Author's Note: The river battle gets pretty intense in places - there's a ton of violence, some gore, and mentioned violence towards kids. Just to let you know so there aren't any unpleasant surprises.
I can't find any points in the narrative where music is definitively required, but I recommend putting this number on whenever Ragefang enters the picture. Any track similar to that one will also work if you have a preference.
Enjoy - Xantalos
As her scarred subordinate burrned a path north to wage war in her name, Gnawdell turned her attentions south and east, leading her horde through the Sombra Wood along the river that Raganos had been built by. In their wake her legion left a mile-wide trail of scarred land, the voracious appetite of her army stripping the very earth bare. Trees were ripped from the ground and mulched by the endless limbs of her army, processed into crude shields, sharp stakes, and seige engines by the hundreds. The destruction they wreaked upon the landscape merely by passing was cruel and vast, but only a hint at what horrors awaited the manthings under skaven dominion.
Gnawdell's forces swept through the wood and snuffed out the towns of Zaraguz and Gualcazar with nary a thought. They were both fortified, as much from experience dealing with Tilean mercenary companies as the current crisis, but it did not avail them. They were crushed summarily under the weight of the Vermintide, the soldiers stationed there fleeing at the sight of endless ranks of Mors stormvermin marching out of the horizon. Gnawdell let them go, for the psychological blow their rout entailed was more valuable than killing them. Stories of skaven might would grow in their heads like uncontrollable weeds, and weaken the rest of Estalia in doing so.
Mors' army reached east like a grasping claw, three blunt fingers stretching through the underbelly of Estalia, reaching for the beating heart at its core that was the city of Magritta. If it fell, the only point in southern Estalia capable of any meaningful resistance would be snuffed out. And the goddess of the manthings knew this just as well as Gnawdell did; by moving on her sanctuary they forced Myrmidia's hand. She could not abandon her city if was to have any chance of surviving Mors' onslaught, yet by defending it she was put exactly where Gnawdell wanted her - with her back against the wall, powerless to fend off the endless swarm of skaven waiting to devour her. A perfect trap by Gnawdell's estimation - one that her prey could see, that she knew she was stepping into, but could not avoid triggering nonetheless. The eagle goddess would voluntarily clip her wings for the sake of her clutch.
----------
As should be expected, reality did not conform to anyone's expectations.
Gnawdell's forces were divided into three prongs - one headed south with a hundred thousand skaven to tear down Solsona and spread east to destroy Chelven, Sitges, and Almagora before reconvening at Javea, which they would take before striking at Magritta from the south. Another two hundred thousand coursed up the river Eboro from the ruins of Zaraguz, aiming to destroy Molena before going down the Tagos river to Magritta from the north. Gnawdell set relatively competent subordinates to these tasks, taking the remaining three hundred thousand with herself and Ragefang on a straight path across the plains east of Gualcazar. The time for subtlety had passed, and she cared not if the manthings saw her approach. They could do naught but be crushed under her advance.
The raids started almost as soon as Gnawdell's army crossed the Eboro. The Myrmidians dared not face her in the field, so they darted and snapped at her side like gnats biting an elephant. Small bands struck at her on an erratic, irregular schedule that still somehow seemed to never leave Gnawdell without a minor crisis to manage. They could not stop her army's progression, for it was so large that it had a momentum of its own - soldiers at the front that camped to rest, forage for food, and be ready to keep marching by the time the tail of the army was reaching them, ensuring her legion never truly stopped moving. But while the Estalians could not stop her, they did their best to slow her down, attacking the sections of her forces that were the most vulnerable with preternatural ease, seemingly springing out of the grass in packs of fifty or sixty, setting fires and causing confusion before vanishing. Gnawdell was constantly on the move extinguishing one situation or another, and even between her and Ripmaw there always seemed to be another raid popping up just as the last one was driven off. Gnawdell knew the nature of the goddess she fought, and noting the presences of many eagles soaring above her army as the days dragged on, ordered her troops to shoot them down whenever they were sighted. This worked on the first score or so, and then the birds ascended to heights her troopers could not hope to hit accurately. The raids continued, and Gnawdell grit her teeth.
