IN THE MISTS OF CHAOS
Rik Hoskin


 	Award-winning fantasy writer Rik Hoskin joins the roster of Inferno!. In his first outing for Black Library, Rik provides a captivating story where nothing is as it seems. Delving into what life as an ordinary mortal can be like, Rik shows us how quickly one’s fortunes can turn in the Mortal Realms.

 
 
 	 
 


 	The sounds of new swords being forged echoed across the settlement of the Ironvale with the familiar clanging of ­hammers on metal as they were beaten into shape. Uffo Weisz winced as he crossed his arms across his broad chest and surveyed the settlement. His arms, like the Ironvale, were scored with scars, evidence of how both man and village had barely survived its recent encounter with the forces of Chaos. The mining settlement was in the process of being rebuilt, locals toiling to bolster the damaged walls that had been ruined by projectiles and flames. Walls could be repaired, but his scars would be permanent, their thick white lines like medals scored into his flesh, proud evidence of the valour he had showed here two months prior. Weisz’s scars stung when the temperature dropped, but his brother’s wounds had been far worse.
 	Weisz and his younger brother Moryn had been central in protecting this settlement from the deranged hordes of Chaos, then saved it with the thrust of swords and blasts of shots, until they had forced back the adherents of madness who wanted to seize control of the Realmgate that waited beyond the pass. Moryn had almost lost his leg during that cruel, final push, the swipe of an enemy’s axe cleaving a great hunk of flesh from his thigh, and dropping the lad to the ground with a blood-curdling scream.
 	‘We won, brother,’ Weisz murmured. They had saved the village, with its mine that scooped the metal from under the ground to forge the swords and shields that Weisz and other brave Freeguilders like him relied upon – but the cost had been colossal. Soldiers had been lost, and there had been the loss of his brother’s wellbeing. That the boy lived, crippled and in constant pain, was no consolation. Death would have been a relief.
 	Weisz was a large man, made larger by the story that had grown up around him since that frantic battle. In the eyes of his Freeguild colleagues, he was a legend. Their stories nurtured that legend with each retelling, clung to it the way they would a shield, as if it could protect them from the horrors that lurked here in the burning realm of Aqshy. Sometimes they would add details from their own imaginations as to why Weisz had been promoted from guardsman to general on that day. In the stories they told, he had fought a thousand beasts of Chaos, had arm-wrestled an Arcanite of the Dark Gods with such determination that the sorcerer’s arm had been pulled clean from its socket and had beaten back the last of the ravening hordes with that bloody limb until all that was left was fleshless bone. Weisz enjoyed hearing the tales, and would even correct them sometimes, adding his own parts to the legend, layer upon layer of hyperbole, each new addition giving the people around him hope.
 	The truth was less sensational. It was, however, enough to cause Weisz to awaken at three in the morning, struggling to catch his breath as the panic set in – seeing his sword cleave through the tattooed forearm of a sorcerer calling himself Ty’Gzar, to stop his weaving of the spell that would have razed the village. Weisz had made an impossible choice to stop the sorcerer instead of saving his brother from the swing of an axe, a choice he would have to live with forever, a choice that had made him a hero.
 	The mining village called the Ironvale was located between two towering walls of rock that hid it from the sun for most of the day. Inhospitable as the location seemed, one hundred and thirty-seven people still called it home. The rock walls towered fifty feet above the fortress village, gleaming with thick seams of iron and copper and tin, spikes and cicatrices of metal lurking in those walls like fossils. Those exposed metal seams were baked hot by the relentless sun until they became scalding to the touch by midday.
 	The buildings were humble, the families young, and like all places where hardship ruled, the community was close-knit. Everyone here was involved in the local mining, either as miners or metalworkers or weapon smiths. And they all knew Weisz – knew his legend, at least, repeating it over homebrewed ale as the harsh red sun set, painting the walls as red as the blood Weisz had spilled to protect them all.
 	Weisz watched from the Ironvale’s lone watchtower as his colleague, Mannetje, came hurrying along the path to the village walls. Mannetje was a small man, stumpy but all muscle, with shoulders as wide as a doorway and a moustache whose ends trailed down past his chin. He looked at Weisz with a combination of awe and reverence, believing the legend more than the man.
 	‘Sightings of movement out in the west,’ Mannetje said, his face grim as he looked up at Weisz.
 	‘How close?’ Weisz asked. He automatically shifted his gaze to the path that led between the towering bluffs, from where Mannetje had run. A tiny sliver of sky could be seen above those rock walls, silver clouds lit orange from the glow of the distant volcano.
