by Various
Gage stared at it in horror. ‘Curseling,’ he whispered.
He’d read of such monsters, and heard stories from other members of his order. Curselings had once been men, before their lust for secret knowledge had twisted them into silent repositories of foul lore. The growth on its shoulder was a tretchlet, a daemonic homunculus – a physical manifestation of all that the curseling had learned.
The eyeless tretchlet gibbered in excitement and slashed the air with its staff, as if urging its hulking sibling on. The curseling’s breath rasped like a bellows, gusting from the vents in its featureless helm. It swung the flail again, splintering a log and showering Gage with shards of bark. He ducked back. He couldn’t match its strength.
He glanced around, seeking aid, but it looked as if his companions were preoccupied. Kuva was surrounded by a ring of acolyte blades. He could hear Carus bellowing nearby, and the shriek of his gryph-hound. And Bryn…
‘Khazukan Khazuk-ha!’ Bryn roared as he crashed into the curseling, knocking it back a step. The duardin spun his hammer about as if it weighed less than nothing, striking again and again. Bryn glanced at Gage. ‘You called, I came, manling.’ He hit the curseling again, staggering it.
With a snarl, it slashed at him, the burning blade carving greasy contrails through the air before it chopped into the floor. The duardin avoided the blow and drove the ferrule of his hammer into the side of the creature’s skull. The curseling moaned and caught Bryn a glancing blow with its flail, sending the duardin skidding across the warehouse floor, scattering acolytes.
The creature spun away from the dazed duardin, moving quicker than Gage had expected. The vile, blue-green radiance of its baroque war-plate stung his eyes, and he fell back before its onslaught. The flail it wielded in one hand slammed down, shattering the wooden planks of the floor. A moment later, its sword hissed out, trailing unnatural flames. Gage retreated, trying to put some distance between them.
Beyond the curseling, he could see Kuva fighting her way towards Bryn, who was clambering slowly to his feet. Acolytes crouched on the walkways above chanted and gestured, unleashing crackling bolts of sorcerous energy. The aelf dived aside, narrowly avoiding the explosive darts. She leapt over the cursing duardin, and lightly scrambled up the stack of logs, her eyes fixed on the walkways above.
He lost sight of his companions as the curseling’s flail snapped out again, nearly taking his head off. He ducked aside and drew a thin line of ichor from its bare arm with the tip of his rapier. The monstrous tretchlet undulated towards him, its eyeless face contorted in a snarl. It swung its staff at his head, gibbering in rage.
A long blade interposed itself, catching the blow. Carus forced the curseling back a step, as staff and sword screeched apart in a scattering of sparks.
‘No, beast, face me,’ the Stormcast rumbled. ‘I am Sigmar’s light, and his wrath, made manifest. I am the faithful.’
The curseling groaned in wordless anticipation and stomped towards this new foe. Gage took the opportunity to draw the second of his pistols. He took aim at the curseling’s broad back as it traded thunderous blows with the Lord-Veritant – the two massive warriors seemed evenly matched, but Gage had no intention of leaving things to chance.
The curseling was only a slave – a tool of the cult. Its master, the cult’s magister, would be close by, watching the fray through the eyes of the curseling itself. The magister was Tarn. It had to be. But the question was – where was he? Gage pushed the thought aside. Time enough for that later. He took a steadying breath and squeezed the trigger.
The boom of the pistol was loud, but the curseling’s scream was even louder. It convulsed in agony and spun. It lunged, and its burning blade nearly opened Gage from crown to crotch. The tretchlet spat something in a shrill voice, and a sorcerous bolt erupted from the homunculus’ twitching hands. Gage swung behind a support pillar. Heat enveloped him as the bolt struck it. He could smell fire, and realised that the warehouse had been set aflame.
The curseling’s blade chopped into the pillar, just above his head. Gage shoved away from it and slashed at the brute. It groaned and struck at him with its flail. An acolyte lunged at Gage, blade slashing a button from his coat. He spitted the cultist, all too aware of the curseling looming over him, blade raised. He turned and looked up into the creature’s empty gaze. There was no malice there, no hatred – only passionless intent. It was an automaton of meat, hollowed out and repurposed by forces beyond the ken of man. It raised its blade, and the flames limning its brutal length blazed with hideous radiance.