But for all their efficacy, the raids were mere annoyances, meant to divert and distract Gnawdell, to give Magritta more time to prepare. They could inflict no real damage, for any time the raiders spent in Gnawdell's horde but the bare minimum was time for her numberless hordes to fall upon them, more time for Ragefang to make his way to them. The Myrmidians took extreme precautions to avoid running into him, for when they did...
---
Blood, gore and gristle absolutely coated the encampment, the remains of the majority of Rico Escobar's raiding party. It had been far from the first such operation in the last few days his men had conducted, and they had been tired. But regardless of such frivolities, they were professionals - hard-bit men drawn from the towns the skaven had ravaged, eager to get revenge upon the ratmen. They wouldn't stop the horde with what they were doing, but every second delayed was another life saved. It's what they had told themselves, the manra they whispered to keep their spirits high. But time runs out for everyone, and their luck had finally come up foul.
A spray of gore arced up as Rico's time ran dry, his spine ripped out of his back by the huge clawed hand of the skaven monster that had torn through forty soldiers without pause. Even as the horned monster roared in triumph it was moving with blinding speed, throwing his spinal trophy at another man hard enough to bowl him over while simultaneously leaping over the thrust spears of five other soldiers, landing on one of them with force enough to crush his ribcage like an egg. Ragefang lashed out all around him in a frenzy of violence, breaking one man's back over his knee so hard that the human was split in two, intestinal fluids providing yet another coating over his gore-soaked helm. Legs snapped under the force of his blows, the jagged edges of their thigh bones providing momentary bludgeoning weapons for the monster, arms were crushed to paste, hearts ripped out through leather and skin and bone with jagged claws, skulls crushed by blows hard enough to pulp the brain within. The Estalians screamed as they died and Ragefang exulted, for it was his god-given duty to rip and tear.
---
It did not go well.
Nor could the raiders endure forever - they were driven by vengance and faith, but neither of those could fill a belly, and as Gnawdell's hordes ground inoxerably across the plain their harrassment slowly petered down. They had stung the leviathan beast that was Gnawdell's army with ferocity and tenacity rivaling that of a hornet, but the time for diversions and distractions was fading fast. Mors' army would soon cross the Tagos river and link up with its northern prong before crushing Magritta. The best hope for Estalia's resistance against the skaven invasion continuing as a unified state - their only hope - laid in ambushing the skaven army in force as it made the slow process of crossing the river. If they could isolate the skaven warlord behind the invasion and slay them in the pandemonium that would ensue, the cohesion of the skaven advance would shatter, and Magritta would stand a chance of survival.
For Estalia to live, Gnawdell had to die.
----------
It was just before dawn as Gnawdell's army approached the banks of the Tagos, and the sky was overcast. It mirrored the endless sea of ratflesh obscuring the land below it, which smothered it underneath black fur and red eyes, rolling forth like a pool of ink beneath the dreary grey sky. A light patter of rain smattered against the bulk of Mors' rat ogres, condensation forming on stormvermin armor. A veil of mist hung over the river, leaving the other bank faintly visible through its white wreath. For all the gargantuan size of the skaven horde, the army was oddly quiet as it lapped further towards the shore of the river as if it were the land and the skaven were the sea. There were no chittering warcries or maniacal exclamations echoing out from the skaven ranks, the rat ogres bellowed no deep-throated bugles, and even the myriad thumps, clanks, scrapes, and rumblings that accompanied the act of moving more than three hundred thousand beings from one place to another were strangely muted. Something in the atmosphere seemed to discourage noise, and the skaven aquiesced with the instinctive recognition of the calm before the storm.
There was a peculiar tension in the air, as though the world were drawn taut like leather over a frame, stretched out so tightly it might snap. As Gnawdell's army coursed across the Tagos like a river of its own kind, the anticipation built. Beady eyes brightened and whiskers stood on end as invisible pinpricks danced down the nape of every skaven's neck. Gnawdell's eyes narrowed as she gazed across the river, and Ragefang's movements took on a quiet sort of restraint, the god-touched skaven's muscles twitching errantly as the silence built and built. None acknowledged it, but all felt it: the eye of destiny was upon them. Whatever calamitous event occurred here would decide the fate of their conquest, for good or ill.
