DAY OF THE SUMMONER

Beyond the bounds of reality hung a silver-pinnacled tower. Glittering bridges and arcing stairways tethered it to shimmering Realmgates, and its mountainous spires rose in anarchic profusion until they were lost in the haze.

Deep inside, in a chamber fashioned from crystal and stone, a sorcerer-daemon hunched over a mass of mirrors. The Gaunt Summoner was one of nine. He was known as the Thief of Wits, and feared for his sanity-blasting conjurations and his ability to devour mortal thoughts.

Within each of the Summoner’s mirrors, scenes of desperation and violence played out. Bands of heroes, villains, champions and killers battled side-by-side against monsters and daemons. They took daring leaps over yawning chasms. They pitted their wits against fiendish booby traps and riddling daemonic oracles.

The Summoner had seen it play out a thousand times. Yet his fascination for the trials of those who walked his tower never diminished. He delighted in every struggle, every forced alliance and desperate betrayal, every permutation of guile, intrigue, foolishness and fury.

Just visible within each image were glinting threads, delicate as gossamer. They emerged from the hearts and minds of the champions and coiled away, representing fates yet to be met. These were not strands that any normal being could perceive, but to the Gaunt Summoner they glinted with promise. Many were silver. Those, he ignored. Yet a scant few glimmered gold and these the Gaunt Summoner watched with rapt fascination. They represented events of great moment, strands of causality that might be subtly plucked in order to alter the wider weft of fate itself.

It was so that they could cultivate and then appropriate these golden strands that the Gaunt Summoners allowed mortal beings to stray into their silver towers. With each future the daemons twisted out of true, the complex weave of the daemons’ own tapestry of fate grew toward fruition.

‘Soon we will be free,’ crooned the Thief of Wits. ‘And then… ohhhhh and then…’

The daemon paused as he felt a ripple of power pass through his sanctum. Purple flames dimmed in wall sconces, causing shadows to billow from the chamber’s corners and stretch like grasping fingers along the walls. The Summoner sought an answer in his mirrors. Had one of his guests summoned especially powerful arcane forces? He recoiled with a hiss as he saw his mirrors going dark one by one. Hoarfrost crackled as it crept across their surfaces. Shadows swam within them, then resolved into new images. The Gaunt Summoner saw the corridors of his tower, but not as they should be. The fires had died. Monsters and champions alike were naught but mouldering bones, while here and there a wailing ghast drifted.

The Summoner keened as he saw all of the fascinating variation and bountiful mutability leaching from his domain. There was nothing here to serve the Changer of the Ways. The weave and weft was gone, burned away to nothingness. All was static and dead.

The daemon’s eyes flickered back and forth between mirrors showing endless deserts of black sand, looming mountains of bone and rank upon rank of shambling corpses with cold green witchfire burning in their eyes. The Gaunt Summoner ground his needle fangs together as he watched the negation of everything his God had set in motion. Behind it all he saw a skull visage, a leering and arrogant death’s head that he knew from wars of old.

Then the visions changed. Sorcerous sparks lit the darkness. Threads of gold enmeshed the limbs of stalking revenants and tore them apart, and from within the cadavers spilled esoteric energies. The Summoner’s eyes narrowed as ravening tides of magic billowed across his mirror images, and the realms shook with their power. Armies marched behind glowing figures across a desert of blackened bone, and the threads of gold wound amongst them until they jerked and twitched on puppet strings, and then were hanged by them.

As suddenly as the visions had come, they faded. Ice melted to water and trickled to the floor. Torch flames leapt. His mirrors filled again with the images of violence and desperation they had shown before.

Yet now they held little interest for the Summoner. He paced his sanctum, muttering to himself. He riffled through ancient tomes, then upended a box of rune-branded scarabach beetles and studied intently the direction each one scuttled before crushing them in the ritual order and swallowing them down.

Suddenly decisive, the Thief of Wits cast his eyes skyward and intoned sibilant words. The sanctum’s ceiling turned opaque then vanished. In its place was revealed an expanse of fractal spaces and impossible stonework that spread away in all directions, and would swiftly have driven any mortal mind mad.

