by Various
Sigmarite crashed as the rest of her cohort advanced to the line of stakes, thrusting those mortals too slow to move behind them. Serena caught a Freeguilder by his cuirass and yanked him out of the way. She caught sight of Creel doing the same, dragging his dazed warriors out of the path of the Stormcasts.
‘Go, sister,’ said Gardus. ‘Take your place in the shieldwall.’
He was already turning away as he spoke, and a moment later he was shouting orders. Serena turned and hurried back to the line. She slid into place smoothly, swinging her shield out and locking it rim to rim with those of the warriors to either side of her.
Ravius chuckled. ‘You are moving up in the world, sister. Speaking with the Steel Soul himself.’
‘Aye, and why not?’ Serena said. ‘He is our lord, and we are his warriors. The least we can do is speak to one another.’ And perhaps, she thought, even listen on occasion.
Ravius laughed, but a ringing thwack from Aetius’ hammer against his shoulder-plate silenced him.
‘Did I say you could laugh, Ravius?’ Aetius growled as he stalked past. ‘Something about this amuses you, does it? Eyes front, mind clear, hand steady. Laughter comes with victory, brother, not before.’
He stopped behind Serena, but said nothing. She kept her eyes resolutely forward, not giving him any excuse to chastise her. Out in the dark, something was watching them. She could feel its gaze on her, sliding across her armour like an oil slick.
‘There’s a light out there,’ Ravius murmured.
‘Flux-fires,’ Aetius said softly. ‘The attack was intended to make us stand still long enough for them to muster enough bodies to bury us. They’ll come quick, now that they have an idea of our numbers, and in strength.’
Serena could hear them now, creeping through the dark. A low, pale mist slithered between the trees and surged about the Hallowed Knights’ legs like the ghost of a river. It brought the stink with it, and she swallowed, trying to clear her mouth of the taste. The mist wasn’t natural. There were shapes in it – ghostly, leering faces with flapping mouths.
The phantoms washed over the Stormcast battle-line, gibbering silently, but otherwise harmless. She heard shouts from behind her, and the crack of a handgun going off, followed by the bull-bellow of an angry sergeant berating whoever had let their nerves get the better of them.
‘Hold,’ Aetius said. ‘We are the bastion upon which the storm of Chaos breaks.’
In the darkness between the trees, something shrieked. A wild, ululating call: a cry of challenge, and of summons. The sound cut through her like a knife.
Behind her, Aetius – steady Aetius – raised his hammer. ‘Who will face the ruin of all things, and not break?’
‘Only the faithful,’ Serena said. She was echoed by Ravius and the others, the words running up and down the line.
Only the faithful. The words were more than a battle cry. They were a mantra. A prayer, a plea and a promise. The warriors of the silver-clad ranks of the Hallowed Knights were chosen for their faith in the face of damnation and death. They were the martyrs of Sigmar, warriors who had fallen in battle with his name on their lips or with great faith in their hearts. That faith bound them after their Reforging more tightly than any earthly chain. They were the faithful, and they would hold back the enemy. They could do no less, if the Mortal Realms were to survive.
More flux-fire flashed in the dark. She could hear screeching, inhuman voices, raised in song – no, a chant. The air became thick and rancid. A sour pong gave vibrant edge to the omnipresent stink, and there came a sound like black thunder, pounding at her ears.
Then the night was split by a daemonic cacophony. All other sound was drowned out by the bellicose roar, and the ground shook beneath her feet. It felt as if something – many somethings – were stampeding towards her.
The first of them appeared a moment later. The creatures had tubular bodies, balanced on a flabby skirt of fungoid flesh. Their flesh sprouted gnashing maws and wailing faces, seemingly at random. Flames spurted from the tooth-lined stumps at the ends of their flailing limbs. They hopped forwards through the trees with ungainly speed, accompanied by loud whooshes of discoloured air. The world seemed to shrink away from them as they lolloped towards the shieldwall, and Serena felt an instinctive chill.
