Just think about the glory.
The sound of heavy booted steps whisked up (or possibly down) the stairs towards me. I tensed, ready for a fight with anything this realm within a realm could throw at me, but the pair of duardin in leather jerkins and gauntlets simply tugged on their beards and grunted ‘lord’ as they flashed past, as though Stormcast Eternals in bed robes ran up and down these stairs all the time. I had visions of more broken warriors like myself. Retinues of them. Conclaves. Chambers. Lost in the Forge of Ong and running for all time like lightning gheists in a bottle. The feeling came over me with such force that I dived headlong for the next door I saw and slammed it behind me. I leant my back against it, my mind a whirl of speed, the terror of a trapped animal tight about my chest.
‘I should have expected that you would do something like that.’
I gave a shout of alarm and raised my fists.
I was in an armoury. Dummies and racks stood in rows in the dark, the storms within them subdued, their final colours muted, awaiting bondage to the souls of Stormcast Eternals as yet unstruck.
The duardin stood in front of me, his expression stormy as he removed his now unbroken spectacles. Lightning flared behind his eyes. Recognition struck me like a bolt from above, and I dropped immediately to my knees.
‘S-Sigmar.’
The duardin touched his face where I had struck him. ‘A good blow, Hamilcar. But you are not a god.’ He drew his hand from the unblemished skin. Lightning played about the fingers as he extended it towards me. ‘You have not earned the right.’
A bolt of lightning tore from the duardin’s open palm. He did not summon it as would a Lord-Relictor or Sacristan. Rather it was as though he ceded a tiny, infinitesimal portion of his being to become lightning. The bolt struck me, and in that heart-flash of divine communion we were connected. My chest. His hand. My soul.
My god.
The duardin had been seared from existence, burned away in full by the soaring majesty of a man, bearded and great, clad in armour of burnished gold and auroral light. In physicality he stood little higher than I did, and yet I looked up. The gaze that met mine was luminous and ancient, curious and wise, wrathful as the stars, yet with a capacity for empathy and courage that barriers of realm or race could not deny. He looked like me. All of that, and more yet that I could not now describe, I felt in the cosmic eye-blink that it took for his lightning to leap fully from his gauntlet and into me.
After that, I am not sure what happened.
I must have flown backwards, cracked my head against the door that I had entered by and been thrown unconscious for a spell. I recalled none of it.
I came to lying on my chest, surrounded by a golden nimbus that might have been the antipodal opposite of the foul luminescence to which I had awoken in Ikrit’s lair. Lightning played across my fingertips, flashing between my eyelashes and the flagstones on which I lay. They had been dark when I had entered, granite grey, pleasing to its dour custodians, but now they were lustrous, marble white and veined with silver. The dummies that surrounded me, stick figures mere moments before, were now clad in the finest suits of thrice-blessed armour, and the weapon racks were full. Light lanced in through windows that had assuredly not been there, but it was not a kind light. It was the light of epiphany and judgement, damning me to glorious blindness while the greatest being ever to claim the Mortal Realms his own stood scant feet from where I lay.
‘Grungni forged you in my image,’ the light intoned, and trembled with the weight of its own words. ‘Not as I am, nor as I would wish to be, but as a memory of something that once was.’ It walked towards me, the light, until he reached out to tilt my face towards his with storm-wreathed fingers. My illumination brought with it a savage pain, tempest and thunder. And yet barely a fraction, I knew, of the boiling heart of the storm of storms he contained.
I must have made a sound, for the God-King looked fleetingly downcast, and withdrew his hand from my chin.
‘So it is true. That which I gave to alloy your mortal soul to mine has been broken. There can be no succour for you in Azyr.’
I shook my head, scrunching my eyes against the incandescence of the Storm Eternal. Denying his charge was the hardest thing I had ever bidden myself to do, and yet I did so all the same.
‘I am still me, sire.’
‘I grieve for what has been done to you, Hamilcar Bear-Eater. As if an injury has been done to a son of my own flesh and blood.’ Eyes of raw, torrential energy became darkly brooding, as if recalling a time when the mortal injury had been done to his inconceivably distant self. ‘But Ong is not wrong. What has been done to you is a threat to the very existence of the Stormhosts. If it can be repeated. If Ikrit succeeds…’ Sigmar looked at the floor and breathed a sigh that carried on it the woes of the eight Mortal Realms. ‘All the long centuries that I left the realms to the mercies of Chaos, allowing them to suffer and change while Grungni and I laboured to perfect the first Stormcast Eternals. It will have been for naught if the skaven, Ikrit, can create a host of his own corrupted design.’
I made to ask him what he knew of the warlock. Like Ong before him, Sigmar had referred to him by name, and with a casualness that spoke of prior familiarity. Before I could muster my courage, the God-King had turned his radiance from me and gestured towards an armour dummy upon which a harness of highly ornate and unusually heavy aegis war-plate had been assembled. It looked like the bastion armour that Broudiccan had worn, albeit far more elaborate and fine.
With the light on me diminished, I took a shuddering breath and sat up.
‘It is exquisite,’ I said. ‘Fit for a Lord-Commander or Celestant-Prime.’
‘Watch,’ rumbled the storm.
Nothing happened, but just as I dared to open my mouth to say so the harness began to change colour, shifting from a drab, even cream to sun-bright amethyst and dazzling gold. Beastmarks displaying snarling bears arose from the previously solid metal of the left pauldron and right poleyn. The cloak thickened to become fur and a necklace of long, grizzly teeth formed a ring around the gorget and a matching bracelet around the cuff of each vambrace. It was conspicuously more magnificent than anything I had worn as a Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars.
‘You are Lord-Castellant no more,’ said Sigmar, drawing the thoughts from my head like bolts of lightning to a rod. ‘The lord of no Stormhost may command you.’ He tossed me a helmet. I caught it between my hands, residual lightning flaring from the eye slots, and looked down into a Mask Impassive that glittered purple. A golden halo swept around the face-plate, a single piece of metal swept into the form of a rearing bear. The feature most striking to me, however, was the lack of the coloured plume that would have indicated chamber allegiance. ‘You have fallen and been remade by my grace. You are Knight-Questor now, appointed by me, beholden to no cause or duty but the geas I lay upon you now.’
I positioned myself so as to be up on one knee, and lowered my head anew.
‘Find Ikrit. Learn his secrets. Destroy every trace of his work. Kill him if you must, but bring him to me alive if you can. I am far from the first to have fallen foul of his avarice.’
‘Sire?’
‘The name “Ikrit” was not unknown to me. Tyrion. Alarielle. Even Nagash. He has crossed many whom I would prefer to call ally.’ He spoke the names of gods as though they were petty lords or counsellors on whom he might call in passing. I nodded as though this were commonplace in my experience. ‘They are but the ones I know of, and even they do not speak of it freely. Can you imagine Nagash admitting to a mortal skaven violating the sanctity of Nekroheim and escaping with the direst secrets of undeath?’