Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

He backed away, teeth bared beneath the expressionless mask of his war-helm, and spread his arms. The greater daemon waddled after him, its sword weaving before it like the tongue of a serpent.

‘Come on then. Come and get me,’ he called.

The daemon-sword tore towards him, and he slammed his weapons together, catching the square tip of the blade. For a moment, the tableau held. Then, little by little, Zephacleas was forced back. The greater daemon lurched forward, its greater weight pushing against him, and loomed over him like a farmer struggling with a stubborn root. It exhaled a stinking mist through its gritted, rotting fangs.

‘Aye,’ Zephacleas grunted. ‘I’m not moving…’ His wrists and shoulders began to ache as he struggled to hold his enemy’s blade at bay. ‘Not yet.’

Flies buzzed around his face, darting for his eyes through the slits in his helm. He saw movement behind the daemon and grinned. ‘Now, Gravewalker!’

Lightning seared down to strike the rotguard. Crackling tendrils crawled across its flabby body and squirmed beneath its armour, setting the daemon alight. Its sword fell from its burning fingers to thump into the mud at Zephacleas’s feet. Smoke rose from the daemon as it sank down and toppled forward, consumed by fire. Zephacleas lifted his helm and spat on it.

‘Smells like a burning midden heap,’ he growled.

‘It is,’ Gravewalker growled.

The Lord-Relictor was, like all of his kind, a fearsome sight — clad in heavy, ornate armour, marked with sigils of power. The ragged hide of a fire wyrm flapped from one shoulder plate, while its skull was set into Gravewalker’s reliquary standard. The standard’s adornments of gilded bone shimmered in the glow of the lightning that crackled about the head of the warhammer he carried in his other hand. His armour was marked by battle, and his weapon was crusted with filth as he swept it out to smash a tottering column of nurglings into its component parts.

A winged shape dropped from the sky to land amongst the plaguebearers. Zephacleas recognized the Prosecutor-Prime of the Hallowed Knights. His shimmering armour was now dulled by dust and grime, and the once-proud crest of his helm had been reduced to a few tattered feathers. His wings spread with savage speed, the crackling feathers slicing through daemonic matter with ease. Any remaining daemons soon fell to the Prosecutor-Prime’s hammers. He moved with such lethal grace that even Zephacleas was hard-pressed to follow.

As the last body fell, mangled and smoking, Tegrus stepped forward, eyes blazing.

‘Where is Gardus?’ he demanded. ‘Where is the Steel Soul? I should be at his side.’

‘Making for the Gates of Dawn, which is what we should all be doing,’ Zephacleas said.

Around them, the battle had reached new levels of ferocity. Astral Templars and Hallowed Knights fought side by side, integrating their battle tactics with an instinctive ease. Slowly, the two hosts became one, and the isolated retinues of the Hallowed Knights swelled as Astral Templars joined them, taking over for their wounded and exhausted brethren.

But it wasn’t enough.

One of the remaining rotguard had taken the offensive. Plaguebearers loped in its wake as the greater daemon crashed through a retinue, scattering Stormcasts with every blow from its flail. The remaining brute was lurching back towards the Gates of Dawn, as if in pursuit of Gardus. Which it could very well be, Zephacleas thought. Gardus was a warrior without peer, but even the Steel Soul couldn’t fight two greater daemons by himself.

‘We have to clear a path and smash our way through. Gardus needs…’ Zephacleas trailed off as a new sound pierced the mist-laden air. A sound like a million scratching claws, scraping across the flesh of the world. The mist rising from the fen stirred, as if something moved beneath it. Then the ground erupted, and reality tore with a sound like a million screams, suddenly silenced. Furry shapes, clad in rotting robes, boiled into sight, rising from beneath the fen, from somewhere else, and launched themselves at the Stormcasts with a hideous chittering war cry. One of the creatures lunged for Tegrus, who flattened it with his hammer.

It resembled a rat, clad in a sickly green tattered, hooded habit, such as a holy man might wear. Foul sores and bony growths wracked the creature’s stunted body.

‘Skaven,’ Zephacleas hissed. ‘Where in the name of Sigmar did they come from?’

A large shape, bigger than any skaven or mutant beast and more nimble, sprang over the heads of its followers and bisected an unwary Liberator, tearing the Stormcast apart with the aid of two wickedly curved blades. Zephacleas had fought the skaven before, and he recognized the horned, hairy beast for what it was — the skaven were as much the servants of the Ruinous Powers as any blood-worshipper or rot-lover, and they had their own daemonic patrons to prove it. Verminlord, he thought, watching as the beast killed another Stormcast. That was what they were called, though he’d never seen one in the flesh.

He barrelled towards it with a roar, followed closely by Tegrus and Gravewalker. His hammer whistled through the air and crushed a squealing ratman as the verminlord leapt straight up to avoid the blow. Zephacleas twisted as the creature came down behind him. Its blades tore through his cloak and scraped his armour as he slashed blindly at it with his sword. It chittered mockingly as it dodged his blows and struck sparks off his armour in return. Its cloven feet crunched into his back, knocking him onto his face as it flipped backwards and landed in a crouch. Zephacleas rolled onto his back as it leapt for him again, but a hurled hammer caught it in the side and sent it rolling away.

Tegrus swooped towards it, snatching up his hammer as he flew past. Gravewalker helped Zephacleas to his feet. ‘Are you hurt, Lord-Celestant?’

‘Only my pride. That beast is mine, Tegrus!’ he bellowed, shaking a fist at the Prosecutor-Prime. Whether the other Stormcast heard him, he couldn’t say, for the Prosecutor was forced to bank and rise upwards as the verminlord retreated to safety amongst the heaving ranks of its followers.

‘Kill-kill for Vermalanx!’ the verminlord shrieked as it sprang to the top of one of the few remaining standing stones that occupied the soupy ground before the Gates of Dawn. ‘Kill the storm-things!’ it shrilled, snapping its yellowing fangs in a show of fury. It gesticulated, urging its followers forward, and they went in scuttling waves, darting between the slower plaguebearers and leaping over the frolicking nurglings to get to the Stormcast.

As the ranks of ratmen went on the attack, squealing bands of skaven slaves scrambled up from the hole the others had emerged from, dragging the rickety shapes of catapults and other, more esoteric, war-engines. These weapons were turned on the Stormcast, and the sky was soon marked by poison contrails and whistling chunks of glowing green rock.

‘We must destroy those weapons,’ Gravewalker said, swatting a frothing ratman in mid-leap. ‘They will pick us apart otherwise.’

He and Zephacleas fought back to back for a moment. The Lord-Celestant saw Tegrus flare his wings and the crackling feathers sliced a ratman in two.

‘Aye, and I know just the Stormcast to see to it. Ho, winged one, make yourself useful… Take out those catapults,’ Zephacleas shouted.

He did not see whether his command was obeyed, for a knot of skaven came at him in a rush, and he was forced to defend himself. He heard men scream and die, and the dull roar of their spirits ascending back to Azyr, bound for Reforging. The black clouds above were struck through with hundreds of pinholes made by these flashes of bright light. How many warriors had already returned to the cosmic forges?