Table of Contents Cover Title Page Warhammer Map Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Epilogue About The Author Legal eBook license This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage. At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it isa land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forestsand vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reignsthe Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of thefounder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer. But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands ofthe Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before. chapter one Stranger in a Strange Land The Lands of the Dead Before The man cast a terrified glance over his shoulder as he ran. He couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t matter. He could feel it getting closer. He fled across the desert, staggering up banked dunes and lurching down them again, his legs buckling as the wind buffeted him. Sand burned the soles of his feet. He ran. He fell. He forced himself back to his feet. He ran again. He stumbled. Fell. It followed. It was there – no matter how far he ran, how fast – it was always there. It was relentless. He clutched the bundle of rags tightly to his chest. The thing wrapped within the rags was repulsive. It reeked of corruption; stank of the dead wind. Paradoxically, it was alive in his arms. He felt it, a pulse beating through the layers of cloth. It craved, hungered. He felt its presence inside his head, the insidious whisper of its need. One word: release. It ached to be free, to be loosed upon the world now that it had stirred. ‘Not yet,’ he managed, through cracked lips. His voice was raw, thick with grit and sand. The desert heat burned in his lungs. His skin crawled, as though the heat of the sun ate away at his flesh. Blisters chaffed against the course weave of his robes. It was an exquisite form of torture. He clung to the pain. He couldn’t remember a time without pain. It was the one constant of his world. As long as there was pain, he was alive. Long thin tendrils of shadow swelled up around him, like some giant hand snatching him from the desert sands. He spun around, stumbling backwards with the momentum of fear. There was nothing behind him – nothing that could have cast that shadow. He turned away quickly. He fixed his gaze on the heat-shimmer of the horizon. The sun blazed in the sky, flensing him of all sense of self. His robes, a dirty-white robe worn threadbare in places, whipped around his legs. He was covered from head to toe. Only his eyes were exposed to the elements. Still the sand bit at them, stung them into tears. The world blurred. The sand shifted beneath his feet as he staggered on, desperate to be free of this dead place. Dust devils churned around him, surging up from the ground like mystical djinn only to be blown away on the wind, no more threatening than the grains of sand they were. The tendrils of shadow thickened. The man ran for his life. He didn’t dare look back. He didn’t need to. He knew what the shadow was. He had always known. The claws of the dark lord, reaching out, reaching… No, that was impossible. That was the voice of his fear speaking to him, a malaise that had haunted him ever since he had entered this forsaken land. It was paranoia worthy of Konrad. Konrad. The name bubbled up inside his head. He tried to focus on it, to recall the face behind the name, but there was nothing. Shadows coiled around his blistered feet. Reaching out from his slumber, woken by your own stupidity, fool. Your power. At the back of his mind, the mocking whisper: Your arrogance. He clutched the bundle tight to his chest. It weighed heavy in his arms. Dark shapes began to solidify on the horizon. His mind painted them as daemons come to claim his soul and drag him down to Morr’s Underworld. A moment later they coalesced into trees. Oasis or mirage, it mattered little to him. He staggered on, his feet dragging one after the other. He tried to imagine the cool trickle of water down his throat, quenching the fire inside him: the need. Laughter rang in his ears: hysterical, spiralling, mocking. The ring on his left hand, a plain unassuming adornment, caught the glare of the scouring sun, dispelling the dark shadows for a moment. His determination to survive grew with each unsteady step. The ring was important to him, but he had no idea why. His thoughts swam in and out of focus. He tried to focus on the oasis. He walked on. It never appeared to get any closer. ‘You’re not real,’ he croaked, knowing even as he said it that his mind was playing tricks on him. He walked on. The world tilted, blurred. He heard the caw of birds, but saw nothing in the sky, straining to make sense of it as blood came sliding down from the sun, burning the desert red before it faded into the black of night. Darkness hid the shadows – it didn’t banish them. The twin moons of Morrslieb and Mannslieb appeared low in the sky, rising. The desert air grew cold. He stumbled on, staring at the ground as it fell away beneath his feet until he splashed over the water’s edge. He fell to his knees, setting aside the bundle, and reached down to scoop up mouthful after mouthful of sun-warmed water. It did nothing to slake his thirst. It was an unquenchable fire inside him. He was burning up from the inside out. It was consuming him and there was nothing he could do to quell it. A black bird had settled on one of the branches around the oasis. The beady-eyed scavenger had obviously come to feed on his corpse. He looked up at the creature, defying it, defying the fire, the hunger, the all-consuming need inside him. ‘I will not die here,’ he told the bird, and he meant it. His defiance didn’t impress the bird. Its harsh caw caw caw mocked him. He threw back his head, tore away the wrapping of his headscarf, and screamed, startling the bird into flight. It swooped down out of the tree, clawed feet looking to pluck out his eyes as its wings beat and battered at his face. The man’s hand snaked out with eldritch grace, taking the bird out of the air. He held it for a moment, cradling the creature in his hands. The bird’s wings flapped desperately as the force of his grip intensified, crushing its delicate ribcage as though crumpling vellum. He tore the bird’s head from its body with a savage twist and raised the still flapping carcass to his lips, sucking greedily at the blood and flesh, feeding. It tasted good. This was what his body had hungered for. This was the need driving the maddening cravings he felt tearing at him: Blood. He savoured the flavours, the thickness of the liquid as it ran down his throat. The taste stirred a dark memory. He had tasted blood before. He tore at the bird with his teeth, spitting out blood-clotted feathers. It wasn’t enough. Now that the need had been awoken it demanded sating. He tried to stand, but he lacked the strength. The world swam out of focus and he lapsed into unconsciousness. There was blood on his hands when he came to. The blood was rust-coloured and caked hard, but it was undeniably blood. He had killed the bird. It hadn’t been some weird fever dream. He had torn the head off the animal and sucked greedily at the gaping hole, draining the pitiful creature of every precious ounce of blood. And he had enjoyed it. But rather than quell the pain, the blood only served to intensify it, reminding his body of what it craved. He looked up. Where the land and sky met, a swarm of black specks had begun to gather. He watched them solidify, a murder of black-winged birds taking shape out of the dark sky, hundreds of them. They seemed out of place in this wilderness of sand.