Crypt of Remembrance
Lethis, Shyish
Dark rites unfolded beneath the labyrinthine streets, shadowed alleyways and mournful towers of Lethis.
Beneath the Raven City’s lightning engines and starwater mills, beneath its prisoner-driven everwheels and ancient burial catacombs, beneath the austere, forbidding bulk of the Grand Necropolis, lay twisting warrens that constituted the dark, mysterious underworld where the Anvils of the Heldenhammer buried their secrets, worshipped their strange, funereal gods and kept their most sacred rites, far from the prying eyes of the mortals who called Lethis home.
Serried battalions of black candles bathed basalt stone, straining pillars and the many monoliths of the crypt in a mournful golden glow. Gheist-wood and shroud-spice incense smouldered in censers, filling the crypt’s interconnected chambers with diaphanous scrims of thin, rippling smoke and bitter perfumes. As the rectors of the tomb lodge intoned a mournful dirge of invocation, the lodge members slowly filed into the central mausoleum. There, they stood shoulder to shoulder in silence as the invocatory rites unfolded. Hundreds of eyeless skulls, pyramided on stone slabs or stacked in web-shrouded alcoves, the fates and names of their owners erased by time and the fragility of human memory long before the present epoch, bore mute witness to the solemnities enacted before them.
Prescribed offerings were cast into guttering braziers. Billowing censers swung to anoint the close, damp air. And finally, Tivrain Greymantle sounded the lodge’s mourning bells in slow, rhythmic succession, the final sign that the liturgy had begun and sacred business was under way.
This was her refuge, the tomb lodge known as the Elegium Aeternum, the place where she communed with her past, even mourned it, and came to terms with her uncertain future.
Knight-Relictor Ansonnir, acting as hierophant, called the congregation to order. He and Tivrain stood upon a low, raised slab at the centre of the catacomb that their lodge had claimed as sacred space, surrounded by lamps and candles and billowing incense burners, the congregation of their lodge brothers and sisters arrayed before them.
‘For the fallen, for the resurrected,’ Ansonnir recited, gauntleted hands held high in sombre blessing, ‘for the indivisible, for the irreconcilable, we gather in solemnity, we give thanks.’
‘Solemn thanks, we give,’ the congregates answered in a single voice.
‘We have been the living,’ Ansonnir continued, ‘we have been the dying, we have been chosen and Reforged. We fight and die and are made anew, each resurrection transfiguring us.’
Again, the congregates answered in kind.
Ansonnir lowered his hands. ‘Well met, all. I call this meeting to order.’
The many Stormcasts present all stood at ease, their formal, square-shouldered stances subsiding into more relaxed but no less solemn attitudes.
Ansonnir stepped back from the edge of the stone dais. Tivrain set the mourning bells upon their silk-shrouded altar and moved to the lectern. The bulky Mourning Codex awaited there.
‘Well met, all,’ Tivrain said as she took her place and let her eyes pass over those gathered. She counted thirty-six – not a poor showing, but not optimal, either. Martial operations, great and small, long-range patrols, and crises in need of quelling frequently wrought havoc with lodge attendance… as did deaths in the field, and the trials of Reforging. As Tivrain perused the scroll naming those slain in the operations of the past several days, her emotions warred inside her like a pair of starving steppe wolves competing for the scraps of an already diminished corpse.
‘I have here the names of the fallen,’ she said, her voice catching in her throat, ‘yet to rejoin our ranks.’
She dipped the ceremonial quill in its inkpot – ink from a Shyishan sea kraken, mixed with the blood of every Anvil currently listed within the Elegium’s rosters, as well as every Anvil who had ever served the lodge, from its inception to the present.
‘Jocastus Frostheart,’ Tivrain intoned, scratching Jocastus’ name into the great codex. ‘Eumaia the Elder. Cyprianus Mynax. Ramesenus Thrace.’
Four names in all, some lost in the battle of the realmgate at the base of Deific Mons, others in more far-flung operations over the weeks past. When Tivrain had completed her recitations and inscriptions of the official fallen reports, the congregates offered yet more names – those who could be accounted lost by those who witnessed their ends, whose deaths may not yet have been recorded on the official rosters.
They called the names of their comrades in grim and orderly fashion. No one competed for attention or spoke while another was speaking.
Patiently, Tivrain inscribed each name without raising her eyes.
Pyrath Redflame, someone said, voice barely a whisper.
Tivrain’s quill hovered, a fat drop of ink gathering upon its trembling nib.
