Starseer's Ruin, page 1
Contents
Cover
Warhammer Age of Sigmar
Starseer’s Ruin
Dramatis Personae
PART 1
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
PART 2
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
PART 3
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
PART 4
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
PART 5
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Skaventide’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
The Mortal Realms have been despoiled. Ravaged by the followers of the Chaos Gods, they stand on the brink of utter destruction.
The fortress-cities of Sigmar are islands of light in a sea of darkness. Constantly besieged, their walls are assailed by maniacal hordes and monstrous beasts. The bones of good men are littered thick outside the gates. These bulwarks of Order are embattled within as well as without, for the lure of Chaos beguiles the citizens with promises of power.
Still the champions of Order fight on. At the break of dawn, the Crusader’s Bell rings and a new expedition departs. Storm-forged knights march shoulder to shoulder with resolute militia, stoic duardin and slender aelves. Bedecked in the splendour of war, the Dawnbringer Crusades venture out to found civilisations anew. These grim pioneers take with them the fires of hope. Yet they go forth into a hellish wasteland.
Out in the wilds, hardy colonists restore order to a crumbling world. Haunted eyes scan the horizon for tyrannical reavers as they build upon the bones of ancient empires, eking out a meagre existence from cursed soil and ice-cold seas. By their valour, the fate of the Mortal Realms will be decided.
The ravening terrors that prey upon these settlers take a thousand forms. Cannibal barbarians and deranged murderers crawl from hidden lairs. Martial hosts clad in black steel march from skull-strewn castles. The savage hordes of Destruction batter the frontier towns until no stone stands atop another. In the dead of night come howling throngs of the undead, hungry to feast upon the living.
Against such foes, courage is the truest defence and the most effective weapon. It is something that Sigmar’s chosen do not lack. But they are not always strong enough to prevail, and even in victory, each new battle saps their souls a little more.
This is the time of turmoil. This is the era of war.
This is the Age of Sigmar
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Vael Scar-Helm – Stormcast Eternal, one of the Hammers of Sigmar
Crosillan – Stormcast Eternal Knight-Arcanum, former comrade of Vael
Kenlo Marinta – human, quartermaster
Perlo Marinta – human, mage, his sister
Stanner – human, Wildercorps scout
Lofus – human, Steelhelm sergeant-at-arms
Regis – human, Fusilier
Groslyn – human, Steelhelm
Fenwech – human, army marshal
Arnulf – Stanner’s dog
Sek’atta – Slann Starmaster
Irixi – Skink Starseer
Gokumet – Saurus veteran
Oaxmal – Chameleon Skink scout, hunter of Huanchi
Zitzel – Skink translator
Ferskine of the Eleventh Bell – Skaven Plague Priest
Part 1
RAISED FROM DUST
CHAPTER ONE
VAEL
Lancing down from a clear sky to the plazas of the great temple. Towering friezes of jade and gold and obsidian loomed over him, depicting squatting shapes with eyes like wells. The sound of thunder, first of their arrival, then of the charging of the beasts. Darts rattled off his armour. Beside him, an arcing purplish bolt blew one of his companions apart. Then they were clashing, Vael and his valiant few against a tide of scaled flesh. Great hulking beasts with crested lizard heads battering at him with toothed clubs or ramming with stone-bladed spears that clove through steel like mud.
A voice, his commander – ‘Sigmar, show us your purpose!’ – as the lines bent, their shields upraised against the brute power of the enemy. Vael’s hammer, descending like judgement, smashed fang-filled snouts, battering down on these beasts of…
‘These are not things of ruin!’ someone was shouting. Crosillan the Knight-Arcanum, the wise. ‘Why are we fighting here?’
‘Just fight!’ The commander’s bellow, and indeed the monsters were giving them no quarter, no chance. And the spears of Sigmar’s lightning flashed and flashed, deploying more Stormcasts to the tilting balconies and sacred squares of this place. Shattering stone and statue, punching through to…
Nothing. To nothing. Below was only empty space and the far-distant hunger of the ground…
In riding the lightning he forgot himself.
Searing blue out of a sky choked with green-black cloud. Descending like Sigmar’s judgement onto the walls. Seeing, as he passed through that moment of electric transition, flash after flash, his allies manifesting all along the battlements. The searing judgement of Azyr, Sigmar! Sigmar! The host of the Stormcasts, the hammer of the Eight Realms, come to… come to…
Beyond the walls was a crawling host of vermin. Vael stared. To the world his face was a golden mask, serene, inhuman, devoid of flaw. Within it, he reeled. He turned, hands clutching about the hilt of his hammer. Sigmar’s hammer. The symbol of his… of his…
A city stretched behind him. Not the celestial architecture of Azyr, just… stones. Sticks. He remembered it, the pattern of its streets, but there had been flames, the buildings cast down in ruins as the hosts of–
‘Brother!’ a metallic voice hailed him. ‘They come! Ready yourself.’
