Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

Daemons of Nurgle in the thousands cavorted and sang. Drums, bells and horns sounded, creating music as dissonant as it was joyful. The noise was enough to make Thrumnor’s chest contract as if he were breathing foul air. The daemons danced. The lumbering, uneven movement of so many abominations was that of maggots heaving under flesh.

At the heart of the ritual stood a titan of plague.

What waits above? Rhulmok had asked.

Here was the answer.

And Thrumnor felt the first true wounds of doubt.

During the most terrible of the sieges that the lodge had withstood, when it had been necessary to withdraw all the Krelstrag to within the redoubt of the Forgecrag, they had fought a Great Unclean One, one of the most powerful daemons of Nurgle. The story of that battle was one that the lodge never tired of hearing Battlesmith Yuhvir recite. It was one Thrumnor recalled in perfect, vivid detail. He recognised the daemon here as kin to the other. It too was a Great Unclean One, though many times larger. It was a mountain in its own right. It was over a hundred feet high. Its mass was swollen, the diseased skin taut and shining with the weight of tumours and the pressure of gas. Its head was sunken in its shoulders, if it could be said to have a head. But there was a maw, a huge one, gaping between the shoulder blades, where a tongue longer than a magmadroth hung pendulously past the fangs, dripping ichor and slime. There were other mouths too. They were on its arms, and on its knees, and they jabbered and slobbered and sang and laughed. It laughed most delightedly when the multitudes of lesser daemons at its feet raised their arms in praise and shouted a word.

‘Distensiath!’

They were calling its name.

The foul colossus led the dance. It created the beat of the song with the ground-shaking impact of its trunk-like legs. It could barely shift its great bulk, and its gut dragged against the surface of the plateau as it lifted and stamped its feet. It waved its arms, conducting the celebrants, and brandished a pitted, twisted sword twenty feet long. The voices of its mouths formed a choir, which summoned a rain of phlegm from the air that hissed when it fell on stone.

The panorama of corruption was intolerable. But the worst of it for Thrumnor was that the beats of the song were the blows of the hammer. Every time Distensiath stamped, the repellent green light flashed, smearing the falling night with its disease. This was what he had seen from the Forgecrag. He had said that Grimnir’s hammer was again striking the anvil. Instead, the truth was the unspeakable amusement of a daemon. It was from this dance that the rockblight flowed. Thrumnor could see it now, see the mould spring into existence around Distensiath’s feet. It piled up, then spread outwards in ripples. It covered the plateau. It poured itself down all sides of the Weld, and from there it reached out to blight all the land.

‘Runemaster,’ said Dorvurn, ‘is this what your vision foretold?’

Thrumnor fought past the horror at what had become of the sacred ground.

‘It must be. Our cleansing fire begins here, runefather.’ The terrible explosion he had seen — that was the coming clash. Fiery glory would follow.

This is the truth, he thought. There is no other possibility.

He kept his doubts secret. He stamped them down.

‘This is our path,’ he said.

Dorvurn turned to address the Krelstrag host.

‘Fyreslayers,’ he said, ‘you see Grimnir’s great work desecrated by daemonkind. I will not stand for it! Will you?’

A collective roar of denial. Hammers slammed against shields. Every warrior present burned with the need to punish the daemons and cleanse the sacred ground.

‘Our oath calls us beyond the Great Weld,’ Dorvurn continued. ‘It calls us through that unclean horde. To fulfil our duty, we must pass through the daemons.’ He grinned. ‘We must destroy the daemons!’

Another roar, louder still, and the greater thunder of clashing weapons.

‘Krelstrag lodge!’ Dorvurn shouted, his voice filling the night with righteous anger and eager fury. ‘March with me to war!’

Dorvurn, Thrumnor and Rhulmok led the advance. Behind them came the runesons, and with them Komgan, the grimwrath berzerker. Then came the fyrds of vulkite berzerkers, Battlesmith Yuhvir striding at their centre. He held high the standard of the Krelstrag, and he began to recite the battles of the lodge, the centuries of sieges withstood and broken, the glories accrued to the warriors of Grimnir. His huge voice reached the ears of every Fyreslayer present. They grinned to think of honours past, and of the saga that would be told of the battle now upon them.