Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

‘Then let us help you,’ Laurelwort insisted.

‘She is right,’ the priestess added, ‘there are many and you are one.’

‘One that will not be stopped,’ Shaddock told them.

‘What will you do?’ Laurelwort said. The wardwood paused. He gestured towards the ailing Arkenwood.

‘I was but one tree unseen among many,’ Shaddock said. ‘Our enemies shall see me now. They shall hear the wrath of the wild places and feel the forest’s vengeance. These Rotbringers are a disease. I shall deliver what all diseases deserve. Eradication.’

Leaving the Forest Folk at the base of the stump-dotted hillock, Shaddock strode up the rise. He smelled the rot of flesh and heard gurgling laughter. The servants of Nurgle seemed to find a madness and hilarity in their suffering. While their bodies broke down about their souls, they belly-laughed and roared through their pain. Fires crackled and rusted plate jangled about the camp. By the time any of them realised that an ancient of the forest towered over them, it was too late. Shaddock had his stone blade in hand.

Like a terrifying entity of the forest, the wardwood suddenly raged with the stoked fires of his soul. His blade hit a group of Rotbringers with such force that they burst and were scattered across the hillside in streams of blood and pus.

Across the rise, it was slowly dawning on Nurgle’s servants that they were under attack. Some had been sleeping, their corrupt bodies putrefying in the warmth of the fires. Others had removed their weapons and plate. Shaddock made them bleed for their lack of discipline. The suffering was brief, however, as with each sweeping strike of his sword, he sent mobs of diseased warriors into oblivion.

Warriors that all suffered from the same horrific affliction woke from their slumber and scrabbled for their weapons. Their pox-ravaged leader shook himself awake, but before he could issue an order from his lipless mouth, Shaddock squelched him into the ground with his roots. Using the flat of his sword, he batted the blighted warriors aside. The last he snatched up and crushed, allowing spoilage to dribble between his wicked talons.

Shaddock could hear the sorcerers atop the rise gabbling orders. As he worked his way towards them, more pox-ridden warriors of Nurgle charged at him from around the sides of the hillock. Taking a ground-shaking run-up, the spirit kicked the blazing embers of one of the campfires flying through the air. Caught in a fiery blizzard, warriors were set alight. While most were consumed by the inferno, some exploded due to the gases that had long been building within their swollen bodies. Those that did make it through were stolid mountains of sickly flesh, ignoring their burning garb, skin and hair. Shaddock wheeled his mighty blade about him like a golden storm, cutting them down and sending leprous limbs and slabs of diseased meat bouncing down the slope.

As he neared the top of the hillock, Shaddock found that it hung over the Ebon Tarn like the crest of a wave. The lake was a festering expanse of filth. Flies swarmed across its surface, which in places had formed a scabby crust. The Plague God’s sorcerers had turned the obsidian waters of the Ebon Tarn into their own steaming cauldron of effluence. Shaddock could see a shadow slowly rising from beneath the bubbling waters. Something huge and daemonic was using the tarn as a gateway to the Realm of Life. The sheer size of the thing was displacing the lake water. It was the water gushing over the banks in bubbling waves of filth that had flooded the surrounding Arkenwood. The Spirit of Durthu might not have been able to save the forest, but he could do something about the sorcerers that had doomed it.

Reaching the summit upon which the sorcerers had conducted their fell rituals, Shaddock found that they were no less corrupted than the warriors who had died for them. The hooded coven closed on an improvised altar in defence of the profane offering still chained to it. Spread across the stump of a once-magnificent ironwood lay a sacrificial victim so diseased and mutilated its race was unrecognisable. The sorcerers clutched staffs and blades in their slime-slick hands that glowed with unhallowed energies.

As one sorcerer made to visit some dread pollution upon Shaddock, the ancient kicked him off the summit and out across the Ebon Tarn. With a vengeful swing of his sword, the Spirit of Durthu felled a whole gaggle of sorcerers. Shaddock stepped forwards, and released the prisoner from its woes. He obliterated the suffering soul with a stamping foot and sent several sorcerers stumbling back. The fell thing leading the ritual launched itself at him, only for the wardwood to snatch him up in his talon.

Turning the blade of his sword about, Shaddock stabbed it deep into the earth of the summit. The ancient heard rock and root give beneath his feet. A crack ripped through the ground before the overhang tore free and plunged down towards the Ebon Tarn, taking a throng of sorcerers with it.

As he clasped the last of their foetid kind, Shaddock felt the sorcerer’s futile resistance. The thing stabbed its sacrificial blade into the thick bark of his arm and pulled back its stained hood to reveal an abhorrent face. Instead of a mouth, the sorcerer had a hooked pit, like that of some parasitic worm. Opening it wide, he vomited forth a stream of corruption at Shaddock’s face. The filth dripped from his frightful visage and steamed away on the amber brilliance that burned within. Shaddock pulverised the sorcerer, feeling blubber burst and bones break within his mighty talon. The sacrificial knife thudded to the ground amongst the mess dribbling down from his fist.

With his sword still burning gold in his hand, he looked down into the festering birthing pool. Without the sorcerers’ spells to sustain its entry into Ghyran, the surfacing daemon sank back beneath the fly-swarming filth. As the daemon’s monstrous form descended, returning to whatever unhallowed place from whence it originated, the waters crusted over, growing thick and still.

Shaddock stood there for a moment. There was no roar of defiance, no celebratory rage. There was only a deep, dark sadness as the ancient looked out across the Arkenwood from the rise. The forest was beyond saving. From the top of the hillock he could see the damage wrought by the Chaos sorcerers and their plague magic. He could see the bare branches of dead trees surrounding a few ancient survivors. Their canopies dribbled with pus, were smothered by moulds, choked with blooms of warped fungus or tangled with the webs of voracious insects.

The Spirit of Durthu soaked up the hopelessness of a diseased land. If the rest of the realm was like this, then the Everqueen would be in dire peril. It was no wonder that the searing call of her spirit-song now passed through the plague-ridden lands of Ghyran. She would need all her noble guardians. Ancients long banished, wardwoods that had once towered at her side, before the Splintering. They would again, Shaddock promised silently. He saw Ardaneth, Laurelwort and the Forest Folk climb the rise. They picked their way through the wounded Rotbringers and groaning sorcerers, finishing with stabbing talons what Shaddock had started on the hillock. The dryads gathered around the wardwood like a circle of forest menhirs.

‘We thank the Radiant Queen for your coming, Great Shaddock,’ the priestess said. ‘You have saved the Arkenwood and its attendant spirits.’

‘You can do more than thank her,’ the Spirit of Durthu said. Ardaneth nodded, looking out across the diseased forest.

‘You are right, of course,’ the priestess said. ‘The Arkenwood is ailing — it will take an eternity of care to undo what has been done. To heal what has been afflicted. To purge, replant and tend.’

‘And what of the next warband or sorcerous coven to lay claim to this land?’ Shaddock asked her. ‘The next daemon to burrow beneath its bark or army to pass beneath its bowers with axe and flame?’