Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

‘Only the faithful,’ he said hoarsely, his throat scraped raw. He stepped down off the dais, weapons in hand, and began to follow the noise of battle. Though the song had fallen silent, still its melody remained in him, and he knew what he must do. Ghyran suffered a blight, and it was up to him to help cleanse it. Whatever afflicted this glade would be first.

Gardus picked up speed, the ache in his muscles and the burning in his lungs forgotten as he followed the screams of the dying and the splintering of wood. A discordant blaring of horns sounded from the southern edge of the clearing, sending a tremor of disgust through his soul. He had heard that sound before, in Nurgle’s realm. He swept out his hammer, smashing a toppled branch thick with maggoty fungus from his path. The servants of Nurgle were close, and Gardus would see them pay for all that he had endured. He struck a rotting, fallen tree with his shoulder, reducing it to a cloud of splinters. Then he was half-staggering into the midst of a battle, surrounded by noise and slaughter.

Heaps of dead skaven lay everywhere, and mingled amongst them were the shattered bodies of sylvaneth dryads. Hordes of ratmen clad in filthy robes scuttled through the trees towards the retreating dryad-groves. Nearby, a fallen treelord groaned and collapsed into a pile of rotting wood and rancid sap as a skaven, larger than the others, struck him with a smoking censer-ball. Gardus took a half-step forward, but as the treelord’s dying groan swept through the clearing, he saw hulking warriors force themselves between the fungus-riddled trees on the glade’s southern edge. The bloated blightkings charged towards the dryads with glottal war cries. Axes and scythes hacked down treekin and spilled ruddy sap into the muck.

Already in disarray, the treekin recoiled in obvious panic. More dryads fell to the skaven; frenzied plague monks stabbed rusted blades into supple bark, tearing festering wounds in their foes. The blightkings added to the tally of the fallen with single-minded brutality.

Gardus plunged towards them, ploughing through a swarm of ratmen who, having noticed his arrival, sought to drag him down. The skaven came at him in a scrabbling rush. Gardus killed the first to reach him with a blow from his hammer, and decapitated the second. Soon, however, he was surrounded by hairy forms. Rusty blades scraped against his armour, digging for a vital spot. He swept out his arms, flinging broken bodies through the air. With the last of the ratmen twitching out their death-agonies in the mud, he moved towards the servants of Nurgle, intent on lending aid to the sylvaneth.

As he ran, Gardus saw a single branchwraith, gnarled and weathered by age and war, tear one of the swollen warriors messily in two with a flurry of lashing vines. Even as the halves of the body slopped to the ground, the branchwraith hunched forward and thrust her clawed hands into the earth. A green shimmer blazed about her inhuman form, growing brighter and brighter, until she suddenly tore her claws free and dragged them upwards. A tangle of roots and vines came with them, and the ground ruptured as thorny tendrils burst from the murk to ensnare the blightkings.

But the brutes could not be stopped. They stomped and hacked at the lashing tendrils, fighting their way towards the branchwraith and her retinue. Gardus roared in fury as he pounded towards the blightkings, and one of the warriors hesitated and turned towards him, pox-marked blade raised. Gardus didn’t slow.

‘Who will be victorious?’ he bellowed, as he brought his hammer down on the blightking’s skull. Such was the force of his blow that he ripped the warrior’s head from its blubbery neck. ‘Only the faithful,’ he continued, whipsawing around and slashing his sword across the throat of a second foe. He kicked the dying blightking aside. ‘Only the faithful!’

Divine lightning crackled across him as he clashed his weapons. ‘Turn, plague-dogs, turn,’ he roared. ‘Turn and face me!’

His blade smashed down, cleaving a blightking from skull to sternum. Gardus tore the blade free in a snarl of lightning, and spun to cut the legs out from under another of the pox-warriors. He drove his boot into the fallen blightking’s skull hard enough to crumple the rusty helm the warrior wore. Smoke rose as the white fires that crawled across the Stormcast burned away the daemonic slurry that befouled his armour.