Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

The Thriceblessed drew away from the mound of glowing debris, listening to the anguished cries of those being consumed within the frozen heap. The Celestant-Prime swooped along the overlooking platforms, driving back those knights who yet lingered above the gallery.

The mound of frost began to boil, rivulets streaming upwards to reshape themselves in new patterns. The Thriceblessed turned from their extermination of the crippled knights, circling around the shifting frost. The same thought was in each of their minds, the fear that the stair would regenerate and bring fresh waves of knights surging down upon them. The prospect of battle wasn’t daunting — it was the worry of failure, the shame lest they should never reach the Prismatic King and wrest from him his dark secrets.

Striking down a clutch of Chaos knights ranged along the platform, the Celestant-Prime turned and started down towards the bubbling geyser of frost. He had smashed the stair once already. To hold the gallery against the Prismatic King’s guards, he would do so again.

‘Wait, my lord!’ Deucius cried out as he saw the Celestant-Prime diving towards the resurgent frost. The Liberator waved his hammer in warning, imploring him to keep back.

The Celestant-Prime noticed what Deucius had seen just as he was raising Ghal Maraz to smash the skein of glowing ice. He pulled out from his dive, swinging away as he gazed in surprise at the billowing mass of frost. What was growing out from the mound wasn’t the stairway, but rather had the shape of an enormous door, a mammoth gate of icy spikes. Around the portal burned the magic light of Throl’s spell, the shimmer that revealed the path to the Prismatic King.

As the Celestant-Prime flew above the gate, the massive door began to shake and shudder. Folding upon itself, without any manner of substance or solidity behind it, the door swung open to reveal a murky chamber beyond, a room utterly different from the kaleidoscopic gallery.

Before any of the Stormcasts could draw near the uncanny phenomenon, something vast and monstrous erupted from the murk beyond the door. It was a gigantic, brutish horror, a thing of purple scales and leathery blue flesh, black chitinous plates and scarlet membranes that fluttered angrily in the arctic chill. The thing’s shape was not unlike that of some gargantuan ape, squat, powerful legs supporting it from behind while great clawed arms dragged its ghastly mass forwards. Twin tails lashed the air behind it, each ending in a slavering mouth filled with dripping fangs. Between its broad shoulders, instead of a head, a far greater maw stretched wide, a scourge of oily tentacles slobbering past its knifelike fangs. A grotesque star-shaped growth bulged from the abomination’s back, a baleful flame blazing at its centre, pulsating with arcane energies. Fingers of sorcerous fire seeped out from between the monster’s scales, crawling up its hideous bulk to merge with the conflagration at the core of the star.

‘The Prismatic King’s hound!’ Throl wailed. ‘Its very touch is annihilation!’

As though to prove the wizard’s words, the hulking beast sprang forwards, its great claw snatching one of the Judicators before the archer could loose an arrow. The golden armour sizzled beneath the thing’s touch. There was a cracking groan, and the sigmarite mail began to disintegrate, trickling through the horror’s claws in a stream of dust. The other Thriceblessed charged forwards to rescue their stricken comrade, striking at the beast with sword and hammer while the arcane lightning of Throl’s wizardry crackled across its hideous frame.

The efforts of warriors and wizard alike were hopeless. The slavering monstrosity ignored their assault, instead lashing out with its tails to catch a second Stormcast. The monster started to raise its second victim towards its dripping tentacles when a fierce cry from above caused it to rear back in surprise. Even its maddened bestial brain recognized the might behind that shout and the challenge it proclaimed.

The Celestant-Prime hurtled down upon the huge beast. A blow from the godhammer and one of the ape-like arms was shattered. His blazing hammer crushed the grisly mess of tentacles and fangs between the brute’s shoulders. Swinging the hammer on high, he brought it cracking around once more, shattering the weird star-like growth and causing the bubbling mass of arcane fire and eldritch energy at its core to cascade down into the beast’s own body. The gigantic creature howled in agony as the vortex consumed it, immolating its mutated frame from the inside.

The Celestant-Prime tore the whip-like tendril from the embattled Stormcast the brute had seized. The first to be caught by the beast was gone, but he lifted the second warrior into the air, bearing him back across the floor to their comrades. Landing beside the Thriceblessed, he watched as the vortex dissolved the Prismatic King’s nightmarish pet.

‘So dies the hound. Now we go and find its master,’ Othmar vowed as the last of the beast was consumed.

Throl pointed to the now undefended gateway. ‘The mutalith would not have been set to guard this door unless it was important to the Prismatic King,’ he said. ‘The tyrant’s throne itself may lie beyond it.’

The Celestant-Prime nodded. ‘Then let there be no further delay,’ he said, leading his remaining comrades through the gate of frost.

The moment they were through the doorway, the Thriceblessed froze, stunned into silence. The Celestant-Prime could feel the dismay of his comrades, could sense the trepidation that threatened to consume them. To his eyes, they had entered a shimmering canyon of glass. Tier upon tier upon tier of mirrored panels, rose far overhead and sank away deep beneath their feet. The floor upon which they walked felt as hard as stone but at the same time had the transparency of spring water, revealing the limitless depths below.

‘The Maze of Reflection,’ Deucius gave voice to the anxiety which gripped each of the Thriceblessed. The warriors had been prepared for almost anything when they breached the walls of the Eyrie, but they had hardly expected to find the insidious trap they had managed to escape — a trap that by any law of time and space should be leagues from the fields of Uthyr.

‘The Prismatic King!’ Throl cursed. ‘He has usurped my magic, twisted my spell to draw us all into his trap.’

The Celestant-Prime glared at the tiers of mirrors. The thrill of warning grew more insistent. He felt that if he concentrated, if he plumbed the very depths of his soul, he would understand the nature of the menace they now faced. But to do so would need time, and that was one resource he didn’t intend to squander.

‘We aren’t trapped yet,’ Ghal Maraz declared. ‘Back away to the door. We’ll try to navigate the hall again.’ As he turned, however, the Celestant-Prime found that their avenue of retreat was closed to them. Where the door of ice had been there was only a continuance of the mirrored rows. The doorway was gone, vanished after hurling them into the heart of the Maze.

Ghal Maraz looked to the Thriceblessed. ‘You broke free of this trap before,’ he began.

Deucius shook his head. ‘That was a miracle in itself,’ he said. ‘We managed to find a flaw in our prison.’

‘Or so I was allowed to believe,’ Othmar scowled. ‘Maybe it wasn’t fortune that allowed us to leave, but some scheme of the Prismatic King. Maybe he knew we would find the Celestant-Prime and bring him into this trap.’

The Celestant-Prime stared across the canyon, studying the mirrored tiers. As though in response, an eerie shimmer rippled through them. The reflective faces were no longer empty. Bound within them, he could see the armoured figures of Stormcasts. From the iconography that adorned their sigmarite mail, he knew these were the Thriceblessed, the rest of the warrior chamber that had been lost in the campaign against the Prismatic King.