[X] Let the Dark Lands erupt in slaughter, for the glory of the Horned Rat!
The world had only witnessed the skaven race truly united once before, when dread Nagash threatened to stand at the head of an army of undead made up of all that had ever died in Nekehara. When the Grey Lords of the time perceived the tremendous preparations the Great Necromancer enacted to perform his Great Ritual, they threw the finest weaponsmiths and spellbinders their race possessed into the grinder, working them until their bodies dissolved to create the deadliest weapon ever forged by mortal hands. The Fellblade, as it was named, was a sword of such pure and concentrated warpstone that it killed whoever wielded it, and condemned Nagash to an eternity of diminishment as it continued to weaken him further even after he was resurrected, the killing blow dragging him back into the grave though he clawed his way out of it.
The Council had been united thus for less than a year, and still guaranteed the defeat of one of the greatest mages ever to exist. Now by divine decree they stood side by side once more, with their hidden knives pointed out toward the world instead of each other's backs. The Great Ascendancy had begun at last!
But the first signs of the Vermintide were not a horde of screaming rats rushing out from the tunnels beneath the world, or a massive green-tinted explosion or anything of the sort. Instead it came from the race perhaps most appropriate to kick start the End Times. The ones that above all would be overjoyed by the news of the final, largest conflict to rock the planet.
The Orks.
----
Gorktoof Warpchoppa gazed around triumphantly at the rival ork encampment. The gathered boyz were silent, gazing at the bisected head of their former boss as what could be called shock in more advanced beings passed through their minds. Their collective gaze followed the arcing paths of Boss Gitclubba's cranium as Warpchoppa dismissively flicked the remains off of his cruel green axe before it snapped back to the victorious challenger. It was unheard of for any right-thinking ork - Warpchoppa had been shorter than Gitclubba by a head, and da bigga one was always the better fighter. Yet the smaller ork had beaten their boss like he was a gobbo git, with his fancy choppa slicing through Gitclubba's massive club and the arm behind it with seemingly no effort. Did this mean that his choppa was da boss now, since it was the weapon that had beaten the old boss?
Their musing was interrupted by Gorktoof stepping forward and roaring.
"So! I's came here and said I's da boss. Dis git said no, e's da boss, and look wot happened to 'im. I chopped him up like 'e was nuffin! So if dis was da sorry exkoose fer a boss you boyz had, dat means I'm da boss now!"
Gorktoof looked around dangerously.
"Or is dere any uvver gits wot fink dey's 'ard enuff ta take on da Warpchoppa?"
As the boss brandished his weapon, a heavily muscled ork stomped his way through the crowd. Smasha, the former boss' right-hand ork, famously taciturn and a fan of chopping things - he'd named himself such so as to confuse his foes - walked up to Gorktoof and looked him up and down. Or more accurately, down and further down, since the underboss still had half a head on the upstart challenger. After several minutes of staring, Smasha spoke.
"I fink if you's gonna be da boss, den I-" here he reached for his choppa, which Gorktoof took as a challenge. The aspiring warboss brought his glowing green axe around in a great arc and sliced Smasha's arm off, the odd warping effect given off by the material cauterizing the wound before it was even fully inflicted. Instead of trying to futilely fight the Warpchoppa, Smasha stumbled back, grabbing his severed limb with his remaining arm. Straightening up, the serious-faced Nob resumed speaking. "Like I wuz saying, if you's gonna be da boss, den I's gonna be yer underboss. Ain't no git round dese parts strong enuff ta do nuffin ta me, specially after you went and chopped ol' Gitclubba in two."
The Warpchoppa nodded appreciatively. "I don't know no uvver ork dat could stop ya, so you got da job. Go find a dok and get dat arm put back on."
The underboss nodded affirmation and trodded off in the direction of the dok tents. Gorktoof looked around at all the boyz still gathered around the outskirts of the ork camp. "And wot are you gits doing standin about? Get movin! I wants all da boyz and all da gobbos and snotlings and squigs in dis 'ere place on da move sharpish! We'z 'eading back to me Waaagh!!!"
The gathered boyz clamored in excitement, then swiftly broke up and ran back into the rest of the camp, bringing the joyous news that Boss Warpchoppa was bringing them all to his Waaagh!!!
--
Some months later, Gorktoof gazed down upon his nascent crusade and felt the closest thing to contentment an ork could feel. A teeming sea of green flesh stretched out to the horizon and beyond, hundreds of thousands of battle-hungry greenskins eager for bloodshed. And he was the boss of all of them. It filled his green heart with pride, and he fancied for a moment that he could feel himself grow a little just from observing his Waaagh!!! And he had indeed grown, and so had his ambitions. As an ork he cared little for the past, but even he could still recall his humble origins...
Bigtoof Grotchoppa sniffed in disdain as he limped away from the ork hamlet. Who was Boss Deffclobba to kick him out? Sure he'd stolen the boss' favorite helmet and pretended he didn't know it wasn't his when confronted. What ork wouldn't? That was a shiny helmet, it was calling to him! Da boss was stupid anyway, 'e didn't deserve it. The beating he'd been given for it was clearly unethical.
He shook his head and continued limping away. Deffclobba had given him a day to be a day away, and he didn't intend on getting krumped just yet. Bigtoof could feel that his career as an ork had more ahead of it than that.
That night, while Bigtoof was slumbering in a crevice midway up a mountain, Eshin came for him. He tried struggling, but for all his aspirations of grandeur he was little more than a yoof and he couldn't resist the assassins. They nailed him to the mountainside with slender knives and shoved spikes of metal blended with warpstone into his gums after knocking his teeth out. They spirited him to the outskirts of his old tribe's territory and vanished into the night, leaving by his prone form a cruel axe forged of an even blend of iron and warpstone.
When Bigtoof awoke the next day, thirsty from the parched air of the Dark Lands, he hardly recognized himself in the polluted pool of water he found. An ork with jagged glowing green teef sticking in all directions out of his mouth wielding a wicked emerald choppa stared back at him, and despite himself Bigtoof was a little startled. Surely the ork he saw in the water wasn't him? That ork wouldn't have let that weedy grot Deffclobba push him out of the kamp. But some slightly painful inspection proved that yes, those were indeed his teef. No one was around to say that the axe was theirs, so it was his too. Clearly Gork or maybe Mork or both of them had seen what a great ork he was and given him a helping hand. Thus emboldened, Bigtoof - well, no, that'd need changing - stomped confidently off to his old camp. He had a score to settle.
--
"Oi Gittoof! I thought I told ya don't come back 'ere, ya thieving grot!"
The strange ork that seemed to have replaced that one git Bigtoof grinned in response, flashing those spiky green teef that seemed kinda imposing. "Da name's Gorktoof, ya pansee! Gorktoof Warpchoppa. I's got visited by da gods, and dey says I'm da boss now. So you's betta listen to me, ya hear?"
Instead of debating with the upstart further, Deffclobba let out a fearsome bellow and charged the smaller ork. Still midway through his grandstanding, Gorktoof was caught off-guard and bowled off his feet and into one of the tents surrounding the boss' clearing. Dazed by the sheer force of Deffclobba's charge, he lay there for a moment while the boss threw down thunderous blows with his bare fists, neglecting to have retrieved his massive club. Then his orkoid instincts kicked in, and with a bellow that was small compared to Deffclobba's he waved his axe around as frantically as his limbs could manage. By sheer luck it intercepted Deffclobba's left fist and sliced straight through, cutting half of the boss' hand off diagonally. As the boss stared in disbelief at his unlikely wound, Gorktoof charged straight into his gut, swinging wildly with his Warpchoppa. With all his fervor, he still only drove Deffclobba back a step before the boss clued back into the fact that he was fighting. With a grunt, the boss grabbed Gorktoof by the head and picked him up with his remaining hand, then dropkicked him straight into another tent. As he charged toward his challenger, Deffclobba failed to notice the faint, shadowy form slip into the tent. Gorktoof managed to stand upright in time to see Deffclobba incoming like a green boulder, but before he could decide to do one thing or another he was shoved to the side subtly. To the boyz observing the scrap, it seemed as though the Warpchoppa had baited the boss into charging him, then dodged aside as Deffclobba barreled into the unfortunate tent, reducing it to scrap. The commotion was enough to completely drown out the sound of a frankly unnecessary amount of cutting and slicing and stabbing happening among the tangled-up fabric of what had once been a dwelling place for some git.
When Deffclobba stood up, he did so shakily, and when he turned around all present were profoundly confused. The boss was positively festooned with stab wounds, clustered in such numbers that there was hardly any intact skin left upon his chest and arms. Thick ork blood oozed in a solid layer out of nearly every surface on his body, from his legs where nearly every vital artery had been slit with jagged blades to his perforated abdomen to his neck which had been cut so deeply it was only his spinal cord and sheer stupidity keeping his head on his neck. He swayed, and seemed about to fall, but caught himself.
The spell was broken when Gorktoof, not an ork to pass up an opportunity, charged forward. "Waaagh!" he screamed as he leaped towards the savaged boss and took his head off with his axe. As he landed unsteadily, he took a step forward towards the rest of the boyz, who flinched back. Surely he had some sort of magic powers if he did that to the boss? Gorktoof raised his axe. "I'm da boss round dese parts now, ya hear?!"
Things had gone very well for Gorktoof after that. He'd grown massively after the rest of the orks in the tribe had accepted him as the boss - and after the few detractors had been found silently turned to mincemeat in the night. Not so large compared to the other, bigger tribes in the Dark Lands, but more than big enough for his Gork and Mork-given blessings to deal with his competition.
For what else could it be, truly? Wherever he went, whichever warboss he challenged, he always won - his Warpchoppa sliced through their crude armor like lard, and his extra-orky teef sliced through their skin like nothing. And even without his gork-given gifts, he'd likely have triumphed - the bosses he challenged always seemed to have suffered a series of deeply unfortunate mishaps just prior to his challenging him. Flesh-eating acid mysteriously manifesting in one boss' fungus brew he drank by the tankard before a fight, mysterious wounds appearing on another during the fight, the one notable instance where an enormous block of stone shaped roughly like Gorktoof (or Gork, or Mork) fell out of seeming thin air and squished Boss Gutcrusha into paste. His foes found their weapons sabotaged, their armor stuffed with explosives, had their feet cut off, their skin slathered in tar, and were thrown into shallow pits of lava by unseen conspirators. Gorktoof happily cultivated the image that he was a master schemer beyond anything that had been seen in an ork before, while in truth he had no idea who had decided to benefit him to such a great extent. Nor did he care; because of their efforts he had got bigga and had more boyz under him to boss about. If his mysterious benefactors decided to turn on him, he'd merely find them with his infallible intrigue capabilities and krump them with the very choppa they'd given him.
As Gorktoof got bigger, so did his dreams of conquest and dominion. As he gradually grew to be the biggest, and then sole, warboss of the Broken Tooth orks, he got the idea given to him (he heard voices in his sleep) that he should go north, to gather the goblins at Mount Grey Hag under his banner. When his Waaagh!!! arrived there, they found the goblin leaders there freshly dead of having accidentally eaten explosive squigs too big to fit inside their bodies (that was the widely accepted conclusion from looking at the plentiful amount of splattered squigflesh everywhere), and so the gobbos folded into his forces without too much thumping required like the gits they were. He then moved further north, taking heed of the voices, which he'd taken to calling his 'birdies', when they said to stay away from one particular mountain with a crooked back. It must have had one, who named a mountain Crookback?
He swept into the Wolf Lands and gathered the boyz there under him without much difficulty, the expected string of misfortune and death following him wherever challengers objected. He never really got much of a fight, but that dissatisfaction was assuaged by the birdies, who promised that he'd get to krump the biggest source of excitement and hatred for any ork in the Dark Lands, the dark stunties. Every last one of them! This promise excited Gorktoof so much that he did what the birdies said even when their demands started getting close to the border of what one could consider un-orky.
He parked his boyz at Mount Grimfang, a cacaphony of green flesh and soot and crude metal being banged into place, and sat there for weeks at a time, quelling rising discontent with well-placed swings of his choppa. And his patience was well-rewarded! At irregular intervals, tribes of orks or goblins would arrive at his stronghold, from the Red Eye clans in the north to Gnashrak's boys to tribes from the foothills of the Mountains of Mourne, across the River Ruin. All bearing the same message, that most of their leaders had accidentally died in highly unlikely ways and their replacements were given instructions to seek out Da Warpchoppa at Mount Grimfang. Oftentimes Gorktoof's more astute nobs, including Smasha, were skeptical of the fact that they had managed to make it all the way across the Dark Lands without being snapped up by the dark stunties, and suspicious of reports of mysterious possibly furry figures in the night murderously removing any obstacles in between the tribes and Gorktoof. He brushed aside their concerns, clearly the figures they were seeing were secret agents of his they all knew nothing about. It was all part of his master plan (that he couldn't tell anyone), you see.
Soon word had reached the ears of the Uzkul-Dhrazh-Zharr about a nascent Waaagh!!! forming on the borders of their territory, albeit one strangely less aggressive than usual. When the mounted hordes of the hobgoblin khanates descended upon his fastness, Gorktoof forbade his mob of boyz from going forth to battle, to much uproar. After many removed limbs in the name of riot control, the Warpchoppa explained that he had a kunnin plan, which he refused to elaborate on. He travelled out alone to meet the khans, and was unsurprised to find that they had been bribed midway to him to serve him instead by a group of hooded figures, who had left a series of strangely-written notes for him specifically. His boyz were disappointed to find that they wouldn't get to have a proper scrap with the untrustworthy gits they now called their allies, but were soothed by the news that the boss had a plan for action at last: they were going to get the last of their boyz for Da Dark Waaagh (the eventual end goal to overthrow the Dark City) by stealing them from the dark stunties.
Only the warboss and his most trusted nobs traveled to the Plain of Zharr where the birdies had said there were slaves to be freed. More would attract attention, so said the birdies, and none of Gorktoof's underlings bothered questioning him on the efficacy of the voices anymore.
As they grew closer to the Plain of Zharr and crossed over into it from the Blasted Wastes, the number of chaos dwarf holdings and operations grew greater and greater. While the Wolf Lands could go years without an overseer passing through, the outskirts of the plain of Zharr saw weekly inspections, and rigirous inspections to ensure no hint of rebellion manifested amongst their orkoid slaves. Of course these overseers were strangely absent as Gorktoof made his way through the slave pens. His nobs Smasha, Crasha, Basha, and Blitzen were suspicious of this, Basha in particular, who had at one point been a slave of a minor sorceror. "Dere wuz more guardie stunties 'ere last," he was heard muttering often. But regardless of where exactly all the whip-wielding slavedrivers had gone too, they couldn't have stopped the uprisings that followed the breaking of the ork's shackles. By now Gorktoof was a terrifying specimen, towering over 3 meters tall, his grim countenance accentuated by the jagged mass of glowing green spikes erupting from his mouth. Whether he was rousing up a mob of boyz to go slaughter the strangely undermanned garrison or exhorting on the greatness of his upcoming campaign, the enslaved orks hung on his every word. As Gorktoof traveled from oil well to lava pump complex to food pit, a growing trail of green grew behind the ork until it was a Waaagh!!! in miniature, a rendition of the Warpchoppa's hard labor. It grew and grew until the birdies warned Gorktoof that the stunties, despite their best efforts, had taken notice of him. The warboss, knowing the value of a strategic attack in the opposite direction, retreated with his bounty of new followers. He sent his nobs ahead to alert the rest of the boyz to meet him midway. Once he linked his forces, the war to overturn the hated oppressor of the orks would finally begin in earnest.
Which brought him back to the present. Gorktoof shook his head to dispel the last remnants of his reminiscence, and began walking to a nearby outcropping of obsidian from which he could speak to his horde below. It was time for his waaaghspeech.
Only, when he arrived at the outcropping (which he'd thumped enough heads to make clear that no one was to be at), there was another ork there. Framed against the backdrop of bustling and brawling green flesh he was a dark figure, a deep near-black green compared to the emerald of Gorktoof's skin. He was almost uncomfortably large, Gorktoof noted. The strange ork had at least half a meter in height on him, and his wrists were the width of Gorktoof's legs. He was holding a bundle of something in the hand that wasn't clutching an enormous menacing axe, something in a sack that was soaked through with blood.
Still, he had plenty of experience krumping bigger orks. His grip tightened on the Warpchoppa when he noted out of the corner of his eyes that there was a gaggle of similarly-colored orks hanging back. He'd never seen any of them before, which wasn't unusual, but they were on his boss-spot. That wouldn't do.
"Oi, you lot! Didn't ya hear? Dis is my boss spot. Get back to where da uvver nobs are or I'll snip ya ears off."
The ork turned at that, an enigmatic expression on his enormously tusked face. "So you's da one who gavvered up dis lot, eh? You's got da choppa for it."
Gorktoof was not used to this type of reaction. Usually other orks either quailed before him or tried to prove their dominance by bashing his face in. This ork just seemed to be ... unimpressed. "Yeah, I's da boss uv all da boyz 'ere. Which since you's 'ere, makes me your boss. So scram off, ya gits! Dis is my boss spot, and since you ain't da boss, you gotsa go."
The other ork turned toward Gorktoof fully, revealing an obscenely muscled and scarred chest, with some cuts still raw and glistening. He snorted in contempt. "Nah, you ain't 'ard enuff ta be da boss of me. No ork is. And you don't 'ave yer squeakies 'elpin ya no more."
