Sigmar is on the back foot. His Stormcast Eternals are desperately trying to hold the line against the endless Skaven menace running rampant across the realms – and they are beset from within by the curse of Reforging...
A Hero's Burden
‘Well, Bes,’ said Rionn, hefting her stormspear and reaching for her helm. ‘What do you reckon to our chances this time?’
Once, that question would have brought a quip or a self-conscious bit of bravado from her fellow Vindictor. A shrug or a sigh, at the very least. Now she got nothing back at all, and that filled Rionn with an almost unbearable sadness. Besara was standing bolt upright and unnaturally still, gazing out across the ash and ruin of Ratham’s Crook. Her once sparkling eyes were devoid of anything but a sort of blank watchfulness. They had been like that for a long time, but Rionn had still not got used to it. It had started back in the bitter campaign against the Scourwind Reavers, and Bes had died three times since then. Each time her soul was broken apart on the Anvil of Apotheosis, she came back a little colder. A little more distant. A little less the friend Rionn had fought beside for so many years.
‘We have not killed enough,’ Bes said. ‘The ratmen are too many, and we have little to counter their artillery. We can withstand perhaps one more assault.’
If we’re lucky, Rionn thought. There were fewer than thirty Hammers of Sigmar left to safeguard the Crook: a scattered assortment of infantry, some archers and two gryph-riders. This was all that remained of an entire brotherhood after a month of bitter, attritional warfare. Out here on the edge of the Gnaw, there was little chance for reinforcement, whether Azyr-sent or otherwise. Two score or so Freeguilders remained standing, but barely so. They were running out of munitions and, more importantly, food.
Rionn approached her friend and placed a hand on Besara’s shoulder.
‘We’ve endured worse,’ she said, wincing at the forced lightness in her voice.
Besara said nothing.
‘Remember the Pyre Gate? You and I alone against a horde of Khul’s reavers. By the end of it, I had a spear through my thigh and a severed hand. You didn’t even have a scratch. Four days and nights of fighting, and not even a graze. I always thought you had Sigmar’s own luck. You remember that?’
Besara stared at her, and a sudden flicker of pain flashed across her pale face. She looked away.
‘No,’ she said, quietly. ‘I hope it is a good memory, Rionn. Keep it for me.’
The words sent another shard of glass lancing through Rionn’s heart. How many deaths would it take before her friend was erased completely?
She had little time to dwell on the thought. A signal arrow rose into the sky, loosed by one of the perimeter scouts. It traced a high arc over the strongpoint, disappearing over the cliffs to the left. There was a scurry of motion and a chorus of urgent shouts as Stormcasts and Freeguilders ran to man the defences.
The Skaven were back.
Rionn and Besara hurried to join their comrades who were mustering at the foregate. The entrance to the Crook had once been a sturdy portal of igneous stone, but warpfire and explosives had reduced it to little more than a cluster of piled debris – a glaring weakness in the strongpoint’s crumbling defences. Some enterprising Freeguilders had thrust a few pikes into the ground to form a crude but effective obstacle. There were several decomposing ratmen hanging from the spear points, unlucky casualties of the last assault.
A hundred paces or so beyond the gate, the narrow canyon boiled with motion. The rats came on in a gushing tide, packed so tightly together and moving so fast that they took on a strangely liquid quality. Shots rang out. It was impossible to tell how many of the Fusiliers’ rounds smacked home into that amorphous mass, but when the Guilders’ sole remaining Great Cannon roared, it smashed a gory furrow though the tide of fur and flesh that was all too hideously visible. The crackling arrows of Vigilors whipped down from above in vicious flurries as the archers did what they could to thin the flood.
The Sigmarites’ volleys were answered by searing trails of warp lightning from some distant battery of enemy war machines. The screeching bolts punched holes through defences and defenders alike, melting stone to bubbling slurry and disintegrating men and women where they stood. The snap-crack of longrifles grew in intensity. Rionn had to step back to avoid the falling corpse of a Fusilier knocked from the ramparts. The man had a neat hole drilled straight through his forehead. Ugly-looking wisps of green smoke rose from the wound.
‘Brace!’ shouted Vindictor-Prime Lucien, and the Stormcasts set their shields and held their spears at high guard. On Rionn’s left side, Segnen was belting out a battle prayer, his voice high and eager. A few more Vigilors began to join him in song, but most of them were too fatigued to do so, for even their supernatural endurance was now sorely tested.
‘A cask of duardin ale says we don’t die,’ Rionn muttered to Besara, whose shield touched her own. Bes glanced at her and nodded stiffly.
‘Accepted.’
