daemon rammed the hard flat of its head into the bulbous armour of the magmadroth’s shoulder. The reptile was pushed back across the mountainside, and then, with a shriek of claws across stone, it was shoved clean off the ridge.

For a moment it seemed to hang. Horgan-Grimnir’s latchkey grandaxe lunged into space. The Griever’s lance spat towards it. The blades missed each other by a metal shaving. Then Caldernorn’s claws found rock again, throwing Horgan-Grimnir back into his seat, and it tore away up the mountain’s flank. The magmadroth scrabbled for higher ground, drawing itself above the Chaos lord, and then swung its head back to loose a torrent of flame. The Chaos juggernaut glowed like an anvil as the Griever turned into the current with his arm held protectively over his grinning skull helm, his lance kindling yellow-red with corposant.

Dunnegar gave voice to a trembling yell that was Grimnir’s battle wrath alloyed to ur-gold no longer, and wrestled the skullreaper from his arms. He broke him across his knee and swung the limp body into the horde, clearing a yard or so for him to run into. Close to the stone and powerful, he bowled Bloodbound aside as if the ground were still shaking.

Behind them was a rock shelf about twelve feet high.

He ran at it, stuck out a foot and kicked off, gaining another few feet of air beneath him, and then swung his greataxe for the ledge. It bit. He hit the cold rock face, thumping the air from his chest. With a wheezing inhalation, he dropped a kick on the blue-veined Bloodbound that came grasping for his legs, and then heaved himself up.

He had time for a breath and he took it. It lanced his lungs with cold, but was welcome there in spite of it.

He was on the very top of the mountain’s cheek, just as it began to slope upwards to the eye. The snow was coming down even more thickly with the altitude, and the realmgate was little more than a fell glimmer. The Griever’s monstrous last line of defence were grotesqueries of looming musculature. The berzerker did not enjoy the runefather’s advantage of a mountain beast, but his wild charge had carried him almost as far.

Wrapped in a scarf of steamy breath, he pushed into the waist-deep drift towards the gate.

Shouts filtered through the blizzard. A grunt. A clash. A daemonic howl. Dunnegar ignored them, eyes staying true to their goal. Horgan was the greatest warrior to carry the name Grimnir in many years. He had once felled Dunnegar with a single punch. The runefather could win his battles without help.

Fire rippled through the gloaming snowfall, opening it up like a fissure.

Dunnegar turned then. Through the steam, he saw a scene of struggle that could have rivalled the gold-brought visions at his Trial.

Caldernorn had its jaws locked around the juggernaut’s throat, but the daemon, in turn, had the ur-salamander on its side and was in the process of mounting its heaving chest. Horgan-Grimnir held firm in the saddle with a titanic grip, stubbornly resolved to his oath that he and the beast would never be parted.

One handed, he parried the Griever’s increasingly frenzied lunges. Flesh banners snapped and ruffled in the heat rising from Caldernorn’s body. The Lord of Khorne chattered like a rolling skull as the juggernaut crunched forward, raising a shriek from Caldernorn as the daemon walked its crushing weight up its neck. In a panic, the beast began to thrash. Horgan-Grimnir raged and swore, but one hand and the grip of his thighs was no longer enough to remain mounted. Sacrificing his guard, he redoubled his oathsworn grip.

The runefather smiled briefly, as though he’d won some kind of victory.

A moment later, Dunnegar watched the Griever’s lance explode from his chest.

Loss hit with the weight of an avalanche. Not grief. Horgan-Grimnir had never been so dear to him. But loss: a challenge to which he would never rise, a trial that there would be no chance to pass.

The runefather arched his back in pain. Caldernorn was still, sinew and scale crunching under the juggernaut’s tread.

‘Rolk Langudsson!’ Horgan howled through bloodied lips, erupting in a column of searing runelight ‘Your oaths are fulfilled!’

The Griever was on top of him, too intent on twisting the lance and claiming another skull for his armour to care how his victim chose to meet his end. He was close enough that he likely never saw the latchkey grandaxe arcing towards his neck.

Howls of an inhuman rage permeated the snow as, as if in tableau, Horgan-Grimnir and the Chaos lord slid from their mounts one after the other.

Dunnegar heard rather than saw the warped spawn tramping down from the realmgate to belatedly aid their master. He knew he should have taken the gate then while it was unguarded, but to his shame he couldn’t bring himself to do so. The battle was won with the death of the Griever, he knew, and others could claim the prize and see the runefather’s quest continued.

He turned aside.

