Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

‘Would that I had felt such courage sooner, great queen,’ said Ancient Holodrin, making obeisance to his ruler. The taint of Nurgle was already seeping away, fresh tufts of grass and red blooms consuming the bodies of the Plague God’s mortal followers.

‘There are none of my folk that are strangers to fear,’ Alarielle replied. ‘When all is nearly lost, one thinks only to cling to what is left. I am not guiltless in such regard. The ages have turned and a different season is upon us. We cannot seek to simply resist our inevitable decline. A new power is coming, and we must allow ourselves to be borne up on the fresh tide or be washed away forever.’

‘What new power, Everqueen?’ asked Holodrin.

She looked up to the skies. Against any natural wind, clouds were gathering, tinged with azure light. Lightning flickered, not of any mortal origin.

‘We are not alone,’ she said. Sadness marred her divine features for a moment. ‘It was only fear that made me think that we ever were.’

Josh Reynolds The Outcast

‘Filthy trees,’ Goral rumbled. ‘They offend me, Blighthoof.’ The Lord-Duke of Festerfane stroked his steed’s cadaverous neck as he spoke. The horse-thing squealed, shaking its lice-infested mane in what might have been agreement. It pawed at the ground with a hoof, causing the root-riddled soil to split and smoke. Goral leaned forwards in his mouldering saddle as his Rotbringers felled another tree. It toppled with a bone-shaking groan and struck the ground with a loud crash.

‘That’s the way. Hew them down, my brothers. Shatter their branches and befoul their stumps. Make the land weep sweet tears, in Nurgle’s name,’ Goral said, gesturing with his axe, Lifebiter. Filth-stained blades and rusty cleavers bit down again and again, tearing, gouging, chopping. Bark ruptured and roots tore loose of the soil with popping sounds as branches cracked and bent. More trees fell, clearing his warband a path into the heart of the vast, black forest known as the Writhing Weald.

It had taken them days to get this far. Then, the Writhing Weald was more stubborn than most. It had swallowed a dozen warbands over the centuries, remaining verdant and untamed despite the best efforts of Nurgle’s servants. But no longer. As a knight in good standing of the Order of the Fly, it was Goral’s duty — no, his honour — to make these simpering lands fit for the glopsome tread of Grandfather himself. And once he found the forest’s heart, Nurgle’s will would be done.

‘Chop them down and stoke the fires,’ Goral said, trusting his voice to carry to the flyblown ears of all seventy-seven of his warriors. ‘We will choke the air with smoke and ash, and call down a boiling rain once we have found the great stones which are the heart of this place. Grandfather will water the soil with the blessed pus of his Garden, and we shall make this wild place fit for civilised men. By this axe, I so swear.’

Goral lifted Lifebiter and felt the weight of the baleful blessing wrought into its rust-streaked blade. It pulled at his soul and left pleasant welts on his flesh where he clutched it. The weapon had a cruel life of its own, desirous of nothing save the chopping of bark and bone. It had been a gift — a token of appreciation by the Lady of Cankerwall, whose fungal demesne he’d preserved from the depredations of the ancient change-wyrm, Yhul.

He thought of her and smiled. Regal and infested, clad in tattered, mouldering finery, she had seemed sad at his leaving, and pressed Lifebiter on him as a sign of her esteem. The axe had been borne by her father-in-decay, and his father before him all the way back to the beginning of the Age of Chaos, and now Goral carried it, with her blessing and in her service. Its pitted blade had been touched by the finger of Nurgle himself, and imbued with a mighty weird. It was an axe worthy of the name Lifebiter and he hoped he was worthy of its destructive potential, and her trust in him. Like Blighthoof, or the scabrous armour fused to his swollen flesh, it was a sign of Grandfather’s favour.

And that favour was why he, above all others, had been sent to accomplish this task. For it required speed of thought and surety of limb, as well as faith in the will of Nurgle. Goral raised his axe and bellowed encouragement as another tree fell. Around him, his vanguard of pestilent knights did the same, calling out to their brothers in support or mockery as they saw fit. Like Goral, they too served the Order of the Fly, and had supped from the unhallowed grail which dangled from Nurgle’s belt. In them was the strength of despair and the will of the gods made manifest.