Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

The central points of his constellation glowed the brightest — his rage, his cunning, his hope, made manifest in his chosen champions. Oxtl-Kor, a proud beacon of cold fury and determination; Takatakk, a quicksilver flickering of celestial power, ebbing and strengthening with Kurkori’s attentions; and Sutok, saturated with the very stuff of Azyr, his scales glowing with the light of the stars themselves.

Chaos had grown powerful during the centuries of blood, but so too had his kind. The Dark Gods had learnt little with the waxing of their might — they were feckless abstractions, impatient and impulsive. Disharmony and disunity were their lot, and all things unravelled at their touch. They did not see the Mortal Realms for what they were, only what they wished them to be, and so were blind to the true nature of the game being played.

That they did this in isolation, each slann pursuing their own campaigns against the slow advance of entropy which threatened to consume eternity, did not hamper them at all. For all that they were the merest fragments of a long extinct civilization, the lingering debris of a vanished world, they were not without some power.

The Eight Realms were a great game board and the Starmasters placed their pieces with calculated precision. They saw many moves ahead of their inattentive foes, and wove iron-hard stratagems which would advance their singular cause, however infinitesimally, from a thousand different angles. Step by step, Kurkori and his brethren manipulated the winds of fate with their celestial mathematics to bring about the final defeat of the ancient enemy.

Sigmar, the being they knew as the Rising Storm, was their ally in this endeavour, though even the God-King could conceive but dimly of the true purpose of the slann. And there were other forces which were, if not allies, yet subservient to the great pattern. The Undying King on his throne of sorrows, the Queen of the Hidden Vale… these too served in their own way to advance the designs of the Starmasters in their wisdom. Pieces, great and small, moved to and fro across a board of stars.

The world was different, but the game remained the same. Sometimes Kurkori dreamed of the world-that-was, of humid greenery and a sky full of falling stars. He dreamed of the vermin, flowing up the wide, stone steps of ancient temples in their chittering hordes. He dreamed of dead kin, eaten as they slumbered, their wisdom devoured by scuttling shadows. Anger filled him, and the saurus marching alongside his palanquin stiffened, growling. He heard the rumbling voice of his favoured general, Oxtl-Kor.

Kurkori felt the energies which formed and filled the saurus. At a whim, Kurkori knew he could reduce the scarred warrior to mere motes of dancing light, or invigorate him into nigh-invincibility. He could send him back into the dream, or stoke the rage which flickered within him. Too, he saw the looming moment that the Oldblood’s life-thread was cut short. Death was not the end for the seraphon, for they did not truly live, save in the memories of the slann. Even so, each death was like a thorn in Kurkori’s flesh, a persistent pain which never dimmed.

He heard a rattle as the servants of the God-King began to advance. They too were filled with the light of Azyr, though they were not made from it. They were not memories but an ideal, shaped and forged and set loose. The crash of thunder, the flash of lightning; they were all this and something more, though Kurkori could not say what. They were a strange dream, drawn from a mind most alien — a thing of rougher symmetry than his own. Cruder, but more powerful. The thoughts of the slann were as polished stones, but the thoughts of the Rising Storm and his creations were jagged rocks, freshly drawn from snow and stream. Emotion, rather than calculation, guided them in all things.

Such was the burden of limited minds; they saw only what the universe allowed them. The celestial pattern was too vast for their comprehension, its beauty too blinding for their eyes. That was why he had dreamed as he had dreamed, why he had come to this place of soft angles and brief lives. The pattern grew layered here — moments from the past, present and future crossed back and forth over one another at a single point, requiring action.

Something old would be found in the depths of the worm, inconsequential from his perspective but with a terrible potential if the equation of this place was corrupted as he had foreseen. The vermin were clever. They had their own patterns, erratic as they were. He could not allow such a random element to be introduced into his design.

Kurkori leaned back on his throne, looking through the walls and past the fortresses beyond, towards the head of the worm. Time and distance were as one to him, and as easily manipulated as the star-born winds of Azyr. He had come following a gleaming thread which stretched back into the shadows of the world-that-was and into the world-that-might-yet-be. Echoes of memories lost, carved before the Great Exodus, old calculations which had survived the death-spasms of a world. It would be found, and its potential neutered. Such he had seen, so he had dreamed, so must it be for the pattern, and his calculations, to remain undisturbed.

With a drowsy grunt, he turned his attentions back to the present. The skeins of pox and filth weighed on the air, making it sluggish and opaque. Their pestilences gnawed at the very fabric of the realm, dissolving it even as they dissolved the worm’s flesh. An untidy equation. A small thing, a confluence of random variables, easily tidied. He reached out with his mind. What the vermin had made, he could unmake. And he did, and found it good.

The bubbling moat of filth became as green glass, its liquid foulness replaced by the solid angles of shimmering perfection. Oxtl-Kor looked at him, a fiery request burning in his eyes. The old warrior yearned to taste the blood of the foe, and the slann did not have the heart to deny him this moment of pleasure. Kurkori blinked in acknowledgement.

The Oldblood snarled in satisfaction and thumped his mount in the side with the haft of his spear. The carnosaur roared in pleasure and surged forward, shaking the ground with its tread. The saurus knights followed their commander, sprinting across the newly hardened field of green glass.

But they would not be enough. The vermin had spread wide and deep, and cast their burrows into the flesh of the worm. So he stretched mind and hand upwards, toward the stars that spun somewhere far above the darkening amber skies and the swirling storm. He drew down dream after dream, star after star, and his constellation expanded, swirling wider and farther. The roars of ancient beasts, unheard by mortal ears for a millennia, filled the air, drowning out the bells and shrieks of the skaven.

The Dreaming Constellation went to war.

And, satisfied, Great Lord Kurkori went back to sleep.

Mantius Far-killer took aim and loosed a crackling arrow. A skaven was punched back into the darkness of the fallen tower, its rotten carcass swiftly consumed by the energies of the arrow. ‘Drive them back, my huntsmen — clear the way for our brothers,’ the Knight-Venator said as he loosed a second arrow.

His Prosecutors skimmed low over the fallen length of the tower, hurling their celestial hammers as swiftly as they could conjure them. The skaven pouring down the ruined setae were hurled in all directions, their foul robes smouldering. But for every one killed, two more scrambled out of the ruin of stone and hair, foetid blades between their teeth and filth-encrusted cudgels in their claws. They were limitless and rapacious — the living embodiment of the evil that the Stormcast Eternals had been forged to fight.

A flash of shimmering light caught his eye, and he smiled. ‘Prey enough for the both of us, eh, Aurora?’ he said, to the circling, iridescent shape of the star-eagle. He’d bonded with the fierce raptor during a training exercise within the Aetheric Clouds which clung to the Broken World. There, in the star-spattered darkness of celestial space, he and the creature he’d named Aurora had hunted the great void-beasts of Azyr. More than once, the star-eagle had saved his life in the void, warning him with a shriek, or tearing apart some ethereal predator with its glittering talons. Now the raptor waited for his command to launch itself down among the enemy, to rip and tear.