Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

‘I cannot return to the gate. If I do, I will bring ruin to us all. But you must. And destroy it.’

Ahead, Kaz’arrath was less than a dozen great strides away.

‘The gate is lost to us,’ said Beregthor. ‘We must take it from the daemons as they took ours in Sibilatus.’

Vrindum hesitated.

‘ Go! ’ Beregthor roared. ‘Your runefather commands it!’

With an agonised cry, Vrindum abandoned Beregthor. He turned back. Once more he cut his way through the daemonic horde. Wrath fused with grief. He would have tried to destroy every daemon in the field if not for Beregthor’s desperate order. Several fyrds of vulkite berzerkers were pushing hard to reach the runefather too, and it was not long before Vrindum was in their midst.

‘The gate!’ he said. ‘We are commanded to destroy the gate!’

He leapt onto the platform. He raced to the right-hand pillar, thinking only of his duty and not the consequences as he swung Darkbane. With the first blow, a chunk of ancient stone went flying. The vision in the portal shook. And a roar of denial and rage went up across the battlefield.

The daemons surged forward, and there was no laughter from the pink horrors now. They howled with desperation. They fell on the Fyreslayers with determination, forcing them back. The Drunbhor were suddenly on the defensive, fighting to keep the daemons from reaching the dais.

‘Think you to escape destiny?’

The voice was magisterial and filled with venom. Vrindum’s mouth flooded with blood.

‘The book is written. All change is ours. For you there is but the completion of your task,’ Kaz’arrath said. The daemon reached down and grasped Beregthor in a huge claw. It spread its wings, beat the air with them and rose above the fray, moving towards the dais. As it did, it struck downward with its staff, and Fyreslayers by the score died, their bodies twisted into the shape of unholy runes.

‘Destroy the gate!’ Beregthor’s cry was monstrous in its pain, a soul making its last stand in terrible combat.

Vrindum renewed his attack on the pillar. Stone flew. The wards blazed in anger, but he was not attempting to cross the threshold. Frethnir and Bramnor joined him. Their blows eroded the strength of the pillars.

‘Faster!’ Vrindum shouted. ‘We must end our failures here!’ Kaz’arrath descended on the dais. With a contemptuous gesture, the daemon swept aside the berzerkers who blocked its way. It held Beregthor towards the portal. It could ward the gate and twist its nature, but it could not open it. The runefather of the Drunbhor alone could do that. His body trembling, controlled by a will much greater than his, Beregthor raised the Keeper of the Roads and inserted its blade into the floating keyhole.

Vrindum attacked the pillar with the frenzy of wrath.

Beregthor turned the key.

The circumference of the portal blazed with lightning. The vision of the magmahold took on depth. The keyhole vanished. With a raucous caw of triumph, still clutching the victim of its manipulations, the Lord of Change stepped forward into the gate.

And the pillar collapsed.

It toppled like a felled tree, pulling the entire arch of the gate down with it. Runic, warded stonework fell into the portal with the daemon and Beregthor only partway through. The gate exploded. The heart of the Typhornas Mountains flashed with searing violet and silver. The dais erupted.

Vrindum hurtled through a maelstrom of fire and stone and raging power. The storm raged, and he raged with it. The fury of reality’s ending battered him.

He bellowed a cry of victory and grief.

The destruction of the gate turned the centre of the bowl into a crater. The blast killed many Drunbhor. The uncontrolled storm of sorcerous energies wreaked even greater devastation on the daemons. With Kaz’arrath gone, they were leaderless and despairing. With Beregthor dead, the Fyreslayers were terrible in their vengeance.

The end came quickly.

At dawn, Vrindum stood at the edge of the crater. The wind blowing from the Typhornas Mountains had shaken free of the three-note refrain. The song was changeable once again, varying with every rise and fall of the mountains. It sounded in Vrindum’s ears like a chant of mourning. But perhaps there was a thread of triumph too. Beregthor’s final command had defeated the daemon’s machinations. And he left behind a legacy.

As the sun’s rays crossed the lip of the bowl, the veins of gold in the crater gleamed.

Frethnir joined Vrindum. ‘The runemaster says there is a rich concentration of ur-gold below,’ he said.

‘Beregthor would be pleased,’ said Vrindum. ‘He led us well until the end.’

‘He did. I should never have doubted.’

Vrindum bent down and picked up the Keeper of Roads. It had survived the explosion, though its blade was gravely scarred. Vrindum presented it to Frethnir.

The runeson shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That is for Bramnor. It is not for me to be auric runefather of the Drunbhor. My brother will lead the march back. I will stay here with those who choose to join me. We will found a new lodge where our father has brought us.’

‘Then I will be of your number,’ Vrindum said. Where the daemon had sought to bring ruin to the Drunbhor, now there would be a greater strength.

The wind’s cry grew louder, a martial song for the birth of a new era.

The storm began at the height of the Ritual of Grimnir’s Binding. From where they stood on the platform of rock high on the flank of the Forgecrag, both Thrumnor and Rhulmok saw it start. It stabbed deep into their awareness, drawing them from the necessary trance of the ritual.

The Krelstrag lodge stood strong in the largest volcanic isle at the heart of the Earthwound archipelago in Aqshy. Here, the Fyreslayers said, one of Grimnir’s blades had cut into the ground as he had landed a great blow on Vulcatrix, the Mother of Salamanders. The molten blood of the great wyrm had poured into the vast cleft. The wound in the continents was a hundred leagues wide and many times as long, and it gaped and bled, never to be healed. An ocean of magma raged at the surface. It was said that the ocean had no true bottom, that the wound was so profound it tore through the barriers between the realms, but no living soul could survive the plunge through the depths of that terrible heat to find out.

In all directions, titanic molten waves rose and fell. The rage of the earth pushed its incandescent rock to the surface, as if ten thousand volcanoes in perpetual eruption had drowned themselves and the land, from horizon to horizon. This was the ocean of tribulation and annihilation, and nothing could live in its eternal fury.

But the Krelstrag stood strong.

Volcanic peaks did rise above the surface of the burning ocean. Islands would come into being. Then the terrible waves would erode their shores, the internal forces would shake them apart, and they would crumble and melt back into the lava. Not all succumbed. Ten mountains had been there since the wound was first torn open. Perhaps it was their birth that had injured the land in the beginning. Jagged and twisted, like the anguished talons of an immeasurably vast beast, they towered over the waves, arrogant, defiant, unchanging. They were mountains at war, mountains under siege. They would stand forever.

And so would the Krelstrag.

The heart of the Krelstrag magmahold was within the largest of the great claws, the Forgecrag. The island mountain was broad, though so tall it resembled an onyx spike. It rose high enough to pierce the crimson-washed clouds. At a point just beneath the clouds, it was possible to look out at the entire domain of the Krelstrag lodge, the chain of basalt claws jutting from the lava. It was even possible, when the wind was strong enough to clear the worst of the haze, to see the sole hint on the horizon that something might exist beyond the Earthwound, that there was such a thing as a mainland. On those days, the bulky silhouette of the Great Weld would appear. Unlike the spikes of the archipelago, it had a wide, flat peak. It was a distant anvil. On this night, a hammer was striking it.