He threw the massive sack he carried dismissively at Gorktoof. It landed at his feet, spilling out a pile of slimy guts and various hacked-up body parts, furry snouts and mangy tails, stinking guts and terror-filled eyes. "Dey tried ta krump me when I got to dis place, but no ratty's a match fer Grimgor Ironhide. And dey told me fings before dey kroaked. Wivvout dem gits, ya ain't got da bossness ta hold dese boyz tugevver on a proppa Waaagh!!! So I's da boss now."
Gorktoof bulged in outrage. This Gitgor Irontoe came into his kamp and insulted his bossitude? Who did this git think he was, the chosen of Gork or something? "I fink you need ta get down wif da rest of da boyz afore I krump ya, Grimgor Irongit!"
Grimgor chuffed in amusement. "Is dat so." Then he moved, freakishly quick for something his size. Before Gorktoof could blink, Grimgor's massive fist had impacted his face, shattering a good portion of his teef. Green slivers of metal had embedded themselves in his knuckles but he didn't seem to care too much. Gorktoof, having being knocked clean off his feet by the blow, scrambled back upright and readied the Warpchoppa. "You fink you can beat me? I's da boss of da Dark Lands!"
Grimgor hefted Gitsnik in response. "No. Da squeakies were yer bosses, and dey ain't 'elping you no more. You wasn't even an ork, just a big green puppet. And I's cut yer strings.' And then he was upon Gorktoof, Gitsnik swinging around in a powerful overhead blow. Gorktoof moved inside the arc of the massive axe and made to cut its head off at the handle, like he had with so many other weapons.
The Warpchoppa shattered on Gitsnik's handle, the orkish charms and blessings upon Grimgor's monstrous weapon dispelling what integrity the warpstone weapon had. Thusly disarmed, Gorktoof was helpless to prevent Grimgor's thunderous head-butt that shattered the front of his skull into paste. He dropped like a sapling before the storm that was the black ork.
Conscious, if only just barely, Gorktoof felt and saw Grimgor pick him up by the throat and carry him to the edge of the outcropping. There he dropped him, and as Gorktoof's head flopped upon the ground he saw his boyz. They weren't even paying attention to him, instead looking with adoration at the 'ardboy Grimgor and his Immortulz forming up behind him. It was like he didn't even exist. Like he was just Bigtoof again.
His air was cut off as Grimgor stepped on his throat. Bereft of even the energy to flop around, the last thing Bigtoof saw was Grimgor raising Gitsnik up triumphantly. He was saying something, what was he saying?
"Enuff mucking about, ya gits! To waaagh!"
The roar of his boyz cheering for someone else carried Bigtoof into death.
----
Meanwhile, in the Mountains of Mourne...
Slikk Oilfur rubbed the bridge of his snout in consternation. Were these simpletons too daft to even grasp-grasp the concept of currency? He gazed with contempt at the massive figure of the ogre sitting across from him, who was staring with an obvious expression of confusion at the sheet laid out before him. And this was the one ogre in the tribe who could read! How dull-dull must the others be?
Said ogre, one Grobdug Bookmuncher, spoke up, his thick voice driving into Slikk's forehead like a ball of mud. "So the numbers mean the ... the how many food you have?"
Slikk sighed. "No. It is a numerical representation of how much gold we are willing to give to you."
Grobdug's eyes glazed over, both at the large words the strange rat thingy was using and the large number on the paper. "Uh ... so that means that you'd give the tribe that many gold if we go do what you said?"
"Yes-yes."
"But why? You can't eat gold." The ogre scratched his fatty neck. "Well, ya can, just don't taste very good. Or fill ya up very much. Better ta eat meaty things."
"Is that all you brutes think of? Just eating and eating with no other goal in mind?"
"Well ... yeah. S'the best part of life is, eating. And we's always hungry." As if to prove his point, the ogre absentmindedly reached out and grabbed a haunch of some indistinct type of animal and began stripping the flesh off of the bone nearly as efficiently as Slikk frisked his debtors. The banker, seeing that the tyrant would likely be even less comprehensible than he was usually, stood up and walked away from the cooking fire they had been seated at. As his heavily armed guards fell in behind him, Slikk clasped his arms behind him. There had to be a secret to getting these ogres to cooperate with the Warpfang Bank's goal. They were too dimwitted to understand the concept of debt, and barely grasped the understanding of an exchange of goods.
He paused at the edge of the hill the tyrant's personal camp was made on. From here he could see the entire tribal camp, a grand mess of rocks painted with crude symbols in various types of gore. There were numerous deep pits with wooden stakes shoved into the rim at a downwards angle, flat rocks that particularly obese specimens used to dice up the monstrous creatures found in these mountains. Everything he could see revolved around food to some extent; the ritual combat that took place in the pits universally ended in cannibalism, the only semblance of property the ogres seemed to grasp was what food one possessed and what weapons one had to make more food. Even what seemed to be their priests were merely butchers that cut meat in mildly creative ways and pretended that that gave the food some form of sacredness. Single-minded primitives. Could probably throw food at them and they'd do whatever you wanted them to do.
...That was it.
I've overestimated these brutes. With the right food they will dance-dance upon my strings. And here I thought they might be anything other than animals to be lured about by meat on a stick.
He turned from the gorging mass of ogres and briskly walked back to where Grobdug was munching on a still-wriggling debtor of his. "Tyrant!" he called out, watching the corpulent creature raise his head from the steaming guts of his tribute.
"Eh?"
"How do you feel about delicacies?"
--
Hans wasn't quite aware of where exactly he was. He knew they'd emerged into open air from how the increased light stung his eyes. He hadn't seen the surface in years, ever since the ratmen had snatched him off the streets of Nuln. In retrospect, following that pipe music had been a bad idea.
Well, maybe not such a bad idea. Sure, he'd never seen his parents again, and his little brother had been eaten in front of him, and he lived in a cage, but the food the rat people gave him was really good! It made his thinking worser, though. And also fatter.
He slowly looked about. He was dimly aware of being in the midst of a crowd of other children like him, all unnaturally plump and placid. They were being herded by the rat people over to somewhere rocky. He didn't really notice, instead wallowing in the narcotic sensations granted by the succulent mystery meat the ratmen had given him.
Oh, who was that? He was like a really big fat man. He must have been ten feet tall and ten feet wide. He seemed happy to see him! Hans waved hi. He saw a shiny ratman that gestured to him and said something. Hans didn't really hear, as most of his senses aside from taste had atrophied badly in his time underground.
The big man thingy was approaching him, arms outstretched. Was he going to give him a hug? Hans spread his chubby arms wide, and giggled sluggishly as he was lifted up. He didn't really feel it all that much when the ogre bit through half of his skull; even if his nerve receptors hadn't withered to nothing long ago, he was killed instantly anyway.
--
The representatives the Warpfang Bank sent into the Mountains of Mourne travelled in small groups, consisting mainly of one or two bankers, several dozen heavily armed collections officers decked out with prototype warpstone chain guns, high-quality steel armor, and disquietingly large collections of melee instruments of pain, and a few hundred unfortunate debtors, who served as chaff for when one of the many monstrous creatures of the Mourne decided to pick a fight, or when the party arrived at their target ogre tribe, opening gifts. Negotiations at first proceeded slowly, as while the ogres understood that attempting to munch upon the heavily armed rats or their bosses was a bad idea, the idea of payment in conventional currency for their services in the coming conflict failed to gain much traction with the tyrants they talked down to. The Uzkul-Dhrazh-Zharr had a fell reputation, even in the pitiless Mountains of Mourne, and the prospect of maybe making it out of that dread plain unchained to spend gold coins to get food eventually was unappealing to any odd ogre, much less the meanest, hungriest ones of the species.
Used to dealing with more manipulative clients with motives numbering beyond finding the greatest and tastiest available source of food, it was a while before the Bank cued into the (in hindsight) obvious idea of bribing the ogres with the most delightfully twisted culinary delights the Under-Empire could devise. Unnaturally fat human children abducted from big cities and isolated farming villages that had been fed incredibly fattening (and mutagen-laced) food until they looked like corpulent eggs, skaven infested with massive colonies of eyeless finger-sized maggot-like creatures, a collection of clanrats that had fallen behind on their payments seeded with a rare fungus from the Southland jungles that caused their flesh to mold together like grotesque clay sculptures, rat-ogres with blood-filled fruit growing from their flesh in place of fur, and more flowed from the uncaring laboratories of the skaven, delighting the ogres who had never even dreamed of such inventive things being done with meat. Their appetites whetted and eager for the promised bounty they would receive upon conclusion of their extermination of the slavelords of the Dark Lands, tribe after tribe barreled eagerly toward that foul plain, their gnoblar auxiliaries stumbling along behind their masters. To their surprise, some months into the recruitment drive, the paymasters in charge of the operation found themselves being approached by tribes entirely of their own volition, claiming they had heard of the rewards they were offering through the proverbial grapevine.
--
Tradelord Greasus Tribestealer Drakecrush Hoardmaster Goldtooth the Shockingly Obese sat upon a pile of his riches, enjoying the sensation of his favored gnoblars squirming through the folds of his flab to clean in between his crevices. From here he could see nearly the entirety of his kingdom, the enormous mass of ogres that all acknowledged that he was the best of all of them. He gazed out upon his riches and was content for a moment before hunger for more seeped into his mind and gut, as it always did. Sure, he had nominal control over the Silk Road, the longest and most valuable trade route in the world, he had lordship over what must be hundreds of thousands of ogres, he had the Scepter of the Titans which gave him the strength to rend to bits anything that would try to cross him, but could he have more?
The answer was, of course, yes. And he knew exactly how, too. He'd heard about the ratfolk scurrying through his mountains, bribing tribes left and right to go into the Dark Lands for whatever reason. The wealth they were throwing about was pretty extravagant, and it might have tempted him to take up their offer in the past, when his gut and ambition were smaller. Now, though, he saw opportunity in these skaven emissaries. There were many tribes in his territory that had recently been ... uncooperative. Their tyrants had begun to chafe under his taxes, saying that it was difficult to come up with the amount needed, yet their guts weren't getting any smaller. They were planning something, Greasus could smell it. But fortune had turned his way, and he'd use it to the fullest extent. These skaven would benefit from the recruitment of his soon-to-be rebellious vassals, and he would take the opportunity to further strengthen his hold upon his kingdom. He'd developed a good nose for change a long time ago, and he could smell it in the air. All that remained was to reach out and grab it.
--
In the mountains to the west of the Dark Lands, Slikk Oilfur was finally done. Reunited with his fellow financial officers, he stood upon a ridge overlooking a horde of monstrous walking gullets with legs, all roped in by the shrewd minds of the Warpfang Bank. Every tribe that could be persuaded within the time limit imposed upon them by the Council had been brought here to this valley, a force numbering at least two hundred and twenty thousand. An impressive force, one sure to crush the weakened chaos dwarves should Eshin's pet waaagh not have the strength to. He admired the results of his sublime bribery skills for a little while longer, than decided to address them and set his part of the Arch-Rat's plan moving. With a series of short hand gestures, his bodyguards and those of the other bankers spread out to acoustically advantageous positions around him and signaled to the other gatherings of stormvermin scattered around the valley while pulling out speaking trumpets.
Slikk stepped forward to the edge of the ridge, and his stormvermin blew a shrill note that drew the attention of all the ogres to him. "Ogres of the many-many tribes!" he called, his words repeated and passed down the line by the bodyguards so that the entire gathering heard him. "You have been called here for a great-great purpose! Our master, Thanquol," here he took in a deep breath, "Grand Underlord of the Underempire, Commander of the Engineers of Skyre, Leader of the Assassins of Eshin, Director of the Beastmasters of Moulder, Chief of the Plaguedoctors of Pestilens, Chosen of the Grey Seers, Prophet of the Horned Rat and Leader of the Council of Thirteen, General of the Army and Admiral of the Navy, Master of Magic and the Arcane Arts, Conqueror of Nuln, Unraveller of Dwarven Mysteries, Vanquisher of the Daemonclaw's Host, The Wise One, Arch-Rat of All Skavendom, The Humble, desires the dark dwarfthings to be crush-crushed!"
He took a minute to regain his breath while his heralds relayed his words. The primitives respected those with many titles, he'd learned, so it was necessary to state all of the Arch-Rat's many titles at once. Once his lungs recovered, he continued.
"It is known that ogres are the most formidable creatures for hire in the world! Therefore our lord has but one command for you: go forth and crush-crush the dark dwarves! The all-powerful Under-Empire has made arrangements to weaken the slavers, and you shall be the bite-bite to the throat!"
The ogres let forth a great bellowing cry at his words that he could feel - and smell - from his ridge.
"At the bottom of this valley, where it spill-spills out into the Dark Lands proper, there is a citadel, the Daemon's Stump! It is undermanned thanks to the ... diversion we skaven have created. Go forth and take it, and from there head north to Zharr-Naggrund! The pyramid of the puny-puny slavers will surely be no match for your muscle! Do this, and not only will the corpses of the fallen be yours to consume, but we of the Warpfang Bank shall gift you twice as much in meat once this is over and our lord and master strides through the ashes of the Dark City!"
The collected force of ogres bellowed then, a guttural roar of stinking breath that lasted many minutes, each bull trying to outcompete the other. Slikk's fur was blown back by the force of so many brutish lungs exerting themselves at once. And well they should; the ogres had already been impressed by the sheer amount and variety of meat the ratmen seemed willing to give to them, now they were promising to double whatever corpsemeat the crushing of an entire realm would give them? Throughout the crowd, butchers and slaughtermasters salivated eagerly as they envisioned the feast ahead of them, sharpening their cleavers and knives in anticipation. When the commotion finally died down, Slikk grinned and spoke once more.
"Well, what are you waiting for? Go! Crush-crush the dwarfthings!"]
The ogres roared once more, and made to begin moving, but stopped in confusion. Variations on 'which way do we go, ratty?' began floating up from the crowd. Slikk groaned, and pointed to the west, where the rocky ground began to slope downhill. His stormvermin took the hint and began yelling out the necessary direction to the horde, which began to rumble inexorably toward the Daemon's Stump.
Slikk stayed there a while, watching his army move. His eyes idly watched an unusually massive specimen with cleavers in place of hands and an enormous pot hooked into his backflesh move as he contemplated the appropriateness of using an army of ogres to storm the Daemon's Stump, which according to what had been found from their preliminary research had been formed when a tyrant had fought with a great daemon for forty days and nights before the both of them were sealed in stone. Or so the legends went.
Slikk snorted. Look-look at him, starting to believe in the tales of primitives! Next thing he knew he'd be believing all the stories the manthings told about their Sigmar. No, surely it was just a myth. Even if it had some basis in truth, his army of ogres held at least a thousand tyrants. Any daemon would fall before such a force.
Yes, Slikk thought, he had surely done well by the Horned Rat's plan.
----
Deep under the jagged slopes of Crookback Mountain, in an isolated series of caverns that glowed a nauseating green and gave off a stench that would kill lesser creatures by virtue of the toxicity of its contents, a bespectacled plague priest named Helkic Stain clawed at her head in frustration. Her superiors were clearly setting her up to fail by giving her this impossible task!
She was standing on a rickety ratwalk made of rusted metal, gazing down into the twenty-foot deep pit she kept all her test subjects in. Normally the hole, its sides encrusted in bile and dried blood with toxic lichen growing off the excretions found there, its bottom an indescribable mix of mud, feces, pus, and bones, was packed to the brim with diseased animals and sentient beings, so many in close quarters the unlucky often couldn't move, all the better for the swift transmission of the diseases she was testing. But today the excavation was empty but for one particularly belligerent subject who just didn't seem to wish to cooperate!
Damnable orks. Whatever diabolical entity had crafted them from rotten beer and sheer stupidity had made them near-impossible to tamper with. Their flesh was not wholly meat and bone like every other living thing he'd poked at, but rather some annoyingly dense spongy mixture of an interweaving fungi-like lattice that was irritatingly sticky and difficult to cut through. Their blood was thick and syrupy, an incredibly deep shade of red that sharply contrasted their skin. Even their bones were possessed of an odd flexibility and sponge-like texture, enabling them to withstand greater force than would normally be needed to break them. All in all, an incredibly durable creature more akin to a gigantic walking mushroom than a fleshbag like most others. Helkic honestly couldn't even comprehend how they were alive, much less moving.
All of this, of course, was just an undercurrent to the thing most frustrating the genius plague priest; their blasted immunity to most every disease in her stock! She'd hit the ork in the pit with everything from the weeping fever of the Hung plains to the shitting death found in Ind. None of them stuck, or if they did they didn't affect the blasted thing nearly as much as they should. The worst she'd seen happen to the beast was when she'd infected it with some common human pox, more out of boredom than anything else. Then it'd sported some small blisters for a few days before they flaked off.
Helkic ground the heels of her hands into her eyes in an attempt to relieve the pressure she felt building up behind them. It was merely from stress, as she'd long since endured every disease she knew of that caused headaches. There was no cure for this but solving her ork predicament, and within a reasonable timeframe as well. After all, it was not by her choice that she was endlessly laboring over worthless primitives that were too alien to accept proper vulnerability to her diseases. The command had been passed down from the Council of Thirteen itself, and she had heard from the mutterings of her dullard partners that Arch-Rat Thanquol had plans to turn whatever plague she concocted on all of the orks eventually. While it was gratifying to see her obvious biological mastery recognized, it was also concerning in that all the blame would come down on her should the promised plague fail to perform.
