FAITH IN THUNDER


 	Robert Charles


 	In his debut Black Library story, fantasy author Robert Charles takes us into the wilds of Ghur to explore ideas of faith and atonement. 

 	As a prisoner in an ogor fighting pit, Niara Sydona clutches to her faith in Sigmar as she battles to stay alive. When she and her fellow captives decide to launch a desperate escape effort, only the grim and mysterious Valruss chooses to remain. While Niara’s belief shines brightly in the oncoming storm, Valruss claims to be serving penance for his past failings. But if either of them are to survive, they must learn to put their faith in the other. 

 
 
 	 
 


 	Snow billowed through the mismatched timbers of the fighting pit’s walls. The wind shrieked like a chorus of the damned dead. A rumble of boisterous, drunken laughter echoed about the crude amphitheatre above. Niara Sydona gripped the rusty sword in white-knuckled hands, and ignored it all.
 	The frost sabre pounced. Niara urged sluggish senses to life and threw herself aside. A blur of iron-grey fur and a snarling feline maw shot overhead. Bones jarred as her shoulder struck the fighting pit floor.
 	Raucous cheers washed over her.
 	Breath burning her lungs, Niara stumbled to her feet. The great cat loped past, muscles rippling beneath fur. She spun, dimmed vision blurring as she strove to keep the beast in sight. Teeth snapped at her trailing heel. She twisted away and lashed out – more from frustration than conscious thought. Blood spattered the snow. 
 	The frost sabre roared and shied away. Cheers redoubled. Heart pounding fit to crack her ribs, Niara sought new footing.
 	The frost sabre circled back around. One mighty tusk was broken off inches from the jaw. Not her doing. An old wound. Ribs showed through a scarred, emaciated hide. The hunting beast was starving, worn thin by winter. Niara knew it’d have killed her long ago, else. Still might. 
 	Probably would. 
 	Thunder rumbled in the unseen distance. Seemed there was always a storm breaking on the mountainside. Niara never glimpsed lightning, not through the undying snows. Couldn’t even see the valley below.
 	But she didn’t need to. Where there was thunder, there was lightning. And where there was lightning, there was Sigmar. Niara knew few truths, but that was the greatest. It gave strength to the body and snap to the limbs. And hope… hope most of all. She’d survive. She owed it to those of her patrol who had died on that desolate mountain. 
 	A yowling roar chased weary reveries away. The beast sprang.
 	Niara breathed deep. The sword, once leaden in her hand, became an extension of her arm. She twisted from the snarling maw. Her rusted blade bit deep through fur and flesh. It shivered against spine. 
 	The frost sabre gave a pained howl and crashed into the snow. With a final, shuddering breath it lay still. Niara edged closer. Death had a look all its own, but the hunting cats were cunning. A jab to the beast’s underbelly confirmed its spirit had fled. 
 	The fighting pit exploded in fury. Niara let her head fall back against her shoulders, and took in sights made familiar by repetition. Ogors lurched to their feet, fists raised in acclamation or anger. Outrage contested the deeper gusto of laughter. Flesh-picked bones and wooden flagons the size of a man’s head rained down and shattered on churned ground. Gold glinted and changed hands.
 	Overcome, Niara let the sword fall. It joined scores of discarded weapons on the fighting pit floor. The first tremors set in. 
 	A booming shout shook the air. It held no words. At least, it had none Niara understood. The crude ogor tongue sounded like rocks grinding together. But she knew the tone of command. Some things transcended race. 
 	Little by little, the fighting pit went quiet. Above the open portcullis to the prisoner pens, a hillock of flesh and crudely stitched furs rose from a throne fashioned from a thundertusk’s ribcage. Dark eyes gleamed above an unkempt beard and chipped teeth.
 	The tyrant’s command came again. His ironstone maul thumped against the balcony’s ill-fitting timbers. He plucked a half-eaten joint of meat from a stone slab and tossed it into the fighting pit.
 	Niara caught it. A mere morsel for an ogor, it was a feast to her. The rich, smoky tang of the meat set her stomach seething. 
 	Uncaring of the tyrant’s teeth marks in the bare bone, she tore hungrily at the gobbets of flesh. Warm juices trickled over her chin. She didn’t know the manner of beast it had come from. It wasn’t human. That was enough. She had certainly eaten worse in her days before the guardian’s oath. Concordia was like that: plenty above, scraps below.
 	Niara’s gaoler lumbered out of the portcullis’ shadow. Chafed lips cracked into a snarl of warning. Niara almost laughed at the farce of it all. She was exhausted, wounded and frozen to the bone, and the ogor reckoned she’d start a fight with a brute eight or nine times her size?
 	Fingers still tight around her prize, Niara mutely made her way back to the cage that had been her home ever since the ambush.
 	She’d done it. She’d survived another day.
 	The cage door slammed. The gaoler set the latch and lumbered away. A drunken roar sounded from the fighting pit, muffled by the cavern’s rock walls.
