Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

Great Lord Kurkori, the Dreaming Seer of the Second Departure, stirred reluctantly on his palanquin. His dreams held tight to his vast consciousness, drawing him into better and brighter worlds than the broken, limping thing he now found himself in.

In his deep dreaming, he saw an empire of order and light, a thing of perfect structure and harsh angles. The universe would move in perfect harmony, every realm, every inhabitant perfectly synchronised and in rhythm with the cosmic plan. It was a good dream, and one he intended to see made real, whatever the cost.

He cracked his eyes. The world drew into stark focus through a veil of celestial light. He could feel the agonies of the great worm upon whose back they fought as a dull pressure upon his thoughts. The beast was ancient as the Mortal Realms judged things, though its existence was barely a blip to his perceptions. Nonetheless, its death was not a part of the pattern and thus he saw no reason to allow it. With a thought, he sent waves of soothing energy through the great beast’s simple mind, easing its distress, if only for the moment.

He could feel the pulse of star-born energies that were his chosen cohorts. Each one was as unique as the stars in the firmament, and as precious to him. They were his claws, his fangs, his darkest dreams made scaly flesh. When they roared, they roared with his voice; when they bled, they bled with his blood. They were his dreams, and he wielded them with a deftness that was spoken of in awe by his fellow slann.

The central points of his constellation glowed the brightest — his rage, his cunning, his hope, made manifest in his chosen champions. Oxtl-Kor, a proud beacon of cold fury and determination; Takatakk, a quicksilver flickering of celestial power, ebbing and strengthening with Kurkori’s attentions; and Sutok, saturated with the very stuff of Azyr, his scales glowing with the light of the stars themselves.

Chaos had grown powerful during the centuries of blood, but so too had his kind. The Dark Gods had learnt little with the waxing of their might — they were feckless abstractions, impatient and impulsive. Disharmony and disunity were their lot, and all things unravelled at their touch. They did not see the Mortal Realms for what they were, only what they wished them to be, and so were blind to the true nature of the game being played.

That they did this in isolation, each slann pursuing their own campaigns against the slow advance of entropy which threatened to consume eternity, did not hamper them at all. For all that they were the merest fragments of a long extinct civilization, the lingering debris of a vanished world, they were not without some power.

The Eight Realms were a great game board and the Starmasters placed their pieces with calculated precision. They saw many moves ahead of their inattentive foes, and wove iron-hard stratagems which would advance their singular cause, however infinitesimally, from a thousand different angles. Step by step, Kurkori and his brethren manipulated the winds of fate with their celestial mathematics to bring about the final defeat of the ancient enemy.

Sigmar, the being they knew as the Rising Storm, was their ally in this endeavour, though even the God-King could conceive but dimly of the true purpose of the slann. And there were other forces which were, if not allies, yet subservient to the great pattern. The Undying King on his throne of sorrows, the Queen of the Hidden Vale… these too served in their own way to advance the designs of the Starmasters in their wisdom. Pieces, great and small, moved to and fro across a board of stars.

The world was different, but the game remained the same. Sometimes Kurkori dreamed of the world-that-was, of humid greenery and a sky full of falling stars. He dreamed of the vermin, flowing up the wide, stone steps of ancient temples in their chittering hordes. He dreamed of dead kin, eaten as they slumbered, their wisdom devoured by scuttling shadows. Anger filled him, and the saurus marching alongside his palanquin stiffened, growling. He heard the rumbling voice of his favoured general, Oxtl-Kor.

Kurkori felt the energies which formed and filled the saurus. At a whim, Kurkori knew he could reduce the scarred warrior to mere motes of dancing light, or invigorate him into nigh-invincibility. He could send him back into the dream, or stoke the rage which flickered within him. Too, he saw the looming moment that the Oldblood’s life-thread was cut short. Death was not the end for the seraphon, for they did not truly live, save in the memories of the slann. Even so, each death was like a thorn in Kurkori’s flesh, a persistent pain which never dimmed.