The Hour of Ruin dawns across the Mortal Realms as the land is split asunder and the Skaven rise ascendant. This tumultuous event is seen through the eyes of the gods who wonder what it portends for them and their ambitions…
It began with the tolling of bells. Discordant and cacophonic, they rang out across the realms, heralding ruination. From the Mistral Peaks of Thyria to the Thondian Krondspine and beyond, mountains trembled and the earth cracked in gaping chasms. Emerald lightning tore the heavens, and mortals cried out at the coming doom.
A time of ending was at hand.
The swathe of unfettered violence that had plunged the realms into primal savagery, that had seen orruk tribes and gargants rise up in destructive apogee, had almost reached its terminus. What had begun at Twinhorn Peak was at last meeting its twilight.
A great tear wrenched open the Thondian plain, scattering massive beast herds and collapsing the cyclopean boneyards along the Coast of Tusks. With it there came the stench of filth. Of decaying things. Of scorched bone and acrid musk. Then the low screeching of rats knifed the air, growing louder with every second until a tumult of furred bodies burst into the light.
The Skaven swept over the land in a sprawling, chittering tide. Devouring, despoiling, ravaging anything in their path. Fires sprang up unbidden, coursing up from the depths of the Ghurish heartlands. Great spurs of warpstone surged forth like teeth of grimy malachite. Far off, a distant clangour resounded. A terrible, resonating bell. Its dissonant chiming drowned the slowing heartbeat of the lands, beating it into submission.
And thus the primal spirit that had awakened in the heart of Ghur and spread across the realms fell into abeyance.
As one era ended, another began.
A fell hour tolled, felt in the very fabric of the realms. Hordes amassed in the shadows, their numbers fathomless, their time nearing. And as the lands were sundered, the gods took heed, lest they be engulfed.
She felt it before the dryads entered the clearing: the keening in the spirit-song, the pain and anguish.
A grief so profound it cut deeper than any axe blade, seared hotter than any flame.
The Realm of Life in agony.
And the fear.
Seated on her throne beneath the Oak of Ages Past, it had been an age since Alarielle had felt fear. She was weakened from her part in caging the Earthquake God and curtailing his destructive reign, and this left her vulnerable, but this strange dread had burrowed into her core. A curious, unwelcome sensation. It crept over her as the outer boughs of the glade parted to admit the delegation, the root barrier receding at her whim.
A host of dryads came forward, their mien subdued in the yellowing of their leaves and their pale barkflesh, heads bowed at their burden. In the wan light of glowspites and the arboreal gloom of the royal grove, the procession of forest-spirits had a funereal air.
For they bore the dead.
Alarielle’s hand tightened around the Spear of Kurnoth.
The afflicted was carried on a bier of leaves, the vines and creepers snaking beneath the natural litter and raising it aloft possessed of a low sentience but no less beloved than any of the Everqueen’s children. For she loved them all deeply, though some more than others…
Sadness welled up in Alarielle like a river at the sight of the stricken Ancient.
‘Lay him down…’ she said, and released the spear to stand against her throne. The branches partially encircling the Queen of the Radiant Wood pulled back as she descended her seat to approach the dying Treelord.
‘He had a name,’ she whispered, grief and rage at war within her, ‘Athraneth…’
A foulness had taken hold of the Ancient turning his roots black, his barkflesh brittle as if scorched by fire. Alarielle reached out to touch him, ignoring the tremors of disquiet resonating from her guardians in the royal grove.
‘This is no corruption of the Plague God…’ she said, as a sliver of horror wormed into her sap-blood. And something else, like the waft of taint on a breeze she could not quite touch. A powerful healing aura suffused her outstretched hand, casting the fingers in jade light. As it brushed against the despoiled barkflesh, it became oily and darkened at the edges. Alarielle withdrew her hand but still lingered over the corpse.
‘My Everqueen, have caution, I beg of thee,’ pleaded Durethanos, the Tree-Revenant stepping forwards.
‘Athraneth had endured for untold cycles,’ she said, bearing her anguish like an open wound. ‘He fought at Blackstone Summit. I can revive him.’
This was not solely the death of an Ancient; Alarielle sensed a baleful power at work. She felt it through the veins of Ghyran but the Goddess of Life would not be denied.
She reached out again, this time placing her hand decisively on the Ancient’s inert body. At once, she flinched, resisting the urge to recoil. Pain lanced through her body as her hand blackened and the veins threading her immortal flesh turned from verdant jade to sickly viridian. The corruption began at her fingertips, before creeping up her wrist, her forearm.
