The Sylvaneth are staunch allies of Sigmar’s throng – even Drycha Hamadreth, the vengeance of scorned woodlands made manifest. Yet her patience for the crude warriors of humanity has its limits, and in this week’s edition of the Dawnbringer Chronicles, the blundering of some careless cannoneers may just break the bough.
The orruk thrashed, still trying to swing its axe despite the talons embedded in its chest. Drycha Hamadreth studied it. A wretched thing, with nothing in its mind but mayhem. If one were to count every leaf in the Grimbark Forest, it would still not equal the number of these creatures she had slain over the long millennia of her existence.
She twisted her claw-like fingers, snapping the creature’s spine, and flung its corpse away. It tumbled down the bank, landing amongst a pile of its wretched kin.
The high ground and sparse trees here gave Drycha the perfect view of the human fortress. This was Fort Gardus, home to silver warriors who called themselves saints. Lightning danced across its battlements, illuminating a terrible slaughter, as towering Mega-Gargants elbowed their way into the keep’s courtyard. In the overgrown valleys at the foot of the fortress, a second battle raged, green-clad crusaders struggling to reach the walls and break the siege. The thunder of their guns was for nought. They had come too late, and the enemy was too many.
The forest would thrive after this night’s slaughter. Green shoots would grow, lapping the blood of gargants, orruks and humans alike. The soil would gratefully claim their flesh, as it should be, thought Drycha. Let them all slaughter each other, these parasites who had brought ruin to the Grimbark. Those who had destroyed the sacred groves and torn down ironbark trees so ancient that they had borne witness to the birth of the realms. This was not her home. She had none, unless it was upon the battlefield, bringing death to the corruptors of the wilds. Yet the song of grief and helpless rage had brought her here nonetheless.
‘For vengeance is my nature,’ she whispered.
A staccato roll of thunder came from nearby, loud enough that the Squirmling spites in Drycha’s hive-like body wriggled in angry protest. Drycha heard chattering human voices some distance off to her left. She pulled aside a frond of foliage and looked out to see a battery of long-barrelled cannons arrayed on the lip of a small ridge, defended by perhaps two dozen steel-helmeted soldiers. Clearly, the thunder of their guns had prevented them from hearing the approach of the orruk band that Drycha and her tree-kin had just slaughtered.
‘Another volley,’ shouted the largest human, whose bare chest was cross-crossed by bandoliers. ‘Load some drakesbreath canisters, lads. Raise your barrels a quarter-mark, and let ‘em have it.’
The ground shook as tongues of fire spat from the mouths of the heavy guns. Drycha watched as half a second later, a series of fireballs erupted amongst the mass of orruks down in the valley below. A great swathe of blackgorse bushes went up in flames, to the cheers of the gunnery crews.
‘That’s it,’ said the shirtless man, approvingly. ‘That’s the range. Keep those fires blazing.’’
Drycha seethed to witness such thoughtless devastation. So typical of humans. She had killed for less. All that stayed her rage was the reminder of the words of the Everqueen’s herald, that foolish sapling Tethamyr. Alarielle did not begrudge the Queen of the Outcasts her vendettas, but neither would she countenance open war with the city-dwellers. Drycha had tasted the Everqueen’s wrath before and did not wish to witness it again.
She heard movement at her side. One of her dryads approached warily.
‘My Queen-’
Drycha hissed, demanding silence.
The Outcast’s warnings were not necessary. Drycha had already sensed the land recoiling at the idiot tread of massive brutes, presumably latecomers to the battle that had got lost in the depths of the Grimbark. The humans, too, heard it. Cries of alarm went up, and the shield-bearing soldiers rushed to get into formation, but there was no chance of the gunners swinging their cannons to bear on this new threat.
An enormous slab of a face protruded from the treeline, breaking into a broad grin as it saw the panicked humans. Illuminated by flashes of lightning, three towering gargants forced their way into the clearing. Though nearly twice the height of Drycha herself, these creatures were small compared to the Mega-Gargants laying waste to Fort Gardus. Judging by the scratches and bruises on their flesh, they had been wandering, lost, in the forest for some time. On they came, barrelling forwards and squashing helpless humans beneath them, lashing out with clubs and fists to devastating effect. One picked up a cannon, and bent its barrel backwards, chortling as it did so.
Drycha could sense the desperation of her Outcasts to join the battle. Not out of any concern for the humans, of course, but simply because they desired to rend the flesh of foes. She stepped out of the cover of the tree and screamed a note of the spirit-song so discordant and hateful that all three gargants staggered, clutching at their temples. They turned to peer at her through narrow eyes that flickered with malice.
Her cry was drowned out by a frenzied buzzing as darting insects spilled from her bark-flesh by the hundred, angling towards the nearest of the trio like a living spear of darkness. Flitterfuries swarmed over the brute’s face, mandibles and poisoned stingers stabbing home again and again. Howling in agony, the gargant tripped and fell, and the Outcast throng surged forwards and fell upon it with lashing talons.
