Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

On the third day, they came to a land riven with narrow gulleys. When they tried to cross, the gulleys became grinding jaws.

On the fourth day, as the land sloped more and more sharply upwards, the ground turned into living glass. It blazed and snarled in the heat of the sun. It broke beneath marching feet without warning, plunging warriors into jagged crevasses, while flamers skittered over the surface. There were many more than on the Voidfire Plain, and they attacked.

And so it went, each day a new trial, a gauntlet that chipped away at the army of the Drunbhor, and the goal was not in sight. Vrindum watched Frethnir’s doubts grow and grow. But the battles were ceaseless, and to challenge the runefather would be a shattering blow to the morale of the fyrds. Frethnir could do nothing to arrest what he clearly thought was a path to disaster without being the cause of a worse one. His agony was terrible to see.

As he fought, Vrindum muttered prayers to Grimnir. ‘Prove the runefather right,’ he said. ‘Prove him right.’

Then there was the wind. The song was still the same, but the air grew more foul. The incense of the forest was gone, but what the Drunbhor now breathed was worse. It was thick and humid, the air of open graves and of a fresh battlefield. It was rotten, and it made Vrindum wonder about the song.

He spoke about the stench with Beregthor.

‘The forces of Chaos seek to turn us aside,’ the runefather answered. ‘They will not succeed.’

Beregthor did not speak with the same fire as he had upon setting out from Sibilatus. His voice was hard, grey, almost a monotone. He did not look at Vrindum. He stared into the distance, as if the invisible goal had thrown a noose around his neck and was slowly pulling him in.

On the eighth day, the Drunbhor encountered fungi so huge they formed caves. Bone-white, streaked with red, they sought to dissolve the Fyreslayers with spores. And when at last fyrds hacked and burned their way through the growths, they beheld mountains ahead of them.

And so, on the ninth day, the Drunbhor reached the Typhornas Mountains.

The wind was immeasurably worse. It was difficult to breathe. Vrindum regarded the landscape with wonder and suspicion. The lodge had arrived at a place of legend, and it was as the myths described. The mountains breathed; they were the lungs of the Evercry. They expanded and contracted, immense heaving movements visible to the eye, and the ground rose and fell beneath Vrindum’s feet. Yet the sensation was not that of an earthquake. The rocky surface did not crack as it stretched. Individual boulders tumbled down the mountain faces, but there were no avalanches. At the same time, Vrindum did not feel as if he were walking on the body of an immeasurably vast beast. His boot heels rang on stone, and the crags on all sides were jagged, solid, monolithic. They were mountains, not flesh.

In and out they breathed, in and out, bellows of such size they sent their endless wind across the breadth of a continent. And the wind was foul. It grew stronger by the hour, until the Drunbhor had to lean forwards, walking into a gale. The three-note song became the shrieking whistle of a mad thing. In the distance, over a bowl in the mountains, lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled from dark, spiralling clouds. This was not the storm the Drunbhor had witnessed from the peaks of Sibilatus. No stars were falling here. There was no explosion as of a war to change the times.

The Fyreslayers entered a narrow pass at the coming of night. They struggled through it against the furious wind. The pass ended at the lip of a huge bowl, a circular valley formed by the meeting of eight mountainsides.

Silence fell.

The wind stopped.

The song ceased.

For a moment, Vrindum thought he had gone deaf. Not once in all his centuries had he not heard the keening over the Evercry. Then he heard the muttered exclamations of the runemaster. He was not deaf, then; yet still the mountains rose and fell, rose and fell.

They rose and fell in silence. There was no breath. Even the stench was gone. It was as if the Fyreslayers stood on a corpse that was unaware of death and continued in its ignorance to move.

In the centre of the valley, on a circular dais, was the gate. Vrindum felt a cautious surge of confidence as the Drunbhor host approached their goal. The gate was clearly the kin of the one the daemons had destroyed in Sibilatus; the pillars bore similar engravings, and though many of the runes were mysterious to him, some of them were also in the language of the Fyreslayers.

A shout of triumph rose from the exhausted fyrds.

The host of the Drunbhor lodge surrounded the wide dais on which the gate stood. Beregthor dismounted from his magmadroth and climbed up. He walked slowly toward the gate, the Keeper of Roads held before him with both hands. Runemaster Trumnir and Runesmiter Harthum walked with him. Vrindum and the runesons followed a few steps behind.