 	‘About three miles out,’ Mannetje said, turning the spyglass in his hands around nervously, as if he was wrestling with a snake. ‘Three miles and closing.’
 	Weisz closed his eyes, secretly thrilled by the prospect of getting revenge on the foul sorcerer who had stolen his brother’s independence. ‘They don’t want us,’ he said slowly. ‘They want the gate. They just think we’re close enough to be in their way.’
 	‘That’s what Bren figures, too,’ Mannetje agreed. ‘That damned Realmgate. I don’t care for it, puts everything off balance.’
 	Weisz nodded.
 	The Realmgate was called Brimfire, a hidden path fabled to open onto another of the Eight Realms, the control of which could end a war or start one. Hidden centuries ago, its only access had neither been marked or mapped, and its mystical properties had been masked by runes of duardin warding. That the Ironvale was located near to one of the suspected entryways was happenstance and nothing else. Weisz and his men were here to protect the mine and its valuable resources, not a Realmgate. That was something better left to soldiers whose nature was closer to almighty Sigmar’s. But even the Stormcasts could not be everywhere, and sometimes a man became a legend by standing his ground when his other option was to die like a dog. Legends never gave up for even so much as a breath.
 	Humanity followed the lead of Sigmar himself, who had strived against all obstacles to push back the dark forces of Chaos. Weisz knew in his heart that it was his duty to do the same, to strive against all obstacles and stand firm against the darkness. Just like Sigmar’s personally chosen warriors in their fearsome armour that gleamed like the sun.
 	‘Amass the men,’ Weisz said, donning his battle helm as he spoke to Mannetje. ‘Today we show this black-hearted spawn what it means to face good men and women on the battlefield.’
 	Uffo Weisz took a few minutes to visit his brother Moryn in their shared dwelling close to the south wall. Moryn had the sweats, the same as he had for the last two months, and his leg was wrapped like something from a butcher’s stand.
 	‘We must push back this sorcerer and his army once and for all, or they shall keep coming over and over,’ Weisz said as he checked on Moryn’s leg. The wound was scabbed over and it was slick with weeping pus, but it looked better than before.
 	‘I’ll come with you–’ Moryn began.
 	But Weisz was shaking his head as he dampened a cloth. ‘You’re in no state for that, Mor,’ he said.
 	Moryn nodded solemnly. ‘You did it once, brother,’ he said, wincing while Weisz efficiently cleaned the wound.
 	‘So the ballad singers tell me,’ Weisz said with a smile. ‘My duty was clear – to drive Ty’Gzar’s unholy army back.’
 	‘When you took the sorcerer’s hand,’ Moryn reminded him. ‘Don’t forget that.’
 	‘I won’t,’ Weisz said, replacing his brother’s dressings. ‘But I doubt that Ty’Gzar has either.’
 	Two miles out from the Ironvale, the fog was rising. Weisz led his troop of three dozen Freeguild soldiers into the west, following the pathway between the towering bluffs until it narrowed to a point where barely five grown men could walk abreast. The shadows were thick here – the sun’s rays never reached between the towering crags of rock. Illumination came instead from the sunlight’s flickering reflections on the seams of raw metal, playing across the walls and ground like ripples on a pond.
 	‘You smell that?’ Mannetje whispered, his nostrils widening as he took a deep breath of air, turned bitter with the tang of sulphur. ‘Reeks of something… twisted.’
 	Beside him, Weisz and several others took a breath, and cursed as they scented the awful reek of Chaos that carried on the warm air along with the rising mist. Down the line, Hobbs, a young recruit who lacked experience, began to vomit, a slick smear of saliva and bile drooling down his chin as he doubled over.
 	‘Someone hold him,’ Weisz said, indicating Hobbs. ‘Make sure he doesn’t choke.’
 	A woman called Berta grabbed Hobbs and held his head. ‘Take a breath, soldier,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t lose it now.’
 	Berta was tough. She wore her hair short and had a burn scar running the length of her face from the platoon’s last skirmish. Before the scar she had worn her hair longer, until a Chaos cultist had set light to it. She was here as much for revenge as Weisz himself.
 	‘Stand firm,’ Weisz told the others, feeling the air pressure change. It was pressure that seemed to be almost internal somehow, like the never-abating fear for his brother’s health. His allies steadied themselves, hands on sheathed swords, a few pistoliers reaching for their guns.