 	Niara sank against the wooden bars. Bound tight by strips of hide, they were perhaps not as rigid as Concordia’s duardin-smithed gaols, but they didn’t need to be to contain unarmed and weary guests such as herself. With a heartfelt sigh, she gazed up and down the uneven row of cages. Two dozen cells in all, packed tight against the walls. Some sat empty, others housed occupants as filthy and worn as herself – plunder from the ogors’ raids.
 	Every cell had a clear view through the broad portcullis arch and into the fighting pit beyond. A tantalising glimpse of freedom, if only the freedom of death. If there was another exit from the cave, Niara had never seen it.
 	She had never determined if the ogors intended for their pit fighters to share the spectacle, or whether it was intended as a cruel reminder of the fate that claimed them all, one by one. She didn’t know, and nor did she much care, for it would have changed nothing.
 	‘You still alive?’
 	Lothran Horst shuffled closer through the gloom of his adjoining cage. Filthy, unshaven and clad in the torn, baggy remnants of a Concordia Freeguild uniform, he looked like the worst kind of bandit, and not a stalwart defender of the fabled City of Spires that stood as bastion against the tumultuous beastlands. Not that Niara could hold that against him. She looked no better, and felt far worse.
 	‘Seems so.’ She thrust the remnants of the joint through the bars. ‘Saved you some.’
 	He snatched it away. ‘Thank you. I take back everything bad I ever said about you.’
 	‘Too late. You already did that three days back, remember?’ 
 	‘No. I’m not a glutton for misery. Every day’s the first day. I keep track of the days – much less remember what fills ’em – I’ll go mad.’ Horst turned the bone over and over. Emaciated fingers picked it clean of morsels. ‘Thanks. Could’ve kept it all for yourself. Should’ve.’
 	‘I’m not hungry.’ 
 	A lie. The meat she had wolfed had only sharpened her hunger. But Horst was one of hers. The last of hers. Duty went deeper than discomfort.
 	Horst fell silent, save for the smacking of lips. 
 	Niara dragged the filthy, lice-ridden scraps of pelt about her shoulders. She hugged herself tight. The warmth from the fire never quite reached the cages. It certainly did little to upset the icicles clinging to the cavern roof. But the wind got everywhere. That was how Loth had died. Curled up to sleep, never to wake. 
 	That had been what, twelve days back? Fifteen? Despite her earlier words, Niara had lost track of time. She measured passage by the dead. Kurt, Wennel, Markin, Dag, Sleever, Loth… a dozen more. Those who’d survived the ambush in the Pass of Jaws, slain for the ogors’ entertainment. Just her and Horst left. It was fitting, in its way. She and Horst had entered the Concordia guard together, escaping a ­scrabbled life in the gutters. Three years on the wall, Horst ever teetering on the brink of dismissal while she had earned a sergeant’s bars. Together to the end. The vagabond and the rising star.
 	Most other cages were empty. The last of the aelves, Methrin, had died that morning. Besides Niara herself, that left three: Horst, Bragga and Valruss.
 	The ogors’ sport was running thin.
 	‘For shame. You’ve saved none for me.’ 
 	Niara allowed herself a weary smile at the gruff mutter. Bragga stood unmoving in her cage. Her bare, stocky arms were folded, her gaze fixed firmly on the door. At least, Niara assumed that to be the case. The ogors had stripped the duardin’s armour away when they had dragged her from her crashed sky-ship. She’d gnawed a crude mask from a scrap of pelt to cover her features from chin to brow. A point of honour, or so she said.
 	‘Thought you Kharadrons didn’t believe in charity. Thought you had a code.’
 	‘The code? ’Tis stricture and guidance for well-fed mercenaries, not prisoners with echoing bellies.’ Bragga shrugged. Fire-cast shadows rippled across her leather tunic, setting etched runes dancing. The long, bloody scab on her left forearm – a memento of her most recent turn in the fighting pit – glinted wetly. ‘It might yet be that Valruss honours a duarkvinn by sparing her a morsel.’
 	It took Niara a moment to wrap her ears around the mix of guttural duardin and accented Freeguilder. ‘He’s in the fighting pit already?’
 	Of course he was. The cage to her right was empty. She had walked straight past him and never known, lost in a fog of victory and numbing cold. She clambered to her feet and peered out. 
 	True enough, the broad-shouldered warrior stood with his back to the fighting pit’s portcullis arch, more statue than man. The battered mace that was his favoured weapon sat planted between his feet. Greying black hair twitched with every gust of wind. He stood otherwise immobile, without a flicker of the apprehension he had to be feeling.
 	‘You’re dreaming, skyborn.’ Horst licked his fingers. He stared regretfully at the now-clean length of bone in his hands. ‘Grimbody’s only out for himself. Reminds me of a priest I knew.’
 	Niara ignored the veiled insult. Horst had despised Valruss from the start, though the hatred seemed irrational to her. Perhaps it arose from the larger man’s imperturbable attitude. Sigmar knew Horst lacked for one of those. 
 	She kept her eyes on the fighting pit. On the gate opposite the prisoners’ cave. The beast-gate, where the ogors kept their pets. ‘I thought you didn’t have a past?’ 
 	Horst tossed the bone aside. ‘Oh, I’ve a past before this place. Remember it like yesterday, I do. Because it was. Don’t let anyone tell you different.’
