Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

He heard a rattle as the servants of the God-King began to advance. They too were filled with the light of Azyr, though they were not made from it. They were not memories but an ideal, shaped and forged and set loose. The crash of thunder, the flash of lightning; they were all this and something more, though Kurkori could not say what. They were a strange dream, drawn from a mind most alien — a thing of rougher symmetry than his own. Cruder, but more powerful. The thoughts of the slann were as polished stones, but the thoughts of the Rising Storm and his creations were jagged rocks, freshly drawn from snow and stream. Emotion, rather than calculation, guided them in all things.

Such was the burden of limited minds; they saw only what the universe allowed them. The celestial pattern was too vast for their comprehension, its beauty too blinding for their eyes. That was why he had dreamed as he had dreamed, why he had come to this place of soft angles and brief lives. The pattern grew layered here — moments from the past, present and future crossed back and forth over one another at a single point, requiring action.

Something old would be found in the depths of the worm, inconsequential from his perspective but with a terrible potential if the equation of this place was corrupted as he had foreseen. The vermin were clever. They had their own patterns, erratic as they were. He could not allow such a random element to be introduced into his design.

Kurkori leaned back on his throne, looking through the walls and past the fortresses beyond, towards the head of the worm. Time and distance were as one to him, and as easily manipulated as the star-born winds of Azyr. He had come following a gleaming thread which stretched back into the shadows of the world-that-was and into the world-that-might-yet-be. Echoes of memories lost, carved before the Great Exodus, old calculations which had survived the death-spasms of a world. It would be found, and its potential neutered. Such he had seen, so he had dreamed, so must it be for the pattern, and his calculations, to remain undisturbed.

With a drowsy grunt, he turned his attentions back to the present. The skeins of pox and filth weighed on the air, making it sluggish and opaque. Their pestilences gnawed at the very fabric of the realm, dissolving it even as they dissolved the worm’s flesh. An untidy equation. A small thing, a confluence of random variables, easily tidied. He reached out with his mind. What the vermin had made, he could unmake. And he did, and found it good.

The bubbling moat of filth became as green glass, its liquid foulness replaced by the solid angles of shimmering perfection. Oxtl-Kor looked at him, a fiery request burning in his eyes. The old warrior yearned to taste the blood of the foe, and the slann did not have the heart to deny him this moment of pleasure. Kurkori blinked in acknowledgement.

The Oldblood snarled in satisfaction and thumped his mount in the side with the haft of his spear. The carnosaur roared in pleasure and surged forward, shaking the ground with its tread. The saurus knights followed their commander, sprinting across the newly hardened field of green glass.

But they would not be enough. The vermin had spread wide and deep, and cast their burrows into the flesh of the worm. So he stretched mind and hand upwards, toward the stars that spun somewhere far above the darkening amber skies and the swirling storm. He drew down dream after dream, star after star, and his constellation expanded, swirling wider and farther. The roars of ancient beasts, unheard by mortal ears for a millennia, filled the air, drowning out the bells and shrieks of the skaven.

The Dreaming Constellation went to war.

And, satisfied, Great Lord Kurkori went back to sleep.

Mantius Far-killer took aim and loosed a crackling arrow. A skaven was punched back into the darkness of the fallen tower, its rotten carcass swiftly consumed by the energies of the arrow. ‘Drive them back, my huntsmen — clear the way for our brothers,’ the Knight-Venator said as he loosed a second arrow.

His Prosecutors skimmed low over the fallen length of the tower, hurling their celestial hammers as swiftly as they could conjure them. The skaven pouring down the ruined setae were hurled in all directions, their foul robes smouldering. But for every one killed, two more scrambled out of the ruin of stone and hair, foetid blades between their teeth and filth-encrusted cudgels in their claws. They were limitless and rapacious — the living embodiment of the evil that the Stormcast Eternals had been forged to fight.