Already partially buried, Horgan-Grimnir nevertheless glittered with precious ur-gold runes, singing to his soul like the forest to a sylvaneth. Dunnegar hefted his axe, quite prepared to defend the runefather’s remains with his own life.

An oath was an oath, but gold was gold.

‘On the three thousand, three hundred and thirty-first day, there was fire…’

The Angfyrd Odyssey

It was a commonly held belief that Fyreslayers did not feel the heat. Dunnegar knew it was untrue. Rather they endured it, like duardin. However, in this unending land where fire fell as rain and rivers boiled whilst somehow remaining liquid, endurance alone could carry them no further.

‘See that mountain over there.’

Killim’s voice was a dry growl. He lowered his flame-discoloured book tiredly and pointed into the distant haze.

The landscape was one of interconnected lakes stretching out towards a promissory red shimmer. Fire swirled across the surface of the water, reminiscent of the pattern of currents, but elementally subverted. That air was still and heavy. Cinders drifted. To describe the combined effect as a heat haze was inadequate. This place was heat. The very land was hazed.

And as far as Dunnegar could see, there was no mountain.

He shuffled back around on his metal stool. It was squat, of Angfyrd make, and hotter than all the hells. He endured it. His left arm roasted similarly on a portable anvil, his bicep bound tightly. He grunted, distracted.

‘No.’

‘There. No. No, wait a moment…’

The battlesmith scratched his dried brow and turned back to his book. It lay open on the back of a wooden cart containing the lodges’ treasures and that the Fyreslayers took it in shifts to pull. It was a straightforward, two-wheeled contraption with a low base built for low country. The wood came from trees that grew natively here, and as such was remarkably tolerant to the heat. The lodges had acquired it and two others like it several years before from a nomadic human tribe in trade for fyresteel weapons. There had certainly been plenty of those to go around since the battle against the Griever, too many to be carried by the few still walking. Hence the need for carts. Now, only this one remained.

A poor trade then, and one bemoaned constantly by the runefather, Nosda-Grimnir.

Running his finger along the map, Killim squinted towards the distant range, then did a double-take between the hellish topography in front of him and the ancient map on the page.

‘I’m sure of it,’ he muttered. ‘The river we followed had to be the Infernum. It had to be. And these are the first mountains we’ve seen.’

‘If you can call them mountains,’ said Solldun, runesmiter of the Sepuzkul lodge, absently.

He was runemaster now in all but name, but the honorific was as yet unearned, and he resisted it. Killim grumbled under his breath and returned to his maps as Solldun made some tightening adjustments to Dunnegar’s restraints. With roughened fingers, the runesmiter felt the muscles of his arm. Exposure to so much ur-gold had built them up hard and massive, but at the same time twitchy. Dunnegar’s muscles flexed painfully as the runesmiter’s fingers walked down to the wrist. Solldun closed his eyes and muttered half-remembered instruction, nodding as his fingers turned back to press down on a spot a thumb’s width up the berzerker’s forearm. Holding it there, he reached across the anvil for hammer and tongs.

‘Are you ready?’

‘Give it to me,’ said Dunnegar. His efforts not to growl made his words sound all the more forced. Deep breaths. He forced his heart to slow. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m ready.’

Puffing out his cheeks to steady himself, the runesmiter applied the rune to the proscribed patch of forearm. It hissed. Hot air blasted through Dunnegar’s gritted teeth. Then came Solldun’s hammer, smiting the rune through surface skin and deep into the muscle.

Dunnegar shivered as new strength suffused him. He felt it restore him to something nearer to normal. Or to a level of power that his body had come to demand as its normal.

‘Better?’ asked Killim.

‘Much,’ said Dunnegar, sagging back.

Breathing hard and feeling somewhat dizzy, he unfastened his bindings and flexed his bicep. It swelled to a pleasing degree. The rune in his wrist was hard and firm amidst the sliding muscle, like scar tissue. It shone dully under the sky’s pervasive amber glow.

So many of his runes had been used up in battle that even recovering the ur-gold from the dead couldn’t replenish them at the same rate. Rationing of the precious substance was beginning to fray sturdier tempers than his and it was only going to get worse. Even those runes that were newly forged, like the one now in his arm, were small and lacking in purity. Solldun had proven himself a force in battle, but he lacked the skills of a true runemaster. Rolk, he was not.

So why then did he feel so much better with the runesmiter’s weak work in his arm?

‘Perhaps now you’re of a mood to help,’ Killim said waspishly as Solldun packed up his tools and departed.

‘Show me a horde of orruks, old friend, and I’ll help.’