 	Weisz wished his brother was here. Moryn fought like he was born to it, he moved like poetry. Weisz was a brute compared to him, a lumbering thing where Moryn had been a specialist. Or maybe it was just the companionship he missed. Maybe the trust that only brothers shared when they put their lives on the line together. This time he would fight for his brother, rather than with him.
 	At that moment, figures began to emerge from the grey fog, moving together but still ramshackle in their way, as if they had tried and failed to coordinate their movements. Some looked human, or nearly so, their faces hidden behind grotesque masks in iridescent yellows and the blue of corpses that elongated or squashed their profiles. Others seemed closer to animals, walking on all fours like hounds, some held tightly on leashes. Weisz counted thirty-eight in total, presumably all that was left of the sorcerer’s cult after their previous clash with his Freeguilders. It was a small group to strive for the Realmgate, but enough for the enclosed terrain.
 	‘Form up,’ Weisz commanded his troops, never taking his eyes from the forms proceeding from the mist. ‘No one moves until my command.’
 	Behind him, Weisz heard his faithful soldiers step forward, readying themselves. They were edgy, he sensed. Many had seen their comrades cut down by these worthless cultists before, and some of them understandably wanted blood. But they needed to remain together, Weisz knew. The numbers were too close, the combatants too well matched to do it any other way. Large weapons and massed armies could do nothing within a tight passage like this – it was a place where only close combat could prevail, for there was not the space for anything grander.
 	‘There!’ a Freeguild soldier called Bren said, pointing to the figures of Chaos emerging from the tendrils of thick, grey mist.
 	Weisz saw, and a jolt of anticipation ran through him. Standing a little way back from the head of the troops stood Ty’Gzar, dressed in robes of midnight blue, a staff in his one remaining hand almost as tall as he was, with a warpfire gemstone embedded within its apex. The man’s right arm was missing from just below the elbow, where Weisz had hacked clean through the bone two months prior, when he had held this same pass against the onrush of enemies. Ty’Gzar’s forces had been almost wiped out then, and now he was running out of troops. He was a fool to attack the same spot again, but Chaos did strange things to a man’s mind, addling him to believe in his own invulnerability. He would learn, Weisz thought grimly.
 	Using the uneven walls and the shadows for protection, the Freeguild soldiers looked to Weisz for their next move. Fearless as his legend, Weisz strode purposefully to a point midway between his own men and those devoted to the trickery of Chaos.
 	‘You’ve taken a wrong turn, Stumpy,’ Weisz taunted, his voice echoing back along the tight passage between the cliffs.
 	The things of Chaos halted, looking to their own leader for instruction on what to do next.
 	Weisz spoke again. ‘Surrender,’ he boomed. ‘Lest you prefer to see how far and how fast you can run from me and my men. For, if you force us, we will cut you down, you can be assured of that.’
 	A dozen steps back from the head of his small army, Ty’Gzar sneered, his yellow teeth seeming yellower still where reflected light was cast through the gem in his staff and onto his face. ‘You’re outnumbered,’ he said, his voice shrill as a crow’s caw.
 	‘In numbers, perhaps, but numbers alone do not make an army superior,’ Weisz replied with a confident laugh. ‘Any blood shed this day will be that of your men and yourself, just as it was before.’
 	Ty’Gzar turned back for a moment, tapping the blunt end of his staff against the ground thrice in a steady beat as he looked into the low-hanging mist at his back. ‘You have miscalculated our numbers,’ he said, as the echo of the staff’s beat rang through the pass. ‘Gravely so.’
 	As the sorcerer spoke, Weisz saw more figures moving in the mist, an army of humanlike things come to wage war on the small company of warriors whose only task was to protect the mining village.
 	Weisz gestured, one hand moving rapidly behind his back. An instant later, his troops moved in unison to join him, their synchronised footfalls loud against the baking metal of the ground, step by ominous step.
 	‘Together,’ Weisz advised, assessing the men and women under his command with a firm nod. ‘Hold the line. No one crosses this point. Sigmar is with us, at every step. He watches over this battle, he sees the bravery within us and he feeds it with his own. We are unstoppable.’ Like my brother was, until this evil struck him down, Weisz thought.
 	Weisz’s troops girded themselves, moving to defend the pass at this, its narrowest point, readying themselves for his next command.
 	‘Charge!’ Weisz hollered as the figures in the mist hurried forward, lolloping and leaping, teeth gnashing and limbs swaying. At Weisz’s back, twelve loyal troops stormed towards the approaching army, weapons drawn, loudly affirming their fidelity to Sigmar. They were all he would need. Behind them, a second wave of Freeguilders launched the fort’s lone cata­pult, dragged behind them as the lead troops proceeded ahead. The catapult was filled with a wad of burning shot. And behind them, more troops moved into position, shoring up the defensive line so that none should pass.
