Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

Ahead, the tunnel widened. The roof was higher. Twisting, grinding roots draped the walls on all sides. Thrumnor watched the shadowy movement of the roots carefully. Rhulmok’s Grognax, just as suspicious, issued a low growl with every breath.

‘The shadows are a thicket,’ Rhulmok commented.

Thrumnor grunted his agreement. Much could hide in the dense tangle.

‘There might be more than plague-ridden stone within,’ he said. The convulsion of a blighted land concealed the artistry of the Great Road of the Wyrm.

There was so much movement. All around them, the shadows bulged and turned and rustled. An attack could come from anywhere.

The attack, when it came, was from everywhere . There was a sudden increase in the volume of the rustling. Things giggled in the dark. The shadows boiled. Down the walls and dropping from the ceiling came a swarm of distended, mewling, chattering, laughing daemons. They were squat, bulbous things, thick with tumours. Their needle-toothed jaws were parted in leering smiles. Horns in ones and twos and threes sprouted from their foreheads.

They were nurglings, and Thrumnor had fought their kind before during some of the many failed sieges of the Krelstrag lodge. Now the daemons attacked as if the Great Road was their land, and the Fyreslayers were the invaders. They came in a tide of uncounted thousands. In moments, the floor of the tunnel was hip-deep in the mire of the beasts. With tooth and claw and crude, rusted blade, the daemons swept against the Krelstrag duardin, seeking to overwhelm them with the sheer weight of their numbers.

The Fyreslayers responded to the attack with fury. These things had made the very veins of the earth unclean, and extermination was almost too good for them. Atop Grognax, Rhulmok let loose a roar of outrage. The magmadroth echoed him. Rhulmok began to hammer a rhythm. He chanted the Krelstrag war song. The ur-gold in Thrumnor’s flesh responded, filling him with the heat of rage and strength to shatter mountains. Down the ranks of the Fyreslayers, the essence of Grimnir came to wrathful life. The sigils and runes beaten into hardy duardin flesh glowed with fury. The uncountable nurglings were the plague-tide, rising up to drown its victims. The Fyreslayers were lava, scouring all before them.

Thrumnor swept his runic iron in wide blows. He smashed swaths of nurglings with every strike. They burst apart with wet cries of distress.

The magmadroths lashed out with tails and claws, destroying scores of the abominations. They crushed the daemons beneath their paws, smearing green bodies to bubbling liquid. They spewed their bile, burning the nurglings to ash.

The warriors of the Krelstrag fyrds hurled themselves into the destruction of the unclean enemy. With axes, they cut the grey tide down. Their voices joined Rhulmok’s, and they sang their fierce joy of battle — a pure, honourable joy that drowned out the burbling, gurgling, nonsensical clamouring of the daemons.

The nurglings rushed forward again with greater force. From behind their first ranks came their leaders. Blightkings waded into the battle, each one commanding hundreds of nurglings. They were bloated, deformed. Suppurating tentacles reached out from gaping maws where stomachs should have been. Some had one eye, others three. Arms were transformed into huge pincers. As they attacked, tocsins rang. The solemn tolling reverberated against the walls of the Great Road, claiming the tunnels in the name of the Plaguefather.

‘Unholy trespassers!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘This is Fyreslayer land. You come here only to perish!’ He ran forward at the nearest blightking. He struck with his runic iron, plunging it into a torso maw. The jaws bit down, seizing the rod, and the blightking swung a pitted axe at Thrumnor’s head. The runemaster ducked and pressed harder. The sacred metal of the iron burned through the pestilential flesh. It shattered its spine and burst through its back. Thrumnor pulled it free as the heavy corpse fell.

A double-flail struck him from the side, and he staggered. Nurglings swarmed against him, trying to smother him with their biting mass. The blightking who had hit him, a corpulent, one-eyed giant, raised its flails again. Nurglings clamped their jaws onto Thrumnor’s arms to hold them back. He was slow to raise his staff to block the coming blow.

A stream of bile fell on the blightking. Its flesh melted and the flail dropped without striking. Grognax’s huge jaws snapped the plague warrior in half. Rhulmok had led the magmadroth away from the main formation of the Fyreslayers, cutting through the nurglings to ease the pressure on Thrumnor. The runemaster smashed the daemons from his person and took his stance at Grognax’s flank.

‘That was foolish,’ Rhulmok shouted in between his drum beats.

‘You cannot accept this sacrilege!’

‘I do not accept useless rage,’ the runesmiter said. ‘This ground is lost, corrupted beyond hope. We must pass through it, not sacrifice ourselves pointlessly. Is this battle the one of your vision?’

It was not. Thrumnor wished he could refute Rhulmok’s logic.

Still the nurglings and blightkings charged. Still they were thrown back. But their numbers told. Thrumnor saw the karl Gabir, one of the elite of the vulkite berzerkers, swarmed by the creatures. He fought them hard and well, killing many, but they clambered over him and bore him down before any of his brothers could reach him. When the other Fyreslayers cleared the mound of nurglings away, Gabir was a half-eaten carcass swelling with boils.

The stench of the daemons was foul. Gaseous, thick, suffocating, it conjured images in Thrumnor’s mind of stone turned as soft as flesh, falling apart like stringy, fly-blown meat.

The nurglings ate into the Krelstrag lines, but they could not stop the march. They brought down individual Fyreslayers, but the fallen warriors’ brothers responded with renewed fury, destroying the daemons in ever greater numbers. Step by step, the Fyreslayers burned and smashed their way forward, grinding the enemy down. This much was true to Thrumnor’s vision. The Krelstrag were the lava flood, and would not be stopped. Certainly not by this enemy.

I saw what must happen, Thrumnor thought, grasping that triumph. We are on our destined path. The sweep of his staff destroyed another cluster of nurglings.

At last, the flood of foes ended. Their numbers were not infinite. The Fyreslayers trampled the last underfoot and watched as the bodies burst into clouds of dusty spores. The air was filled with disease, but the fire of Grimnir burned brightly in the ur-gold of the Fyreslayers, and they would not be brought down by so lowly a foe.

Less than an hour later, the tunnel split. The left-hand branch continued to climb toward the surface. On the right, it plunged deeper into the earth. Dorvurn raised an arm to call a halt. Thrumnor and Rhulmok rode up beside him. They were joined by the runesons. Together, they stared in horror at the full extent of the blighted underworld.

The route up was relatively clear, but the roots of the petrified forest created a thick, malodorous tangle on the path that descended into the lodge. The mould there had reached a critical stage, achieving an unholy union, and the roots now spread the pestilence to the rock around them. What Thrumnor had only imagined earlier was a reality here. The tunnel walls and ceiling pressed in on each other, as soft as a sponge, a fleshy collapse. There was no passage to be had here. There was barely room for a single Fyreslayer at a time to try the tunnel, and it narrowed further at the edge of torchlight.

‘How can such rot be?’ Forvuld asked.

‘It has had all the time it needs to settle deep into the marrow of the earth,’ said Dorvurn. He turned to the left-hand path. ‘We will travel overland.’