The Great Black Pyramid

Like a living shadow, Kriktail of Clan Slynk led his clique of Gutter Runners and Assassins from archway to colonnade to mausoleum on his way through Nagashizzar. His clique was but one of hundreds, but with the surety of a born winner, he knew he had penetrated the furthest into the cursed city of Nagash. His kill-pack picked their way through catacombs and cloisters, sliding from one monolithic obelisk to another, sneaking past towering statues of the legendary Mortarchs and building-sized death’s heads. Darting in the shadow of lumbering undead gargants they went, flitting as half-shadows between stationary legions of bone-things, then climbing up the skull-studded pillars to run soundlessly across slanting roofs.

The Slynk adepts had learned of what the Grey Seer Retchnik had intended, and through him, learned the schemes of the Masterclan. There was undoubtedly something at the heart of the obsidian-black pyramid hovering inverted above the city; a prize that could ensure the ascendance of the Clans Eshin forever more. According to their shadowmaster back in Ulgu, the stakes were higher than ever.

On they went through the undead city, using every artifice of the Form of Smoke and Shade to its full extent. Even Nagash’s watchful Morghast sentinels were little match for Clan Slynk’s finest. With their uncanny abilities bolstered by rites of concealment and illusion, at times they were no more substantial than sighs of cold air on the breeze. They slid ever onwards towards the vast black pyramid at the necropolis’ heart. In there was the quintessence of power, and they would claim it.

No matter the cost.

Atop the highest of Nagashizzar’s pyramids save one, Arkhan the Black stared upon his works with a feeling of cold satisfaction. How long had it been since Nagash had tasked him with creating the masterwork that now blotted out the light of Hysh with its vastness? How many of the restless dead had marched to his slavish beat over the millennia? Come to that, how many warriors of how many races had given their lives to stop it, the screams and battlecries of their armies even now carrying upon the wind?

It mattered little, in the final reckoning. Let Mannfred have his sport, setting one enemy against another as he sprung the long-honed defences of Nagashizzar upon those who sought to challenge the Master. Let Neferata rejoice in the culmination of her centuries-long schemes, strife upon strife ensuring that no force of the Pantheon of Order could truly call another a trusted ally. Nagash’s would-be nemeses were arriving piecemeal, or not at all.

All that mattered was the Great Work, and it was a few trickling sand-grains away from completion. With a thrilling sense of grandeur, Arkhan looked out upon the myriad tombs, monuments and statues of Nagashizzar. He intoned a phrase of power in ancient Nehekharan, and summoned the host of departed spirits that would carry the capstone of his greatest achievement – Nagash’s greatest achievement, he corrected himself – to its final resting place, and in doing so, damn the Mortal Realms forever.

Soon, so soon, it would all be over. The Great Black Pyramid would thrum with power, and the necroquake unfold. Together Nagash and his faithful servants would watch as the spirits of all the ages rose from their graves to slay the living, and then drink in the power that was rightfully theirs in the aftermath. The souls of the dead would all find their way to Nagashizzar, starving the other gods of worship – and in so doing, laying them low.

It was a plan so beautiful in its ambition, its completeness, that Arkhan felt moved for the first time in aeons. If he had still been a mortal man – and if he had still been capable – he would have wept.

Ignoring the sounds of battle around the citadel’s lower levels, Lord-Ordinator Arros Diviniad put his eye to the arcanoscope of his citadel’s observatorium. Pushing the sounds of screaming and the clashing of swords out of his mind, he consulted the complex orrery and scrying mortar-and-pestle arrangement on his desk, tweaked a silver strand of wire on the Shyishan section of his star chart, and leaned in close. Within the brimming mortar upon his desk, a solution of ground celestium and powdered glimmerings revealed a scene of marching armies converging upon a city of midnight-black monuments. It was a sight that filled him with mounting dread.

Weeks ago his trusted friend and confidante, Vorrus Starstrike, had given in to his own vendetta instead of leading the march upon Nagashizzar. In waging war against the Khornate armies of Marakarr Blood-Sky, he had destroyed any chance the two forces had of reaching Nagashizzar intact and shattering the works of the Great Necromancer. Without coherence, without unity, the vitality, talent and spark of the races of the living would be stymied, and ultimately come to nothing. Even now they were held at bay by the serried legions of the dead – who, by contrast, were united under a single indomitable will.

