The tempest from the north raged and billowed south, and the holy men of the skaven convened to complete their sacred work. The labyrinth was drinking in the torrent of the winds of magic hungrily, and the dark power invested into it was growing in intensity and scope as the days passed. Soon it would be too powerful to properly manipulate, to control, and it would be corrupted and swallowed up by the chaos gods. Such heresy could not be allowed to happen.
The corrupt geometry of the labyrinth was analyzed and thirteen points where the shifting power within would be susceptible to manipulation were found. Many of these nexuses of energy were within the maze itself, and so protection was needed. Pestilens wove great nets of disease around its priests, invisible auras of vile microorganisms that hung heavy around the priests they infested and ate the very air. The Grey Seers retrieved great vats of warpstone from their sacred stocks and enacted multitudinous dark rituals to force it into protective artifacts - monstrous-looking masks in the image of the Horned Rat that covered their heads, glowing medallions and rings that would absorb excess energy attempting to intertwine with their auras, and other things, each Seer having a hand in crafting his or her talismans. Many on both sides perished in the course of crafting their protection, but compared to the fates they could suffer in the labyrinth it was considered a merciful death.
Thousands of grey seers and plague priests set off into the labyrinth, and skaven from the newly cleansed Hell Pit to Scalpel Spire sighed in relief as their religious authorities departed. Twelve groups centered on the confluences of power dispersed sporadically throughout the spatially distorted labyrinth, relying more on their innate magical senses rather than their eyes to guide them, for the curdling dark magic that was ever-present in the inhospitable mausoleum that was the maze had shifted the very bounds of its dimensions - any ordinary being lost within its twisting tunnels would never find their way out as tunnels paradoxically turned upon themselves and stretched out far longer than they actually were. But the hungry souls of the wizard-priests found their way to the nexus points, and there they brought their holy structures - great bells that screamed high, thin notes with each peal on their warpstone surfaces, ancient cauldrons encrusted with the residue of a thousand plagues, an aura of divine rot build up like layers of sediment. Six nexuses were claimed by Pestilens, and six by the Grey Seers.
The thirteenth nexus, at the very center of the labyrinth, was where Kritislik and Skrolk headed. Helkic followed nervously in their wake as the two religious leaders traced ritual circles and set up complicated patterns of dark sigils in the floor. The dark was smothering in the tunnels, even for her dark-vision, and the evil light given off by the magical arrays illuminated Kritislik and Skrolk with fell green radiance. The air crackled with overlapping arcs of magic as the sacred thirteenth hour rolled over, and Helkic shrank back into a small corner as they began.
The ritual used was one familiar to both Pestilens and the Seers, to infuse an object with the Horned Rat's will. It normally required thirteen hours of intense concentration and prayer, but the roiling mass of energy in the maze was powerful enough that this iteration would require thirteen days. The twelve outlying nexuses tamed the dark power around them with intonations of the sacred bells and binding sub-rituals conducted over plague cauldrons, drawing it in as invisible skeins of corrupting force and molding it into what they desired. The Seerlord and Papus Pestilens at the center of it all directed the efforts of their underlings, grasping the processed energy they produced and drawing it into the central nexus, where they used their magical might to concentrate it yet further, drawing in the energy of the entire maze down to one point.
Helkic stayed awake for the first three days, her paranoid eyes watching her superiors for signs of betrayal, but found nothing, nor did the maze seem to change at all. When she awoke on the fourth day, however, there had been a shift. The air seemed smaller, if that was possible, and what little light persisted in the nexus had vanished. She could dimly perceive thirteen exit points in the cavern they were in, air currents gusting softly out of each, both hot and cold. The currents swirled around the walls and over her fur in strange patterns, and the echoing whistles they produced almost seemed to sound like whispers.
On the seventh day, the wind had stopped, and some measure of light returned to the maze in the form of a faint ... greenness that never appeared directly to the eye, but instead always seemed to come from behind the observer. Sounds echoed through the corridors of the labyrinth, the skittering of millions of tiny claws on stone and the quiet rustling of fur-clad bodies pushing past each other. By the tenth day the faint light had resolved itself into a sea of emerald pinpricks staring out from the dark at the corners of the eyes, and quiet whispers echoed from out of sight into the minds of those in the maze. What exactly they said was indistinguishable, but for the promise of a quiet end. Helkic felt furry bodies brushing past her if she stayed still too long, and slept no more even as her eyes grew bloodshot and bleary.
By the thirteenth day, it was ready to come to a conclusion. The hungry eyes of the dead stared openly at the living from the dark, and the walls rippled to the touch. There was no escaping the omnipresent sense of claustrophobia, and even the air became impossibly crowded, breath being stolen out of mouths by invisible presences. The tiny whispers had become louder, audible even over the nonstop pealing of the sacred bells, and the things they said were frightful and awful.
As things begin, so they often end. So it was that at the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the ritual, the betrayal Helkic had been agonizingly watching for finally happened. It was so quick that she almost did not see it, and could not discern who had struck first. Instead she felt it in her gut as a horrible wrenching feeling as the energies that had been painstakingly built up alongside each other were now grasped and used to strike at each other, to cut down, to kill. It felt as though her guts were being ripped out and her brain bitten in half, and she vomited black bile as the auras of the Seerlord and the Papus Pestilens exploded into violence. She watched helplessly as the two struck at each other with the accumulated power of the millions of deaths that had gone into this place, every attack rippling outward into the magical structure of the labyrinth and ripping their collated work asunder more and more. The clashing magical fields tore at Helkic's very soul and drove her to her knees. Her skin cracked and her eyes bled, and every breath she took was like crawling across a mile of glass.
