Sylvaneth

by Various

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  Discover more stories set in the Age of Sigmar from Black Library

  ~ THE AGE OF SIGMAR ~

  THE GATES OF AZYR

  An Age of Sigmar novella

  ~ THE REALMGATE WARS ~

  WAR STORM

  An Age of Sigmar anthology

  GHAL MARAZ

  An Age of Sigmar anthology

  HAMMERS OF SIGMAR

  An Age of Sigmar anthology

  CALL OF ARCHAON

  An Age of Sigmar anthology

  WARDENS OF THE EVERQUEEN

  An Age of Sigmar novel

  WARBEAST

  An Age of Sigmar novel

  FURY OF GORK

  An Age of Sigmar novel

  ~ BLADESTORM ~

  PART ONE: VENGEANCE ETERNAL

  PART TWO: RIGHTEOUS BLOOD

  PART THREE: THE MANTICORE DREADHOLD

  PART FOUR: IRON TIDE

  PART FIVE: SPLITSKULL PASS

  PART SIX: CHOSEN OF SIGMAR

  PART SEVEN: THE SPIRAL TOWER

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer Age of Sigmar

  The Resolute – Josh Reynolds

  Heartwood – Robbie MacNiven

  The Splintered – Rob Sanders

  Wrathspring – Gav Thorpe

  The Outcast – Josh Reynolds

  About the Authors

  An Extract from ‘Labyrinth of the Lost’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer Age of Sigmar

  From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.

  Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.

  But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.

  Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creation.

  The Age of Sigmar had begun.

  The Resolute

  Josh Reynolds

  The rotling roared out a challenge and Felyndael, Guardian of the Waning Light, turned to meet it. They always sought to challenge him. It was not bravery, he thought, so much as hunger. Hunger for challenge, hunger for conquest… hunger for death. They were like the roots of a blighted tree, still stretching for nourishment even though the trunk was dead. They belonged dead, but could not die. He gestured contemptuously, and the rotling lumbered towards him.

  Around him, his fellow tree-revenants fought with other rotlings, leaping and slashing among the clumsy plague-lovers. Scarred Caradrael bisected a bloated warrior from crown to groin as lithe Yvael cut the sagging throats of three with a single blow. Daemonic ichor splashed across the wondrous curved structures of the reed-city of Gramin as the rotlings stumbled and died beneath the blades of his twenty-strong kin-band.

  Felyndael felt a surge of satisfaction as his warriors fought with their customary flowing grace. They flickered in and out of sight, lunging and striking at their opponents from every direction at once. They were veterans of the withering years, and could easily dispatch three times their number in open combat.

  He turned his attention back to his challenger as the brute, bulbous and clad in stinking furs and pitted metal, came at him in a clumsy rush, roaring out the name of its foul god. It seared the air with its murk. An axe swept down, and Moonsorrow rose to meet it. The ancient blade hummed with strength and struck with the force of an avalanche. The jagged blade of the axe shivered apart. The rotling reeled back, pustule-dotted jaw working in shock beneath the rim of its foetid helmet. Flabby paws waved in hapless defiance as Felyndael darted forwards, quick as the wind.

  Moonsorrow screamed in joy as it pierced the noisome bulk. Flesh, muscle and bone parted like smoke before the bite of the sword. The rotling hunched forward with a shrill wheeze, clawing helplessly at Felyndael’s bark-clad arms. Wriggling worms spilled from its mouth and pattered to the ground as its stinking ichor gushed from the wound.

  Ably done, noble one, Yvael thought, her compliment pulsing through Felyndael’s mind as he pulled Moonsorrow free of the rotling’s cancerous body. He let the creature sag to the ground and looked around.

  I am not alone in that, my sister, Felyndael thought. Around him, his tree-revenants finished off the last of the dead thing’s companions, killing the bellowing brutes with graceful savagery. The rotlings had become separated from the flow of the horde now occupying the circular streets of Gramin, and thus were easy prey for him and his kin-band as they erupted from the spirit paths close to the heart of the city.

  The reed-city was as much a thing of Ghyran as Felyndael and his warriors. Alarielle’s magics had constructed it in ages past. She had drawn up the reeds that grew thick and wild in the shallows of Verdant Bay and woven them together into a great metropolis of canals, bridges and high, sweeping arches, spreading outwards from the Basilica of Reeds at Gramin’s heart. All as a gift for the mortals who had sworn to care for that which she had entrusted to them in ages past – a clutch of slumbering soulpods.

  It was a duty that the citizens of Gramin had upheld until the final days of the withering years, when the rotlings had come from the sea. Their plague ships had clustered like maggots along the shore, befouling the green waters of the lagoon, kept pure until then by the budding soulpods. The raiders swept through the city with fire and axe, killing or enslaving all who inhabited it.

  Felyndael’s grip on his sword tightened at the thought. Though they had not been of his soil, the mortals had been caretakers, even as the sylvaneth were. They had not deserved such a fate, and he wished that he had been there. Perhaps– no. The season was done, and the cycle continued. Though his heartwood cried out for vengeance for the atrocities of the past, his task now was more important than simple slaughter.