 	The noble Freeguild men and the loathsome Kairic acolytes met with a clash of metal on metal, as blade struck against shield and armour and flaming projectiles rained down. Weisz watched derisively as an acolyte met his sword blade with his hideous mask, splitting the mask in twain so that it dropped away to reveal an even more hideous mockery of a face beneath. Weisz raised his sword again and swung it down, splitting the acolyte’s skull as the man tried and failed to stab him with his blade.
 	All around him, Weisz was aware of his comrades doing similarly, meeting this wretched army with fearlessness. They were fighting not only for their lives but for their very way of life, and all to the honour of Sigmar. And they were winning. Acolytes fell to their blows, men whose senses had been twisted to Chaos. Then the grey mist rose around them, and dark horrors shuffled in its depths, bounding forward to join the battle like hunting dogs catching a scent.
 	Weisz saw the face of the first emerge from the fog and he recoiled in disgust. Its features were human but malformed, the eye sockets too large, the mouth too wide and with teeth like a shark’s. The thing screamed as it bounded across the ground towards Weisz, and he drew back his sword in a two-handed grip. Then, Weisz swung the heavy blade and its arc met the vaulting monstrosity at the precise moment that it came into reach, striking with a bone-crunching clatter.
 	The creature went down with a ghastly shriek, the cry like stone grinding against glass.
 	The mists seemed to rise as the monstrosity fell, immersing Weisz and his colleagues deeper within their foul-smelling depths, visibility reduced to almost nothing in an instant. Weisz’s colleagues became shadows, moving shapes in the gloom. The Freeguildman was aware of things all around him, the cackling of Ty’Gzar in contrast to the battle cries of Weisz’s fellow defenders.
 	Where did this cursed sorcerer find such allies? Weisz wondered. When they had met before, Ty’Gzar had employed only human acolytes to wage his campaign, but now he had these things that defied logic, each more nightmarish than the one before.
 	Another monstrosity appeared from the gloom, a sickening thing that Weisz could hardly bear to look at. It was taller than Weisz, with a second face leering above its armoured head, the expression twisted in agony. It was not one being then, but two – a host and a rider. It smelled awful, like it hadn’t washed in… well, a lifetime, perhaps. Weisz thought he would be sick, his stomach spasming as the thing approached.
 	Weisz evaded the thing’s broadsword as it swept the ground towards him. ‘In the name of Sigmar!’ he cursed, as sparks were kicked up from the ferrous content of the rock beneath their feet.
 	Above the main body, the second creature was weaving a spell, its hands aglow with eldritch magic as they gestured towards him. On some instinctive level, Weisz realised what it was in that moment – a combination creature, with the combat prowess of a warrior and the dark knowledge of a sorcerer. Weisz sidestepped, sweeping his blade around with the movement and hacking at the horror’s legs with the same gusto he would attack the trunk of a tree. The conjoined beast wailed as the blade hacked into its host body, and its spell went awry. A bolt of Chaos energy shot out into the sky, momentarily painting the mist in a multitude of blues and greens before it hurtled away.
 	Weisz hacked at the right leg again, smiling grimly as the twinned creature began to sag, its leg giving way.
 	Another sweep, another strike, and the creature finally dropped, sagging sideward where the kneecap burst and the shinbone gave way. The homunculus on its back continued to weave its spells, eyes dark pits in the withered remains of a once-human face.
 	The monster’s head split from its neck in a single, brutal strike, spraying gore across Weisz, ruined flesh hitting the ground with wet thumps. For a moment its emaciated body continued to waver, hands still knitting the air as it tried to conjure whatever spell of abomination the dread thing had planned. And then, abruptly, it fell still, the life draining from the rider’s body instantaneously, like the last embers of a dying fire.
 	Below, the mount body, the one that had lost its mind in this cruel bargain, swayed where it kneeled on one ruined leg.
 	‘Die,’ Weisz snarled, panting for breath as he drew back his sword and struck the final killing blow. ‘And stay dead.’
 	Around Weisz, the cries of his colleagues echoed through the pass, distant voices in the gloom of the risen mist. Every man and woman had joined the fight now, while the Freeguilders’ catapult had fallen silent, out of ammunition, lost somewhere in the haze. They sounded fearful, desperate, but they remained strong – like all men of righteousness, they had more to fight for than any acolyte of Chaos.