 	Niara shook her head. Horst’s peculiar sense of humour had seen him brought up on plenty of charges over the years. More than one officer had accused him of living in a world that bore only tangential connection to whatever counted as ‘real’. But now? Since their capture, it had been one dry, cynical jibe after another – sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes not – played for an audience that wasn’t laughing. She’d given up calling him out on it.
 	A drunken bellow issued from the fighting pit. The beast-gate creaked open. A gangling, wart-encrusted creature shambled into view. It was human-shaped, if not of human proportions: ferociously ugly, with tattered flaps for ears and ridged, sinewy limbs. 
 	Niara caught her breath. A troggoth. Seemed the ogors had tired of watching Valruss slaughter wolves, frost sabres and the like. They didn’t want a fight. They wanted Valruss to die.
 	The troggoth rushed forward. A raucous cheer sounded as the chain about its neck went taut. The brute roared and strained. The chain creaked, but held.
 	‘Don’t look much like Valruss’ll be sharing much with anyone,’ muttered Horst. ‘Going to miss his sparkling conversation.’
 	‘Quiet!’ snapped Niara. She wondered why she bothered. Horst was right. In all the time they’d been fellow captives, Valruss had barely spoken a dozen words to her beyond his name. To any of them, far as she knew. He was as quiet as Horst was not.
 	The chain tore free of its mooring, or was set loose – Niara couldn’t see. With a ragged roar that challenged the tumult of the crowd, the troggoth barrelled towards Valruss. 
 	He didn’t move.
 	‘Move yerself, grimbody!’ Horst gripped the bars, ambivalence forgotten.
 	Bragga grunted. ‘Thought you didn’t care?’ 
 	‘I don’t.’ His grip tightened, all the same.
 	The troggoth’s knuckles dragged against the frozen ground as it picked up speed. Drool splashed from slavering lips and steamed in the snow.
 	Valruss snatched up the mace and swung an arcing, double-handed blow.
 	The troggoth skidded, claws scraping on ice. The mace struck. The troggoth lurched, its expression more confused than pained. Shards of splintered teeth spattered the snow. Valruss, moving swifter than a man his size ought, stepped aside. The troggoth struck the ground with a muffled thud. The fighting pit fell silent.
 	A spill of sonorous – but gleeful – duardin burst from beneath Bragga’s mask. Niara found herself cheering. No words, just unfettered emotion. She’d seen him fight before, but she never tired of it. The man had been born to the battlefield.
 	‘Ain’t done yet,’ said Horst sourly. ‘My old ma said that troggoths regrow missing limbs. It’ll laugh that off. You’ll see.’
 	Valruss swung the mace down in a whistling, overhead blow. Once. Twice. On the third strike, Niara heard a dull crack. On the fifth, the troggoth’s head mulched like a palefruit.
 	Bragga laughed. ‘A strike worthy of Grungni’s hammer. That wazzok won’t rise.’
 	Satisfied, Valruss tossed the mace aside.
 	Before long, he was back in the cage between Niara and Bragga, the tails of his tattered blue cloak wrapped around ragged tunic and trews, and a hunk of meat from the tyrant’s table in his hand.
 	Niara nodded in greeting. ‘I’m impressed.’
 	‘Impressed! Impressed?’ Horst flung an agitated hand towards the fighting pit. ‘Too cursed quick is what it was. What if they send another of us out there? I ain’t fighting a blasted troggoth!’
 	Suddenly, Niara was tired of his voice. ‘Enough, Horst.’
 	Valruss gave no sign of having heard either of them.
 	In the event, no one else fought that day. The fighting pit fell empty and silent. Niara’s fellow captives found what ease they could – no easy business in cramped cages – while their gaoler laboured over a simmering cauldron. 
 	Horst passed the time in fitful sleep. Bragga, as was her wont, stood facing the door to her cage. Sometimes it seemed to Niara that the duardin slept standing up. Maybe she did, but not at that moment – not unless she sang softly in her sleep. The melody smoothed the harsh edges of her words and set them sparkling like gemstones.
 	Valruss knelt in the centre of his cage, eyes closed and palms on his knees, motionless save for the gentle swell of his chest and the twitching bristles of his beard. Last night Methrin had still been with them, muttering away, begging for salvation from his distant gods. Niara wondered which of them would be gone tomorrow.
 	For herself, Niara couldn’t sleep. She’d been cursed that way as long as she could recall. Too long standing night watch at Concordia gate, she supposed. A body got used to it after a while. 
 	Instead, she tried to recall her life before the cage. Names and faces swam in her memory, familiar and yet indistinct. Names perched forever on the tip of recollection. The more she strove to focus on features, the faster they dissolved. Even her parents’ faces seemed distant. Lovers, too. Maybe Horst was right to treat each day as the first. It was kinder that way. She’d been too long in the cage. Weeks. Maybe even months. Waiting to fight, waiting to die. It had become her life.
 	She longed for thunder. For the proof that Sigmar was near. None came.
 	Hours after snow-chased dusk faded into night, the gaoler at last turned from the cauldron and dropped a wooden bowl outside each cage. The day’s rations, such as they were. 