She raised her eyes towards the lodge brothers and sisters gathered before her. They stared back in patient silence, awaiting some action from her that she could not divine.
‘Could the last name be repeated?’ Tivrain asked.
No one spoke. A few of the congregates exchanged puzzled glances.
Pyrath Redflame, an embittered voice hissed. The sound was right in her ear, as though the speaker stood at her elbow.
Tivrain’s head swung towards the sound, seeking the speaker. The space beside her was empty. The only eyes upon her were the empty black stares of a mass of skulls stacked with fiendish precision in a burial alcove.
But there – was that not someone moving through a side passage? A hulking, armoured form, like one of her Stormcast comrades?
A hand fell upon her left shoulder.
Tivrain all but spun from the lectern, half expecting to see another of those strange faces – the ones who languished, the ones who called out to her in the dark – standing beside her.
It was Knight-Relictor Ansonnir.
‘The names have been offered,’ Ansonnir said quietly. Concern clearly haunted his face.
Tivrain nodded, drew a deep breath to compose herself and once more faced the lectern and the Mourning Codex.
She heard beseeching whispers from the recesses of the catacomb. With great effort, she forced herself to concentrate upon the names she had inscribed upon the page.
Eleven in all. All were, Sigmar willing, now being Reforged, and would soon rejoin their ranks, but whether they would remember their comrades here, or what this lodge and its fraternity had meant to them… that was a mystery. ’Twas always thus, and always thus would be.
Some would trickle back in over the weeks to come, knowing only that they were called to this place by some innate, ineffable impulse inside them, an inarticulate longing that bore no name. A select few might return by choice, knowing precisely what this place had meant to them, even if their window on the world had shifted or contracted. Many would never be seen again, their Reforged minds having shed all meaningful memories of or associations with this place, these brethren. If approached by any of those now present, the Reforged might only see strangers. If invited to rejoin the lodge, they might shun the offers, instead finding a new home among a different lodge with rites and ceremonies that now felt right to them… that felt like home.
Tivrain knew the feeling well. She had not always been part of this lodge, but she had found her way here precisely because her former lodge – and its austere, uncompromising hierophant, Lord-Arcanum Neiros Steinbrech – had become, after her last Reforging, impossible to bear.
Tivrain raised her pale grey eyes to scan the congregation.
They watched, waited, mute and patient.
Pyrath Redflame now stood among them, gaze smouldering and accusatory.
Tivrain stared. Blinked.
Pyrath disappeared in an instant, proving that he was little more than an illusion, a ghost projected by her own waking mind.
‘Very well, then,’ Tivrain said, throat dry. She returned the quill to its ornate inkpot upon the lectern. ‘The names of the fallen are recorded. Long may they remember, long may they be whole.’
The adherents answered in solemn concert.
‘We come now to the Time of Recall,’ Tivrain said. ‘Who petitions us for recollection?’
A Liberator in the front rank, face broad and olive-skinned, eyes of a notable hazel shade, bright within his dark features, stepped tentatively forward. Like many of his comrades in the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, his age was impossible to place, his skin smooth enough to be young, his haunted gaze ancient and distant.
It took Tivrain a moment to remember his name. At the last meeting, thirteen days ago, it had been one of those inscribed in the great codex before her. He had fallen in battle just days prior to that meeting.
‘Alexos Sunspear,’ Tivrain said. ‘What do you seek?’
‘Help me to remember,’ he said quietly. ‘For I do not… not entirely.’
‘Approach, then,’ Tivrain said. She began turning the leaves of the codex, seeking the page upon which Alexos’ recollections had been inscribed.
Among the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, tomb lodges were ubiquitous, though infinite in variety. Each and all among the Anvils had, at one time, dwelt in an afterlife, their mortal lives ended, their eternities secured. It was common knowledge that Nagash the Undying yet bore Sigmar a bitter grudge, enraged by the God-King’s seizure of souls already in his necrotic orbit. For the Anvils of the Heldenhammer themselves – the men and women who trained, fought, died and were Reforged in abeyance to Sigmar’s will – their provenance as once-dead souls endowed them with a special, inborn understanding of death, sparking reverent affinity in some, embittered anathema in others.
For each and every Anvil of the Heldenhammer knew death. They knew its rewards and its punishments, its lauds and its lamentations, as well as they knew life itself. That haunted aspect – that unending, funereal pall that lay upon each and every one of them, in some manner or another – was the thing that marked the Anvils of the Heldenhammer as singular among all of Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals. Even the most ruthless, hard-hearted mortal fighters felt a vague shudder, a sense of quailing unease, in the presence of the Anvils. Even the bravest, most stout-hearted paladin or priest felt their hackles rise and their flesh prickle when they heard the Anvils speak in their hollow, deathly whispers, or noticed the preternatural calm that pervaded them even as they waded into a blood-soaked melee.