Amongst the endlessly replicating facets of sundered reality, the Summoner’s eight kin looked up from their own sanctums and met his gaze. The Tyrant of Eyes stared at him through magically conjured orbs. The Tongueless Lord hunched over his mirrors as meltwater dripped from them. The others, too, were there, though several were illusory simulacra; these saw to their duties in secret even as their true selves walked the realms at Archaon’s side.

‘You all saw, yes…?’ asked the Thief of Wits.

‘We ssssaw,’ replied the Prince of Stolen Breaths. ‘It was a vision from the Changer. It portends victory for the upsssstart god of the dead.’

‘If it was a vision from the Changer then it portends possibility, for nothing is set,’ replied the Thief of Wits.

‘Perhaps it is a warning that our course leads towards the ruin of all,’ mused the Tyrant of Eyes.

‘A coward’s claim,’ intoned the Slayer of Names. ‘We have been wise at every weaving. The Changer shows us a confluence of fates amidst which we may grasp the all-weave as one and turn it to our own designs. We all saw the sorcery that was unleashed, the threads that bound and strangled.’

‘Arrogance. Dangeroussss arrogance,’ spat the Prince of Stolen Breaths. ‘If the Everchosen should learn of our designssss our punishment would make all previous sssleights seem paltry by comparissson. There is no guarantee those hanged figures were not our own.’

‘Until we free ourselves from his leash, we are little better than slaves,’ snarled the Slayer of Names. ‘We are creatures of Tzeentch, not of Archaon. It is unbecoming…’

‘This argument is a fire long turned to embers and ash,’ said the Thief of Wits. ‘The Changer has sent us a vision, this we know. Allegory is an open tome to such as we. Opportunity waits to be seized.’

‘What are your thoughts?’ asked the Tyrant of Eyes.

‘We have seen the omens, the portents, the great surges of fate and change that wash across the Mortal Realms,’ said the Thief of Wits. ‘Now the Changer sends us this vision of doom and damnation transformed. I have cast the beatles and I believe that it is a spur to action. I believe he wishes us to continue with our works, but to alter our weaving in sympathy with greater events.’

‘You think he ssseeks an end to Archaon amidst this coming war of soulssss?’ asked the Prince of Stolen Breaths.

‘I think the Changer wishes power to be unleashed, his and ours both,’ said the Thief. ‘And I think that we have seen the price if we fail to act now. It is an opportunity and a warning both. I say we continue our weavings against the Everchosen, but with this vision in mind. We twist our champions’ paths so that they might best serve Great Tzeentch’s ends in this dark time, and in so doing we bring an end to Archaon and defy Nagash all at once.’

Several of the other Summoners crooned their approval and eagerness. Others remained silent and watchful.

‘Let ussss also send forth the formlesssss one, then,’ suggested the Prince of Stolen Breaths. ‘I have a notion of where he might ssserve us best in thissss.’

‘Very well. If this is to be our course then there are auguries and castings to be made,’ said the Tyrant of Eyes. ‘Our weave is infinitely complex and fragile.’

‘Then time is a currency better spent in action than in discourse, is it not?’ asked the Thief of Wits.

‘We concur,’ said the Tyrant of Eyes after a heavy pause. ‘We are agents of change in all its forms. Inaction will not suffice.’

Amidst a chorus of hissing breaths, the decision was made. The fractal vision vanished, replaced again by a ceiling of gem-studded stone. The Thief of Wits took a moment to savour the deference he had been shown, and then leant over his mirrors with fresh purpose.

His eyes crawled across the figures within them, finally settling upon a skaven Deathrunner from whom a thick golden thread stretched. The verminous assassin crouched behind a crystal column, daggers in hand, waiting with skittish patience as a band of champions strode, unknowing, into his ambush.

‘Yes, you will do nicely…’ murmured the Thief of Wits, and his spider-like fingers began to weave.

PRODUCED BY GAMES WORKSHOP IN NOTTINGHAM

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