The End Times:
The Return of Nagash
(Josh Reynolds)
The world is dying, but it has been so since the coming of the Chaos Gods.
For years beyond reckoning, the Ruinous Powers have coveted the mortal realm. They have made many attempts to seize it, their anointed champions leading vast hordes into the lands of men, elves and dwarfs. Each time, they have been defeated.
Until now.
In the frozen north, Archaon, a former templar of the warrior-god Sigmar, has been crowned the Everchosen of Chaos. He stands poised to march south and bring ruin to the lands he once fought to protect. Behind him amass all the forces of the Dark Gods, mortal and daemonic. When they come, they will bring with them a storm such as has never been seen. Already, the lands of men are falling into ruin. Archaon’s vanguard run riot across Kislev, the once-proud country of Bretonnia has fallen into anarchy and the southern lands have been consumed by a tide of verminous ratmen.
The men of the Empire, the elves of Ulthuan and the dwarfs of the Worlds Edge Mountains fortify their cities and prepare for the inevitable onslaught. They will fight bravely and to the last. But in their hearts, all know that their efforts will be futile. The victory of Chaos is inevitable.
These are the End Times.
To Lindsey and Graeme for making this, among other things, readable.
PROLOGUE
The world was dead.
It simply didn’t know it yet.
That was the bare truth of it, and it pleased the one who considered it to no little end. Oh, there were things to be done yet, debts to be paid and webs to be spun or broken, but the weight of the inevitable had settled across the way and weft of the world. Time was running out, and the beast was all but bled white.
Long fingers – scholar’s fingers – stroked the murky surface of the blood that filled the ancient bronze bowl before him. The bowl was covered in the harsh, jagged script of a long-dead empire. It had once belonged to another scholar, who had come from a still-older empire even than the one that had produced the bowl. That scholar was dust now, like both of the empires in question: all three erased from the tapestry of history by hubris and treachery in equal measure. There were lessons there, for the man who had the wit to attend them, a voice that may or may not have been his own murmured in the back of his head. He shrugged the voice off, the way a horse might shrug off a stinging fly.
The scryer considered himself susceptible to neither arrogance nor foolishness. Were it any other moment, he might have admitted that it was the height of both to think oneself beyond either. As it was, he had other concerns. He ignored the soft susurrus of what might have been laughter that slithered beneath his thoughts with a surety that was the result of long experience, and bent over the bowl, murmuring the required words with the necessary intonation. The empire of Strigos might be dead, and Mourkain with it, but its language lived on in certain rituals and sorcerous rites.
The blood in the bowl stirred at the touch of the scryer’s fingertips, its surface undulating like the back of a cat seeking affection. Its opacity faded, and an image began to form, as though it were a shadow flickering across a stretched canvas. The images were of every time and no time, of things that had been, things that would be and of things that never were. The scryer desired to know of the calamitous events that afflicted the world, events whose reverberations were felt even in his tiny corner of the world. The world was dead, but with a voyeur’s eagerness, he wanted to see the killing blows.
The first image to be drawn from the depths of the bowl was of a twin-tailed comet, which blazed across the crawling canopy of the heavens, fracturing the weak barrier between the world of man and that which waited outside as it streaked along its pre-destined course. In its wake – madness.
A storm of Chaos swept across the world, spreading outwards from the poles to roll across the lands of men and other than men one by one. Daemons were born and died in moments, or tore their way through the membrane of the world to sow terror for days or weeks on end. There was no rhyme or reason to any of what followed; it was merely the crazed whims of the Dark Gods at work. The scryer watched it all with a cool, calculating eye, like a gamesman sizing up the opening move of an oft-played opponent.
In the cold, dark reaches of Naggaroth, the sound of drums set the ice shelves to shivering and caused avalanches in the lower valleys. A horde of northmen poured across the Ironfrost Glacier, and in their vanguard swooped down the elegant, crimson shape of Khorne’s best beloved. They smashed aside the great watchtowers, and the mighty hosts sent against them only stoked the fires of their fury. As Valkia exhorted her followers towards the obsidian walls of Naggarond itself, the scryer stirred the bowl’s contents, eager to see more.
The image shifted, and then expanded into great walls of pale stone, which thrust up from the green nest of the jungles of distant Lustria; here, scaly shapes warred with nightmares made flesh in the heart of the ruins of Xahutec. Elsewhere, the jungle was afire, and once great temple cities had been cast into ruin, as a continent heaved and burned.
Lustria’s death pyre flared up so brightly that the scryer winced and looked away. When he looked back at the bowl, the scene had changed. Red lightning lit the sky and strange mists spread down the slopes of the Annulii Mountains, bringing with them the raw power of Chaos unfettered. The land and its inhabitants became warped into new and terrible forms, all save the elves. The walls of reality wore thin and tore, and daemons flooded into Ulthuan. The forests of Chrace burned as the rivers of Cothique and Ellyrion became thick with virulent noxiousness, while in the heartland of the elven realms, the great cities of Tor Dynal and Elisia fell to the assaults of Chaos, rampaging daemons overwhelming their embattled defenders. As daemons scrambled in a capering, cackling riot towards a battle line of Sapherian Sword Masters, and elven magi drew upon every iota of power at their command to throw back their enemy, the image shattered like a reflection in a droplet of water, reforming into another scene of warfare.
Across the glades and valleys of Bretonnia, disgraced knights and covetous nobles flocked to the serpent banners of Mallobaude, illegitimate son of Louen Leoncouer, and would-be king of that divided land. The scryer watched as the nation over the mountains descended into fiery civil war, and his eyes widened in surprise as he saw Mallobaude throw down his father at Quenelles with the aid of a skeletal figure clad in robes of crimson and black. A skull blazing with malignant power, with teeth as black as the night sky, tipped back and uttered a cackle of victory as Leoncouer was smashed to the ground, seemingly dead at his offspring’s hand. Arkhan the Black was in Bretonnia, and that fact alone tempted the scryer to try to see more. But the image was already dissolving and he let the temptation pass. There would be time later for such investigations.
A new picture rippled into view. In the deep, ice-cut valleys and towering heights of the mountain range known as the Vaults, the dwarf hold known to the scryer as Copper Mountain tottered beneath the assault of a tempest of blood-starved daemons. The legion that assailed the stunted inhabitants of the hold was so vast that the hold’s defences were all but useless. But as the dwarfs prepared to sell their lives in the name of defiance, if not victory, the daemonic storm dissipated as suddenly as it had gathered, leaving only blue skies and a battered shieldwall of astonished dwarfs in its wake. As the dwarfs began to collect their dead, the scene dissolved and a new one took its place at the scryer’s barest gesture.