Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

Quick as hate, the rat-daemon was on him, blades flashing down towards the joints of his armour. With desperate speed he squirmed backwards through the muck of the fen, blocking the blows as he went. Sigmar, he’s a fast one, he thought. The rat-daemon leaned in and struck, its curved blade screeching off his war-helm in a shower of greasy sparks. Zephacleas drove his feet up into its gut and sent it flying over his head. It slammed down a few feet away, its fleshless snout digging a trench in the mire.

Zephacleas rolled to his feet, hammer in hand, narrowly avoiding a flailing kick from the verminlord. It scrambled around on all fours, body contorted in a bestial fashion. Its tail lashed out, and the bladed tip tore the weapon from his hands with stinging force. He flung himself aside as the rat-daemon pounced. Sweat coated his face, and his breath rasped in his lungs as he rose to one knee and clawed for the hilt of his runeblade. He jerked back instinctively as the verminlord’s bladed tail skittered off his helm, nearly blinding him. Quickly he reached out and caught the ropy length of the tail as it curled back around. In the same motion, he drew his blade and chopped down, severing the twisting, squirming appendage. The rat-daemon squealed in agony and rage.

Zephacleas flung the still-writhing lump of flesh aside, but the verminlord hissed and charged with arms wide. The creature’s blades tore one of Zephacleas’s pauldrons loose as he lunged forward. Frantically he twisted, bringing his sword through its chest and out of the rat-daemon’s back in a gout of brackish blood and foul-smelling steam. Its weight carried it past him and he ripped his weapon free as it fell, body already beginning to dissolve into clumps of mouldering hair and rotting meat. Hairless, blind rats squirmed out of the sagging mass and scampered away, squealing obscenely.

Zephacleas had little time to see to the vermin. The remaining skaven were fleeing with high-pitched squeals of panic, clawing at one another in their haste to escape the enemy. The daemonic legions, however, showed no indication that they were at all concerned by the rout of their allies. Plaguebearers lurched towards the thin line of Astral Templars and Hallowed Knights, as nurglings burbled ahead of them in a cackling wave. He tensed and readied himself to meet their charge, only to be knocked to one knee. The ground suddenly erupted in thrashing tendrils of bark and vine, obliterating daemons on all sides.

They were not alone in their fate.

All around him, great roots burst from the ailing soil as quick as bolts from a Judicator’s crossbow. The roots rent and throttled daemons wherever they found them, and those creatures that escaped their deadly grasp were torn apart or stamped flat by the vast talons and crashing feet of the thing storming towards them with earth-shaking strides. To Zephacleas it resembled a tree, but one imbued with hateful purpose and ferocity far beyond any creature of common flesh. It towered over the foe, and pummelled them with heavy fists as it stomped past him.

Treelord, he thought, in horrified wonder. He had never seen such a being, but he had heard the tales — all Stormcasts had: stories of marching forests, and the wrath of the deep woods on any who dared threaten the realms of the mistress of the Sylvaneth.

Behind the bark-born giant came a clattering warglade of Sylvaneth dryads, crooning an eerie song of slaughter. With whipping, vicious talons they stabbed and strangled any daemons that had survived the treelord’s initial charge. The Lord-Celestant stepped back as a sharp-limbed dryad bounded past him to pounce upon a plaguebearer. He stepped forward, hammer raised, to help the treekin and the dryad whirled with a hiss.

He lowered his weapon and took a step back. The dryad turned back to its prey and stabbed branch-like fingers into the daemon’s one bleary eye. The plaguebearer bucked and kicked as the dryad peeled its skull apart.

After a moment, the dryad rose, hissed at Zephacleas again, and then loped away. He watched it go, uncertain as to whether it was advisable to follow. Had Sigmar’s messengers found Alarielle? Or were these treekin acting on their own savage initiative?

A moment later, his question was answered. The last daemon fell, pulled apart by two squabbling dryads. The treelord shoved the two creatures aside and moved ponderously towards the remaining Stormcast. Zephacleas rejoined the others; Gravewalker and the Judicator-Prime of the Hallowed Knights followed him.

‘Solus,’ Zephacleas murmured. ‘Good to see you still breathing.’

‘For now, at any rate,’ Solus said, wiping pestilential muck from the blade of his gladius. His once-pristine armour was caked in mud and grime. ‘Gardus?’

‘Gone,’ Zephacleas said.

Solus nodded, knowing well enough what that meant. ‘Most of us are,’ he said softly.