Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

A billow of rain-filled air battered him in the face as Lord Maerac alighted on the parapet.

‘See, sorcerer! This is true Chaos! Not your pedantic constructions. The fortress is lost! Your own pet has let them in!’ Maerac was laughing, a hard mix of despair, anger, and glee.

‘Coward!’ screamed Ephryx. ‘I will not abandon my work!’

He turned upon the men on the walls and the metal plaza outside, sending gales of billowing fire into the ranks of his foes, transmuting Stormcast Eternals into all manner of hideous forms. A volley of bolts arced towards him. He waved a hand and they fizzed into nothingness even as his other throttled the Judicators that had fired them.

‘It is lost!’ repeated Maerac. ‘Flee.’

A terrible howl drew Ephryx’s attention to the courtyard. The mutalith slumped to the floor. Its vanquisher turned and raised his hammer at the mage in defiant challenge.

Ephryx fixed Maerac with a doleful stare.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Maerac. ‘No, Ephryx!’ he said warningly. ‘Do not call upon such powers!’

The sorcerer raised his hands, all the while glaring at the lord defiantly. Cursing, Maerac urged his mount into the storm-wracked sky.

Ephryx chanted an arcane phrase three times. Attackers were approaching from the other side of the breached wall. A jagged bolt of lightning slammed into the fort’s central tower. The artefact within heard and responded, a secret signal only Ephryx could detect. The calling of the hammer to its master set his teeth hurting, but he would not stop and chanted the phrase over and over again.

Reality screamed. Ephryx channelled as much power as he dared, his soul chilling as he handled the dark energy.

The last syllables left his lips, and he nearly choked upon them. Angrily he drew upon the reservoirs of energy trapped in his fortress, enraged that they must be expended.

A circle of blackness expanded from the sorcerer, slaying every thing that it touched. Chaos warrior and Stormcast Eternal collapsed as the fortress discharged curling arcs of night-purple doom. The skulls clawed at the lives of the Stormcasts killed, but there were so many slain that the castle could not consume them all, and their essences raced home. The earth rebelled at this black work, shuddering in pain. His tower swayed, its walls cracking and revealing the golden light of the artefact within, but it was not enough to hold back the darkness Ephryx had unleashed. For a split second the sorcerer stared into the realms of death. Something ancient and dark gazed back at him with contempt.

The light returned. Ephryx sank to knees, dizzy. All around him were the dead. The Stormcast Eternals had disappeared, carried off by their lord. The ground was carpeted by the bodies of his men and Maerac’s followers.

A dry chuckle sounded behind him. Wearily, Ephryx raised his head.

‘Master,’ he said.

‘A clever gambit, mortal,’ said Kairos.

‘It was idiotic,’ said the second head, arching close to the sorcerer. It tilted to one side, its eye filling Ephryx’s vision.

‘A good play,’ disagreed the other. ‘Why would I want a dull follower?’

‘Perhaps I would,’ argued the second head.

The heads spoke together, the menace in Kairos’s words unmistakeable. ‘Now you have had your turn. Let us bring this to a close together.’

‘Yes, together,’ said one head.

‘That is what we always intended, no?’ asked the other.

‘Y-y-yes!’ said Ephryx. ‘Of course my lord! Why, I only intended to… There was no time… I had to act quickly, I…’

Kairos leaned heavily on his staff. ‘Tut tut tut,’ said the first head.

‘Do shut up, Ephryx,’ said the second.

Memories bubbled and slipped from Thostos, a fleeting impression of darkness and snatching hands tearing at his spirit. He was moving fast and lost in the light. The pain was so great it overcame the universe. An ocean of agony, deeper than time. He could not recall his name. He remembered… Where? A land of giant beasts, a castle in a country considered civilised. A kind father, a good life.

He remembered its end. Blood and death and pain for those he loved.

He smelled the ruin of it, thick and cloying, and he gasped. No air came into his lungs, only energy, raw and crackling. He had no lungs. Something convulsed. There was no body. Was it his soul?

Caeran. Was that his name?

Something twitched in the stormlight, a zygote that split and divided rapidly.

A woman’s face. His mother? An aunt? He did not recognise them, but the sight of them brought the need for vengeance.

A man’s face, crowned with a circle of red gold. Dead. Consumed. He raged at the thought, and the need for revenge gripped him more tightly. In the wash of light, delicate bones rapidly thickened, became a hand bare of flesh, a hand that clenched. He felt muscles grow, the strands of their fibres wrapping around one another. More bones erupted from the stuff of magic, caging organs that inflated wetly. A skull crept over a newly sprouted brain.

The pain worsened.

There was another castle, where he had another name. A land of metal. A horned man.

So much pain! He thrashed, trailing streamers of raw nerves that sparked excruciatingly.

The process quickened, but in truth the duration could have been months or seconds. Thostos had no frame of reference for time, only the pain. All he knew was that the sequence of growth increased in pace. Skin, hair, teeth, nails. Or something like them, something that had their semblance, but that lacked their solidity.

Agony seized his skull as a new face grew over it, twin pits of pain where fresh eyes budded.

He could not bear it.

Time ceased. He was elsewhere. A castle of stone, hung with dreadful fruits. A castle of metal, bursting under the strain of stolen magic.

A castle that hid a great prize…

‘Thostos!’

His God-King called to him.

‘Thostos!’

His king.

‘Thostos Bladestorm!’

Thostos, was that his name? Yes. The name given to him by the God-King, the lord of light. Sigmar’s gift, a new name for a new life. Had there been another?

A man, a woman. A burning castle. Vengeance. Memories of that time slipped away, became blurred, and were lost to him forever.

He was Thostos. Thostos Bladestorm of the Celestial Vindicators. There was no other, not any longer. Guilt persisted, a leftover of another world, cool and unyielding as a diamond, that was all he had left.

Never again would he fail.

Another light replaced the first, softer, soul-cleansing. It rinsed him through and through, and he let out a sharp breath as the last vestiges of his pain slipped from him.

‘Stand, Thostos Bladestorm!’ Words of gentle thunder. The memory of the pain was wiped away.

The light dimmed, resolving itself into the shape of a great man, a god. Sigmar Heldenhammer, seated in the throne of Azyr. Thostos knew his face better than he knew his own. Tall and regal, majesty manifest, a man clad in the light of godhood. Thostos blinked. He held up his hand in wonder to eyes that smarted in their newness. His hand, armoured in its celestial turquoise, whole and unharmed.

‘We shall kneel no more,’ said Sigmar. He gestured, encouraging Thostos to rise.

The Lord-Celestant of the Bladestorms stood on legs that felt insubstantial, as if his armour were all that gave them shape. There was strength there; he did not shake or fall, but it did not feel like it was his. It was loaned to him from elsewhere. Or stolen.

‘Your Reforging is complete,’ said Sigmar.

Thostos recognised where he was: in the throne room of Sigmar, a hall suited to the God-King’s majesty. Others stood behind Thostos, lesser beings than Sigmar though great in their way, the Lord-Celestants of a dozen stormhosts.