Gnawdell's horde was almost fully across the river when it finally happened. The sun was rising behind the clouds, and the muted, half-formed shapes of the trees dotting the riverbank were just starting to become more defined through the fading mist when the Estalians struck. From both the north and south hails of arrows hissed out of the fog, alight with holy fire, perforating the rearguard of Gnawdell's forces, where the Arch-Despot herself was. Stormvermin fell, punctured through gaps in their armor, and the cries of eagles rang in skaven ears as the spears and shields of Myrmidia's armies lit up in twin blazes of flame, illuminating the grim faces of the Estalians, who had crept unsettlingly close to Gnawdell's battle lines under the cover of the fog. But now the time for stealth was over, and the Estalians advanced forth on both sides under a rain of flaming arrows, chanting one phrase over and over in Queekish that was broken and improperly accented, but got the message through.
"Die rat-things die!"
They marched forth, their numbers hard to determine but miniscule in comparison to the horde. They were not here to do open battle, that much was clear, they had positioned themselves to catch the skaven train just as its tail end swept over the river.
"DIE rat-things die!"
Stormvermin regiment leaders bellowed orders and some wheeled about and opened fire with their warp-forged guns, but the size of the horde was working against it, and by the time enough clanrats stopped against the momentum of the crowd around them to aim, the Estalians were close enough that the whites of their eyes could be clearly seen. Arrows continued to hiss out from behind them as they closed in, and they continued to shout in unison, beating their shields and screaming out their mangled Queekish.
"DIE rat-things DIE!"
Gnawdell remained calm, though many of her subordinates did not, stuck as they were on the bank of the river while the Myrmidians closed in. She patiently listened to their nervous muttering, then wordlessly laid about her with the flat of her sword, leaving her attendants cringing and wailing from acid burns, all the while keeping her eyes out for the one man-thing she instinctively knew would be there.
"DIE RAT-THINGS DIE!"
Ah. There she was. Approaching from the north, all afire with righteous intent, spear and shield blazing like twin beacons. She stood half a head taller than any man around her, and her armor was of the finest make among the forces of the man-things, helm and plate and greaves that did not impede her movement in the least colored a luminous white. Her voice pierced both the fog and ringing clamor of voices all around her, but alone out of all the man-things, her Queekish was both grammatically and phonetically perfect.
"DIE RAT-THINGS DIE!"
Gnawdell harbored no delusions about her chances in a direct fight with Myrmidia. Councilrat or no, she was no match for an incarnate godthing. But Gnawdell's strength was not limited to the muscle in her body or her skill with a sword. When she struck, she did so with the fist of thirty thousand stormvermin, and her war cry rose from a million throats. She would fight the god-queen of Estalia her way, with soldiers and steel and unyielding force. And as for the manthings who attacked her southern flank without their goddess at their side...
Gnawdell clicked her tongue twice, calling the attention of the hulking colossus that was Ragefang Fleshtaker. She pointed at his armored bulk, then to the southern formation of the man-things, then clenched her hand into a fist.
Ragefang shone a feral grin, showing a forest of pointed teeth, for that was all the direction he needed.
Then there was no more time to think, for the Estalians were upon them.
"DIE RAT-THINGS DIE!"
---
Myrmidia's soldiers drove into the skaven lines as a pair of great flaming phalanxes from both north and south, causing the battle formations to resemble the beak of an eagle closing around the limb of a much greater beast from above. Even with their ambush having stalled the already slow response of the main body of Gnawdell's massive horde, the section of the army they now attacked still outmassed them nearly fifty to one. They couldn't hope to defeat the skaven here before their main army arrived and crushed them under weight of numbers, so their only hope was to dive point-first into the horde with the intention of provoking the attention of the skaven warlords present so that they could be slain, and the greater campaign of the ratmen thrown into disunity and confusion.