With a howl, Zephyr leapt atop it. The gryph-hound savaged the tretchlet with her beak as she clung to the brute’s shoulder. The curseling warbled in rage and began to thrash, trying to dislodge the tenacious beast. Gage saw his chance and lunged, driving his blade home into the creature’s unprotected armpit. His sword grated on bone and then sunk past, into something soft. Something important, he hoped.
The curseling stiffened, twin screams echoing from both heads. It staggered back, pulling itself off Gage’s blade. With a convulsive heave, it hurled the gryph-hound away before turning and lumbering off into the darkness, leaving a trail of ichor in its wake.
Gage took a step after it. It would take more than that to kill such a beast. Several acolytes moved to block his path. They raised their hands, chanting, conjuring sorcerous bolts. He tensed as the searing bursts of magical energy hurtled towards him, too close to dodge. Suddenly, Carus stepped between Gage and the sorcerous missiles. He swept out his staff, and the shimmering bolts dissipated in the light of the Lantern of Abjuration.
From above, he heard a scream, and stepped back as the body of an acolyte crashed to the floor. He looked up and saw Kuva on the walkway, war-axe dark with the blood of her foes. The aelf looked down and gestured with her head.
‘Gage – go! The duardin and I are more than capable of killing a few fools in bird masks.’
Gage hesitated, but only for a moment. She was right. He caught Carus’ eye and gestured. The Lord-Veritant nodded solemnly and whistled. His gryph-hound gave a squalling bark and loped in pursuit of the fleeing curseling. The nimble beast would stay on its trail, whatever obstacle lay between them.
Carus started after the creature, his tread shaking the floorboards. His staff snapped out to club one acolyte from his feet, even as his sword slashed down to crack another’s shield in two. Gage hurried in his wake, reloading his pistol as he ran.
‘Come, witch hunter,’ Carus growled. ‘Our quarry seeks the safety of the shadows. Let us drag him into the light!’
Chapter Three
THE STEEL SOULS
Serena Sunstrike, Liberator of the Steel Souls Warrior Chamber, caught the first blow on her shield. Guided by instincts honed on the training fields of the Gladitorium, the Hallowed Knights warrior swept a second slash aside with her warblade. Undaunted, her attacker lunged, pressing its assault with a savage ferocity. She met it, matching her mystically enhanced prowess against its unnatural strength.
The beast before her might have been a man once. Now it was a twisted thing, avian-like, with curling horns and a curved, stabbing beak. Its blue flesh was marked by intricate tattoos and ruinous sigils, and its bronze armour stank of unnatural oils. It leapt forwards, yelping and gibbering, a serrated blade in either hand, trying to force her back.
All around her, the Hexwood echoed with the clamour of battle. Silver-and-azure-clad Hallowed Knights, alongside mortal Freeguild warriors wearing the white-and-blue uniforms of the Faithful Blades regiment, fought against the savage tzaangors that sought to overwhelm their lines. The creatures were devoted servants of Tzeentch, serving their dark god with bestial cunning and fierce strength.
Her opponent brought both its blades down on the rim of her shield, jerking her off balance. It darted forwards, the hook of its beak scraping against her war-mask. Instinctively, she snapped her head forwards to mee
t it. Silver sigmarite crunched against malformed bone, and the beast reeled with a squawk. Before it could recover, she sank the edge of her warblade into its skull.
The tzaangor collapsed, but there were others to take its place – more of its kind loped out from the trees, their trilling shrieks pounding upon the air as they crashed into the Stormcasts’ shieldwall.
‘They’re trying to overwhelm us,’ the warrior beside Serena snarled, stamping forwards. His warblade chopped down into his foe’s skull.
‘I have eyes, Ravius,’ Serena replied.
