Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

‘They ambushed you,’ said Rokkar, karl of the hearthguard, casting a weighted look over the rugged, open landscape.

‘They recovered quickly. The Lord of Khorne here calls himself the Griever. I do not know why, but perhaps you will soon have cause to rue the name as we do.’

‘Griever,’ Dunnegar muttered, turning to Killim. ‘A lieutenant of Taurak Skullcleaver, perhaps?

Aethnir looked taken aback. ‘You know that name?’

‘Aye,’ said Killim, forgetting for a moment that his voice had gone three days without respite. With palpable excitement, he reached out and grasped the foreign duardin’s wrist. ‘What brings your lodge to this place?’

‘I suppose the same as you. We have received the call home.’

‘But if both our ancestors came from Fyrepeak,’ said Dunnegar, looking the macabre duardin over with a sick feeling in his belly. ‘That would make us…’

‘Related?’ Aethnir finished, parroting Dunnegar’s actions exactly, but with an added tincture of black humour. ‘You think you are a disappointment.’

‘How far have you travelled?’ Killim interrupted. Dumping Grimnir the Wanderer into Dunnegar’s unsuspecting hands, he unslung his pack and rummaged about in it until he found what he wanted. He withdrew a thick book. The pages were a dull silver, the ancient binding clad in orruk tusk ivory.

Muttering excitedly, he cracked open the tome.

The first page was — like all of the books Dunnegar had once lost himself in as a flameling — given to a highly detailed map drawn by the lodge’s founders. A large circle in the centre depicted the region known to the Fyreslayers of the Angfyrd lodge. Smaller circles depicting other places overlapped the first, joined by realmgates that were indicated by a runic marking. Civilizations had fallen and risen and fallen again since that map was drawn. Many of the cities it marked were rubble, but mountains, oceans: they could but hope that time and Chaos had not altered those.

Killim stabbed his finger onto the map. ‘We took the first gate here, to the Ferroussian Sea, then followed the Orran upriver to these mountains.’

‘Titan’s Edge,’ Aethnir confirmed.

‘Then we are on the ancestors’ path.’ Killim looked upward with a relieved sigh, closed his eyes and muttered his thanks to Grimnir. ‘And you head for the same realmgate as we do.’ Dragging his finger towards the centre of the page, Killim tapped a spot within the mountain range where the silvery-coloured region they occupied overlapped another wreathed in fire.

‘According to our Founding Saga, the journey from Fyrepeak took four thousand days to complete.’

Aethnir nodded. ‘Ours has taken longer.’

The stranger turned his gaze towards the mountains, and the pyre.

Dunnegar’s fingers flexed and tensed around the standard’s steel pole. No one knew what made the grimwraths special amongst their kin, but even though he could endure the amount of ur-gold in his body, the erratic flow of power made him restive, impatient at best, violently ill-tempered at worst. It was one thing to be aware of that. To act before he snapped and somebody lost blood was another.

He took a deep breath, and tried not to think of the battle waiting in those mountains.

‘Have you been told why we’ve been called home?’

‘The message flame spoke of war. What other reason is there?’ With a shrug, Aethnir nodded towards the pyre. ‘Beyond that, you would have to ask the runefather.’

A duardin in ossified ceremonial robes bearing the runic iron of a runemaster called out in an ancient tongue, and a gang of pall-bearers set to withdrawing a scorched iron pallet from the fire. From the quantity of smouldering ur-gold on the pallet and the wealth of the helm, gauntlets and belt, the crisped bones rattling inside their wargear could only have belonged to the runefather of the Sepuzkul lodge. The priest inspected the remains as they passed him, spoke some manner of blessing over them, and sent them for burial by a company of hearthguard. With their red, rune-studded torsos and powdered faces, they looked strange and unearthly.

‘You are burying his runes?’ said Dunnegar in surprise.

After it was spent, ur-gold reverted to an inert state, but so far from his home and forge it would be a rare Fyreslayer who would risk using his final rune. Surely some of Grimnir’s power still lingered in those fragments.

‘They are his, and his soul faces more battles if he is to pass through the Underworlds,’ said Aethnir as though this should be obvious to anyone. ‘Do you not?’

‘We definitely do not.’

The duardin all turned as Runemaster Rolk strode towards them with Horgan-Grimnir, his hearthguard, and a trio of grimly armoured warriors of the Sepuzkul lodge behind him.

Walking with the aid of his runic iron, which he stabbed into the ground ahead of him, the priest glowered at all he passed. Bits of glimmering metal banged against his armour on chains, trinkets of presumably of priceless ur-gold that he had picked out from amongst the jewellery of the enemy dead.