Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

The howl climbed higher, becoming a gurgling screech so intense, blood filled Thrumnor’s ears. Distensiath’s body began to swell. It became even more immense. The flesh of its belly bulged like a frog’s throat. The sickly green became the pallid white of tension. The scream rose higher yet.

Thrumnor saw what was coming. There would be no shelter. Nor did he wish it. He pulled himself up into a crouch and held fast to the staff. At the last moment, at the height of the scream, he saw that the mouth on Distensiath’s knee was laughing.

Then came the searing light from Thrumnor’s vision.

The daemon exploded.

The gasses in its body ignited. The blast hurled Fyreslayers and daemons back across the Great Weld like leaves in a gale. Distensiath vanished, transformed into a rain of bile-green ichor that covered the entire plateau. Stone hissed and dissolved at its touch. Flesh erupted in boils. Thrown a hundred yards by the explosion, Thrumnor staggered to his feet. He was coated with the daemonic essence, and he felt it eat into his being. His skin wept pus. Something foul sought to take him apart.

He spat in contempt. He shook his head, ridding his beard of the ichor. There were cries of agonised rage on all sides as the devouring plague gnawed the flesh of the Fyreslayers.

‘Karls of the Krelstrag!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘The fire of Grimnir runs in your veins! Deny the pestilence. Cast its weakness down and trample it underfoot!’

Rhulmok had climbed back onto the throne atop Grognax, and had resumed the beat on the war altar with a vengeance. Ur-gold flared, and it burned the corruption of the flesh. The purging was torture, but it was a needful pain, true and clean, and Thrumnor exulted in it.

Not all the berzerkers found salvation. The surface of the plateau was littered with bubbling, dissolving bodies. But the Krelstrag were still strong, and they rallied round Yuhvir’s standard and the runefather’s raised grandaxe. They formed a circle of iron at the centre of the plateau.

As Thrumnor ran forward to join the fyrds, he heard something that chilled his blood. It came as the last of the ichor fell from the sky and settled into the Great Weld. He heard a sigh, and he heard a whisper. The voice was Distensiath’s voice, a phantom echo, a single word.

‘ Fulfilled. ’

In the vision, the anvil had shattered. Now the Great Weld heaved. It rocked to and fro, but the movement was wrong. This was no earthquake. This was no eruption. This was transformation. Standing beside Grognax, Thrumnor looked toward the distant edges of the plateau, and saw them rise up and down. Like flesh. Like muscle.

And now Thrumnor understood the pattern he had partly seen at the base of the Great Weld. The shapes embedded in the rock were not just those of fused volcanoes. They were also limbs. Revelation flooded in. Thrumnor gasped.

‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn shouted. ‘What is happening?’

‘Grimnir’s feat was greater than we imagined,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It was not volcanoes he fused together. He battered a great beast into submission. He turned his opponent into the anvil of stone. It became volcanoes.’ He paused. ‘And now that defeat is being undone. The beast is awakening.’

We have done this thing, he thought bitterly.

The heaving became more pronounced. The cracks in the surface of the plateau began to assume a different cast. They were the outline of scales.

The beast came closer and closer to waking. Then it would walk. A monster of plague the size of a mountain chain would be loose upon the realm.

The plaguebearers and the nurglings closed in once more, but gradually, as if waiting for a signal. It came now. Across the entire plateau, the scales of the beast rose, and from beneath each one came another plaguebearer. Thousands upon thousands of them dragged themselves up from the beneath the skin of the Great Weld.

Tens of thousands.

Hundreds of thousands, covering all the leagues of the Great Weld.

There was a sudden, terrible, immense lurch, as of a single step.

The daemons in their uncountable legions raised their voices in solemn praise to the Plaguefather, and they advanced.

The Fyreslayers were surrounded.

‘The defilers of the Great Weld come to meet their doom!’ Dorvurn thundered. ‘Be the fire of Grimnir, and burn them from the realm!’

The air shook with the defiant clash of blade on shield, but there was a different quality to the sound this time. Thrumnor knew it. This was the last stand of the Krelstrag.

From atop Grognax, Rhulmok called to Thrumnor, making peace. ‘At least it will be a fight worthy of song.’

Thrumnor shook his head. ‘This is wrong,’ he said. ‘This is not my vision.’ He could not have been so tragically mistaken. He filled his lungs and howled his wrath at the fates. ‘ This was not foretold! ’

The Krelstrag lodge decimated. The Great Weld transformed into a leviathan of plague. This was not what he had seen. This was not what the great light in his vision had produced.

Ahead, the front lines of the Fyreslayers hurled themselves against the ocean of daemons. The sound of the battle was immense, as of a great hammer coming down on iron. At that sound, Thrumnor thought of his vision, and of the forging. Of the shattered anvil, and of the lava that came after.

And he felt a surge of hope.

The transformation was not yet complete. Thrumnor called to the wrath inside the Weld, and found it was still there. Grimnir’s work was not undone. The fury of volcanoes had not turned into corrupted blood.

‘Rhulmok!’ Thrumnor cried. ‘We may yet honour Grimnir! With me, brother! Let this be not an anvil, but a crucible. Let us unleash its full wrath!’

Dorvurn looked down at him from Karmanax. ‘Can you do this?’

The image before Thrumnor’s mind’s eye was one of shattering and lava. ‘It is foretold that we will,’ he said.

Rhulmok laughed, and drummed the anvil of war with renewed energy.

‘I see it now!’ he said to Thrumnor. ‘I see it at last! What a grand transformation we shall forge!’

‘We will be the prophesied fire,’ said Thrumnor.

The runefather nodded, and then he spoke to the entire lodge, his voice strong with pride and drowning out the chanting of the daemons and the rumble of war. ‘Fyrds of the Krelstrag, what comes is no sacrifice! This shall be the greatest victory, and the greatest tale, of our lodge!’

The Fyreslayers roared their approval, and with joyous fury they threw themselves at the sea of daemons, holding them back as Thrumnor and Rhulmok did what they must.

Rhulmok increased the beat on the altar. Thrumnor felt his ur-gold sigils ignite with a fire greater than ever before.

‘One more Binding, then,’ Rhulmok said.

‘One more,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It will be our greatest work, youngflame.’

‘A fine song it will make.’

‘So it will.’ For a few moments more, Thrumnor watched the fyrds fight a war they could not win, and there too was the making of a fine song. The Krelstrag cut the daemons down by the score, by the hundreds. The hundreds of thousands pressed closer, but now, right now, the fury of the Fyreslayers was unstoppable, as the voice of Yuhvir shouted the litany of victories.

Let this be how I last see my brothers, Thrumnor thought.

Then, with both hands wrapped around the staff, its power crackling a deep violet and plunging deep into the transforming ground, he reached for the magma.

The strain threatened to tear him apart. The rage of the Great Weld was enormous, but the change was coming to it too, and molten rock would soon become diseased blood.

But not yet.

Thrumnor called to the magma. He called to the fury of the Weld. Eager, it rose towards him. He felt the deep vibrations as Rhulmok spoke to stone that had not yet become flesh. It raged against the transformation of the Great Weld. At the runesmiter’s command, it parted before the rising magma.