 	‘Roll call!’ Weisz hollered as he spun around in the billowing fog.
 	The voices of his troops wended back from the depthless mists:
 	‘Bren!’
 	‘Falke!’
 	‘Mannetje!’
 	Eighteen men and women yet lived, all told – eighteen against the amassing forces of Chaos. Each man was most likely fighting alone now, Weisz realised, against enemies unseen, who materialised just feet from their faces as they revealed themselves from the blanket of thickening fog.
 	Weisz turned in place, eyes narrowed as he scoured the murk, trying to discern his enemies. A figure came spinning out of the gloom, arms flailing about it like a spinning top, face a tightening of muscles and flesh as it displayed a rictus grin. It was a creature from the sadistic depths of Chaos, with blue skin the colour of a bruise and eyes that glowed like weeping sores, accompanied by the foul aroma of sulphur. With its impossibly wide mouth and abruptly shortened body, it was no more human than the sword that Weisz wielded.
 	The beast leapt at him with a hiss, and Weisz was repelled by the stench of the thing’s breath. Wincing, he swung blindly, the noxious scent raising bile at the back of his throat, and felt the hard thud as his sword blade struck the beast. The ghastly thing cried out, a very human sound, and dropped back with a loud, fleshy slap against the ground.
 	Weisz stepped over the fallen beast, his nose wrinkling as he smelled the sour tang of spilled stomach acid where the thing had been gutted.
 	But there was no time to stop. Already another enemy was moving in from behind, another of the human cultists who made up the majority of Ty’Gzar’s forces. This one wore blue armour and a mask with a hideously hooked nose, red eyes burning from within the mask’s sockets. The eyes reminded Weisz of the tattoo that had been grafted to Ty’Gzar’s forearm – the one he had hewn free in their prior encounter. That pulsing eye was what came back to Weisz in the middle of the night, staring at him from the depths of his dreams, stabbing through his thoughts like a hot dagger. The eye had twisted in such a way that it had seemed infinite somehow, one edge looping back to the other. The eye had been coloured a vivid blood red with blue at its corners, and even after the flesh had cooled, still the eye seemed to move and pulse, as if the tattoo was somehow alive.
 	A strained cry snapped Weisz’s thoughts back to the present. His brother had almost lost his leg through a momentary slip of concentration; Weisz needed to stay alert to stay alive. The acolyte was shouting something shrill and incomprehensible at Weisz, the words ‘Chaos’ and ‘beware’ bubbling muddled from beneath the mask as he hefted a sword that glinted silver in the gloom.
 	‘Beware yourself!’ Weisz snarled, meeting the blade with the length of his own in a shower of brilliant sparks, shoving it aside even as his own legs threatened to buckle with the impact. With a grunt, Weisz stood his ground, waiting as the cultist tried to get his bearings to renew his attack.
 	Emboldened, the acolyte came at him in an obvious attack, almost as though he thought Weisz posed no threat to him, and Weisz brought his sword up in a brutal swing that met with the man’s side.
 	Then another came at Weisz – had the first been sent as a distraction? – even as his sword struck the first acolyte in his flank, embedding itself there. For a moment it seemed that Weisz was defenceless against the second man. This one too wore a mask, a hideous inhuman thing that looked like a mockery of a woman’s face.
 	Weisz let go of the sword and stepped back, allowing the second acolyte’s sword blade to jab past him by a matter of inches. Drawing back his bunched fist, Weisz stepped forward until he was within the outer arc of that swinging sword, and punched the cultist hard in the face, breaking his mask and his human nose beneath.
 	The acolyte staggered back with a shriek of pain, and for just a moment his words came out as a plea: ‘Look at what you’re–’
 	Weisz punched again, driving his mailed fist hard into his enemy’s jaw, feeling the satisfying crunch of breaking bone. He followed through with a knee to the man’s groin, delivered with such force that the masked acolyte left the ground momentarily before crashing back into the sheer wall of the bluff.
 	But there was no time for Weisz to catch his breath. Already the first man he had felled was rising once more, the sword no longer in his side, the blue glyphs painted on his body seeming alive in the swirling mist. Weisz dropped down as the Chaos disciple lunged at him, and plucked his sword from where it had fallen.
 	A feint, ducking another attack, and then Weisz was upright, using his superior strength to bring the sword down on the acolyte’s head. The sword landed with a sickening, wet thud. The acolyte sank to his knees, dropping his weapon as his hands reached up for his ruined face, and Weisz swung the sword once more.
