Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

Sleikh raised himself up, sniffing the night air. The pack-leader’s red eyes stared, peering into blackness. Then he hissed, and a smile twisted his wolfish features.

‘They stink yet,’ he whispered, reaching for his bloody axe handle. ‘This way.’

The others crept closer, fingering their hooks, their axes, their chains. The weapons were poorly made, for who but the warlords of the Brass Keeps could command forges to give them what they needed? The bloodreavers were the scavengers, the gory-mawed beasts that prowled the flickering edges of camp-fires. They used whatever they could loot or fashion from the wilds, and that was enough to break flesh and flense muscle.

‘Follow,’ ordered Sleikh, loping out into the night.

Rakh darted after him, as did all the others, and the hunt resumed again.

Aqshy, the realm was called, though none but the most powerful of its denizens would ever have known that. Here, on the Brimstone Peninsula, the bones of the land were forged in fire, and under its rocky mantle ancient furnaces boiled and churned. Before the ages of ruin it had been teeming with life, lent vigour by the magical currents coursing over its mountains and gorges.

Those years were forgotten now, scraped clean from history by the ceaseless procession of damned armies. The cities of the realm were gone, the kingdoms were gone, overrun and turned into sucking quagmires of spilled ichor. New citadels took their place — temples to violence, clad in bronze and bound in brass, housing thrones of iron around which the blood boiled in runnels. The killing continued even when all possible dreams of conquest had been satiated, goaded on by the whims of cruel gods. The number of the dead had been incalculable, but in truth they had been the fortunate ones, for they had not lived to see what reality was capable of being turned into.

All that remained in Aqshy were the Lords of Ruin — mortal champions of the Pantheon, striding across the earth they had despoiled in the hope of finding something fresh to kill. With the demise of any true resistance, they turned on their own kind, launching swollen hordes at one another in a perpetual orgy of slaughter. The only ones who could survive for long in such a crucible were the Gifted — those blessed with the trappings of daemonic power or possessors of fell weapons. Dark magic swirled and simmered across the bone-strewn wastelands, fuelling the cycle of murder further, provoking the feuds that kept the anvils ringing and the forges blazing.

For the less exalted, all that remained was a kind of half-life, forever clinging to the edge of oblivion. Children were still born, and so the progeny of mankind lingered, but they were never more than prey, slaves or fodder, predated on by the chosen of the victorious Dark Gods. To stay alive for more than two decades was considered fortunate, to make it to three was exceptional. After that, the rigours of life in hell were too destructive. There were no scholars, no princes, no wizards and no priests — just a desperate, scrabbling, grasping fight to draw one more breath, gain one more heartbeat and see one more blighted sunrise before the tides of killing caught up.

Kalja’s tribe, for all the stories they told themselves, were no different to the thousands whose light had endured for a brief time before being stamped out. They ran with desperation but with no hope. Only the manner of death remained an ambition — to meet annihilation cleanly, with little agony; that was the prize.

Kalja pushed the pace, feeling her breathing grow ragged but knowing that a single slip now would end it. Svan kept up with her, the rest straggling behind, stumbling as the land became lumpen and twisted around them.

From the wider Brimstone Peninsula, they had reached the southern edges of the Igneus Delta and the earth was breaking beneath their feet. Fissures opened up, some clogged and dry, others glowing from the exposed fires below. Plumes of sulphurous steam roiled across the crusted landscape, breaking into slivers across the thorny clusters of iron-limbed plants.

It was hard to make any progress in that terrain — they would stumble down a wide gully only to see it end in a rubble-strewn cliff, or they would race across flattened plates before finding themselves surrounded by pools of boiling lava. Everything stank, and the heat dragged at them, making it a torture just to breathe.

‘This place will kill us quicker than they will,’ gasped Renek, limping badly from a gash on his left thigh — the thorn-clusters were vicious.

‘Pray that you are right,’ muttered Kalja, charging onwards, not allowing the weak to slow her. It was just possible the bloodreavers would settle for the stragglers that night, so it paid to keep to the front of the herd.