 	‘Food,’ he rumbled, tongue clotting on the unfamiliar word.
 	Duty done, he clutched a fifth, larger bowl and ambled out of the cave. The portcullis rattled down behind him.
 	Niara dragged her bowl through the bars. The greyish-brown gloop commended little to sight, but to smell…? If she’d learned one thing, it was that ogor cooking tasted even better than it smelled. The brutes weren’t entirely without art.
 	She fished a lump of meat out of the stew. Her stomach rumbled.
 	‘Don’t eat it,’ hissed Horst. ‘For all you know, that’s Methrin floating in there.’
 	Bragga belched. She ran a finger around the rim of her empty bowl and licked it clean. 
 	‘’Tis not gamey enough to be aelf,’ she pronounced. ‘By the plentiful Ice Wind, but these ogri know how to cook troggoth.’
 	Horst stared at his bowl with a fraction more disgust. ‘You eat troggoth back in Barak Skarren?’
 	Bragga shrugged. ‘Only a fool finds profit in an empty stomach.’
 	In truth, Niara’s own appetite had abated with the mystery’s resolution. But practicality won out. Rations were thin enough. That it tasted every bit as good as she’d expected only made it worse. When she was halfway done, Horst made inroads into his own meal. Valruss’ bowl was already empty, his meditations renewed.
 	‘No, no.’ Bragga tilted her head to one side in thought. ‘I’m in grave error. That is elgi.’
 	Horst spat a mouthful of stew across his cage. Niara’s stomach lurched. Bragga chuckled.
 	‘Harden your heart, manling. I’ve not eaten elgi.’ She folded her arms and lowered her voice. ‘But by Grungni’s Beard, I’d do so if it’d see me out of this place.’
 	Horst wiped his mouth. ‘Ain’t no way out.’
 	‘Sure there is. Portcullis is open during a fight.’
 	He scowled. ‘Open onto a fighting pit full of ogors.’
 	‘A fighting pit full of drunken ogors,’ Niara corrected. ‘Even sober they are slow-witted. One alone doesn’t stand a chance, but if we stick together, we might just fight our way out.’
 	‘Say that’s true,’ said Horst. ‘We have to get out of these cages. How do you answer that?’
 	Bragga crouched and fished beneath the scraps of matted fur at the base of her cage. Steel gleamed in the dying firelight. The broken tip of a sword, no more than four inches long.
 	‘Found this in the fighting pit yesterday. Scrap, it may be, but I’ll warrant it holds enough of an edge to slit the bindings on the bars.’ 
 	‘How did you get that in here?’ Niara’s pulse quickened. Maybe this was possible. 
 	The duardin’s fingers danced across her forearm, against the wound that Niara now realised wasn’t a just a wound, but a sheath of bloody flesh in which the blade had lain concealed.
 	‘The search was lacking,’ said Bragga, ‘and my need severe.’
 	Horst let out a low whistle. ‘That’s… revolting.’
 	‘It will be no small labour, but I can loosen enough bars to get out. A steady hand and careful eye are necessary, lest the cage entire clatters apart. Fortunately, a duarkvinn has both.’ She tapped at the base of a bar, and nodded thoughtfully. ‘A night of toil, and I shall be free. Maybe one other at my side. But if we’re all to be out of this place, someone has to keep our gaoler’s eye tomorrow. That task falls to whoever goes into the fighting pit first.’
 	Niara nodded. There was no way to know who’d go in first. Best case was it’d be someone whose cage hadn’t yet been broken. ‘I can do that, if they come for me. Horst?’
 	‘What if we’re caught? More than that, what if we’re not? Where do we go?’
 	‘Anywhere,’ Niara replied flatly. ‘There is nothing for us here but death. At least we’ll have a fighting chance on the mountainside. Who knows, we might even make it back to Concordia.’
 	‘’Tis a breach of accord to say as much, but a Barak Skarren trade route runs a few leagues westward,’ said Bragga. ‘If we’re bold enough to make it that far, you can barter passage home.’
 	Horst scowled. ‘If the ogors don’t run us down first. They’ve cages full of hunting beasts, you know that. They’ll be on our heels.’
 	‘And how will you outrun them in the arena?’ said Niara. ‘If this is merely a choice between the ways of death, I’ll choose one where I’m free. Do you have a better idea? Chances are you’re dying in the fighting pit anyway. How much longer do you think you will last?’
 	He flinched. ‘I don’t like it.’
 	Niara bit away a flash of anger. Their numbers were slim as it was. ‘I’m not asking you if you like it. I’m ordering you to come.’
 	He stiffened. ‘Glad to follow you into death.’
 	She smiled. ‘As you should be. Valruss, are you in?’
 	‘No.’ He spoke without opening his eyes.
 	‘No?’ she hissed. ‘What do you mean, “no”?’
 	‘I have no intention of leaving. You may do as you wish.’
 	And just like that, they were down to three. Bragga raised the lower lip of her mask and spat on the floor. Horst sank back against the bars of his cage. 
 	‘Called it,’ he muttered. ‘Grimbody’s only out for himself.’