The attack was as savage as it had been sudden. One moment, the forest had been silent. Then, strange twittering calls had echoed through the trees, accompanied by the sound of pine needles crunching beneath many feet, before the first of the beastkin had burst from the dark corridors of shadow between the scaly trunks of the looming pine trees. They came accompanied by the frenetic clamour of unseen musicians – wild horns skirled, and great drums thumped, somewhere deep in the forest.
That the Hallowed Knights and their mortal allies had been seeking the very creatures who now assaulted them did not make Serena feel better about the situation. The intent had been to crush the creatures in their lair, but the column of Stormcast Eternal and Freeguild warriors had been caught all but unawares by the ambush, and now fought by lantern light.
Unlike the towering Stormcasts, the soldiery of the Freeguild were naught but mortals. But what they lacked in size and strength, they made up for in the discipline with which they faced the enemy. The Faithful Blades fought as they had been trained to fight, leveraging halberd, crossbow and handgun against their bestial enemies.
Stormcast Judicators and Freeguild crossbowmen loosed volley after volley from their positions by the supply wagons as the beastkin raced into the light. Freeguild warriors thrust halberds between the shoulders of the Stormcasts and over the rims of their locked shields, forming an uncompromising bulwark – at least for the moment.
Serena flinched as a crackle of azure lightning signalled the death of a fellow Stormcast Eternal. The lightning surged upwards with a deafening snarl and punched through the thick canopy, streaking into the dark green of the sky.
‘Another soul gone home to Azyr,’ Ravius said, shoving his opponent back.
The tzaangor staggered, screeching. Serena opened its throat with a quick slash and silenced it.
‘May they find themselves forged anew, stronger than before,’ she said. She turned, avoiding a blow, and responded in kind. She blinked away the afterimage of the lightning flash, trying to clear her vision as another of the twisted beastkin bounded towards her, shrieking out guttural war cries.
She wheeled to meet it, her pulse thundering in her ears. She drove the rim of her shield into the throat of the beast as it reached her, and it collapsed in a choking heap, dropping its weapons. She ran it through before it could rise. It clawed at her forearm as she twisted the blade, stilling its heart.
Light blazed forth suddenly, filling the glade and driving back the shadows. Serena turned, knowing the source of the radiance even as she did so. Lord-Celestant Gardus, the Steel Soul himself, fought at the centre of the battle-line, wielding a runeblade in one hand and a hammer in the other. His form blazed with a holy light – it seeped between the joins in his silver aegis war-plate, and grew brighter with every passing moment.
The beastkin confronting him fell back, their unnatural flesh steaming. They staggered as if blinded and stumbled away, seeking the safety of the dark. The heavily armoured Paladin Retributors surrounding Gardus caught them before they got far, their crackling lightning hammers slamming down on the beastkin.
The Paladin cohort, clad in thick bastion armour and wielding massive two-handed lightning hammers, were often found wherever the fighting was the thickest. At their head was Feros of the Heavy Hand, a great roaring giant of a warrior. Feros wielded his hammer with a startling elegance, and shouted imprecations at the enemy as he smashed them aside. Twisted bones snapped and splintered, and the creatures fell, their wails of pain silenced moments later.
Gardus’ light swelled as he pressed the counter-attack, he and his bodyguards driving the creatures before them with brutal efficiency. Some said the light was a blessing from Sigmar – a sign of both Gardus’ faith and the God-King’s favour. Others, less charitably, murmured that it was a sign that something had changed in the Steel Soul – that he was both less and more than the man he had been, before he had fallen in battle with the forces of Chaos.
Duty did not end with death for a Stormcast Eternal. To fall in battle was to be reforged on the Anvil of Apotheosis, to have the broken shards of one’s body and soul hammered once more into useful shape. Serena had not yet endured a second Reforging, but she had heard the stories from those who had suffered such a fate: the rush of celestial lightning, the impossible agony of rebirth… and worst of all, the loss that came with such a renewal. More and more of the tenuous memories of who they had been were stripped away with every death, reducing Stormcast warriors to taciturn automatons.
The thought of that loss, more than any other, unsettled her. What were they without memory? Without that tether to mortal existence, what was left of them? Already she could not recall much about who she had been before. It was as if those memories belonged to a different person; they crowded at the edges of her mind.