 	As his blade cut through the acolyte’s belly, Weisz heard the pained shout of Mannetje close by, in the unmistakable gasp of a man’s final breath. It made Weisz’s momentary victory bittersweet, hearing his friend’s final gasp even as the Chaos man’s limp body slipped to the ground from his blade.
 	Weisz looked around in the swirling mist, but he could not see Mannetje. Still, he knew – knew the sound of a man dying, knew the noises a man made when he had reached the end of his life.
 	‘Mannetje?’ Weisz shouted into the fog, still searching around. But there came no response.
 	The realisation made Weisz more determined. Weisz knew Mannetje to be a good man, a good soldier. And, by the Stormhosts, he would not have given his life in vain. No soldier under his command would – Weisz swore it. These spawn of Chaos would be routed.
 	‘Drive them back!’ Weisz yelled into the mists, trusting his unseen allies to hear him. ‘In Sigmar’s righteous name, drive them back!’
 	The battle cries of brave men and women echoed back, muffled by the mists that swirled and danced across the scarred ground, allies reduced to shadows projected upon its moving surface.
 	Weisz raised his blood-slicked sword once more and charged with a booming holler: ‘Let the routing begin!’
 	They came at Weisz from all sides then, things that slithered and things that hopped, things that smelled like the grave and things that smelled of a sweetness so strong that it addled the senses. They wore expressions that defied comprehension, sometimes in places where faces should not be. And each of them wielded swords and knives and axes, with shields and armour to protect their deformed, reformed, malformed bodies. Torsos were hewn in two by Weisz, heads parted from shoulders and limbs mangled under the onslaught of his defence. If any had doubted his legend before, by Sigmar’s blade, he was proving it now, with every cut and thrust, every hacked limb and broken bone.
 	But the Chaos things seemed endless.
 	First they came in ones and twos, acolytes wearing fright masks to unsettle a foe as they stepped from the swirling mist, but human all the same.
 	Then came things that seemed to be made from the elements themselves – headless beasts covered in a fire that burned blue with the brilliance of the oxygen that fed it, long arms that ended in cruelly toothed claws. Shimmering like flames on a candle’s wick, the creatures turned the ground red-hot beneath their tread, steam hissing from the surface, and lunged for Weisz with those clawed appendages amid the confusing blur of their self-generated heat haze. Azure flames leapt at Weisz’s body and face, turning him around as he avoided their burning lunges, fingers of flame playing across the ground before him as he strived to force them back. He cut furrows with his blade, blow after blow as he backed away from the creatures, until they could come no further down the narrow pathway of the pass, no closer to the Ironvale.
 	The flames sparkled in the fog like stars in the night sky, until Weisz had backed away sufficiently that they dwindled to nothing, absorbed by the grey.
 	But the surge of Chaos was relentless. There came things that were too big to comprehend, lunging out of the mist on knees that had been reversed, causing them to totter like toddlers as they made their approach. Weisz took these on too, his sword a blur of movement in the clouding fog. The feel of his sword making contact in the murk was enough to let Weisz know that the fight could still be won, and that he still had the strength to win it. Each wound he endured was worn like a fresh medal, each bruise a mark of victory. His brother had almost given his leg to an assault like this, and he still had faith in Sigmar’s righteousness. Moryn had never given up. Weisz took it upon himself to be Moryn’s fury on the battlefield, to stand firm against the creep of Chaos. And creep it did.
 	A blue-fleshed creature fell to Weisz’s sword, breaking apart only for its dismembered limbs to reach for him where they had fallen, its disembodied mouth snapping at his ankles until he killed it a second time.
 	He did not notice when his allies dropped out of the fight. He called for them, instructing them to sound off and getting just two responses, but the next time he cried out, minutes – or was it hours? – later, no one shouted back. They were dead then, most likely, taken by Ty’Gzar’s forces, and all that Weisz could hope for was that their demise had been swift and as painless as it could be in the circumstances, and not drawn out and cruel in that manner Chaos preferred. They had trained together, eaten together, lived together. They had been as familiar and trusted as his own sword. But now was not the time for grieving. Weisz would lament them later, honour them as they deserved.
 	Weisz’s breathing was coming hard when the last of the Chaos things fell. He stood, hunched over, his shoulders sagging as if he carried a heavy weight, the ache in his muscles burning like fire. Around him, the corpses of those cultists loyal to Chaos were piled, blood wetting the ground, turning the flickering seams of iron to scarlet where it washed.
