by Various
Ramus planted his reliquary into the metal between them. ‘This land has been claimed. From the Celestial Realmgate to the Junkar Mountains and beyond the forests of Cartha, this land is Sigmar’s.’
At the name ‘Sigmar’ power lashed from his staff and stung the hulking Ironjaw a blow to the shoulder. Korruk jerked back, bellowed in pain and shock, electric spasms forcing out a grunt of annoyance as he involuntarily yanked on the chain attached to his mount’s spiked collar and locked his thighs down on its neck. It choked out a growl and instinctively threw out a battering-ram punch that smashed Ramus in the gut and off his feet.
His legs flipped over his head. Light to dark. Sky to metal. His face plate smashed the top of the crenel spike, a crack spidering from the left eye socket of his helm. Dark to light, the sky above him. He flung out a hand and caught the spike. His arm snapped taut and jerked him back, slammed his body hard against the fort’s metal wall. Ramus’ feet slid across the wall without getting any kind of purchase.
‘Haha!’ roared the Great Red. ‘Maybe you should both have a go. Hah! Take turns, maybe.’
A flash of light burned like forked lightning through Ramus’ shattered orbit as Vandalus explosively took wing. There was another bark of pain from the Ironjaw, and the clash of blades.
With a grimace, Ramus tested his bicep against his weight and heaved. He began to lift, bellowed as his shoulder passed his elbow, and then tossed his reliquary back inside and hauled himself after it. He collected his staff and rose, lightning pouring into him until the metal beneath him turned blue.
Vandalus and the Great Red were fighting high up above the fort’s roof. The Azyros flitted agilely around the Ironjaw’s monstrous axes, leaving a glowing trail where he passed as though it were a net, cleverly lain to trap the brute in his own savagery.
The megaboss’ metal teeth glinted hungrily, one booming growl rising from his vast jaw without any apparent need for breath. He was a green storm, destruction made manifest, his brute physicality merely the solid housing for a force of nature. His axes flashed down together, forcing Vandalus into a parry that sent the Azyros spinning. The maw-krusha’s claws clenched as though taking the air in its grip and then lunged out. A paw like a gargant’s spiked mace smacked the careening Azyros, and hammered him back down.
Vandalus hit the roof in a blaze of spinning pinions and rolled until he hit the inside of the parapet. Ramus could hear armoured boots pounding up the staircase below. It would be Cassos.
‘Sigmar is the true lord here, beast!’
Lightning stabbed from Ramus’ staff and coursed through the megaboss and his monster. The Ironjaw sprayed Vandalus in phlegm before he could grind his metal jaws shut. Blood ran down his chin as his enormous body seized. Howling, flapping with erratic fury, the maw-krusha crashed back down. Exhausted, Ramus recalled the flow of current and turned to check on Vandalus.
The Knight-Azyros stood up, almost fell right back over, but steadied himself with a widened stance and shook out his light wings, creating a dazzling show of might and colour, as if to ward off a rival or a predator. To Ramus’ surprise, Korruk gave a rumbling chuckle. The Ironjaw dismounted with a gravely structural clang and kicked his war-beast out of the way.
‘You fight good for thunder men. Better than the big boss I killed at the thunder door.’
Vandalus started forwards, only for Ramus to hold him back.
‘Take him,’ hissed Skraggtuff, down by his hip. ‘While his guard’s down.’
Of their own volition, Ramus’ muscles tensed to lift his reliquary, but then he frowned. ‘I did not summon you.’
‘He’s too strong. He doesn’t need you. He won’t listen. End him while you have the chance.’
Ramus lowered his staff. ‘That is Skraggtuff’s voice. But those are not his words.’
A sepulchral chuckle issued from the skull. Not one, in fact, but two, an eerie echoing effect as though he were being laughed at from both sides. The first was gruff and breathy, recognisably Skraggtuff, while the other was the sound of courteous good humour. Korruk ground his thickly armoured slab of neck around, one eye narrowed in annoyance. It was that, rather than the voices from the other side, that turned Ramus’ insides colder than the desert wind.
Ramus was the conduit for the divine storm, the beacon for the soul-eternal.
Only he could speak with the dead.