 	Niara glared at Valruss, and dredged deep in her soul for words to change his mind. But a man who calmly faced down a raging troggoth was not a man to be swayed by bluster, and she didn’t know what it would take. Where had he come from? His accent did not hail from Concordia, nor from any place she knew… Though something about it was familiar, all the same. All she knew was that he had been here before her – before Bragga had been dragged from the wreckage of her sky-ship some weeks before. Maybe that was how he had lasted so long, by fighting when called to, and not getting involved in any damn-fool escapes.
 	She shook her head. The Dark Gods take him, anyway.
 	‘Suit yourself,’ she said instead. ‘But we’re still going.’
 	Niara jerked awake at the thunder-crack. She had dozed off. Pulse quickening, she scrabbled amongst the blankets for the precious scrap of steel. Bragga would kill her if she lost it.
 	Fingers closed on metal. Relief flooded in. She glanced at Bragga’s cage. The duardin stood in her customary position. Awake or asleep, she’d said nothing since she’d pressed the broken blade into Niara’s hand and clambered by into her gimmicked cage. The soft ripple of Horst’s snores washing over her, Niara wrapped one end of the steel in the blanket, and went back to sawing.
 	Thunder rumbled. The storm was getting closer. She peered up at the cave roof, and wished she could see the lightning. 
 	‘You are afeared of the thunder?’
 	Valruss’ eyes flickered open as he spoke. He otherwise remained unmoving, knelt in his meditative position.
 	‘No,’ she replied. ‘It gives me hope. Sigmar is in the storm.’
 	He shook his head, crow’s feet in his skin reshaping into a maybe-smile. ‘So that is how you have kept your fire. You believe the God-King will sweep down from the heavens on a lightning bolt. That he will smite your salvation on the mountainside?’
 	Niara bristled. ‘No. Why would he bother with a handful of souls? But he might send his Stormcasts.’
 	A soft chuckle. ‘And what do you know of the Stormcasts?’
 	That was harder. She’d seen a chamber of Stormcast Eternals once, when they had fetched victory out of massacre at Rockfallow Gorge. Only from a distance, though. But what she knew went far beyond what she’d seen. Faith did that.
 	‘They’re heroes,’ she said. ‘They are salvation.’
 	Valruss scowled. ‘Heroes fall. And salvation is better claimed than sought.’
 	Niara stopped sawing at the hide and fixed him with a withering stare. ‘Then claim it. Fight with us tomorrow. We need you.’
 	‘No. I am already where I belong.’
 	She spat her disgust. The other’s fatalism struck a poor chord with his calm demeanour. ‘A rat in a cage? Why’s it so important you stay?’
 	‘Why is it so important you leave?’
 	‘Because I’ve a duty, that’s why. I swore to Sigmar that I’d fight for those who couldn’t.’ That detail shone true in uncertain memory. ‘I will choose death with a sword in my hand over any other.’ 
 	‘Duty begs you to go. It commands that I atone for surviving where my brothers and sisters did not. Only then will I be worthy of the storm.’
 	Worthy of the storm? His earlier words echoed back with fresh resonance. Heroes fall. ‘You’re a… Stormcast? No! They’re heroes who ride the lightning, not apostates in grubby garb and tattered cloaks.’
 	If Valruss took any offence, none showed in his face. ‘Never confuse the armour with the warrior within. The armour is divine. The warrior is flesh. And flesh is… fallible.’ 
 	Disgusted, Niara returned to her sawing. ‘Keep your lies to yourself. The Stormcasts are perfection. The chosen of Sigmar.’
 	‘Proclamation is not truth. To be a hero is to strive. Nothing more. It is certainly not perfection.’ One eye narrowed. ‘You named me Stormcast. Why?’
 	Niara shook her head, angry at herself as much as Valruss. Why had she? The man had the physique to be one of Sigmar’s chosen – and the battle-skill, sure enough. More than that, the title fitted him in a way she couldn’t explain. As if she’d glimpsed beneath the torn raiment. Or maybe she was weary… too weary to argue.
 	‘Say I believe you. You should be out in the world, fighting for a glorious age of light…’
 	She broke off. If Valruss was what he claimed to be – what she believed him to be – she should be respectful… even afraid. Could that cage even hold him, if he wished otherwise?
 	For the first time, emotion marred Valruss’ expression. Not the anger Niara had feared, but an abiding hollowness. ‘My host – the Knights Tempestor – fought at the forefront of the Realmgate Wars until the Dark Gods sent their greatest sorcerer against us.’ 
 	He paused. A scowl of recollection flitted across his lips. ‘I slew him too late. His conjuration slaughtered my brothers and sisters. Of the host, only I survived. I awoke on this mountainside, armour blackened and melting away. Alone. Even now, my memory lies in tatters. Wisps and fragments of might-have-beens. But I know that my fellows are gone. I fear their spirits are lost, that they never regained the solace of Azyrheim and were drawn into the Dark Gods’ embrace. It is my fault that it is so.’ 
 	Niara glanced around the cave. At the emptiness that was an accusation of her failure. So many dead. The patrol she’d led into the ambush was gone, all save her and Horst. For the first time she felt a kinship with Valruss, bleak though it was.