Of course she was blameless, as her endless labors would attest. The fault clearly lay with the orks for being too bloody stupid to actually succumb to her toxins!
Her thoughts were interrupted by a bellow from the ork down in her testing pit. "Oi! Rat fing! Is you gonna throw somefing fer me ta fight down 'ere or wot? I's gonna waste away if ya don't let me krump somefing."
Helkic sighed. Then paused as something clicked in her pus-covered brain. Of course! Orks got stronger from fighting, every simpleton knew that. The more fights they participated in, the bigger and stronger they got. But was the reverse true as well? If deprived of a conflict, would an ork grow small and weak and thus easy to infect with anything that wouldn't result in those upstart Morbag hacks peeling her skin off? Declining to give the ork an answer, she scurried off to the primary plague cauldron, brain already freed from its unending cycle of stress to focus on what disease she could test on the ork once it was weakened enough. They'd captured this specimen but a week ago, there should be a bit of time before its hunger for bloodshed began to weaken it. Now then, that pox had shown a hint of promise. Perhaps if incubated in successive generations of parasitic fungi from the Khuresh hinterlands...
--
Some months later, Helkic rubbed her claws together in excitement. It was working! Finally, the dull impossibility of the greenskin biology bent to her indomitable will!
She was perched on a platform at the near-top of a greatly expanded testing cavern, with hundreds of testing pits like her old one dotted across the floor. Each held a snarling ork, carefully isolated from any other of their kind to prevent them from gaining strength by fighting the other. The solitary confinement had weakened them - not nearly as much as she had hoped; she'd had to throw out her theory that gretchin and goblins and the like were merely orks that had lost a sufficient number of fights so as to turn into a different subspecies - enough that the disease she had concocted with what she was rather certain was the blessing of the Horned Rat himself had begun to affect them. For who else but the most brilliant plague priest in the entire under-empire assisted by the father of her race could take a formidable race such as the greenskins and turn their greatest strength, their love - and need - of fighting, and make it their weakness?
Ah, her underlings were administering a dose to a healthy ork. Helkic scurried to a more advantageous position where she could see the procedure more clearly. A choking team of slaves hauled a massive rusting iron pot over to the edge of the pit, the contents a foul brownish-blue in color. After pausing to regain the necessary strength to go on and toss their fellows that had died from the fumes into the cauldron, they took hold of the sides of it and with a great collective heave, tipped the cauldron over, letting its noxious liquid pour into the pit and onto its ork occupant, who howled in dismay. "Oi, wassis? You rat gits ferget 'ow to drink squig beer or sumfink?"
When the deluge finally halted and the unlucky ork staggered out, Helkic was both elated and disappointed. Finally something had had a result, sure, but it was not nearly as dramatic as she'd like. Something like the ork keeling over with its flesh dissolving into rats as it did was what her mind had hoped for, while her reality was ... less impressive.
The ork now had pebble-sized red boils popping up all over its skin, more coming to the surface as time passed. The brute hardly seemed perturbed by this, instead preferring to hoot and holler while it tried to claw its way up the sides of the pit to where the remaining slaves were taunting the thing. As she watched with a detached interest, one of them managed to peg the ork with a rock they'd somehow smuggled in. The boil struck by the pebble burst, and began leaking an unusual amount of fluid. This sharpened Helkic's gaze slightly; she'd cut apart more than a few orks trying to figure out how to effect them and she'd always been irritated by how little the things bled; their blood was think and clumpy, and mostly concentrated in the center of the torso where it nourished the organs rather than the muscle of the arms and legs, which seemed more to be that annoyingly dense spongelike lattice rather than conventional muscle. To see what looked to be a viable way to make them actually bleed and thus transmit the disease ... while not as glamorous a result as she'd been hoping for, it would certainly do. Especially as the Council's enforcers had been growing ever more testy as of late...
--
A hundred or so orks woke up several miles east of Crookback Mountain with fragile red boils all over their bodies and no idea how they got there. Being orks, after some mutual brawling to let out the tension of having been stuck in those nasty no-fighty pits for months they mostly put them out of mind and headed north on a vague feeling that grew stronger with every step they took. There was a Waaagh!!! brewing, and though many of them were pale with blood loss, their step was strengthened by the anticipation of the war ahead.
----
When the order came down from the Supreme Underlord for Eshin and Pestilens to deploy forces to the Dark Lands in order to conduct his preparatory schemes to bring down the chaos dwarfs, Moulder and Skyre saw opportunity. While they would not dare to commit open sabotage while the Horned Rat still gazed attentively upon the affairs of his spawn, there could certainly be advantages gained from having their fellow Great Clans otherwise occupied.
They continued plotting ways to increase their own fortunes until Thanquol's orders were delivered to them in full.
They - two of the most powerful clans of all the skaven - were being placed under the authority of ... of ... Mors! Yes, Paskrit was mentioned as well, but Morskittar and Verminkin both considered her a witless fool, only kept on the Council by her seeming inability to be defeated in a challenge and her usefulness as a pawn. No, it was surely the conniving upstart Gnawdell that had secured this favor from the 'Wise One'. She had always lusted for more than her fair share of power, having disgracefully manipulated Clan Gritak into taking the brunt of the casualties at Karak Eight-Peaks and claimed credit for the deed of capturing the dwarfhold. She'd never truly deserved her place on the Council of Thirteen, and now she twisted their ...noble... leader into giving her authority over them?!
How had she done it, both of them wondered? What trick had she employed that they hadn't tried to get Great Leader Thanquol's attention? Had she used feminine wiles on his no doubt warpstone-addled mind? The very concept was foreign to the two, who mostly thought of females as new underling generators, but notes were scribbled down to develop ways to exploit this weakness of their overlord nonetheless.
Then the orders were reread and blanched at. Though the two Council members were many miles apart from each other, both of them had the exact same reaction near-simultaneously.
"Collaborate?!"
--
Ikit Claw and Fleshsculptor Stitch stared warily at each other. Unwilling to undergo the blow to their egos that collaborating with each other in person would've been, Morskittar and Verminkin had instead dispatched their most senior underlings to complete Thanquol's project in their stead. However, at the first glance at each other the two could tell that whatever semblance of cooperation their superiors hoped to see would not pan out, and the extremely short exchange of words they had only confirmed it.
"We will make-make a -"
"Tunneling drill, with fire magics to pierce the fool-fool dawi zharr underbellies!"
"Your drill will explode halfway there! Skyre mechanisms are unreliable. I will make a race of boring bomb worms to detonate the foundations of their cities!"
"Fool-fool! Do you not remember the Council has decreed that we work with Mors? We will have to transport their stormvermin. I will take lead of the project and create mighty-mighty fire drill transports to surprise the enemies of the Under-Empire!"
"Imbecile! If you are trying to get the Mors stormvermin dead - not a bad-bad idea, admittedly - then that is what we do! Instead my race of colossal vole-rats will transport our troops in their guts!"
"Oh, so you intend to feed-feed our forces to your untrained beasts? Bah! You Moulder are all the same, merely gluttons looking for the next easy kibble!"
The two skaven - scientists in their field of craft both, altered in body in their particular way both - were snout to snout, their whiskers angrily flicking against each other. At last Ikit ground words out between his metallic teeth. "Morskittar will eviscerate me if I gut you and rip-rip your heart out like I wish to. So here is what we will do. I will take my warlock-engineers and create a series of glorious flaming drill transports to tunnel Mors' stormvermin into the Dark City. You will go and do whatever idiotic endeavor you believe will have a fraction of a chance to best my genius. When I prove-prove my mastery of science over you, you will acquiesce and devote your resources to my project. Agreed?"
Stitch grinned ferally, the teeth in his mouth all different shapes and sizes, universally sharp and gleaming. "And when your machines crash and burn-burn, you will put the resources given to you to my warbeasts. Very well."
With that, the two turned their backs on one another and marched back to their subordinates, ushering them impatiently to the laboratories that had been provided for them. They'd be damned if they let those scumbag other-clanners take their rightful prize!
A majority of each of the clans' researchers, biologists, mechanics, beastmasters, warlock-engineers, and all manner of unhinged scientists had been dispatched to Clan Mors' headquarters of Karak Eight Peaks, now renamed to the City of Pillars. The two Great Clans quickly sectioned off entire sections of the city for their use, on opposite sides of the labyrinth of dwarven tunnels. Soon enough hellish sounds began to ring out from the twisted depths of those districts, a cacophony of screeching and clanging and the wails of expendable slave fodder used for effectiveness testing.
From the Moulder district came a great assortment of throaty bellows and twisted roars as the Fleshmaster got to work. He started out initially with what amounted to a 'basic' template for the start of a Hellpit Abomination - one or perhaps several unlucky skaven that had been stitched together and exposed to a mutagen developed to fuse them into one mostly whole, vaguely rat-shaped mass. Stitch had had hundreds of these mewling horrors brought with him to the City of Pillars, and now he bent his malign will upon them. Over a span of a few weeks and many injections of nutrient fluid mixed with hefty amounts of warpstone, the formerly vestigial limbs of the rat-shaped things had swelled to many times their original size, bulging with hideous muscle beneath their sheet-white skin. As a side effect of the treatment, whatever fur the subjects possessed had fallen out (and promptly been mixed into their feed - waste not). The Fleshmaster gave it little thought, as the beasts were primarily meant to tunnel underneath the earth. One more hairless abomination crawling around underground wouldn't go out of place.
Next additional limbs were added, as the tubular beasts were found to not move fast enough for Stitch's liking. This was done by taking the limbs of those beasts which had died from competition with their kin, crippling mutations, or autopsy by the Mutation Ministers overseeing the day-to-day aspects of the breeding program to see how the creatures were developing internally, and stitching them to the sides of the healthiest beasts. After being fed a considerable amount of mutagen fluid, the dead flesh molded itself onto the sides of the beasts like they had always been there, effectively granting another limb to the creature. This was done in great amounts, and in the occasional case when no spare limbs could be found, the collossal beast would be chained down and its limbs split in half down the middle before a specially balanced warpstone paste was applied to the open wounds. Soon the creatures operated on this way were sporting a minimum of eight limbs each, which were frequently sawed off and re-attached based on changing orders from the Fleshmaster. A few generations of accelerated breeding later, Stitch had at his disposal a gaggle of hundred foot-long hairless ratlike creatures with 24 legs each, spaced out relatively evenly around their bodies, which stretched long and circular. Further minor modifications were made via similar Lamarckian procedures, removing their ears and replacing them with a network of wiry whiskers along their bodies that sensed vibration as they tunneled through the earth, and shortening the snout by way of chopping a good length of it off in order to shape the maw for efficient troop loading in the future.
Now Stitch sought to solve the dual problem of making the beast be able to actually tunnel in a time-efficient manner and also load skaven into its guts without digesting them (overly much). This was firstly done by removing the stomach and intestines, instead replacing them with a series of podlike organs that were filled with a mildly paralytic yet oxygenated fluid that could safely preserve a stormvermin, or perhaps two or three clanrats, for transport. With those inconvenient organs removed (and as a matter of fact, there didn't need to be those there either. Liver, kidneys, bladder, the thing could easily live without them), an average of 825 stormvermin could be loaded in at maximum capacity. To solve the problem of the beasts dying overly quickly due to the lack of most of their vital organs, something that killed a substantial portion of their breeding stock before it was realized and rectified, the limbs of the creatures were modified so that in the middle of each of their palms their gaped a mouth, more a jagged hole with spiked teeth angling downward, leading down a ways along the arm before the pseudo-esophagus reached a secondary stomach implanted in the end of the limb. While this didn't entirely solve the problem of persistent hunger and malnutrition in the beasts, the ability to consume by moving forward did incentivize the beasts to go in the direction their handlers desired, as well as impart a rabid hunger for flesh and blood as it tasted much better than the dirt and rock it typically ingested, both positive traits in the Fleshmaster's opinion. Still didn't do much for the tunneling speed of the beasts, which while it was formidable, was nowhere near what the upcoming invasion would require. But they'd find a solution for that.
Confident for now in the eventual success of his creation, Stitch allocated some of his resources to spy on Skyre and see what foolish machinery they had devised to compete against the Tunnelfiend of Clan Moulder.
What he saw surprised him about as much as his accomplishments surprised Ikit Claw when the engineer's own spies returned.
Skyre had not been idle while Stitch was carefully introducing desirable traits into his stock. Though their normal train of thought when dealing with a foe such as the dawi zharr would be to construct some monstrous superweapon to obliterate their fell city and all that lay within it, the Supreme Underlord evidently desired to obtain samples of their technology and magical lore as well. Something different would have to be done. Something unconventional. Something daring.
In other words, straight up Skyre's alley.
The mechanically inclined clan had somehow constructed a gargantuan drill of some sort, a thirty foot-long cone of ragged metal with a glowing emerald strip of warpstone-infused steel spiraling its way up the drill. Within the drill itself there was a frantically chugging machine that vaguely resembled the boilers that drove the steam tanks of the hammermanthing's empire. However, this seemed to be only a superficial resemblance, as the machine instead rumbled and roared constantly as though it were continuously exploding, a sentiment not eased by the ominous colors the metal of the construction occasionally glowed.
Outside of this core of the drill there was a cylindrical framework reminiscent of the outer body of the Doomwheels. As the warpstone engine roared and shook, the framework spun at speeds impossible for nearly any machine currently in existence. The spinning of this framework wound up and spun various other gears and whirring cogs that in turn spun a larger framework of steel bars that encompassed all of this, which itself was encompassed by and powered the spin of a larger framework that was bolted into the inner frame of the drill itself. This complex system of spinning cogs and gears allowed the power that the fearsome engine at the machine's heart generated to be amplified as it was turned into kinetic energy, translating into the drill spinning at intimidating speeds, the warpstone edging allowing it to cut through stone like mush.
Of course, as with any great idea made reality, there were some issues. The workings of the drill weren't as fragile as some pieces of skaven engineering, but they were still finicky enough that the drill couldn't go too far before one piece or another broke down, due mainly to vibration buildup from the lack of a stable platform to drill from. This would have been solved by the weight of the passengers the Hellprobe was supposed to transport to battle, but something about the dynamics of how exactly the drill went through rock meant that any excess weight in the form of armored passenger capsules often lead to the thing drilling in a completely different direction than the controls dictated, most times directly into the unfortunate clanrats standing in as test subjects, or in one memorable occasion, itself, as the drill imploded somehow. When it worked correctly it positively zipped through the earth - and presumably enemy flesh - at an incredible rate. It was just getting it to do that for a long period of time that was an issue.
Ah, they'd find a way.
--
As Moulder and Skyre continued their age-old rivalry, something far more bizarre and intimidating was springing up in the City of Pillars. Something alien, something any normal skaven would (correctly) label as a sign that the end of the world truly had come about. Something terrifying.
Camraderie. Cooperation.
A ... partnership.
In sharp contrast to the old familiar antagonistic relationship the four great clans had with each other, the comparatively newly anointed fifth, Mors, and the organization referred to by most as the Army in casual parlance had found that they were extremely compatible with each other. Before now they hadn't had much opportunity to collaborate - the USA had been formed only fifty years ago, and Paskrit had achieved her membership of the Council but twenty-five years past, contemptuously slaughtering Warlord Blacknose in single combat. This short timespan and the Army's housing being mainly located at Skavenblight itself had hindered any major projects the two council members may have wished to collaborate on.
Not so now, however. With Paskrit herself and one of her most skilled underlings, Sleek Sharpwit - himself the former warlord of Mors who had voluntarily abdicated to Gnawdell to join the fledgling organization that was the USA at the time - the Army had transported a large portion of its forces over to the City of Pillars, moving into the remainder of the city not occupied by Skyre and Moulder with legions of disciplined rat-ogres and stormvermin wielding a wide assortment of weapons and operating a wide variety of war machines. They were fitted easily into the myriad tunnels and caverns in the hold, for the Army was tiny in comparison to Mors' numbers. While each one of its members was elite compared to the common clanrat, the Great Clan outnumbered them by a thousand to one with the clanrats occupying the city alone. Paskrit and Gnawdell wished to change this, for if the assault on Zharr-Naggrund was to succeed, they must combine the Army's discipline with the sheer numbers Mors had by comparison.
The two Council members, along with their most senior underlings Queek Headtaker and Sleek Sharpwit, convened in a small but opulent private cavern as to the best way to accomplish their shared goal. For three days they exhaustively mapped out the optimal route to, if not bring those Mors clanrats chosen for the mission up to the standards of the USA, which would take years of intensive training, enable them to act much more cohesively and coordinately than before, setting up clear chains of command for each strike force with Army members in key positions to prevent opportunistic backstabbers from taking advantage of any momentary confusion. When they emerged from their seclusion and began enacting these reforms, there was some outcry over this as skaven who had bribed and honestly cheated their way up the ranks were ousted in favor of 'sergeants' and 'privates' sporting strange accents and a distinct lack of favoritism. There was talk of rebellion for a time, which was swiftly quashed by the stormvermin of Mors, who were by and large admiring and envious of the discipline and power their Army counterparts showed.