Another of the gargants – a pot-bellied beast with a forked beard slickened by blood and ale – came hurtling towards Drycha, swatting the spite-swarm aside with a tree-trunk club.
The Queen of the Outcasts darted beneath the gargant’s clumsily waving weapon, and raked her talons across its flank, carving a bloody welt down to the bone. The creature howled, wheeling about and trying to snatch at Drycha, its face blotchy with flitterfury stings. Her Outcasts surged forth to protect their mistress, leaping in the way of the gargant’s drunken swipe, Spite-Revenants slicing at their prey’s legs while Gossamid Archers filled its eyes with arrows that were living things: grubs that bored their way deep inside its skull. Howling, the gargant turned and staggered off back into the depths of the forest, leaving a trail of bright red gore and trampled corpses behind.
The last of the gargants was a head taller than his kin, his entirely bald head a mass of puckered flesh and burns. His spiked warclub was smeared with sticky blood and scraps of barkflesh, and around him lay the wreckage of Dawnbringer cannons and munition crates. Only one of the heavy weapons remained, manned by a handful of terrified humans. The gargant, however, had lost all interest in them. Instead, he locked eyes with Drycha across the battlefield, grabbed a hovering Gossamid out of the air and bit the archer’s head off, contemptuously hurling the rest of the body over his shoulder.
Drycha met the gargant’s gaze with a bitter snarl, savouring the thrill of hatred that coursed through her like a river. This one she would keep alive for a long, long time.
‘Fire in the hole!’
The words were accompanied by a fizzing hiss. Drycha saw that the humans of the sole remaining cannon had set alight to three of their X-marked powder barrels, and now hurled them down the slope towards the gargant, who stared dumbly at the burning objects as they smashed into his ankles. The Dawners hurled themselves flat, and Drycha cried out a warning to her Outcasts.
Too late. The world burned white as the barrels detonated. Were it not for the strength in Drycha’s bough-like limbs she would have been sent flying backwards. A crown of fire roared out across the clearing, setting light to the undergrowth and turning trees into flaming brands. The forest crackled and screamed as it burned. Of the gargant, there was nothing left but a mess of smoking innards spread out in a circle two-dozen yards across.
Drycha had only ever known the spirit-song of the Sylvaneth as a discordant echo, a marred and tragic symphony of loss, grief and rage. As she looked across the clearing it thrummed inside her skull with insistent fury at the charred and twisted corpses of Spite-Revenants caught up in that terrible explosion. Some staggered through the smoke, their limbs aflame. A terrible, icy rage filled Drycha Hamadreth then – a fury that erased any doubts she may have had about angering the Everqueen.
‘Gods damn it, did you see that?’ one of the humans cried, clambering to his feet unsteadily. ‘Blew the blighter all the way to Azyr, so we did.’
The man’s companions also rose, but they did not celebrate, for they saw only the Queen of the Outcasts standing there amidst the bodies of her forest-spirits, her murderous gaze fixed upon them.
‘Get that cannon loaded,’ the oblivious man continued, hands on his hips. ‘I want another-’
Drycha’s talons punched through the back of the man’s chest. He choked and gasped, struggling feebly. As if they were a manifestation of her rage, spites crawled from the hives in the Outcast Queen’s barkflesh, swarming all over the dying man, stinging and biting and stabbing with venomous stingers. Drycha let him fall, twitch and writhe his last on the ground at her feet.
Her remaining Outcasts gathered around her, encircling the other humans, who trembled and cowered. Drycha looked past them, to the distant gates of Fort Gardus, which now lay twisted and broken. The greenskins and their gargant allies were amongst the defenders now, killing at will. In the valley below the fortress, the crusaders too were harried fiercely. If they did not withdraw or receive support soon, they would surely be overrun.
‘Let them perish,’ snarled Drycha. ‘Destroyers and desecrators of the deep places. By the Shadowed Season, I curse them all.’
As the Queen of the Outcasts turned to depart, one of her Outcasts crept forwards.
‘What of these soft-skins, dread mistress?’ it rasped, gesturing at their captives.
Drycha looked at the pathetic band of humans, whose pleading stares simply made her despise them all the more. With a gesture, she summoned lengths of barbed vine to encircle them, pinning their limbs and winding tight around their throats. They struggled helplessly. In the distance, coming closer, came the sound of guttural orruk war cries.
‘Let them pray to their stripling god for salvation,’ Drycha said. ‘Perhaps their own kind will find them before the greenskins do. I care not. ’
While the humans and gargants slaughtered each other, the Queen of Outcasts would make this forest her own. She would turn every branch, root and vine into a weapon against these trespassers. Whoever triumphed in their petty war would know only suffering and death so long as they remained in the Grimbark.
The latest chapter in the Dawnbringers series, Reign of the Brute, is available on the Games Workshop webstore right now, following the Mega-gargant legion of King Brodd on a campaign of vengeance against the followers of Sigmar, as well as the destruction wrought by Trugg the Troggoth King in the wake of last week’s Dawnbringer Chronicles. Pick it up now to find out what happens when this pair of regal rampagers smashes headlong into the Twin-Tailed Crusade.
