Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

They reached a long, twisting defile. The further they went, the higher the banks on either side reared up. Soon the edges were too steep to climb easily, and lined with more thorns, and so the only course was to keep going down to the defile’s end and hope that it was not just another blocked route.

As they went, they heard the thud-thud of footfalls behind them. The narrow gorge amplified the sounds of the pursuers, reminding the tribe just how meagre the gap between hunter and hunted had become. Silently, grimly, the fugitives kept their heads down, trying to ignore the burning in their lungs, and kept going.

Kalja was the first to reach the valley’s end. Its two walls narrowed into a slender gorge, and for a moment she thought they would come together completely. In the end, they remained apart by little more than the width of a man’s waist, revealing a tiny gap through which she could push herself.

She squeezed between the two sides, feeling the hot stone snag at her ragged clothes. The cleft ran for more than twenty yards, and with every step the rock underfoot grew hotter and more oily. Soon Kalja was enclosed in almost complete darkness, and the press of solid rock around her made her want to scream.

Then, abruptly, the passage opened out again. She emerged onto a narrow shelf of rock, and the red sky arched away above her, mottled with gravid cloudbanks and scored with lines of lightning.

She pressed her back to the cliff-face behind her and looked out. The rest of her tribe pushed their way free of the cleft’s mouth and lined up along the shelf.

A broken scree-slope fell away before them, dropping steeply down to the edge of a plain. Obsidian-black terrain stretched off beyond that, marked by sinewy trails of fire and barred by the rolling fumes of sulphur-geysers. In the far north, the darkening horizon was studded with mountainous piles of skulls, blackened by flame. In between the pyramids of bone stood the remains of ancient ramparts, all shattered, standing like ribcages against the turbulent skies. Iron scaffolds studded the ruins, some still bearing broken skeletons on their spiked wheels, and rusting gibbets swung in a growing storm-wind.

The stonework ran for miles, scarring the land as far as the eye could see. Once, the place must have been vast, a whole empire of great buildings. Amid the few edifices that remained, one stood out, derelict, isolated among the wreckage at its feet.

Two massive piers of stone thrust up out of the magma-scored earth, buttressed by statues in the shape of men bending under the burden. Pillars twisted atop those piers, each one carved with runes and bearing more images — dragons, serpents, icons of comets and twisting astrological symbols. The pillars combined into two enormous flanks of a single arch, which terminated in a keystone some three hundred feet above the level of the plain. Winding stone stairs ran up either side of the curves, twisting in and out of old turrets and watchtowers. Black-veined ivy cascaded down its flanks, cracking the stone and exposing glowing threads of magma within, but still the bulk of the structure remained intact, dwarfing all else, resplendent even in its degradation.

Kalja stared at it. An entire army, thousands strong, could have marched beneath that archway, and yet it led nowhere. No road had been built across the blasted delta, and the void under the keystone’s curve gaped emptily, revealing more ruins on the far side.

The others picked their way down the slope towards the plain. Kalja snapped out of her reverie and followed them down. Less than thirty of them had made it, though if those at the rear had been taken, it might buy the rest of them a little more time.

‘What is it?’ whispered Kalja as they hurried down towards the arch’s sweeping shadow.

‘I care not,’ said Svan, not even looking up at it. ‘It cannot hide us, it cannot save us. Stop staring.’

But Kalja could not stop. Her eyes were drawn inexorably upward — to the towers, the sculpted stone, the strange runes that she could not read but which somehow felt meaningful. As she looked on, the air under the arch flexed as if it were liquid and had bulged from the far side. She halted.

Nothing. Hot ash-wind blew through the aperture, unchanged by the stone it passed under, still as foul as it ever was. Another growl of thunder shook the skies, and the clouds raced above them, piling higher with every breath she took. It would be a big storm. Perhaps the rain would foul their tracks and put the bloodreavers off their scent.

A scream pierced the dark, high and terrified. The sound came from the mouth of the cleft, and echoed strangely as it surged out into the open. Kalja knew the owner of that voice, and shivered to think of the torment that could make him cry like that. She shook herself down, forgetting about the ruins and concentrating on the old obsession — to take just one more breath, to live to see just one more dawn.