Once the chain of command was secured, the drills began, much to the dismay of the common skaven who had climbed over his fellows to get selected hoping for easy glory and plunder. Endless drilling day in and day out of formation, maneuvers, basic sets of orders etched painstakingly into the heads of the skaven militia. Day by day exhausted skaven dragged themselves back to their burrows, too exhausted even to struggle with their neighbors for food. Some went hungry and starved. The drills continued, the Army officers cleverly encouraging competition by granting minor boons to the units that performed the best, and punishing those who were caught sabotaging their fellow clanrats in a way that significantly impacted the performance of the unit. As one drill instructor explained from under his wide-brimmed hat, "Step-stepping on your brother or sister to get ahead is fine-fine. That is what makes us skaven, makes us great. What I won't allow is you doing so in ways that make all of us do worse! Then we're all thrown back into Father Rat's gullet. So play-play your games of sabotage if you must. But if you impact this unit, I will find out. And you will wish-wish I had not."
By the thirteenth week of the exhaustive training, results were showing. The exhausted recruits now shared food amongst themselves when they returned to their burrows for the eve. Some took to sleeping together in great communal piles, and forcibly claimed food for themselves at mealtimes. Mors' stormvermin were particularly prone to this, and many of them took to the training the Army stormvermin set for them with a relish, going through combat drills late into the night. In practice melees, cohesion notably improved. While the great mobs of skaven were by no means a fully disciplined force, there was a semblance of order in the chaos. When unit leaders called out orders, they were obeyed for the most part, and while they still broke and ran far easier than veteran Army troops, they did not immediately panic at the 'death' (or sometimes actual death) of their leaders - subordinates were able to keep the unit together for the most part, and keep a rout from happening at the drop of a hat. Mors' stormvermin showed even more improvement than the common clanrat, performing at a level that the Army rats referred to as 'nearly as good as a recruit'. While the drill instructors clearly desired to go further, being sadistically overjoyed to have such a massive supply of underlings to torment/train, their commanders decreed that that would have to do - the time for the invasion to commence was nigh, according to their intelligence - though they'd had no reports from Eshin as to the status of their Waaagh!!! for a while now, past reports and common knowledge of how the greenskins operated allowed for an extrapolation that held the green tide would wash over Zharr Naggrund in just under two months, followed closely by whatever the Warpfang Bank had managed to scrounge up from the Hungry Mountains. They needed to begin moving out now if they were to arrive on time - assuming Skyre and Moulder had lived up to their boasting of creating a transportation system that would get them there in record time.
This was, of course, where problems sprang up.
--
"They don't have anything?!"
The unfortunate skaven quailed before the simultaneous exclamation by both Paskrit and Gnawdell. "N-not exactly, most illustrious and enlightened Warlord-General and Arch-Despot. I spoke to both Lord Ikit and Lord Stitch," - in truth the messenger rat had been rebuffed by both and scrounged his information from bored members of both camps - "and they informed me that they both have designs that would be more than adequate to bring-bring your troops to the dark dwarfthings. It's just that ... they're not quite ready yet."
Gnawdell strode forward and seized the unfortunate rat by the throat and lifted him up into the air, incensed by this blatant shirking of her authority by the arrogant Great Clans. "You will go and inform both Ikit Claw and Fleshmaster Stitch that they will come before me - us," she added with a glance at Paskrit, "and tell-tell us why exactly that the vaunted Skyre and Moulder were unable to live-live up to their boasts. Do this and you'll live in comfort for the rest of your days." She released the messenger, who rapidly nodded while clutching his throat and scurried off, already dreaming of sleeping on a bed of solid gold for the rest of his life.
When his mutilated and savaged corpse showed up in the middle of the Army's camps with a note pinned to it saying 'more time', greater action was taken. Queek Headtaker took command of the legions of Mors that had been trained by the Army and bullrushed his way through Moulder's occupied district, using his knowledge of the back ways and inner workings of the City of Pillars to storm to the Fleshmaster's laboratory with a minimum of casualties from the hordes of giant rats the mutators attempted to unleash. Here the newly instilled discipline of the units showed themselves, as the skaven held firm against the oversized rodents and overwhelmed them with coordinated strikes. Meanwhile, Paskrit gathered up an elite strike team of Army rats and struck like a lightning spear, ending up in Ikit Claw's sanctum almost before he knew they were attacking. There were no explosive lectures from the leader of either strike force, no inquiries of what exactly the supposedly competent clans had been up to in the intervening time. Instead they stepped aside and let the Grey Seers they had brought along with them step forward. Simultaneously, each of the servants of the Horned Rat seized up and cried out in agony before snapping back to look at Ikit and Stitch, their eyes and mouths glowing an eerie green. Out of their mouths came Thanquol's voice, and their bodies withered away as they spoke, the flesh practically evaporating off their bones. The Underlord's message was simple: "Listen. I don't care what you do in particular, but you are late. Get me a way to bring my troops to Zharr-Naggrund within the turning of the moon or I'll reach-reach into your soul and do things you don't want to know." With that, the near-skeletal forms of the unfortunate Grey Seers collapsed into small piles of warpstone dust in the shape of the Horned Rat's symbol, transmuted into the holy substance by the sheer power of the Arch-Rat. The message was obvious.
Cooperation between Skyre and Moulder picked up significantly following Thanquol's message.
The two Great Clans compared each other's designs and quickly identified what was wrong with each of them. Moulder's Tunnelfiend could transport a ridiculous number of troops, but the organic pods had no space for actual equipment or armor, and it made its way through the earth far too slowly for their goal. Skyre's Hellprobe tunneled at ludicrous speeds, but had issues travelling far due to the lack of a stable platform and had no way to transport more than a handful of skaven. It was almost as though their projects had been made to be fused.
The Tunnelfiend's guts were hollowed out, the transport-pod organs replaced by a metallic hangar with harnesses and bolted-down handrails. The number of troops able to be transported was cut down to around seven hundred, but equipment could now be taken along for the trip, and entry and exit was made easier by irising portholes bolted into the sides of the squealing beasts. The inefficient maw and head of the beast was covered and replaced by a smaller version of the Hellprobe's drill, fear of the Underlord's wrath driving the warlock-engineers to make the arduous miniaturization process go much faster. To aid in the speed of the beast crawling through the earth, as well as survivability, enormous lengths of spiked treads were bolted onto the hide of the beast, that whirred and spun and helped drag the beast's enormous bulk through the earth while the miniaturized Hellprobe drilled the way ahead. Armor was added to the relatively vulnerable arms and whatever skin was still left exposed. Lastly, the backside of the beast, normally gone unused, had an an enormous booster engine bolted onto it, which could be activated to powerboost it through a particularly tough patch of stone, or theoretically allow it to leap above the ground as a whale did the sea waves. Most of the remaining dickering was isolated from the actual design of the project, instead devoted to the name of the magnificent semi-mechanical monstrosity. Finally, at the crux of the deadline Thanquol had imposed upon them, the creatures were unveiled with an appropriately grandiose title.
The Skyre/Moulder Drillfiend was complete.
----
The Dark Lands
Zharr Naggrund
Second-Highest Level
Ghorth the Cruel, the second-oldest yet most powerful sorcerer-prophet of Hashut alive, was troubled. He commanded armies of greater quality than any other on the face of the world. He stood on equal grounds of influence with Astragoth Ironhand himself despite being several centuries younger than the ancient mage. Lesser sorcerers feared even the presence of his heralds, he commanded a clear majority on the Council of the Sorcerers of Hashut, and his forges could scarcely keep up with his warlord Zhatan the Black's demand for weapons and munitions to add to his ever-increasing dominions and slaves. At the rate his personal wealth and power was growing, he would be the unquestioned master of Zharr-Naggrund in a mere 74 years, and with no more of his parts turned to stone than his finger and toenails thus far. By all rights his mood should be grimly content, with his dominion ensured in the long run.
And yet despite his coming prosperity, Ghorth was concerned. His dreams, while universally dark and full of bloody subjugation, had recently taken a more personal turn, showing him his own holdings, Zharr-Naggrund, all of the Dark Lands, utterly ruined and destroyed - not burned to ash or anything like what other races would envision, but stripped bare of all usable resources, heat, and slaves - all gone, leaving a barren wasteland with nothing to exploit or extract, full of crumbled fortresses with scratched walls and even the corpses stolen. It filled him with terror and indignation, that his premonitions would show that he would be so thoroughly swindled. The portents he extracted from the screaming intestines of still-living sacrifices didn't give him any better indications - universally the entrails spelled out patterns relating to 'doom', 'desolation', and 'self', in that order. The one occasion he had a different result was even less reassuring if possible - the tremendous gut of an ogre too old to effectively work anymore toppled out of its body in one solid piece, the muscles contorted in such a way to hold it all together like an organic cauldron. When Ghorth peered inside the vestibule, still filled with stomach acid and froth from the brute's last meal, he clearly discerned the face of an enormous horned beast, grinning maliciously at him. The image was unclear, and he could not tell if it was depicting the Father of Darkness or not before it faded. It troubled him for days afterward, and his mood, already legendarily vile, dove to yet greater depths. Hashut was clearly warning him of something, some cataclysm in the future that would attempt to take the entirety of his property from him. He would have to be stronger than whatever it was, or he would not be worthy to be a scion of Hashut.
He threw himself into his work, feverishly searching for any sign of the impending threat to his holdings. Any grumblings from his slaves was met with harsh and swift inspection, his lesser clan members became wary around their patriarch, and his harem lay abandoned as Ghorth focused on any threat he found. Zhatan the Black was often seen leading elite teams of Infernal Guard into random households, factories, and hidden boltholes all around Zharr-Naggrund, exposing and crushing hidden conspiracies to bring Ghorth down. When at last no more plot showed themselves, the daemonsmith turned his attentions outside of the Black Ziggurat, looking for anything that could have caused such foul omens to be given to him. What he found was nothing quite so severe as what his dreams had shown him ... yet.
A Waaagh!!! was forming at Mount Grimfang, a great gathering of orks lead by a beast with glowing green teeth known as the Warpchoppa. While for now it was a manageable threat, he knew from his studies of the history of his predecessors that the chaotic rampages their primary slaves could embark on often proved to be disastrous affairs to resolve that only became more difficult to deal with the longer they were left unchecked. While this ork's forces were manageable at the moment, that did not guarantee anything if he was left to his own devices.
Of course Ghorth had no intention of letting this greenskin jeopardize his operations. With a sense of grim satisfaction at having finally found the source of his foul omens, he sent a message to the leader of the hobgoblin khanate that he allowed to exist in the Blasted Wastes, Gorduz Backstabber. He commanded the khan to go and challenge the leader of this incipient Waaagh!!! to single combat, then have his followers fill the fool full of arrows. Ever-fearful of the price of failure, Gorduz soon set out with his army for the mountain. Ghorth was once again grimly content, for the moment. He had quashed the coming threat to his city without wasting even a single dawi zharr.
Then the reports came in. The Warpchoppa's Waaagh!!! hadn't been decapitated as he had hoped - in fact, Gorduz had lived up to his name in the worst possible way and joined the growing horde. Ghorth silently vowed to throw the traitorous filth into a pit filled with lust-enflamed bull centaurs and read the rest of the sparse reports his scouts had delivered. The crusade was still strangely static for now, so measures could be taken to counteract it.
Of course, it couldn't be that simple. Ghorth tried to muster his armies, deliver orders for the defense tunnels in the Blasted Wastes and the parts of the Plain of Zharr he personally owned to be manned and double-checked, tried to send more scouts out to determine the state of the Waaagh!!!, sent out orders to have the slavemasters in the greenskin's most likely path riled up against the beast. Nothing seemingly got through, no replies ever came back, and whatever underlings he sent to investigate were never heard from again. For all intents and purposes he could do nothing about the oncoming threat of the Waaagh!!!, nor even know what it was doing. He couldn't even contact Zhatan, for he had sent the lord back to his usual duties (the acquisition of slaves of all races in ludicrous quantities, if it wasn't blindingly obvious) with the completion of his internal investigations. Nor did he know who was obstructing him in such a manner. One of his rivals, no doubt. No other living being would be skilled enough to intercept every effort of his to derail the impending ork crusade. But who? Baalkor Goldentusked? Azag-Nannar the Vengeful? Maruduk of Hashut?
No, he was only fooling himself. There was only one living being that had the means and motivation to do this. The oldest dawi zharr in all of Zharr Naggrund, the second most powerful sorcerer-lord next to Ghorth himself. Astragoth Ironhand.
--
Some weeks later, Ghorth paced back and forth in his personal chambers. It was an extravagant display of blood money, the skins of great beasts the world over hanging on the walls, valuable talismans and coinage from many different nations set in recesses in the obsidian. A statue of a dawi zharr stood in front of his desk, a perfectly formed sculpture of a sorcerer-prophet standing as if braced against some oncoming force. His face was curdled in disgust and one hand was stretched out, his fingers arranged in the beginnings of some spell or other. His master, Borghuth the Infallible. Past his master did Ghorth tread, past the mounted head of a Rhinox Zhatan had killed for him, past tapestries tallying the countless slaves he had at one point possessed, past his personal forge complex, arcane laboratory, and training room. At last, after hours of trudging through every room he possessed, he passed through an archway and out onto a colossal balcony, overflowing with ominous spikes and bull-like winged statues. He rested his hands on the balustrade and stared out at the view of the southern half of Zharr-Naggrund. Oftentimes seeing the immensity of his city and knowing that he would soon solely control it gave him comfort, but today it only enflamed his temper. His teeth ground together with a sound akin to a rockslide.
The third-highest level of the great ziggurat of Zharr-Naggrund was where most of the sorceror-prophets that headed the dawi zharr made their residence, but the second level had been claimed by only two beings - himself and Astragoth. The more ancient dwarf had claimed the northern side of the level, where he was treated to the view of the River Ruin flowing into the city, clear and cool, to be used to cool the immense forges of the city. Ghorth's side, on the other hand, overlooked the Ruin as it exited Zharr-Naggrund, red and yellow and black with pollutants, so toxic that flesh burned merely from the fumes given off by the water. In times like these the symbolism was not lost on Ghorth, and his anger seethed like a magma pit. Slight snubs like this from the Ironhand were common at the best of times, but the nominal lord of Zharr-Naggrund had been even more distant than usual in the last weeks. Ghorth had attempted to contact him in what must have been a hundred ways, but all had been rebuffed. He'd even tried to directly visit Astragoth in his quarters, something nearly unheard of among the sorcerer-prophets, but had been greeted by the ancient dawi zharr's herald Rhykarth the Unbreakable, who explained that 'Lord Astragoth is occupied with important matters'. As if anything could be more important than the Waaagh!!!heading their way! What could the old fool possibly be accomplishing by bringing in all the statues of former sorcerers stretching out along the roads to the city, or retreating from his own workshop to perform no doubt blasphemous research elsewhere in Zharr-Naggrund?
Ghorth's musings were interrupted by a soft gong sounding as a servant requested permission to join him on the balcony. He waved them forward without looking back, and continued grimly staring ahead as Zhatan thumped forward to join him. "I sent summons," he stated.
"I received none," the dwarf lord replied. "And there is worse to tell. An ork Waaagh!!!-"
"-Is heading towards Zharr-Naggrund, yes I know," Ghorth interrupted. "I've known for months and yet been unable to do anything about it. Any message I send out goes missing, every underling I entrust with the information mysteriously disappears. If I shouted it out in front of a crowd I've no doubt they'd all be found dead in their beds the following day." He reined in the desire to throw a fireball towards the horizon. The cost of his magic had not left his mind ever since he'd overcome his master.
"I apologize, my lord, but that is not the worst of it. The greenskins will reach the city within the week, perhaps two. My expedition ran into them on the return trip, and only I escaped intact."
Ghorth's fingers tightened on the balustrade. "What of the emplacements in the Blasted Waste? The periphery outposts in Zharrduk? Have they been abandoned? They should be manned."
"Reports on the matter are unclear, my lord. Some claim they were overrun by an army of vermin, others that those manning them were swallowed up by the night. In any case, they will not pose an obstacle to the Warpchoppa's horde."
Ghorth ground his teeth. "Place the city under lockdown. Begin full siege preparations. If what you say is true, we do not have much time."
Zhatan, upon hearing the command that had never before in the history of the dawi zharr been given pass his master's lips, was unruffled. "Lord Astragoth will no doubt object-"
"No he won't. While you were out of the city he shut himself away somewhere doing something unproductive. I don't know where he is. If you happen to find him, inform me. But he will not obstruct this."
Zhatan bowed at the waist. "At once, my master." Turning about face, the dawi zharr lord swiftly trotted out of Ghorth's quarters, his voice already ringing off the walls as he called for his subordinates. For his part, Ghorth continued staring at the horizon. So the omens bear themselves out. No matter. I will persevere. Though it was folly, he almost fancied he could hear distant echoes of the greenskin warcry already.
