C. Werner - Blighted Empire

What he had discovered was so much more than mundane appreciations of life and death. He had tasted eternity, an eternity of tranquillity devoid of pain and sorrow. He had experienced a world without oppression and fear — a world where all the discord was forced into harmony, all the frayed edges had been mended.

His focus lost, Vanhal could feel the magical vibrations coursing through the tower ebbing. The stars overhead assumed their natural positions as time reasserted its tyranny. Blocks of stone, held in place solely by the aethyric vibrations, fell away, crashing from the walls. The levitating altar dropped to the roof, smashing into bits of bone. Vanhal himself dropped away, landing with a jarring impact on the splintered wreckage.

Beyond the walls of Vanhaldenschlosse, he could hear the frightened squeaks of the fleeing skaven. Briefly, the necromancer sent a little tendril of power into the remaining dragons, enough to sustain their decayed frames while they harried the ratmen back to their burrows. When he had time, he would perform a more complete ritual to reduce the transience of their animation. Alongside the droves of dead the skaven left behind, the dragons would make short work of completing his tower.

A surge of discordant emanations drew Vanhal’s attention to the base of his tower. Far below he could see a colossal shape scrabbling up the stones, dragging itself with gravity-defying malignance on a confusion of what seemed at once both legs and tentacles. The thing’s shape was that of some insane insect, yet there was also that about it that suggested both crabs and spiders. A motley, piebald fur stretched across most of its grisly body while across its broad back, elongated into an absolute of madness and horror, was the visage of a huge horned rat.

The ghastly residue of Seerlord Skrittar, the foul spawn born of his arcane apotheosis, squirmed up the tower with such swiftness that Vanhal was unable to direct even the most minor of incantations against it before the thing had reached the roof. Whips of aethyric energy crackled about the thing as it clambered up to meet him, the distorted skaven face grinning idiotically as the residue of the grey seer’s mentality tried to remember why it was here. One paw, the only portion of the monster that was unchanged, pointed its claw at the necromancer.

‘Die-die!’ the giant, rat-like head bellowed.

The whips of energy lashed out at Vanhal in a withering discharge of amok magic. The stones beneath the necromancer’s feet turned to jelly, the shattered bones of the altar took flight as rainbow-winged insects. Where the energy glanced across his robe, the garment sprouted gritty, coral-like encrustations.

‘I have too much to do before that happens,’ Vanhal told the insane Skrittar-spawn. The necromancer’s eyes blazed with power as he drew the waning energies of the fulcrum into his mind…

Lothar von Diehl stepped around the mess of putrid, steaming fur. No need, then, to ask his master what had become of the monster he had seen climbing the tower. Having sensed the power of the creature, he had worried that Vanhal might not be able to defeat it on his own. Now he felt foolish for having hurried back to render aid.

Turning away from the loathsome puddle, Lothar bowed before his seated master. No sense in wondering how Vanhal had brought his palanquin up from the halls below. Perhaps he’d been inspired by the monster’s ascent and simply had the thing climb up the side of Vanhaldenschlosse.

‘The enemy is in full retreat, master,’ Lothar reported. ‘Between the dragons and the destruction of their leader, I think they won’t be back.’

Vanhal was silent for a time, eyes closed behind the skeletal contours of his mask. ‘Never underestimate the foolishness of mortality,’ he said, his voice like an icy whisper. ‘The living can only be trusted to do the unpredictable, be they men or rats.’

‘What then is the answer?’ Lothar asked.

Vanhal opened his eyes, but there was a faraway quality in their gaze. Whatever the necromancer stared at, it was nothing his apprentice could see.

‘The answer is to bring them peace,’ Vanhal declared.

‘The only peace any of them will ever need.’

Middenheim

Ulriczeit, 1118

Vrrmik bared his teeth at the vengeful dwarfs as they struggled to reach him. The stormvermin of Clan Mors were among the strongest and most vicious warriors in the Under-Empire. A fortune in food and armour, weapons and warpstone had been spent to make them an elite force without equal. Entire burrows had been enslaved to cultivate the warpweed that supplemented their carnivorous diet and caused their muscles to swell. They were the terror of a hundred warrens, a thousand burrows. Entire clans of slaves quivered at their very scent.

It was, therefore, quite a shock to the warlord when his super-skaven broke before the vicious assault the dwarfs mounted. The white ratman’s eyes went wide with fright when he appreciated that the only thing standing between himself and a throng of enraged dwarfs were a handful of opportunistic clanrats who had thought to loot the corpses left by the stormvermin. As the stormvermin scattered, the clanrats found themselves staring straight into the snarling masks of the dwarfs’ helms.

For an instant, the fury of the dwarfs was turned against the looters. They had the misfortune to be discovered in the act of cutting rings from the fingers of the dwarf champion Vrrmik had slain. What the dwarfs did to the scavengers was horrible enough that the warlord forgot himself and expelled his glands. Nervously, his claws tightened about the haft of Drakdrazh.

Scurrying away from the dwarfs, Vrrmik tripped over the corpse of a ratman who had treacherously died in such a fashion as to make himself an obstacle for his warlord. Angrily, Vrrmik swung the stolen hammer at the carcass. He was shocked when the head exploded into a mist of blood and gristle. A mad titter of awe hissed from his clenched fangs. In his panic, he’d almost forgotten the reason he’d taken such risks and involved himself directly in the attack.

Jumping to his feet, Vrrmik met the charging dwarfs. There were five of them. He swung the warhammer full into the side of the first dwarf, crumpling his steel shield as though it were a mouldy leaf, hurling the dwarf across the cavern with such force that his armoured body left an impact crater inches deep in the rock wall. The other dwarfs tried to put up a better fight, but the dire combination of Drakdrazh and Vrrmik’s vicious, warpweed-enhanced strength was too great for them to overcome. One by one, they died.

Vrrmik exulted in the carnage, savouring the smell of blood as he reduced his enemies to pulp. What need to hide behind his stormvermin (though those treacherous flea-licking mice would suffer for abandoning him) when he was a veritable demigod of battle! An avatar of the Horned One raining death and destruction upon all those mad enough to oppose him!

The last dwarf turned and ran, even the stubborn courage of his kind incapable of enduring Vrrmik’s murderous havoc. The warlord watched him flee, debating whether he should allow the wretch to tell others of what he had seen or whether to smash him into paste as he had the dwarf’s comrades. Vrrmik wondered if he could swing Drakdrazh lightly enough to merely maim the dwarf. That would give him the best of both choices.

The scent of human in the air caused Vrrmik to hesitate and allow the dwarf to flee back behind the ranks of his kind. The warlord’s whiskers twitched as his cunning restrained his bestial bloodlust. There were far more important things to consider than the slaughter of a few dwarfs. Oh yes, much more important things!