Chapter Text
Most of the diurnal races in the western hemisphere of Mallus were asleep when the stars began to shift.
Not Teclis. He was still awake, long after his subjects and servants and all those who bothered him in the day had gone to sleep. It was a habit he had taken up in his early days, many centuries ago, when his many ailments and illnesses had kept him awake long after any godly or sane hours.
Bent over his papers, ink, quills, astrolabes, compasses, scattered across his desk, he almost missed the shift of destiny.
However, Teclis was not one of the greatest Archmages in Elven history for nothing. Even the sliver of a second or an inch of uncertainty decided the fate of worlds, the High Loremaster knew. He saw.
As the hazy cloud of Azyr shifted, bending and twisting the light of those fiery, gaseous celestial bodies above, Teclis snapped to attention.
He rose suddenly, his chair screeching back. An inkpot clattered to the ground, a crystal glass of rare red vintage fell over, and a priceless astrolabe worth more than all the fiefdoms of the Border Princes fell to the ground.
Teclis turned to the window and peered out.
The window, gazing out from the highest floor of the White Tower of Hoeth, was sufficiently high up that it burst through the lowest clouds, and gave those who stood where Teclis did an unhindered view of the sky and the stars.
He had seen its beauty many times. Teclis held out his hand into the cold frigid air, reaching into the sky, into the clouds of Azyr , into the strings of fate. He tugged on one, plucking it as a bard would pluck the strings of a lute. It reverberated to him a single note, one he knew was the first of many. Too many. He had to focus on the one first.
“Who was the Emperor of Man, again?” he mused. “Magnus?”
Teclis suddenly remembered that Magnus von Bildhofen, the Pious, had died some hundred and a half years ago.
He snapped his fingers as a face floated into his mind. “Ah. Karl Franz.” The High Loremaster of Hoeth hurried back to his desk, dipped a quill into the widening puddle of split ink, and began to write …
The Slann Mage-Lord stirred from a brief moment of contemplation that had spanned the past century. He shifted, a near imperceptible movement that had been the greatest physical action he’d taken in past three centuries or so.
Before him, the Skink Priest whose eyes the Slann had spent the past decade peering through stumbled, its head spinning. It dropped the ritual dagger it had been holding. The Skaven sacrifice on the altar before it squirmed free of its restraints, taking the priest’s distraction to slip away into the darkness.
The Slann twitched an amphibious digit, the greatest physical action he had taken in the past one minute, and the ratman was incinerated in a flash of light.
“A prophecy!” the Skink Priest cried, holding up its reptilian arms before the Slann in veneration. “Please, my great lord. Bless us with your wisdom.”
The Slann barely heard the nascent prophet. He raised his hand, the greatest physical action he’d taken in the past ten seconds, and closed his eyes, seeing the Great Plan before him.
There was something he hadn’t considered.
“A bowl.” he hissed. The Skink Priest nodded and bowed and groveled, rushing to bring to him a scrying bowl. The Slann peered into the water.
A hundred faces floated back to him, of Men and Elves and Dwarfs, of red Skinks and white Sauruses, of Ogres, of unmentionable servants of the ancient enemy …
The Slann Mage-Lord shook his head. He would have preferred a few centuries to mull over this, but unfortunately, most of the faces he saw in the water would be long dead by then. He brushed the waters, and decided to begin with the smallest of them all.
Volkmar the Grim hunched over his table, deep in the clutches on the ancient tome.
It was only at times like this that the trials of age and all he’d braved showed in the lines of his face and the exhaustion of his body.
As the words, speaking of Chaos and impending doom and despair, began to blur before him, he closed his tired eyes. The Grand Theogonist rubbed his temples. “O Sigmar,” he murmured, “will you not show me what you need of me?”
For the first time in a long while, Sigmar heard his plea.
A comet broke apart in space, splitting into a thousand shards. They trailed through the cosmos, fiery tails trailing behind each one, and each one showing a different scene.
There are too many, Volkmar thought, desperate. The vision was already fading from his mind’s eye, so he reached out and seized one that was closest to home.
“Ubersreik?” he wondered aloud.
In the oblast of Kislev, the Winds of Magic swirled high in the sky.
Few of the unfortunate souls travelling through the oblast were any the wiser. But a Hag Witch, her eyes blessed with witch sight, turned her head to the sky to gaze upon the Winds.
She was used to seeing magic; she had seen all her life, after all. It was commonplace and normal to her, as normal as seeing the sun and stars and moon.
But this, even this turned her head. Rivers of glimmering light, of colours she could not describe, wound their way through the sky, reflecting off the pristine snow and the mountains in the distance.
And things of the Aethyr burst forth, some beautiful, some terrible, some beautiful and terrible, showing her of what was to come.
The Hag Witch stumbled, clutching her head, her screams raw in her throat.
The night was dark, illuminated only by the fairer moon of Mannsleib, hanging white and fat in the sky, and its lesser cousin, the dark moon of Morrsleib, looming cold and green and vicious in the back. But it would not be for two more weeks that Morrsleib shone its brightest and most horrific, and not a soul worried, save for parturient mothers who feared their babes would be born beneath the evil green light of Morrslieb.
The Goblin Shaman, like most others of his kind, paid it no mind. The dark of the night was nothing to him, his slitted red eyes penetrating the dark far better than the weak men he stalked. Moonlight and starlight were more than enough, and he could see the party of men was five strong — four mercenaries sitting atop the caravan and one rider. He knew there were likely a few more men sitting within the caravan, these more finely-dressed, poorly-armed and craven.
It mattered not. He had more than twice their number, as he led one of the many scouting parties sent ahead of the larger Waaagh that had been ravaging the southern parts of the Reikland in the recent weeks. Caravans had been burnt, travellers slaughtered, and two unwalled villages had been marked for death. He had with him seven Goblins, five wolf riders, two Orc Boyz, and himself. It would be a slaughter.
He hissed the command, and mad, gleeful shouting broke the silent night air as the Greenskins charged at the startled men. The horses reared, and the human rider snapped the reins, his face paralysed with fear, but hands moving to urge the horses forward. But before the horses could act, the caravan rider’s head was taken off with a swing of an Orc Boyz’ clubs, and all devolved into chaos.
In short order, the mercenaries had all been slaughtered, the merchants in the caravan dragged out to share the same fate. They screamed, babbling pleas for mercy, as the Greenskins took off their heads.
The Shaman sneered at their losses — three Goblins and a wolf rider — for he had no sympathy for the weak. The humans lay dead on the road and the caravan was being broken open like overripe fruit by the Orc Boyz. The shaman himself had not even needed to cast a single spell. He knew that this same scenario was taking place all over the Reik Road — looted caravans, slaughtered humies, savage praise for Mork and Gork.
He ought to have been gleeful. But as he looked up, staring at the two moons, like two mismatched eyes of dread, an inexplicable sense of dread whispered down his green spine. He had a strong feeling that his luck was about to change.