Durethanos went to intercede but Alarielle stopped him with a thought.
I can revive him, Durethanos!
Agony etched her face but the Everqueen held on, reaching for the deep magic that coursed through the roots of Ghyran yet found it… spoiled. For a moment, she arrested the corrosion that sought to subsume her but then withdrew her hand back, wisps of greenish, shard-flecked smoke uncoiling from her fingers.
She hissed in pain, but this was not why Alarielle hesitated.
Durethanos was about to approach, when her words stopped the Tree-Revenant.
‘It bores deep…’ Alarielle rasped and the sliver of unease became a shard. ‘And afflicts much more than just our noble Ancient.’ The corruption she felt, a deep and ravening hunger – it was here in this place. She wasn’t trying to heal one of her children; this was a wound in her realm and Athraneth merely a conduit. Her jade eyes narrowed as she regarded the corpse.
A sorrowful silence fell as the Sylvaneth mistook the Everqueen’s reticence for grief and united in empathic mourning. Durethanos raised his head to sing a lament for the fallen Ancient when a scritching emanated from within Athraneth’s withered husk. All now turned to regard it as the scritching grew louder. Insistent. Almost frenzied.
Durethanos ran forwards, unsheathing his blade.
‘My queen!’
But Alarielle was ready. She knew now what this was. The reason for her strange dread…
To the horror of the gathering, the spoiled barkflesh broke open revealing a mouldering hollow. Alareille’s eyes widened at the reason for her healing arts failing, watching as hundreds of screeching rats poured out in a rancid flood. They swarmed Durethanos, bringing down the Tree-Revenant and others of his kindred who had spurred to respond. For every rat they slew with glaive and blade, dozens more took their place, the Ancient’s husk seemingly engorged with vermin.
A foul gnawhole, a great tear in the metaphysical fabric of her lands, opened in the royal grove. It split poor Athraneth apart, sundering the Ancient into wooden flinders, a yawning crevice of humid darkness left in his wake. The vermin spilled out unabated in wretched proliferation, though they were but a precursor to what awaited behind them. Alarielle could feel the Skaven’s eager hunger, poised to devour the royal grove, the Everspring Swathe, all of her beloved Ghyran. A rising blight that would reshape the Mortal Realms…
With horror came revelation. She had been trying to heal a rift in the very substance of the realm, not merely a creature – even one as formidable as Athraneth – and cleanse a cosmological vector of corruption so potent it almost defied definition. And even for the Goddess of Life, this feat was beyond her.Her Sylvaneth inundated by rats, Alarielle cried out. She hadn’t moved from Athraneth’s side as thorned vines and tangling roots speared from the forest, her glade a living weapon. They impaled and crushed the creatures, before threading the gnawhole across its length, stitching it back and forth until it was bound tight, choking off the unclean sorcery at work. It took a measure of her strength, scintillating life magic healing the immediate taint and suffusing the glade in a jade aura.
Filthy vermin blood spattered the ground, drawing a scowl from the furious Everqueen.
‘This is beyond trespass, beyond insult… they defile us.’
A fragile calm had returned but a brumal atmosphere now pervaded, the air turning wintry as Alarielle cast her mind throughout Ghyran. She saw fires raging through the rainforests of Thyria, saw Kurnotheal choked by ash and thick clouds of smoke rising into a crackling sky. The Eversping Swathe split like corpse-flesh, swallowing entire glades as her children wailed their terror and anguish into the spirit-song. Foul menhirs of warpstone bore through once healthy soil like tumorous growths, tainting everything around them. She saw entire wyldwoods ablaze, soulpod groves burned to nothing, the canker festering in a hundred places across Ghyran, and the gnawing hunger of the Skaven as they emerged from hidden warrens between worlds to devour and despoil.
‘Blight and famine…’ Tears ran down her icy countenance, her wrath a cold storm roiling within. ‘It cannot be… not this, not again…’Alarielle’s hand, still outstretched as it lingered impotently over the slain Athraneth, curled into a fist.
The realms trembled in tectonic upheaval. Massive shelves of rock uprooted, cataracts of soil spilling in their wake. The ground cracked in great, yawning canyons of stygian blackness, Skaven in their multitudes boiling up from the abyssal darkness.
To the east of the Adamantine Chain, a jagged bolt of viridian lightning struck one of the lesser mountains and blasted it apart. Huge chunks of burning stone and clods of soil rained like a meteor storm.
