Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

How had he come to be there? He had no memory of entering this room, or of kneeling. He remembered… he remembered metal…

‘Now tell me of Chamon,’ prompted the God-King.

There was an eagerness to Sigmar. He was triumphant. What did he expect Thostos to say? What had he done?

Thostos swallowed. His throat felt different. His limbs buzzed with magic. What had happened to him?

‘There was…’ he began. His words sounded hollow in his ears. ‘There was a fortress of magic. We breached its walls, only to die in a burst of unlight that was fought by a greater light.’

Sigmar leaned forward. ‘Speak to me of this greater light.’

There was more, there was… death. Dark lands, a covetous presence thwarted. He had died. There was a chill in his heart that had not been there before. He had lost something. He remembered clawing, skeletal hands and shuddered.

‘Golden,’ said Thostos. He had to force the word out, like it was a part of himself that had to be chipped painfully free. ‘Not the bastard energy of Chaos. Violent, but pure.’

Sigmar tensed. The air of triumph intensified. He nodded, and though he looked at Thostos he saw into another time and place. ‘I remember it well,’ he said eventually.

He turned abruptly. ‘Lord Vandus!’

One of the others stepped forward. Thostos knew him. His memories of this place he retained, faded but clear, like tapestries whose colours have bled away with age. Hammerhand. Vandus Hammerhand. That was him, a fellow Lord-Celestant, and, and a… friend?

The Hammerhand stepped up to Thostos’s side.

‘Prepare thy warriors,’ commanded Sigmar. ‘That light is mine.’ He sank back into his throne and gripped the metal gryphons that made up each arm of his seat. ‘We have found Ghal Maraz.’

Thostos had done that. He remembered, as Sigmar spoke on.

Sigmar finished. The crowd of warriors roared. Some chanted his name. But he could not think.

He had found Sigmar’s greatest weapon, but in doing so he had lost himself.

Virulent green mist rose from the damp soil of the Ghyrtract Fen, choking the air and all but blinding those who toiled within its reach. Lord Grelch, master of the Ghyrtribe, scooped an errant tendril of mist towards his disease-ravaged face with bloated paws, inhaling it. It burned pleasingly as it seeped into his lungs and blistered mouth. He gave a sigh of deep satisfaction.

‘Tastes like death,’ he murmured, to no one in particular.

Grelch sat midway up a slabbed pile of stone steps, which climbed upwards to the edge of a steep cliff. The steps ended at an arch shrouded in clinging vines, its capstones cracked and shot through with roots thicker around than his thigh. He shifted the long-hafted plague-axe lying across his lap and turned to eye the archway suspiciously. He had fought long and hard to lay claim to this patch of forest and the archway, but even now he wasn’t entirely sure why. Stories clustered fast and thick about those stones like flies.

The Grandfather’s eye was upon this place though — his great hand had stirred the nearby Rotwater Swamp, casting a dense and foetid fog across the fen, and this part of it in particular. The sky was as black as the boils on his backside, and the once-green leaves of the now-withered trees were covered in sticky, dripping moisture that was not dew. Fertile soil had been reduced to damp sludge by the tread of his warriors, and the waters of the rivers had grown stagnant and pleasingly foul. The men of the Ghyrtribe had long ago given themselves over to the tender mercies of Grandfather Nurgle, and they carried his blessings with them wherever they went. They warped the land about them into more pleasing shapes, reminiscent of the Grandfather’s garden.

Smacking his lips, he gazed down from his perch and watched as his slaves wriggled through the muck and mist, dragging heavy stones towards the points their overseers indicated with lash and blade. The stones were covered in carvings dedicated to the glory of Grandfather Nurgle. Each one was a prayer given physical form, and together they would form a silent chorus calling to the Grandfather in his garden, calling him and his children to the Greenglades. Grelch sighed in satisfaction. From where he sat, the slaves looked like maggots wriggling in spoiled meat.

‘Speaking of which,’ Grelch grunted, inspecting the mottled flesh of his forearm. The cut he’d received a few days earlier had sprouted squirming white shapes, which nibbled enthusiastically at his rotten flesh. He smiled indulgently.

‘Eat hearty, little ones. Soon you’ll be proper flies, and no mistake,’ he crooned as he playfully stirred the maggots with a finger. The wound ached, but it was a small price to pay. Grandfather Nurgle never gave a man more blessings than he could bear, sure as sure, and Grelch was happy to serve in even this smallest of ways. He sat back, feeling cheerful. Yes, he was happy to serve. And why not? After all, it was an honour to be here.

The ragged banners of the blessed and flyblown jutted from every horizon, even as noisome fogs and vast clouds of insects swarmed across the land. The drone of a billion flies accompanied the efforts of Grandfather’s own — the Glottkin, Torglug the Despised, Gutrot Spume, and the mangy Beastlord Gluhak, amongst others — as they strove to bring the bilious blessings of the garden to Ghyran. That wasn’t even taking into account the scuttling servants of the Horned Rat, where they crouched in the Rotwater Blight.

And Grelch as well, most powerful of those born here, in these filthy climes, Grelch thought.

Let the others, like that nitwit Kraderblob or brutes like Torglug and Gutrot Spume, scramble about in the filthy Greenglades, hunting the witch Alarielle and getting themselves ambushed by Nurgle alone knew what. Grandfather had sent three captains to find her, for without her there could be no lasting victory for Nurgle.

He flexed his wounded arm, and remembered the talon-like branch, whipping forward faster than his rheumy eyes could follow to lay open his flesh to the pitted bone. It hadn’t hurt; his sense of pain had been one of his first offerings to the Grandfather. He remembered too the fierce green hatred burning in the eyes of the monstrous bark-creature as it had smashed him back on his heels, before he’d driven the rusty edge of his axe into its creaking maw. They’d used what was left of it and its fellows for kindling the witchfires that now burned about Ghyrtract Fen, providing an eerie light for the slaves to work by.

Let’s see Spume do that, the kraken-bellied oaf, Grelch thought.

A baleful drone suddenly echoed through the trees, causing the foetid air to quiver like a frightened animal. Grelch’s eyes popped open and he turned, all thoughts of gardens forgotten. It was the Dirgehorn, originally hewn from the skull of the great plague-beast Brondtos by Beastlord Gluhak, the Crusted Blade — a feat it never stopped barking about. The Dirgehorn had been hollowed out and consecrated to Grandfather, and now sat atop Profane Tor. Its whining call, sluggish and flat, could be heard even in the Grandfather’s garden.

Someone somewhere in the vast woodlands that stretched from the Shimmertarn to Ghyrtract Fen had found some sign of the radiant queen, Alarielle. Like hounds on the scent, the other disparate warbands, searching for places such as this archway, would follow the winding echo of the Dirgehorn to wherever it led.

At the same moment, the sky darkened, grey turning to black. The snap of whips slowed and fell silent as slaves and slavers alike found their eyes drawn upwards to the roiling clouds. Grelch felt his stomach lurch, and not in the usual pleasing fashion. A moment later, the air was split by a sound greater even than the Dirgehorn — a crack of thunder which reverberated through the trees, and even his bones, deafening him.