She shook the nagging thoughts aside and raised her shield, the flat of her blade balanced on the rim. Around her, the shieldwall reformed as the beasts fell back from Gardus’ light. She could hear Aetius, the Liberator-Prime of her cohort, bellowing orders.
‘Lock shields – lock them, I said! Reform the line!’
Known as the Shieldborn, Aetius was a stolid sort, stubborn and determined. He stalked behind the battle-line, his silver armour tarnished, his hammer encrusted with gore.
‘They’re running,’ Ravius said excitedly. He took a step forwards, as if to pursue, and Serena almost joined him, caught up in his eagerness. The battle-line wavered on the cusp of pursuit. ‘We can finish them!’
‘Don’t be foolish – haring off after them only earns a useless death and weakens our lines,’ Aetius snapped. ‘Are you new-forged? Remember your training.’ He caught hold of Serena. ‘Lock shields, I said.’
‘This is not my first battle,’ Serena said, stung. She shook him off.
‘Yes, but the Gladitorium is different, isn’t it?’ he chided. ‘More like play than war, though blood is spilled all the same. This is the real thing.’ Aetius studied her. His gaze was unwavering, and she met it without flinching.
‘I am faithful,’ she said.
Aetius nodded.
‘Good enough.’ He dropped a heavy fist on her shoulder. ‘Hold position, sister, until I say otherwise. That goes for all of you – hold, until I say.’ His voice rolled down the line, made unnaturally loud by Sigmar’s gifts. He slammed his hammer against his shield. ‘Who will stand, though the shadows lengthen?’
‘Only the faithful!’ Serena and the others shouted in reply.
They struck their shields with their weapons, whether warblade or hammer, casting the sound after their fleeing foes like a roll of thunder. The beasts ran, shrieking and heedless. The sound of their fading cries ratcheted through her, pricking at her consciousness.
It all seemed familiar, somehow, as if she had heard that same sound long ago. But she could not recall the circumstances. It wasn’t the first time – she often heard the murmur of familiar voices, but could not tell what they said, or to whom they belonged. Even worse, she sometimes saw faces in her mind’s eye – achingly familiar, yet she could put no name to them, no matter how she tried.
Frustrated, she struck her shield again.
She was not alone in this affliction of memory. All Stormcasts suffered from it to a greater or lesser degree. Those reforged earliest remembered the most about their mortal existence, whil
e those crafted in the Second or Third Striking remembered less, as if the process were somehow being perfected.
Those few memories she had were invariably painful. She knew that those whose faces and voices haunted her were now long since dust, their souls gone down to the dreamless lands of the dead. All that she had been, all that she might have become, was lost.
No – not lost. Sacrificed. Forged anew on the Anvil of Apotheosis, made into something stronger and better. Something that could stand between the innocent and the darkness which threatened to consume them all.
All that mattered was who she was now: Serena Sunstrike, Liberator of the Shieldborn conclave, and a Hallowed Knight of the Steel Souls Warrior Chamber. This would have to be enough. Perhaps later, when the war was finished, she might be allowed to be something else. She shook herself, pushing the thought aside. There was enough to worry about without thinking of a future that might never be.
It had been almost a century since Sigmar had reopened the Gates of Azyr and cast the storm of his wrath into the Mortal Realms. Almost a century since the first Stormcast Eternals had hurled back the servants of the Dark Gods and established their beachheads in the realms of Fire, Metal, Beasts and Life.
Serena had witnessed some of these battles first-hand. She had fought alongside her conclave as they strove to claim the ancient realmgate known as the Gates of Dawn. She had seen the resurrection of the Everqueen at the Blackstone Summit, and watched as Alarielle’s divine fury drove back the forces of Nurgle at the Genesis Gate during the All-Gates War.
And now, in the wake of those first bloody engagements, a new age had begun. Armies of men, duardin and aelves had marched forth from Azyr to retake ancestral lands long since lost to Chaos, or to build new homes in unfamiliar realms. New cities rose on the bones of the old, and ancient alliances were renewed.