And they would pay with their lives.

Lord Arros sighed, the weight of a dozen deaths heavy upon him, and strode towards the stairs. He must return to Azyr, for the Sacrosanct Chambers would be mustering for a new war, and his brotherhood had need of him.

The sound of armoured feet came from the citadel’s spiral staircase as horned, plate-clad killers raced up the stairs. He took up his astral hammers and ran to meet them, knowing full well he went to his death.

A robed figure drifted over the cold Shyishan dunes towards the Crystal Gates, his many mouths muttering in a dozen different languages at once. Bangles chimed on his four slender arms, and motes of light like collapsing constellations glimmered under his voluminous hood. He had led many key players in a secret dance, manipulating their actions to music only he could hear. With the other unwitting participants sliding into place at the last, his master would be pleased with the chorus of anarchy that resulted.

The daemon shapeshifter could feel the energy of potential futures crackling in the air. The greatest change to befall the Mortal Realms since the coming of the Great Game was mere moments away. Soon, those energies that mortals sought to tame – and gods too, come to that – would be unleashed, never to be truly controlled again.

The Deathrunner Spark-eye gave the signal, and as one the Clan Slynk skaven held their breath. The cool air of Nagashizzar above them was filled with a gale of spirit hosts, swirling around the purple-black monoliths that formed the outer skin of the Great Pyramid.

The time was nigh.

As the shadow of the penultimate obelisk slid over the Slynk adepts, Spark-eye shut his eyes. His fellows did the same. In a single instant he and his shrouded killers shade-stepped from the city into the sky, skitterleaping to cling to the underside of the giant black monolith casting gloom on the city below.

The huge construction, still rising, led them to within twenty feet of an aperture in the pyramid’s side. They leapt, one after another, through the gap. Glidsnik didn’t quite make it, his claws scrabbling on the glassy underside of the inverted pyramid before he was snatched away like a rag doll by the gales of aetheric power that raged around it.

Spark-eye smirked as he climbed up inside the Great Black Pyramid and into the gloom beyond. There was a reason he had put Glidsnik to the rear. He had never really liked the backstabbing little sneak anyway.

Nagash of Nehekhara felt the fires of anticipation in his chest. Once cold and barely smouldering, they now roared like a furnace.

The last time he had felt this way was when he had condemned the lands of his birth to a hideous demise by plague, followed by an eternity of undeath. What a glorious time that had been. Even if it was a world away, it still gave him satisfaction to think of it.

Now, a new world order was imminent, with Nagash at its very heart. The prophecies had been unfortunate. Many a mortal, deludedly thinking itself more than a mere a puppet, had striven to disrupt his plans. Even the gods had united against him. Some had almost succeeded, but they had failed at the last.

He had kept Khorne occupied with the Red Mist in Aqshy, releasing the anger of a hundred slain death gods through the Abyssal Fires. Tyrion and Teclis, for all their talk of enlightenment and illumination, kept to their own borders and their obsession with Slaanesh, little realising their insularity doomed them as much as any overcommitment.

Through Arkhan and his Black Disciples, Nagash had set Morathi and Slaanesh against one another. By invading Ulgu’s thirteen kingdoms he had given the Shadow Queen all the reason she needed to muster armies to fight his pawns – and secretly use them to defy the followers of her ancient foe. Tzeentch had largely stayed out of his way after Nagash’s agents – Neferata foremost amongst them – had engineered the sacrifice of the prophets and soothsayers across the realms. Soon after, he had released the ghost of the dead moon Morrsleib from its bondage to feast on the secrets of men in the form of Lunaghast. The Architect of Fate had been kept busy ever since.

All the while, that fat fool Nurgle was busy trying to redefine the realms themselves, preoccupied with bringing riotous life to lands whose very nature rejected fecundity. Nagash had been only too happy to indulge the Plaguefather’s parochial obsessions, ceding lands that he could do without whilst the true battle was fought elsewhere.

Gorkamorka had moved against him with surprising speed and efficacy, so much so that Nagash was unsure the greenskin god did not have a shadowy sponsor working behind him. He had been forced to summon the Black Void of Shyish to steal more time, expending a great deal of grave-sand to ensure he had nights enough to complete his great work. It was a risk, but one well taken, and it had paid off.