As the people of the cities and the tribes of the wild places cried out in terror, the broken sky writhed with febrile intensity, promising greater torments.
And a hellish bell could be heard, ringing out the realm’s ending.
Bastian Carthalos braced himself against the war table, his armoured form casting a long shadow.
A trio of battlemages stood opposite him across the breadth of the table where a map of the Great Parch had manifested, conjured into being by the carto-arcanabulum war table and the wizards’ sorcery.
No mere piece of parchment cartography, the varied geography of the Parch was revealed as a simulacrum of mountains, cities and forests. The contoured rendering was imperfect, created from sand imbued with veins of celestium, but far more accurate than a physical map could ever be. Based on the many reports now flooding into Hammerhal Aqsha, it also described the delicate balance of the war in Aqshy. Bright candle flames represented the parts of the realm reconquered by the armies of Order, whereas patches of shadow denoted where settlements had fallen or the light of Sigmar and his allies had yet to reach.
Bastian noted much of the map was swathed in darkness. It had been growing darker of late. His brow furrowed, features uplit by the arcane refulgence of the map and the light of burning braziers ensconced around the war room. The low flames hinted at the warriors standing at the periphery of the large chamber, plated in golden sigmarite like their Lord-Commander, each face hidden behind the Mask Impassive. None could have appeared more stoic than Carthalos, even without his warhelm that sat beside him at the table’s edge.
‘How accurate is this image?’ he asked in a low, rumbling timbre.
Storm-light kindled in the eyes of the Knight-Arcanum at his shoulder, briefly lifting the gloom. ‘Within the last hour, Lord-Commander.’Even allowing for inaccuracies, the Great Parch was in turmoil. As soon as the Bloodbound who had been battering at Hammerhal’s gate had been repulsed, breathless messengers from Hallowheart, Vandium and a dozen other cities and strongpoints arrived clutching missives. A slew of them, the unfurled scrolls curling against the magic animating the war room, littered one end of the table. They brought dire tidings: of Freeguild companies ambushed and slaughtered by sudden swarms of ratmen, of massive bolts of green lightning shearing apart bastions and watchtowers, of cities swallowed by the hungry earth, and dozens of other reports of a similar nature.
For every incident, there were many more where a strongpoint had fallen silent or entire armies simply vanished without warning.
The shadowed patches on the map spread further like bloodstains, black and forbidding.
‘Sigmar’s grace, this cannot be happening…’ he murmured, stony gaze straying to the mountainous Adamantine Chain and the nascent free city just east of its borders. Embergard was to be a potent symbol of the God-King’s might and his followers’ destiny to reclaim the realms from Chaos. He let out a long, weary breath through his nose. How many centuries had he fought this war? A heavy burden, but a mantle he carried willingly like any other, even if this one dragged like a lead cloak. He had fought and died like all his brethren, faced gods and monsters in battle. This latest crisis felt different though. The very land was tearing itself apart.
Footsteps on the stairs behind him pulled Carthalos from his thoughts and he looked askance at the warrior who came up alongside him. Splattered with mud, her skin flecked with someone else’s blood, Neave Blacktalon looked weary but resolute as she regarded the Lord-Commander.
‘My lord…’ she began, bowing her head to Carthalos. ‘I have abandoned the hunt as ordered,’ said Neave, her mood obvious by her irascible tone. ‘Though on our way to the city, we saw the skull takers on the retreat – but you know as well as I…’ she grimaced, her eagerness for war bleeding through, ‘the bastards like fighting and have a tendency to linger.’
Carthalos smiled to himself, immediately forgiving any impropriety from the phlegmatic Stormcast. She had a way about her, an edge that provoked wariness in some, even her comrades, but he saw the loyal warrior within and valued her unvarnished candour. Too often, his lieutenants gilded their words so as not to offend. Neave had no fear of the truth and voiced it readily.
‘Tell me what you see,’ he said, turning his attention back to the map.
Neave took in the arcane spectacle, in seconds absorbing every facet of the changing tactical situation.
‘I note, lord, that there is more dark than there is light,’ she uttered wryly but a shadow darkened her face.
‘As it has ever been. What else?’
‘East of the Adamantine Chain…’ she gestured with a gauntleted hand, though even as she did so the map was changing, a large patch of darkness growing slowly westwards, ‘the Reclaimed Demesnes,’ she added as the coastal territories were entirely engulfed.
