Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

‘Come, little warriors,’ roared the man, a mocking leer visible underneath a towering horned helm. ‘Give your skulls to me!’

Mykos half-staggered, half-ran forwards, and ducked as the warrior swept his burning anvil back around. He felt the heat of it as it rushed past his head, and brought Mercutia up in a thrust aimed for the fiend’s throat. His opponent ducked back, spinning with unsettling grace for one so large, letting his momentum add to an overhead swing that had Mykos scrambling backwards, falling to the ground with his blade out of position. The warrior flicked the chain back up, and the anvil smashed into the bottom of Mykos’ war-helm. He felt the bones in his jaw come apart, and sprawled backwards, head spinning.

The brute stalked forwards, laughing.

‘Well fought, little general,’ he chortled. ‘You have earned a place on my trophy belt.’ He gestured to a row of chipped and broken skulls that had been bronzed and arrayed on a chain around his midriff.

He raised the flaming anvil.

A thick blade punched out from the front of his throat. The warrior glanced down in surprise, and blood poured down the front of his battered iron armour.

Lord-Castellant Eldroc retracted his halberd, switched his grip on the long haft and swung it sideways at the Skullgrinder’s neck. His head tumbled free as his body collapsed awkwardly and rolled down the stairs. The Gryph-hound Redbeak spat a clump of flesh from his jaws and trilled briefly in appreciation.

Mykos watched, blearily, as the Lord-Castellant rushed over to him.

‘Do not move, my friend,’ he heard, as the cloud of darkness at the edge of his vision threatened to engulf him. Suddenly the blackness was washed away in the face of a soothing beam of light, like a breaking dawn.

‘Come back to the light, brother,’ he heard Eldroc say.

Thostos kicked open the door, his metallic skin still dripping molten sigmarite and hot blood, and emerged into a storm of profane magic. Coils of twisted, baleful light spiralled and curled around the tower summit, enveloping three forms that were raised above the fortress wall on jagged iron crosses. These figures flickered and jerked spastically as the onslaught of fell energies wracked through them. In the sky above clouds rolled back, exposing a dark vortex that crackled and howled. Thostos could see shifting, roiling shapes within. A terrible sound echoed in his ears, the laughter of something impossibly old and unimaginably vast. The veil between the realms was being torn apart.

Before him stood a tall, powerful man in ridged black armour, hands resting easily on the pommel of a bastard sword with pulsing veins running through its obsidian blade. On one side the man’s face was almost concave, and where the eye should be there was instead a red jewel that wept blood. The man smiled.

‘My name is Varash Sunken-Eye,’ he said, in a measured, almost soft voice that seemed at odds with his fearsome appearance. ‘I am lord of this Dreadhold, and I will claim your skull.’

‘I am Thostos Bladestorm, and you are welcome to try.’

‘I knew you would meet me here,’ said the warrior, circling around the pit of bodies with a wide grin on his ruin of a face. He gestured to the boiling skies. ‘Symbolism. Ritual. This confrontation was inevitable, as soon as you arrived in the Roaring Plains.’

‘It was,’ said Thostos, settling his weapons in each hand and fighting away the waves of pain that threatened to bring him to his knees.

A small, pallid rodent of a man dressed in garish purple robes appeared from behind the Chaos Lord and glared at Thostos, seemingly more in irritation than anger. He clutched a small, serrated blade and inched towards the cage on the far left side of the tower, where a clutch of blank-eyed human prisoners crouched. They were guarded by more of the bandaged, stitch-mouthed monsters that Thostos had fought in the tower below.

‘There must be no interruptions,’ the small man said. ‘Finish this thing quickly, Lord Varash. It disturbs my work.’

With a roar, Varash leaped across the pit of blood, his flayed-skin cloak spreading out behind him like the wings of a bat and his obsidian blade reaching for Thostos’ throat.

‘Lord Thostos,’ Alzheer whispered. She could hardly believe that the twisted, melted thing before her was the grand and imposing Lord-Celestant she had met on the plain. His armour was a smouldering wreck, and his exposed flesh was a dull, ash-covered gold. He moved slowly, shorn of the terrifying speed and surety he had displayed in battle against the orruks. The Chaos warrior that faced him was smiling as he ducked and wove out of the path of the Lord-Celestant’s attacks, occasionally dragging his blade across an exposed flank or knocking Thostos off-balance with the heavy pommel.

‘He will fall,’ said the warrior Emni. Her dreadlocked hair was matted with blood, and her scarred face was bruised and swollen where she had been struck. ‘Look at him. He is done. We must escape, priestess.’

‘There is no escape from that,’ said Alzheer, nodding at the boiling blood that rushed past the edge of the tower.

‘Then we kill as many of those monsters as we can,’ Emni replied fiercely. She nudged Alzheer, and gestured down. Though she kept her hands together, the priestess could see that her friend’s bonds were cut. She wondered how Emni had done it, then saw the dead prisoner behind her, bone protruding from a shattered leg.

‘One of Rusik’s lot,’ whispered Emni, and she was grinning. ‘Cursed traitor at least managed to serve us in death.’

‘Hush,’ said Alzheer. The wizened man was returning, and as he gestured, two of the bandaged servants bent to unlock their cage. Alzheer held her breath, and gripped her claw-hound tooth necklace tight enough to draw blood. She had taken the trophy from her first kill, and the fang was still sharp, after all these years.

‘Take me, you filth,’ shouted Emni, as one of the figures reached for a man with one ear missing and started to drag him out, kicking and screaming.

Its foul head snapped around, eyes weeping, stitched-together mouth drooling. It grabbed Emni, and began to haul her free of the cage.

The warrior let the creature drag her until she was half-in, half-out of the cage door. Then, in one fluid motion, she pulled the thing off balance and wrapped her legs around its neck. It struggled and moaned, but Emni made a dagger of the first two fingers of her right hand, and jabbed them into one rheumy eye. Stitches tore free as the creature gave a strange, ululating howl. Emni grasped the corpse-knife that the thing carried in its belt, and drove it into its neck.

‘Insolence!’ roared the sorcerer. ‘Grab her! She will be the next to bleed.’

Another of the bandaged servants reached at Emni. Alzheer tucked in her legs, forced her bound arms underneath, and rolled them free. As the creature grasped at her friend, the priestess clenched the claw-hound tooth between two fingers, and punched it in the face once, twice, three times. It screeched and reeled back.

The two women crawled free, and the other prisoners, given fresh hope of escape, scrambled after them.

‘Enough!’ shrieked the sorcerer, and gestured at Emni. A white-hot bolt of energy spat out from his finger and burned into her chest. She screamed and fell to the floor.

Alzheer did not have time to worry for her friend. She scooped up the knife as it clattered to the floor and charged the mage. He laughed, stepping backwards and weaving another spell. She felt her muscles constrict, and suddenly she could not move at all.

‘Oh, very good,’ he giggled. ‘Very brave. But you cannot stop what is happening, girl. No, in fact you will watch. I will slaughter all your friends, and then, at last, I will allow you a slow death.’