Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

Runemaster Thrumnor and Runesmiter Rhulmok stood on the edge of the high platform. Behind them were a hundred warriors of the auric hearthguard, those chosen to make up the Sentinels of the Reach. Before each Fyreslayer was a drum. The drums were made of hide stretched over a stone framework built into the platform itself, and could never be moved. They had two purposes. The first was to provide the rhythmic thunder of the ritual. The sentinels beat their instruments, and the sound reverberated throughout the tunnels and vaults of the Forgecrag. The drumbeat was the pulse of the land as magma coursed through its veins. It shaped the humours of the Earthwound and called it to attention. When Thrumnor and Rhulmok listened to the beat, when it entered their flesh and their blood and their bones, when it vibrated through the ur-gold runes that were even more central to their being, then they were one with their environment. Then Thrumnor summoned the rage of molten rock, Rhulmok gave it form, and together they built the bridges.

There were homes and mines in the other claws of the archipelago, but the Forgecrag was the heart of the lodge, and its fortress in times of war. The Fyreslayers of the Krelstrag needed to move from one peak to another, and there was only one way that was possible. The Earthwound’s fury was so total that there were no tunnels that could link one island to another. Instead there were bridges.

Seen from the platform, a suturing of rock connected the islands. Narrow walkways spanned the ocean. Just as the fragments of Grimnir’s being were gathered together in the ur-gold, so the bridges brought unity to the fragments of the Krelstrag lodge. Grimnir had wrought the Earthwound, yet through his strength was a whole forged by his faithful Fyreslayers.

Though they were stone, the bridges were ephemeral. Once they were built, they sometimes lasted as long as a week, sometimes a single day. When the ocean’s rage was great, a bridge could vanish mere hours after its creation, swallowed by waves of lava a hundred feet high.

The bridges had high, curving sides, three times taller than any Fyreslayer, protecting those who crossed them from the worst of the ocean’s heat. Passage across them was controlled by more Sentinels of the Reach. Positioned at either end of each span, carefully trained by Thrumnor and Rhulmok, they observed the conditions of the crossings, determining whether or not they were still safe to use. There lay the second purpose of the drums — to beat the alarm when a collapse was imminent, and so help direct the work of the ritual.

In battle, Thrumnor summoned magma from below, destroying the foe as lava erupted from the ground, burning all who dared challenge the Krelstrag. Rhulmok commanded the direction of the magma’s flow. Tunnels opened before his will, and the Fyreslayers moved beneath the battlefield. Over the centuries, as he had learned to call on the magma’s wrath, Thrumnor had also learned how to calm it. He could cool it to solid rock. Rhulmok, in his turn, came to know how to shape what Thrumnor soothed. What was a bridge, after all, but a tunnel through the air?

And so the Krelstrag lodge thrived, extending its reach across the islands of the Earthwound archipelago, and any enemy foolhardy enough to try its strength against that of the Krelstrag first had to cross leagues upon leagues of the Earthwound ocean.

The Krelstrag had a term: lavasmite . It meant a period of time so short as to be not worth mentioning. It came from the contempt they felt for the sieges they had withstood and smashed to pieces, and for the uncounted thousands of foes who had been swallowed, screaming, by the lava. The sieges lasted only long enough for the Krelstrag to hurl the enemy into the embrace of the Earthwound ocean.

The Forgecrag could not be taken. It would stand forever.

Then the storm came.

Thrumnor was deep in the pounding trance of the ritual. He had caught a great fountain of lava in the clenched gauntlet of his will and chanted a prayer of low, guttural syllables. The blood of Vulcatrix must be called to answer. Righteous rage forced a wave of lava to climb above the ocean. It forced it to change its strength from fire to rigid stone. Rhulmok’s voice was there with him, no less determined but calmer, grinding and growling like the parting of stony waves. The cooling lava lengthened and the bridge came into being, arcing out from the side of the Forgecrag towards a new peak, one that had risen from the ocean a month before, and was now deemed stable enough to explore. Then, at the horizon, where the Great Weld stood guard, there was an explosion of lightning. It disrupted the song. Its thunder was too distant to be heard, but it was so huge it was felt in the air, and Thrumnor stuttered in his song. Rhulmok choked. The half-made bridge collapsed into the lava. Grimnir’s Binding unravelled, its energy lashing out uncontrollably across the bridges. They shook, cracking and groaning. The filament nearest to the incomplete crossing began to glow. Hundreds of Fyreslayers caught on the strut started to run, racing against the rising heat and shifting rock. They barely made it to the safe ground of the Forgecrag before that bridge, too, collapsed.

Out of the trance, Thrumnor saw the last flashes of Binding dispersing over the farther bridges.

‘Grimnir grant we killed no one,’ said Rhulmok, his voice strained with shock.

Thrumnor grunted. His own breath was rasping. His gaze was fixed on the sky’s rage. This was no natural storm. The lightning struck again and again as if beating a rune into flesh. Pulsing in sympathy with the flashes was a searing glow on the summit of the Weld. The light was a vivid green, and Thrumnor experienced each burst with a mixture of holy dread and the excitement of war.

‘What does this portend?’ Rhulmok asked. There was awe in his tone, but great suspicion too.

‘It portends much,’ Thrumnor said. ‘ The hammer of Grimnir strikes his anvil once more ,’ he recited.

Rhulmok did not appear to recognise the line of prophecy. The foretelling was an ancient one, and almost forgotten. There was much of it that Thrumnor could no longer recall himself.

‘We must speak with the runefather,’ said Rhulmok.

‘Aye,’ Thrumnor agreed.

But there was something he must do first.

Thrumnor knelt before the altar. It was a great stone anvil with seams of gold running through it. The strands gathered at its base, and then appeared to flow upwards, becoming a statue twenty feet tall: Grimnir in battle against the wyrm Vulcatrix. The statue was resplendent with golden fire, shining in the light of a hundred torches. There was no ur-gold in its construction; that element, holy with the contained essence of Grimnir himself, was too precious to use in anything but the runes hammered into the Fyreslayers’ bodies. Such was the craftsmanship of the artisans who had created the altar, though, that the lines of the figures resonated in the runes of whoever came before it. Thrumnor felt the warmth of the designs in his flesh. Their power stirred, urging his blood to battle, to march along that road leading to the union with Grimnir, and the great reforging of his scattered being.

Thrumnor leaned forwards, arms spread wide. He rested his palms and his forehead against the side of the altar. With his eyes closed, he could feel the stone vibrate with the beat of the distant storm. The beat passed into his body. His runes flared. Fire coursed through his soul.

The beat grew stronger. It overwhelmed him. Thrumnor no longer touched the altar. He was falling through a darkness resonating with the blows of hammers, a boom boom boom boom shaking realm upon realm. Then, at the centre of the dark, there was a sharp point of bright orange light. It spread with every beat of the hammers. Then the dark peeled away, and Thrumnor beheld a vision. Something dark yet streaked with red and gold moved up the height of a vast anvil. It seemed to be a stream of living ore. A hammer as big as the sky was poised over the anvil. When the ore was gathered, the hammer fell. An explosion filled Thrumnor’s sight. The anvil shattered, then lava was flowing over a landscape. There was movement on the ground before its path, a suggestion of flight, a ripple of war. The lava consumed all. It was a tide hundreds of feet high, and it moved with purpose. Thrumnor could not see where it came from, nor where it was going, but a great will determined the destruction. There was a reason for this wave. And there was judgement.