‘What new power, Everqueen?’ asked Holodrin.
She looked up to the skies. Against any natural wind, clouds were gathering, tinged with azure light. Lightning flickered, not of any mortal origin.
‘We are not alone,’ she said. Sadness marred her divine features for a moment. ‘It was only fear that made me think that we ever were.’
Josh Reynolds
The Outcast
‘Filthy trees,’ Goral rumbled. ‘They offend me, Blighthoof.’ The Lord-Duke of Festerfane stroked his steed’s cadaverous neck as he spoke. The horse-thing squealed, shaking its lice-infested mane in what might have been agreement. It pawed at the ground with a hoof, causing the root-riddled soil to split and smoke. Goral leaned forwards in his mouldering saddle as his Rotbringers felled another tree. It toppled with a bone-shaking groan and struck the ground with a loud crash.
‘That’s the way. Hew them down, my brothers. Shatter their branches and befoul their stumps. Make the land weep sweet tears, in Nurgle’s name,’ Goral said, gesturing with his axe, Lifebiter. Filth-stained blades and rusty cleavers bit down again and again, tearing, gouging, chopping. Bark ruptured and roots tore loose of the soil with popping sounds as branches cracked and bent. More trees fell, clearing his warband a path into the heart of the vast, black forest known as the Writhing Weald.
It had taken them days to get this far. Then, the Writhing Weald was more stubborn than most. It had swallowed a dozen warbands over the centuries, remaining verdant and untamed despite the best efforts of Nurgle’s servants. But no longer. As a knight in good standing of the Order of the Fly, it was Goral’s duty — no, his honour — to make these simpering lands fit for the glopsome tread of Grandfather himself. And once he found the forest’s heart, Nurgle’s will would be done.
‘Chop them down and stoke the fires,’ Goral said, trusting his voice to carry to the flyblown ears of all seventy-seven of his warriors. ‘We will choke the air with smoke and ash, and call down a boiling rain once we have found the great stones which are the heart of this place. Grandfather will water the soil with the blessed pus of his Garden, and we shall make this wild place fit for civilised men. By this axe, I so swear.’
Goral lifted Lifebiter and felt the weight of the baleful blessing wrought into its rust-streaked blade. It pulled at his soul and left pleasant welts on his flesh where he clutched it. The weapon had a cruel life of its own, desirous of nothing save the chopping of bark and bone. It had been a gift — a token of appreciation by the Lady of Cankerwall, whose fungal demesne he’d preserved from the depredations of the ancient change-wyrm, Yhul.
He thought of her and smiled. Regal and infested, clad in tattered, mouldering finery, she had seemed sad at his leaving, and pressed Lifebiter on him as a sign of her esteem. The axe had been borne by her father-in-decay, and his father before him all the way back to the beginning of the Age of Chaos, and now Goral carried it, with her blessing and in her service. Its pitted blade had been touched by the finger of Nurgle himself, and imbued with a mighty weird. It was an axe worthy of the name Lifebiter and he hoped he was worthy of its destructive potential, and her trust in him. Like Blighthoof, or the scabrous armour fused to his swollen flesh, it was a sign of Grandfather’s favour.
And that favour was why he, above all others, had been sent to accomplish this task. For it required speed of thought and surety of limb, as well as faith in the will of Nurgle. Goral raised his axe and bellowed encouragement as another tree fell. Around him, his vanguard of pestilent knights did the same, calling out to their brothers in support or mockery as they saw fit. Like Goral, they too served the Order of the Fly, and had supped from the unhallowed grail which dangled from Nurgle’s belt. In them was the strength of despair and the will of the gods made manifest.
‘Beat them, break them, burn them,’ the knights chanted, in low, hollow voices. Their flyblown steeds screeched and buzzed, tearing at the ground with claws and hooves. Goral joined his voice to theirs, but as he did so, the remaining trees began to sway slightly, as if in a breeze. The chanting died away, as did the sounds of labour, as every rotten ear strained to hear the sound, in case it was the sign that they had been seeking.
It was a soft thing. Like loose leaves scraping across stone. Goral tightened his grip on his axe. Soft sounds were dangerous in the forests of Ghyran. Blighthoof stirred restlessly. The horse-thing whickered and Goral patted the sagging flesh of its neck. ‘Easy,’ he murmured. Far above, in the high canopy, branches rustled and then fell silent.
Goral looked around. He feared no mortal enemy, but this was something else. He could smell it, stirring in the dark. Like sap gone sour and rotting leaves. An old smell, almost familiar, but… not. It choked him, and made his stomach turn. The forest was alive with a thousand eyes, watching, waiting.
He’d fought the tree spirits before, with axe and balefire. Nevertheless, it was unnerving. They came so suddenly, and with such ferocity that even a moment of inattention could mean the difference between life and death. ‘Where are you?’ he muttered. ‘I can feel you, watching. Are you afraid, little saplings? Do you fear the bite of my steel?’ He lifted his weapon, waiting. Nothing answered his challenge.
But they would. This realm, the Jade Kingdoms entire, was waking up now, and all of the dark things within it. The forest-queen had been driven from her hidden vale, and into the wilds. Now trees marched on Festerfane and a thousand of Nurgle’s other holdings. What was once a certainty had become mutable. Goral couldn’t have been more pleased. It had been decades at least since he had faced a worthy challenge.
The sound faded, as quickly as it had come. As it paled, a new, more welcome noise replaced it. The guttural barking of Chaos hounds. The beasts loped into view, bounding over fallen trees with long-limbed grace. They were shaggy and covered in sores, their blunt, squashed muzzles streaming with slobber and snot. They had bulging, compound eyes and worm-pale tongues which lolled as they sprang at Goral in greeting. Their high-pitched yelps momentarily overwhelmed even the crash of falling trees and Goral laughed as he swatted an overly affectionate hound off his saddle.
‘Hail and well met, my lord,’ a rasping voice said. A broad figure, swaddled in grimy furs and filthy armour stepped out of the trees, one bandage-wrapped hand resting on the cracked hilt of his sword. His other hand held a thin, broken shape balanced on his shoulder. The hound-master’s face was swollen with what might have been insect bites, and tiny black shapes writhed beneath his tight, shiny flesh.
‘Hail and well met, Uctor. Good hunting, then?’ Goral asked. Uctor had fought beside him for longer than any other, and was, like Goral, a servant of the Order of the Fly. The hound-master was strong in the ways of war, and as loyal as one of the four-legged beasts which trotted at his side. Goral had dispatched him to locate their prey, as his Rotbringers set the fires that would flush them from hiding. He gestured to the thing on Uctor’s shoulder. ‘Have you brought me a prize?’
‘Aye, my lord,’ Uctor said. He let his burden fall to the ground and planted a foot on its back. He caught hold of the protruding, antler-like branches and bent its inhuman features up for his lord’s inspection. The tree-thing was dead, or as good as. Golden sap ran from the cracks in its face and stained the ground where Uctor had deposited it.
‘Can it speak?’
Uctor made a face. ‘Can they ever? They are but brutes. No more capable of conversation than my maggot-hounds,’ he said. He let the head sag, and it thumped to the ground. The whole thing had begun to shiver and crack apart. It was dying. Goral could see the blistered wounds where the infectious jaws of Uctor’s hounds had savaged the tree spirit. They were such fragile things, for being so deadly.