Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

The mountains — whether the Red Mountains or no — were rust red, fangs of rock to rip open the jugular of passing worlds and drink the fire of their blood. The trail that wound through them was rugged and uneven, climbing by sudden rises and twisting often, but not nearly difficult enough that thirty of the hardest duardin ever to leave the Realm of Chamon could hold back the horde for much longer.

Thirty. Against a thousand thousand.

Few they were, but that it was they who had made it this far and not others was testament to their bloody-minded tenacity to kill rather than be killed.

The last of the two lodges’ hearthguard held the old cart, containing the tools of runemaking and the last few ingots of precious ur-gold, as though it were a fortress. Globs of molten magma screamed from their pikes, blasting smoking trenches deep into the enemy ranks. Solldun the runesmiter chanted from his smoky bastion, straddling a pair of fyresteel chests packed over the axle, and bade the rock to split and boiling geysers to fire the Bloodbound to their dooms. What he admittedly lacked in the rune-maker’s craft, he joyfully accounted for in the arts of war.

The final fyrd of vulkite berzerkers was the wall around them. Leading them in a song of gold and glory, Killim left his years behind him to fight with equal fervour. He and Aethnir battled back to back, the latter a ghost-pale blur behind his twinned fyresteel axes.

‘I am vengeance!’

By foot and shoulder, Dunnegar cleared space enough to swing his axe. It clanged against a blood warrior carrying a mace and a shield stretched with human skin. Too close. The rune-scratched bloodsteel took its hit, and then the warrior thumped him back with the flattened face of his shield. Dunnegar shook off the stunning blow, but not before a bloodreaver daubed in black and red flame tattoos grabbed the haft of his axe and tried to pull it from him.

Dunnegar punched the man in the face. Once, twice. The man’s lip split, his jawbone caved. The third hit twisted his head so sharply that his neck snapped.

Dunnegar shrugged off the mobbing bloodreavers with a howl.

‘I am Grimnir! I am already dead!’

And in that moment, power that did not belong in mortal veins rushing through his mind, Dunnegar was Grimnir again.

The heat of the mountain, the dust on his hands. He could feel the meat of Vulcatrix’s mammoth neck coming apart beneath his axe. And claws. Claws piercing, claws in his chest and in his jaw and spearing his thighs. The god-lizard was dying, and in its savage throes those claws came apart. He felt it. Gods of old, he felt it!

Weeping golden tears, he hurled himself headlong into the grind, striking out with such furious pain that it no longer mattered that there was no room to swing. Everything that got near him died.

‘Tame yourself, grim brother,’ bellowed Nosda-Grimnir from atop his terrible ash-grey magmadroth. ‘Back into line, lest the souls you condemn cry your name into the Underworld and bring the gaze of Nagash upon your shade.’

The Sepuzkul runefather was fending off an ape-like monster of blood and sinew at the extreme range of his grandaxe. Black spikes split its muscular torso without any thought to symmetry or pattern, branded icons of control sweating against slick red skin. Fists like boulders beat aside armoured Goresworn and blood marauders alike in its efforts to get close. The magmadroth sent spumes of flame battering against it, re-opening partially healed lash scars and, in concert with his master’s axe, only just managing to hold the rabid bloodspawn at bay.

‘If we die then we die fulfilling oaths!’ Killim screamed, throat raw, mouth red. ‘To the last! All of us on to the bloody death.’

‘A bloody death!’ Aethnir echoed, raising his axes high.

The Fyreslayers sung it, shouted it loud, beat the words into Bloodbound shields. Some even laughed it, for what was death but the penultimate step on Grimnir’s road?

‘A bloody death!’

The shock of a horn blasted back in answer. The note was as deep as the earth, as powerful as thunder, and on hearing it a fire seemed to die in the eyes of the Bloodbound. Dunnegar felt it too, the fight being drawn from him through the uncanny goose bumping of his flesh, though not to the obvious extent of the Khornates. They stared at each other as if through a dream, and in a listless scrape of greaves and boots on the armour of dead men, they stumbled back.

The Fyreslayers let them go. Expedience perhaps, or exhaustion. Or maybe the pacifying power of that horn had affected them more profoundly than they realised. The armies stared at each other across ground thick with dead. A silence well befitting a graveyard fell across them. Duardin shuffled warily.

‘What is this?’ Dunnegar hissed.

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Killim.

And soon enough, they did.