Daemons. She had fought daemons before – the putrid servants of Nurgle, who came stumbling on stick-thin legs, their swollen bellies dripping pus, accompanied by clouds of flies. But these were something different. Something worse, for familiarity bred contempt, and she had never faced anything like these creatures before.
A daemon bounded towards her on its rubbery trunk, hissing and spitting eldritch fire. The flames washed over her shield, and the sanctified metal grew unpleasantly warm. She swung the shield aside and lunged, her warblade punching into the twisting, unnatural form. The daemon squealed and flames cascaded across her armour, scorching the silver black. She tore her blade free in a welter of ichor, and kicked the thing backwards.
‘Hold the line, brothers and sisters!’ Aetius roared. ‘Not one step back, whatever comes. Who will hold the firmament suspended, though the world crumbles?’
‘Only the faithful!’ Serena shouted, joining her voice to those of her brothers and sisters. ‘Only the faithful!’
More daemons tumbled between the trees, spewing their multi-coloured fire across the wall of shields. She raised hers again as a wash of heat enveloped her. The sorcerous fire clawed at her sigmarite, seeking its weaknesses. It slashed out, enveloping the nearby trees and scoring the ground. She heard her brothers and sisters roaring their defiance as the shieldwall began to buckle against the relentless pressure. She set her feet and shoved back against the strength of the flames.
‘Only the faithful!’
For a moment, the flames slackened. Daemons fell, as warblades and hammers rang down with terminal finality. The Stormcasts hacked and battered at their foes, driving them back. From behind her, she heard cries of alarm.
‘The trees – they’ve set fire to the trees,’ Ravius roared, slashing at a persistent daemon. It clung to his shield, rings of teeth gnawing at the metal.
Serena risked a look around and saw that he was right. In every direction, the forest seemed to be ablaze. Multi-hued flames shimmered along the branches and trunks of the pine trees, causing them to groan as if in distress.
She felt a pressure on her foot, and looked down. A black root had surfaced from the ichor-soaked ground. It resembled nothing less than the head of a questing leech. Shouts and curses filled the glen, as more roots tore themselves loose from the soil with a wet rasp.
The sound rose up, accompanied by a deluge of creaking and popping. At first, she thought it was the foliage being consumed, but then a tree twisted towards her.
As she watched in growing dismay, its bark split open to reveal a distorted maw of splintery fangs, oozing sap. With a soul-curdling groan, the thing that had been a tree lurched towards her, newly grown jaws snapping hungrily.
Chapter Four
SPLIT-SOUL
The light of change was beautiful.
Tzanghyr Split-Soul, Great Changer of the Thornhoof Warflock, floated in its embrace. The infinite threads of fate threatened to pull his shade in innumerable directions, but he knew his place and purpose, and he held fast to them – to lose one’s self in the Infinite was to risk the ultimate dissolution.
Even so, the light was beautiful.
It was the only truly beautiful thing in the realms. The thrum of colour – every colour – and the subtle thunder of the realm’s pulse rose up through him to expand and fill his senses. It was blinding and painful and wonderful, all at once.
He could feel the thunder of ancient drums in his spirit, and see the threads flash like lightning. The tops of the trees glowed as if they were aflame, and bands of impossible colour ran through the soil, growing brighte
r with every passing moment. The Hexwood was growing. Changing. Its crooked pathways were stretching through black seas of infinity, and soon he and his warflock would follow them into the light.
For now, his shade stalked the shadowy threads of fate which ran through the forest, hunting the scent of prophecy. It was the quickest way of seeing what must be seen, in order to prepare for what was to come. The eyes might lie or misjudge, but the perceptions of the soul were harder to fool. The paths of moment and fortune had been seeded and grown here over the course of centuries, and he walked them without fear. The Hexwood had grown strong as its roots fed on the blood of sacrifices, both willing and otherwise. Soon, it would flower in full. When the rite which was even now underway was complete, its shadow would spread over the cities of men – starting with the one called Hammerhal.
It was Tzanghyr’s destiny to spread that shadow. To claw out the beating heart of Hammerhal, and make of it something more fitting: a monument not to failed godlings or their servants, but a citadel fit for the children of change – a bastion of the Great Schemer, from where his designs might unspool and stretch to the far corners of every realm, unthreatened and inviolate.