‘Old friend…’ Killim snorted, crossing his arms over his chest, but only for a moment. They were all too hot for that. ‘My old friend would be here with me making some sense out of this map.’

Dunnegar shook his head, ignoring him, levering his forearm backwards and forwards against the anvil and feeling the rune pull. Killim puffed out his chest angrily and made to remonstrate further when an even-tempered hail from the lakeside distracted him.

‘Another day, another argument,’ said Aethnir, striding up from the water’s edge with a band of loosely armoured Sepuzkul hearthguard sweating behind him. His bleak smile, like the Fyreslayers themselves, was diminished, but clung on with a stubbornness that was at odds inspiring or infuriating, depending on the swing of Dunnegar’s moods. ‘You must indeed be strong friends, else one of you would be dead by now.’

Killim and Dunnegar eyed each other. They both knew which one.

Remembering himself, Killim bowed stiffly. His attitude to their reversal in status was ironic given that it had been by his own scholarly concession, ‘not unheard of’, that had finally overcome the resistance to the decimated Angfyrd lodge being absorbed into their cousins’ ranks. It was Aethnir now that commanded the auric hearthguard, with Killim relegated merely to carrying the standard.

‘Perhaps in a few hundred years,’ Nosda-Grimnir had said by way of consolation, time enough for the old smith to memorise the chronicle of the new lodge he was now a reluctant part of.

‘Shouldn’t you be foraging ahead?’ Killim grumbled.

With a self-deprecating shrug, Aethnir indicated the slimy marmot-like creatures strung up from his fyrd’s magmapikes. The animals burrowed into the soil all over this country where the lake was shallow. They tasted even more like dung than dung, but they needed neither cooking nor skinning, and when left to hang could release three or four times their dry weight in lukewarm water.

‘I’d rather eat the magmapike,’ Killim grumbled.

‘You could always try going hungry,’ Aethnir returned. ‘It would be better for the pike.’

‘I should’ve gone with Huffnar and Rokkar. Founded a new lodge and forgotten this damned quest. I’ll wager they’re not eating this hot drez right now.’

‘I’d wager you’re right,’ said Aethnir levelly.

Dunnegar snorted, earning himself a sharply quizzical look from his old mentor. ‘You really think they managed to start a new lodge anywhere here?’

‘Better off,’ Killim grumbled after a moment.

Dunnegar turned to the young karl. ‘Do you know how far we are from Fyrepeak?’

Aethnir simply shrugged.

‘Of course he doesn’t know,’ Killim snapped, swiping up his own chronicle and waving it like an admonition to an entire damnable world. ‘It’s been thirty-three hundred days. We should’ve seen the Plain of Dust, but we haven’t. We should have had at least a hint of Taurak Skullcleaver or the last of his lieutenants, but we haven’t. We should be entering the Red Mountains, but we bloody well aren’t.’ He looked around, drunk with sarcasm. ‘We’re not, are we?’

Aethnir squinted at the red haze on the horizon. ‘They look a bit l–’

‘They’re not the Red drenging Mountains,’ Killim screamed, slamming his book shut, then taking it two-handed and launching it into the air.

It sploshed into the lake, ignited an instant later, and sank under with a hiss.

Panting, Killim turned slowly pale. ‘Oh, drez.’

‘It’s alright,’ said Aethnir. ‘I don’t think it was helping anyway.’

‘This is your fault.’

‘My fault?’

‘Aye. You. Burying ur-gold I could have used. Feeding me these… things.’

Ignoring them, determinedly so for the circularity of their arguments made him dizzy, Dunnegar rose to his feet and leaned forward. He was peering to the horizon, and that latent red shimmer. For a moment it had seemed to crackle as if with storms. He listened, counting under his breath, and on the count of nine came the rumour of thunder.

He couldn’t say why, but the storm made him think of war.

‘The Red Mountains are there,’ he said, sure of it. ‘And we go on.’

‘The four thousand and first day saw the end of one quest and the beginning of another. The journey had proven long and costly and perhaps we should have abandoned it before we did, though there can be few who were there that day who took issue with the outcome. An oath is an oath, but gold is gold…’

– The Sepuzkul Chronicle
(formally the Angfyrd Odyssey)

‘I am wrath!’ Dunnegar roared, throwing his elbow through a warrior’s pointed jaw. Blood exploded from the reaver’s mouth. There was no time to attend him further. The enemy were packed in so close that there was no air to breathe that had not already been breathed out or bled into. The froth from their mouths was in his beard, their blood was in his eyes, and he killed more men with his fingernails and his teeth than he could with his axe.

