Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

Shaddock sagged. Then, the weight of his trials and travels was lifted from his shoulders. He rose before Alarielle, to bathe in her glory and her love for all living things.

‘My queen calls,’ Shaddock said, ‘and her subject obeys.’

Gav Thorpe Wrathspring

Something noisome carried on the wind. The reek was born of blood and rotten offal and rodent droppings. It was a harbinger, the vanguard of a thoroughly loathsome tide. Not just the air carried the taint. The Wrathwaters knew what was coming. Even the springsfed surge churning down from the peaks of the White Stair could not clear the pollution from the winding waterways and rising pools. The trees drew in their roots, sickened by the presence of the corruption. Fish lay gut-to-sky, rotting amongst withered leaves and decaying rushes.

In the heartwaters below the rivers and lakes, deeper than the delving of millennia-old trees, the miasma of decay spread through the veins of the forests. The font of wyldmagic — the essence of life, the meltwater of souls — thickened into sluggish swells, bloated and bubble-ridden like a stream choked with noxious gasses and rank sludge.

Diraceth, Leafmaster of Clan Arleath, felt all of these changes — upon his bark, in his sap, on the tips of his taproots. The cloying, stifling Chaos taint was like a fungus on his spirit, leeching his essence, spreading fibrous tendrils through the lands of the Wrathwaters into every part of him.

It was hard to rouse himself, even with the strength of the long-awaited blooming forcing rivulets of life energy into his body. All of the worldwood sickened — it was folly to believe that the Wrathwaters could hold out. Better to succumb, to give up the last clinging vestige of life. Oblivion was preferable to further torture, the never-ending gnawing of soul and strength.

‘Lord!’ Callicaith, the branchwych, had climbed into his upper limbs and was dragging her wood talons against his rough bark — insistent but not painful, nor deep enough to draw sap. Her heartsong was an agitated twittering like the alarm of a bird. On her shoulder, a glimmersilk grub twitched with agitation. ‘Lord Diraceth! The ratmen, they come at last. They come for the lamentiri!’

He opened deep green eyes and looked at the slender tree maiden.

‘The soulpod groves?’ His voice was sonorous, as deep as the earth into which his roots ran. He quivered at the thought. Diraceth’s drooping branches scattered leaves onto the surface of the lake. Around him the bloodwillows responded, straightening their trunks, pulling up ruddy-leafed limbs.

Beyond his copse, other spirits were answering the growing strength of the clan-song. His fellow treelords rumbled echoes in their diminishing slumber. Sylvaneth warriors stirred in the dappled gloom at the water’s edge. Polished wood and firestone of bared blades caught the scant sunlight, scattering glints like water droplets.

‘No more pestilence, no more sickness,’ Callicaith continued. ‘Ratmen with blades, with spears. Creatures we can fight. Creatures we can kill!’

The thought brought Diraceth further from his slumber, drawing up an influx of the essence of Ghyran, the magic of the Realm of Life streaming through his sap.

‘A poor move,’ he growled. He let his roots fall away and drew up a foot. ‘Skaven, always impatient. Another hundred seasons and we would be quite beyond resistance.’

‘There are many, lord.’

‘There always are, my glade-daughter.’ Diraceth levered his other foot out of the sodden lakeside bank and took a step, his sap continuing to rise. It felt good to move again. ‘Rouse the clan. We go to war!’

The wailing of trees competed with the deafening chitter of rats. Arboreal screeches and thrashing leaves beset the river glades of the Wrathwaters as the skaven advanced within a bank of burning mist. Tainted by warpstone, the deathfog of Pestilens scorched leaves and blistered bark. Droplets of warp-touched acid settled on the pools and meres, sinking slowly into the waters with greenish trails.

Diraceth waited, ignoring the pulses of pain that ran through him from the wickedly deep cut across his trunk — a wound that still seeped with the corrupted taint from the blade of the plague priest that had struck him. He wept streams of thick sap, the agony of his body nothing compared to the injuries inflicted upon his domains. The treelord ancient could feel a shudder of misery throbbing through the pools and rivers every time the filth-ridden missiles of the catapults crashed through the canopy. A dozen of the accursed engines had pounded the last scraps of territory for two days, littering the banks and water with heaps of steaming, disease-ridden offal and corrupting shards of warpstone.

Most of the trees were dead, and the rest had retreated with the sylvaneth. Beyond the painfully slender ring of forest sheltering Clan Arleath, the Wrathwaters had been turned into a steaming mire, a wasteland of sucking marsh and drifting, suffocating clouds.