Magritta was a beautiful city. It had been so since its founding; many of the initial settlers had been architects hailing from the grand, doomed Tylos, who sought to recreate the glory of their lost home. While they never quite recreated Tylos' unique blend of dwarf and human architecture, the city they founded had a style of its own, using inspiration taken from nearby elfin ruins to create tall, slender buildings supported by sturdy arches. Over the centuries, many came to visit the seaside city, and enjoyed passing through its wide plazas and gently sloping streets. Even its docks were aesthetically pleasing, always bustling with fishing boats and traders, dockworkers carrying goods and spices from the world over. Even the duelists that roamed its broad boulevards were colourful and bright, wearing flamboyant clothing that proudly proclaimed their allegiance to one noble house or another. The constant smooth babble of the Estalian language flowed over and through the city, rising up from myriad chimneys as chattering housewives baked bread just as it pattered out of the stalls of bargaining merchants and rang from the throats of Myrmidian priests as they instructed their charges.
Magritta was beautiful, but the sight that greeted the men led by their goddess as they re-emerged into their city was not.
The Magritta that they beheld was a nightmare.
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"Morr's gaze," a soldier swore as he clambered out of a sewer grate into a plaza. "It's ... it's hell. Hell on earth!"
Magritta was engulfed in fire. It danced between partially crumbled buildings in billowing sheets, darting out of doors and windows and clinging to walls like a film of flickering light. Thick smoke choked the air, coiling at head height in tumultuous thunderstorm-like clouds, faintly backlit with emerald radiance. The sky was difficult to see through it, save for patches where the haze grew thin, revealing a sky stained a deep red, with the evil green moon Morrslieb hanging ominously low and large. Screams echoed throughout the city, terrified human shrieks punctuated with the triumphant chattering of skaven. Underlaying it all was something else, something almost alien for how loud it was - the
deep, groaning timbers of many impossibly deep throats howling with insatiable hunger. The sounds seemed to come from every direction, echoing off the cracked flagstones of the streets until they blended together into a hurricane of raw horror and frantic strife. The sickly sweet stench of burned human flesh wafted copiously through the air.
Myrmidia's soldiers were struck dumb by the spectacle as they clambered tiredly out of the tunnels that had brought them from Under-Magritta. "How did this happen?" One exclaimed in disbelief. "There's no way the skaven could have made it here without us knowing!" Many sobbed, knowing their families were somewhere inside the hellish cacophony. Others shook in terror at the unnatural wailing that writhed through the air, for they knew in their bones that no natural-born creature could make such a sound. They cried
diablo and gripped their spears tighter for reassurance. Still others prayed fervently to the gods, and looked anxiously to Myrmidia at their head for guidance. Their god-queen was silent, however, the flames casting her face in shadow. Her expression held no small amount of shock, but was dominated by anger. She did not speak, only gazing unflinchingly at the worst of the flames. Her eyes were steel, and their intensity was such that only one of her soldiers was brave enough to approach her.
"My lady," he began, and flinched back momentarily as she turned to him, eyes blazing. "We must retreat," he ventured, uncomfortably shifting his weight under Myrmidia's glare. "The city is lost. Whatever the ratmen have unleashed, we can't hope to defeat it with the men we have here, and if we lose you, our people are lost. Please, my queen," he begged, "We must flee - to Molena perhaps, we can regroup with whoever managed to escape and make our way north, into the mountains. Anything but remaining here."
Myrmidia shook her head. "No."
She turned back to regard the city. "I will not abandon my people when they need me most. I will not abandon
my city when the skaven attempt to force me out. If we cede the city we effectively cede the entire country. They must be driven out. More pertinently, there are still soldiers in the city - they are disorganized and scattered, but still there. With them, we have a fighting chance. We make for the grand temple -
move!"
That word resonated out through the minds of her soldiers, and for the moment they forgot their churning stomachs and dry throats. They were Estalians, soldiers of the nation with the richest cultural heritage in the world, under the leadership of the greatest general that had ever existed. If the skaven wanted their home, they would have to take it.
They arrowed their way through the streets from the central square, an armored wedge of several hundred men punching through the chaos that ran rampant through Magritta. They ran into resistance at points, mobs of armored skaven warriors armed with poisoned swords and pistols, setting fire to buildings, running down civilians, and generally causing havoc. They died skewered on Myrmidian spears, though they sent more than a few soldiers to Morr.
They made their way to the Grand Temple of Myrmidia, dragging a ballooning wave of civilians, guards, and mercenaries along with them. It took an hour and a half to reach the temple, time in which the cacophony only increased in volume. When they arrived at the temple itself, they were abruptly shown why.