----
Mingol Zharr-Naggrund had stood for over five thousand years, living up to its name of fire and desolation with every one of them. The product of over 800 years of planning by the vengeful dawi zharr, having freshly pledged themselves to the god who saved them during the Great Chaos Incursion, Hashut, the inital foundation was molded out of a mountain of pure black obsidian by one hundred forty-four of the most powerful sorcerer-prophets living at the time. It had been greatly expanded upon since that time, all the great and foul mineral wealth of the Dark Lands that the chaos dwarfs could delve out of it being channeled all back to the Dark City. The entire ziggurat had been hoisted laboriously out of the earth more than once so that new levels could be built underneath, and a gargantuan complex of forges and workshops and armories had spread out from the central pyramid, stretching to the horizon. Smaller black ziggurats rose out of the cityscape periodically, imitations of the central tower that belonged to the most powerful of the dawi zharr. The entire city resembled nothing so much as a colossal copy of the mountain it had been carved from more than five millennia ago, a black volcano shrouded in the smog of its own making and lit eternally by fires innumerable burning within. It was a complex designed to forge the dominion that would crush the world, guarded by walls over a hundred feet tall and forty feet thick, it was a stronghold fit to withstand any force the world could throw at it and relentlessly grind their remains underfoot.
And now it was under threat.
From atop the many battlements of the city, the Dawi-Zharr watched as a tidal wave of green bowled towards their stronghold. It stretched to the horizon and beyond, an enormous carpet of bellowing green flesh that wore a face of pure aggression and bloodshed. There were easily a million and a half orks present in the oncoming horde, no doubt more. Many of them were possessed of a strangely dark coloration, their faces set in grim determination and moving in units with a strange discipline that was foreign to most orks. Snarling squigs were everywhere, ravening balls of flesh with stumpy legs that snapped and writhed at their chains. Some orks rode them, their squigs great lumpy balls of fungoid tissue that had great collections of serrated tusks sprouting angrily out of their maws. Great collections of goblins strode side-by-side with their ork kin, their normally cowardly kin emboldened and sharpened to a cruel anticipation by the thundering Waaagh! energies roiling in the air. Great packs of them rode emaciated wolves, the red-eyed beasts resembling their greenskin masters more than their normal canine brethren. The horde even possessed crude seige towers built as idols to Gork and Mork, their snarling faces ready to deposit greenskins in their thousands upon the walls. Primitive catapults strained their mechanisms. Great rock and dung piles somehow walked among the horde here and there, glowing a sinister green. The dawi zharr watched all this approach their bastion with arrogant grins on their faces. The resources of the Dark Lands were easily turned to murder, and the road to Mingol Zharr-Naggrund was perilous to the unwary.
As the green tide drew closer to the city, the ground itself rebelled against the ork. Great gouts of magma rocketed up from the ground, incinerating greenskins midstep. Chasms opened up underneath mobs of orks, sending them falling to their impalement on concealed beds of spikes. Goblins in their thousands trod upon explosive devices buried in the earth that sprang up from their concealment and detonated at head height, sending shrapnel clouds whistling through emerald flesh. Gargantuan blades popped up from secret crevices in the ground, bisecting whoever was unfortunate enough to activate the trap. Great clouds of toxic gases hissed out, enveloping vast sections of the oncoming horde.
When they cleared, the Dawi-Zharr's arrogant confidence faded slightly. There had undoubtedly been immense casualties from the emplaced traps leading up to the city, but they were a mere dent compared to the vastness of the horde. Even as they watched, the greenskins walked over the trap pits now filled with dead bodies, spat upon the magma as they trod by in such immense quantities that they doused the substance, dug the hidden traps up from the earth and began carrying them about to use as weapons. The horde was merely bloodied, not blunted.
Still the defenders of the dark city were confident in their inevitable victory. True, it was strange that a Waaagh!!! of this size had made it past all the other citadels their race possessed in the Dark Lands, and all the various emplaced traps in the direction they had come from, and that they hadn't had word of the horde before now, but these were mere pebbles in their path of victory. Their records of the past indicated that their forebears had faced black ork incursions of ... not quite this size, but approaching it. And their defences had only grown since then. These barbarians would be properly subjugated.
The horde tumbled toward Zharr-Naggrund's walls, some orks outright foaming at the mouth to begin the fight. They were rewarded when hidden grilles in the ground began to retract, revealing tunnels out of which rank upon rank of goblins and orks and hobgoblin overseers marched. They were clearly fearful of the oncoming swarm, and doubtless in any other circumstance they would have outright deserted their erstwhile masters and joined with their kin. But their hated hobgoblin 'captains' held aloft great black banners emblazoned with a great ziggurat, and other runes in a dark and smoking red. They emitted enormous clouds of choking smoke that encompassed the whole of the Dhrazh-Zharr's slave armies, and all who breathed in the foul stuff had their will bent away from any possibility of rebellion. They arranged themselves in thin rows, spreading themselves across the whole front that the million-strong horde presented, though they numbered perhaps forty thousand. Even the most amateur armchair general could see that they stood no chance of doing any meaningful damage to the Waaagh!!! Nor did they, as the green tide crashed into their battle line like a cannon ball. Instead, utter confusion broke out among the scrap as the enemy greenskins scattered every which way, throwing smoke bombs and interweaving into Grimgor's army until nobody could tell friend from foe anymore. The entire front collapsed into an orgy of indiscriminate violence, orks stomping on goblins before being swarmed by mobs of the diminutive creatures who took the opportunity to exact vengeance for past cruelties, hobgoblins throwing entire regiments into disarray by pretending to be a part of them and backstabbing their leader, snarling squigs rampaging every which way, scooping helpless gretchin into their cavernous stinking maws. The Waaagh!!! had ground to a halt, which allowed the vast emplacements of artillery the Dawi-Zharr had atop the walls to target the horde effectively.
All across the outer walls of Zharr-Naggrund, enormous war engines turned to aim at the massive brawl. Firing points were checked and rechecked. Ammunition was placed for easy access in reloading. Ogre slaves toiled by the sides of Dreadquake Mortars, heaving the enormous shells into place. Magma Cannons heated up. Skilled Dhrazh-Zharr lined up shots with their Bazukas. Siege engine-sized variants of Inferno Guns clanked into position. Deathshrieker Rocket Launchers were readied in their hundreds. The hundred forty-four gargantuan Hellcannons that had been painstakingly hauled up onto the walls in the days leading up to the assault by Ghorth's order were awakened from their imposed comas with sorcerous incantations, the black words ringing through the air with a harsh radiance. The daemon engines attempted to leap forward into the melee, but were stymied by the obsidian shackles holding them in place. All of this malevolence turned with a cruel eye toward the ork horde that dared to intrude upon their territories. The air grew taut with tension, and at some unseen signal it was all unleashed in a roaring conflagration of hate.
A veritable wall of fire and metal leapt off the walls and plunged into the Waaagh!!! below. Grapeshot flew through greenskin flesh like lard, and evil fire spirits harvested from the shrines of Hashut burst free of their containers and rained down upon the horde, gleefully cackling as their short-lived cavorting set dozens aflame. Dreadquake shots burrowed into the ground and exploded in eerie crimson bursts, red light shooting up from the ground for hundreds of meters in every direction, scorching all it touched to ash. Great gouts of lava vomited out of the barrels of Magma Cannons, blanketing those unfortunate greenskins that approached the walls in a tide of toxic molten rock. The noise was a force in and of itself, blowing out the eardrums of any greenskin even remotely close to the concussive shockwaves that followed each thundering impact. Here and there nobs attempted to restore some form of order, but each of these was swiftly terminated by Bazuka wielders targeting these sole points of order in the all-encompassing chaos. The Hellcannons, enraged beyond belief that they were not able to bathe in the blood of the innumerable foes just beyond their reach, vented their fury through their barrels, eye-searing bolts of foul sorcery boring through the army and forever scarring the landscape beneath them.
The devastation was immense, as if Hashut himself had crushed the assembled host of the greenskins beneath his mighty hoof. The bombardment lasted many hours, the disciplined firing crews of the Dawi-Zharr keeping up a rate of fire unattainable by any other army on the face of the world. So many shells impacted the ground and exploded above the heads of the orks that the chaos dwarf's entire view of the battlefield was obscured by an immense cloud of smoke. Even after firing solutions became all but impossible, Zhatan bade the artillery crews to fire into the smog for nearly half an hour before they ceased to assess the damage they had inflicted upon the horde.
As the smoke gradually cleared, a vast carpet of mulched orkoid corpses became visible to the defenders. The ground had become almost completely blanketed with gibbets of emerald flesh, stained black from the sheer volume of fire the chaos dwarfs had put out. In the spots where the ground itself was exposed it glowed cherry red, and was warped and twisted to such an extent that the entire range they had fired upon had been fused into an expanse of black glass and molten rock. The corpses of at least half a million orks littered the ground.
Of course, that left the other million.
The horde had been reduced by a third, but the remainder was still enough to kill every last Dawi-Zharr at a thousand-to-one kill ratio. The barbaric creatures roared in triumph, believing that the dark stunties had exhausted their ammunition, and began approaching the walls once more. With a snarl, Zhatan ordered the bombardment to resume, if at a less frantic pace than before to ensure that supplies would hold out for the duration of the conflict. The siege engines adopted a denial strategy, forming a line of fire that held the oncoming mob from reaching the walls. Now able to fire back without fear of being annihilated, crude catapults began to launch ragged boulders at the walls, and primitive shamans began their incantations, emerald bursts of light arcing toward the gargantuan defenses. Both were deflected with no issue, the thickness and ingenious construction of the fortifications effortlessly deflecting the former and the black runes emplaced within them rebounding the latter. Still the crude projectiles came on in their thousands, the common orks still throwing themselves happily into the path of shrieking rockets in an effort to get closer to the walls.
The duel went on for the better part of a day, projectiles being hurled back and forth with such frequency the sound was like that of a never-ending avalanche. The oncoming Waaagh!!! clashed again and again against the resolute defenses of the Dawi-Zharr, the dark dwarfs confident in their victory. No matter how stupidly large the numbers of their enemy were, they had no way of breaking through the walls. Their immovable object would wear down the unstoppable force of the greenskins.
Then the dots appeared on the horizon. Whatever they were, they approached with immense speed. At the sight of them, the orks grew excited, and threw themselves at the walls with redoubled ferocity. The guns tore them to shreds, but they died with stupid grins on their faces as the things on the horizon barreled toward the city at ever-increasing speeds. Knowing that whatever they were, allowing them to proceed unhindered would be folly, Zhatan peered at them through his masterfully crafted runic scope. What he saw took his breath for a moment.
It was Iron Daemons, the colossal steam engines the Dawi-Zharr used to transport war material from place to place with great speed. Their snarling faceplates had been defaced by the crude idols of the greenskins, and the holds had been packed to bursting with some sort of grotesquely swollen squig. Anything that vaguely resembled a speed limiter had been torn off, and the things were careening towards the walls as though they hungered to impact with them. Their Skullcracker attachments churned at the air. Zhatan hurriedly counted at least a hundred of the things; the greenskins must have looted the things on their approach to Zharr-Naggrund, and whatever they had planned for them was sure to be catastrophic, a suspicion which was proven correct as an unlucky squig fell off a war engine at the back of the pack and promptly detonated in a disproportionately huge explosion. Cursing, the Overlord began barking orders for the various engines of destruction to be relocated to the inner walls of the city. Based on his mental estimates the detonation would break through the outer walls, but provided the defenders were in place by the time they hit casualties would be minimal.
The relocation went smoothly for the most part. The majority of the war engines were moved with characteristic efficiency, a few low-ranking volunteers staying behind to man the Hellcannons and earn Hashut's favor. Some portions of the defenders were delayed when small bands of ork kommandos inexplicably popped up inside the walls, having evidently somehow swam into the city via the gates of the River Ruin. Few Dawi-Zharr were killed, as the orks were universally crippled by the sheer toxicity of the river, but the delays added up. By the time the Iron Daemons arrived at the walls there were still some chaos dwarfs left on the outer walls. They stared oblivion in the face and snarled, pumping out shell after shell with grim fatalism. The Hellcannons tore free of their bindings here and there and careened off the walls, rampaging through the Waaagh!!! which had approached the walls with the reduction of the barrage. Zhatan grit his teeth as he huddled behind his personal fortification, bracing himself for the impact.
The collection of looted war engines impacted the outer wall of Zharr-Naggrund as a broad spearhead at ridiculous speeds, smashing themselves to bits against the pitiless stone of the corrupted dwarfs. As they did so, their cargoes of specially bred Boomy Squigs detonated, the unstable mix of chemicals contained in their bloated flesh building on each other as they exploded in close proximity to one another. The blast was a searing holocaust of heat and light that set the very world to shaking. In places where the dread Hellcannons were enveloped by the immense shockwave, the bindings on the rapacious daemons imprisoned inside were shattered and the warpspawn exploded in hellish bursts of carmine illumination, amplifying the crude explosion of the orks with hellborne malice. As the Dawi-Zharr who had been unfortunate enough to be facing the fireball attempted to clear the image from their retinas, the ork horde surged forward. The outer walls of Zharr Naggrund, which had stood for several thousand years, had been reduced to naught but slag. The emboldened Waaagh!!! charged again into the fray, brutal warcries on their lips.
----
A week later
Zhatan the Black, Commander of the Gates of Zharr, Lord of Genocide, Herald of Ghorth the Cruel, wielder of the Black Hammer of Hashut, snarled as he gazed upon the wartorn mess his city had become. Zharr-Naggrund was normally filled with the endless wailing of slaves and the clangor of countless hammers banging inside countless forges, shrouded in the smog of ceaseless industry. Now it was a landscape of strife, rubble scattered everywhere from the constant artillery duels conducted between the two sides. Mobs of orks continually howled through the narrow streets looking for stunties to kill, smashing through buildings in their eagerness for bloodshed. Packs of squighounds sniffed out hidden pockets of resistance, and more than half the city was engulfed in fires that served no purpose. The very sight enraged the Dhrazh-Zharr lord.
After their unexpected gambit with the Iron Daemons that had shattered the invincible bulwark of the outer walls, it had only been a matter of time before the ork horde overcame the inner fortifications. They lost countless greenskins to the insane amount and variety of traps placed in the killing field between the first and second walls, but there were always more. The Dawi-Zharr sent out mobs of giants with armor and weapons bolted into their very flesh out in an attempt to draw out the horde's leader, but the unusually high numbers of Black Orks in the enemy horde put an end to that ploy. Their disciplined units clustered around the heels of the flailing abominations, cutting the tendons that enabled the beasts to stand at a cost of many of their own. The Siege Giants all fell within the day, and the walls fell soon after, the massed shamans of the greenskins eventually punding it down with massive emerald spectral fists and feet, with the assistance of the same type of sneaky gits who had previously snuck into the city by way of the river gates, who placed crude explosives in inconvenient spots, slit the occasional throat, and essentially made life hell for the defenders. Eventually Zhatan ordered a general retreat, those war machines too big to move quicly destroyed to deny them to the enemy, and split up command among his regimental leaders. The Dawi-Zharr fell back into their city and began a grueling campaign of guerilla warfare, their discipline and high-quality equipment enabling them to skillfully ambush the lumbering orks in the narrow confines of Zharr-Naggrund, shredding their bulky bodies with extensive use of their blunderbusses. But regardless of how many greenskins a single warrior could murder, the numbers disparity was too high for them to hold, and the teams of Dawi-Zharr warriors were gradually forced further and further into Zharr-Naggrund, creeping stealthily through massive forge complexes, taking whatever they could to deny it to the greenskins.
While the deadly game of dashing and shooting played out in the narrow corridors below, the skies were equally contested. Now that the massive concentration of artillery was dispersed across the city, the ork warboss had grown confident enough to send his wyverns in. Over a hundred of the ugly beasts coasted above the city, high enough that any cannon or sniper shot from the chaos dwarfs was easily evaded or bounced off their scales. On occasion their riders would bid them descend, and the beasts would frequently embark upon bombing runs, the shamans upon their back casting spells the whole way down. The Dawi-Zharr did not possess numbers sufficient to match the wyverns creature-to-creature, but the beasts they did possess could take on ten wyverns without sustaining more than minor wounds. The Overlords that rode the Bale Taurui were among the elite in chaos dwarf society, for the incandescent beasts would tolerate no rider but one with a spirit to match their own blazing flesh. Frequently duels would play out in midair with more than twenty wyverns attacking a mere two Tauri, yet their riders skillfully exploiting the sheer brute force and firey blasts their mounts could produce to escape nearly unscathed. Wyvern corpses rained upon the avenues of Zharr-Naggrund whenever a Great Taurus took flight. And when their counterparts in the Lammasu took to the air, they took no damage whatsoever, for the gargoyle-like beasts were near as intelligent as the sorcerers that rode them, and magically inclined as well. Fists of Gork fizzled out when met with the magic-draining fog the Lammasu exhaled, and the unfortunate shaman was universally incinerated shortly afterwards.
Yet it was not enough. The cold arithmetic of war ground on, and the sheer numbers of the greenskin horde began to tell. Individual chaos dwarfs fell, victim of bad luck or holding actions or sheer inevitability. The orks, meanwhile, were inexhaustible in number, and high on their battle-fever did not grow weary of fighting like normal beings did. The Uzkul-Dhrazh-Zharr were just as, if not more stubborn than their western kin. They would fight until their last limb ceased working and take a hundred orks with each of them. And the Waaagh!!! they were facing could still consider that a victory. They needed something to turn the tide. Though it had taken Ghorth, who had become essentially the leader of his race in this time of crisis, a long time to admit...
They needed the help of Astragoth Ironhand.