To mere mortals, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer were not simply Sigmar’s servants, his familiar, sigmarite-plated killing machines – they were death incarnate. They were darkness. They were the hungry grave made manifest in champions who, ostensibly, fought to preserve Order and Light but bore with them the pallid chill of the Abyss and the bitter, musty stench of the grave.
Despite their shared experiences, however, each Anvil’s relationship with death – their philosophical regard for or dismissal of it, their desire to disinter their fractured pasts or to forever entomb them, their intense hatred for Nagash or their respectful fear of him – was highly individualised and deeply personal.
Thus, the tomb lodges had sprouted and diversified among the ranks of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer down through the ages. In the present era, dozens of lodges persisted, while many score more had come, flourished, and ultimately been extinguished by drifting patterns of worship and the ever-evolving psyches of their Reforged adherents. Most regarded Nagash as the great enemy – a being of malign intent more terrible than all the Princes of Chaos combined. Some worshipped ancient death gods such as Morrda, the Pale Rider, while others dismissed such mythic beings as smoke and shadows, Sigmar being the only true god – or, at the very least, the only deity worthy of their worship and respect. Some embraced the erasure of their humanity and identities through their many deaths and Reforgings, making of forgetfulness a virtue, while others sought desperately to record what they could of their pasts to remember them, if only second-hand.
Tivrain Greymantle’s tomb lodge, the Elegium Aeternum, was one of the latter. They met on a fixed schedule, every thirteen Shyishan days, to perform solemn rites and ritual recollections. Tivrain had only joined the lodge less than two years prior, but she had, in short order, risen to the rank of rector – a lay priestess who assisted Knight-Relictor Ansonnir, the current hierophant of the lodge, with the rites, maintained the lodge records, and sought new members whose desires and mindsets might mesh well with those already amongst their ranks.
During the present portion of their ceremonies, the presiding rector searched the leaves of the Mourning Codex, or fetched one of the many prior volumes from a nearby burial tomb-turned-bookshelf, and prompted any who might come forth to contribute to the eternal, unending elegy. On some nights, none offered themselves at all, and the great books were returned to their places of honour. On others, several Stormcasts might present themselves before the rector and proclaim what they wished to have recorded in the book or read from it.
I dreamt of tart, sweet apples for five nights in succession, they might say. Perhaps I was an orchard-keeper?
The rector would record that strange, disembodied fact – dreams of apples – beneath the subjugate’s entry in the great book.
When I stand before a raging bonfire or lava plain, I feel a visceral terror in my belly, another might offer. A fear so deep it seems to live in my bones. Perhaps it was fire that ended my mortal life?
I played a tune I did not recognise upon my pipes just three nights ago, yet another might say. My companions said it was pleasant, even moving. Record that my music moved them.
Noted, and noted.
I bear Nurgle and his pestilent disciples a bloody grudge – an enmity that remains, cold and sharp, inside me, like a jagged spear of ice. I should like to know why I hate them so.
I sometimes see the spirit of a little girl. She holds a kitten in her pale, fat arms, and she smiles at me, completely unafraid of my fearsome, skull-faced helm or my grim, uncovered countenance. I know not who she might be, or if she ever was.
I recall a woman, dark and golden-eyed, who looks upon me with love and devotion.
I see a man in my mind, a strong, broad-shouldered man with kind eyes and rough hands but a gentle touch.
I sometimes taste the pique and fire of Aqshian wine upon my tongue when I wake.
Seas sing to me…
Trees tell me their secrets…
I stood alone against a company of Tzeentchian battlemages and died in agony, by their foul magics, to allow my comrades opportunity to escape.
On and on, fragments of lives lived, loves lost, pasts effaced and fractured by endless life, violent deaths and agonised Reforgings, for that was the guiding principle of the Elegium Aeternum – to record, and to remember. The Mourning Codex in which Tivrain or the other active rectors recorded the elegies was not the first in their collection, nor would it be the last. Already more than a hundred tomes lined the crypt walls, overflowing with the remembrances of prior generations of Anvils of the Heldenhammer. Even now, there were members of the lodge whose recollections were recorded in those books centuries before, the living connection between their present incarnation so removed from its forebears that if they delved into the storied volumes and found their own recollections inscribed there, they would think of that previous self as a stranger, some remote ancestor whose only familiarity was in passing.
