Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

She emerged without disturbing the water’s surface, her spirit-form invisible to mortal eyes. It was immediately apparent that she was in Brocélann no more. Around her, trees stretched, but these were not the healthy boughs and branches Nellas had passed through when she had last visited Mer’thorn, many seasons ago. The forest was skeletal, leafless, the trunks bare and gnarled, each tree seemingly struggling to stand beneath the weight of its own dead wood.

Their song cut to the branchwych’s heartwood. It had none of Brocélann’s spirited cadence, none of the vibrant pitch and swell that coursed through the Jade Kingdoms still resisting the Great Corruptor. Instead it was a low, weary moan, the creak and sigh of a tree that had long given up the hope of ever sprouting fresh shoots again.

Nor were there any spites. The lack of the little darting lights and the elegant counterpoint of their songs was like a void in the branchwych’s core. A forest without spites was a forest that had lost the essence of its being.

Nellas eased her own song into that of Mer’thorn’s, her light, quicker tempo seeking to stoke the Wyldwood’s sentience.

Who has done this to you?

The tired answer drew her on along the bank of the stream, deeper into the Wyldwood. As she went, she noticed the waters beside her were also changing. The stream no longer possessed the crystalline clarity it had in Brocélann, but instead grew steadily murkier. Soon it was brown and discoloured. It began to congeal around the edges, the banks thick with green scum. Eventually it took on the appearance of tar, oozing and black, a pestilential stink coming off its bubbling surface.

The woodland, too, grew worse with every ethereal step Nellas took. The trees were no longer bent over and gaunt, like bare old beggars. Now they were clothed, but in all manner of vileness. In her time tending to the Evergreen, the branchwych had uprooted and carved out many diseases and blights before they could take hold among root and bark. Ever since the distant days of the Great Corruptor’s arrival in Ghyran, constant vigilance had been needed to ensure his plagues didn’t achieve what his Rotbringers could not.

Here, those plagues had run rampant. As she passed through the fallen Wyldwood, she saw every blight she had ever encountered in evidence around her. Spinemould covered entire trees, turning them into bristling, puffy growths. Sap with the consistency of pus poured from the hideous gouges bored by Weeping Rot, while all manner of monstrous worms and maggots had burrowed out nests among bark and branches. Leaves were black and slippery with Slimestench and Daemon’s Spit, while the forest floor beneath was rapidly becoming a rotting, shifting mulch. Instead of mischievous spites and darting forest spirits, great swarms of black flies now droned, filling the air with their buzzing, ugly insistence.

Nellas stopped trying to commune with the Wyldwood. Its song was no longer weak and breathless. It was no longer the voice of something dying a slow, inevitable death. It had become a drone, unhealthy but strong, a sonorous chant that she wanted no part in. The forest here, she realised, was no longer dying. It was alive, but it was not the life granted by the changing of the seasons or the Everqueen’s grace. It was unwholesome and twisted, a vile parody. It was the fresh life of maggots bursting from a boil, of a virus coiling in a bloodstream, of flies hatching from rancid meat. It was a mockery of everything green and vibrant, of everything Nellas had spent her entire existence nurturing and protecting. The realisation sent righteous anger coursing through her.

She began to seek out the Everqueen’s distant song, holding onto it like a beacon amidst the encroaching darkness. Even though she was invisible, the sensation of being observed made her thorns prickle. The forest was aware of her. She knotted a glamour about herself with whispered words, clutching her scythe close. Even her spirit-self felt as though it was swarming with lice and maggots, and each step became more difficult, more repulsive, than the last.

Before her, a clearing emerged. She realised as soon as she gazed beyond the final dripping, cancerous boughs that her worst fears were true. The heart of Mer’thorn and the heart of the corruption were one and the same.

Like all Wyldwoods, Mer’thorn had also once had an enclave at its heart, a grove where the energies of life swirled and eddied the strongest, where the soulpods thrived and the spirit-song reached its crescendo. Such places could take many forms, and Brocélann’s mighty Kingstree was only one expression of a heartglade. Mer’thorn’s had once been a menhir, a great, jagged pillar of primordial stone standing tall upon a grassy knoll, thick with moss and carved with the swirling heraldry of the enclave’s sylvaneth clan.

That menhir still stood, but it was split and deformed almost beyond recognition. Something had burrowed out its core, and now the space within was no longer a part of the Realm of Life. A sickly yellow light pulsed from its heart, and whenever Nellas tried to look directly at the rent in reality, her gaze instinctively flinched away, her spirit shuddering with revulsion.

From the open rift daemons came, clawing their way into the Wyldwood. They already infested the heartglade around the menhir, a sea of sagging, diseased flesh and corroded iron. Clusters of plaguebearers circled the space with an endless, limping gait, the tolling of their rusting bells a counterpoint to their throaty chanting. Great flies, bigger than Nellas and dripping with thick strings of venom, droned overhead. Underfoot, a living carpet of nurglings writhed, bickering and giggling like a nightmarish parody of the spites that had once inhabited Mer’thorn. The entire clearing was alive and bursting with the vital virulence of entropy and decay.

The Wyldwood’s heart was still beating, Nellas realised. It was choked and rancid with rot, a rot that had first taken root not at its borders, but at its very core.

The horror of realisation momentarily eclipsed all of Nellas’ other concerns. Her glamour shimmered, and she heard the chanting of the daemons skip a beat. The dirge of the trees around her rose in pitch. Her spirit-self tensed. She sensed a thousand rheumy, cyclopean eyes turn towards her.

Branchwych. The words, squelching like maggots writhing in rotten bark, slipped directly into Nellas’ thoughts. Skathis said you would come. He wants us to tell you it is too late. He wants us to thank you, branchwych. He wants to bless the rot that already works through your bark, for welcoming him into your home. Grandfather’s glory be upon you, and upon his Tallybands.

She had been right. Mer’thorn was lost. Shaking, she fled.

Nellas returned to her body with a scream of pain and rage. For a second, she didn’t remember where she was, her branches thrashing through the water as she surfaced.

But the agony in her side, worse than ever before, stung her thoughts into order. She had been right. She had brought corruption into Brocélann, but it hadn’t been in her. It had been in what she had carried.

Scythe in hand, she made for the Evergreen, keening a song of fear and warning for the forest spirits to spread around her. She had to rouse the Wyldwood, before it was too late.

‘She took the realmroot to Mer’thorn,’ said Brak. Du’gath dipped his branches in acknowledgement, fangs bared as he watched the branchwych race towards the Evergreen. To the spite-revenant’s attuned senses, the wound in her side reeked of corruption. Her visit to the fallen Wyldwood and her sudden madness were the final confirmation.

‘She must die,’ he said to his surrounding kin. ‘Before she can spread her foulness any further. Follow me.’