‘Awake, Skraggtuff,’ whined the skull in a wheedling falsetto. The ogor’s voice was gone, replaced entirely by the urbane imposter that Ramus recognised all too well. ‘So tediously stentorian. Where is Mannfred, Skraggtuff? You are connected through the ether, Skraggtuff.’
Now that it was presented to him, it was clear that the voice had always been there behind the ogor’s words. How had he not heard it before?
‘That voice,’ breathed Vandalus.
‘The Betrayer.’
‘Here, O conduit of the tepid squall, beacon of arrogance eternal. Tell me, are the Stormcast Eternals prone to delusions or is it just you? Imagine, believing that your quaint, half-mastered talents could begin to rival mine.’
The voice tutted, and Ramus realised that it was no longer coming from the skull. A hazy human figure had appeared, wavering about a foot above the rampart. His black, ridged armour was dented and scratched from countless battles, and the red cloak he wore, though magisterial still, was tattered. The wind blew through him, his long dark hair fluttering in some other breeze. His hair was wilder than Ramus remembered, his teeth longer, his eyes redder. His patrician features were horribly burned. Sigmar’s gaze was not so swiftly healed.
‘Poor, pathetic hero.’
‘You brought me here,’ Ramus yelled, fury making his voice crack. ‘You led me by the damned nose. Why?’
‘Temper, temper, Lord-Relictor. What kind of example does that set the peasants?’
‘Why!’
Mannfred laughed. ‘I think we demonstrated back in Cartha that I have little to fear from you.’ He half turned towards Korruk, one melted, hairless eyebrow suggestively raised, like a school master trying to goad the proper answer from a well-intentioned but slow-witted pupil.
‘Me?’ rumbled the Great Red, scrunching up his face in thought.
‘Where have you just been?’ Mannfred prodded.
‘The thunder door.’
Vandalus’ face dropped in understanding. ‘Just think, my friend. Had you gone straight to your realmgate as you suggested then I might never have been able to get by the Ironjawz to take it.’ The megaboss drew up at that. ‘Of course, Great Red here would have killed you out of hand, but we can’t have everything can we, and as he’s likely going to do that anyway, that would have come at no real cost to you.’
The apparition turned to Ramus and bowed. ‘Of all the Stormcasts I have encountered, dear friend, you are the most rigid.’ He grinned, teeth sharp and somehow brighter for their transparency. ‘I appreciate rigidity in my friends. It makes them so much easier to bend.’
‘I am no friend to you, Betrayer,’ Ramus spat, but Mannfred continued as though he had not heard, and turned to the glowering Ironjaw with a long, low bow, cloak falling to a floor that was not there.
‘It will be I, not you, who will be the first to cross the Sea of Bones. The march of my horde will be felt in the Realm of Death.’ With an elaborate flourish, he rose and turned back to Ramus. ‘I will hold our mutual friend Tarsus with affection, when he is my prisoner instead of Nagash’s.’
With a spluttering cry, Ramus thrust his reliquary into Mannfred’s wavering face and cried out to Sigmar for lightning. His staff pulsed blue-white and sprayed power in indiscriminate, arcing forks that carved through the apparition without effect. The vampire replied with a tolerant smile, swept his cloak across him and became a cloud of red that disintegrated on the wind.
‘Dwell upon your failures, Stormcast,’ came the disem
bodied voice, ‘as I make the Sea of Bones mine.’
Korruk’s sudden howl of fury struck Ramus from any fixation on his own boiling blood. Stomping around without another intelligible word, the Ironjaw jumped onto his maw-krusha’s back and kicked the beast into the air. It gave a bellow, flung out its vestigial, leathery wing-flaps and leapt from the parapet. It dropped into the pall like a stone.
Ramus listened as the megaboss’ livid cries receded. He bowed his head as though in prayer. His eyes stung. It was impossible to hear the Ironjaw and not be reminded of the same unthinking rage that had driven him to this place. Despite it, his heart hammered for further vengeance.
If only his own intemperance could be soothed away as readily as the bone cloud took the Ironjaw’s.
‘Vandalus. Brother, I–’
‘What’s done is done, brother. Sigmar will judge you, but not I.’