She looked at Carthalos but he did not move. ‘What is this?’
‘There is more,’ he said.
The patch kept spreading, sweeping towards the Chain, taking Hel Crown, the Snow Peaks.
‘God-King’s blood,’ she breathed as the darkness kept reaching and reaching like a lapping black sea, ‘that’s the entire eastern territories of the Parch. How accurate is this?’
Carthalos gestured to the scattered missives. ‘It represents everything we know.’
She stared at the map for a few seconds before a mote of anger heated her words. ‘How did this happen? Is this some horde the watchtowers missed? We should send out aetherwings at once. It must be massive.’
‘Not an army,’ uttered Carthalos, ‘not as such.’ He glanced again at the reports, reminded of the warnings of flame and devastation, of Skaven in great profusion. ‘It is cataclysm.’
As if summoned by the Lord-Commander’s words, a plangent chiming emanated through the window that looked out onto Hammerhal Aqsha’s upper districts. In his mind’s eye, he imagined a great and terrible belltower, brass spires lurching skyward of a rising city, one that would blight the realms…
Carthalos shuddered at the unexpected portent, a moment of weakness Neave thankfully missed.
Her fierce eyes remained fixed on the map.
And Carthalos watched too as the disaster eclipsed the nascent free city into which so much hope and toil had been invested.
‘That’s Embergard, of the Twin-Tailed Crusade,’ said Neave.
‘It was Embergard.’
‘Sigmar’s mercy, the settlers… we ventured with them for a time when the hunt and the crusade overlapped. It was a mighty host. Could it not yet endure?’
‘Perhaps.’ Carthalos was unconvinced. He was already devising a response, considering the forces he had to hand and those he could yet call upon. His mind went to plans of defence for Hammerhal Aqsha, and securing the Stormrift Gate once more if it came to it.
They stood in solemn silence for a few more moments, waiting to see if the darkness would spread any further westward. When it finally halted at the mountains, Carthalos took up his warhelm.
‘Gather your comrades. I have need of every blade, and yours are more potent than most.’ The Mask Impassive replaced his patrician features with a golden visage.
‘Our quarry still roams. The hunt calls, my lord,’ Neave replied but her protest was half-hearted, disturbed at the bleak revelations imparted by the map.
‘I call on you, Blacktalon,’ Carthalos said, his voice resonant from behind imposing sigmarite. ‘War comes to the Adamantium Chain and the Hammers of Sigmar must answer.’
He took his leave, his warriors in step behind him, and did not wait to see if Neave Blacktalon followed.
The inferno tore throughout the realms, igniting in rampant conflagrations and incinerating cities.
No army, no arcane ward could oppose it. Defensive palisades collapsed to ash, metal twisted and flesh ran like wax.
Throughout the lands, seas boiled and the air turned thick with a toxic fume.
Devastation reigned, falling hardest in Aqshy where a vast pall of pyroclastic cloud surged up from the bowels of the Great Parch in a towering tsunami that seemed to touch the apex of the sky. It smothered the light of Hysh, before crashing down and swallowing everything in its path.
Archaon stepped a boot onto the edge of the shattered battlement, the city far below ransacked, its army vanquished and routed.His eyes, unshielded by his helm, followed a pack of Darkoath horsemen as they chased down the fleeing rabble of the defenders, shouting their pledges to the gods. He envied their abandon, the vigour that came with first stepping on the Path, but he knew not all the revelations would be welcome. Many would not receive them at all. For most, their dreams of glory would end in mutation and agony. For the Dark Gods were fickle and their gifts double-edged.
Though not for all. For the strong, for the chosen – those with the will enough to claim power.
The thought turned Archaon’s regard to the monster rampaging through the broken streets below. Dorghar’s bestial cries echoed loudly above the shouts of the terrified citizens it hunted. They had hid as their walls were breached and their immortal protectors slain. Craven and weak. How he loathed the false inheritors of the realms. A stain worthy only of eradication.
Breathing deep of bloodscent and fear, Archaon ran a gauntleted hand across the back of his head to cool his ire. A thin, sticky blood veneered his shorn scalp, the skin calloused and scarred around the brand of an eight-pointed star. An old wound in the flesh of his neck glared redly, the remnant of a former life long seared away.