They smashed into the ranks of the skaven with unmatched fervor, roaring prayers to Myrmidia to strike fear into the hearts of the ratmen, scorching flesh with their flaming spears and deflecting the glowing bullets of warpstone guns with their shining shields. Always they were moving, not allowing themselves to get bogged down in the mass of skavendom that even then stood and fought with unusual tenacity, hacking at ankles and exposed wrists with acid-dripping swords even as they were impaled and set aflame. Instead the Myrmidians punched straight through the skaven throng, guided by the gifts of their goddess that granted them outright supernatural awareness of the entirety of the battlefield. On both the north and south sides the Myrmidians cleared the grasp of the horde and formed up into impenetrable formations, taking advantage of features of the battlefield that let them fight at an advantage to the numerically superior skaven. On the north side of the battle, where Myrmidia and her cohorts had crept down the east side of the Tagos, they stood proud upon the riverbank, forcing the skaven to clamber up the incline to get to their foe, which rendered them horribly vulnerable to the spears and arrow volleys of the Estalians. The god queen herself took squads of soldiers and harassed the flank of the vermin as they attempted to overwhelm their manthing foe, aiming to draw Gnawdell herself out for a decapitation strike. On the southern half of the melee, which took place on the west side of the river, the Estalians ventured closer to the water - more of the ratmen were on this part of the battlefield, and without their goddess among them they could not prevent the ratmen from massing for a devastating charge as easily. Instead they parked themselves at the edge of the river and denied the skaven momentum by keeping them in the water, shieldwall grinding against skaven blades with brutal ferocity. They would take more casualties, but they had foreseen this and assigned more men to this segment of the mission - they would happily die to pin down the skaven forces long enough for their goddess to kill the leader of the ratmen.
Then Ragefang arrived.
The water of the Tagos, already stirred into a brown muck by the innumerable feet of the skaven, was churned into a froth by the blessed skaven's passing. The weight of the water was no obstacle to his god-forged muscle, and he sprinted at full tilt towards the Estalian battle lines, trampling those who did not get out of his way as he accelerated to speeds comparable to a horse. He reached the bank of the river in a matter of seconds and leapt straight over the line of human soldiers holding against his smaller bretheren, casting down his spear in midair through the body of both a hapless soldier and the man standing behind him. He followed his weapon down with the force of a thunderbolt, his body enveloped in a nimbus of green light that showed the Horned Rat's favor. He landed on top of a block of soldiers with enough force to crush two men's ribcages with his feet, wasting not a moment before he grabbed the nearest man's arm with one clawed hand and punched straight through his torso with the other, snatching the head of another man behind that and squeezing hard enough to pulp his skull with a grotesque crunching squelch. Shaking off his kills, he leapt, bulling through the mob of Estalians who were desperately trying to rally, wrenching their spears out of their hands hard enough to break their arms before impaling them and two others hard enough to splinter the hardwood shaft of the manthing weapon. He became a blur of red gore, ripping off limbs and pulping human flesh in a frenzy of violence that never stood still for even a split second, but was always moving, jerking from tearing out the throat of one human to shattering the legs of four others with his spear to punching through the skull of another so hard it liquefied before moving on to the next target of his trail of carnage. The Estalians put up a desperate effort to stop him, moving with goddess-granted coordination and fervor, trying to surround the freight train of destruction that was Ragefang, to slow him down so that they could cripple and kill him. But their efforts were in vain, for in attempting to entrap him in clever formations and pin him down with soldiers they only gave him more bodies to rip, more flesh to tear. Time and time again he roared with savage exultation as he shattered a spine over his knee or pulled a set of guts out with his bare hand, moving to the lightning-quick tempo of blood pulsing in his ears. This was his element. He was unstoppable!