 	Weisz stood, strength leaving him as his fury passed, and he heard laughter, cruel and mocking. Weisz looked up, saw the fog slowly part, its tendrils like slippery grey fingers pulling gradually away from his eyes, revealing what lay beyond, just feet away. There, arrayed before him were not the bodies of the dead cultists at all – no, they were his colleagues, revealed one by one, and beside them the miners from the village. Every last one of them had been butchered. Weisz stood in the centre of the Ironvale, surrounded by the corpses of his allies, his friends. No one lived. No one but him.
 	‘I… must have got… turned around,’ Weisz muttered as he realised where he was, the stench of death assaulting his nostrils. The mist had played cruel tricks on his senses, and he had travelled here as he fought – each time he had spun around in the heat of battle must have brought him closer.
 	But the bodies. How could he explain the bodies? His colleagues lying here where it should have been those wretched beasts of Chaos, those bent-limbed, flame-faced, sick-smelling things who had accompanied Ty’Gzar?
 	Weisz looked up as he heard that mocking laughter once more, reverberating from the high walls of the canyon and the buildings of his village. Ty’Gzar was striding towards him, yellow teeth on show, chuckling with spite. As Ty’Gzar approached, flanked by his remaining acolytes, the last of the mists departed, swirling away to nothingness.
 	‘You’ve done a masterful job,’ Ty’Gzar said, sweeping his staff casually through the last of the fog, his voice that familiar, grating crow’s caw. ‘More than I could have done.’
 	Weisz looked around, absorbing the details of the scene before him. There was Mannetje, guts strewn before him like the tangled roots of a tree that had been upended by lightning. And there, his ally Bren, who had first spotted the attackers and Berta, who had suffered such terrible burns in their previous encounter with Chaos, dead now with her face caked in blood where it had been caved in by a savage blow. And other Freeguilders, even civilians – the blacksmith who worked swords for the armies of man in the hut at the west of the village, the horseshoe worker whose knack with animals was a thing of wonder to observe.
 	And then Weisz’s heart seemed to stab at him as he spotted the other figure, the one he had really been looking for all along – the body of Moryn, his own brother. The dressing on his mangled leg was dark with blood, his body was twisted where it had been struck with something heavy. Moryn’s eyes stared up into nothingness, as if waiting for the heavenly Stormhosts of Sigmar to come down and claim his spirit, his last breath already departed.
 	‘I… did this?’ Weisz asked, the words stinging in his throat.
 	Ty’Gzar watched him, a cruel sneer on his twisted face. ‘You were merciless,’ the Arcanite revealed. ‘It was the stuff of legend, a thing to behold.’ Around him, guttural voices chuckled, from throats that had given up their own humanity in their pursuit of power.
 	Weisz felt his knees give way then, and he crashed to the ground like a felled oak tree, a legend rendered just a man after all. He had not just killed his brother, he had taken away his right to prove himself worthy of ascension to become a Stormcast Eternal. Everything had been taken away with the blind thrust of a sword.
 	‘How…?’ Weisz asked, the words little more than a whisper.
 	Ty’Gzar moved his stump of a right arm, gesturing to the narrow confines of the pass. ‘It can be so easy to become confused in the fog,’ he said vaguely, the yellow smile never leaving his face. ‘Tragically easy.’
 	Weisz saw it all then, piecing the whole terrible sequence together in his mind’s eye. He and his men had gone into battle against Ty’Gzar’s meagre forces only to be drawn into the unnatural fog that had followed them. The fog was a spell, Weisz realised with a hollow sense of horror. A way to muddle a man’s mind and confuse him until he saw things that were not there. In Uffo Weisz’s case, he had seen the awful multitudes of Chaos, swarming upon him in wave after wave, beast after beast, thing after thing. His colleagues likely had seen the same, their senses tricked, never aware that they were fighting one another, killing their allies until there was no one left but Weisz himself. And in all the confusion, Weisz and his men had been funnelled back to their safely walled village, proving it not to be safe at all.
 	‘Why didn’t they cry out?’ Weisz asked, staring at the ground before him, the bloody hilt of the sword slick and warm in his hand.
 	‘Oh, they did,’ Ty’Gzar said, striding closer as his men parted to let him through, handing one of them his gem-topped staff. ‘“No, Uffo!” “What are you doing?” “Keep back, keep back!”’ – the words came from Ty’Gzar’s mouth but the voices were familiar, captured by his magic, the pleas of the dying before Weisz had killed them.
