With the Realm summoned, Skullbrand released his grip on the staff. It remained lodged deep, poisoning reality and twisting the solid matter around it, but it no longer needed his guiding word. The bloodsecrator was now free to give in to his urges, and so thundered towards the slender thread of gold that even now kept his minions from taking the Gate.
‘Slaughter them!’ Threx bellowed, shaking with unfettered wrath and still wreathed in the burning bronze aura of the Blood God. ‘Slaughter them all!’
Vandus smashed his hammer down again, hurling the vast beast of Chaos back into the mass of bodies behind it. His Liberators pressed forward, fighting with their calm skill at arms, each one more than a match for the blood-rabble that faced them but still heavily outnumbered.
The Flayer was another matter — he used his flail as both a weapon and a deception, weaving clouds of darkness about him as he thrust and parried. The dracoth lunged for him, trying to rip his arm off, but Vekh was too quick, darting away before the teeth could close and dragging the spiked tips of his lashes across the noble beast’s muzzle.
All across the battlefield, the contest still lay in the balance. Vandus could see Anactos and the Skyhost weakening the portal’s wards with every strike, but it was not happening quickly enough. The charge of his Liberators had pushed the enemy back in on itself, but resistance was stiffening as the horde brought its sheer size to bear. If the Stormhost could not break the enemy’s resolve soon, Vandus knew he would have to retreat lest Ionus be overwhelmed — they did not have the strength to maintain two spearheads for long. Once he did that, though, then the battlefront would shrink further, allowing the enemy commander to throw his entire horde’s strength at a single point.
‘For Sigmar!’ he cried, blasting apart the skull of a blood warrior who got too close to the arcs of Heldensen.
The behemoth loomed back over him, inured to fear and enraged by the beating it had already taken. As it reached in again to swipe him from the saddle, Vandus leapt up, standing on the dracoth’s heaving spine, and whipped the hammerhead out towards it.
The beast made to dodge, believing the sigmarite was aimed at its flesh, but that was not Vandus’s intended target. With a shout of release, he channelled the power of the comet into the sacred weapon’s crown, and a stream of pure white fire burst from it, cascading into the onrushing beast’s charge and ripping deep into its burnished flesh.
It bellowed in agony, thrashing its great claws and trying to douse the flames that cascaded across it. The pure fires of Azyr pained it more than a thousand blows from its master’s whips, and it stumbled away, roaring in anguish.
With the behemoth seen off, the Flayer circled warily, bereft of his greatest weapon. He replaced his flails with a blade drawn from his belt, and waited for the mass of blood warriors to flank him. In a mirror movement, the surviving Liberators advanced around Vandus, and the two lines of warriors, crimson and gold, faced one another across a rare gap in the swirling melee.
‘Thus shall it be for you all,’ warned Vandus, returning Heldensen to its solid form and taking position back astride the dracoth’s back. ‘Leave this place and you shall endure life for another cursed dawn. Remain here and I shall end you now.’
As soon as the words had left his mouth, a great explosion rocked the landscape and a pillar of bronze energy thundered up from the ground over towards Ionus’s position. The detonation of magic was followed up by screams as the Realm of Chaos burst up from the heart of the battlefield.
Vekh laughed, as did those about him.
‘This is our place,’ he said. ‘You know not what we are capable of in it.’
Vandus quickly saw the truth of it. The warlord’s full tally of troops had now reached the battlefront, and the ranks of blood warriors had become almost endless. Banners to the God of Battles swung by the light of torches, rocking to the beat of human-hide drums, and the mocking laugh of triumph was already on the marauders’ lips. They were undaunted by any amount of losses, and the shed blood seemed to rouse them to ever-greater feats of bravado. Now that the very matter of the Corrupted Realm was spilling freely into the world of the senses, their strength was multiplied further.
The Realm was spreading, unravelling like a pox across the plains, bringing ruin with it. It was but a phantasm yet, but in that vision was the future of all Realms, should they fail. In those baleful fires and boiling metals was the destiny of mankind, the one that the God-King had seen more clearly than any other. It was infinite, and it was terrible.
Vandus hefted Heldensen and looked down at its unmatchable shaft. The gold of it was unsullied, for the blood of the unclean boiled away with its every strike. The sigil of the comet was emblazoned down its length, and icons of honour and splendour had been carved into the holy sigmarite by the priest-smiths of the God-King.
This was not the weapon of a mortal man. Mortal terrors had no hold on him now. He had been Reforged, made into something a little less than the gods themselves, and even daemons had no strength to compare with that.
He drew himself high in the saddle, and the storm-gale made his cobalt cloak billow. He raised the warhammer again and lightning arced down from the heavens to greet it.
‘Fear no scion of the Outer Dark!’ he roared. ‘Their grip is over, their terror is gone! To me, Eternals of the Storm! Dawn shall come again!’
With an answering roar, the Liberators took up their holy weapons, led by their lightning-crowned lord, and the cries of war echoed out once more.
Anactos cried aloud, transmuting his hammer into the pure essence of the comet, and flung the blue-white fire at the void beneath the Gate’s arch. The mixture exploded, sending a radial shockwave spiralling outwards. There was a sharp crack, an echo, a shower of dislodged stone, and he was hurled back.
With a surge of sudden hope, Anactos saw then that the Gate’s seal had been weakened. The bolts of his brothers had almost broken through, but now they were fighting hard just to stay alive, and the rain of comet-fire had slowed to a trickle.
Anactos himself was tumbling now, thrown out of position by the backwash from the explosion. He pushed down hard with his damaged wings, gaining a little loft. Though deathly weary, he summoned up yet another transmuted hammer, ready to convert the energy of the storm into a comet-bolt and send it spinning into the cracking centre of the Gate’s portal.
As he swivelled for the strike, he felt the storm pushing him down again, back into the open maw of the horde below. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a mighty champion in crimson armour, now no more than thirty feet beneath him. The icon-bearer was pulling his twin-bladed axe back for the throw, and Anactos knew that there was no way he could avoid it. He still had the energy of the comet cradled in his gauntlets, though. If he used that, he could smash the Chaos champion apart before he had the chance to loose the blade, giving him time to escape, to fight again, to survive.
Anactos allowed a smile to flicker across his ravaged face. He only had the power for one such bolt, and there was no question what he would do with it. With all his remaining power, he hurled the comet’s essence into the fractured heart of the portal. The very next moment he felt the thrown axe-blade bite into his spine, flung with perfect accuracy by the champion below.
The Skylord arched his back, stricken with purest agony, and plummeted to earth. He cartwheeled helplessly as he fell, unable even to see with any clarity whether he had penetrated the portal’s seals or not. The tempest screamed about him, ripping his broken armour from his breast. He had a sensation of extreme cold, before he cracked to the ground, his wings rent and his armour shattered.