Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

One last Binding, Rhulmok had said. It was true. This was their grandest enactment of the ritual. Though they sought a perfect destruction, in the coming annihilation they would return the Great Weld to its volcanic being. All the bridges linking the islands of the Earthwound archipelago found their culmination here, as they fused wrath with its fullest, most holy expression.

The magma rose. The full strength of the Weld, all of its contained rage, rushed upward to the peak. The surface of the plateau had become flesh, but the interior of the Great Weld was still stone. Walls parted. Tunnels opened up. Molten magma climbed. Thrumnor’s temper joined with Rhulmok’s shaping.

The wrath came. The entire plateau bulged upward, swelling as Distensiath’s bulk had, only this time with the fires of purification.

Thrumnor smiled as the ground rose, and he felt the heat through his feet.

‘For Grimnir,’ he said.

And the world erupted in a terrible blaze.

Dorvurn strode down the far side of the Great Weld.

His body shielded from the blast and fire by Karmanax and the will of Grimnir, he had lived through the initial moments of the destruction. He had flown through fire and smoke and incandescent gas, through lightning and ash and still more fire. Burned, his weapons gone, he had landed beyond the new, immense caldera, on a ledge partway down the mountainside.

There was purpose in his survival. Chance had no part in it.

He descended the sloping ledge, so much like the one the Krelstrag had climbed on the other side. It was stone again, not a beast. The ground was still a long way off, and Dorvurn knew he would never reach it. His moments were numbered. Lava was everywhere, flowing down the Great Weld and spreading over the land. Dorvurn was walking between streams, and soon enough another would come to swallow him.

But he was content.

Below, the blighted land was purged by the ocean of lava.

‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn said, ‘I have lived to see the truth of your vision.’ The Krelstrag had truly become what Thrumnor had foreseen. The Fyreslayers had brought the purifying fire. Dorvurn’s lodge had, in every sense that mattered, become the lava flood. And the Krelstrag would be strong yet. Homnir would see to that.

Dorvurn looked off into the distance, toward the other lodge, its name still forgotten, its location unknown. It was unreachable. But perhaps their actions here today would aid those Fyreslayers. Perhaps the vast scouring of the land would be enough to weaken the hold of Chaos on the entire region.

Dorvurn was still marching in the direction of the lodge, still holding fast to the oath, and to the knowledge the Krelstrag had humbled a vast army of Chaos.

So as the heat came for the runefather, he did not mourn.

They always came for the Hardgate.

To one side of the volcano, its flanks sloped more gently, allowing the Slaaneshi to gather in larger numbers than elsewhere. After one hundred years of siege, the ground was a mess of bones and old armour, the remains of men and titanic monsters tangled with the broken remnants of great siege engines. Time after time, the forces of the daemon prince Qualar Vo threw themselves at the gates with ecstatic abandon. They laughed as they died, revelling in the sensation of death. Time after time, the Fyreslayers of the Ulgaen lodges cast them back.

Today was different. When the Slaaneshi assailed the gate, they broke into the hold from below.

‘Stop them!’ roared Ulgathern, twelfth runeson of the lord of Ulgaen-ar. ‘Kill the breaching worms!’

Hideous, pallid things thrashed as vulkite berzerkers buried their axes in rubbery flesh. Petal mouths gaped and snapped, but the duardin were too swift. Their ur-gold runes lent them speed and strength, and the worms could not land a blow. Other Fyreslayers battled with the human tribesmen coming up the tunnels that had been chewed through the rock by their monsters. The south passage was a disorienting racket of clashing arms and screams.

Ulgathern sliced through the body of a worm behind its head. The creatures were massively thick, and it took several blows to sever its head completely. The body did not cease thrashing, but yanked back into the tunnel keening shrilly, leaving a slick of clear blood on the floor.

The sounds of battle receded. All around the tunnel were heaped the bodies of Slaaneshi marauders. Their gaudily coloured skins were smeared with blood. The last fell with a defiant yell.

‘Ha! Chaos filth!’ roared Mangulnar, third and oldest surviving runeson of Karadrakk-Grimnir. He slapped Ulgathern hard on the shoulder and flicked the gore from his moustaches with a grin. Both of them were covered in the stinking fluids of the worms. ‘When I’m Runefather, little brother, we’ll run out after them and kill the lot, not skulk in these caverns waiting to die.’

Ulgathern looked sidelong at his elder sibling. Sometimes, Mangulnar enjoyed fighting a little too much.

‘That would be the best way to lose the war,’ he said.

‘You sound like Father. Where’s your hunger for the fight? There’s pleasure in war, and we should embrace it. Fear brings no ur-gold to our lodge.’

‘Be careful what you wish for. The thirst for pleasure is what drives our enemies at us.’

Mangulnar spat. ‘Their pleasure makes them weak. Battle joy makes us strong, it’s completely different.’

‘These are not their best warriors. I sense a ruse. Their attacks are getting bolder, more inventive. The worms are new. It is nearly one hundred and one years since the siege began. Storms fill the skies, and we should be wary.’

‘Are you talking about that bloody prophecy of Drokki’s again?’ said Mangulnar harshly. ‘You should be careful whose words you heed. As withered in mind as he is in arm, that friend of yours. Listening to the likes of him is why you’ll never be a Runefather, but if you’re fortunate, I might let you serve me when I am lord of Ulgaen-ar.’ Mangulnar stalked away, looking for something else to kill.

Ulgathern stared after his brother. Mangulnar and he rarely saw eye to eye.

‘You there!’ shouted Ulgathern to one of his warriors. ‘Report back to my father that the third deeping is clear.’ The warrior nodded and ran off. Ulgathern looked to the holes. The walls of the burrows were slick with the worms’ secretions. ‘And get a building team here, plug these up. I don’t want anything else coming through.’

‘Are you to join your father, my lord?’ asked Grokkenkir, Ulgathern’s favoured karl and leader of his vulkite berzerkers.

‘The runefather ordered me to the Hardgate once done. My brothers and father will stop the other breaches soon enough without my help, you can be sure of that.’

Ulgathern took the steps up to the gate parapet three at a time, his muscles hot with Grimnir’s power. Well before the thin daylight penetrated the gloom of the stairwell, he heard the enemy: a frenzied roaring as repetitive as the booming of the sea. On the wallwalk over the gate stood the auric hearthguard, firing their magmapikes into the packed hordes a hundred feet below. Ulgavost, thirteenth runeson of Karadrakk-Grimnir, watched the enemy die from a step behind the battlement. Ulgathern went to join his brother, and looked out over the mountain slope.

The Hornteeth Mountains were in Ghur, but they might well have been in the Realm of Fire: a long chain of sharp-peaked volcanoes stretching sunward and nightward across the continent, dividing the prairies from the Darkdeep Ocean. The mountains were all black ash and young rock, cut through by chasms that often filled with torrents of lava. Precious little grew around the Ulmount. The skies were choked with clouds of dust that glowed orange when the mountains spoke to one another. Blue skies were a rarity; more so recently, for strange storms raged daily.