It was obvious that the ancient priest had known that something was going to happen to put the entire race of the Uzkul-Dhrazh-Zharr in peril. Every other time that some catastrophe had threatened his race, the venerable priest had stepped forward and guided them out of danger. But this time he had vanished somewhere inside Zharr-Naggrund, pursuing some secret project or other. More importantly, he had taken all the Immortals with him. Each a veteran of defending and traversing the expanses of the warp rift beneath the Daemon's Stump, clad in stone armor that deflected all but the mightiest of blows, the formidable warriors served as an independent secret police, judging whether a Dawi-Zharr had truly been serving Hashut. Often to invite their attention was to invite death. They had to be found if any chance of decapitating the Waaagh!!! was to be had.
The Warboss had been spotted intermittently in Zharr-Naggrund, a gargantuan edifice of ebonic emerald flesh that outmatched nearly any warrior the Dawi-Zharr had to offer. Zhatan was sure that were he backed by a team of elite Bull Centaurs he could take the beast down, but they had no such warriors at their disposal apart from the sacred ones who guarded the Temple of Hashut who would not abandon their post no matter what. Other than them and the Immortals, no warriors in the city were of high enough caliber to pin down the wily ork and successfully kill it. If their race was to be saved, Rhykarth the Unbreakable and his troops must be found. And if Astragoth had some sorcerous ritual to eradicate the blasted greenskins from his city, Zhatan considered it a nice bonus.
All this contributed to why he, Ghorth, and a handpicked team of lesser sorcerer-prophets and acolytes of the priesthood were currently huddled behind a depot, cautiously looking at a complex ambitious daemonsmiths had hoped to use to fire missiles at their enemies on other continents, which had been abandoned due to lack of success with their experiments. It was a massive construction, still standing over a hundred feet over their heads thanks to its solid construction. The launch tubes themselves numbered twelve, and stretched the highest, formed of black obsidian blended with hellforged steel. They stretched in a great circle, eleven launch tubes spaced evenly apart from one another with one larger one in the center. Around them a great complex stretched outwards, which their party stood on the outskirts of.
"You are certain?"
Zhatan shook himself out of his introspection. "My underlings were clear, my lord. While the High Priest was not seen entering this complex, several of them did note that he undertook frequent visits to this area of the city in the months leading up to the greenskin invasion. Unless he has developed some sort of obsession with an obscure forge in a back alley somewhere, he will be here."
"Then we go forth. I will not let the senile fool doom my empire to the dust."
And with that proclamation, the group set off into the complex, their senses on alert for any hobgoblin wolf riders or other greenskin scouts that could give them away. They scurried past large series of rooms dedicated entirely to accurately cartographing the prospective targets of the weapon, through forges with gigantic molds for the missile components still hanging, ready for use. As they made their way through offices and targeting calculators, certain strange details stood out to the party. Calculations were scribbled down in a secret code known only to the ruling sorcerer-prophets, detailing the necessary fuel requirements to travel distances absurdly far compared to any place in the world they could name. Some forges were still cooling as though they had been used in recent weeks, and the footprints of many thousands of slaves could easily be discerned everywhere, enough to encompass the entirety of what Ghorth estimated Astragoth kept for his private stores. The ancient priest was clearly planning some sort of ritual, but it was unclear what he intended to accomplish.
They descended deeper into the complex, gradually heading underground as the various signs of passage began to point down stairwells and sloping passageways lit by the occasional red rune. Their eyes glowed in the pitch darkness, glowing coals of malevolence trooping through hidden tunnels. They began to hear things as they headed lower, an immense rumbling that they could feel in their bones and through the soles of their feet. The temperature in the tunnels gradually increased, though they all endured the stifling heat without complaint. They were Dawi-Zharr, after all, and their very heritage was rooted in fire and endurance. All of these only got more intense as they navigated the maze of passageways, Ghorth growing more and more certain of his rival's path. It eventually took on the vague perception that they were inside the throat of a colossal dragon, and whether the sheer sound or something else would kill them first was uncertain.
Eventually they encountered the opposition they had been hoping against. The unfortunate Barrzhuk, Junior Acolyte of Hashut, rounded a corner and was startled when the point of his fireglaive clanked against something metallic. As he slowly looked up from his weapon point to ascertain how large this thing was, it slowly began to light up with an incandescent red-orange glow, formerly cool metal beginning to burn with a molten intensity. Barrzhuk finished looking far, far up at the beast which until now had merely been a subject of fearful rumors to him. A twenty-foot tall beast with the body of a dawi-zharr and the head of an bull. Batlike wings flared out behind the thing, and a serpentine tail whipped and cracked, throwing light and shadow about in a dizzying array. It held a cruel sword festooned with evil runes, and the fingers of its other hand were tipped with claws that glowed bright white with heat. The beast chuffed, sending a wave of heat out that scorched the unfortunate acolyte's face, which caused his brain to finally clue into the fact that he was facing a K'daai Destroyer.
He stumbled backwards bellowing in terror, unloading as many shots as his fireglaive possibly could into the advancing daemonic construction, which roared with a harsh clangour and rushed forward with speed belying its size. The rest of the group rushed to Barrzhuk's location, but only found his scorched, dismembered remains scattered across a progidious distance. Zhatan looked immediately to the enormous hoofprints melted into the stone of the tunnel floor and spoke one word: "Master?"
"K'daai,' Ghorth replied, already running down the passageway in the opposite way the footprints led. "Use haste! I don't know that I can bring it down without killing all of us with it down here." The group swiftly heeded the sorcerer-prophet's words, for Ghorth was an old hand in crafting K'daai and knew their capabilities intimately. If he was unsure about his own capability to kill the thing, none of them stood a chance.
The chase was an affair of desperate running and shallow breaths. Ghorth drove his acolytes mercilessly, and the air had begun to shimmer from the heat building up in the tunnels as they delved ever deeper into the earth. The footsteps of the K'daai could be heard as an everpresent pounding in their ears, growing closer and closer as the molten creature searched for them. On occasion its evil radiance could be glimpsed illuminating the end of a tunnel, which they would promptly turn off and make their way away from. Eventually, however, the blazing daemon statue found them. Perhaps the rumors were true and it really could smell the blood beating inside their hearts, but one way or another the group turned a corner and found the bullheaded colossus waiting for them. Zhatan barely had time to bellow an order before it lunged forward, its wings defying all conventional logic as they carried it through the air like a flaming meteor toward their dimunitive forms.
The nineteen remaining acolytes they had rushed forward without hesitation, bellowing the Dirge of Defiance with hate in their hearts. They stood no chance of doing anything but delaying the monster, a fact underscored when in landing the K'daai crushed one of their number beneath its molten hooves. But to serve their lord and aid in the survival of Hashut's servants they would give up anything. Ghorth, Zhatan, and the junior daemonsmiths hurried away as the warriors surrounded the beast, hacking at its ankles with their halberds and dodging its blows to the best of their ability. Even as one of the sorcerers glanced back, the creature swept up a struggling acolyte in its claws and bit him in two.
Ghorth led the group through columned halls and over perilous bridges under which there were bottomless pits that led to the ancient depths of the world. The screams of the dying acolytes echoed behind them, a wordless proclamation of what fate awaited them should they falter. After a dizzying race through a long, flat tunnel shone with a glossy texture, they came upon a large, square chamber with a ceiling much higher than any they'd been in so far. It was well-lit by bright red crystals embedded in the walls at regular intervals, and in the far wall there was a massive door that was barred by an intricate locking mechanism. "This is it," Ghorth said. "I remember being in this chamber four hundred years ago. Beyond that door is where the rocket was to be. It never materialized, of course, and the fools were thrown into the shrine for their folly, but if Astragoth is anywhere he will be beyond that door."
"How will we get past it, my master? My hammer is powerful indeed, but to get through a gate like that would take longer than we have before the K'daai catches up to us." Zhatan drew the Black Hammer and hefted it to emphasize his point.
"You and the others will delay the Destroyer," Ghorth replied. "I recall how to open it still, but I will need time. Most of us contributed to the ward that sealed the door, but I am strong enough to overcome it." With that, he strode forward and placed his hands upon the door. They were soon enveloped in a bloodred flame that slowly began to heat up the metal underneath them.
Seeing his master get to work, Zhatan rounded on the nearest apprentice sorcerer. "What spells has my master instructed you in the use of?" The apprentice unconsciously straightened up at the attention of one of the most powerful Dawi-Zharr alive, and responded, staring straight ahead and barking out the answers as if he were a drill cadet. "Overlord! My compatriots have mastery of all the conventional spells Hashut grants us! Calling forth hatred in our warriors! Spewing torrents of lava at the enemy! Crushing the will of the enemy! Inflicting Hashut's Curse upon the enemy! Calling forth a storm of hot ash! Manifesting Hashut's powers as an enormous black hammer with which to smite the enemy!"
"Can you summon forth the flames of Azgorh?"
The apprentice blanched at the mention of the dread spell, and swallowed nervously before answering, the quaver in his voice nearly imperceptible. "I believe that all of us working together could accomplish the spell, Overlord! It would require a short time to channel the necessary energies!"
"Then you will attempt to distract and delay the K'daai when it finds us," Zhatan ordered. "Blind it with storms of ash, scatter and hit it with your burning wrath, use your firearms to take its attention off me. I will get in close and use the Hammer." The weapon shone greedily in the red light of the chamber. "It is enchanted to kill anything that can be set aflame. We shall see if it works on the Destroyer."
"And if it does not, Overlord?"
"Then I will match it blow for blow while the rest of you call up Azgorh's flames. Bar the door."
The apprentices hurried to obey, and Zhatan set the Black Hammer down, placing both hands on its pommel. Only his eyes were visible through his helmet, red and resolute in contempt.
--
The air slowly grew taught with tension as they waited for the Destroyer to find them. Ghorth was completely absorbed in his focus, eyes shut and muttering arcane secrets as his hands glowed white-hot, lighting up a slowly-expanding pattern of traceries and runes on the door. From behind it came an ever-increasing rumble that echoed off the walls of the chamber until it began to drown out speech. But the group could still hear the footsteps of the K'daai when it began to thump down the corridor leading to their chamber; a series of crashes followed by a foul sizzle as the molten hoof of the construct burned its imprint into the stone, that grew faster and faster as the K'daai sped up. The tremors began to shake the entry door in its hinges until at last the unfortunate door was burst completely open, the intense heat of the K'daai warping it into uselessness.
The beast stood in the entryway, the directives imprinted into its very construction etching themselves along what might be called its mind. Find Those-Who-Were-Not-Creator-Astragoth. Determine if Those Found were Authorized-By-Creator-Astragoth. Destroy The-Non-Authorized. There stood before it fourteen Not-Authorized. One directly in front of it. Twelve a short distance away. One at the back of the chamber.
Elimination proceeded.
The flaming sword of the K'daai swung down onto Zhatan in a great arc. The Overlord caught it on the haft of his hammer and rolled under the blow, coming to his feet in between the monster's legs, the Black Hammer homing straight for the juncture. The already-molten metal glowed white-hot where the hammerhead impacted, but the beast didn't seem to notice, instead raising up a flaming hoof to stomp Zhatan into paste with a dismissive huff. Again Zhatan nimbly sidestepped, his bulky blackshard armor belying his impressive speed, and brought the Black Hammer down in a two-handed strike at the ankle of the K'daai. The hoof was driven back before the construct had finished bringing its other leg down, causing the beast to topple over. Zhatan sprang back from the earth-quaking impact and darted in again, raining blows down upon the fallen K'daai. Each seemed to irritate it no more than a flea bite would a genuine bull, but the Dawi-Zharr Overlord showed his consumate mastery with a hammer by providing five blows in half as many seconds. Then the construct blurred, its legs seeming to melt and reform so that it was standing above Zhatan in an instant, its blade the size of his body stabbing out towards him. Zhatan let his knees buckle, voluntarily falling on his back to avoid the burning point of the sword, his pitch-black hammer swinging up to impact the blade and bat it out of the way as he did so.
Before the K'daai could take advantage of Zhatan's downed position, an enormous spectral bull's head impacted into the side of the metallic golem, sending it tumbling down and sending an enormous clang through the chamber as though a gigantic gong had been struck. The K'daai shook its head and turned to the junior sorcerers who had until then been left unnoticed, just in time to meet twelve streams of lava centered on its face. It stood there unfazed, the molten rock streaming down its body and in some cases flowing into it. Zhatan scrambled to his feet and rushed towards it, but before he had taken two steps, the K'daai moved forward in a wingbeat-assisted leap that blurred it to the eye. Before Zhatan had taken his third step, the construct was among the apprentices and had torn two of them into bloody smoking shreds. By Zhatan's fifth step all but two of the apprentices were dead. The remainder then managed a spell, a thick burning ash cloud swirling out from their hands, completely obscuring them and the K'daai. Zhatan could hear the construct bellowing in brassy tones as he rushed toward the cloud, and the top half of an apprentice sailed out of it as he approached. Without hesitation he plunged in, shutting his eyes against the glowing embers and letting his dwarven smell and hearing guide him to the molten monstrosity. Opening his eyes the barest fragment, he could see it, a glowing red collossus looking all about for the remaining intruders to kill against a background of hot ash filling the air. Embers stuck to its skin and were burned to nothing by its radiance.
Zhatan moved in for the kill before the K'daai could swing its head his way, landing several punishing hits to its ankles. Something about the magical composition of the ash amplified the effect of the hammer, incandescent red cracks spreading out from each blow. But it was still not enough. The giant bullheaded creature merely looked down and backhanded Zhatan out of the ash cloud, leaping after him and hitting him in midair with a fist the size of his whole body. He hit the far wall hard enough to make a sizeable indent in the black stone, cracks spreading out from the point of impact. Falling out of his crater and onto the floor, Zhatan struggled onto all fours, vomiting a worrying amount of blood out. He looked up as the K'daai thudded down in front of him, looming over his form like Hashut before his prostrating subjects. It huffed and raised its flaming sword high, and in that moment Zhatan saw the last remaining apprentice - the same one he had spoken with earlier - stumble out of the ash cloud, sputtering and hacking as he attempted to wipe his face clean. Summoning all the energy left in his body, Zhatan grabbed the Black Hammer and tumbled forward, avoiding the descending guillotine that was the K'daai's sword by mere inches. "AZGORH!" he cried as he started a desperate assault on the towering avatar of molten metal, frantically dodging blows and dealing them in return with a pain-fueled mania. "AZGORH! AZGORH! AZGORH!"
Gharlund Blackfist, Most Senior of The Most Honored and Revered Sorcerer-Prophet Ghorth the Cruel's Junior Apprentices in The Dark Art of Hashut-Gifted Sorcery, was frankly shaking with terror. He had heard hushed rumors of the terrible potency of the K'daai, but seeing it in the flesh was almost too much to bear. His hands and feet had been transmuted wholly to black obsidian from the concerted effort he and his fellows had put forward. He was disoriented, woozy, and burnt all over from the ash storm he had summoned. It had gotten into his robes and rubbed his skin raw whenever he moved. He was tired and frightened, and wanted nothing more than to return to his apprentice quarters where everything was neatly organized and predictable, not this horrifying mess of undignified running and death. But when he heard The Lord Ghorth's Overlord Zhatan the Black desperately yelling the one word that had haunted his dreams ever since he had been unfortunate enough to see what it meant, he knew his duty and did not falter.
Summoning up all the magical energy he could possibly tear out of the ground, he fed it through his body in the pattern he had been taught. He could feel it surging within his chest, a rushing torrent of magma pumping through his heart and setting his lungs afire. His arms and legs rapidly began to darken and turn to stone as he cast, his imperfect mastery of the spell dooming him to succumb to the Sorcerer's Curse. But he would have one last impact on the world before he was doomed to eternity as a statue. Glowing from the inside, his eyes completely dissolving and leaving behind flames that shot out of the empty sockets and his mouth as he screamed, he mustered the willpower to shout one last sentence. His voice was suffused with Hashut's power, ringing off the walls with a harsh clanging that demanded those who heard it to listen.
K'DAAI! BEHOLD THE FIRES OF YOUR UNDOING! BEHOLD THE FLAME OF AZGORH!
Gharlund unleashed his spell, the very last of him turning to obsidian with the effort, freezing him forever in a pose of defiant courage. Underneath the K'daai, the ground utterly exploded, the ancient self-destructive eruption of the volcano Azgorh rendered in miniature, a torrent of white-hot magma exploding up from beneath the beast's feet, enveloping it whole with a sound like that of tearing metal. It lasted on and on, the explosion lingering with a potency granted to it by the entirety of Gharlund's life force, blanketing near the entire chamber in a flood of fire and smoke. The nearby walls began to glow red from the intensity of the eruption. Finally, after more than a minute, it ceased as abruptly as it started, the smoke slowly clearing as it revealed the K'daai slumped in a pile on the ground, having taken the brunt of the titanic spell. Incredibly, it was still alive, though barely holding together. It began to slowly reform itself from the slag heap it currently resembled, only to be met once more by a thunderous impact by the Black Hammer of Hashut. At last the enchantments upon its molten flesh could not endure any more abuse, and shattered utterly, the K'daai melting down upon itself until it was naught more than a pile of melted bronze and steel. Zhatan fell to his knees beside it, scorched, battered, and bleeding, but still barely alive. The black amulet he wore around his neck to deflect hostile magic had absorbed what part of the Flames of Azgorh had reached him, leaving him only with his skin nearly burned off inside his nigh-destroyed blackshard armor rather than being wholly burned to ash. Seeing that the threat to his master was at last eliminated, the desperate energy that had filled him earlier fled his body and he crumpled into a heap.