It was a subjective eternity until she managed to stand. She only dimly perceived the battle happening in the background, her mind had no space for it. Her entire focus was on the here and now. She could feel in her bones the magical architecture of the labyrinth warping out of the shape they had forced it into, as what must have been all the rest of the Seers and Pestilens acolytes joined in the battle of their masters. Had all this really evaded her notice? She forced the question out of her mind. No space for doubt if she wanted to live. The collapse of the labyrinth would kill her. Skrolk would live. Seerlord would live. Not she. Labyrinth had to stay. Had to be completed.
Blunted, rotting claws shakily scrabbled in the earth. Nerve endings lit up in silent fire as a circle was drawn. Pain pushed through. Survival paramount. Sigils etched, gleaned from observing superiors. Careful, careful. Warpstone dust drawn from hidden pocket in robe. Sprinkled in sigils. Had to do this right. Remember the words, what were the words?
She couldn't remember the words. Her flesh had failed her. But there was one other option. Her mind recoiled instinctively, but other option was death. Survival was paramount. Breath taken in. Lungs bleeding, torn. She could feel them leaking. They worked, that was enough.
The ritual had been on the cusp of completion when the skaven had turned on each other. Even as its structure was assailed by the corroding energies of the two factions of wizard-priests who wished to twist it to their own specific vision, it hungered for the culmination of its purpose, for completion. As the Grey Seers and Plague Priests battled all around her, as two ancient titans amongst skaven leapt at each other and bit and clawed and tore next to her, a bespectacled priest named Helkic Stain stood upright on shaking legs and called out something that froze both Kritislik and Skrolk in horror.
Though it tore her trachea to shreds as it climbed out of her throat, Helkic's voice emerged loud and clear as she called one of the Horned Rat's 13 Names.
The fighting stopped as the air stopped. The labyrinth itself froze, horrific anticipation oozing out of the very walls.
As both the Seerlord and the Papus Pestilens turned tail and ran, the floor beneath Helkic's feet became rats. Like a metastasizing cancer, they chewed outwards at the fabric of reality and transmuted it into more rats, infinitely black of fur with piercing green eyes. The carpet of rodent flesh flowed outward from the centerpoint of the maze, consuming the walls, the air, everything was consumed and became silently chittering rats with emerald eyes. The countless dead were consumed and remade into strange, horrific things stalking the maze, emaciated skaven-like things with thin blades that stared with bulging eyes, horned beasts that lurked in ever-present shadow and other, more fell beings. The attention of the Horned Rat himself had been drawn to the labyrinth by the incantation, to a far greater degree than even Kritislik had wanted. He had seen the nesting ground his children had created and claimed it as his own, and none of the souls within had protection. Many were devoured as they fled in terror from the thing spoken of in the oldest scripture.
It was said to be the nesting place of the Horned God himself. Time and space meant nothing there, utterly subservient to his will, and those who trespassed would be devoured by the walls themselves as they wandered the endless passageways. It had many names in the ancient tomes of Skavenblight: The Under-All, the Horned Labyrinth, the Hungry Catacombs, The Birth-Nest of All Vermin, but the one most often used was The Infinite Warren.
The Seers and Pestilens priests escaped with naught but a third of their numbers devoured, and it was counted as a blessing. Kritislik and Skrolk parted ways quickly, neither keen to dwell on what they had brought into the world.
Of Helkic Stain, there was no sign.
---
A chaos lord named Khalrath Bearcrusher led his army of Baersonling berserkers to the Hell Pit late in the year as blizzards both real and magical blew ferociously. He commanded an army of over ten thousand warriors, blessed by the gods to be able to take on ursine form, becoming creatures capable of biting through plate armor and ripping mortal men in half. He was accompanied by hulking daemons, spectral wolf-like creatures that slavered for blood and could track their prey through the boundaries between worlds. Even the slaves he drove before him were blessed with holy rage by Kharneth, and would fell five normal men before falling. He saw taking the skaven city as a way to gain favor in the eyes of the gods, and he hungered for the flesh vats of the Master Moulders. His was an army that could take on a force ten times its own and come out victorious.
They entered the tunnels beneath the skaven city and were never seen again. Their boundless hunger for blood was overshadowed by what they encountered beneath the earth, and they were torn apart body and soul.
Superweapon Created: The Infinite Warren
Part of the Horned Rat's daemonic realm, the Warren has been manifested underneath skaven-held territory in Norsca due to the undiluted faith of Helkic Stain preserving and enhancing the works of Seerlord Kritislik and Papus Skrolk, which otherwise may have been destroyed in their struggle to impose their creed upon it. It will effectively guarantee that any attacks by the Forces of Chaos on the Hell Pit or Scalpel Spire by any but a major hero unit will fail. However, it is not friendly to anyone, skaven or foe, and as such any authority assigned in Norsca will inevitably suffer significant casualties until the proper research is conducted. See the Superweapons tab in the Technology threadmark.
Helkic Stain has vanished within the Infinite Warren! However, the Papus Pestilens is insistent that she is not dead. See Heroes threadmark.
