Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

More prisoners scrambled across the blood-slick stone to get at the sorcerer, and he cackled and waved a hand at them. A curtain of flame enveloped them, and a dozen men and women went down, burning and screaming. Alzheer felt a finger twitch. The sorcerer took a pace backwards, stepping out of the way as a blazing figure collapsed in front of him.

That step brought him too close to one of the other prisoner cages. Hands reached out of the bars, grasping at his robes, pulling at his hair.

‘No,’ he screamed. ‘Release me!’

Alzheer took a step forwards. She stumbled as the spell released her from its control. Her legs ached as if she had just run a thousand leagues, but she did not stop. She took another step, then another, then she was sprinting. The sorcerer brought one hand up to fend her off, and she could see the fear in his eyes. She stabbed the blade in between his ribs. He squealed like a dying rat, and his eyes were wide with terror and pain as she twisted the knife. Then he was writhing and melting, falling in upon himself with his last scream still echoing in her ears. The purple robes fell to the floor, with no body to be found.

Thostos could not win. He had known this from the moment he matched blades with the Lord of Chaos. His opponent was too fast, too fresh. His own reflexes were slowed by pain and exhaustion. Each step backwards, each block and parry sent a sheet of lightning roiling through his body.

He blocked a downwards swing on his blade and swept his warhammer around at Varash’s side. The man turned and spun, neatly avoiding the strike, and flicked his blade along Thostos’ arm. Whatever twisted, Chaos-tainted alchemy had forged that obsidian blade, it had imbued it with astonishing power. It cut deeply into his transmuted sigmarite flesh, and the pain caused him to open his hand. His warhammer bounced away on the hard stone.

Thostos tried to step back, to gain some space, but the Chaos lord was too fast. His bastard sword swept out and cut across the Lord-Celestant’s leg, and as Thostos stumbled, a backhand swing tore a shard of metal from his face and snapped his head violently to the side. His vision swam, and he felt himself clatter to the floor.

‘I had expected more,’ said Varash, wiping bloody tears from his ruined eye. ‘This is a disappointment, truly.’

There was only one chance, only the briefest of opportunities as the monster standing before her revelled in his apparent victory. Alzheer knew that taking it would in all likeliness mean her death. She had never been concerned by that possibility before, despite living every moment of her life in some form of life-threatening danger. As fervently as she had preached the wisdom and benevolence of Zi’Mar, she had always believed that her people were dying, and her god was gone. The sacred words and rituals were simply fragments of a better past that she could not quite let go.

That was until they had come, these warriors in burnished plate. These demigods who spoke like men. Now, she had a reason to live. They all did. Hope. Hope that they would see this new future that the Sky God had offered them, hope that the orruks and the forces of the Dark Gods and all the other cataclysms that had seemed so insurmountable could in fact be resisted — could even be defeated. She wanted so badly to live to see that future, and conversely that made her choice so much easier. Life meant something now. Life, and what she chose to do with it.

She did not waste her opportunity.

Staggering across the gore-slick ground, she jumped onto a table covered in the innards of unfortunate prisoners, and from there leapt onto the creature’s back, scrabbling for purchase on the trophy-racks and chains that wrapped his gore-encrusted plate armour. He was lightning fast, snatching at her with a spiked gauntlet that ripped into her flesh, but she had surprise on her side and a hunter’s instinct for the kill.

The claw-dog tooth she held in her fist sank into the Chaos Lord’s eye, and she twisted and dragged it, screwing it deeper and deeper. She returned the pain that ran through her a hundredfold, screaming a prayer of vengeance for her fallen friends.

He roared in agony, and suddenly she was flying through the air. Something rushed forwards to meet her, and the world went blank.

The Chaos lord staggered back, cursing and pawing at his face. There came the sound of shattered earth, of rushing water, of a thousand siege-stones striking a thousand castle walls.

The sky opened once more, but this time it was not the bloody horror of Chaos that issued forth, but the searing righteousness of the storm that was Sigmar. A fork of lightning as tall and wide as a mountain blasted into the vortex, exploding in a coruscating web of blue energy that arced across the sky. For a moment it seemed as if Sigendil itself, the High Star that bathed blessed Sigmaron in purifying, celestial light, had descended over them.

That purifying bolt of light turned the rain of blood to mist, banished the darkness that had fallen across the Dreadhold, and fell to strike Thostos Bladestorm in the chest.

Thostos screamed as the storm enveloped him. It tore him apart and reassembled him. He felt the agony of transformation as armour and sigmarite flesh moulded and reformed around his body. With the pain, the honest, cauterising pain, came memories. He remembered the agony as the vile minions of the Dark Gods cut into him. He remembered the sorrow of loss, the ecstasy of his grief as he looked for the last time upon the smoking ruins of his lands. He remembered the helplessness, and the shame of knowing that his people had counted on him to protect them, and that he had not been there in their hour of greatest need. Thoughts and memories seared through his consciousness, too many and too vivid for him to process.

As quickly as it had come the storm was gone. Varash blinked as the flare slowly receded from his vision. His eye burned as if molten steel had been poured into the socket, but from somewhere in the haze of torment a figure swam into view. The storm warrior still knelt before him, but where once his warplate had been melted and seared, it was now resplendent in gleaming turquoise. There was not a mark upon its surface, and it shone as if it was freshly polished. The figure, despite its miraculous transformation, showed no sign of movement.

‘A clever trick,’ spat Varash, ‘but it makes no difference. You will die now, and know that every one of your warriors will die with you.’

As he spoke, he brought his bastard sword up and over, rolling his shoulder in a circular motion, adding furious momentum to the killing strike.

Thostos Bladestorm, warrior of Sigmar, who once had been the mortal warrior Prince Caeran of Wolf Keep, reached up and caught his enemy’s hands as the sword fell. The blade came to rest an inch from his eye.

‘No!’ shouted Varash, and his ravaged eye widened with shock.

Thostos stood, and as he stood he brought his runeblade up, roaring in defiance as he tore its edge through the Chaos Lord’s thick mail armour, cleaving devotional totems and skulls in half as he cut a bloody, vertical line into the man’s pale flesh. He ripped his sword free, and a mist of blood covered his armour.

Lord Varash stood, eyes fixed in astonishment at the ruin of his chest. As he swayed, he turned his gaze to Thostos.

Blue eyes bored into his skull, not the emotionless reservoirs of cold fury that they had been, but alive with righteous fervour, the eyes of a man who fought for a cause that he embraced with every fibre of his being.

‘Tell your gods that we are coming for them,’ said Thostos, ‘and that their realms will burn as ours did.’

Varash Sunken-Eye, master of the Dreadhold, collapsed in two separate pieces, toppling to the floor of the tower in a shower of gore.