Since its very inception, clan Mors had been under existential threat. It had started out as nothing, a minor gathering of pathetic dregs, one of hundreds of slave clans in the World's Edge Mountains. It was only by the barest of margins that the clan endured its gestation in the mountains; the World's Edge was an unforgiving environment, and every step, every breath taken was one stolen from another. A combination of skillful leaders and good fortune let the clan survive in one form or other, its fortunes fluctuating as the burgeoning clan eked its way out of slavery. Then Sleek Sharpwit rose to leadership of the clan. A natural-born genius, strong of body and quick of mind, he led Mors on a path of conquest, rapidly absorbing the lesser clans that surrounded them and using those newly gained forces to gain more territory for his clan. His efforts were very successful, culminating with Mors being instrumental in the seizing of Karak Varn, and gaining ownership of the most lucrative parts of the dwarfhold. Sleek was triumphant, but by that time he was past his twentieth year and knew his immediate subordinate would kill him for his place soon. He enjoyed living, and so a year later voluntarily abdicated, travelling to Skavenblight on the tail of a project his growing web of contacts had informed him of.
His protege, Gnawdell, took the reins of the clan, and her accomplishments outstripped those of her predecessor just as much as Sleek's had overshadowed those of his. Her innumerable conquests, the taking of Karak Eight Peaks foremost amongst them, catapulted her name into the echelons of skaven society and earned her a spot on the Council of Thirteen. Even then, Mors' safety was not assured, for their star rising so rapidly had drawn the attention of the Great Clans, who looked with disdain upon the upstart in their midst, and sought to lay Mors low whenever it attempted to climb higher.
The one lesson that had sustained Mors through all its trials was that of pragmatism. Generations of war against the merciless dwarfs of the Karaz Ankor had bred armies of strong, cunning stormvermin that used any weapon they had available to them to accomplish their mission. Mors did not shirk from avenues of attack that other skaven would have shirked - were it any other clan invading Estalia, their forces would most likely not make a significant appearance until the country was nigh destroyed already, instead preferring to whittle away at the manthings until they were so frail a breeze could push them over. Gnawdell thought differently - Estalia had been distracted and disoriented by the Council's preliminary actions, and now was the time to strike. They held the initiative, and if they dared to seize it, Mors could crush the entirety of the country in one decisive strike.
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The town of Ragaños could best be described as quaint. It was relatively small, nestled between the Vault Mountains and the Sombra Forest, and its collection of sturdy buildings with arched roofs presented an aesthetically appealing sight when the sun shone over the mountains. None of this helped in the slightest when a horde of skaven rose up from underground and put it to the torch. Human screams echoed out into the night, but there were no friendly ears to hear them, only the ratmen with their scarred snouts and red eyes that shone as the town burned.
By morning Gnawdell's army was still emerging from the tunnels, a miles-long behemoth comprised of just over a million skaven - a substantial portion of Mors' military forces that left their home front in the World's Edge mountains thinly defended, a risk Gnawdell would not hesitate in taking. As the tail end of her forces trickled out of the tunnels in the mountains, she called her primary underlings to her. Though the thought irked her, she could not conduct the conquest of the entire country by herself. Delegation would be required. She would split her legion in two - she would take command of one half and sweep east on the southern side of the mountains, crushing any resistance she found and slaughtering the Estalian goddess in her own home. Her second-in-command, meanwhile, would take the other half of her forces north and east, crushing Vizeaya, Bilbali, and all the other cities on Estalia's northern half. Once their trails of conquest met up at the eastern coast, they would join forces and crush whatever resistance remained in the central mountains like a rat cracking open a bone for the marrow.
In any case, she had to admit,
choose-picking my own underlings leaves less room-space for the other clans to meddle. It was partially for that reason that she looked with satisfaction upon her two current contenders for acting commander of Mors' armed forces. Truly the Horned Rat looked with benevolence upon her ambitions for the time being.
