Lightning in a Bottle

Sergeant Olfren leant hard against the door of the town hall. The splintered wood shook, an arrhythmic juddering produced by dozens of battering fists. The moans of the dead were loud in his ears, their rotting faces visible through rents smashed in the door. The sight caused every part of him to constrict, reducing him to a hard knot of fear.

‘Brace the door!’ he bellowed. ‘Brace the bastard door!’

Several of his men had been backing away into the shadows of the town hall, eyes huge and faces bloodied. At his strangled cry they came to their senses and rushed to help him.

‘Sarge, what in Sigmar’s name are we going to do?’ shouted swordsman Dhenns.

‘It’s only a matter of time before they get ’round the back way,’ panted handgunner Lanslo. ‘And there’s none left but us. How long’re we meant to hold this door shut?’

‘Long enough for me to think of a way out of this disaster,’ barked Olfren. ‘Now shut up and let me!’

In truth, he had no answers. His thoughts had scattered in panic, and they wouldn’t rally. The dead had fallen upon Harthaven, ghasts flowing through the town’s walls to throw open the main gates. Deadwalkers poured in in their hundreds, overrunning the small garrison and penning the survivors within the town’s squat buildings. As he led the retreat to the town hall, Olfren had seen cackling spectral horsemen sweeping through the walls of each structure, bursting out again dragging snared and screaming souls behind them.

Soon that would happen to him, to his lads, but if they let go of the doors the dead would swamp them in seconds. Panic tightened his chest, and the booming of Deadwalker fists on wood echoed in his head. Olfren screwed his eyes shut and tried to think.

‘Sarge!’ shouted Dhenns. ‘Hammer and anvil, Sarge, look!’

Olfren’s eyes sprang open in time for a bolt of black lightning to sear a line across his sight. He blinked, tearing up as more bolts flashed outside, visible through the rents in the door. The dead were blasted apart, scorched flinders of skin and bone filling the air like shrapnel. Dark figures appeared in their stead, hulking huge in the unmistakable armour of the Stormcast Eternals. Their Sigmarite plate was black, trimmed with gold, and each hefted a mace or axe taller than Olfren himself.

‘The Anvils of the Heldenhammer!’ gasped Lanslo. ‘Now them ghasts are for it!’

The black-armoured Stormcasts waded into the enemy. Incorporeal things came at them in grasping masses, stabbing with ethereal blades and hissing their hate from hollow jaws. Grim and silent, the Anvils struck them down. Each swing of their mighty weapons filled the air with crackling contrails, and wherever their blades bit home the servants of Nagash were torn to fading tatters.

‘That’s right,’ snarled Olfren through gritted teeth, slamming his palm against the inside of the door. ‘That’s right, tear ’em apart!’ He was manic with sudden hope, and the satisfaction of seeing his persecutors suddenly become the victims.

The Stormcasts had fought their way down into the town square, and now the dead were pouring in at them from all sides. Still they swung their great weapons, tearing through the enemy like harvestmen at the reap.

Then one of them trod in a writhing corpse and his foot slid, just enough to throw his balance. Deadwalkers surged, for all the world like a cresting wave that broke upon the bulwark of the Anvil’s armour. He was born off his feet by the press, buried in writhing, biting flesh. Olfren winced at the sudden flash of lightning that blew the corpse-mound apart and went darting away into the skies. Dimly, he understood that he had just seen a Stormcast Eternal killed, but he couldn’t quite process the idea. He clung instead to the hope that the rest of them would fight on, and deliver him from danger.

The second warrior to fall did so standing against the headlong charge of ghostly green horsemen. She swung her huge mace, obliterating one wraith, then another, then another. The next wraith span its spectral scythe and sent the Stormcast’s head bouncing across the square. Head and body both had exploded into lightning and flashed away before the severed cranium could roll to a stop.

Olfren saw more ghasts flowing from the streets around the square, and yet more. Deadwalkers stumbled through them like drunkards through fog, flailing and clawing as they made for the Stormcasts.

Flash! Another Anvil fell, impaled by a dozen spectral blades.

Flash! Another, torn limb from limb by corpses.

Flash! Another.

Flash! Another.

And then only the leader of the Stormcasts remained, backing away before the horde, still swinging his axe in deadly arcs. He had almost reached the door before a terrible shape rose amidst the billowing cloud of ghasts that filled the square. It was a hunched thing, huge and lambent, festooned with rattling manacles and weighted chains.

Defiant, the Stormcast roared a challenge at the spectre; his only answer was an imperious gesture with a spectral talon.

The ghasts raised a storm of gleeful screams as they flowed up the steps and hammered the warrior backwards into the door. The ruined portal shuddered on its hinges as the Stormcast was stabbed again and again, finally crashing to the ground, dead.

Only Olfren saw what happened next.

Staring wide-eyed through a gap in the wood with his knuckles jammed between his teeth, he saw the Stormcast’s soul flicker like a candle in a strong flame. Then, instead of leaping skyward, it flew across the square into the ghostly mass, vanishing with a faint wail into a heavy padlock held high by the hunchback ghast.

The end came quickly after that for Sergeant Olfren and his men, but of it, the Sergeant knew little; by the time the door crashed down, he had already gone quite mad…

PRODUCED BY GAMES WORKSHOP IN NOTTINGHAM

Lightning in a Bottle © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Lightning in a Bottle , Malign Portents, GW, Games Workshop, Warhammer, 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.

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