In a chorus of mad, screeching howls, the ratmen met the walls. Driven by their sheer momentum, many were impaled on the palisade spikes. Others fell and were trampled into the dirt by their own kind. Some leapt at the outer ramparts, trying to scale the rough stone and get at the gunners above. A great gush of stooped figures poured over the shattered blockade and hurled themselves at the Hammers. The ratmen’s eyes were raw and mad, their stench an acrid alchemy of fear, eagerness and hatred.
A score of Vigilor spears struck out with crisp simultaneity, and the first of the enemy perished before they released their doom. Rionn’s own weapon sank through a Skaven warrior’s scrawny chest; she withdrew it and sent it jabbing back half a dozen more times into different targets. Dead ratmen began to pile in front of the Hammers’ position, but the press was relentless. Screams rent the air. The artillery onslaught became a one-way affair. The walls screeched and shuddered under a ceaseless thunder of impacts. The Great Cannon was silent. Rionn could spare no time to look, but she guessed that those damned snipers had slain the last of the gun crews.
Stormcasts began to fall. The rats simply swarmed over them, their crude blades scraping along the seams of sigmarite armour until they found ingress, then sinking deep. Lightning cast the battlefield in strobing colours, both the pure white of discorporated Azyrite energy and the Skaven’s foul green art. Sorely wounded comrades fought on, killing until the moment their bodies dissolved into screaming bolts and leapt for the skies. The line was somehow holding. It was always the same with ratmen, Rionn told herself. If you could withstand their onslaught – the sheer scale and ferocity of it – for those vital opening moments, you could weather the tide until their spirit broke.
But that was the other thing with these wretched creatures. The moment you thought you had them figured out was when the dagger slid into your back.
The ground lurched beneath their boots. Dry-baked rock splintered, and there was a deep, doom-laden sound like a cave-wyrm grinding its many fangs. Rionn risked a glance behind her and saw the floor of the compound give way as a great maw of churning metal emerged from the depths, showering them with a lethal hail of stone fragments. The devilish engine rose up into the air like a breaching whale then came smacking down atop a cluster of screaming Freeguilders, crushing them. There was a moment of stunned calm, the entire battle seemingly pausing to take in this shattering turn of events. Then a great metal plate on the side of the drill-machine fell away, and screeching warriors spilled out – not only the enemy’s wiry footsoldiers but also hulking and slavering horrors taller than any Stormcast, their bodies marred by crude stitching and seams of pulsing warpstone.
‘Fall back!’ Vindictor-Prime Lucien was shouting. ‘Back to the second line.’
The last line. Little more than the burned-out skeleton of the old strongpoint barracks, gutted by fire and filled with the dying and the wounded. There they would fight until they could fight no longer, and then they would be cut down one by one.
Rionn was ready to obey her Prime’s command when she noticed that her right flank was open. A ratman came scrabbling in to attack her, but she rammed the edge of her shield into its face, then kicked it in the chest hard enough that she felt ribs shatter. Bes was out of sight.
At first, Rionn thought her friend had fallen, but a glimpse of sigmarite showed she was still fighting, ignoring Vindictor-Prime Lucien’s order. Rionn’s breath caught in her throat. Besara was surrounded by corpses. A circle of Skaven hissed and clambered around her, trying to summon up the courage to attack en masse.
‘Bes!’ Rionn cried. ‘Retreat, damn it.’
Her friend stared at her for a moment, and Rionn saw no kinship in those crackling eyes, nor even the hint of recognition. Besara was gone, consumed by a passionless killing zeal that Rionn had seen before on the faces of lost comrades. That hollow look of those one too many times Reforged, whose souls had been worn down until they were brittle, joyless things who craved only righteous battle. Thinking their foe distracted, the Skaven closed in. That was their mistake. Besara moved with terrible swiftness, lashing her spear about in a wide semicircle to smash two ratmen from their feet, then stabbing out once, twice, three times. Several more corpses joined the pile at the Vindictor’s feet.
Rionn saw the Rat Ogor out of the corner of her eye before it struck, a mass of rancid, waxy flesh and muscle, moving with the speed of a pouncing lion. It barrelled through the press and smashed into Besara, bearing her to the ground.
‘Bes!’
Rionn ignored the cries of her retreating comrades and raced to the aid of her friend. The foe was clustered tight together, but she lowered her shield and smashed straight through them, desperation lending her strength. The snarling, bloated fiend was raking dagger-length claws down Besara’s plate. Strings of acidic drool dribbled from its oversized maw, and the scars that criss-crossed its back pulsed with hideous, bile-green light. She drove her spear deep into its side. It reared and howled. Besara – her armour rent in a dozen places and gushing blood – somehow freed herself and slammed her fist into the beast’s jaws, shattering teeth. The Rat Ogor recoiled, then it seized the stricken Stormcast and hurled her into the air. Besara’s body flipped like a ragdoll. She landed on her neck with sickening force.