Nurgle, the Chaos God of plague and despair, had once ruled supreme here. The Realm of Life had been his from roots to canopy, even as he wasted his reign hunting the fugitive Everqueen. His brothers had gazed on the prize with envy, for none among them could claim one of the Mortal Realms as their sole fiefdom. But while Khorne had turned his attentions to the realms of Fire and Death, seeking new challenges, Tzeentch had worked patiently and subtly to undermine his great rival.
Now, with Nurgle’s season at last waning and his foetid servants in retreat, it was the time of the Great Schemer. His influence swelled as that of his brother dwindled. Where once stagnation had held sway, now change would rule.
The possibilities swarmed about Tzanghyr like a murder of crows, whispering into his ears. He saw victory, and tasted defeat. Every action, every decision, was a ripple in the Infinite. New portents were birthed from these disturbances, and he sought them greedily, casting aside those which were of no use. They came faster and faster as the power of change built deep in the black heart of the pine forest.
His shade sped on, weaving between the memories of trees. They belonged to Tzeentch now, but the echo of their former masters was held within them, both as a warning and as a prize. The sylvaneth had been driven out at last, thanks to Tzanghyr’s cunning. He had taken their soulpods, and with those, their future. He held it in the palm of his hand, and he could crush it at a moment’s notice. That threat had been enough to force the tree-kin to leave the forest, but they still lurked close at hand. Watching, always watching. He could feel the subtle pressure of their attentions on the skeins of fate.
They were patient. And cruel. In a way, he almost admired them. But their time was done: the Hexwood belonged to the tzaangors now, and soon Ghyran itself would belong to Tzeentch. Tzanghyr felt the sharp pulse of magics thrum through him, and he followed the multi-coloured threads to their source near the forest’s heart.
Too near. Too soon. It had been foreseen, but even so, he experienced a moment of uncertainty.
He saw the shade of his coven-brother directing the warflocks in tzaanwar – the ritual slaughter of those who did not know the light of change. He saw the silver-skins and the soft-skins, held at the place he’d dreamed, trapped in a ring of flame and wood. Some would escape the trap – that too, he’d dreamed. He would be waiting for them.
His coven-brother, Mzek, wove cunning sorceries, calling on old alliances made long ago with the Ninefold Courts of Scintillation. Daemons streamed through the gateways of wood, bleeding from one realm into the next, seeking the prey promised to them by his fellow shaman.
Mzek, Tzanghyr whispered, sending his thought-greeting to his coven-brother.
The other shaman twitched where he crouched atop his daemon-disc, his staff clutched tightly in his claws. His brightly hued plumage stiffened as he grunted in irritation at the intrusion in his thoughts.
Tzanghyr laughed. How goes it, coven-brother?
It goes as was preordained, Tzanghyr. It can go no better, and no worse. You would know this, if you were here. Mzek was a sour creature, scarred and bitter. Tzanghyr had outstripped him in influence and power, forcing him into a subordinate position that he chafed in. Soon, if things proceeded as they must, he might seek to redress the balance between them. For now, though, he made an able subordinate.
Beware the bite of the Bright Soul, brother, Tzanghyr warned. I have seen your end, and I would not be proven right in this instance.
What will be, will be. I have not dreamed of my death. Mzek clacked his beak in irritation. Begone, coven-brother – back to your bower. You have your rites to oversee, and I have mine.
He gestured, and their minds snapped apart, like the ends of a broken thread. Tzanghyr hesitated, and then moved on. Mzek would rise or fall by his own doing. They all would. Such was the will of the Great Schemer.
In his dreams, he had seen the silver-skins come and topple the flux-cairn and the lesser herdstones. That could not be allowed, not when they were so close to victory. The uncertainty grew. The forces of the Bright One were closer than he’d thought – Mzek had let them get too far into the forest before he’d sprung his trap.
