Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

With a hum of fine-edged steel, a throwing axe splintered the blood priest’s ribcage. The giant looked at the blade for a moment, coughed blood over the handle, and then, losing muscle control in stages, folded indelicately to the ground.

‘No respect for the dead,’ muttered the stranger, relaxing his throwing arm as Dunnegar finished off the last of the rabble. The rest broke and fled for their precious mountains. Dunnegar turned to glare at his unwanted saviour.

‘You could have made him yours if you had truly wanted him,’ the duardin stranger said.

He was referring to the ur-gold runes hammered into Dunnegar’s slowly cooling flesh, added to many times since the day of his trial and shining dully now. Dunnegar grunted acknowledgement. Indeed he could have, but the power of ur-gold was precious and finite and not lightly tapped.

To his slim credit, the other duardin nodded and extended a hand.

‘I am Aethnir, of the Sepuzkul lodge. Thank you for the help.’

A strange name. And strange words.

‘Talkative for one of the Grim Brotherhood,’ Aethnir murmured sarcastically, a smile parting his beard.

Ignoring the stranger, Dunnegar looked across the blasted foothills that Killim’s ancient lore had brought them to.

A mist of gelid gore hung thinly in the air. It clung to the rocks and to the handful of forsaken trees that persisted here, and glazed the standards of the diverse war bands to a common, glistening crimson. While a few of those bands were still battling willingly against the Fyreslayers pushing into the highlands from the plains, the majority were ever-reddening shades disappearing back into the mountains.

Dunnegar squinted into the scarlet dampness.

The fog made it impossible to make out the peaks themselves, but something about their too-smooth contours imparted a frisson of unease. Looked upon directly, as now, the mountains were a jagged haze in the far distance, but caught side-on by an accidental glance, those ill-defined shapes became something other. Statues. Hard warriors whose horned helms broke the sky and whose broad shoulders were cloaked in snow.

The blast of a horn called his attention back, dragging his gaze over a satisfyingly long and deep trail of Bloodbound dead.

Marching at the head of a fyrd of hearthguard elite, Killim held the battle standard of the Angfyrd lodge aloft. The old battlesmith had forged the standard expressly for the great odyssey, and the fyresteel icon depicted Grimnir in his aspect as the Wanderer. The differences to Grimnir the Vengeful, or the previous standard of Grimnir the Destroyer, were subtle, and Killim had captured the ancestor god’s form masterfully.

‘What have I told you about… charging ahead?’ Killim wheezed.

The hearthguard — never the most forgiving of companions — tactfully ignored the battlesmith’s exhaustion. The incline was shallow, but over many leagues taxing, and while they had merely marched it the old smith had spent the last three days and nights through hostile country reciting the five thousand year-long Angfyrd Chronicle to the rhythm of their boots.

The battlesmith struck his standard into the rocks.

Dunnegar offered a conciliatory mumble, Killim huffed something that suggested he was appeased, and on such a foundation their friendship would make it to the seven hundred and twentieth day of the odyssey.

The hearthguard closed ranks around their standard, regarding Dunnegar and Aethnir with equal suspicion.

‘What did you mean about disrespecting the dead?’ Dunnegar asked of the stranger, ignoring the hearthguard as they would rather ignore him.

The dark Fyreslayer pointed up into the hill country. There, under a pall where blood and smoke mingled, a great pyre burned. Dunnegar had assumed the fire to be some phenomenon related to the presence of the Goresworn.

It turned out that he was wrong.

‘Come with me,’ said Aethnir solemnly. ‘I will take you to the runefather.’

With bone weariness, Killim dragged up his standard once again and the duardin fell in behind their cousin.

As far as anyone knew, all Fyreslayers cremated their dead. It recalled the origins of their cult in Grimnir’s demise, the infernal twinning of destruction and rebirth. It reminded the living that power could never be annihilated, only dispersed.

The Sepuzkul’s funeral pyre burned high and hot on a mound of their fallen, tapering in the copper-tasting wind that came in off the highlands. A gathering of grimly attired duardin stood to one side, approaching the flames one by one to cast gold scavenged from the battlefield into the fire. Watching through half-lidded eyes was a magmadroth so worn and ancient that its life could only have been drawn out through some uncanny means. So far beyond its physical prime was it that the heat in its belly wasn’t even enough to clear the rime from its gums. It appeared to be in mourning for its master.

‘We stopped to send on our fallen,’ Aethnir explained. ‘We had not expected the dogs of Khorne to regroup so quickly.’