Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

‘Rhulmok!’ Thrumnor cried. ‘We may yet honour Grimnir! With me, brother! Let this be not an anvil, but a crucible. Let us unleash its full wrath!’

Dorvurn looked down at him from Karmanax. ‘Can you do this?’

The image before Thrumnor’s mind’s eye was one of shattering and lava. ‘It is foretold that we will,’ he said.

Rhulmok laughed, and drummed the anvil of war with renewed energy.

‘I see it now!’ he said to Thrumnor. ‘I see it at last! What a grand transformation we shall forge!’

‘We will be the prophesied fire,’ said Thrumnor.

The runefather nodded, and then he spoke to the entire lodge, his voice strong with pride and drowning out the chanting of the daemons and the rumble of war. ‘Fyrds of the Krelstrag, what comes is no sacrifice! This shall be the greatest victory, and the greatest tale, of our lodge!’

The Fyreslayers roared their approval, and with joyous fury they threw themselves at the sea of daemons, holding them back as Thrumnor and Rhulmok did what they must.

Rhulmok increased the beat on the altar. Thrumnor felt his ur-gold sigils ignite with a fire greater than ever before.

‘One more Binding, then,’ Rhulmok said.

‘One more,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It will be our greatest work, youngflame.’

‘A fine song it will make.’

‘So it will.’ For a few moments more, Thrumnor watched the fyrds fight a war they could not win, and there too was the making of a fine song. The Krelstrag cut the daemons down by the score, by the hundreds. The hundreds of thousands pressed closer, but now, right now, the fury of the Fyreslayers was unstoppable, as the voice of Yuhvir shouted the litany of victories.

Let this be how I last see my brothers, Thrumnor thought.

Then, with both hands wrapped around the staff, its power crackling a deep violet and plunging deep into the transforming ground, he reached for the magma.

The strain threatened to tear him apart. The rage of the Great Weld was enormous, but the change was coming to it too, and molten rock would soon become diseased blood.

But not yet.

Thrumnor called to the magma. He called to the fury of the Weld. Eager, it rose towards him. He felt the deep vibrations as Rhulmok spoke to stone that had not yet become flesh. It raged against the transformation of the Great Weld. At the runesmiter’s command, it parted before the rising magma.

One last Binding, Rhulmok had said. It was true. This was their grandest enactment of the ritual. Though they sought a perfect destruction, in the coming annihilation they would return the Great Weld to its volcanic being. All the bridges linking the islands of the Earthwound archipelago found their culmination here, as they fused wrath with its fullest, most holy expression.

The magma rose. The full strength of the Weld, all of its contained rage, rushed upward to the peak. The surface of the plateau had become flesh, but the interior of the Great Weld was still stone. Walls parted. Tunnels opened up. Molten magma climbed. Thrumnor’s temper joined with Rhulmok’s shaping.

The wrath came. The entire plateau bulged upward, swelling as Distensiath’s bulk had, only this time with the fires of purification.

Thrumnor smiled as the ground rose, and he felt the heat through his feet.

‘For Grimnir,’ he said.

And the world erupted in a terrible blaze.

V

Dorvurn strode down the far side of the Great Weld.

His body shielded from the blast and fire by Karmanax and the will of Grimnir, he had lived through the initial moments of the destruction. He had flown through fire and smoke and incandescent gas, through lightning and ash and still more fire. Burned, his weapons gone, he had landed beyond the new, immense caldera, on a ledge partway down the mountainside.

There was purpose in his survival. Chance had no part in it.

He descended the sloping ledge, so much like the one the Krelstrag had climbed on the other side. It was stone again, not a beast. The ground was still a long way off, and Dorvurn knew he would never reach it. His moments were numbered. Lava was everywhere, flowing down the Great Weld and spreading over the land. Dorvurn was walking between streams, and soon enough another would come to swallow him.

But he was content.

Below, the blighted land was purged by the ocean of lava.

‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn said, ‘I have lived to see the truth of your vision.’ The Krelstrag had truly become what Thrumnor had foreseen. The Fyreslayers had brought the purifying fire. Dorvurn’s lodge had, in every sense that mattered, become the lava flood. And the Krelstrag would be strong yet. Homnir would see to that.

Dorvurn looked off into the distance, toward the other lodge, its name still forgotten, its location unknown. It was unreachable. But perhaps their actions here today would aid those Fyreslayers. Perhaps the vast scouring of the land would be enough to weaken the hold of Chaos on the entire region.

Dorvurn was still marching in the direction of the lodge, still holding fast to the oath, and to the knowledge the Krelstrag had humbled a vast army of Chaos.