At the back of the chamber, the far door was finally wholly covered in burning red sigils and creaked open. Without looking back, Ghorth rushed through, utterly intent on finding his rival and making him pay for such costly expenditures.
The Sorcerer-Prophet rushed down the long corridor presented to him, uncaring of whatever obstacles presented themselves. When he reached the seeming end wall, he merely blasted through the obstructing barrier and continued on his path. At last he reached what seemed to be an anterior chamber, the omnipresent rumble that had accompanied them this whole time grown to skull-shaking levels. There was a door to where the rockets had previously been held, but it was the glowing runes carved into the wall next to it that caught his attention.
So you made it past the K'daai. I congratulate you on that at least, my inferior. If you have reached this chamber when I anticipated you would, I am currently in the chamber beyond, but I would not attempt to pursue if I were you. Potent as you are, even you cannot withstand the force of the rockets I have designed. And soon I will be leaving this world behind, to spread the dominion of Hashut amongst the very stars themselves, as our god commanded me to fifty years ago. You wish to usurp my titles and position, I know. You are welcome to them. Proclaim yourself High Priest of Hashut to all the world, and if you survive the cataclysms that would end the mortal realm, you have my sincere admiration.
Knowing you, though, I doubt it. This will no doubt be our last communication. Zharr-Naggrund is yours, Ghorth. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Astragoth Ironhand, True Prophet of Hashut's Will, Continuation of His Dominion
Still Better Than You
Ghorth was fuming as he reached the end of the message. How dare that old doddering fool, call him inferior and arrogantly claim his doom and say that Hashut intended him to survive above Ghorth, his most powerful servant, and add in that last juvenile snipe?! "AAAAARRRGH!" Ghorth screamed, fire spewing out of his mouth and obliterating the meticulously carved runes. Before he could do anything else, the room shook as though the world had imploded, a sound like a continent detonating filling his ears. He could see the door glowing red-hot from whatever was going on outside it, and he knew that this was undoubtedly the method that old fucker was using to run away from his homeland.
"ASTRAGOOOOOOOOTH!"
--
Zharr-Naggrund was witness to a bizzare spectacle - just as the twin-tailed comet that had heralded Sigmar's birth had crashed to earth thousands of years ago, now it seemed to some that the event was being reversed. A black tower carved in Hashut's resemblance rose into the air on twin towers of fire, blanketing the city for miles around in choking smoke. It ascended quickly, clearing the cloud layer in under a minute and soaring yet higher as the slaves packed into its holds were burned to ash and converted to magical power. Across the world, people looked to the line of fire being drawn into the heavens and wondered as to its significance. Some claimed it was the gods abandoning the world, and called it a sign of the end of the world.
As the rocket reached the edge of the atmosphere, Astragoth activated the stasis spells he had arduously prepared all those years ago. Inside the elaborate pods they lay unconscious in, Rhykarth, his Immortals, and all those of Astragoth's clan were subsumed in magma that turned to stone as it touched them, sealing the passengers in stasis. For his part, Astragoth sank into meditation. He would be required to remain conscious for the duration of the voyage to a new home for his kind, but his will was strong enough to prevent his insanity. The ravages of time would not reach him here inside this, his greatest work and the continuation of his kind.
He would endure.
--
As he made his way out of the smoking ruin Astragoth's departure had left, Ghorth fumed. He said nothing as he smashed the statue of his apprentice in order to heal Zhatan, and merely motioned for the lord to follow him as he quickly strode out of the ruin, not noticing the devastation the K'daai had left. His anger only grew as he made his way back to the Temple of Hashut, obliterating a few mobs of greenskins that were unfortunate enough to encounter him, and recieved the news that while he had been down in the launch complex, an additional army of ogres had barreled in from the horizon and entered the city like a flabby boulder, driving those greenskins who were still outside Zharr-Naggrund in ahead of them. Seeing the assortment of brutish monsters that were in the process of invading and despoiling his city, Ghorth delegated everything to Zhatan and barred the top level of the Temple of Hashut to everyone but him and the Tau'ruk that guarded it. As he sank into a stupor of distilled rage through which he searched for answers to his predicament, he privately wondered if anything else could go wrong.
----
Mignol Zharr-Naggrund
Thirteen Hours Later
Five hundred thousand orks, hobgoblins, and other assorted greenskins rampaged through the streets of the Chaos Dwarf capital. Two hundred thousand ogres crashed through alongside them, the two forces frequently clashing in the rubble that comprised most of the Dark City like the fists of two gods. Those Dawi-Zharr who remained in the city were drawn back to the foundation of it, the original collossal black ziggurat carved out of a mountain in ages past. Here their stand would be made, and their enemies would falter on the wall of hate they found there. Zhatan the Black commanded the defense, and it was whispered that his master Ghorth the Cruel was divining a great spell from Hashut himself to cleanse their city of the invaders. They had taken an immense beating, but their spirits were high still. If this was all the enemy had to offer, then their victory was inevitable. Their foe would be bled dry on their walls.
Of course it was at this particular moment that the Skaven arrived.
All across Zharr-Naggrund, though concentrated vaguely toward the center, five hundred Drillfiends surfaced from the earth like collossal metallic whales, skaven platoons pouring out of portholes on the sides of the beasts. As soon as the last rat leaped out of the beasts, they took off in the direction of the nearest non-skaven living thing, distorted roars constantly pouring out of the spiked maws on its hands, the treads bolted onto its flesh whirring and dragging it along as it ravenously scrabbled towards food. In some cases, the enormous engines on the back of the monsters lit up in explosions of emerald flame, causing the Drillfiend to be propelled several hundred feet, boring straight through buildings and walls in search of its prey. Orks and ogres alike were swallowed by the dozens, and weapon strikes bounced off the armor affixed to their hides.
As their monsters roared through the streets, stuffing their proto-stomachs to bursting, the skaven army brought along surged forward in unified purpose. They numbered three hundred fifty thousand, bereft of the massive numerical advantage they normally enjoyed in battle, but that did not matter to them. They were trained more thoroughly than the average stormvermin, and they were filled with a vicious sense of triumph, for they were the embodiment of the Vermintide that would swallow the world. They rushed toward their goal in near-unison, overwhelming the scattered ork mobs they came across, leaving naught but gnawed carcasses. From all around they came, from tunnels underlying the city, erupting from inside the pyramid itself, from all around the ziggurat, all across the city, an army appearing out of nowhere. Battle was joined near-immediately, the shield walls of the Dawi-Zharr locking into place with iron discipline. But unlike most other clashes with the foul race, the skaven did not try to drown the dark dwarfs under a tide of flesh, instead clashing against the garrisons with disciplined fury, often bypassing the battle lines entirely, coming up behind the embattled defenders and cutting them down with strikes to the back. Higher and higher they ascended, gradually overrunning the ground level and forcing the Dawi-Zharr up into the higher reaches of the ziggurat. Fuming with surpressed fury, Zhatan wrested control from his panicking subordinates, drawing his armies towards the higher reaches of the pyramid, leaving the lower levels trapped and burning behind them. He lacked the numbers to defend the whole of the ziggurat, so he would form his forces into an iron core that would be impossible to dislodge. And hopefully Ghorth would find something in the time he was buying.
Of course, this was not all he had to contend with. Spurred on by the sudden appearance of the skaven, the leaders of ork and ogre gathered what forces they could in the swirling chaos of the dark city and made for the central pyramid. From the east approached Skrag the Slaughterer, who some called the prophet of the Great Maw. Dozens of Butchers and Slaughtermasters accompanied him, hundreds of Tyrants and their retinues trailing after him in hopes of taking part in the glory. Twisted monstrosities known to the ogres as Gorgers, their mutated kin with an even greater hunger than them ran freely alongside Skrag, the sole ogre to earn their trust. Suffused with the energies of the Maw, they thundered toward the ziggurat. From the west came Grimgor Ironhide, his two thousand-strong force of Immortulz marching next to him, the corpse of Gorduz Backstabber impaled on his bosspole after the hobgoblin had attempted to betray the black ork. Waaagh! energy crackled over them like a thunderstorm, and they fell upon the black pyramid like a black spearhead.
It was universal pandemonium as ork, ogre, and skaven scrabbled for the death of the Dawi-Zharr and each other. The assembled monsters clashed against each other with the crushing blows of ogre clubs and the sheer momentum of orkish choppas, interspersed with vollies of warpstone bullets and coordinated rushes by the skaven troops. As they ascended the pyramid, they began to encounter dispersed Bull Centaurs, who had refused to abandon their sacred posts. These beasts wielded immense lances and two-handed axes, or gargantuan swords and shields which they wielded with great skill, cutting down hundreds before they were overwhelmed. Some held chokepoints in the layout of the pyramid, mowing down ludicrous amounts of enemies with contraptions that had whirling blades at the end, which they pushed forward into the packed crowds of the enemy to literally mow down their foes. Their flesh had the consistency of living metal, and their already hardy physique required far more blows to put down than might be expected. But the combined force of the monsters was too much, and eventually the Dawi-Zharr were pushed back all the way to the top two levels of Zharr-Naggrund. There were a small amount of combatants present compared to the storm of carnage still going on in the city at large, perhaps twelve thousand if every side were totaled up, but whoever triumphed here would win the city. Destiny could be felt in the air, writing and rewriting skeins of fate to determine the outcome.
The orks hit the lines of the Dawi-Zharr from the west. The ogres hit them from the east. The skaven came from below. It was carnage at its most primal, the massed blunderbusses of the Dawi-Zharr reaping immense tolls each time they fired and the defending Bull Centaur Tau'ruks keeping the foe at bay with great scything blows of their greatweapons. The orks and ogres were not to be deterred, however, and crashed through the lines of battle like cannon balls, each infused with the power of their gods. The skaven tripped up their foes, taking advantage of the chaos their unwitting pawns had caused to slip through the gaps the Dawi-Zharr had in their shieldwalls. It was an unending meatgrinder, and out of it fought the most elite of each force present. At the very entrance to the Temple of Hashut where Ghorth was performing some sorcerous ritual within, the leaders of each respective army found themselves. Skrag the Slaughterer and fifteen Tyrants following him, with a stray pack of Gorgers hanging by their master's heels. Grimgor Ironhide was accompanied by thirty Immortulz, and Queek Headtaker had with him a force of twenty Mors and twenty USA stormvermin. Facing all of them, standing in front of the great doors that barred the entrance to the Temple which presently held all of Zharr-Naggrund's noncombatant population, was Zhatan the Black and the eight most senior Bull Centaurs that guarded the Temple. The Chaos Dwarf Lord was outfitted in the ancient armor of the sorcerer Bazherak, and he wore the gauntlets forged by the daemonsmith Gazrakh, which granted monstrous strength to who wore them. His face was concealed by a brass mask that seemed to reflect endless torment to whoever looked into it. For a moment, a strange peace held sway over the assembled groups, an unspoken tension that would snap at the slightest wrong motion.
Queek eyed his opponents and the chamber as his stormvermin fanned out behind him. It was a fairly large place, the walls adorned with gargantuan snarling faces and immense plaques exhorting the glory of the darkdwarfthings' bull god. The door into the temple was ringed by runes that burned a black red, and the doors looked thick and heavy. He'd need warpfire throwers to break through those.
His foes were many and varied, and he eagerly anticipated taking their heads for his collection. Some ogre with cleavers instead of hands and a gigantic pot strapped onto its back, with a collection of muscled brutes around him. One was munching on a book with an idiotic expression on its face. The greenskins far surpassed any he'd seen, each a hulking mountain of dark green muscle holding massive axes and wearing crude plates of armor. Eshin had really gone overboard in building up those things. The dwarfthings ... well, those bull centaurs looked more like metallic statues than living beings, and the hammer held by that one ordinary one unnerved him. He could feel the heat radiating off it from where he stood.
The spell was broken as Zhatan took a step forward, his armor clanking heavily. "Turn back, inferior races," he proclaimed. "So speaks Zhatan the Black, Commander of Zharr-Naggrund and the Gates of Zharr, K'daai-Breaker, Lord of Genocide. Retreat now and you will be granted lives of eternal servitude in Hashut's mines and forges. Refuse and your bones will feed our god."
The first to respond to the Dawi-Zharr's grand announcement was Grimgor. "Sod off, stuntie! Da Dark Landz is mine! WAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!" With that, he charged forward, his Immortulz taking up his warcry. There was no more time for talk as the room erupted into violence, the ogres and orks charging forward into each other with a thunderous crash. Strength clashed against strength, crude choppas embedding themselves into thick muscle and massive clubs crushing skulls. Grimgor and Skrag crashed into each other like two avalanches of muscle, the Slaughtermaster's cleaver-arms clashing with deceptive speed against Gitsnik. They snarled at each other and grappled, each attempting to bring the other down with sheer brute force. As they fought, so did their underlings, Grimgor's Immortulz moving as a group against the mostly individualistic Tyrants. Each ogre was a match for two or three of the enormous black orks, but the Immortulz supported each other while the Tyrants at best fought on their own, and on occasion shoved each other out of the way in order to get a swing in. In the midst of this earthquake of muscle, the skaven moved in, quick and merciless. When Skrag's Gorgers charged the tasty-looking morsels, the Army rats laid down a field of fire that tore the beasts to shreds. For his part, Queek charged the dwarfthing commander. Eager for battle he may be, but he wasn't going anywhere near that pair of ork and ogre until they'd severely wounded each other. But if he could take this stumpy thing's head and throw it into the melee below him, he would break the morale of the Dawi-Zharr. He vaguely recognized his clanrats baiting the Bull Centaurs into charging them as his vision narrowed. The dwarfthing was just about to kill a stray ogre, there was a perfect opportunity to cut his hamstrings -
Queek leaped at Zhatan from behind, but the Dawi-Zharr reversed his grip on the Black Hammer from where it lay in the ruin of Grobdug Bookmuncher's skull and hit him square in the gut with the pommel of the runed weapon. Toppling to the ground with the breath knocked out of him, Queek barely rolled out of the way as Zhatan embedded the Black Hammer in the stone where his head was. The Drazh-Zharr Overlord looked to the Headtaker and said but three words: "You end now." Then he pulled the Black Hammer out of the miniature crater he had formed and pressed the attack, his gauntlets letting him swing the hammer with even more ferocious speed than he had previously. Queek was positively thrilled - he hadn't had a foe give him this much of a challenge since the traitor Ikit Skratch! Hefting Dwarf Mauler and Gouger, his ancient mace-blade and cruel-edged sword respectively, Queek engaged in a flurry of blows with Zhatan, the skaven's dual wielding and unnerving speed letting him keep up - barely - with the titanic strength Zhatan exercised. Several times the Black Hammer came close to splitting Queek's skull open, but each time he frantically threw himself out of the way - he could smell the strength of the enchantments on the thing and knew that if he was hit even once it would be his doom. In an attempt to stop the avalanche of swings the Overlord was putting out, Queek hooked Gouger around the handle of the Black Hammer and yanked it close to him, pinning the weapon to him. Zhatan shifted his feet in order to yank it out of his arms, which was all Queek needed. His tail, which until now had mostly been used to maintain balance in the fight, coiled with whip-like quickness behind his back and grabbed the poisoned dagger sheathed there, darting out and toward the slim gap beneath the bottom of Zhatan's war-mask and his armor, Queek pulling himself up using Zhatan's own strength as energy for an improvised leap. One of Zhatan's gauntlets was there before the dagger connected, batting it aside contemptuously before cracking his elbow into Queek's incoming gut, but the dawi-zharr's unstoppable advance was stopped for a moment, which was all the Headtaker needed. He began a flurry of his own, his mace, sword, and dagger flashing out in asymmetric, unpredictable patterns, leaping and darting around Zhatan's flanks, forcing the dawi-zharr lord to use the haft of the Black Hammer to deflect the blows where they stood a chance of slipping in between the gaps in his plate. His thunderous attacks still swept out frequently, forcing Queek to duck out of the way, but nowhere nearly as fast as that first thunderous assault. Queek was confident in his victory even as he watched an unfortunate ork that had blundered in between the two combatants have its skull broken and burnt from a single blow; the dwarfthing's movements were slowing. Surely it must be growing tured from the weight of all that armor, and soon his head would go on Queek's wall. A worthy trophy, the Headtaker reflected as he rushed back at the dawi-zharr, Dwarf Mauler flashing overhead in a savage arc. Zhatan would deflect it, Queek knew, but he would not expect the dagger in his tail to slip into his armpit in the vulnerable moment he would leave as he blocked. His superlative skill in combat allowed him to analyze the dwarfthing's fighting style, and while its strength was monstrous it was actually rather predictable when you got down to it. But not all could be as enlightened as the skaven.
Queek brought Dwarf Mauler down in an overhead arc. Zhatan batted the mace aside with the Black Hammer, but when Queek abruptly whipped his tail in a line straight toward his armpit the dawi-zharr stepped aside with blinding speed, bringing his other arm down and pinning Queek's tail to his side. Shocked, Queek registered Zhatan dropping the Black Hammer, but was unable to react until Zhatan had already reached down to grasp the base of his tail and ripped it off. Queek's vision was consumed by blinding white as he was overwhelmed by horrific pain. He vaguely saw Zhatan casting aside his limp appendage with a rumble of 'pathetic', but was more focused on the tree of fire growing up from the base of his back. His body twitched and spasmed as it attempted to process the loss of a good third of its spinal cord, voiding all his various glands in an attempt to signal for help that in all likelihood was not coming.