For all the diversity and uniqueness of the tomb lodges among the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the Elegium Aeternum was one of only a handful that made such recollection their duty, their highest and most solemn sacrament, to record the slowly erased pasts of their congregates so that, after each Reforging, those same congregates could return, find themselves again, and collect all those disparate fragments of their pasts in an effort to see the broadest and most manifold picture of themselves, no matter their present state.
Now, it was Alexos Sunspear’s turn.
As the handsome Liberator took his place beside the lectern, Tivrain raised her eyes to scan the congregation.
There was another strange face among them now, a woman with sharp, chiselled features, eyes as dark as loamy soil, her skin the colour of red sandstone. She glared at Tivrain, smouldering and disdainful, as though she bore her some terrible grudge.
Tivrain’s breath caught in her throat.
It was another face from her visions of the Har Kuron captives.
Tivrain simply lowered her eyes to the tome before her.
‘Alexos Sunspear,’ she said, reading to the congregation as much as to the Liberator now standing beside her. ‘In life, one child among eleven, his father’s favourite, his mother’s bane–’
A ripple of low, weary laughter ran through those gathered.
‘Slayer of gargants and ogors,’ Tivrain continued. ‘The last to fall at the Siege of the Flaming Spires. Beloved by all for the beauty and strength of his singing voice, and the many songs he sang of heroes and loves long past.’
She stole a glance at the Liberator. Alexos’ face was utterly blank, save for a vague, barely perceptible sense of mounting horror.
Tivrain knew that look well. It was the terrible realisation of hearing one’s own cherished memories recited and remembering none of them, meeting one’s past self and seeing only a stranger. Alexos Sunspear stood face to face with who he had been, and could not reconcile that person and the person he now believed himself to be as the same individual.
One of two things would happen – Alexos would either return and persist, struggling to regain some measure of the man he’d been before his latest Reforging, or he would disappear and never be seen in their lodge again. He would find a new lodge, with new brothers and sisters, new rites and ceremonies… and he would forget who he had been, forever, because he chose to.
For some Stormcasts, there was nothing to gain by clinging to memories or identities that no longer felt familiar, or even true. When the gulfs between who they had been and who they had become grew wide and insurmountable, many simply let the old self – their memories, their identity, their circle of boon companions, their vision of the world and their place in it – die without mourning or grief.
It was detritus, shed to lighten the load they carried. Rid of it, they marched on.
It was that conscious surrender, that abandonment of past and self-knowledge and understanding, that Neiros Steinbrech’s tomb lodge, the Altar of the Scoured Slate, embraced and ennobled. They made a sacrament of divestment, a holy rite of leaving bits of oneself behind, carrying as little as possible forward through the ages.
For a time, it had suited Tivrain, given her peace and purpose, even. But, as frequently occurred, she had been struck down and Reforged and returned… altered. Suddenly, Steinbrech’s austere purging of all that was personal, all that was mortal and human and beloved, gave Tivrain no peace at all. In fact, it filled her with dread and a strange, hitherto unknown existential terror.
That was why she had left the Scoured Slate. That was how she’d found her way to the Elegium Aeternum.
And that was why if she never saw Alexos Sunspear present in their tomb lodge again, she would not blame or condemn him. He could only do as his fractured heart and increasingly disordered mind bade.
Sometimes, forgetting was as much an act of survival as remembrance.
Nonetheless, at present, it was Tivrain’s task to read all the text scrawled upon Alexos’ page in the great book. Despite his indifference, she forged on.
‘Dreams of the taste of sweet plum wine and sheep’s cheese,’ she read. ‘Sometimes wakes in a sweat, smelling burnt lumber and sizzling fat. Named his sword Dreamsnatcher and speaks to it, lovingly, as he oils and sharpens its blade.’
She stopped. There was no more. She looked first to the congregation.
Pyrath was there. The dark-eyed woman was there. A huge, pale beast of a man with a thin ridge of braided hair down the centre of his otherwise bald pate was there as well – a new arrival, but distressingly familiar.
They are not there, she reminded herself. You are seeing things, Tivrain.
‘These are the recollections of Alexos Sunspear,’ Tivrain forced herself to say, the familiar litany used to close the rite of remembrance. ‘His own, and those of his trusted comrades. Do any wish to add to them?’
No one spoke or raised a hand.
Tivrain looked to Alexos.
‘And you, brother?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to add.’