He wheeled round, seeing a great tide of rodent flesh surging towards gates that, in his memory, were sundered through already. He had seen a tide of green orruks smashing gleefully through them, their great tusked beasts bellowing and swaying, struck through with arrows of lightning yet still charging… He…
No, that had been…
Vael Scar-Helm dropped his hammer at his feet and clutched at his head. He was being deceived. This was a stratagem of the powers of Chaos. The Bringer of Desires had clouded his eyes, the Lord of Rot had infected his mind. He remembered this place. He had fought here. It had been ruined. It had been new-built. It had–
He gripped the parapet. The metal voices swirled around him, calling his name like mocking ghosts. ‘Vael! Vael!’ The vermin horde were scaling the wall, just climbing up one another in their chittering desperation to reach the top.
‘Where are the warhosts of Nagash?’ Vael demanded. ‘We come to save these people from the Lord of Death.’ He remembered it so clearly. The tide of bone and steel coming at them. The pure certainty that Sigmar’s thin line of gold must not buckle, must never yield. And yet they fell, in the end. The city could not be saved. The dead had claimed these streets and the spears of the necrotic troops had pierced him through his mail, and he had died.
The first of the rats crested the wall. His hammer lay at his feet, but his hands reached out and tore the thing apart, without any need for him to direct them.
Did Sigmar not catch us? Are we the slaves of Nagash now, dead forever and defending this place for the dead against the vermin?
The rats fell back. Bolts of searing blue stabbed into the mass of them. Along the wall, men and women discharged thunderous weapons of smoke and noise. He did not know them. He did not know any of them.
‘Brother!’ A mailed hand on his arm, hauling him round. ‘Are you injured? Take up your hammer, they will come again.’ A blank gold mask of a face, peering into his own. A voice he did not know.
‘No!’ Vael roared. It was a trick. It was all a trick. He had seen this city die. He had seen them all die, even as he had died. A hundred times he had died. He grappled with the gold-armoured figure before him, feeling as though he was fighting his own reflection. ‘I do not know you!’ he shouted. ‘You are dead!’ Tearing the mask from his mirror image’s face, expecting the pallor and corruption of a corpse.
A woman, dark-skinned, dark-haired, staring at him. ‘Vael,’ she said, and he did not know her. She was not of his company. She had no
‘Where are the hosts of the dead?’ he shouted at her. ‘Where are the legions of the Everchosen? Where are the defenders of the temple-city?’ Images were flashing and searing in his head as if the spears of Sigmar were piercing his skull. He had fought here. He had seen these walls built. He had seen them destroyed. He had died here. And here he was once more.
‘Vael, they are coming again!’ the woman shouted at him. He saw the crackle of fury about her eyes, her frustration with him.
Beyond her, the gunners leant over the wall to shoot, and past them more of Sigmar’s chosen, loosing crackling bolts and javelins.
‘What does it matter?’ Vael scooped up his hammer. ‘You are all transient!’ he yelled at the defenders, at the wall, at the world. ‘I have won this ground before. I have lost it. I have died here. We win, we lose, it never ends! Who are we?’ Lightning was weeping from the corners of his eyes. ‘Who even are we?’
A hulking thing hauled its way over the parapet, bulky as an ogor, its head little more than gnawing incisors the size of shields. With a howl of despair Vael whirled and struck it with all the strength Sigmar had beaten into him. Felt its misshapen, stitched-together form collapse under the blow. The blades of the scrabbling things behind it scratched at his mail and he wept sky-fire as he beat at them. He would kill them. They would kill him. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing would change. He was caught in a cage of lightning. It would never let him go.
He did not die. Not for want of trying, but the rats and their monstrous creations could not bring him down. He found he hated them for it. That they hadn’t been enough. Hated the walls for still standing. The citizens of the city – whose name he could not even recall – for being alive at the end of the day, when the remaining rats crept away into the earth. Vael leant his elbows on the walls and stared out after them, feeling each sundered point in his mail where they had almost been good enough to bring him down.
‘Brother.’ That same woman, the one he didn’t know. The one who had not been there when he was made. When Sigmar had crafted the first of his eternal servants out of the fires of Azyr. ‘Brother, we are called.’
Vael looked up. Of course they were called. The lightning would return them to Sigmar’s halls, where they would train and study and… He would not call it living.
‘I remember.’ His voice was a croak.
The woman’s face was new enough that he still saw empathy on it. She had not died enough to have that hammered out of her. She still thought it mattered. ‘Brother?’ Respect, in that voice. A new-made pawn of Sigmar speaking to one of the very oldest. A son of the first forging, who had died in Sigmar’s service more often than she had sat down to eat.
‘I remember,’ Vael said again. He didn’t want to. A moment ago, it had been the forgetting that tormented him. Now it was what little remained. Take this burden from me, Sigmar. Rid me of the last of myself, so that I may better serve you! But the remorseless descent of the hammer had somehow struck away his certainties and left him with only the memory of when he was weak.
