Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

A double-flail struck him from the side, and he staggered. Nurglings swarmed against him, trying to smother him with their biting mass. The blightking who had hit him, a corpulent, one-eyed giant, raised its flails again. Nurglings clamped their jaws onto Thrumnor’s arms to hold them back. He was slow to raise his staff to block the coming blow.

A stream of bile fell on the blightking. Its flesh melted and the flail dropped without striking. Grognax’s huge jaws snapped the plague warrior in half. Rhulmok had led the magmadroth away from the main formation of the Fyreslayers, cutting through the nurglings to ease the pressure on Thrumnor. The runemaster smashed the daemons from his person and took his stance at Grognax’s flank.

‘That was foolish,’ Rhulmok shouted in between his drum beats.

‘You cannot accept this sacrilege!’

‘I do not accept useless rage,’ the runesmiter said. ‘This ground is lost, corrupted beyond hope. We must pass through it, not sacrifice ourselves pointlessly. Is this battle the one of your vision?’

It was not. Thrumnor wished he could refute Rhulmok’s logic.

Still the nurglings and blightkings charged. Still they were thrown back. But their numbers told. Thrumnor saw the karl Gabir, one of the elite of the vulkite berzerkers, swarmed by the creatures. He fought them hard and well, killing many, but they clambered over him and bore him down before any of his brothers could reach him. When the other Fyreslayers cleared the mound of nurglings away, Gabir was a half-eaten carcass swelling with boils.

The stench of the daemons was foul. Gaseous, thick, suffocating, it conjured images in Thrumnor’s mind of stone turned as soft as flesh, falling apart like stringy, fly-blown meat.

The nurglings ate into the Krelstrag lines, but they could not stop the march. They brought down individual Fyreslayers, but the fallen warriors’ brothers responded with renewed fury, destroying the daemons in ever greater numbers. Step by step, the Fyreslayers burned and smashed their way forward, grinding the enemy down. This much was true to Thrumnor’s vision. The Krelstrag were the lava flood, and would not be stopped. Certainly not by this enemy.

I saw what must happen, Thrumnor thought, grasping that triumph. We are on our destined path. The sweep of his staff destroyed another cluster of nurglings.

At last, the flood of foes ended. Their numbers were not infinite. The Fyreslayers trampled the last underfoot and watched as the bodies burst into clouds of dusty spores. The air was filled with disease, but the fire of Grimnir burned brightly in the ur-gold of the Fyreslayers, and they would not be brought down by so lowly a foe.

Less than an hour later, the tunnel split. The left-hand branch continued to climb toward the surface. On the right, it plunged deeper into the earth. Dorvurn raised an arm to call a halt. Thrumnor and Rhulmok rode up beside him. They were joined by the runesons. Together, they stared in horror at the full extent of the blighted underworld.

The route up was relatively clear, but the roots of the petrified forest created a thick, malodorous tangle on the path that descended into the lodge. The mould there had reached a critical stage, achieving an unholy union, and the roots now spread the pestilence to the rock around them. What Thrumnor had only imagined earlier was a reality here. The tunnel walls and ceiling pressed in on each other, as soft as a sponge, a fleshy collapse. There was no passage to be had here. There was barely room for a single Fyreslayer at a time to try the tunnel, and it narrowed further at the edge of torchlight.

‘How can such rot be?’ Forvuld asked.

‘It has had all the time it needs to settle deep into the marrow of the earth,’ said Dorvurn. He turned to the left-hand path. ‘We will travel overland.’

It took another day’s journey, beset by smaller nurgling assaults, before the Krelstrag reached the outer gates. They emerged on a steep slope, less than a league from the base of the Great Weld. The petrified forest with its agonised forms was now at their back, but the route to the Weld was strewn with boulders, fuzzy with mould, and the ground was a carpet of rock-devouring lichen. If there were daemons nearby, they did not attack. The Fyreslayers moved on.

As dusk fell, the army reached its destination.

Thrumnor gazed up its height. The size of the Weld was overwhelming. A force beyond reckoning had brought multiple volcanoes together, fusing them into a single giant, standing alone.