It was well known that the skaven bred many types of monsters to use in war - mutated wolf-sized rats, ogre-sized skaven bulging with muscle, even the rare many-limbed gigantic amalgamations of arms and legs and gaping maws their fleshmasters deployed on occasion. Any of these being present would not be unprecedented - it would be bad, but not something the situation could not recover from. What was present outside of the temple gates was not any of these, however.
It was something far worse.
They almost resembled gargantuan worms writhing out of the earth. They were long, writhing strips of flesh fully one hundred feet long, topped with gargantuan whirring drills and covered haphazardly with great slabs of beaten metal, the cracks between exposing pallid flesh writhing with thick motile hairs. They each possessed a forest of horribly elongated limbs with far too many joints that were topped with disproportionately large hands. In the middle of their palms was what could only be described as a gaping maw, a gash of greenish undulating flesh four feet in diameter extending downwards into the wrist, ringed by thickets of slick inward-pointing fangs the size of swords. The limbs extended from every imaginable point on the creatures, and pawed frantically at anything nearby, vacuuming everything from dead bodies to stones to nearby skaven into their multitudinous maws. They wailed constantly as they did so, the same high, chilling tone that had been echoing through the city for hours on end. There were three of the horrid creatures scrabbling against the walls of the temple, trying to crack their way through to get to the succulent human meat inside. On the ground below them, seeming like ants next to their sheer immensity, was a crowd of several thousand skaven warriors baying for blood. Even as they watched, more of the ratmen clambered out of metallic portholes seemingly drilled into the sides of their monstrous things. They huddled half in, half out of the cover the monsters provided, wary of both the flaming arrows and pitch the temple's defenders were hurling at them and their own creature's voracious appetite.
"Hell's blood," someone swore as they beheld the abominations scrabbling against the walls. "What the fuck
are those things?! We can't beat that! We can't even scratch those! We're going to die, I just know it!" Murmurs of fear spread throughout the crowd of soldiers and those following them, each person growing more and more uncertain and frightened as the people around them did. Tension hung heavy in the air, and at the edges some seemed ready to break ranks and run.
Myrmidia whirled aboutface.
"You forget yourselves, Estalians!" She bellowed.
"You forget the nature of your enemy! Even as your city burns around you, as the skaven cut down the innocent and the helpless as they run, you think your foe will adhere to the rules of war? They are not here to impose concessions, or gain a favorable trade route or even to seize the city. They are here to exterminate us, not to make war. And it is up to you - to
us - to return the favor! Do you truly think it was for nothing that I chose you and your brother Tileans as my people? You are the heirs to the greatest martial potential on the planet, and though the skaven's monsters may bellow and their guns may roar, they will never,
ever match the feats you are capable of!"
She thrust her spear into the air and it burst into flame, quickly followed by the rest of her army's weapons.
"
Now show them," she cried, and her people's hearts were filled with divine wrath.
They fell upon the back of the skaven like a blazing trident, split into three prongs centered around two of the higher ranking officers present and the war goddess herself. Myrmidia dove into and through the center of the skaven lines, while her captains came at the skaven from either flank. The clash was horrific - the stormvermin held against the bellowing soldiers, unloading warpstone bullets into their ranks and stabbing and slashing with two or even three weapons. The Estalians were not daunted, however, their flaming weapons stabbing through the skaven's shoddy armor and setting their mangy fur on fire. They fought in tight formation, shielding each other in perfect time to catch a strike so that the soldier beside them could stab outwards. The humans advanced forward, step by grinding step, compressing the skaven force from either side into a packed ball.
Myrmidia swept through the central ranks of the skaven with piercing cries, her spear and shield flashing brilliantly enough to blind her foes. She punched through their lines almost before they knew what was happening, diving through to their rear and reaching the base of the horrendous Drillfiend pawing away there. She did not flinch at its immensity, running and leaping partway up its bulk before clambering the rest of the way up, using her spear to help her climb. She reached the portholes midway up the width of the creature and vanished inside, leaving her entourage to hold the skaven tide off. Their commanders spoke, their words reaching the ears of their soldiers perfectly despite the horrific din of battle. They split up into two fronts, the wedge they had driven into the skaven now spreading out on either side to envelop the inner sides of the divided ratmen. Pressed on both sides, the stormvermin began to coax their Drillfiends off the walls, waving dead bodies in front of their hand-maws in an effort to entice them to devour their Myrmidian attackers.