The mountains – whether the Red Mountains or no – were rust red, fangs of rock to rip open the jugular of passing worlds and drink the fire of their blood. The trail that wound through them was rugged and uneven, climbing by sudden rises and twisting often, but not nearly difficult enough that thirty of the hardest duardin ever to leave the Realm of Chamon could hold back the horde for much longer.

Thirty. Against a thousand thousand.

Few they were, but that it was they who had made it this far and not others was testament to their bloody-minded tenacity to kill rather than be killed.

The last of the two lodges’ hearthguard held the old cart, containing the tools of runemaking and the last few ingots of precious ur-gold, as though it were a fortress. Globs of molten magma screamed from their pikes, blasting smoking trenches deep into the enemy ranks. Solldun the runesmiter chanted from his smoky bastion, straddling a pair of fyresteel chests packed over the axle, and bade the rock to split and boiling geysers to fire the Bloodbound to their dooms. What he admittedly lacked in the rune-maker’s craft, he joyfully accounted for in the arts of war.

The final fyrd of vulkite berzerkers was the wall around them. Leading them in a song of gold and glory, Killim left his years behind him to fight with equal fervour. He and Aethnir battled back to back, the latter a ghost-pale blur behind his twinned fyresteel axes.

‘I am vengeance!’

By foot and shoulder, Dunnegar cleared space enough to swing his axe. It clanged against a blood warrior carrying a mace and a shield stretched with human skin. Too close. The rune-scratched bloodsteel took its hit, and then the warrior thumped him back with the flattened face of his shield. Dunnegar shook off the stunning blow, but not before a bloodreaver daubed in black and red flame tattoos grabbed the haft of his axe and tried to pull it from him.

Dunnegar punched the man in the face. Once, twice. The man’s lip split, his jawbone caved. The third hit twisted his head so sharply that his neck snapped.

Dunnegar shrugged off the mobbing bloodreavers with a howl.

‘I am Grimnir! I am already dead!’

And in that moment, power that did not belong in mortal veins rushing through his mind, Dunnegar was Grimnir again.

The heat of the mountain, the dust on his hands. He could feel the meat of Vulcatrix’s mammoth neck coming apart beneath his axe. And claws. Claws piercing, claws in his chest and in his jaw and spearing his thighs. The god-lizard was dying, and in its savage throes those claws came apart. He felt it. Gods of old, he felt it!

Weeping golden tears, he hurled himself headlong into the grind, striking out with such furious pain that it no longer mattered that there was no room to swing. Everything that got near him died.

‘Tame yourself, grim brother,’ bellowed Nosda-Grimnir from atop his terrible ash-grey magmadroth. ‘Back into line, lest the souls you condemn cry your name into the Underworld and bring the gaze of Nagash upon your shade.’

The Sepuzkul runefather was fending off an ape-like monster of blood and sinew at the extreme range of his grandaxe. Black spikes split its muscular torso without any thought to symmetry or pattern, branded icons of control sweating against slick red skin. Fists like boulders beat aside armoured Goresworn and blood marauders alike in its efforts to get close. The magmadroth sent spumes of flame battering against it, re-opening partially healed lash scars and, in concert with his master’s axe, only just managing to hold the rabid bloodspawn at bay.

‘If we die then we die fulfilling oaths!’ Killim screamed, throat raw, mouth red. ‘To the last! All of us on to the bloody death.’

‘A bloody death!’ Aethnir echoed, raising his axes high.

The Fyreslayers sung it, shouted it loud, beat the words into Bloodbound shields. Some even laughed it, for what was death but the penultimate step on Grimnir’s road?

‘A bloody death!’

The shock of a horn blasted back in answer. The note was as deep as the earth, as powerful as thunder, and on hearing it a fire seemed to die in the eyes of the Bloodbound. Dunnegar felt it too, the fight being drawn from him through the uncanny goose bumping of his flesh, though not to the obvious extent of the Khornates. They stared at each other as if through a dream, and in a listless scrape of greaves and boots on the armour of dead men, they stumbled back.

The Fyreslayers let them go. Expedience perhaps, or exhaustion. Or maybe the pacifying power of that horn had affected them more profoundly than they realised. The armies stared at each other across ground thick with dead. A silence well befitting a graveyard fell across them. Duardin shuffled warily.

‘What is this?’ Dunnegar hissed.

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Killim.

And soon enough, they did.