Tivrain thought she could hear the final surrender in his voice.
‘Go in peace, then, brother,’ Tivrain said, her voice catching in her throat. ‘Find solace in remembrance.’
Three more petitioners presented themselves, begging aid in remembrance. The rites were repeated. Tivrain found their names in the great codices, read aloud their recorded deeds, their odd proclivities, their superlatives and foibles. When no more came forth, Knight-Relictor Ansonnir once more led those assembled in a mournful hymn to the fallen, followed by a brief reading from their recorded rites, a lament for all that was lost. When their solemn recitations were done, the Knight-Relictor offered his customary benediction and sent the congregates on their way.
Per custom, Tivrain stood, quiet and patient, beside Knight-Relictor Ansonnir as her lodge brothers and sisters filed silently out of the crypt into the passages outside.
Under normal circumstances, this would be one of her favourite times of the rite, the reverent solemnity that attended their departure from the lodge, when she quietly absorbed the lingering energies still swirling about the crypt – tattered remnants of sadness, streamers of confusion, twisting embers of transformation and smoke trails of regret, all coalescing into a single, ghostly afterglow that gave Tivrain hope, and solace, and a sense of evolution towards an inevitable end.
Normally, Tivrain basked in that afterglow, in the unspoken gratitude exuded by their comrades – the sense that things could be lost, but that other things remained to be discovered and reclaimed. The sense that the parts of them that were broken or even erased by the agonies of death and Reforging could yet be exposed and unearthed, even as mere psychic relics, and that such excavations could make them, somehow, whole again.
But that night, Tivrain felt no solace, no peace. There was only the bitter sting of loss, an impotent rage, and vague, lingering pangs of regret.
For even though the congregation had filed out, the crypt remained populated. The spaces beneath the dais were full – cramped, even – three-score Stormcasts in night-black armour standing shoulder to shoulder, their imploring eyes all fixed upon Tivrain. Their recriminating gaze seemed to lay her bare and expose her as surely as if her sigmarite armour had been violently stripped from her and she’d been left, trembling and naked, before them.
Knight-Relictor Ansonnir clearly did not see them. He was already busy gathering and storing their codices and sacraments.
Of course he cannot see them, Tivrain thought bitterly. They chose me, not him.
Pyrath Redflame stood at the fore, near the edge of the dais, just a few steps from Tivrain. He beseeched her silently, as though Tivrain knew the answer to a riddle that might set him free.
Though none of their mouths moved, she thought she heard them all whispering. At first, the words were mingled, buzzing inarticulately like the sound made by a swarm of insects. But little by little, moment by moment, their separate petitions coalesced into one synchronised, manifold voice.
End this.
Tivrain clutched the Mourning Codex closer to her sigmarite breastplate, as though it were a shield. A thousand questions scurried through her mind as she studied the strange Stormcasts now occupying her ritual space – the faces of strangers, familiar only by virtue of visions and nightmares.
‘Stop it,’ she hissed. ‘What do you want from me?’
For the fallen, for the resurrected, the dark-eyed, bronze-skinned female said, her voice a harsh, funereal whisper.
We have been the living, another said – a tetra, their face gaunt and skeletal, their voice seeming to reverberate from all directions despite never rising above a whisper. We have been the dying, we have been chosen and Reforged.
We have lived, several more intoned in chorus, we have died, we shall live and die again.
We are the named, a tall, slender female with skin the colour of bone hissed.
We are the fallen, a broad-faced, tattooed male said.
‘I am helpless!’ Tivrain cried, forcing herself forward, still clutching the tome. ‘I did what I could for you! I was commanded to abandon hope of freeing you!’
Pyrath Redflame mounted the lowest stone stair to the dais. He reached out one gauntleted hand and placed it flat against the face of the Mourning Codex, which Tivrain now clutched.
Long may you remember, Tivrain, he said, voice as hollow as notes from a bone flute. Long may you be whole.
Tivrain was about to ask him what he meant – what he wanted – when she felt a wave of nausea crash through her. In the next instant, lantern-flies swirled upon a curtain of black velvet that engulfed her vision.
In the swallowing darkness, Tivrain saw all of the congregates below. They no longer stood in the Crypt of Remembrance, however. Instead, all were in strange attitudes of rest or seizure, struggle or surrender, individually cocooned, enshrouded in a miasma of resinous fibres – prey in a spider’s vile web.
