Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

As the two warriors spun apart, the dracoth took on the daemon-hound, and together the two beasts fell into a snarling, snapping brawl. Khul swept back in close, thrusting his blade at Vandus’s body, and this time the collision nearly wrenched Heldensen from his grip.

‘Your gifts have not made you stronger,’ said Khul, mockingly. ‘You were weak then, you are weaker now.’

Vandus swung the hammerhead across, generating huge momentum, but the blow rebounded from Khul’s counter-strike and the fires along its ensorcelled length guttered out. Calanax was holding its own against Grizzlemaw, but nothing seemed to harm the Lord of Khorne. They traded more swipes, denting and cracking the armour they both wore, and neither broke through to give the decisive wound. The wider battle raged about them, though no warrior dared to intervene in their lords’ duel, locked as they were in deadly struggles of their own.

Khul changed tack then, falling back by a stride’s length. The dracoth sensed the retreat and thrust after him, trying to seize him by the neck. Grizzlemaw leapt for the creature’s scaled shoulder and lodged fast, driving its yellow teeth into the flesh. The dracoth reared, wrenching himself from the daemon-hound’s grip, giving Khul his opening as Vandus struggled to control his mount — the warlord’s axe found a way through, biting deep along Vandus’s armoured thigh, and the Lord-Celestant cried aloud.

The blood warriors in earshot roared with scorn as they heard the sound, and the Liberators felt a shard of doubt enter their souls. The duel had become the locus around which the entire battle revolved — with no breakthrough from either army, it had come down to the survival of the lords that led them.

Khul sprang back, evading Vandus’s vengeful strike, panting hard. For all his mastery, he too had taken heavy damage, and his strength, though immense, was not infinite.

‘Will you be taken from me again, I wonder?’ mused Khul, circling the dracoth, keeping his axe-edge high. ‘At the moment when I hold your life in my hands, will your God-King pull you from peril as he did before?’

Vandus barely heard the words. Everything he had done since his Reforging now hung on this moment. He had been sent to Aqshy to slay the warlords who ruled it, and now, with the storm of Sigmar’s wrath circling above him, he was still holding back. His power felt blunted, incomplete. Every time he aimed Heldensen at his adversary, his aim lacked the sharpness it had possessed in a hundred other duels.

The dracoth was undeterred, and lashed out fiercely at the hound. The two beasts were bleeding freely now, their jaws a mess of torn flesh. Khul prowled back for the next strike, his dark outline radiating a casual lethality.

‘Why even return?’ the warlord asked. ‘Can you not see it? There is nothing left. You should have kept the Gate closed — we will come hunting for you now, just as you have done for us.’

The taunt had been designed to enrage him, to place the fear in him that Azyr too might be at peril, but Vandus did not linger on those words. The ones that resonated with him were the others: there is nothing left.

And then he understood. His grief had risen when he had seen what he was fighting for — the fire-scarred wastes, the old ruins. That was not what he had once striven to protect. He had breathed the realm’s parched air and smelled its charred bones, and his mighty heart had sunk.

Even now, an aspect of him was lodged in that other world, the place in which all his old loves had dwelt. He had been a part of that, and in the long years of preparation a part of him had hoped something would be left to retrieve — some survivors, some mark of the old civilisation. When it was clear that the past was lost, that hope had dissolved. He could not fight for the Aqshy of the present as he might have done for the Aqshy of the past.

And therein lay his fault — he had let his old self swim up to the surface, for the grief was not his, it was Vendell’s. Vandus had not been sent to restore the realm of the past, he had been sent to create the realm of the future.

Heldensen roared into flame once more. The sign of the comet emblazoned on his armour burst out with a pure light, reflecting the hidden glory of the Celestial Realm. Vandus pulled the dracoth’s head around, driving him hard at the waiting figure of Korghos Khul.

The warlord gave no sign he had detected the change, and raced to rejoin battle. Their weapons smashed into one another once again, but this time it was the axe that rebounded, its fires wavering. Vandus flung down another blow, knocking Khul back and sending him staggering.

Vandus spoke no words, for his fury was now enough. Khul recovered himself, his laughter gone. In a thousand years he had never been bested, and he surged back into contact, his blade whirling about him in tighter circles.