Sigmar Soulthief had sent his legions, hurled his meteors in a fit of pique, but was too concerned with consolidating his gains against Chaos to see the danger growing under his nose. He called himself the God-King, now, but it was plain to all he still thought as a warrior, with all the limitations that brought. No amount of hammers and blades could fight against the energies of the cosmos.

As for the Horned Rat, he was too weak to...

Nagash felt a ripple in the aether, a breath of unpredictability on the wind.

As for the Horned Rat...

A niggling claw of a doubt scratched inside his skull. But by then, it was too late.

Spark-eye backflipped like an acrobat, narrowly avoiding being decapitated as a giant wight with glowing green eyes barrelled around the corner. The undead revenant’s black-bladed axe carved across the corridor in a blur of dark energy. A shadowsmoke bomb was already leaving the Deathrunner’s hand as his image split in two, his doppelganger keeping the massive, horned skeleton busy as he slid under the sweep of its double-headed axe. The corridor filled with Ulgu-smoke, and Spark-eye’s little band of rats slunk past to dart further into the black-walled pyramid.

There were only three of his fellow assassins left, now, the rest having fallen to curse-traps or the undead denizens that prowled this labyrinthine maze of arcane passageways and crawlspaces. Fewer to claim the wealth, Spark-eye told himself. Fewer to steal the glory that was rightfully his. But in his soul, he knew that was pure bravado. The musk of fear was heavy in the air, for the inside of the pyramid did not seem to conform to the laws of the cosmos. All four of the Slynk adepts knew they were hopelessly, irrevocably lost.

Then Spark-eye saw something that lit a flicker of hope in his breast. A chamber ahead glowed with a lambent purple energy, illuminating strangely angled walls inscribed with line upon line of tiny runes and pictograms. Some of the eldritch diagrams glowed brighter than others, glimmers of particularly pure black realmstone crystals marking the vital points. The Deathrunner’s eyes lit up with avarice. He suppressed a shudder, putting it down to the excitement of triumph, as he ran his claws along one of the walls. He motioned his fellows forward, then pulled out a three-bladed triskele and began to dig a gem-like crystal out of the wall. He put his shoulder to it, and out it came with a pop.

The pyramid shuddered, just enough to vibrate Spark-eye’s whiskers and make his musk-gland tighten unpleasantly.

Probably nothing, he thought, taking his triskele to the next jewel.

Borne by the spirits of dead kings, the final stone of the Great Black Pyramid slid into place with a soft click. That sound was the death of a thousand nations.

Slowly, impossibly, the Great Black Pyramid began to turn. The gale of spectres that swirled around it turned into a vortex, spinning as hurricanes of Shyishan magic were sucked in to converge upon the megastructure’s tip. The inverted pyramid revolved faster and faster as gales of eldritch power were absorbed by its vitrified grave-sand. Its stolen energies pulsed as it accelerated to whipping, blurring speed.

As Nagashizzar and the lands around it were drained of colour, the nexus of Shyishan magic reached a critical point. In a single instant the soul of every living creature for hundreds of leagues was wrenched free from its body. Rapidly desiccating flesh was blasted to dust, and a chorus of agonized screams echoed across the bleached wasteland.

As the Great Black Pyramid became impossibly dense with magical energy, it began to sink into the heart of the realm, not so much drilling into it as buckling, stretching, drawing the lands down around it. The pit beneath it became a sinkhole, an abyss, a hungering whirlpool of energy that gathered in everything around it and drew it ever downward.

With a thunderous boom like the cracking of worlds, the energies of Shyish imploded – and from there spread out across the Mortal Realms in a horrible, shrieking tide. The bow waves of energy that crashed across each realm brought with them a strange and anarchic disruption of the aether – for, at the last, Nagash’s great ritual had been tainted by the agents of Chaos.

Everywhere, the spirits of the dead rose from their graves. Twisted gheists of all descriptions burst from the mortal clay they had once inhabited as one domain after another was assailed by a billion dead souls. Then, as the metaphysical backlash cascaded across the cosmos, the energies of the cataclysm went wild.

Laughter rang out in the darkness, maddening and without end. The Shyish necroquake had come, and the Mortal Realms were changed forever.

PRODUCED BY GAMES WORKSHOP IN NOTTINGHAM

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