Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

It was an uncertainty that he himself had felt before his first taste of battle. He remembered the moment that silence had fallen across Sigmaron the day the war had begun. The clanging, grinding din that had been so much a part of the daily fabric had stilled, as the great forges and mills had ceased all labour. It had been as though they were holding their breath, waiting for some long and hoped-for moment. And then, into that grim silence, had come a sound. A lone bell tolled. It was a doleful, soul-aching sound, and it had carried the length of every great avenue and into every barracks and vault, reaching every straining ear in the Celestial City. The mournful toll had echoed off each of the vast pillared structures and swelled to fill the empty plazas until it too at last faded into silence.

Then had come the booming clap of thunder that signalled the opening of the Gates of Azyr and the beginning of the war. Zephacleas had is first texperience of real fighting — not merely training in the gladitorium or orruk hunting in the wilds of Azyrheim — in the assault upon the Brimstone Peninsula after the Hammers of Sigmar had taken the Igneous Delta. He found that he had a taste for it.

Zephacleas flexed his hands, clad in their gauntlets of sigmarite. With hammer and sword, he had cut down Chaos-twisted Aqshian tribesmen and lumbering khorgoraths alongside the Stormhosts of his brethren. He and his Warrior Chamber had fought their way across the Brimstone Peninsula before returning to the celestine vaults so his warriors could heal. There, Zephacleas attended a war council with the other chamber leaders of the Stormhosts and learned how the cloying presence of Chaos had twisted many of the realmgates. His fellows had spoken of sentient flames that burned on the Bridge of Fire and the streams of contagion that burst forth from the archway to the five gates of Ghyran. It was as if the very fabric of reality itself were under assault. The Ruinous Powers waged war on the Mortal Realms.

To Zephacleas, all of this was merely proof that Sigmar had been right to cast the Stormhosts into battle when he had. Battle had been joined and would only end in victory or death.

‘As it should be,’ he said out loud. The Stormcasts had been forged for war, and were ready for whatever awaited them beyond the Gates of Azyr.

The sound of his voice was swallowed by the vastness before him. Stars pinwheeled about the fraying edges of swirling nebulas and shimmering galactic coronas — it was a sea of colour and light, but eerily silent and stretching into an impossible infinity.

He’d never truly understood Gardus’s fascination with the precipice of the Sigmarabulum, and what lay beyond, but he had to admit that the sight was soothing in its way. He laughed. Soothing, yes, and also invigorating. Here was the sum totality of existence, wrought upon celestial canvas and laid out for his eyes. There was a chill beauty to it, but also a ferocity — the stars lived and fought and died even as men. Brief flickers of light against the dark, soon forgotten, but always replaced.

And if that does not describe the Stormcast, I do not know what does, he thought.

No, Zephacleas. Never forgotten. Never that, a voice rumbled in his mind. It was a warm voice, but powerful, like a summer storm. Nonetheless, Zephacleas found himself bowing beneath its weight.

‘My lord Sigmar — is it time?’ he asked, fighting to hide the eagerness in his voice. The question was moot. Sigmar would not have deigned to speak with him unless the need was great. ‘Are we to be cast once more into battle?’

Yes, Zephacleas. The Astral Templars are needed.

Sigmar’s voice echoed through his skull like the peal of a bell, shaking him down to his marrow. The God-King spoke with the voice of the heavens themselves, and in his words could be heard the roar of comets, the hum of nebulae, and the endless echo of the black between the stars.

‘Where, my lord, the Greenglades? The City of Branches?’ he asked, wondering which of his brother Stormcasts was in need of aid. Where in the Jade Kingdoms would Sigmar cast his thunderbolt? Wherever it was, it was long past time, Zephacleas thought. He’d had enough of quiet contemplation. Now he wanted a fight.

The Ghyrtract Fen. The Hallowed Knights are beset by an enemy far beyond them.

An image filled Zephacleas’s mind — he saw figures in shining armour confronted by something massive and foul, the sight of which filled him with an icy dread. This was no brute monster or champion, swollen by the power of its fell god, but a shard of a god itself. A creature beyond any single Stormcast, Lord-Celestant or not.