Zhatan again hefted the Black Hammer, taking the opportunity crippling the skaven had given him to assess the rest of the chamber. The majority of the ogre tyrants and gorgers lay dead, interspersed with the bodies of skaven and ork, which continued to clash against each other in a savage brawl. More seemed to have come from the lower level, the conflict spilling into Hashut's very entrance hall. They would not come any further, Zhatan vowed. Even as he walked over to the twitching skaven, the ogre slaughtermaster with cleavers instead of hands desperately fended off the assault of what must be the Warboss, the massive dark-skinned ork's axe flashing wickedly. Six of the Bull Centaurs lay dead, several with glowing green holes between their eyes. The ratmen would pay for their impertinence. All of them would. He kicked the skaven so it lay on its back, focusing on him with bleary eyes. "You lack the mettle needed to become great," he informed the crippled thing. "May Hashut gnaw eternally on your soul." He raised the Black Hammer.
The room shook. Skrag mistepped, allowing Gitsnik to take his arm. The Immortulz and skaven troops fell all over each other. Only the two remaining Bull Centaurs remained unshaken, taking up positions on either side of the great door to Hashut's temple proper, which was glowing red hot. A fearsome bellow rang out from behind the door, seeming to ring not through the air, but the minds of everyone who heard it. Zhatan turned and motioned for the Bull Centaurs to enter into the Temple. Whatever his master had unleashed within Hashut's altar, the Tau'ruk would serve better within rather than guarding the door. They obeyed, taking hold of the door and wrenching it open, making their way in quickly before it shut with a resounding clang. Satisfied, Zhatan turned back to his skaven triumph, only to see a wall of dark green muscle coming toward him at high speed as Grimgor Ironhide barreled toward the Chaos Dwarf Overlord.
--
Ghrathor and Jzhad, Bull Centaur Tau'ruk both, had seen many bizzare and terrifying things in their time guarding their Father's temple. They had witnessed sorcerers turning to obsidian from the slightest misstep in a ritual, slaves melting to puddles of boiling flesh as they were tossed into the Altar of Hashut, devoured dawi and manlings and ogres and even the strange lizardfolk on rare occasions. They were thouroughly used to flesh distorting as they ripped it apart in their metallic maws, and felt only bloodlust at the sight of most distortions of the body. Even so, they were taken aback at what they saw when they entered the Temple proper.
Hashut's temple was small by the standards of the rest of Zharr-Naggrund, but it was still ludicriously grand and opulent. Plated near-entirely in gold and other precious metals, it was the city in miniature, a grand ziggurat with each level devoted to a different way of appeasing Hashut. Around the sides of the massive room ran streams of magma, lending the room a hellish glow. But now the Temple was absent of its usual screams of the damned and the bubbling of the sacrificial pits. There was nowhere in there apart from one solitary figure at the very top, dwarfed by an incandescent pillar of red hate crowned with two bull's horns. A Bloodthirster of Khorne stood towering over the distant figure of Ghorth the Cruel, clenched in hatred but not attacking for some reason. Ghrathor and Jzhad immediately began sprinting up the stairs that led to the top of the ziggurat, disregarding as they did the fact that the streams of magma were running up the sides of the pyramid. They must safeguard Ghorth!
They were at the top of the pyramid in moments, and were only stopped from throwing themselves at the daemon with feckless abandon by Ghorth raising his hand. They instantly halted, standing at attention while the sorcerer-prophet spoke and the Bloodthirster attempted to stare holes in all of them, still not moving as if trapped.
An admirable form, would you not agree? You do not possess the sorcerer's sight, but can still almost feel the violence it is capable of. I can see more, so much more. That axe in its hand has slain countless mortals. It is an engine of destruction, an avatar of hatred. And yet were I to let it loose it would fall. It would slay many, but eventually sheer numbers would prove too much for it and it would be banished back to the Realm of Souls. That enrages you, does it not? Not that you possess the capacity to do anything but hate, but it fills you with anger that you cannot contribute all the skulls in this city to your greater self's throne.
Ghorth turned to Ghrathor and Jzhad. His skin had turned dark red, and his eyes lit up like blazing red coals. The tusks jutting out of his face were more pronounced than usual, and his form was bulging with muscle absent previously.
Do you know what I have learned about things like the Bloodthirster? They claim to be an unstoppable force of their god's will, that each of them is an independent entity. They lie, every one of them, knowing or not. They are merely an extension of their parent's will. And if they can be slaved to a conglomerate in the spirit world, they can be slaved to something here. He chuckled, the tone reverbating oddly in the air. That is the basis by which we Dawi-Zharr make many of our more powerful weaponry. Hellcannons, K'daai, even you two are the result of Hashut blessing our feeble flesh with his power. But no one ever thought of binding daemons into themselves. Why is that? All one requires is a will of steel and the proper knowledge. I possess both, and this beast's lesser kin were crushed by my mind like the inferior beasts they were. But I admit, this one is proving more troublesome than I had anticipated. Which is why I must thank you for coming when you did. Zhatan did his duty well, and I will reward him after I reach the realm of the gods.
Ghorth reached out and clasped Ghrathor and Jzhad by their shoulders, and his hands immediately began melting their metallic flesh. It almost seemed to be sucked into his form. To their horror, they could not move, not even to scream. Hashut forsook me, Ghorth explained. He chose to place his trust in that decrepit statue Astragoth and leave me to die. I will repay him in kind, when I consume the souls of all my enemies. I will consume our Father in Darkness and bring about the dominion of the world he was too weak to conduct.
The forms of the Bull Centaurs collapsed into molten pools that Ghorth inhaled, the patterns on them seeming to form screaming faces as the sorcerer-prophet swallowed their essence. The fires within him seemed to flare higher as he ingested their souls, and he turned back to the Bloodthirster. Now, Baaltor, you will know true death within my gullet. Be grateful that you get to be part of my ascension. The bloodthirster glared mutely at Ghorth, facing oblivion with a stubborn anger.
--
Hammer and axe clashed together in a contest of strength not seen since the ogre Tyrant Argut Skullcrusher and the Bloodthirster Baaltor battled for forty days and nights in the southern Dark Lands. Grimgor Ironhide put the full force of his warborne body behind each of his swings and found his strength matched by the dark sorcery present in Zhatan the Black. The two titans hit each other with force that would shatter the bones of any other creature but merely glanced off their armor. The thunderous claps of their strikes echoed off the walls and back, drawing the attention of the few still left alive in the charnelhouse of gore that the chamber had become. Even as they cut each other down and bled out from wounds earlier sustained, the two fought on, a whirlwind of violence against an unbreakable rock. More than once their stray blows shattered the walls when they strayed too close, sending shards of rock splintering into their blurring forms. Even their warcries were a force unto their own, Grimgor's shout of "WAAAGH!" competing against Zhatan's litany of hatred he ground out with each blow, accentuated by the screams of the tormented coming from within his mask. "Your bones to dust! Your flesh to ashes! Your organs consumed! Your soul to Hashut!" Zhatan repeated this mantra of domination with each blow he struck against the Black Ork.
[Grimgor Ironhide, Chosen of Gork vs Zhatan the Black, Lord of Genocide: 44 vs 64]
Their conflict eventually ended as quickly as it had begun. Though breathing with difficulty from having half his ribcage shattered, his armor battered and scratched, Zhatan dropped to one knee, ducking a horizontal slash by Grimgor that nevertheless took his helm off and pivoting to strike the black ork's ankle. Finally its dark emerald flesh succumbed to the burning force contained within the Black Hammer and burst asunder, Grimgor toppling over with a howl of dismay. Zhatan seized the moment, shattering the Warboss' collarbone with an uppercutting strike before clambering onto the ork's chest and swinging down, down, down with the Black Hammer until Grimgor's upper chest and shoulders were composed of little more than singed mush. He paused for just a second, spitting blood out through his shattered teeth, then raised the Hammer for the killing blow.
He never lowered it, as with a sickening crunch Queek Headtaker buried the dagger still bound in his severed tail into the back of his neck. The Lord of Genocide collapsed, twitching as Queek twisted the knife, cutting his spinal cord. The Headtaker pried the Black Hammer out of his unresisting hands and buried it in Grimgor's skull, falling to one knee as he looked about. Somehow, he was the sole survivor of the melee that had occurred. Taking some time to regain his breath, he gingerly pulled the Black Hammer out of the ork's face, wincing as the motion aggravated his still-open wound. He slowly limped to the entrance of the chamber, pausing to extract one of the cleavers in the arm-stumps of the ogre slaughtermaster that had been beheaded by Grimgor. Trophies in hand, he made his way down to the lower level, pale from bloodloss and forever crippled, but alive.
--
The morale of the orks was broken with the death of their leader. Whatever sense of insane courage had filled them in the rest of their campaign fled them, and many parties of greenskins could be seen leaving the city, heading somewhere else. Many of them still ran screaming around the ruins of Zharr-Naggrund, but fought each other as often as they did the many other foes. The ogres, for their part, saw their job as done and began eating the corpses of the fallen, delighting in the insane plenty they found. The dawi-zharr were mostly dead by this point, the few that lived sedated heavily by the skaven.
Queek reformed the skaven under his command. They had suffered casualties - only a hundred thousand or so remained alive, and while many of the Drillfiends remained alive, only fifty could be corralled, the rest running wild through the city or indiscriminately eating everything they came across, crazed by the taste of foreign blood and flesh. Queek set the majority of his forces to pacifying the city in preperation for the Arch-Rat's arrival, taking three thousand to storm that final room of the temple. They made their way up the forbidding ziggurat without any resistance, avoiding what traps had been unsprung. With the assistance of a Drillfiend, they broke through the titanic doors and made their way inside.
Ghorth was waiting for them.
--
The Drillfiend broke through the door and began eagerly scrabbling through the hole, only to stop and spasm before going still. The scent of burnt flesh drifted through to the skaven troops. Queek at their head, they made their way in and were paused by the sight presented to them.
The Drillfiend lay halfway into the Temple, missing its top half. Facing them was one solitary dawi-zharr, or what had once been a dawi zharr. It towered over the skaven, and even as they watched it grew taller, flickering upwards like a hungry flame. It had bright red skin and burning black eyes, and the monstrous tusks that jutted out from its mouth were large and serrated. Multiple rows of horns sprouted from its skull, interweaving to form what looked like a gargantuan hat of bone. It had a beard composed of fire, the many strands of flame pouring out from its face interweaving in complex patterns. The being exuded an aura of power that singed the fur of the skaven merely by standing near it. They were unanimously quieted when it spoke, the words setting the very air aflame.
You stand in my temple and deny me proper obeisance? I shall teach you the price for such impertinence, unclean vermin.
It was among them with unholy speed and power, cutting down hundreds with single blows. It consumed the skaven with scorching streams of fire, arms of stone reached up from the earth to squeeze their guts out, their very bodies burst into flame with no apparent provocation. It was no battle, merely rats running and hiding against a nascent god.
Queek was the last standing, spared by some cruel sense of mercy Ghorth still possessed. He loomed over Queek, taking Zhatan's head off his belt. A pity, the titanic avatar of flame boomed. I never had a servant such as him. Still, he is gone. I suppose you think yourself powerful for defeating him? Bah. True power is this, feeble thing. The power to reshape the world as I see fit.
Burning an immense handprint into Queek's fur as he carried him, Ghorth strode to the top of the stairs leading to the top of the Temple. He raised Queek high in his fist, letting him see the destruction wrecked upon Zharr-Naggrund. You have done much damage to my rightful domain, ratman. But it was all for naught; I proved the stronger. I will eat your heart here and restore it all, ten times what it once was. Then the world will not be able to stand before us.
Ghorth's form flickered momentarily. What?
--
Thanquol relaxed in joy at the sheer opulence of his palanquin. The massive room was stuffed nearly to the brim with the softest skins and various sweetmeats, as well as the Arch-Rat's personal belongings, which necessitated a second palanquin in order to transport the fraction he had decided to bring to the Dark Lands. Noticing an odd twinge in his gut, he clambered to the entrance and poked his head out. "How much longer before we go-go into the Dark Lands?"
"We should enter into them soon-soon, oh exalted Thanqol," came the reply from one of the servants outside. Content with the answer, Thanquol dove back into the mountain of sheets. caring little for the sudden rumble that permeated the tunnel.
--
[Ghorth's Containment Roll: FATE'S BITCH]
Ghorth the Cruel had a mere instant to comprehend what was about to happen before he blew apart. His very soul exploded, freeing the mulched essence of the thousands of Bloodletters, nine Bloodthirsters, and seas of raw warpstuff the mad sorcerer had ingested. Combined with each other and given flame by Ghorth's soul, they exploded outward in an apocalyptic inferno that quickly grew to swallow all of Zharr-Naggrund. Everything within it was turned to ash, the eruption of Azgorh come again in a titanic detonation that sent shockwaves of heat and ash flying for miles around. Anyone in the Dark Lands could see it, a newborn sun that shone for only a minute, blinding many who were unfortunate enough to be looking in its direction. In the nearby Mountains of Mourne, the vibrations set off many rockslides and avalanches. When the light finally faded, there was nothing left of what had once been Zharr-Naggrund, merely an immense streak of glass across the ground. Not even the complex tunnel network underneath the city had been spared, tongues of white-hot fire jetting through them incinerating anything and everything unfortunate enough to be within the former city. The beds of the River Ruin were exposed for miles around, the waters evaporated by the sheer heat given off by the explosion. Great clouds of toxic fumes wafted their way up to the sky, forming a multicolored pillar miles high. Zharr-Naggrund was gone.
----
The subjugation of the Dark Lands went quickly after the destruction of their capital. The Daemon's Stump had been overwhelmed by the ogres the Warpfang Bank had hired, and the Tower of Gorgoth and Gates of Zharr were sorely undermanned by Zhatan's recalling the majority of their troops to defend the capital. They fell quickly to the skaven armies that surged through the polluted landscape. Nor did Uzkulak, Place of the Skull, last long. The Arch-Despot Gnawdell led a merciless strike force around its primary gates and slaughtered all within, in no mood to give quarter after all of her forces dedicated to the assault on the Dark City were destroyed. She left the dark labyrinth under the place alone, and turned her attention back to her domain. To the south, Paskrit and Sleek Sharpwit extracted surrender out of the Legion of Azgorh at the Black Fortress, drawing their commander Drazhoath into a cunning ambush and chaining his Bale Taurus Cinderbreath to the ground. With their Legionmaster's life at risk and armies endless beseiging them, the masked warriors of the Legion eventually stood down after having three-fourths their number cut down.
Clan Morbag was relatively untouched by the devastation affecting the rest of the campaign, instead prosecuting a relatively subdued campaign to dominate the Dragon Isles with the assistance of the Navy. The two Council members mostly ignored one another, and though their combined forces were able to seize nominal control of the isles, there were still holdouts, the sparse lizardmen fighting with an unusual ferocity to hold their ground, and voluntarily destroying their spawning pools rather than letting the skaven get their paws on them. It would be a while before the dinosaurs inhabiting the island could be tamed for skaven use without being cut down by a hail of blowdarts first.
Thanquol and the Grey Seers were displeased that Zharr-Naggrund had been wiped off the map. They had been hoping to access the stores of sorcerous lore stored there, which were no doubt bigger than any other of the dwarfthing's strongholds. They were still able to busy themselves fruitfully with what they could glean from Uzkulak and the Black Fortress. Details on binding spirits into objects of the material, a few perserved K'daai that were left deactivated for the moment, Hellcannons, and all the lore that Drazhoath had accumulated in his exile from Dawi-Zharr politics. Cackling was frequently heard echoing out from the Arch-Rat's chambers as he dissected the spells the Drazh-Zharr had left behind.
In the same regard, Skyre and Moulder were delighted to find the prolific samples present in the Dawi-Zharr's work. Warlock-engineers pored over the Magma Cannons in rapturous dazes, and the fleshmasters had unnervingly wide grins at the sight of the Great Tauri and Lammasu that had been captured.
Eshin and Pestilens, meanwhile, did not fare so well. Eshin had lost an embarrassingly large amount of assassins to the very ork Waaagh! they had created, and their protests that some other ork had come in and wrested control from their puppet were brushed aside. Pestilens was the subject of negative scrutiny by the Council, for their promises of an ork-affecting plague had apparently failed to come to fruition. It was only when their stores of captives were inspected and found to contain orks clearly infected with some sort of pox that they were let off the hook, to the confusion of all. One particular plague priest spent many hours staring at her subjects, repeating 'why didn't it work?' over and over.
Mors suffered from the campaign as well, losing a large number of its elites in the assault of Zharr-Naggrund. To Gnawdell's dismay, the USA only ballooned in size, as rumor of their incredible prowess had spread from their time training in the City of Pillars. She often glared resentfully at Paskrit, wondering if the whole debacle was some elaborate scheme to get her discredited.
At long last it was done. A mere four months after Thanquol's proclamation, the Dark Lands had fallen to the Vermintide.
