Because war is like snow.
Even if you can’t see it, it’s falling on someone, somewhere.
A traumatic death and a lengthy reforging had left me damaged in more ways than I think I understood at the time. Nightmares of both had plagued me for years, and had only just begun to subside before Sigmar returned me to the Ghurlands, to capture the Seven Words alongside Akturus Ironheel’s Imperishables. It was one of the few subjects that I never talked about, but there are no secrets within a warrior chamber on campaign. They all knew. Broudiccan certainly knew.
Thinking of my steadfast second-in-command going through the same experience made my stomach knot. We have all gone through it once, of course, but the best of us need never do so again. This would be Broudiccan’s first return to the Anvil, and that he went in my stead left me feeling hollow.
Do you hear that sound, my friends? It is the Bell of Lamentation tolling for poor, sorry Hamilcar.
I sat there in my self-recriminations and silence for hours or minutes. As it was upon the Anvil, so too did time matter little in sunless solitary confinement. I had no way of knowing how long I wallowed like that before the sound of a key turning in a lock jolted me out of my misery.
I stood up quickly as a fantastically obese clanrat strutted past my cell. He was blind in both eyes, missing an ear and several teeth, and the right side of his face was a mess of milky white scar tissue that only enhanced his good looks. Despite being in the heart of his own lair, he wore an iron hauberk. Though if I’d been through what he apparently had, I think I’d wear one too. A fat ring of keys clinked from a leather belt that was almost white with the strain of closing around his belly. Given the well-known skaven proclivity for consuming one’s rivals, I assumed that this one had to be near to the top of his particular hill.
He sniffed at me and grinned, baring his teeth and chittering something to the two thugs that followed him in, which I somehow doubted would be complimentary.
They were big, broad across their shoulders, thick ropes of muscle rubbing together under their mangy brown fur. They were mostly naked but for fur and a bit of loincloth, their bodies covered instead in brands that reminded me of street gang tattoos or the tribal runes that I had idly painted into my own flesh. Theirs were crude and angular things, the horned cross of their repellent god drawn in various pigments and sizes. Unlike theirs, I did not know what mine were supposed to represent. Perhaps they depicted gods too.
I could, however, recognise low-lifes when I saw them.
Call it a gift.
While Milk Scar watched me, his heavies dragged another prisoner, one arm apiece, to the cell across from mine. I felt my chest swell. I’d been consciously captive for less than a day, or so I guessed, and I was already overwhelmingly grateful for the gift of another furless being. In size and proportion, he was clearly human. Judging by the scars on his flesh and the size of his bones, he had probably been a well-built one too until incarceration had worked its curse on his muscles. His skin, though, was a mossy shade of green, and his hair was the colour of autumn leaf fall. He appeared to be unconscious. If not for the fact that the skaven were bothering to lock him up and hadn’t already eaten him I would have thought him dead.
Squeaking at his henchrats, Milk Scar locked the cell door, then hauled himself around to go back the way he’d just come.
Something in me snapped at the thought of being left alone in the dark so soon.
I drove my arm through the bars and grabbed for the keyring hanging from Milk Scar’s expanse of waist. He didn’t so much as flinch, which was unexpected as the skaven aren’t exactly well known for their cool under duress. It occurred to me then that, blind as he was, he must have known exactly where to stand so as to be well out of reach should anyone take exception to their confinement. He turned his pearly eyes to me and snickered, air whistling through the gaps in his smirk. He chittered something I didn’t understand to one of his henchrats who then smacked me on the wrist with a wooden cudgel.
I made a barking noise, surprise and anger, and grabbed for the skaven’s club, but he knew his business and it was already out of my reach.
‘Bad dog,’ said Milk Scar in passable Azyri. ‘I do not like-take disobedience.’
‘My name is Hamilcar Bear-Eater, vermin.’
‘I know-smell who you are.’
‘And who are you? I would know the name of my captor.’ I pressed my face back to the bars and bared my teeth. ‘Before I eat him.’
The clanrat leered at me, tongue lolling over the side of his mouth. ‘Fool-fool. I am not your captor.’
I thumped the bars in frustration, the ratman tittering as he strolled off. ‘I will find a way out of here! I will walk out wearing your skin for boots and gloves and with your skull to sup from when I grow weary of slaughtering your kin. You hear me, rat? Answer me!’ His wheezy laughter faded as the dungeon door clanked shut behind him, leaving me again in semi-darkness.
When I had calmed down enough, I sat back down. I frowned through the bars. I frowned at the ceiling. I turned to frown at the other cell across the way.
‘Friend,’ I called over. Nothing. ‘Talk to me, brother.’
He was out cold, only the shallow rasp of his breaths to answer my welcome.
I sighed.
I wondered if his being imprisoned here where I could see him was a deliberate ploy on the part of my captors. That he had been badly abused, and over a significant length of time, was obvious. Was this the psychological equivalent of a torturer displaying the paraphernalia of his craft? Did they expect me to spend my hours of solitude henceforth consumed by the terror of what awaited me at its end? If so, then they sorely underestimated the fortitude of the Stormcast Eternals.
I may not have exactly edified myself with my response to captivity, but if there is one thing that unites all Stormcast Eternals it is our capacity to endure, and familiarity with, pain.
I looked forward to their attempt.
If only to give me someone to talk to.
The hours stretched by. I tested the bars one by one. I shook them, pulled them, threw myself against them. None of them budged. I tried scratching at the walls. Somehow I came to the conclusion that if a skaven could burrow through it, then so could Hamilcar Bear-Eater, but I lacked their claws, and I surrendered a fingernail long before the rock was ready to yield. Frustrated and bloody-fingered, I was the very model of a caged beast. My thoughts drifted from sullen defiance to my brothers, the Bear-Eaters.
‘They will come,’ I muttered to myself, quietly, so as not to disturb Zephacleas.
I had named my echo Zephacleas. It seems strange now, looking back, but it felt natural at the time.