The skaven that arrived at her command tent first was short, even for a skaven, and round, thick in the chest and limbs. His commonplace brown fur did not subtract from the menace he exuded; it was in his expression, in the way he carried himself, in the veritable mountain of scar tissue crisscrossing his body and covering nearly the entirety of his face. His birth name had been discarded in battle with the Karaz Ankor, and he now styled himself Ripmaw. Rumors about him floated like corpse flies around the ranks of clanrats, calling him corpsegrinder, bonechewer, gorefeeder, for to be under his command carried a high likelihood of carrying out bloody assaults on the fortifications the dwarfs maintained in their tunnels. Ripmaw had spent his life in brutal, grinding warfare against the dawi, and had learned much from his foes. Her forces would no doubt suffer heavy casualties under him, but they would be wielded with a sort of brutal effectiveness. And there was something to be said for a commander that knew the value of personal safety, Gnawdell contemplated as her gaze panned over to her other follower.
Ragefang Fleshtaker, as he referred to himself, truly came as a gift from the Horned God. Just as she was beginning the long and arduous process of combing her stormvermin stock for a breeding pair that could possibly generate offspring remotely comparable to Queek Headtaker, the death of whom she still grit her teeth in resentment over, (such potential for future generations lost!) what news came out of her new settlement of Uzkulak but that of a skaven with a stature nearly matching that of a Skittaur, with horns and sacred sigils embedded into his flesh to boot, marching straight out of the northern wastes. Even the dullest waste of flesh could recognize the towering warrior's appearance for the opportunity and blessing that it was, and Gnawdell had wasted no time in personally travelling to her new territory to claim the sacred warrior for her clan. As she observed his hulking form move with deceptive smoothness to kneel before her, she felt a wash of grim satisfaction - and some aesthetic appreciation - roll over her as it had when she first beheld the horned herald.
He had the height and muscle of a rat-ogre, but was proportioned far more evenly, like a stormvermin scaled three times larger. His arms bulged with muscle, and his legs had the thickness of small trees. He wore exquisitely-crafted steel armor that bore the Horned Rat's sigil in neon green upon the breastplate, and wielded a spear that pulsed with cruel intent, the razor-sharp head shaped into the sacred triangle of the Horned God. What little of his grey fur could be seen was thick and sleek, his python-like tail rippled with slow movements, and the pair of pointed horns extending from his skull gleamed. His crimson eyes glowed with suppressed intent as he stared unwaveringly up at Gnawdell, awaiting her command. Not like Queek, no, not at all. Queek had been restless from the start, always twitching or fidgeting even when standing still. He had conducted warfare in erratic, jagged fashion, following patterns only his own mind could see, approaching problems from an angle most would not have even realized existed, let alone contemplated taking. His instability had been at once his greatest strength and fatal flaw, letting him outmaneuver and destroy his enemies, yet chaining him to the level of merely a brute killer. Ragefang was not much better in this regard; where he differed from his predecessor was in his combat style. Queek had fought unpredictably, erratically, taking a hundred different paths to victory at once in a fight. Ragefang, on the other paw, was far more methodical and simplistic in comparison. He had one tactic, and made it work very well for him: whatever was in his path he murdered. He had demonstrated the efficacy of this admirably the previous night in Ragaños, crushing skulls with his bare hands, impaling a horse and its rider with one thrust of his spear, and ripping more than one manthing in half at the waist. He was not Queek, true, and never would be.
But he was still magnificent.
