Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

Enemies, sweet Grelch, and far beyond you, the voice of his master rumbled.

Grelch felt the sadness those words carried. He would join his maggots soon and join his warriors, broken and dead in the mire.

Dead, yes, but not forgotten, my best, brightest bubo, his master gurgled. Grandfather watches you, Grelch. Show him how brave you are, my servant. Open the way for me, and join Grandfather in the eternal garden, where all is green and growing and life waxes fat. He waits for you, waits to take you in his arms… Hurry, Grelch. Hurry!

Grelch felt his fears evaporate as the words of his master, his mentor, filled his skull to bursting.Then he bounded ponderously down the slick stones with axe in hand. Grelch sensed, without knowing how, that only a bit more effort was required. He would show Grandfather how brave he was, and he would dwell in the garden in wonder and glory forevermore. That was all he wanted; all he had ever wanted.

‘I do not know you, murderers, but you will know me,’ he rasped. ‘I am Grelch, lord of the Ghyrtribe, and master of the Ghyrtract Fen. When you go back to whatever place spawned you, tell them it was I who sent you. Tell them that Grandfather Nurgle sends his greetings, sure as sure.’

He lifted his plague-axe in both hands and held it across his body, taking comfort in the weapon’s weight, stepping towards the silvery ranks of the enemy. ‘Come on then. Send me to the garden, if you can,’ he spat. Only a little more blood, he thought. Hadn’t intended it to be mine, but, well, you can’t have everything. Grandfather never asked more than a man could give.

One of the warriors stepped forward. He was tall, taller almost than Grelch, though he lacked the latter’s sheer bulk. His baroque armour shimmered strangely in the light of the witchfires, and he raised the hammer he carried in what Grelch thought must be a salute. In his other hand he carried a sword, its blade etched with sigils that burned Grelch’s eyes. Grelch spat at the warrior’s feet.

‘Tell me your name,’ he demanded. ‘Grandfather likes to know the names of the souls I send him.’

The warrior cocked his head, blue eyes alert behind the unmoving, too-perfect features of his mask. He lowered his weapon.

‘Gardus,’ he said. His voice was like a clear peal from a great bell. It struck Grelch’s belly like a fist, and climbed his spine into his brain where it reverberated, much as the thunder had earlier. Grelch shook his head to clear it.

Grandfather, give me strength, he thought.

‘Gardus,’ he said, chewing over the syllables. ‘Well, Gardus, a pleasure to meet you.’ Then, with a roar, Grelch swung his axe up and around, and launched himself at the warrior.

The Grandfather’s garden awaited.

Gardus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights, looked down at the bloated body at his feet, then at the patina of sour bile clinging to his hammer. The plague warrior had fought bravely for being outmatched. He had hurled himself knowingly into death without hesitation or fear. Gardus wondered how such a debased creature could possess such courage. Then, would I have done any less? he wondered. He swept his hammer out, dislodging the muck which clung to it and banishing the thought in the same motion.

‘Who are the victorious?’ he called out, raising hammer and sigmarite runeblade. His voice boomed out across the clearing, reaching every ear. Some called him the Steel Soul, though he could not say where the name had come from. Regardless of its origins, his Warrior Chamber had taken the name for their own, and they bore it with honour.

‘Only the faithful,’ his warriors roared in reply.

Gardus gazed with no small amount of pride at those who had followed him into battle as they raised their voices in triumph. Liberators, Prosecutors, Judicators and Retributors, all clad in star-forged sigmarite, and bearing weapons crafted from the samen material. Their panoply of war gleamed silver where it was not rich gold. Their shoulder guards were of deepest regal blue, such as the heavens themselves, as were their heavy shields. The weapons they carried shimmered with holy fire.

They were all heroes. Their valour proven in battles all but forgotten in the haze of their Reforging. The Hallowed Knights were the fourth Stormhost to be founded, and the ranks of their Warrior Chambers were filled with the faithful of the Mortal Realms. Their only commonality was that each had called upon Sigmar’s name in battle, and been heard, and that each had shed his mortal flesh in the name of a righteous cause.

Gardus himself could but dimly recall who he had been before he had been made anew in Sigmar’s eternal forge. His old identity had been torn away by celestial lightning and replaced by something new and greater. The memories of that time surfaced only rarely, though he thought — he hoped — he was the same man he had been then. The same man whom Sigmar had deemed worthy to give a portion of his power to. Of the time before his Reforging, he remembered only fear, battle, pain and blood and, finally, the lightning which had brought him to Sigmaron amongst the stars.

He could not truly recall the cause he had died for, or the names of those who had fought beside him, in that final battle.

But I remember you nonetheless, my friends, he thought. I remember your faces, and how you died. I remember that we fought in Sigmar’s name, against the same evil I face today. I remember, and I will honour you the only way left to me — with sword and celestial fire. He lifted his runeblade and gazed at the sigils etched into its gleaming length. They seemed to glimmer with heat, the repressed fury of a storm. Sigmar himself had blessed the blade, after Gardus had forged it. I will not fail you, he thought, though whether he was speaking to Sigmar or the faded ghost-memories of half-forgotten comrades-in-arms, he could not say.

He looked around, taking stock of the battlefield. What he saw was not pleasant. The churned mud was full of monsters — most dead, some dying — their vile flesh no longer regenerating as it had during the initial moments of battle, twisted shapes whose abominable features were mirrored in the very land itself. Sickened, he smashed aside a looming icon dedicated to the Ruinous Powers. There were hundreds stabbed into the earth throughout the clearing, and they caused his stomach to twist in an instinctual revulsion. A trace of the man he had been, he suspected. Everywhere Gardus looked, disease blossomed.

The very air stank of it, and the nearby waters ran with pox. The ground was covered in a carpet of maggots — and other, unrecognizable, scavenger beasts — as well as a glistening putrescence. The sickly trees fed upon this rich loam of decaying matter, sprouting unnatural growths that resembled struggling insects or wailing faces. Thick creepers, covered in unhealthy looking cilia, sought to strangle what little normal-looking plantlife remained. Even the rocks were covered in pus-filled boils. Gardus was at once repelled and fascinated by it; he had never seen its like before.

He looked around at the crumpled and fly-ridden bodies of the plague-worshippers, and then at the idols, altar stones and obelisks that they had been in the process of erecting when the Steel Souls had arrived. The enemy might have been defeated, but there were still his works to cast down. Every dark monument would be toppled or broken up by the time they were done here. But somehow, he knew that this place would never be entirely free of the contagion that afflicted it.

Even so, that was no reason to tarry.

‘Feros, how goes it?’ he called out to his Retributor-Prime. Called the Heavy Hand by some, Feros had earned his rank at the Battle of the Celestine Glaciers, where a blow from his hammer had sheared loose the rim of one of the eponymous glaciers, sending the warriors of the Ruinous Powers tumbling into the icy depths. Like his fellow Retributors, Feros was the wrath of the heavens made brooding flesh. He smelled of lightning and rain, and his heavy, ornate armour was marked with the lightning bolt of Sigmar.