 	‘I’ve lost comrades too…’
 	He growled. ‘You dare compare your loss to mine? My kith should have been reborn, forged anew at Sigmar’s hand. Now they are dust, my punishment is to suffer. Why else would Sigmar have sent me to this place?’ With visible effort, he regathered his composure. ‘I am to shed my blood until I am forgiven.’
 	Niara decided ogors were an odd path to enlightenment, but elected against saying so. Be he madman or Stormcast, she would gain little by offending Valruss.
 	‘And how will you know when you are forgiven?’ she asked instead.
 	‘Sigmar will send me a sign.’
 	‘And what if we’re that sign? Maybe Sigmar wants you to join us.’
 	He laughed softly. ‘No. Sigmar is many things, but he is not subtle in his wishes. The sign I seek will not be mistaken.’
 	Valruss closed his eyes. The first murky rays of dawn glimmered at the cave mouth. Niara swore under her breath, and redoubled her efforts with the blade.
 	The gaoler did not come at dawn, nor for many long hours after. For Niara, this was all to the good, for the bindings on her cage were tougher than she’d believed possible. But with perseverance – and no small cost to herself in sliced fingers – the last strip tore free as the portcullis rumbled open. She hurriedly thrust the precious scrap of steel through the bars into Horst’s hand and awaited the gaoler’s selection. Whose suffering would buy time for the escape?
 	The ogor peered myopically from one cage to the next. Then, decision made, he rumbled forward and yanked aside the door to Niara’s cage. She shared a brief nod with Horst, and followed the gaoler’s beckoning hand.
 	A raucous cheer greeted her arrival in the fighting pit. It fell swiftly away beneath the tyrant’s rambling, stentorian address. The first bout was always the tardiest for that very reason. Niara normally hated the delay. Fear festered, and the cold sapped what little vigour remained. But today, every moment the tyrant rumbled on was a moment she would not have to buy. If only they’d taken Horst for the fighting pit, and not her. There would be no bonds to cut, and no need for delay.
 	She stooped, reclaiming the short sword she’d used the previous day. She glanced behind. The gaoler stood beneath the open portcullis, his attention on the fight to come. Good. That much was going to plan, at least.
 	After a cold, shivering age, the tyrant fell silent. The far gate creaked open, revealing a gangling, white-furred beast with black, ice-frosted claws. Twisted teeth parted in a hooting roar.
 	Niara’s heart sank. A yhetee. Large as a troggoth, but faster and quicker-witted to boot. Valruss could have killed it, but she? Bloody fur and scabbed limbs betrayed wounds already taken. Maybe it could be done. And besides, all she need do was survive until Horst was free.
 	Thunder rumbled across the sky. Niara raised her sword. 
 	Eyes closed, Valruss sought peace in meditation. He blotted out the snarls of the yhetee. The guttural cheers of the crowd. The thunder. Niara’s screams of pain and challenge. She was not his sign. Not the sign of forgiveness. 
 	Sigmar had shown him the path of penance, and that path lay in the carnage of the fighting pit. Not in escape. And certainly not in offering his fellows false hope of salvation. After all, who was to say they had not failed as he had? That Sigmar was not testing them all? Such tests were not to be passed, but endured until the dawn of divine mercy, or strength failed.
 	So why did he feel otherwise? Why did he feel a kinship? Why had he spoken so freely of his burdens? He had not in all his years as a captive. Sooner or later, everyone died. Attachment to fellow captives gained nothing.
 	A harsh, wooden clatter dragged Valruss from his musings.
 	‘Oh, crask.’ 
 	Horst stood frozen in place, his grasping hand extended almost comically as the heartfelt curse spilled from his lips. A wooden bar from his cage tottered back and forth on the rock floor. 
 	In the cave mouth, the gaoler lurched about. Bellowing in outrage, he lumbered towards Horst’s cage, cudgel readied.
 	‘Kazak bryngadum!’ 
 	Bars clattered as Bragga barrelled out of her cage. Snaring a burning brand from the fire, she hurled herself at the gaoler and thrust the glowing timber up at his face. The ogor’s roar of pain drowned out the sound of sizzling flesh.
 	Horst slashed. Broken steel glinted. Blood welled on the ogor’s forearm. 
 	The brute flailed, striking Bragga from her feet. The cudgel smashed down. The arcing sweep ended in a meaty thud and a crack of breaking bone.
 	‘I’ll have you for that!’
 	Horst slashed again, this time at the ogor’s belly. The blade snagged on the filthy apron. As he drew back for a second stroke, the gaoler backhanded him across the face. Stunned, Horst fell across the bars of his cage. The ogor’s hand closed around his throat.
 	The gaoler spared no glance for the lifeless duardin. A struggling Horst still dangling from his grip, he lumbered towards the cave mouth.
 	Valruss watched until they had crossed the threshold. Would Horst find the strength to endure? To continue penance for sins Valruss could only guess at? Perhaps. Either way, Sigmar would wish no intervention. Valruss closed his eyes once more, and sought elusive peace.