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She gave Ripmaw command of a third of her army, a veritable legion unto itself equalling the might of three lesser warlord clans. To this she added nearly every scrap of 'aid' the Council had sent on this venture - Eshin death squads, herds of Moulder Skittaurs, Skyre sniper teams, and Pestilens holy orders were all herded nervously into the stout skaven's permanently grinning grip, to do with as he willed. She then commanded her underling to sweep north, and not to return to her sight till he had razed the upper half of Estalia to the bone. She had no doubt Ripmaw would ensure the other clan's reinforcements would not survive the campaign; he had spent his life fighting for territory in the merciless mountains Mors called home, and would look ill upon competitors attempting to worm into his clan's rightful territory. It was as it should be - the assets of the other clans could make the conquest easier, but that was not the issue. Mors needed to be seen exerting its force against the manthings and winning if its name was ever to be spoken with fear in the halls of Skavenblight. To that end Gnawdell and Ragefang would take the remaining two thirds of her forces, over six hundred thousand Mors skaven thirsting for blood, and lead them south and east to crush the god-queen the manthings thought could save them. Once she had broken Myrmidia, seizing the land would be all the easier.
Thusly organized did the skaven legions set off, leaving a trail of broken and gnawed countryside behind them. Gnawdell and Ragefang marched at the front of their forces, each presenting a towering figure of indomitable might. Ragefang was a silent colossus of menace, every move imbued with silent, barely restrained murderous energy. The clanrats around him shied away from even his sidelong glances, petrified that the slightest sliver of attention drawn would rouse the deceptively placid fiend's monstrous anger. Gnawdell, in comparison, was like a pole of crackling energy that electrified all the skaven near her. Her eyes gleamed with a horrid eagerness, ambition that promised the death of millions evident in her every step. She was shorter by far than her behemoth underling but the aura of concentrated anticipation surrounding her made her the tallest skaven in a hundred miles.
The Ripmaw took his allotted forces and stormed north, the forces of the other clans at the forefront of his horde. Skyre artillery and the strength of Moulder's beasts made for easy passage through the mountain trails, and though they would be dead by the time the campaign was through he intended to extract every drop of effort he could before then. In truth the little skaven was looking forward to war against the manthings; it would make for a nice break from assaulting dwarf fortifications. It took months to break through the outer fortifications of dawi constructions, and it would be amusing to see those same maneuvers replicated in days at most against manthing walls.
The iron snake that was his army slithered north, destroying the towns of Durango and Guaniar with little trouble. They possessed walls and militia, but the armies of the Myrmidians were elsewhere and such pittances meant little against Ripmaw's troops, who overran such defences in hours. They poured north like a tide of locusts, crushing homesteads and isolated farming communities as they went, making no effort to hide their presence. They found more resistance in Graus, for the city of Vizeaya had sent forces to reinforce it when their scouts gave news of the skaven horde. The skaven found two thousand or so fighting men behind sturdy fortifications meant to hold them off long enough for Vizeaya's armies to mobilize. While on paper a sound plan, it did not account for Eshin Gutter Runners eviscerating their commanding officers just as battle began, nor did it predict a wedge of Gilded Skittaurs vaulting clean over their barricade to dismantle it from the inside. When Vizeaya's army arrived, they found the town wholly occupied by the skaven, who lured them into the town by making as if the bulk of their army were still attacking and allowing some human captives to run frenzied amidst the rubble, before withdrawing once the humans were well and truly stuck in the quagmire Graus had become and shelling it with Plague-Claw catapults, killing the entire enemy force, along with a smattering of their own troops - a few thousand or so, which did admittedly include a fair amount of the comparatively rarer Skyre jezzail teams and Gutter Runners. Once the town was an irradiated wreck, Ripmaw turned east and blitzed to Vizeaya, his enforcers whipping any who protested until their bones cracked.
The city was in disarray when they arrived, fires and general mayhem from the Drillfiend deep strike still holding sway over a significant portion of it. Its walls still held strong, but there were simply not enough men to prevent Ripmaw from rushing over with a straightforward assault. Stormvermin poured over the walls like a tidal wave, and though the soldiers manning the defensive barricades put up a valiant effort, the gates were cracked open in minutes, and Ripmaw's army poured through. They sacked the city in a brutal but efficient fashion, putting the human inhabitants to the sword and hacking them into smaller segments to more easily devour. An army marched on its stomach, and Ripmaw's was voracious even by skaven standards. They also happened to retrieve several Squeakless Snouts agents who had been busy stirring up distress for the human garrison to deal with and stealing military communications, which they had managed to decode. The information within was mostly low-level chatter, but the overall pattern presented by the more recent reports indicated that the bulk of Estalia's armies in the region were spread out dealing with the plethora of literal and metaphorical fires the rampage of the Drillfiends had caused.