 	Weisz’s eyes were focused on the haft of the weapon in his hand, where a droplet of blood was slowly wending its way down its length to join a scarlet puddle on the blood-soaked ground. ‘Why… didn’t… why couldn’t I hear them?’ he asked the ground, barely whispering now.
 	‘Because you took my hand,’ the Chaos sorcerer replied, his words a cruel hiss. ‘My hand! I would have let you live, if you’d just stepped aside those months before, but no – you had to fight, and so you brought all of this upon yourself.’
 	The words of the masked acolyte with the hook-nosed mask came back to Weisz then, the one he had ultimately gutted with his sword. Only now Weisz recognised the voice despite the way the fog had dulled the sound. It had been Mannetje. ‘Chaos’, Mannetje had said, and ‘beware’, the rest of the words lost…
 	We’re being deceived by Chaos, Uffo, beware before you kill us all.
 	The words were suddenly clear, the gaps filled in by memory or conscience, spoken by a man whom Weisz could neither see nor hear at the time when they were said, a man who had died on the sharp edge of his blade, his head cleaved, his belly ripped open.
 	And the other, the ‘acolyte’ who had accompanied Mannetje. He had begged for Weisz to see, shrieking out his last pleas as he sank to his knees – ‘Look at what you’re–!’ The voice had been familiar. The voice of Falke.
 	They had seen him, then – his allies – as he had raged and rampaged his way through them, killing every single man who had placed his trust in Weisz and in the legend that had blossomed around him. They had not all been fooled, not entirely. No, they had known full well what he was doing. He had killed them all.
 	Weisz felt the void opening inside him, the utter emptiness of defeat and of loss, the wide expanse of a grief so absolute that it seemed, in that moment, to have no limits. He had lost his allies, his friends, his family, and they had been killed at the end of his blade, either killed by him or by his colleagues as they fought in that awful, mind-altering mist. Whether Weisz had killed his brother or it had been one of his colleagues, it did not really matter. Moryn was dead. Because of him. Because of his intervention. Because he had stood up to Chaos and taken the hand of a sorcerer whose only desire was power.
 	As the dying words of his allies came back to him, replaying over and over in his mind, Weisz heard other words too. They were the taunting words of Ty’Gzar from just a few moments earlier: ‘I would have let you live, if you’d just stepped aside…’
 	‘You’re wrong,’ Weisz muttered, the words so quiet that only he could hear them. ‘You lie. You would never have let me live.’
 	As Weisz spoke, he saw Ty’Gzar’s shadow cross over the ground before him, its dark shape playing over the blood-soaked hilt of the sword he held there. Above Weisz, his victory complete, the Arcanite was voicing the slithering words of another tongue, words of magic to draw this conflict to a close. The words of Chaos burned into Weisz’s skull, pounding into his brain like hammer blows, each one raising the pressure there until Weisz could barely think at all. Ty’Gzar’s remaining hand twisted in the air, forming the eldritch shapes that would bring his spell to fruition.
 	‘No!’ Weisz spat, swinging his sword blindly up at the shadow that loomed before him. The sword struck, with the solid thud of chopping wood, driving through the sorcerer’s remaining arm instantaneously.
 	Ty’Gzar looked bewildered as his hand was replaced by a geyser of spurting blood where Weisz’s sword had opened an artery, the limb itself dropping to the ground with a heavy thud like a hunk of discarded meat.
 	Weisz rose to his full height once more, his gaze meeting Ty’Gzar’s as the Arcanite struggled to process what had just happened. Weisz could see it in the sorcerer’s expression, a look of disbelief across his Chaos-warped face. It was clear to Weisz, in that bloodied, scarlet moment, that the Arcanite had mistakenly believed him to be utterly broken by what had been done to him, driven to madness, with all hope and all thoughts of resistance gone. But he was wrong.
 	Ty’Gzar sank to his knees like wet cloth, all colour draining from his face. ‘How…?’ Ty’Gzar asked, the word a squawk from a strained throat.
 	‘You look like you’re struggling,’ Weisz said, a sneer curling his lip. ‘The way my brother struggled to fend off your depraved fanatics two months ago, the way he has struggled ever since, because of you.’
 	Behind Ty’Gzar, the remaining masked acolytes of Chaos charged, swarming towards Weisz as he stood before them in the ruined village of the Ironvale.
 	Let them come, thought Weisz. He had nothing left to lose.
 	Weisz drew back his sword and entered the fray once more, smiling with grim glee as he batted aside the first of the cultists. For a man with nothing left to lose has nothing left to fear.