 	Niara screamed as she rammed the sword home. The yhetee, every bit as bloodied and weary as she, screeched. Rusty steel punched through matted fur, glanced off a rib and plunged deep into the creature’s heart. 
 	With a mournful, keening wail, the yhetee fell. Niara barely made it out from beneath its stinking, smothering bulk in time. The crowd roared approval.
 	Heart pounding, she fell to one knee. Her left arm – her broken left arm – throbbed with an insistence that promised worse to come once the glamour of battle faded. The side of her face was slick with her own blood, and her right ankle ground whenever she set weight upon it. And that was before she took account of the dozen or so gashes from the yhetee’s claws. 
 	She had survived, but she had failed. She’d had to end the fight before Horst and Bragga had freed themselves.
 	The gaoler emerged from the cave with an indignant bellow. The ogor’s face was blistered and raw. A struggling Horst dangled from his grip.
 	The crowd fell silent. On the balcony above, the tyrant rose to his feet and rumbled a question. The gaoler jabbed his cudgel back at the cave mouth. A booming back-and-forth began between the two ogors. Freed from the gaoler’s grip, Horst scrambled on hands and knees to Niara’s side and helped her stand.
 	‘Are you all right?’ she gasped.
 	He rubbed his neck and grabbed a short-handled mace from the ground. ‘Damn near popped my head off. Otherwise, yeah.’
 	‘Bragga?’
 	Horst shook his head. Niara felt a pang of loss. Maybe you couldn’t trust a Kharadron unless your coin was good. Didn’t mean you couldn’t like one. 
 	‘Valruss?’
 	Horst snorted. ‘Grimbody watched, and did nothing. As usual.’
 	‘You know he told me he was a Stormcast?’
 	‘No such thing as Stormcast. Told you before.’ 
 	‘You have not.’
 	The ogors’ conversation fell silent. The gaoler withdrew. Timber creaked as the tyrant made his way down the shallow stairs to the fighting pit floor. It was only now that Niara realised how truly massive the brute was – an avalanche of armoured fat and slabbed muscle come to bury her alive. Thunder rumbled fitfully, like the growl of a watchdog that hadn’t yet roused itself to the challenge, but was giving the matter serious thought.
 	‘Don’t suppose he’s setting us free.’
 	Niara sighed. Spikes of pain shot through her chest. ‘What do you think?’
 	The tyrant halted a dozen paces in front of them. He hoisted the ironstone maul aloft. The haft looked like a toothpick in his hands. The crowd roared approval.
 	‘I think we’ve upset him,’ muttered Horst. ‘You hang back. You can barely stand.’
 	Niara straightened. ‘Damned if I will.’ 
 	The tyrant lumbered forward, maul back-swung and ready to strike. Niara and Horst shared one last nod, and charged.
 	Unburdened by a lumpen ankle, Horst reached the ogor first. The air screamed as the ironstone maul came about. Horst skidded in the snow, half turning as he fell. The killing blow swept over his head. Horst rolled to his feet. His mace cracked against the tyrant’s armoured knee. 
 	Might as well have struck the mountain itself, all the good it did.
 	Niara joined the fray, striking from the tyrant’s left as he lumbered to crush the upstart Horst to his right. Thick furs cheated her first strike. The second slipped beneath his corroded gut-plate and drew blood.
 	Enraged, the tyrant spun about. The maul whirled, the sound of it lost beneath the rising storm.
 	‘Move it!’
 	Suddenly Horst was at her side. His shoulder rammed Niara clear. She sprawled to the ground. Agony flared bright as broken bones ground together.
 	The tyrant’s blow took Horst full in the chest. A sound of snapping ribs like branches broken underfoot, and he spiralled away. His pulped body struck the timber bounds of the fighting pit and lay unmoving in the bloody snow. If he had screamed, it was swallowed by the thunderclap.
 	Niara crawled onto one knee. Her sword arm shook with cold and exhaustion. The tyrant’s rough laughter washed over her. The crowd cheered. Thunder rumbled, closer than ever before. So close she felt it in her bones. So close she could almost embrace it.
 	The tyrant raised his maul. 
 	Thunder roared. Niara dropped her sword, and let it swallow her whole.
 	Light blazed in the darkness of Valruss’ meditation. The sizzling, roiling crack sounded a heartbeat later. A rush of sharp, sweet air flooded his lungs. Achingly familiar and longed for, all at once. Like coming home after a long journey, or setting out anew with strong stride.
 	He opened his eyes. Fire raged beyond the cave, the fighting pit’s mistreated timbers set alight by the lightning strike. Wind howled beyond, whipping the flames to a flurry of smoke and fury. An unnatural tempest as familiar as the lightning itself. And something else. Not words. Not even a voice. But a presence as familiar to Valruss as his grief-born burdens. One so long desired he wept as it touched his thoughts. 
 	He remembered that feeling from long ago, from before the armour and duties of a Stormcast had claimed him. But the presence had not come for him. It barely acknowledged his existence. He was unworthy. It had come for another. One worth saving.
 	One worth saving. Niara’s penance was done, if it had ever existed. She did not belong here. She did not deserve his fate.