Ramus hung his head. Such a covenant should have been reassuring, but for some reason the prospect of receiving Sigmar’s judgement gave him a flutter of apprehension.
The Knight-Azyros spread his wings, stowed his starblade, and offered Ramus his hand. ‘What are we waiting for, brother? Would you leave all the fighting to the Ironjawz?’
Ramus lifted his face to the golden light of the Azyros and felt an icy peace quell his heart – the peace that only a certainty of purpose could bring. The Hallowed Knights had departed Azyrheim to renew old alliances, and perhaps a truce with the warriors of Gorkamork had always been Sigmar’s will.
‘They will have all the fight that they please,’ he said as he clasped the Azyros’ gauntleted hand. ‘But Mannfred is mine.’
Only the Faithful
David Guymer
Vandalus cut through the ethereal pall like a javelin. Clouds ripped by. Clouds with faces that screamed with horror and hatred. Clouds with claws that scratched his purple and gold armour.
‘I am a Knight-Azyros of the Astral Templars,’ he shouted into the wind, his warrior’s heart urging that the dead-storm’s challenge be met with a response. ‘I am storm-forged, a herald of Sigmar. I have fought daemons of air and lightning over the molten sky rivers of Chamon. I was forged to fly!’
The wind moaned and cried. Too many voices to comprehend. What Mannfred von Carstein had conjured to conceal his fastness in the Sea of Bones was no mere storm.
Only the restless souls of billions could carry such anguish.
The air was so thick he could barely see his fingertips, could hear little beyond moaning whispers and the crackle of his wings. He only knew which way was down because if he stopped beating his wings for long enough then that was the direction he fell. His first inkling of the Prosecutor in front of him was the repulsive hiss as two sets of Azyrite wings came into contact with a crack of discharge. His shoulder clanged into the other warrior’s hip and both were sent spinning.
‘Vand… ou… doing… ere.’
Vandalus fell, clung to by insubstantial hands. Air whistled through his thrashing wings. He fell for one painfully beaten out heartbeat before managing to right himself, wings flaring out to arrest his descent.
His heart hammered on, regardless. Head spinning, he scanned the boiling souls around him and spotted the glint of purple and gold of an Astral Templars Prosecutor. Dust and sand battered the warrior’s already badly scuffed armour, the halo thrown off by his beating wings humming with static. Vandalus recognised him as Kanutus, one of the warriors called from Sigmaron to pursue the vampire into the desert.
‘You’re supposed to be on the left flank,’ Vandalus yelled, swinging his arm in that direction. ‘The left!’
‘… what… say… on… right.’
Vandalus shook his head and banged the side of his helm with his gauntlet. What he wouldn’t give to look into Kanutus’ eyes and see his lips move.
‘Any sign of the vampire? Or the Celestial Realmgate he holds?’
‘By… the… agon… see… thing.’
‘All this time he’s been ahead of us, brother. Now he makes the mistake of standing still and we have him. The orruks and our brothers punish the undying’s legions, but they can’t fight the entire Sea of Bones.’
The Prosecutor shrugged off a clutching shade. ‘Spe… for your… elf. I will… gladly… em all.’
‘We need a direction to attack if we are to take the head of this snake.’
Vandalus gestured to signal that he was going down. His wings dipped. The relentless soul-drag on his shoulders waned. For a moment he hung, unsuspended, pulled under by shapeless fingers – then he tilted forward. The blood rushed to his head and he grinned.
With a whoop, he dropped. The dead surged to smother him, but he was an arrow and pierced them layer by layer, reducing them to tatters in his wake, the Sea of Bones a dust-strewn target billowing up to greet him. He saw a patch of dark against the churning white of the sky, then the curve of a dune and the spiky outline of gigantic bones. They became more defined as the soul-clouds were stripped away, almost as if they were growing out of the Sea of Bones to impale him.
From the ground, the Sea of Bones was dust: rising dust disturbed from the earth by the march of armies; falling dust carried in on the cry of the soul-wind. And where the two met and merged, blinding dust, shrinking each warrior’s battlefield to a gritty fugue of rattling bone and bobbing witchlights.