  The raiders had left the city itself – and that which even now slumbered beneath it – untouched, after scouring it of all mortal life. Perhaps they had deemed it unimportant, or indefensible. Regardless, they had retreated to the great sargasso, where they had raised foul citadels upon the floating weeds and left the reed-city and its hidden treasure to sit silent and undisturbed.

  Until now. Until Alarielle had awoken, and her scream had set the skies to burning and the winds to roaring. As the echoes of that scream spread throughout Ghyran, the rotlings had returned in their scabrous galleys, stinking of ruin, and their return endangered the slumbering grov
e of hidden soulpods. Now the city shuddered in the grip of a malaise, and the waters beneath screamed without ceasing.

  Moonsorrow trembled sympathetically in his grasp. He could feel the ghost of the mountain for which the sword was named stir within the blade. A sorrowful weight, a millennium of tragedy, condensed and compacted into the weapon he now held. A burden and an honour both. It sang to him sometimes, when the moonlight struck the blade just so, and the din of battle had faded.

  But it was not singing now. Even if it had been, Felyndael could hear but one song – the war-song, the song of the reaping. Alarielle’s voice resounded through him, branch and root, summoning him, driving him to war. It had been centuries since he had last heard the Everqueen’s voice. It was like a gale wind, ripsawing through the realmroots. She sang and screamed and whispered all at once, crying out in wordless command.

  It was a command he had no difficulty obeying. Indeed, he had never stopped fighting. Felyndael of the Fading Light had never set aside his sword, had never set down roots or shrunk into the dark and quiet like many of the others. He had fought without ceasing since the first rotling had set ragged claw on the good soil of Ghyran. And he would not stop until the last of them were mulch beneath his feet. He would not stop until they had been punished in full for their crimes against life itself.

  The sword hummed in his grip, the voice of the mountain murmuring to him. Calming him, settling its weight upon the rage that rose up within him like a wildfire, snuffing it. But not for long, he suspected. It grew more difficult to ignore with every turn of the seasons. The harder he fought, the harder it became to do anything but fight.

  He had become a hollow thing, burned black and made brittle by war. But he would serve until his roots shrank and his branches cracked. Calmer now, Felyndael examined the body at his feet. Why had the rotlings come back? The servants of Chaos always sought to destroy the soulpods, when they knew of them. But that was not the case here. He would have sensed it if the soulpods were in any direct danger. Something else was going on.

  One of his warriors, Lathrael, stretched out her hand. The air is wrong here, she thought. Her words pulsed gravely through the connection that bound them.

  It is sour, Caradrael the Scarred thought, with the mental equivalent of a shrug. Like everywhere the rotlings infest. And so? Caradrael’s bark had been kissed by fire long ago, and it had made him short-tempered. Let us kill them, and cleanse this place.

  Their numbers are great, Yvael thought.

  Then our vengeance will be all the greater. Caradrael’s thought was the hiss of a slashing branch.

  No. Lathrael is right. It is different, Felyndael thought. Like the calm before a storm. It trembles, like a thing afraid. Wait – something is–

  The air shuddered as unseen bells tolled. The sound of it was every axe-thud, every root-snap and crackle of flame. It was the sound of bark sloughing, curling, decaying and the scream of dry grass in the burgeoning. Felyndael nearly dropped Moonsorrow as he clutched at his head. The others were similarly afflicted by the droning reverberation.

  As the tree-revenants recovered their wits, horns brayed in the distance, and drums thudded. The rotlings were agitated. But not, Felyndael thought, by his kin-band. Something else had come to Gramin. Come, brothers and sisters, he thought. Let us see what has our foes so excited.

  Aetius Shieldborn, Liberator-Prime of the Hallowed Knights, led his warriors through the deepening murk that clogged the streets and plazas of Gramin. Three retinues of Stormcast Eternals from the Steel Souls Warrior Chamber marched in his wake. Their panoply of war gleamed silver where it was not befouled by grime and mud. Their shoulder guards were of deepest regal blue, such as the heavens themselves, as were their heavy shields, where they were not scored and marked by battle. The weapons they carried shimmered with holy fire, lighting their way through the gloom.

  The Hallowed Knights were the fourth Stormhost of the First Striking, and only the faithful filled their ranks. Each warrior had called upon Sigmar’s name in battle, and each had shed their mortal flesh in the name of a righteous cause. Their courage had been proven in battles all but forgotten in the haze of their Reforging. And among the Warrior Chambers of the Faithful, the Steel Souls were pre-eminent.

  For Aetius, it was not so much a matter of pride as it was a simple fact. The Steel Souls had been at the forefront of the war for the Jade Kingdoms, and the entirety of Ghyran itself. They had forged a path for their brothers to follow, hurling back the servants of the Plague God wherever they found them, from the Grove of Blighted Lanterns to the Mirkwater.

  As they would do here, Sigmar willing.

