The Time of Plenty

‘Let the feast begin!’

As High King Atheldade gestured grandly at the banquet laid out before him, the silken ribbons of his regalia billowed in the scented air. He smiled at his reflection in his nearby seeing-glass, then looked upon his gathered court, as proud and benevolent as a father watching his children playing in a meadow.

Turning his head to look over the Arch of Prophecy to the great eyrie high above, he met the eye of his dragon companion and faithful steed, Illuminas. The skydrake nodded, just once, in stately approval. The celebration of their victory over the Gaudy Blades was looking to be a fine day indeed.

There were hundreds of his kith gathered, gossiping and laughing lightly with excitement. Every man, woman and child was hale and hearty, with rosy cheeks and gleaming eyes. Doves flitted to and fro in their roosts high above, and to either side of the king’s lavishly upholstered throne, splendid white peacocks fanned their feathers.

Atheldade took in a huge lungful of the night air, and breathed out pure relief. Despite the rains, despite the raids of the vile barbarians and would-be conquerors they had hurled back so many times, and despite last winter’s landslide opening their palace to the cold night air, the Kingdom of Wendel’s Glory still shone like glittering jewels in the twilight. Now, with their messenger patrols bringing word of a bumper harvest to come, the future looked even brighter. It made the old warrior’s heart pound with pride in his massive chest.

Down on the mountainside, pallid figures scurried and slithered through the muck like worms writhing in an open grave. They held in their pale arms various human remains turned grey-black with the ash and cloying mud of the landslide. Holding high great armfuls of fleshy remnants as offerings to their master, they strove to get ever higher up the paths and climbways of the peak. Every few seconds one of them would slip and tumble to a slump, or succumb to a ravenous hunger and sink sharp teeth into his fleshy burden. Despite these lapses, the throng made slow progress upwards.

At the top of the peak, standing in the largest of the caverns that holed the mountainside like a rotten honeycomb, was a monstrous white giant surrounded by grovelling troglodytes. It was clad only in tatters of skin. It howled, its voice redolent of despair turned to vicious hatred.

Carrion crows quorked, startled into the air, and a few half-dead vultures ruffled their feathers as they clucked in alarm. They too took flight as the undead dragon squatting above the white king roared in response, flecks of rotting meat flying from its blackened gums. In the dirt below, the slimy, wriggling creatures crawling up the cliff gibbered and cackled to see their long-revered dragon rear up high.

‘Kindsmen! Gentledames!’ shouted Atheldade, projecting his voice to regain his subjects’ attention. ‘I beg of you, for one moment, give me your eyes!’

Some of the pale ghouls held up ocular offerings to their king, gelid orbs glimmering in the moonlight. A few literal souls even plucked out their own cataracted eyes, gibbering with pain and maniac glee as they raised them triumphantly to the peak.

‘This day is of great consequence,’ continued Atheldade. ‘We have won a great victory over our arch-enemies, the Gaudy Blades!’

The king held up a severed arm slicked with blood. The remnants of its Freeguild uniform flapped in the wind alongside a sail of tattered skin. It was still holding an unopened scroll in its death grip, its wax seal that of a request for parley. Emblazoned upon it was the sigil of distant Lake Lethis.

‘Better yet,’ said Atheldade with a smile, ‘Our brave scouts, led as ever by the redoubtable Baron Retch ven Gizzard, have returned triumphant. They bring not only vittles, but the grandest of tidings!’

At this, a bony freak on the king’s right took a gangling bow. Shaking his head in mock exasperation, Atheldade grasped his minion’s arm by the wrist and raised it high as if it were that of a victorious prizefighter. The freak drooled through a horrible approximation of a smile, and the crowd of slithering ghouls screamed in excitement.

‘We Wendels have been through sad and desperate times of late,’ said Atheldade, his tone suddenly serious. ‘We, who have tilled the fields to exhaustion and been forced to eat of our faithful steeds and prized oxen alike, came close to starvation.’ At this, his expression clouded further, and his confident tone grew choked as tears brimmed at the corner of his eyes. ‘Close to despair, some would say. I myself even came to doubt, when the landslide laid this most glorious palace bare unto the stars.’

The white giant’s face contorted once more, and he grinned, exposing rows of shark-like teeth adorned with chunks of gristle.

‘Yet we made it through! The time of the eternal harvest is upon us!’

Rapturous cheers erupted from those gathered below, the ladyfolk waving their perfumed handkerchiefs as the men drew their swords and held them aloft in salute. Atheldade soaked up the adulation, inclining his crowned head in thanks.

‘And to those of you who thought the Wendels would not come through our long trials, shame on you,’ chuckled Atheldade, waving his finger as if scolding a clutch of errant stable boys. ‘The prophecy has proven itself to be wise and true, after all these years, just as I said it would!’

The ghouls on the mountainside, having stopped to listen to their master’s ravings, held tatters of torn skin and sharpened bones as tribute to their king.

‘The time of the eternal harvest is upon us,’ said Atheldade. ‘We have won through the time of strife, found the promised era, and all the while we did not forsake our ideals. Not even when times seemed so dark we were rendered blind. Now we see again, and all we need do is feast! Hunt and feast forever more!’

The white giant turned triumphantly to the archway above him, long overgrown with moss and caked with the gore of a hundred cannibalistic feasts. He gestured grandly at the carefully hewn inscription that spanned the arch in foot-tall letters above him.

THERE WILL COME A TIME OF PLENTY

WHERE NO MOUTH WILL WANT FOR MEAT

AND THE TRUE RULER OF THIS TROUBLED LAND

WILL RISE UNSTOPPABLE

Howling in a horrible mixture of glee and madness, the king hoisted up the messenger’s disembodied limb he had been clutching, and began to eat.

PRODUCED BY GAMES WORKSHOP IN NOTTINGHAM

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