Worse yet for the Estalians, Ragefang was not a lone agent. He had punched a hole in their lines with his arrival, one the skaven had taken immediate advantage of. The air in his wake lay heavy with the musk of battle, exuded in such dense concentrations that it drove the skaven who smelled it wild with battle lust. They threw themselves at the manthings, and in doing so squirted yet more of the musk of battle, starting a chain reaction that spread through their surroundings like lightning. Chittering with rage, their eyes flashing and teeth shining, the stormvermin and clanrats following after Ragefang pushed, putting even greater pressure on the already-strained line of battle. Men grunted and screamed with exertion as the mass of skaven bodies scrabbled against their shields, their feet scrabbling in the mud for any sort of leverage, bodies straining and breath huffing. Blood and gore coated the ground and all who walked on it like oil floating on water, and the reek of bile and shit hung like a cloud over the riverbank. Skaven and men both fought and died, giving no regard to the life of the other, only seeking to kill and kill and perhaps survive.
Ragefang punched through the line of men from behind like a cannonball, sending bodies flying and crushing many of his own troops with the sheer force of his charge. Like a whirlwind he lashed out all around him, shattering ribs and sending whole groups of men hurtling back with forceful kicks as he bowled others off their feet with the butt of his spear. The skaven pounced upon the gaping hole he had blasted in the formation of the Estalians and surged in like a flood, swamping the humans under sheer weight of numbers. They pressed, and under the pressure the Estalians snapped, turning and running lest they be devoured utterly by the surging army of skaven. Their goddess' voice was with them even in their darkest hour, however, and they kept their discipline, retreating not in a disorganized rout but in an organized fallback. They gave ground with their shields up and spears out, and though Ragefang and his cohorts continued to ravage their lines, eventually they drew far enough away from the battle that the skaven disengaged, looking to the force of manthings that still held steadfast on the east bank of the river.
---
Faced with the endless wall of force that the skaven army represented, Myrmidia flowed like water. Her troops moved with outright unnatural levels of coordination in accordance with the war goddess' will, drifting backwards against skaven charges and probing forwards like they were merely body parts of one larger organism. The skaven pushed up from the bottom of the riverbank, taking fire from archers parked further back as they did so, and the Estalians fell back before the advance before reforming on either side of the skaven blob and piercing in at a weak point to combine up again, ducking and weaving on a tactical scale like a seasoned boxer. Myrmidia did all she could to draw the skaven as far east as she could, spreading their ranks thin as the ratmen attempted to pin down her archers, leaving their formation at the river easy to penetrate. Once the skaven had been sufficiently disorganized by her carefully masterminded unravelling, Myrmidia arrowed into the melee still ongoing on the riverbank. The skaven warlord was there, she knew it in her soul, and these would be the moments in which her people were saved.
The Myrmidians drove through the skaven flank like a hot knife through butter, diving deep into the heart of the horde to find their quarry. All around them skaven threw themselves at their ranks, but this was their finest hour, and the numberless skaven could find no purchase on their advance, which dove under and over and through everything it encountered. The sun was up, and it shone brilliantly on their armor, lending them the appearance of brilliant white plate. Myrmidia at their head was a beacon of righteousness both metaphorical and literal, her spear shining with a light bright enough to blind the ratmen who looked upon it. She killed and killed her way forward, her mind picking up on countless little details as she did so, processing them at superhuman speed into intuition that led her inoxerably toward her target. The Estalians were in their moment of glory, and when they had found the skaven leader and mounted its foul head on a spike their country would be saved.
Then the western flank broke. Freed from the threat to their back, always a skaven's first concern, the remainder of Gnawdell's warriors present at the battle surged into the fighting, and Myrmidia's advance slowed under the increased weight of numbers. Yet worse, her eagle's eyes noted that the flow of reinforcements from the rest of the ratmen's colossal legion was thickening. It would not be long before the full might of the skaven horde crashed upon them, and no amount of tactical prowess could save them in an open field then. This had to be ended soon. The war goddess steeled her resolve and her soldiers drove yet harder, buoyed by her will.