Ruination seized the realms in a magnitude not seen since the Age of Chaos. Carnage and death roiled throughout settled domains once utterly enslaved by the armies of Chaos. And so they would be again. Archaon cast his mind towards Aqshy where the rising cataclysm would fall hardest. A rare smile turned his lips at a vision of flame and smoke swathing continents, enough to blacken the sky. He beheld the faintest hint of curled horns amidst the darkness, the impression of an immense verminous visage.
Embers of discontent stirred within. A necessary evil, Archaon reminded himself as he turned his smouldering wrath towards his true foe.
His fist clenched, the yearning for conquest and to bring the Unberogen’s dreams of civilisation to ash ever unsated. His fingers found the wound on his neck. It had the vague shape of a hammer. In a time beyond reckoning, when he was a lowly mortal, he had once heeded the teachings of the liar god. Amusing, he supposed, how Sigmar’s failings had led to his own apotheosis.
Archaon would not rest until he was before the Heldenhammer again. The false king had escaped judgement at the Battle of Black Skies, fleeing to his gilded palace to cower like a beaten cur. How he despised him for that. How could his spineless followers call him a warrior lord, a god king? Archaon scoffed, though his mirth was bitter.
‘You are a soul-thief who sits astride a betrayer’s throne…’ he said, his voice grating and resonant with power.
A reckoning was coming, his Dark Gods had promised it, though Archaon knew they were not to be trusted either. He had instead made alliance with the Horned Rat, that most treacherous of all deities but also the most avaricious. For now, his and the Skaven’s desires aligned, and he knew he needed the ratmen to fulfil their part of the bargain in what was to come. Though the pact sat uneasily, for what was done could not be undone, Archaon was not so blind to pragmatism when it was required.
If it brought him what he sought.
He took up his horned helm, an ancient artefact that shimmered with malice and portentous mutterings from the Eye of Sheerian, embedded in the dark metal. Returning his attention to the here and now, his gaze fell to the warriors who had been standing silently in his shadow. Dread champions all, and generals of his armies in their own right, they nonetheless bent their heads in fealty to Archaon.
‘Everchosen,’ uttered the foremost of the Varanguard, Ezarkien, and kneeled before his lord. As they all did.
Conquest was calling again. It called to them too.
May it never cease.
‘It is akin to breathing,’ Archaon uttered in answer to Ezarkien’s unspoken affirmation.
Ezarkien bowed his head, his serrated sword held out like an offering. A tribute.
There was the beating of huge wings as the shadow of Dorghar fell upon the Varanguard and their liege. Rock shattered as the monstrous Steed of the Apocalypse grasped at the edge of the broken battlement with sword-like claws. Slabs of stone cascaded to shatter on the ground far below. The three-headed titan regarded everything as prey except for its master, but it pleased Archaon to see his champions unflinching before the beast.
Mounting the broad saddle, he donned his horned helm. Pits of hell-flame flickered in the eye sockets.
‘The hour comes,’ he declared to his Varanguard who had mounted their hellish steeds. ‘Death to the Unberogen and the cities of man.’ ‘Death,’ the Varanguard chorused.
Archaon nodded, satisfied with all he saw before him. The alliance with the vermin god was well made. The Horned Rat was nothing if not treacherous but his ascension would upset the balance of power and destabilise the pantheon of the Dark Gods. A useful outcome and not the only benefit to levy against the risk. An old aphorism, trite but with a ring of veracity to it, came to mind.
The enemy of my enemy…
Not a friend, never that, but an ally that would bring about such ruin to Sigmar’s failing empire. The realms would be ravaged. His people would suffer.
Let him feel it, he thought. Let the liar god feel it as they cry for him in vain.
And yet, as Dorghar bore him into a sky splintered by emerald lightning, the Everchosen suppressed the mildest tremor of unease.
As the ground cracked and fire reached into the storm-wracked sky, as the light died behind a vast miasma of cinder-flecked smoke, a tangled mass of landscapes, their tendril-like peninsulas clawing into the Parch, was revealed.
That sprawling landmass was but an invasive sliver of the wretched immensity that was Blight City. An infernal sub-realm that breached reality itself. The skies around it roiled in emerald fulmination and the deranged disharmony of screaming bells. The merest piece of Skavendom, immense and terrible. Trailing broken earth and stone, it broke through the skin of the realm’s essence like a foetid claw tearing from a dewy caul. Its birth throes annihilated land masses, reducing them to a despoiled hellscape, anathema to life. A wasteland, a desolation, a great Gnaw.
