Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

This was the leader, then, the champion, the brooding presence that kept the warband on its leash. Rakh had never seen armour so fine, nor a weapon so suffused with earth-scouring power. As the first crack and growl of thunder broke out across the landscape to the north, Rakh writhed in the ankle-thick mire, shuffling backwards, uncaring now about anything other than escape from the behemoth that towered over him.

The champion took a single stride, covering the distance between them effortlessly, and pulled his standard high into the air. Flickers of carnelian slid up its shaft, crackling as they burned from the Khornate icon above. Rakh could only stare up at his killer, already tensing for the agony of the spiked staff’s heel crunching into his stomach. Duly enough, the pole came down, and Rakh screwed his eyes closed.

‘Skullbrand!’ came a voice, roaring out of the night, shaking the earth beneath their feet.

Time froze. The screams died out, the battle-roars echoed into nothing.

Rakh’s lungs continued to pull in air. Slowly, he opened his eyes. The heel of the killer’s staff was just inches from his body, held rigid by the champion. The death’s-head helm above was impassive — Rakh could only see the glowing light of two unnatural eyes burning behind a grotesque mask of iron.

The champion did not move. The warriors around him did not move. As if held by some invisible net, they had paused in their slaughter, leaving the surviving bloodreavers to cower on the ground beneath them.

Grudgingly, the champion withdrew the staff’s spike. Rakh slithered backwards, away from the icon-bearer, glancing up at the warriors around him as they retreated. He managed to shuffle his way over to Sleikh, who had collapsed on the ground with a gaping chest wound. Despite everything, Rakh couldn’t help but eye the glistening flaps of skin hungrily.

‘What is this?’ Rakh whispered.

Sleikh, grey-faced, gestured weakly. Something else was coming down the slope from the east, crunching through the loose stone. Blood warriors were falling back, making passage for it. The icon-bearer waited where he had paused, as still as a graven image, his staff held stiffly at his side.

‘Blood for the Blood God,’ Rakh murmured, issuing the words like a prayer. Prayers never helped, not in this land, but the habits of forgotten generations still persisted.

Another crack of thunder rumbled along the valley’s edge. Rain began to spit, fizzing as it hit the winding cracks in the realm’s charred land-skin. Rakh peered out into the gloom, at once daunted and compelled. An aura of dread hung over the whole tribe now, more complete than that generated by even the icon-wielder and his trained killers. Then the owner of the voice strode out of the shadows, and Rakh’s pulse began to truly race.

This one was colossal. He was decked out in the same elaborate crimson armour as his captain, though every plate and facet was finer, larger, heavier. Everything about him reeked of a dark, majestic extravagance, from the skulls clattering at his belt to the spiked bronze halo rising high over his shoulders. The upper half of his face was hidden by a bone mask, but the lower jaw was exposed — a mottled scrap of age-hardened skin, swollen with distended teeth and marred with scars and snake-figure tattoos. He carried a vast twin-bladed axe, the metal face of which was blotched with old stains and the shaft greater than the height of a mortal man. At his feet loped a huge, scale-hide hound with jaws like a vice and a studded collar around its corded neck. The creature bared yellow fangs at Rakh and let slip a long, grating growl.

Even in a place as fallen and debauched as the Brimstone Peninsula, there were some lords who commanded dread of a different order. Some monarchs of ruin were so deep in corruption that it overflowed like an aroma from them, polluting the very air through which they strode. Rakh was the lowest breed of vermin and untutored in the arts of the God of Carnage, but even he could sense that noxious stink now, dyed deep in the soul of the monster before him.

Their armour rattling, the blood warriors bowed the knee, recognising the paramount slayer among them. Even the icon-bearer inclined his helm, though the gesture was awkward, as if he were still straining on the chain, desperate to resume where he had been forced to halt.

‘Threx,’ said the warlord, with a voice that made Rakh’s teeth ache. ‘ Threx. ’

The warlord strode up to the icon-bearer and clasped the champion’s head with both mighty gauntlets. His mouth moved strangely when he spoke, exposing filed iron teeth within a pair of chafed raw lips.

‘There will be blood,’ he said, soothingly, yet with a kernel of steel. ‘You know it. You will fill your belly with it. You will gag on it, and we will drink deep as we have always done.’ He patted the champion on the cheek of his helm, like a father might a child, and released his grip. Then he turned away, running a frigid gaze across the beaten remnants of the bloodreaver tribe. ‘But not these. These are mine.’

He strolled up to Sleikh and stood over him. It was all Sleikh could do to meet the downward gaze, and his breathing was shallow and rapid. The warlord stooped, resting his great axe on the rocks and studying the bloodreaver coldly.

‘You are the leader.’ It was a statement, not a question, but Sleikh nodded — to deny it was pointless.

The warlord lifted the axe up, keeping the shaft-end down, and pressed the heel against Sleikh’s pulsing throat. ‘You were careless.’

He pushed down sharply, breaking Sleikh’s neck with a single thrust. Then his baleful gaze moved along, scrutinising those who remained. In his head, Rakh kept chanting the same thing, over and over, Blood for the Blood God, Blood for the Blood God, hoping he would be overlooked and the terror would pass. Even death would be preferable to enduring that lord’s attention — his heart already felt like it was fit to burst, and the sweat running down his neck chilled him.

With a grinding inevitability, though, the warlord’s deathly gaze came to rest on him.

‘Do you know my name?’ the warlord asked, and just listening to those words felt like his bones were being pulled from his body.

Rakh managed to shake his head.

‘I am named Korghos Khul,’ the warlord told him, working his black tongue sinuously over the syllables. ‘Seven warlords of seven keeps offer me tribute in living flesh lest I return to tear their lungs from their unworthy chests. Even now my army marches, and this is but a tithe of those who follow me.’

Rakh wanted to scream. He would have done anything — anything — to escape those glowing eyes.

Khul stooped, coming closer, and foul vapours from his cloak wafted over him. The daemon-hound slunk around his feet, glaring at Rakh with a hungry leer.

‘I seek the final skull,’ Khul said softly, his voice a purring growl. ‘I seek the zenith for my tribute. I have scoured the southlands for a hundred years, and none linger there worthy of my blade’s edge. I have laid the cities of kings low, ever seeking the one who in death could finish this great work, and all I find is dross and wastage.’

As the warlord spoke, Rakh saw visions swirl before him, pushed into his mind by Khul’s malign will. He saw great vistas spin away from him, each one glimmering with the ever-present smouldering of flame, cracked by magma, dominated by the smoking ruins of destroyed keeps. He saw armies marching, whole legions of red and gold, their helms lit by the churning of lurid skies.

And beyond all of them, far away, overlooked by eternal night and flanked by towers of beaten bronze, was a pyramid as vast as a mountain, its sides mottled and irregular. Only as Khul spoke did Rakh realise what it was made of — skulls, thousands upon thousands of them, heaped high and lodged fast, their empty eye sockets like flecks of midnight amid the sheen of picked-clean bone.