I ruefully accepted the offer of a cup of black qahua, swilling the bitter-tasting brew around my mouth, then spraying it over the fire.
The flames leapt hungrily. Aeygar squawked in alarm, her feathers rustling, while the soldiers whooped and laughed, covering their eyes against the licking flames. I chuckled along with them, a pleasant fuzziness in my breast, wondering if a mortal troop had ever, or would ever, dare pull something like that on a Vandus or an Akturus.
I downed the qahua and tossed Nassam his cup back.
Probably not.
My laughter faded as I watched the greatsword struggle to catch the hot cup, the others playfully shoving him and laughing.
It was then I realised.
They felt no aversion to me.
My brother Stormcasts could sense what had been done to me, even if they could not understand how fundamentally I had been diminished or why it was that I repelled them. But not the Blue Skies. Not the mortals. I was still Hamilcar Bear-Eater to them, the saviour of Jercho, hero of the Seven Words, and they loved me as openly as any Champion of Order could hope for.
And I loved them too.
In my own way.
The fire shrivelled back down. I found myself staring as it popped and crackled. Almost like a chitter.
‘What did you say?’
Hamuz looked at Nassam, then the man to his right, and gave a tentative shrug.
I looked over my shoulder, a slow itch crawling down my spine.
The fire had bleached my night vision, but I could still see the faint amethyst halo of Barbarus, sat on the loam at the light’s edge. He was hunched over, working with fingers and knife and Nubia’s chirping guidance to repair the damage to his wings. The star-eagle looked up occasionally to glare at me, eyes twinkling indigo and red in the firelight, as though this was my fault. It was, but I wasn’t going to take that from a star-eagle. The Errant-Questor was ostensibly keeping watch, although I would put my faith in Aeygar and Brychen over the King in the Sky in that duty any day.
At the thought of the Wild Harvest priestess I rubbed absently at the thick ring of sigmarite around my neck. I didn’t know much about what she was capable of, but somehow I doubted there were too many skaven capable of getting the drop on her.
Of course, I could think of one or two.
With a sigh I turned back to the fire, as if I might find truth there.
Barbarus was just avoiding me.
I was wondering what that made me. Was a god without worshippers just a fickle power in the aether? Could an orator without an audience still be said to have a gift with words, or was he just another madman in a realm full of them with a penchant for talking to himself? I was the Bear-Eater. A force of nature. A gale from Azyr. I wasn’t a man, I was a totem. With Sigmaron itself barred to me, what was that worth? The knights of my own chamber could not abide my presence. A totem to whom? Was burnishing my legend amongst the mortal folk of the other seven Mortal Realms enough for a champion of my stature?
I thought about it for a time, then shook my head.
Even with the great outpouring of souls following the opening of the Gates of Azyr – the reverse migrations of the displaced over a hundred years – the population of Azyrheim alone was still greater than the entirety of the other seven Mortal Realms combined. I had no interest in being half a hero. I was Hamilcar Bear-Eater. All in, or nothing at all. The thought of adapting to my new condition barely even occurred to me. I would find Ikrit and see myself made whole: I would be the hero of Azyrheim again.
I glanced again at Barbarus. Afterimages from the fire swam about the Errant-Questor like phoenix feathers. Sigmar had warned me that other divinities had despatched champions of their own to capture Ikrit.
He might have mentioned that some of his own warriors were amongst them.
I frowned across the clearing.
Ikrit would face judgement in Azyr, as Sigmar had tasked me. If Barbarus, Brychen or anyone else wished it otherwise, then they’d soon learn why the name ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater’ was interchangeable with boldness and resolve across half the known realms. Hyish and Ulgu still being largely unexplored at this time…
‘You keep looking at him.’
Without my noticing, Brychen had emerged from wherever she had wandered off to after the battle and creaked down beside me. I’d assumed that the priestess had been offended by the fire and found somewhere in the wood to sit. She was a tree-worshipper, after all. But she stared into the smoky offering with a rapacious fascination, as though there was something affirming at play in the consumption of dead wood by the flame.
The Jerech that had been sitting there shifted out of her way, suddenly interested in the murmured conversation going on to his other side.
The priestess turned to me, her eyes a luminescent green.
‘Why?’
I could have just ignored the question, and probably should have, but it wasn’t in my nature to keep quiet on a subject – particularly when the subject was myself.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I said.
‘The old wood does not understand why it must burn.’ She glanced in the direction of Aeygar. ‘The sheep does not understand the eagle.’
‘Good for them.’ I thought about it. ‘I suppose.’
‘We are neither wood nor sheep. I am the woodsman. I am the shepherd. And you…’ She looked at me archly. Shadows stretched down from her chin and the arms folded over her knees as she straightened, leaving her skin oddly discoloured. Like a browned leaf. ‘You are not a thing of nature at all.’
I grinned. ‘Hardly. I’m the walking extension of a god, an avatar of the Eternal Storm. There is nothing more natural than Hamilcar Bear-Eater in this wood tonight.’
‘Sigmar’s impression of what is natural, perhaps, but there is nothing “eternal” in the Gorwood. There is only predator and prey. And even that can never be constant. Infirmity. Calamity. This is what nature is, and what it brings.’ She sighed and turned back to the flame. ‘There is always something bigger, younger, fiercer. Dominance is illusory, and always temporary.’
‘You’re talking about Ikrit,’ I said.
She hissed. ‘Even after the loss of the Maiden we thought that we ruled these woods. The brayseer and his predecessors never troubled us in our own lands. Then the warlock came, killing and enslaving. He was the fire that strikes in summer. He was the predator that enters new territory and finds no rival there.’
‘Until now,’ I said.
‘Praise Sigmar!’ declared Hamuz, to much cheering and clapping from the Jerech.
Brychen smiled sweetly. Like a poisonous flower. Her teeth were black and sharpened to points.
‘You remind me of my brother,’ she said to me. ‘He thought the seasons turned around him as well.’
‘He told me something similar,’ I smiled, rubbing thoughtfully at my beard, pulling out the occasional stringy bit of stelx. ‘You haven’t told me yet what you’re doing out this far from the Nevermarsh.’
‘The skaven burned down our temples, massacred my people, murdered my brother. The Maiden teaches us hardship, but the warlock goes too far. The fields have been burned, the weeds have flourished, but now it is the reaping time.’ She clenched a fist, her wooden armour creaking. ‘I have drawn Ikrit’s roots this far, and soon I will pull him from the earth that harbours him.’
‘You as well, then?’ I said, casting another glance at Barbarus and Nubia.
So much for the solitary life of the Knight-Questor.
I leaned in closer to the priestess. ‘You weren’t sent after Ikrit by a god, were you?’
‘The Maiden doesn’t ask. She takes. And those she leaves behind grow all the taller and stronger for it.’