Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

The destruction of the gate turned the centre of the bowl into a crater. The blast killed many Drunbhor. The uncontrolled storm of sorcerous energies wreaked even greater devastation on the daemons. With Kaz’arrath gone, they were leaderless and despairing. With Beregthor dead, the Fyreslayers were terrible in their vengeance.

The end came quickly.

At dawn, Vrindum stood at the edge of the crater. The wind blowing from the Typhornas Mountains had shaken free of the three-note refrain. The song was changeable once again, varying with every rise and fall of the mountains. It sounded in Vrindum’s ears like a chant of mourning. But perhaps there was a thread of triumph too. Beregthor’s final command had defeated the daemon’s machinations. And he left behind a legacy.

As the sun’s rays crossed the lip of the bowl, the veins of gold in the crater gleamed.

Frethnir joined Vrindum. ‘The runemaster says there is a rich concentration of ur-gold below,’ he said.

‘Beregthor would be pleased,’ said Vrindum. ‘He led us well until the end.’

‘He did. I should never have doubted.’

Vrindum bent down and picked up the Keeper of Roads. It had survived the explosion, though its blade was gravely scarred. Vrindum presented it to Frethnir.

The runeson shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That is for Bramnor. It is not for me to be auric runefather of the Drunbhor. My brother will lead the march back. I will stay here with those who choose to join me. We will found a new lodge where our father has brought us.’

‘Then I will be of your number,’ Vrindum said. Where the daemon had sought to bring ruin to the Drunbhor, now there would be a greater strength.

The wind’s cry grew louder, a martial song for the birth of a new era.

David Annandale Shattered Crucible

I

The storm began at the height of the Ritual of Grimnir’s Binding. From where they stood on the platform of rock high on the flank of the Forgecrag, both Thrumnor and Rhulmok saw it start. It stabbed deep into their awareness, drawing them from the necessary trance of the ritual.

The Krelstrag lodge stood strong in the largest volcanic isle at the heart of the Earthwound archipelago in Aqshy. Here, the Fyreslayers said, one of Grimnir’s blades had cut into the ground as he had landed a great blow on Vulcatrix, the Mother of Salamanders. The molten blood of the great wyrm had poured into the vast cleft. The wound in the continents was a hundred leagues wide and many times as long, and it gaped and bled, never to be healed. An ocean of magma raged at the surface. It was said that the ocean had no true bottom, that the wound was so profound it tore through the barriers between the realms, but no living soul could survive the plunge through the depths of that terrible heat to find out.

In all directions, titanic molten waves rose and fell. The rage of the earth pushed its incandescent rock to the surface, as if ten thousand volcanoes in perpetual eruption had drowned themselves and the land, from horizon to horizon. This was the ocean of tribulation and annihilation, and nothing could live in its eternal fury.

But the Krelstrag stood strong.

Volcanic peaks did rise above the surface of the burning ocean. Islands would come into being. Then the terrible waves would erode their shores, the internal forces would shake them apart, and they would crumble and melt back into the lava. Not all succumbed. Ten mountains had been there since the wound was first torn open. Perhaps it was their birth that had injured the land in the beginning. Jagged and twisted, like the anguished talons of an immeasurably vast beast, they towered over the waves, arrogant, defiant, unchanging. They were mountains at war, mountains under siege. They would stand forever.

And so would the Krelstrag.

The heart of the Krelstrag magmahold was within the largest of the great claws, the Forgecrag. The island mountain was broad, though so tall it resembled an onyx spike. It rose high enough to pierce the crimson-washed clouds. At a point just beneath the clouds, it was possible to look out at the entire domain of the Krelstrag lodge, the chain of basalt claws jutting from the lava. It was even possible, when the wind was strong enough to clear the worst of the haze, to see the sole hint on the horizon that something might exist beyond the Earthwound, that there was such a thing as a mainland. On those days, the bulky silhouette of the Great Weld would appear. Unlike the spikes of the archipelago, it had a wide, flat peak. It was a distant anvil. On this night, a hammer was striking it.