‘What do you remember, brother?’ The woman leant on the wall beside him, her face staring at his, trying to read him. But Vael’s features had been written over too many times, life after life, battle after battle, death after death.
‘Sigmar,’ he said hoarsely. ‘When he chose us. Took us at the point of our first deaths and remade us. His champions.’
‘That must have been glorious,’ she said, and he felt the prickling fire at the corners of his eyes.
In riding the lightning he remembered.
The scaled warriors, fighting with cold fury at this intrusion. His hammer descending on them, but there were more and they knew no fear of the lightning. He saw his own determination in them, the rigid righteousness of Sigmar’s chosen turned back on him. A spear lanced under his pauldron, a javelin jabbed into his knee. A keening, flying thing swooped down and caught up the warrior beside him, hauling the gold-armoured form into the air and tipping him over the rail into… empty air. They were aloft. A city that was a temple that was a vessel, coasting over twisted, death-clutched ground.
And slanting, the carven tiles beneath Vael’s sabatons now at a dangerous angle. He saw cracks in the stones and between the stones. The lightning played about the place, Sigmar sending his finest into this skyborne fray whilst below, the hosts of ruin seethed through the crooked trees of Shyish. The true battle, that they were supposed to be fighting.
The voice of Crosillan, the Knight-Arcanum, ‘We are not supposed to be here! Commander–’ Cut short by the roaring of a monster that thundered out from between the tilting spires. Man-length jaws closing on gilded mail, thrashing and shaking the warrior-mage into fragments and pieces.
Vael charged it, slammed his hammer into the scales of its leg hard enough to stagger the behemoth, and then a blow slanted off his backplate, sending him staggering. He whirled to see a great champion of the reptile warriors there, a head above the others, armoured in gold-and-green stone. Its club was of wood and copper and onyx, but crafted in some way that made it harder than steel. It roared into his masked face and he yelled right back.
The ground sloped beneath them. He could see the towers of the place falling. The great frog statues toppling down on the combatants of both sides, wreaking indiscriminate destruction.
Not our battle. Not where we should be. The lightning of Sigmar, interrupted on its way to the earth. Pointless, pointless, but no way to tell these monstrous beasts.
He took the descending force of the creature’s club on his hammer haft, feeling the appalling strength behind the blow. Feeling his soles scrape two feet backwards, then further as the stone beneath him shifted and dropped. And still the lightning speared down, completing the act of ruin. Below, on the distant ground, Stormcasts and Archaon’s followers fought under a rain of broken stone and fragmented statuary.
Vael roared and the beast lunged forwards and caught his golden mask in its jaws, the metal buckling beneath its bite. It tore his gilded, perfect visage aside and exposed the flesh beneath, the truth of him. He felt the fangs go in, gouging his brow, his cheek, his chin, piercing his eye. He felt fierce. He felt alive, even as he died.
Later, he stood before a mirror in the argent halls of the Stormcasts, the flawless complex of white stone where they trained and studied and… waited. Waited on Sigmar’s need, for what else was there for them? He stood in a grand chamber and studied his own reflection, not vanity but as though meeting a stranger whom he ought to recall. He saw… his face. Not his face. The features he’d had when he’d lived, and that had been recreated on Grungni’s anvil after he’d been denied his first, mortal death. The features he’d carried into the lightning in his first sortie as one of the chosen, the Stormcast Eternals. The script of countless wounds unwritten. Restored, as he was always restored. The marks of every deathblow stolen from him, along with the memories of how he received them. How many times? He only remembered that he couldn’t recall.
There had been those who might remind him, once. His first comrades, those whom the lightning had sent into battle alongside him from the start. One by one he had lost them. Some had outlived him in one battle, or died ahead of him, so that their cycles of rebirth and destruction had fallen out of sync with him and they had passed like ships, never meeting again, grown distant through a disjunction of lives. Others had died more, been remade more, until it had overwhelmed them. Grown strange, grown inhuman, losing the last of themselves until they became a threat, physical or existential. The Ruination chambers, went the word. The last home Sigmar reserved for his servants who had grown too fierce and maverick for regular deployment. They will have a place there reserved for me. But not yet. Of them all, he clung on to the last scraps of himself. He was Vael, and once that had meant something.
He took out his knife, the small one he used for eating. Death and Sigmar had robbed him of so much, but there was one thing he could take back. In this way, Vael exercised what little control he had over his life. He touched the tip to his brow, paused not because of remembered pain but because he wanted to get it right. To write here on his skin the record of his first true death. Not the mortal death he’d been snatched from by Sigmar, but that first time he was slain in Sigmar’s service. Lightly, almost briskly, he traced the jagged imprint of the first fang, and blue-white fire hissed from the wound. The pain… the pain was terrible, but it was living. It was his. It couldn’t just be taken away from him.