From the air however, it became more. It moved, undulated, almost a living thing comprised of the two vast armies that pushed and strove against each other.
The warclans of the Great Red Ironjawz were a wall of red and black, fifty thousand of them or more in impressively monstrous armour, lumping forward like flowing lava. The deathless legions crushed against them were of another order entirely. Rank upon rank, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder and marching tirelessly, went way back into the haze. Stick shadows, lurching through the dust cloud. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of bony, scrappily armoured heads and shoulders, spears waving above them.
The Great Red’s ironclad siege boats lobbed green-tinged energy that blasted open the skeletal legions, while gargants of bone and weird horrors of dust waded through entire mobs of Ironjawz. Dead things screamed. Orruks howled. Catapults twanged back and forth. Hundreds of warchanters drummed out a dervish beat. A charge of gore-gruntas – the orruks’ savage boar cavalry – momentarily filled the air with grunts and snapping bone before a weirdnob brought a massive ectoplasmic foot stamping into the ground. With a great ripping of bone, a skeleton so vast that the clouds had to part around it tipped into the hole that the orruk’s magic had thumped into the ground, and began to collapse.
Vandalus saw more devastation in that one moment than in all his lives before.
‘Thunder man.’
Korruk the Great Red hung in the air, his maw-krusha working vestigial wings to carry him towards Vandalus. His massive, clawed gauntlets each held an axe, one an enormous half-moon in black, the other flat-bladed like a butcher’s cleaver and blood red. His head was the one part of his body left unarmoured, the black and red pattern reversed with a slash of crimson paint over the dark, scarred flesh. He grinned a mouthful of bloody iron teeth.
It had been the Great Red who had first taken the Celestial Realmgate from the Astral Templars tasked with its defence and then built a fort on it. But common enemies demanded uncommon allies.
‘A good enough fight for you?’
‘Hah!’ Korruk replied simply.
‘This landscape has changed since I saw it last. Do you know which way our... your... old fortress lies?’
The hulking Ironjaw pointed Red Axe into the murk. Vandalus held up his celestial lantern and drew back its gilded shutter. Golden light streamed from the opening and, for one brief moment, burned a clear path through the wailing spirits.
Made bitty by dust and distance, lapped at by an ocean of bobbing spears, a citadel rose from the Sea of Bones
like the spines of a surfacing kraken. The ossified edifice was blistered with Ironjaw scrap fortifications. Most of those structures had suffered damage or been torn down, and the latter made a jagged earthwork of mangled iron around the basilica’s dust-shrouded basin.
The Ironjaw defences were new to him, but even the citadel itself was different to Vandalus’ memory of it. Cancerous, bony growths threw up bizarrely shaped towers, twisting battlements and ridges. The realmgate was there, strobing a fitful blue at the citadel’s heights where the original, long-destroyed stronghold had been raised to control it. He was no Lord-Relictor, but he could see that it looked damaged somehow. Scores of fizzing, intermittent copies of it slashed the sky, others partially or wholly buried under the ground and spitting out great geysers of sand.
‘What madness is this?’
‘Dunno,’ rumbled Korruk. ‘It wasn’t broken when my boyz were here.’
‘Then the vampire did this. I have to tell Ramus.’
The Great Red gave a huge shrug and dropped. Vandalus saw the maw-krusha thump into the middle of a block of skeleton warriors like a bludgeon scattering sticks.
Listening to the bellows of ‘Waaagh!’ as Korruk and his beast got stuck in, Vandalus followed him down.
Levelling off gracefully, he plunged between a yawning pair of ribs a hundred feet high and flashed across the length of the battlefront. Tarnished helmet. Ragged banner. Snap of claw. Splash of red. Orruk. Undead. Orruk. The undead forces were essentially interchangeable throughout, numerous as grains of sand in the desert, and like sand, no hardship at all to throw in an enemy’s face.
The line stretched over several dozen miles and scores of brutal clan-scale melees, and even at his speed and altitude he could not yet make out the far end of it.
Lightning laced what was nominally earth to what was notionally sky, stitching bone dust and soul-ash with a sputtering light. It was there that the Hallowed Knights lent their disciplined solidity to the sheer numbers of their Ironjawz allies.