Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

Grizzlemaw, though, was in their path. The daemon-hound snatched the spirits from the air, and ripped them from reality with a shake of his neck.

Ionus felt their deaths as an icy spike through his heart, and his last strength gave out. His golden helm struck the ground, and his hands slipped free of the reliquary’s staff.

Khul walked towards him idly, hoisting the axe high and preparing to use it, when a lone voice cut through the battling warriors around them.

‘No further.’

Khul turned, and a broad smile creased across his bony jawline. Grizzlemaw growled and raised its hackles, but the warlord merely prepared himself, bracing the axe across his body and planting his feet firmly for the onslaught.

‘Then all is accomplished,’ he said, his deep voice resonant with pleasure. ‘You face me at last, and thus my final trophy finds its home.’

Setting eyes on Khul at last, Vandus felt a surge of old emotions. His dracoth roared, desperate to strike, and the daemon-hound did likewise. In every direction, Liberators, Retributors and blood warriors remained locked in mortal combat, a sweep of violence that ran from the Gate’s edge to the mouth of the valley beyond. Everything was in motion, everything was poised.

And yet he could not move. The warlord of Chaos stood before him, just as he had been in the other age. He had grown in stature since then, and there were more skulls hanging from his iron belt, but the crimson helm and the black-toothed mouth were the same, as was the crackling axe-blade at his side that had laid whole kingdoms low.

For the first time since setting foot in this land, Vandus felt his twin lives truly blur. He was the Lord-Celestant, bringer of Sigmar’s wrath. He was the chief of the Direbrands, doomed to die before the blades of the Goretide.

Khul fixed him with his dark eyes and amusement twitched across his exposed mouth.

‘The one who ran,’ he said. ‘That is what they named you, in the later years. They cursed that name even as I killed them.’

Those words hit home. Vandus remembered how it had been — the howl of anguish, the pleading to be sent back. Every soul he had pledged to protect had died that night, bereft of the warhammer that would have been wielded in their defence.

‘This realm is now taken from you,’ Vandus said, holding the dracoth back, loath to launch the attack that he had been created to make. ‘The Gate is secured. You have no purpose here but to die at my hand.’

Khul remained smiling, and flickers of blood-red fire raced across the edge of his axe-blade. ‘No purpose? You are my purpose, Direbrand. You are the culmination of my great quest, and when your age-bleached bones are placed atop the pyre of Khorne, then all these realms will be mine.’

The voice was so terrifyingly familiar. Vandus remembered the raw fear, how he had forced himself to fight through it. All mortals were subject to that fear — Khul was a creature of a maddened pantheon, a mere cipher for their limitless malice. The stuff of Chaos leaked out from his every pore, and though he was already less than a man, it would take but a fraction more power to make him far greater than a daemon.

‘The God-King foresaw this day,’ replied Vandus. His voice was as steady as his weapon-arm, but it belied the turmoil within — he spoke to remind himself as much as he did to challenge his old adversary. ‘You laughed then, but your defeat was already ordained.’

‘Laughed?’ roared Khul, outraged. ‘Gods of Ruin, boy, I was enraged! I laid a dozen kingdoms in ashes and still my thirst was not slaked.’ But he was laughing truly now, his eyes shining with a raw exuberance. ‘If I had known that you would return, that the only one of my enemies who had ever escaped me would come back to me, I would have spared them so much pain.’ He fixed Vandus with a sardonic look, utterly unafraid, drenched in the strutting confidence he had always displayed before the kill. ‘They died because you left them, Direbrand. That is the truth of it, and you know it in whatever heart your God-King has given you.’

Boy. That was what the warlord had called him, just before the lightning had come. In truth he must have been little more than a child then, bearing weapons forged from crude metal and defending collections of hovels barely capable of standing in a gale. Now he was the first of the Legions of Azyr, gifted power beyond mortal reckoning, and still the word ‘boy’ cut him to his soul.

Vandus. Vendell.

That was enough.

He released his hold over the dracoth, and took up his warhammer as the creature powered into the charge. At the same moment, the daemon-hound pounced, joined by its master in the race to combat. Khul leapt high, striving to reach Vandus and launching a great circuit of his axe. Vandus parried, and the two weapons clanged from one another, sending a shockwave blazing out from the impact.