Ripmaw saw the opportunity this represented, and commanded his army to spread out amongst the countryside, looting and burning as they went. Fifty skaven hordes appeared from out of Vizeaya with about five thousand skaven in each group, rampaging through every scrap of land east of the city, their ravaging extending all the way to the Tarmos river. In the course of their activities they inevitably encountered the armies of Estalia, often in groups of a few hundred or so, attempting to shore up some village or other. The difference in numbers was not so ludicrously vast between the two sides in these battles, and the Estalians inflicted moderate casualties, fighting to the last man with spear and strategy to defend their homeland. Regardless of their valor, they died, and soon enough everything from Azuara to the Feroz Hills was burning. Moulder's Skittaurs performed admirably in the wide fields they fought in, acting as a heavy cavalry counterpoint to the Mors foot soldiers they accompanied, smashing lines of pikemen to create holes for the tide of clanrats to pour through. Ripmaw himself swung up the coast with fifty thousand Mors stormvermin and smashed aside Alquezaro and Barboza like they were made of matchsticks, using Eshin operatives to suss out hidden sewer lines and then sending hapless clanrats down them with explosives set to detonate when they passed under the walls. Stormvermin clambered through the gaps generated, slaughtering everyone within with ruthless efficiency. Ripmaw cracked them like eggs and left them to bleed out as he headed to the ruins of Potes, sending messengers out through the shallow tunnels his armies had passively bored during the campaign to summon the scattered groups back together. Bilbali was next in his sights, and for all the paltry resistance the manthings had put up so far, the northern city was the second hardest target in the country, and Ripmaw did not intend to have to take more than one attempt to crack it.
Bilbali was ready for them. When Ripmaw's army marched on the city, they were harassed night and day by hardened groups of skirmishers, nipping at the edges of the army, testing for vulnerable points to drag off from the main body in order to weaken the cohesion of the whole. Pestilens' coteries of plague monks, often meditating on the outskirts for obvious reasons, were particularly vulnerable to this, their fervor prone to causing them to charge after the Estalian rangers and getting lost if they were not killed, costing valuable time in retrieving them. In response, Ripmaw sped up his march to breakneck pace, going day and night without rest. This cost him when Bilbali's army slammed into him just after he finally gave the order to rest a day's march out from the city, hitting the exhausted skaven just as the sun was rising with thirty thousand men. Coordinated by the ineffable military minds of the Myrmidian priests and commanded by Marco Rodriguez Garcia, a former foot soldier Myrmidia had seen great potential in and granted command to, they arrowed into the side of the skaven army like a pike gutting a boar, aiming to get to the center of the horde and murder Ripmaw before he could spur his army into motion.
It was chaos everywhere as the Estalians did their best to break the morale of the skaven before they could be fully roused. Spears flashed with flame, acid-covered swords hissed as they cut through flesh and the roars, hisses, shrieks and moans of mutual slaughter were omnipresent. The Estalians had punched wholly through Ripmaw's weary lines, coming out the other side and reforming with polished ease as the skaven behemoth roused itself. Over the next several hours they would painstakingly retreat back to Bilbali, clashing with trailing skaven forces the whole way there, for they knew they couldn't defeat an army of that size in the field. Instead they had injected a toxin into its heart, one that with luck would send it into fatal spasms. A squad of hardened veterans had been ferried into the center of the skaven horde, where the Myrmidians estimated their commander resided. They would root out the skaven leader from his burrow and they would stick him like a pig, and leave his corpse impaled on a spear for all his underlings to see. The ratmen forces would fall into infighting, and perhaps Bilbali would have a chance.