  Gramin had been beautiful once, Aetius thought, as he led his fellow Stormcasts through the vacant streets. The city was a living thing, shaped rather than built, and reeking of the strange magics that permeated much of this realm. Once it had been home to thousands. Now it was a husk, emptied and abandoned, and falling to the same blight which was slowly devouring all of Ghyran. Black ichor seeped from the reed-walls, and stinking water bubbled up through the mat of the street. Flies choked the air.

  So far, their advance into the city had been uncontested. They had discovered great ironwood barges abandoned in the marshes and used them to reach the city. The barges now sat beside the beslimed quays of Gramin, guarded by a few volunteers from among his retinue. The outer ring of the city had devolved back into a quagmire of reeds and marsh-grass, uninhabited save by unseen beasts. But the enemy were near. The sea-wind carried with it the monotonous thud of their war-drums to Aetius’ ears.

  The mortals who had once lived in this place had fought when the Rotbringers laid siege to their sea-gates and lagoon-walls. But without Sigmar to guide them, they had faltered and fallen. Those who had survived the sack that followed the shattering of the sea-gates had been taken in chains to the miasma-shrouded sargasso-citadels that now dotted the mouth of Verdant Bay like sores. There they had likely been cast into the plague-gardens as fuel for the balefires that now ceaselessly vomited pox-smoke into the skies above the marshy coastline.

  But Gramin had remained, abandoned and forgotten. Until now. Until the bells. When they rang, they filled the air with their dolorous cacophony. The sound of the bells spread like a plague, stretching from the coastal marshes and onto the Plains of Vo. And the lovers-of-plague had come following it, drawn like maggots to dead flesh. Hundreds of them, moving from the north and the south, trudging towards the source of the clangour. The curse-bells, calling Nurgle’s children to war.

  The rest of the chamber was to the north, somewhere on the Plains of Vo. Lord-Castellant Grymn had ordered scouting parties sent out to search for the bells while he led the other Steel Souls in battle with the migrating warbands. Numerous ruins dotted the coastline for leagues in either direction, and any one of them could have been the origin of the din.

  ‘It’s the basilica.’

  Aetius glanced at Solus, his second-in-command. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s where they are, I’d wager. It’s the highest point in the city,’ Solus said, pointing towards the domed roof that was just visible over the tops of the other buildings. The great structure known as the Basilica of Reeds occupied the heart of the city. Once, Sigmar’s worshippers had filled it with the sound of song and reverence. Now the God-King alone knew what horrors stalked its aisles.

  ‘Maybe,’ Aetius said.

  ‘Definitely.’ Solus was possessed of a calm certainty that Aetius could scarcely fathom. Sometimes he fancied that the Judicator-Prime was the eye of a storm made manifest. When Solus deigned to speak, even Lord-Celestant Gardus, the Steel Soul himself, listened. Aetius envied his brother Stormcast that steadiness. Solus seemed to have no doubts as to his place or purpose in the world.

  In contrast, Aetius had nothing but questions. Unlike some Stormcasts, Aetius had no memory of who he had been – no recollection of what event had prompted Sigmar
to choose him for a life of eternal war. There was an emptiness in him, a hollow space in his soul that he’d hidden behind a wall of faith and now tried his best to ignore. For Aetius Shieldborn, there was nothing in the world save duty.

  ‘If they are here, we will find them,’ Aetius said.

  ‘If? That doesn’t sound like if,’ Solus said, as he drew and readied a crackling arrow. One by one, the Judicators of his retinue followed suit. ‘That’s not just the wind we’re hearing, Aetius. Listen!’

  Aetius cocked his head. The sea wind rolled through the streets of reed and soil, carrying the sour smell of the distant sargasso. And something else. A low sound that spread like a fog rolling in off the sea… The sound of the bells of Gramin. A hollow groan rolled over the assembled Stormcasts, reverberating through their bones and souls alike with a horrible finality – it was the sound of dirt striking a coffin lid and the last cry of a dying beast, the crumbling of stone and the sifting of sand through an hourglass, the sound of futility and ruin. One of the Liberators stumbled forwards, vomit spewing from the mouthpiece of his helm.

  ‘Back in line,’ Aetius growled, as the warrior mumbled apologies for his moment of weakness. His brothers helped him to his feet. Aetius kept his eyes on the broad avenue ahead. The thick miasma clung to everything in this sour place and seemed to be thickening, growing more opaque with every toll of the unseen bells. It stank of the sea and of decaying seaweed and rotting fish. And from within it came the padding of many feet.

  ‘I know that smell… Rotbringers,’ Solus said.

  ‘Form a square, brothers.’ Aetius raised his hammer as his warriors shifted position, forming a loose phalanx. ‘Lock shields and brace yourselves,’ he continued. The Hallowed Knights had come seeking sign of the enemy, but it appeared that their foes had found them instead. ‘Solus, take your retinue behind the shield wall and ready your arrows.’

  ‘Aye, Shieldborn,’ Solus said, leading his men into the square of sigmarite. The Judicators would be able to ply their trade freely there. Few foes could break a Liberator shield wall and survive. Aetius stepped back into line. The miasma crept closer, billowing upwards and thickening. It reminded Aetius of nothing so much as a snake readying itself to strike.