‘No!’ cried Rionn, knowing she was already too late.
She sank her spear into the small of the monster’s back. This second blow saw it reel, howling and clutching at the wound. Still the cursed thing would not fall. It lumbered at her, screeching mindlessly. One swiping paw struck Rionn’s shield dead centre. The force of the blow knocked her off her feet. She landed on her back, dazed. Through a blurry haze, she saw the beast looming above, bringing both its fists up high to crush her skull.
A shadow engulfed them both. Something vast plunged down and seized the Rat Ogor in gleaming talons. The fiend was lifted from its feet and carried through the air by the winged behemoth, then it was brought crashing to the ground in a surge of leathery wings. Rionn saw a coat of red scales and a flash of golden armour, and a roar split the air. She crawled towards Bes, spear in hand.
The foul skies that roiled above were sundered by blistering lances that speared from the heavens. Storm-energy was released in a shattering boom that sent ratmen flying, their flesh scorched and blackened. The dust kicked up from those impacts obscured the battlefield, and then Rionn heard chanting: low, sonorous voices joined in a dirge that spoke of battles long ago and comrades lost but not forgotten. Grim, silent figures emerged from the dust-cloud, their towering silhouettes somehow familiar and yet terribly strange. They drove into the dazed ranks of the Skaven like the God-King’s own hammer. Now the screams that split the air were the faltering cries of terrified ratmen. Armoured in dark gold, these Stormcasts slew with the same brutal coldness that Besara had displayed. Where their blades swung, the enemy was hewn and hacked to pieces. Their frenzy forgotten, the ratmen began to break, fleeing in a messy, haphazard tangle of tails and limbs.
Despite this unexpected reversal, the battle had faded into irrelevance in Rionn’s mind. Her eyes were fixed upon Besara. Her friend lay still, her helmet ripped from her skull to reveal an ugly wound. A mortal wound, certainly. The Vindictor’s blank eyes stared at Rionn dully. Half-formed words bubbled on bloody lips.
‘Bes,’ Rionn said, wiping gore from the warrior’s cheek. ‘Let go, my friend. It’s time for you to see the stars of Azyr again. I’ll meet you there.’
Rionn felt a hand fall on her shoulder. It guided her gently to her feet.
‘We have come for your comrade,’ the newcomer said. The words were little comfort, for they were spoken in a voice that rattled like a death-hiss.
But they were not without pity. She turned to see the warrior who had descended upon the dragon to save her life. His helm was a stark skull, his armour lined with bones and symbols of the Relictor temple. She knew him on sight. All of the First-Forged Host knew of Ionus Cryptborn, hero of the Realmgate Wars. She had heard rumours of his grim new duties, though until now she had wished they were nothing but hearsay.
‘Warden of the Lost,’ she whispered.
‘Bid your friend goodbye,’ he said. ‘You will not see her again.’
‘Where will you take her?’
He was silent for a moment. She realised the sounds of battle had ceased, save for the groans of the wounded and a distant rattle of gunfire. She was dimly aware of some humans staggering through the smoke and rubble of the strongpoint. Vindictor-Prime Lucien and a few remaining Stormcasts strode through the piles of Skaven, making sure each bloody corpse was truly dead.
‘She will be taken to a place where she will be remembered,’ Cryptborn said at last. ‘Where she will continue to serve the God-King as she has since the moment of her calling. Until at last she is ready to cross the final threshold.’
‘She deserves more than that.’
The man sighed, a rattling sound. ‘She does. So do we all. But existence is often cruel, and we must take our comforts where we can. Know that she will be amongst others who have suffered the same hardships. Know that she will be honoured and her deeds written into the annals of the lost. That will have to be enough.’
Tears stung Rionn’s eyes, and she nodded. She bent one last time to clasp Besara’s hand. She thought, for a moment, that the haze of blackness slipped from the stricken warrior’s face, and her eyes sparkled once more with life. She felt Bes squeeze her hand with sudden strength, and – perhaps she simply imagined it – but her friend’s head seemed to incline, as if nodding assent to her fate.
‘Thank you,’ said Rionn, and let her go.
Seraphs descended on wings of dark fire. Reverently, they grasped the fallen hero, lifting Besara’s body into the skies. The Warden strode to his waiting drake, which observed proceedings with sombre dignity, the slain Rat Ogor lying torn and ripped at its feet. It spread its wings as Cryptborn climbed atop the seat strapped to its back. The skies – so long choked by sorcerous stormclouds – briefly cleared. A ray of light illuminated the ruins of Ratham’s Crook as Besara was borne away to whatever fate awaited her.
The Warden of Lost Souls spoke the truth. Rionn never saw her friend again.
The Stormcast Eternals can begin the fightback this weekend, when their new battletome and units reach pre-orders.