Crowned by brass spires that impaled the land like unclean spears, and thronged with verminous hordes beyond count, the tortured landmass was inviolate and impossible. Elsewhere, ruination blighted every realm. From the curdling seas of Shyish to the lofty islands of Chamon, to the desert plains of Ghur and the sweltering forests of Ghyran, no place was spared Skavendom’s malign influence.
Wretched in its nightmarish splendour, it was a fusion of architectural madness, of bridges and walkways, of rusted towers and nests and burrows, of shadowy warrens, of plague pits and darksome lairs, a lurching and decrepit bastion, a vile haven of Skaven-kind without equal.
The other Dark Gods rumbled their displeasure at the usurper in their midst, the heavens churning with their anger.
Shrill, chittering laughter answered, the Horned Rat revelling in his ascendency. The godly laughter lingered long after the rumbles of discontent had faded.
For it presaged the Hour of Ruin, and an era of ravening desolation.
They had ceased their bickering at last.
In the feverish confines of the grand warren-chamber, the masters of the Council of Thirteen looked on in eager self-satisfaction.
An image of the devastation shimmered before them, of Skavendom triumphant and the great ascension of the Horned Rat to the elder pantheon of Chaos.
They each believed they alone had brought about this grand victory, that their plan had been the crucial element that had wracked the nexus points of Aqshy’s Great Parch and allowed the greatest stronghold of Skaven-kind to manifest into the realms proper.
Blight City, the living embodiment of ruination and Skaven dominance.
Schemes were already afoot, evident in furtive and beady-eyed glaring, the subtle rubbing of mangy paws in anticipation of treachery, the gentle wafting of fear-musk in paranoid expectation of assassination. Now the deed was done, all would scramble for advantage. Vermin clambering to the summit of the rat pile.
Vizzik Skour knew this and observed it all keenly. Birthed in the filthy kiln of the Great horn Rat’s need for worship, he was the self-proclaimed daemon-prophet of Skaven-kind, an arch-zealot and demagogue, indivisible from the Horned Rat himself.
And he was exultant.
‘Well have we conspired,’ Vizzik voiced in shrieking declaration, laden with unearthly power. ‘Yes-yes,’ he crowed, casting a feverish glance at Skreech Verminking whose tails flicked in irritation. ‘Lo, Blight City is arisen and our rightful ascendency has come!’
He thrust a pallid claw to the furnace-hazed vision before the Council, his mouldering vestments flapping around his arms, the scratchy runes etched into the fabric glowing with cankerous light.
‘Bring forth the famine-frenzy!’ He rapped the ferrule of his Gnawstaff against the ground and tremors shook the chamber in a sympathetic echo of the devastation. ‘Let the gnaw-hunger reign!’
Red, balefire eyes narrowed as they took in the gathered Lords of Decay on their vile thrones. Much squirming, fang-gnashing and thrashing of tails abounded as all looked to the shadows or the toe-bones of gnarled, rattish feet. Skreech Verminking alone met Vizzik’s fervent gaze, used to his own preeminence and doubtless chafing at the rival in his midst.
Vizzik hid a cruel smile at the thought, and lowered his voice to a more sinister cadence.
‘There shall be a purging of unbelievers…’
The restive squirming redoubled.
‘Only the worthy-loyal shall be spared.’
He gestured with a veiny talon to the soaring mountains, the bulwark at which the ruination had halted.
‘Let the great-grand Gnawhorde of the faithful gather in glorious fecundity,’ he snarled with gleeful rabidity, his zealotry rising again. ‘Let us smother-choke their fortresses, let us undermine their cities, let us chew-feed on their bones! Our claw shall fall at the wretched mountains, whose roots will fester, whose flanks will sunder. We have decreed it, so it shall be done. Glorify us with sacrifice, revere us with offerings and receive our blessings!’
Froth flecked his mangy snout, strings of spittle stretching from the daemon’s noxious maw.
‘Kill-kill! Slaughter-slay! All shall crumble in the name of the Horned Rat, all shall corrode and wither!’
At Vizzik’s fevered rhetoric, the mood in the chamber turned manic as even the great Lords of Decay succumbed to their hunger and innate greed. A frenetic chittering struck up, the garbled prayers and proclamations of the Council, all beseeching the Horned Rat and his dread avatar.
Well, almost all.
Vizzik threw up his arms in a gesture of transcendence and, ignoring the murderous stare of Skreech Verminking, basked in the adulation of the devoted.
‘Behold,’ the prophet cried out, throwing back his rattish snout in triumph, ‘the Vermindoom!’
