Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

All around him his men were slaughtering the Chaos warband. The Chaos warriors had approached confidently, almost eagerly, seeing the Stormcasts as worthy foes. Little did they realise how outmatched they were.

The clash of arms and shouts lessened, until all the warriors lay dead.

‘We have finished them, my lord. Victory!’ called Perun.

‘Victory! Victory!’ chanted the Bladestorms.

Thostos looked down at the man he had killed. The knight had been huge, granted great strength and size by his patron. The fashioning of his armour would have bankrupted a good-sized kingdom of the old realms, being set with precious stones and rare metals. Thostos cleaned his weapons with a thought, the magic of them boiling off the blood from hammerhead and sword edge. He sheathed his runeblade and bent down, reaching for the knight’s helmet with his free hand.

‘What are you doing, Lord-Celestant?’ asked Perun.

‘I would look upon this man that I have slain.’

The helm slid free. Unlike some they had slaughtered, the armour had not fused itself to the man’s flesh, and the face beneath was untouched by the warping power of Tzeentch. His eyes were closed, his face slack.

‘Look at him. In death there is no emotion, no wickedness. He seems to sleep, and his face could be that of any man.’

‘Aye, but it is not any man,’ said Perun. ‘He is a follower of Chaos, a traitor to all mortal kindreds. He bartered his soul away for power.’

‘He did,’ said Thostos. His gaze remained fixed upon the dead man’s face. ‘But I wonder how much choice he had in the matter. Did he take the road willingly, or was he forced down it at sword point, for fear of his family’s fate?’

‘We all had our choices, lord,’ said Perun angrily. ‘And we took a different way.’

‘Those were different times,’ said Thostos. ‘In those days men threw in their lot with the Dark Powers for gain, that is true. But to be born into this.’ He extended a hand and swept it around the barren mountainsides, the bare valley cloaked in thorny scrub. ‘What choice would he have?’

‘They die. We have our vengeance, that is what matters.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Thostos. He cast the helm aside. ‘But our anger might be better spared for the masters, and not the slaves.’

Already carrion birds were alighting upon the slain with a clatter of bronze feathers. Two spread their wings and darted their heads at one another. They hissed puffs of steam from pistons in their wings as they contested for the choicest scraps. A third hopped onto the chest of a fallen follower of Tzeentch and began nipping through the breastplate with a serrated beak of steel more akin to forge shears than the mouth of a living creature.

Thostos looked to the plateau in the west. The shapes of ruined buildings crazed the horizon. Behind them something massive shimmered, part obscured by distance and magic.

‘We draw close to the fortress,’ said Thostos. ‘The mightiest redoubt in this region. There we will find the lords of these lands, and we shall kill them.’

‘A worthy target for my hammer,’ said Perun.

As they proceeded west the sky cleared, and the land grew hotter the closer they drew to the city. The sun beat down on them as it crawled overhead, heating their sigmarite armour intolerably. The rocks and gritty soil of the region glinted with innumerable mineral fragments, a scintillation that was as disorienting as it was beautiful. The city wavered in the heat, parts of it vanishing in the haze so that it appeared the great tower at its heart floated on the air.

As they drew closer, the jagged shapes upon the cliff resolved themselves into a vast, eight-towered castle, far larger than they had anticipated. The fortress dominated the centre of Elixia, a plateau dense with metal ruins. Sharply angled walls of metal and stone rose high over the wreckage of the city, studded with long spikes and covered with thousands of glinting copper skulls. The castle’s heart was wholly of metal — an enormous tower, impossibly high. No mortal construction could have been made so tall.

Thostos raised his hand and the column of Bladestorms came to a halt.

‘This fortress is too great for us alone. Prosecutors!’

A group of winged warriors hurried to the head of the column. Thostos addressed them.

‘Fly with word to Lord-Celestant Cumulos, Lord-Celestant Vard and Lord-Castellant Barahan at the Bright Tor Gate. Tell them to send as many of our brothers as they can spare. After you have informed Eldroc, take the Silverway to Sigmaron. I will provide a message to our lord Sigmar, asking that he return the rest of the Celestial Vindicators to Anvrok. This realm will not be so easily won after all.’

CHAPTER NINE Lord Maerac