With Dawnbringers: Book III – The Long Hunt coming to pre-order soon, we turn once again to the Twin-Tailed Crusades and the Dawnbringer Chronicles. Lord-Relictor Ionus Cryptborn is back in action, but without the cure for reforging he fears the Stormcast Eternals are losing too much.
Cthorak had long ago grown used to Shyish. His attuned eyes could see the shift between twilit days and murky nights through the ever-present blanket of gloom. The Draconith had once spent every waking moment of his search on the brink of paranoia, listening for the clacking of rising skeletons or the shrieking of bats in the dark.
Let them come, he now thought. He could handle them.
Leaning against Cthorak’s side, hands raised to the campfire, was his rider. Ionus Cryptborn was much like him, enjoying the echoed silence above all else in times of brief peace.
'Do we really have to take our leave soon, Stormlord?' Cthorak huffed, bringing his wing up to shelter the Warden from the wind. 'We must find a location for the next Citadel with haste. With respect, going back to the Perspicarium feels like a mistake.'
'It’s been an age since I checked on him,' Ionus muttered, pulling a morsel of meat from the fire. This was dutifully split in half and shared.
'I do not claim to understand why you seek his approval. He cares little for our plight,' Cthorak muttered, drawing a dry chuckle from the warrior below.
'I do not need Vandus’s approval,' Ionus rasped. A hand rested on the skull-faced helm at his side as he brushed a thumb over the champion’s mark that adorned it. 'I don’t need anyone’s approval anymore.'
'Then why go back?'
'To know he is alright,' Ionus simply said. Cthorak lowered his great head and rested it against his master’s side. In the dark, sometimes he, too, dreamed of the fearsome roars and proud flights of the kin he had left behind. Only in discovering the fate of their underworld would Cthorak be able to rest, though the pain of their absence was suffocating sometimes.
'Tell me of him,' Cthorak said. 'I have heard Vandus’s legends, Warden, yet I do not claim to know the man.'
Ionus smiled slightly as he laid a gauntleted hand upon Cthorak’s head.
Gargant’s Hollow was the last place I spoke with Vandus. We charged through its magmic waterfalls to scour it clean of Bloodbound. The battle was already over, for the priestess that led them had been slain, her blood ritual stopped in its tracks. All that was left was to mop up the last of the straggling foes, too violent and crazed to accept that they had lost.
I had stopped fighting. The battle had been vicious, and the chamber was exhausted. The other chambers that had supported us were taking their leave and my mind was turned to healing the wounded. It was my duty to search the battlefield and attend to my injured comrades.
There was a flash of brass and crimson to my left. I swung around, hammer held high, just in time to ward off a Bloodreaver’s frenzied blow. Before I could repel this attacker and strike him in return, I felt a searing streak of wind skim past me – and a smouldering javelin pierced clean through the man’s chest to skewer him to the ground. It vanished in a burst of lightning and noise, and I followed its trajectory to see Prosecutor-Prime Cometfall passing overhead, recalling the weapon as she led her winged kin deeper into the scattered Bloodbound.
I still remember Iara Cometfall. She once sat with me beside a campfire, much as you do now, as we made their way across the Brimstone Peninsula over a century ago. Her eyes were ringed red when she recounted the moment she ascended fighting the Goretide, defending a tribe that believed Sigmar had left them behind.
She had been called to a higher purpose. Her tribe had fallen to the Khul. She gathered us in prayer to mourn the people those Bloodbound used to be.
Now it was Cometfall’s javelin that speared warriors to the trees, leaving them slumped and bleeding. The Prosecutors carried on without a backwards glance. I was left to press on towards the centre of the battlefield, my prayers drowned under the frenzied screams. All I could think of was Vandus.
I wove through the last throes of the battle, reinforcing the ranks where the most tenacious of foes still held out. Not a single plea to Sigmar went unanswered that day. The God-King sent me his lightning to smite packs of gore-stained berserkers, crippling the enemy for nearby Liberators to put an end to them.
At the very centre of the battlefield, I finally saw Vandus once more. The Lord-Celestant was trading blows with a hulking champion crowned with a bloody pair of horns. Vandus’s hammer glanced off the mutant’s clawed gauntlet and smashed into its axe. Without missing a beat, Vandus seized the opening to plunge his weapon’s spiked tip into his opponent’s chest. Though blood gushed from the Khornate champion's pierced heart to drench his chest red, he summoned the last of his strength to punch through the gaps of Vandus’s armour with his bladed vambrace, causing the Lord-Celestant to double over in pain.
Vandus collapsed to his knees even as his foe crumpled to the ground. I was running before I was thinking. My healing prayers had been reduced to a simple plea.
‘Don’t let him be Reforged again.’
Thank the God-King, it was still enough. The light of Azyr poured from behind the clouds to bathe Vandus, sealing his wounds shut. With the most powerful of their captains gone, the Goretide finally began to scatter. And then he spoke.
‘Your orders were to hunt down the Goretide.’
‘And does not coming to your aid further that goal?’ I asked.
‘Those were not your orders. If you had not come to me, another five of Khorne’s faithful may lie dead.’
‘As would you,’ I pointed out.
‘How can you talk of helping me, of prioritising the Hammerhands, when you spend your days sifting through Shyish for a panacea that doesn’t exist?’
The battle was won. Vandus was safe. I didn’t feel any reason to stay, to watch them lead him back to the Perspicarium and leave him to his solitude. I started walking away to make preparations for my return to Shyish, and I could hear him calling out to me.
‘Ionus! You would turn your back on your chamber for such a pointless search?’
He kept calling my name as I left, but I just couldn’t look at him.
Ionus’s rasping voice faded back into silence as the pair watched Hysh’s light fight towards prominence on the foggy horizon. Cthorak found his mind turning again to the wild, flame-wreathed flights of his kindred as they bore their starry-eyed riders into the most glorious of battles, uncaring as to what would become of their race should the fight prove to be their last.
‘We never did find a cure for the flaw in Reforging,’ sighed Ionus after a pause. ‘Maybe we should simply press on with our new mission.’
‘No,’ Cthorak rumbled, ‘I think not, Stormlord. It’s time we paid a visit to the plains of Capilaria.’
The Warden turned to look up at Cthorak, his shade-ringed eyes a fraction brighter.
‘No effort to save those you love is ever pointless,’ Cthorak said. ‘It is what makes you Stormcast.’
A brief echo of a smile passed over Ionus’s face before it vanished under the cool metal of his helm. He scrambled to his feet and onto Cthorak’s back.
‘Thank you, old friend.’
Cthorak let out a hollow roar as he took to the sky, bearing Ionus Cryptborn to greater heights.
Dawnbringers: Book III – The Long Hunt was announced during last week’s Warhammer Day Preview, alongside a stellar new miniature for Ionus Cryptborn. Both of these – and more – will come to pre-orders soon.
