Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

The daemon exploded.

The gasses in its body ignited. The blast hurled Fyreslayers and daemons back across the Great Weld like leaves in a gale. Distensiath vanished, transformed into a rain of bile-green ichor that covered the entire plateau. Stone hissed and dissolved at its touch. Flesh erupted in boils. Thrown a hundred yards by the explosion, Thrumnor staggered to his feet. He was coated with the daemonic essence, and he felt it eat into his being. His skin wept pus. Something foul sought to take him apart.

He spat in contempt. He shook his head, ridding his beard of the ichor. There were cries of agonised rage on all sides as the devouring plague gnawed the flesh of the Fyreslayers.

‘Karls of the Krelstrag!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘The fire of Grimnir runs in your veins! Deny the pestilence. Cast its weakness down and trample it underfoot!’

Rhulmok had climbed back onto the throne atop Grognax, and had resumed the beat on the war altar with a vengeance. Ur-gold flared, and it burned the corruption of the flesh. The purging was torture, but it was a needful pain, true and clean, and Thrumnor exulted in it.

Not all the berzerkers found salvation. The surface of the plateau was littered with bubbling, dissolving bodies. But the Krelstrag were still strong, and they rallied round Yuhvir’s standard and the runefather’s raised grandaxe. They formed a circle of iron at the centre of the plateau.

As Thrumnor ran forward to join the fyrds, he heard something that chilled his blood. It came as the last of the ichor fell from the sky and settled into the Great Weld. He heard a sigh, and he heard a whisper. The voice was Distensiath’s voice, a phantom echo, a single word.

‘Fulfilled.’

In the vision, the anvil had shattered. Now the Great Weld heaved. It rocked to and fro, but the movement was wrong. This was no earthquake. This was no eruption. This was transformation. Standing beside Grognax, Thrumnor looked toward the distant edges of the plateau, and saw them rise up and down. Like flesh. Like muscle.

And now Thrumnor understood the pattern he had partly seen at the base of the Great Weld. The shapes embedded in the rock were not just those of fused volcanoes. They were also limbs. Revelation flooded in. Thrumnor gasped.

‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn shouted. ‘What is happening?’

‘Grimnir’s feat was greater than we imagined,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It was not volcanoes he fused together. He battered a great beast into submission. He turned his opponent into the anvil of stone. It became volcanoes.’ He paused. ‘And now that defeat is being undone. The beast is awakening.’

We have done this thing, he thought bitterly.

The heaving became more pronounced. The cracks in the surface of the plateau began to assume a different cast. They were the outline of scales.

The beast came closer and closer to waking. Then it would walk. A monster of plague the size of a mountain chain would be loose upon the realm.

The plaguebearers and the nurglings closed in once more, but gradually, as if waiting for a signal. It came now. Across the entire plateau, the scales of the beast rose, and from beneath each one came another plaguebearer. Thousands upon thousands of them dragged themselves up from the beneath the skin of the Great Weld.

Tens of thousands.

Hundreds of thousands, covering all the leagues of the Great Weld.

There was a sudden, terrible, immense lurch, as of a single step.

The daemons in their uncountable legions raised their voices in solemn praise to the Plaguefather, and they advanced.

The Fyreslayers were surrounded.

‘The defilers of the Great Weld come to meet their doom!’ Dorvurn thundered. ‘Be the fire of Grimnir, and burn them from the realm!’

The air shook with the defiant clash of blade on shield, but there was a different quality to the sound this time. Thrumnor knew it. This was the last stand of the Krelstrag.

From atop Grognax, Rhulmok called to Thrumnor, making peace. ‘At least it will be a fight worthy of song.’

Thrumnor shook his head. ‘This is wrong,’ he said. ‘This is not my vision.’ He could not have been so tragically mistaken. He filled his lungs and howled his wrath at the fates. ‘This was not foretold!’

The Krelstrag lodge decimated. The Great Weld transformed into a leviathan of plague. This was not what he had seen. This was not what the great light in his vision had produced.

Ahead, the front lines of the Fyreslayers hurled themselves against the ocean of daemons. The sound of the battle was immense, as of a great hammer coming down on iron. At that sound, Thrumnor thought of his vision, and of the forging. Of the shattered anvil, and of the lava that came after.

And he felt a surge of hope.

The transformation was not yet complete. Thrumnor called to the wrath inside the Weld, and found it was still there. Grimnir’s work was not undone. The fury of volcanoes had not turned into corrupted blood.