It was at this time that the Drillfiend that Myrmidia had entered went absolutely berserk, trilling agonized notes from its twenty-four throats and rearing back from its position on the temple walls to thrash in agony on the ground, crushing many skaven and some Estalians that did not manage to get out of the way in time. The drill on its head was revving ferociously fast and giving out a disturbing amount of smoke, throwing it from side to side in great spasms that carved deep trenches in the ground. Myrmidia leapt out of a porthole near the back of the beast soon afterwards, a jet of flame leaping out after her. The beast continued to thrash spastically, burning up from the inside. In its agony it crashed into the Drillfiend to its left, the two beasts nearly immediately beginning to tear at each other with claw and fang and drill in a near-deafening chorus of glass-shattering shrieks.
"Regroup," cried Myrmida, her voice cutting through the din with supernatural ease. She stabbed her spear upwards through the throat and skull of a stormvermin and it shone like a beacon to her soldiers. "On me, men of Estalia!"
They rallied, making their way around the panicking horde of skaven and the grappling Drillfiend pair, both of which by now were on fire, shrieking loud enough to shake the ground as they burned and tore at the flesh of the other. Myrmidia leveled her spear at the last remaining group of skaven, who had managed to tear their Drillfiend away from the wall and point it at them. "Forward," Myrmidia cried, and the soldiers of Magritta stared into the face of the skaven's colossal annelid horror, grit their teeth, and marched.
They met the skaven lines in a clash of fang and spear, skaven mettle against human will. Each side ripped and tore at the other, fighting for more than just the death of the other - they fought for their homes, for the sake of their kind's very survival and propogation. They fought to stave off death and so they fought viciously and without mercy. Spears gutted ratmen just as easily as warpstone bullets tore gaping holes in human flesh and skaven fangs sank into vulnerable necks.
The Drillfiend rampaged forth, drunk on the smell of human blood. Myrmidia's soldiers were as ants before its might, yet they moved as a legion in perfect coordination, dodging clumsy swipes from the beast and biting back with spear and dagger. The beast bellowed in irritation and hunger, and redoubled its efforts. It and its skaven handlers were so focused on crushing the arrogant Estalians that they never noticed the Myrmidian templars sallying out of the temple gates until they were lanced in the back. The war goddess' knights crashed into the embattled skaven back in a thundering charge before wheeling off with machine-like precision to execute another. In a matter of minutes, between confronting flaming spears at the front, an angry goddess on their flank, and charge after charge smashing into their rear, the remaining skaven troops lost their nerve and broke, leaving the Drillfiend to be cornered and slowly killed limb by limb by the resurgent defenders.
Before long it was over, a carpet of corpses covering the ground. The burned husks of the two other Drillfiends lay below the walls, still smoldering from within as they lay locked in each other's death grip. The casualties were mostly skaven, but many a human lay upon the ground, often in pieces. The mood was somber as Myrmidia conferred with the priests of her grand temple, the holy men updating her on the situation as they knew it.
The ratmen had risen from the earth in their Drillfiends a few hours before Myrmidia arrived back on the surface, a full five of the beasts erupting from the earth like pillars of plated flesh and gangly arms, crumbling buildings and vacuuming up anyone who came near into their maws. Thousands of ratmen leapt out of their holds, looting and burning the unprepared city almost as soon as they landed. The city guard held the attack off as best they could, but they were uncoordinated compared to the skaven ambush and fell swiftly under the force of the ratmen's assault. Two of the Drillfiends had exited the city on their own, one drowning in the sea when it attempted to pursue fleeing civilians onto a boat that its armored bulk crushed, and the other rocketing off into the countryside for some indiscernable reason. The skaven assaulting the temple, no doubt assuming Myrmidia herself would be within, had comprised the majority of the attacking force, the rest of which had either been killed in the chaos of the city or were still out there in isolated numbers. Thanking them for their steadfast fortitude, Myrmidia took charge of the templars still remaining in the temple and lead them on a lightning-fast circuit through the city, hunting down the last of the skaven over the course of a few hours as the rest of her men put out the fires and did their best to restore order. Even after that, though, the goddess did not rest, marshalling a host of troops under her banner. She knew that this had not been an isolated attack, that the skaven had no doubt struck at the other cities in Estalia as well. She would have to maintain a strict operational tempo if she was to avoid being overwhelmed by the Vermintide.
Sure enough, when messenger birds from Bilbali, Vizeaya, Diamanterra, and more came to Magritta's gates some six hours later, they carried news of chaos, abrupt attacks from below by the ratmen, beaten off in Bilbali with great difficulty but still ongoing in others. Myrmidia grit her teeth and marched to Gualcazar at the head of her army, face set grimly. She would not have much time before the true onslaught came for her people, and if any of them were to survive she would have to push herself to the edge of her divine endurance and beyond.
She could only hope it was enough.
