Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

‘If someone must stay, why not Forvuld?’

As the eldest, Forvuld’s hope to succeed Dorvurn as runefather was arguably the strongest.

‘Because you have much to prove,’ Dorvurn said. ‘You will perform the miraculous to protect the hearth.’

To his right, Forvuld nodded, showing his confidence in his younger brother.

Homnir bowed his head in acquiescence.

‘Your father is grateful,’ Dorvurn said. ‘And your runefather is grateful. Gather the people in the Forgecrag in our wake. The bridges will be dangerous until our return.’

‘I will, runefather.’

Homnir walked toward the edge of the plateau, so he would not be in the way of the departing army. Dorvurn went forward to where Karmanax, his magmadroth, clawed at the ground, impatient to be away. Dorvurn climbed into the saddle and stood tall.

‘Fyreslayers of the Krelstrag!’ His voice boomed over the eternal rumble and liquid roar of the Earthwound ocean. ‘To the Great Weld and beyond! On this day, we begin the fulfilment of an oath made an age ago. On this day, we march toward the manifestation of prophecy! For Grimnir!’

‘ For Grimnir! ’ the great host of the Krelstrag answered.

Dorvurn looked at Thrumnor and Rhulmok. ‘Runemaster,’ he said. ‘Runesmiter. Pave our way.’

Thrumnor made a fist and struck his left shoulder in salute. Rhulmok did the same, and mounted his own magmadroth, Grognax. Thrumnor moved to the magmadroth’s side. With the crunch of thousands of feet against stone, the march began.

The journey through the Earthwound archipelago was a long one. It took many days just to move beyond the Krelstrag domains. Thrumnor and Rhulmok worked in unison, creating bridge after bridge. There came a moment, seven days into the march, when the distance between the volcanic cone on which the army mustered and the next peak to rise above the ocean of lava was so great that Thrumnor wondered if he and the runesmiter could span it. Span it they did, though, and the bridge appeared as thin as spun gold as it stretched across the seething, restless inferno. The bridge was strong, and it carried the host. In the end it was the island they had left that sank first, taking the bridge down after they had already begun construction of the next one.

Days and days of crossings, a journey over the infinity of the ocean, and always the waves of molten rock heaved to the horizon. Slowly, very slowly, the Great Weld grew larger, and Thrumnor began to believe they were making progress. The unnatural lightning storm had ended, though at different points in the sky it would return for a time, like the flaring of a new war. The green bursts on the top of the Weld continued, the rhythm unending, the hammer striking the anvil ceaselessly. It was a summoning so insistent Thrumnor had to remind himself that the ascent of the Weld was but the first stage of the journey, and not the destination itself.

Finally, after many, many more days, a dark line appeared on the horizon. It was the mainland.

The Earthwound ocean had a shore.

The shore was blighted.

A forest spread over the leagues of jagged foothills and deep, narrow canyons that led towards the base of the Great Weld. It was a forest that had been buried aeons ago, but that now had been resurrected into a monstrous new life.

The forest was petrified. The trees in their millions had been killed by the violence of the land, and then turned to stone. They still stood, skeletons of rock reaching up to the cruel sky. Something new had come among them; a terrible foliage hung from their limbs, a thick, black, glistening fungus. It dripped ichor down their trunks. Where the fluid ran, it ate into the rock, dissolving and devouring. Thrumnor examined the fungus more closely as the Fyreslayers moved through the dead-yet-diseased forest. The growths resembled giant slugs. They clung to the trunks and branches as if trying to suffocate them. The surface rippled like muscles.

‘A plague to eat stone,’ Rhulmok muttered. Thrumnor nodded. He tightened his grip on his runic iron. Rhulmok sounded at least as curious as he was horrified. Thrumnor felt only holy outrage.

‘We will find our way below the surface,’ Dorvurn announced. ‘We will take the ancient ways, and if an enemy awaits, we will meet him on our terms.’

The forest writhed. Stone rotted. Insects with clattering wings swarmed from burst fungus pods. Thrumnor learned that stone could have a stench. But there was no attack, and at the end of the first day on the mainland, a scouting party of vulkite karls found a gateway underground. It was a ruin, its doors long rusted to nothing, the pillars of the entrance leaning against each other and blocked by a heap of fungus twenty feet high. The Krelstrag scoured the parasite away with fire, and then descended.

The world they found filled Thrumnor’s soul with melancholy. There was much that was familiar, which made its dereliction all the worse. The tunnels had once seen much work. There were traces of engravings on the walls. Caves were recognisable as dining halls and smithies, and more than once, as the days passed, Thrumnor’s breath caught when a vast, empty tomb of a chamber revealed itself to have been a forge-temple.

‘What lodge was this?’ Forvuld wondered.

‘I have seen signs of several,’ said Dorvurn. ‘But I do not know their names.’

‘Then this was once an empire,’ Forvuld said with bitter awe.

‘Yes.’ Dorvurn was equally solemn.

Forvuld insisted, ‘It is wrong that we have forgotten who was here.’

‘Yes,’ said Thrumnor. ‘It is wrong. But we can do nothing about what has been lost. What we are doing now preserves at least one strand of the long past. We will honour it, and in so doing, safeguard the future.’

The dereliction disturbed him, though. These ruins were not an insurmountable journey away from the Forgecrag. That the Krelstrag had no memory of who had been here was a sign of how much had been taken by Chaos, even if the Krelstrag held fast in the Earthwound archipelago.

They passed under a colossal archway whose runes could still be read. It announced itself as the gateway to the Great Road of the Wyrm. The tunnel was enormous, travelling in a straight line over a long distance, as if it truly had been bored through the stone by a leviathan of myth. It had once been the lodge’s trade route. For three days, the Krelstrag grand fyrd moved long it. Thrumnor’s melancholy turned to anger as he gazed upon its forgotten majesty. So much had been taken from the Fyreslayers. The roof of the tunnel was vaulted, so high that it was a distant shadow in the torchlight. The pillars supporting it were carved in the form of titanic limbs. Their orientation alternated. First was an arm thrusting up from the floor to splay its hand against the ceiling, then another reaching down as if to pull the ore from the earth. Every few leagues, chambers opened up on one side or the other. In them stood towering statues that had been defaced. Many were missing heads, but the heroism of their stances was still apparent. They straddled crevasses so deep that they reached down to the molten depths of the mountain, and an orange light bathed their corroded features.

Glory and loss, everywhere Thrumnor looked. Glory and loss.

Towards the end of the third day, the route sloped upward, rising in increments toward the surface. As it did so, it became more and more unclean. The roots of the petrified forest reached down through the tunnel roof. They too were stone, and they too were diseased, covered in a grey, flaking mould. And they moved. Rock twisted in pain. The roots scraped at the walls. They tortured the ceiling, dropping jagged blocks to the floor of the tunnel. The more the path went upwards, the more the roots clustered and the more they tangled the space. Stone creaked in rotten agony. Leading from the front, Dorvurn smashed at the roots with his grandaxe, while the magmadroths battered them to fragments with their claws. At one juncture where the tunnel narrowed, Karmanax reared and unleashed a torrent of flaming bile into the knot of twisting corruption ahead. The stream melted the roots to nothing, clearing the way. The magmadroth snorted in unhappy contempt at the remains as he passed through.