Ragefang found them soon thereafter. Freed from his obligations on the far side of the river, his battle lust led him to the humans with the unerring aim of a bloodhound. Sweeping lesser skaven out of his path with every step, he slammed into the flank of Myrmidia's formation like a cannonball, his vastly superior height and reach allowing him to knock back the Estalians in his path like sapling trees before a storm. In the initial shock of his arrival, he slew five men, shattering their spines and tearing their limbs with vast sweeps of his spear and claws. But these were men in the direct presence of their goddess, and their mettle was stronger than the others Ragefang had torn to shreds. He leapt forward, a freight train of death aiming to keep up its lethal momentum, but was stymied at every turn - now that they knew their foe the manthings could fight it, and they used their numbers and superior coordination to their advantage, blocking his sweeping strikes with split-second shield walls while their comrades simultaneously stabbed at his flanks. They fought with one breath, one mind, and Ragefang could not match them, slowly being harried down. But as they fought the monster within their ranks, their advance slowed, and their target slipped further and further away.
"Beast!"
Ragefang turned from his latest attempted victims, his eyes gleaming. Myrmidia stood no more than fifteen feet from him, weapon and shield in hand. Leveling her spear at Ragefang's chest, the goddess spoke in a voice that pierced the din of battle all around. "I am Bellonna Myrmidia, the one your masters would have you kill. Turn your attention from my subordinates - if you want my head, it is here for the taking!"
Ragefang pulled his lips back in a monstrous grin, exposing a forest of pointed teeth that stank of blood and meat from the day's battle. He replied in kind, pointing his own spear at Myrmidia's throat. "I am Ragefang Fleshtaker, Champion-Killer of Arch-Despot Gnawdell, and Herald-Chosen of the Horned God. Weep, fool-fool manthing goddess, and die-die," he hissed. Wasting no time, he unleashed the immense power within his coiled legs and blurred forward, his spear glowing radioactive green as it shot lighting-quick towards Myrmidia. He had slain well over a hundred men in the last hour like this, his unnatural speed such that by the time their eyes registered his movement they were already impaled. But now he fought a goddess, and did not meet the same result. Before Ragefang had even launched off his back foot Myrmidia was already springing out of his path, her eyes seeing what he would do before he even began. The haft of her spear snapped down, deflecting Ragefang's thrust into the trampled ground. Before his spear even hit the muck she had coiled back up and thrust in turn, her weapon briefly blazing with holy power as it took him underneath the arm, piercing through the gap in his plate to sever the tendons there. Ragefang howled in pain and whirled, his spear whistling down in a two-handed overhand blow toward the goddess. She stepped inside his reach, deflecting the butt end of his spear with her shield and stabbing at the same arm again as before, the tip of her weapon piercing deep into his flesh through the gap in his plate, widened by her repeated attacks. As the monster lunged forward, aiming to tear out her throat, she hit him in the face with her shield boss hard enough to crack teeth and followed it up with a whirling bash to the eye with the butt end of her spear. She danced out of his reach and over to the side both his injured arm and eye were on. Ragefang turned, but not quick enough, and the last thing he saw with his right eye was the leafblade of Myrmidia's spear. Screeching in rage, he surged forward to
kill-kill this fucking manthing and was summarily rewarded when Myrmidia caught his wrist with her spear somehow and used his own momentum to throw him into the ground, slamming the edge of her shield again and again on the back of his neck, buckling the armor at the joint that was present there. Seeing an opportunity, Ragefang snapped out with his working arm, trying to grab her ankles so he could simply dash her head on the ground and be done with it. The goddess was the swifter though, using the reach of his arm to clamber up his body and onto his back. As Ragefang stood up to try to shake her off, she wrenched his helm halfway off and thrust her spear through the back of his head, the shining tip exploding out of his mouth. Ragefang stiffened up in the unique sort of agony that only spinal trauma brings, and toppled to his knees, then onto his face as the war goddess leapt off. She wasted no time on celebrating her victory, only dashing off towards her true target, her men following her.
---
[Ragefang Survival: 88, 33 Needed. Pass]
As he lay in the muck, choking on his own blood, Ragefang's unnatural vitality served him well. Though it was agony, he swallowed his own vital fluids as they poured from within his head, clearing his airway enough to snuffle down the tiniest breath of air. He had not been the one to defeat the manthing goddess, but the Horned Rat still held him in his favor, and his body glowed a faint green as his wounds ever so slowly began to close.