[Ripmaw Survival: 79, Pass]
They made a valiant effort, and fought with the mettle of heroes. They died to a squad of plague priests swinging glowing censers, that Ripmaw had had the foresight to bring near his command tent when the Myrmidian army arrived. What remained of their corpses were hung up on banners to prove to all that the manthings were weak and pathetic. With this sign of their assured victory bolstering their spirits, the skaven marched on Bilbali a day later.
The city gave the most spirited resistance Ripmaw had seen so far, even with the attrition its fighting forces had taken thus far. Bilbali was one of the two great cities of Estalia, and though it had been ravaged by Drillfiends, Mors swords, and Squeakless Snouts infiltrators in the past weeks, it would still require a fight to put down.
Ripmaw's forces clashed against the walls of the city like a great flood, taking shelter beneath shields and behind each other as arrows, boiling oil, and explosives were thrown off the walls. The jezzail teams of Skyre put warpstone rounds in the head of anyone who looked vaguely important atop the walls, the remaining warbeasts Moulder had leant to the campaign clustered around the gates and pounded ceaselessly at them, and Eshin's gutter runners searched fruitlessly for some hidden passage through the walls - Garcia was a wary man, and had stoppered up any holes and tunnels he found with rock and mud. Ripmaw wished briefly that the metabolic processes of the Drillfiends had allowed them to live long enough to bore through Bilbali's walls for him, but discarded the thought. He possessed more than enough forces to take the city ten times over, and trials like this were good for weeding out the cowards in his ranks, of which there were plenty.
Ripmaw did not take Bilbali in one overwhelming rush like he had with Vizeaya - instead his attack was like the ocean against the shore, many small waves ceaselessly wearing the rock that was Bilbali down. He hemmed the city in a ring of siege camps, secure in the knowledge that they had no ships to evacuate on, and threw assault after assault on the walls - only a few thousand at a time, not quite enough to break through, but enough to deny the defenders rest and recuperation. Time and time again the Estalians forced the skaven off their walls, bellowing declarations of fervor to their goddess, but as soon as one wave retreated another hit another section of the walls, and as the unending attacks wore on the Estalians grew haggard and grim, silent and weary from lack of sleep and rest. It took four days of nonstop fighting, but at last Ripmaw judged them softened up enough, and sent his full force screaming towards the gates.
The defenders of Bilbali had fought with a passion rivalling the heroes of ancient legend. Hundreds of deeds of heroism were committed in those days, any one of which could have inspired a hundred generations of future Estalians to follow the example of Marco Rodriguez Garcia and his steadfast followers, who never gave up, who kept fighting to the last even as death and desolation stared them in the face.
It was not enough. The men at the gates were too weak, and the timbers were cracked, then smashed asunder. The skaven army, well-rested and full-bellied from devouring the surrounding countryside, leapt into the city and killed all they found within. Mothers and babies, old men and young boys, none were spared. Marco himself was killed in a last stand at the city's temple of Myrmidia, dying with the corpses of nine skaven surrounding him. The tenth spat on him and looted his body.
After Bilbali fell, it was over for northern Estalia. Ripmaw's armies spread out like a carpet of locusts once again, tearing apart the countryside and savaging whatever scattered peoples they found. San Luis, Sahagun, and Diamanterra fell like dominoes, and at last his armies fell upon the forest-side town of Verin and tore it apart. By now most of the extra-clan forces in Ripmaw's army were dead - only Pestilens still retained a force worth noting, the unnaturally durable physiology of the plague priests allowing them to endure much more punishment than their counterparts. Aside from them and a few scattered gutter runners, only Mors clanrats remained in his horde, which had been reduced in size by two thirds by his brutal handling of them. He halted this army in the ruins of his town when his scouts found the god-touched skaven, Ragefang, leading a few hundred drugged-up stormvermin northward. His permanent grin grew wider when he heard what the gore-soaked juggernaut had to say, and he commanded his horde to spread north and west, into the Pina Woods, hacking and burning down the vegetation as they went.
The long march for his army had ended. Now, the hunt began.