Simpering and shuffling under the crack of whips, the ranks slowly parted to form a corridor. A pair of towering slaughterpriests walked down it with lengthened strides, escort and honour guard to the monster between them.

It might have been a horse once, but its mouth had since become a beak and its spine curved like one of the daemon hounds of Khorne. Fired burned where a mane should have grown and eyes with just enough intelligence to weep rolled in sockets all over its many-jointed limbs. And mounted on that fell beast rode the real monster.

He was a colossus of armour plate, clanking roughly from side to side with the violence of his mount’s ungainly stride. His armour was a fluted puzzle of grooves and channels through which blood sluggishly trickled. His helm had a Y-shaped opening that revealed a black face with eyes like burning coals, and a pair of flat, angular horns.

The priests of blood parted and there, straight backed and with arms crossed like statues before a realmgate to the Realm of Chaos, they stood.

The Lord of Khorne lowered his horn, made from a length of curving, hollowed bone, and regarded the Fyreslayers one by one.

‘I am Kar Thraxis,’ he said, the deep timbre of his words inflaming the blood of all who heard with a need to do violence. ‘I am the Ravager, the Devourer in Flame. I would meet your mightiest.’

Killim, Aethnir and Nosda-Grimnir shared glances.

Without waiting for them to decide, Dunnegar strode into the clearing and readied his greataxe.

Kar Thraxis nodded, apparently satisfied by what he saw. ‘I hear you slew the Griever.’

‘Not I,’ Dunnegar grunted, ‘but I was there.’

‘Good. You cannot imagine how long I have waited to see him dead.’

Dunnegar gave an impatient growl. ‘Are we going to fight then?’

‘One day. Perhaps.’

With a snap of his armoured wrist, a gang of inhumanly muscular men with dull, beast-of-burden looks, trudged between the watching priests. They dragged heavy chests behind them, pulling them by chains that were fed through the steel rings hammered into their bruised flesh. At a motion from Kar Thraxis, one of the slaughterpriests stepped forward to kick the lock from one. The giant bent low and threw it open.

The Fyreslayers murmured in stunned appreciation.

Dunnegar’s eyes widened as he took in the glittering hoard. As if he could simply absorb it all.

‘There is ur-gold here,’ said Solldun, crouching, eyes fire bright.

‘You’re sure?’ Dunnegar mumbled.

Many Fyreslayers had some sense for the presence of ur-gold, but only a runemaster had the gift to pick ur-gold from gold.

Solldun simply nodded.

‘You like my gold?’ said Kar Thraxis, a smile opening his face like a fissure in deep earth. ‘I had heard.’

‘We like some of your gold,’ Dunnegar said cagily, but bartering now seemed pointless. The Lord of Khorne had seen the hunger in them all, the starvation. He lowered his axe in surrender, dimly conscious of his brothers and cousins doing the same. ‘What do you want for it?’

Kar Thraxis gestured behind him. There, the storm that the Fyreslayers had been following like a guiding star blackened the mountain sky. ‘The war storm is here, led by a being the Stormcasts call Celestant-Prime.’

‘You want me to kill this Stormcast for you?’ Dunnegar wrenched his gaze from the gold and turned to face the Lord of Khorne. He felt no fear of this monster. He stuck out his jaw, puffed out his chest. ‘Because I can do that.’

Chuckling, Kar Thraxis dismounted and knelt to be eye-to-eye with the Fyreslayer. ‘His death by another’s hand wins me nothing.’

‘Taurak Skullcleaver,’ Dunnegar grunted in understanding.

‘The gods demand unity in the face of the storm. His death by my hand will also win me nothing. Will you do it?’

Dunnegar’s gold-flecked eyes met the Khornate’s hate-filled glare and held it. The runefather was dead, his lodge destroyed and swallowed by another. Ancient as such civilized trappings could appear, they were temporary. Grimnir’s life and death taught that. Only power was eternal.

Only gold.

He hawked up a gob of saliva and spat it on his palm, extending it to the Lord of Khorne as it sizzled.

‘I will. And I can.’

About the Author

David Guymer is the author of the Iron Hands novel Eye of Medusa and Echoes of the Long War for The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, he is best-known for his Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novella Thorgrim. He is also responsible for a plethora of short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. David is a freelance writer based in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Awards for his skaven novel Headtaker.

A group of heroes assemble to hunt the Eight Lamentations, mighty artefacts of the Dark God from the Age of Chaos.

A Black Library Publication

First published in the Fyreslayers anthology in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Stepan Alekseev.

Four Thousand Days © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Four Thousand Days, 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: 978-1-78572-881-5

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