---
The Estalians had driven hard, to the limits of what mortal men could do and beyond. But it was not enough; the main body of Gnawdell's force had arrived to the battle, and it was impossible to make any real progress amidst the sea of skaven they were now swamped in. But Myrmidia still drove onward, her eyes set relentlessly on her goal. She could not turn back now. If she did, she was as good as dooming her countrymen to death or worse. Should it cost her life and that of all her soldiers here to put down the threat, she would pay it. Her spear cut through skaven flesh like lard, and her vengance-filled visage filled her men with such profound fervor that they fought on even when they were wounded mortally by a lucky blow.
At last Myrmidia came within sight of her quarry. Standing atop the shields of four stormvermin, Arch-Despot Gnawdell was grinning a conqueror's grin from the back end of a block of a good five thousand stormvermin, armed to the teeth. Beckoning to a subordinate at the sight of the war goddess, the skaven war leader was passed a speaking trumpet, and a collection of musclebound stormvermin that could only be her bodyguards began hoisting up...
"No," Myrmidia breathed in sorrow. For impaled upon cruelly spiked stakes that the Arch-Despot's underlings held up for her peerless eyes to see were a collection of children, younglings the skaven had obviously captured in their rampage up to this point. Their were bloodied and beaten, every one of their eyes trailing tears of blood, and from the marks on their flesh it was clear they had suffered greatly before they expired. As Myrmidia's eyes flashed over every one of them, her eidetic memory perfectly capturing the picture of torment they presented as her mind quivered in shock, Gnawdell lifted her speaking trumpet up and spoke in jagged, broken estalian. "Come-come, queen-god of manthings! Avenge them. Kill-kill for them. Make us die-die for them, yes-yes!"
Myrmidia's eyes flashed to Gnawdell's through a veil of tears, reading the intent behind them perfectly, and understood what she must do, though it tore at her very soul. By brandishing the tortured corpses of children in her face, the skaven warlord hoped to inflame her passions such that she would ignore the tactical situation and charge in blindly, avenging the murder of the children that she knew would never leave her mind's eye. But she would die if she did that; waves of skaven would enclose her and her men and they would drown under the Vermintide. She had lost, and Myrmidia's very being ached to throw herself into the fray, to stab and slash and kill until she was brought under so that she would not have to look the children in their empty eyes. But she could not. While she lived, she could help preserve the lives of even a few more of her people, and she could not forgive herself if she took the coward's path out. So though her limbs shook with rage, Myrmidia spoke a single word to her men, laced with venom and loathing. "Retreat."
They were not harried once they had escaped the battle itself, Gnawdell holding her troops back in favor of letting the goddess stew in shame and anger. In a matter of hours the corpses of both men and skaven had been gathered up along with their equipment by the innumerable arms of Gnawdell's horde, and they completed the crossing of the river and joined up with the other host of skaven who had come down from Molena. With any resistance that could realistically oppose her dealt with, Gnawdell turned her attention to Magritta.
----------
The city fell within a day, and the less said about the horrors that were conducted within, the better. Gnawdell let her troops off the leash, allowing them to do as they pleased with the helpless inhabitants. Some of them managed to escape on what was left of the city's fleet, but the majority of them were butchered and eaten in gruesome fashion.
The rest of the countryside fell quickly after Gnawdell left the ruins of Magritta. Everything from Torrosa to Los Cabos was razed under a tide of steel and skavenflesh, the scattered remnants of Myrmidia's armies helpless to resist the sheer might of Mors. Forces that strayed near the Irrana mountains were set upon by vengeful soldiers, for that was where Myrmidia had retreated after the battle of the Tagos, but Gnawdell did not concern herself with the trifling amounts of death they managed to inflict on her legions. Soon the entirety of Estalia's flatlands was under skaven control, and she dispatched the mostly-healed Ragefang to inform Ripmaw of her next orders - now that they had pinned the manthing goddess in the mountains, they would squeeze from all directions, and crush the last remnants of Estalia's human population like an eye between a set of jaws.
