Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

‘Your skull will be mine after all,’ the warlord growled.

The haft of Heldensen rang as Vandus desperately parried the blow. He lashed out, finding strength from anger, but Khul was swift and already within the Lord-Celestant’s guard.

‘You are nothing without your drake,’ Khul sneered, his unbreakable grip around Heldensen’s haft.

Vandus roared, unable to wrench the hammer free. He lunged instead, smashing his head against Khul’s face and splitting the skull mask in two. He saw a glaring, angry visage beneath.

With a sharp twist, Khul disarmed Vandus and threw the hammer aside.

‘I was wrong about you,’ he said, spitting blood and teeth. ‘You are still Vendell Blackfist, doomed to fall by my blade. Die now!’

I am the lightning. The words came back to Vandus, as did the image of the bolt striking down from above. Before Khul could end him and condemn his soul to torment, Vandus leapt from the killing blow to land crouched within a handspan of the Gate of Wrath.

As he rose up, Vandus reached out and gripped the edge of one of the pillars of the gate.

Khul was close, blood-crazed and frothing…

‘I am the lightning,’ whispered Vandus, as he closed his eyes. ‘I am Vandus Hammerhand.’

A crash of thunder sounded overhead.

‘Lord Sigmar, strike thy servant now!’

God-lightning seared from the turbulent sky, an arcing blast so powerful that it shook the earth.

Vandus saw light: a blinding, searing luminescence so bright it eclipsed all sense of being and self. Then he was gone.

Now…

Ionus unshielded his eyes to see the Gate of Wrath utterly destroyed. Nothing remained but steaming, molten rock.

All around it for a hundred paces or more, both Stormcasts and Bloodbound had been thrown off their feet. Tendrils of corposant writhed across their bodies as the storm bolt was slow to dissipate.

There was no sign of Vandus Hammerhand or Calanax. Sigmar had reclaimed them, and in so doing vanquished the realmgate to Khorne’s domain.

A great cheer rose up from the Stormcast Eternals.

‘Azyr! Azyr!’

Only Ionus did not raise his voice. Instead, he watched Khul as he beheld the ruination of his plans. The Red Pyramid collapsed, skulls tumbling from its flanks in an avalanche that spilled amongst the Bloodbound in a flood. In moments it was nothing but a swathe of shattered bone, destroyed, its power broken.

As the warlord bellowed his impotent wrath to the uncaring night, Ionus knew they had struck a telling blow, but the war was not over.

‘Not yet…’ he whispered, as the victorious Stormcasts swept down upon the remnants of the Goretide like a living tempest.

The guilt Thostos Bladestorm felt for spending the last days of his mortal life away from home had never left him. Not through his first Reforging, nor through his second. No number of rebirths could purge such regret from a man’s soul. When the cause was lost to him, the guilt stayed, a distillate of pain. Forever it was his spur, his strength and his weakness.

One last time Thostos relived the moments of his first death as Prince Caeran, in light and pain, when he was reborn at the God-King’s behest.

This is how he remembered it.

Then…

Warm wind sang through the pass of Unnumbered Birds. Scent is the key to memory, and the smell of the place was the last thing that Thostos forgot. In later days, when many lifetimes had passed him by, he would catch a reminder of it and search his broken memories for a full recollection. Alas, he would always be frustrated.

The strongest above all was the sharp smell of the birds themselves. Many nests crowded the cliffs either side of the narrow road, their guano streaking the rocks. There were other, subtler smells beneath that rich stink. The wind ran over the plains to the mountains, all the way from the distant sea. Even in the high mountains there was saltiness upon the wind still. This too Thostos remembered, and the blood and the ash that had come to taint it.

On that last day, the mountains preserved the semblance of peace. There the land seemed as it always had, as wild and free as any place in Amcarsh before the coming of Chaos.

To return to the mountains from the hell of the lowlands lifted the heart, even that of Prince Caeran, who would be Thostos, for he was burdened with many worries. But on that day, he breathed free, clean air, and returned home in victory. Secured to the flank of his horse was a bloody sack. Within languished the head of Sur Jactyr, Great Lord of Chaos and Reaver of the Sixteen Cities. His sharpened teeth would never again bite into flesh, and his golden eyes would see no more atrocity wrought in his name. Silver thread bound the sack shut, keeping the dead lord’s evil from corrupting the one who carried it. It was a successful hunt, enough to make Caeran forget for a moment the horrors of the world.

He was accompanied by Tarm, his childhood friend. No matter what evil they faced together, always they came back side by side. As was Tarm’s habit, he goaded his prince for sport as they rode.

‘My father says to me that the duty of an heir is to remain at home and learn the ways of governance. And yet here you are riding out on the hunt.’

Caeran laughed, though there was annoyance in it. ‘And what would your father have me do, work the fields and build terraces?’

‘That he would,’ said Tarm.

The pass was narrow, little more than a gully, and their voices echoed from the sides. Sunlight cut down from blue skies that were still untouched by the bruises of Chaos. The shadows of crags divided the rocky landscape into patches of delicious heat and pleasing cool.

‘Ask your father how I can remain at home, when evil brings all good things low and every month sees another city razed to the ground? Ten years ago, my father said that we would be safe within our valley, that the Warding Hounds of Garma would keep us safe, that Chaos—’

‘Hssh!’ Tarm said.

Caeran dropped his voice. ‘What?’

Tarm’s eyes were fixed upon the sky. Caeran raised his own gaze.

‘I see no birds,’ said Tarm.

The skies were empty. There was no sign of any birds at all.

Without exchanging a word, the warriors spurred their horses into a gallop. Their steeds were born for the rough terrain of the mountains and picked their path without faltering, haring along the rough road as sure-footed as goats. Soon enough, they rounded the kink in the valley where it opened onto the Great Glen of the Wolf.

‘Smoke!’ called Tarm. He slowed and stood in his stirrups for a better view.

Caeran thundered past him.

‘Wait, Caeran!’ Tarm shouted. ‘Be careful!’

But Caeran did not heed him. His stomach churned with sickening dread, an utter conviction that the worst had happened, and that his life was over.

The mountainside curved away, the glen broadened, and Wolf Keep, seat of Guild-King Glothian’s power, came into view. The keep was set high on the mountain, backed onto a soaring crag so that it looked out over the wide grazing lands of the glen. The Woolguild’s isolation had been its salvation. The mountain walls that yielded such meagre crops barred the advance of Chaos, and Glothian had kept the clans of his guild safe; once from the great and terrible beasts of Amcarsh and later against the depredations of hell-spawned monsters.

That is until then.

Caeran galloped past a burning cottage. The corpses of the farmers were pegged outside its blackened walls, cruelly mutilated. Hayricks blazed. Smoke rose from every building in the valley, thick over the four villages and thickest over Wolf Keep.