Tzanghyr glanced up, past the shimmering canopy, into the sky, and saw not stars but the top of a vast hall, stretching into infinity. Pillars rose like distant mountains, holding up a curved roof, upon which had been carved a dizzying array of shapes and scenes. These seemed to move and change before Tzanghyr’s eyes, and he hurriedly looked away from them. Such sights were not for him. Only those who had the favour of the Feathered Lords could gaze upon the convolutions of the Impossible Fortress without being driven mad.
Great avian shapes, indistinct and immense, were perched among the pillars. They looked down upon him with cold calculation. When they spoke, it was not with words, but in a rush of colour and sensation that soothed his uncertainty. The Feathered Lords were pleased with his gambit thus far. They approved of such audacity, when it served their ends.
Satisfied, he looked away. He was following the right threads. He held the skein of his fate firmly. He was sure of it. He had only to pull it taut, and the true work could begin. Emboldened, he flew on, racing now, following the pulsing glow of the change-light back to the roiling heart of the Hexwood. There, in the great vale, his shade circled the nine crystalline monoliths that erupted from the raw soil like blisters, forming a single crown-like shape. The monoliths towered over him, thrusting outwards in all directions and at all angles, catching the light of the moon and stars above and changing it in unsettling ways.
The ancient flux-cairn was like a blister of festering magic; it was the wellspring from which all his hopes and schemes flowed, the heart through which pumped the black blood of the Hexwood. It was almost blinding in its luminosity, and where its light touched, all things changed. The soil became as water or smoke, and the trees bent themselves into ruinous sigils, or else sprouted curious fleshy protuberances which sang soft hymns to the Great Schemer. Strange shapes moved through the ever-shifting soil – things like roots or worms or both, stretching and streaming outwards and away, deeper into the forest.
At the heart of it all, dozens of tzaangors crouched, pounding on wide drums made from the hollowed-out bodies and stretched skins of daemons, their voices raised in a shrieking hymn of abasement. Others blew wild skirls on pipes made from bones, capering as the mad rhythm of the flux-cairn’s song flowed through them. The lunatic tempo rose and fell, like waves crashing against the shore, and with every rising, the light of the flux-cairn blazed more brightly.
Tzanghyr found himself drawing closer to the flux-cairn, though it was dangerous to do so as a bodiless shade – he risked being drawn into it, and his essence devoured by the emptiness between realms. Nonethele
ss, he slid through the stones, following a softer song than the one that held the attentions of his kin. A subtler melody, and older.
At the centre of the stones, floating within their radiant opacity, was a clutch of shimmering orbs – the soulpods of the sylvaneth. The silvery spheres were the hope of the tree-kin made manifest. Within them lay the potential for new groves of sylvaneth, and where they nestled, life flourished. To Alarielle’s servants, they were the most valuable of treasures, to be guarded and preserved whatever the cost.
The soulpods were caught within the flux-cairn, both trapped by it and a part of it. To Tzanghyr’s eyes, they were all shapes and none, changing faster than even he – attuned to such transmutations – could follow. They were life itself, and there was no telling what they might have become in time.
Even now, they blazed with the raw stuff of creation. That power was all that protected them from the warping influence of the flux-cairn. Soon, however, it would not be enough. The flux-cairn had been raised around them and drew upon their power, turning it to different ends. The rite currently underway would drain that power entirely, and the soulpods would be consumed at last and their essence drawn into the cairn. Whatever was within them would be consumed as well, the whole of its potential devoured and used to fuel the twisted machinations of Tzeentch.
Tzanghyr could hear the soulpods crying out for their protectors as the rite grew wilder. And he could hear the sylvaneth as well, somewhere beyond the forest’s edge, watching helplessly, gnashing their splintery fangs in impotent fury. They could not risk a rescue attempt – not if they wanted the soulpods intact – but neither could they allow the ritual to proceed. He shivered in pleasure as their helpless despair resonated through him.
He leapt away from the flux-cairn, satisfied that things were as they must be. He swept beyond the circle of drummers and pipers, seeking the place where his body lay under guard. He looked down at himself, lying curled in a foetal ball upon a bed of moss and branches, steaming braziers arrayed around him. Their contents began to bubble and froth as he dropped down towards his form.