 	Seized of a purpose he had not felt in long years, Valruss gripped the bars of his cage.
 	Niara staggered to her feet as the fighting pit collapsed around her. Soot stung her eyes and clogged her lungs with the sour tang of roasting flesh. Snow hissed into the rising flames. The wind plucked at her tattered clothes, but otherwise let her be, as if she stood in the eye of her own personal storm. Of the tyrant, she saw no sign. The lightning strike had hurled him away. The fire hid all else.
 	Piece by wretched piece, the storm tore the fighting pit apart. High above Niara’s head, timber wrenched free and vanished into the tempest. A fluttering length of fur followed, then a section of planking. 
 	An ogor plunged from the upper tiers and thudded into the fighting pit, his lifeless flesh already shrivelled and black where the fire took hold. Another succumbed at the balcony’s edge, his body blazing like a torch. Panicked roars and the thump of running feet echoed as the survivors sought safety. Niara saw only flame and the starburst of black ash at her feet.
 	Thunder shook the sky. Taking heart from the sound, Niara limped towards where she had last seen the stairway. She had to risk the fire. To stay in the fighting pit was to die.
 	The flames surged. A dark shape lumbered out of the conflagration, roaring in anger and pain. The tyrant’s furs and beard were ablaze. His seared face glistened like molten wax. But the maul was still in his hand.
 	He swung. Niara twisted. The ironstone head whistled inches past her face. 
 	Oblivious to the pain, the tyrant came on.
 	Thud. The tyrant staggered and lashed out behind. Valruss strode out of the smoke, long-hafted mace gripped tight. With a wordless grunt, he swung at the ogor’s head, driving him back. 
 	The maul came about once more. Valruss darted back. When the blow passed, he struck knee and gut, and then at the head once more.
 	Blood crackling into his blazing furs, the tyrant cast his maul aside. When Valruss next swung, the mace was wrenched from his grasp. The tyrant snarled in triumph. 
 	As Niara watched in horror, the ogor gathered Valruss into a bear hug. Strong though Valruss was, he was no more than a child beside the tyrant’s bulk. Horror crystallised into determination, and determination into action.
 	Niara snatched up her sword. Tucking it in close, she levelled the blade like a lance and threw herself at the ogor as fast as her buckled ankle could bear. 
 	Steel thunked into flesh, slicing cleanly between the ogor’s ribs. The tyrant roared anew. A flailing arm struck her away, the sword still in his back. Already off balance, Niara landed awkwardly. She cried out as her wounded ankle gave way with the sound of a snapping bough.
 	Valruss prised himself free of the single arm that now held him. Rolling clear of the tyrant’s attempt to snare him, he ripped the sword free and thrust. 
 	The tyrant’s roar died with him, the sword buried in his throat.
 	Her vision dimmed by pain, Niara barely saw the ogor fall. Even the wind seemed distant, its fury spent alongside her own. But the fire raged stronger than ever.
 	‘Leave me,’ she told the approaching Valruss. ‘I can’t walk.’
 	‘You have no need to,’ he replied, and gathered her up across his shoulders.
 	Valruss stared out across the mountainside. The distant ogor camp was but a dull orange glow against the deepening dusk, half hidden by the blizzard and the trees. He saw no sign of pursuit. That would come later, if any had survived the fire. By then, the snow would have covered their tracks. Or so he hoped.
 	Turning his back on the mountainside, he retreated deeper into the narrow cave. Niara sat before a small fire, her broken bones splinted and bound.
 	‘Well?’ she asked.
 	‘We are safe. For now.’
 	She nodded, wincing as the motion tugged on wounded flesh. ‘Thanks to you.’
 	‘I am a poor steward of salvation. You must look elsewhere.’
 	She nodded. ‘I know it wasn’t just your doing. Sigmar sent the lightning, and the storm.’
 	Valruss nodded, though that was not what he had meant. 
 	Should he tell her? That the lightning was portent as much as liberator, a sign that Niara was marked for greatness – perhaps even ascension to the ranks of the Stormcast Eternals themselves? A noble life – even a necessary one – but it was not his to reveal. He who had broken from his penance in a moment of weakness. The thought of that failure yawned wide in his soul.
 	Or… had Sigmar meant for him to act? To shepherd a worthy soul from an unworthy fate? Had penance become redemption? Was he at last worthy of Azyrheim’s golden spires once more? The fellowship of his brothers and sisters?
 	He grimaced and discarded the thought as the fantasy of a weak heart. It was in the nature of portents to reveal what the witness most desired, and the nature of the desperate to cling to what they saw. His penance was broken. He could not go back to how he was. There was only the path forward. The old war renewed in shame. That would suffice. It would have to.
 	‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sigmar saved you.’
 	Niara’s eyes narrowed. Her cheek twitched. ‘And he has forgiven you?’
 	He turned away. ‘The war against the Dark Gods goes on. I will be part of it again. But I will see you safe to Concordia first, so you may also play your part…’ He hesitated. ‘Whatever Sigmar wills that to be.’
 	So saying, he returned to the cave mouth, where he stood a long, lonely vigil until night fell.