For an instant, only an instant, each of their minds opened to Tivrain, a hundred small floodgates on some great duardin dam bursting in concert. For that instant, Tivrain ceased to be herself and became each and every one of them, simultaneously. She felt their terror and despair, their pain and need, their loss and confusion. She was assailed by their scattered memories, slashed and torn by their separate traumas.
It was a monstrous storm, a hurricane encompassing all of their pain, all of their desire, all of their loss and hopelessness.
Someone screamed.
Tivrain realised it was her.
Then, Knight-Relictor Ansonnir shook her, staring down at her because she no longer stood on her feet but lay on the dais, clutching the Mourning Codex, twisting and convulsing under the weight of the pain and suffering she had endured.
‘Tivrain!’ the Knight-Relictor cried. ‘Open your eyes, Tivrain! See me! Return to me!’
Tivrain’s scream trailed off into stunned silence. She blinked, looking into Ansonnir’s pensive face. She could not recall ever seeing the Knight-Relictor so shaken, so frightened.
‘What happened, sister?’ Ansonnir asked.
‘They came for me,’ Tivrain said. Beneath her armour, her skin was clammy and she shook like a frightened babe.
‘Who?’ Ansonnir pressed.
‘All of them.’
That night, Tivrain Greymantle slept fitfully. She did not dream, precisely – instead, she woke again and again, always with the unpleasant feeling that she was being watched, or shaken, or smothered. It made for a nigh on unendurable night. The final coming of the grey Shyishan dawn was, in the end, as welcome as death itself might have been.
She had no pressing duties to engage her, so Tivrain tried to expiate the doom-laden tension that encompassed her with endless stormblade drills in an unused corner of the armouretum. For hours, she practised alone, swinging, spinning and slashing through a series of high-intensity combat drills learned when she was newly forged, still a whole and perfect being with a complete understanding of who and what she had been before Sigmar had chosen her. Despite the powers afforded her as a Knight-Incantor, as well as the many spells and offensive magics encompassed in her Incantor’s staff, she liked to keep her blade skills sharp, to know that she could yet defend herself even if magic failed her.
The drills felt good, but even as her muscles began to ache and sweat covered her muscular form and she pressed on, refusing to give in to exhaustion or boredom, she knew she was never entirely alone.
They continued to watch her. To beseech her. To accuse her of suppressing or ignoring their pleas.
As the day wore on, other Stormcasts drifted into the armouretum for their own intensive sparring bouts, their own solitary drills. Some of these watched her – sweating and gulping breath as though she were drowning, grunting and hissing through gnashed teeth as her stormblade split the air. After a time, many of the idle watchers challenged Tivrain. In an effort to stay sharp, and to banish the ghostly apparitions that still haunted her from her awareness, Tivrain accepted all challengers.
A total of eight Stormcasts of various ranks and specialties challenged her. She drove each to their limits before so cruelly overwhelming them that several seemed vaguely offended, as though she’d made their friendly contest into something bitter and personal. By the time the last of them had been forced from the ring, a small crowd had gathered, watching Tivrain duel with her challengers, quietly muttering amongst themselves about her driven spirit, her indomitable will.
More than once, between duels, Tivrain saw Pyrath Redflame, or others from among his imprisoned cohort, lingering at the rear of the ranks assembled to watch her.
Tivrain took those glimpses as proof positive that she had not pushed herself hard enough, and she redoubled her efforts in answer. When she ran out of willing competitors, she began randomly challenging those looking on.
Most accepted. Many nearly overwhelmed her, pushing Tivrain to her absolute physical and mental limitations. None of them banished the phantoms that hovered in her peripheral vision.
After many hours of physical toil, to say nothing of the perils inherent in sparring with naked blades, Tivrain finally allowed herself a moment’s respite to withdraw to her corner of the armouretum. She quaffed watered-down honeywine from a cup, wiping thick rivulets of sweat from her pale face. When she turned again, ready to call upon new challengers, she found that her audience had fled, leaving a small cadre of familiar faces in their stead.
Knight-Relictor Ansonnir, Protector-Prime Ordys Stormwall and Liberator-Prime Ibon, their grim faces suggesting that they both admired and pitied her.
Tivrain studied them, each in turn. Ansonnir’s pensive, insightful gaze, his short beard neatly trimmed into a point as sharp as a spear tip. Ordys, her square shoulders and warrior’s stance concealing the warm, maternal nature that Tivrain knew to be the smouldering fire that infused her spirit. Ibon, his implacable, hangdog face making him look like a sad-eyed ploughman who had somehow materialised into clanking Stormcast armour by mistake.
They were not simply Tivrain’s lodge mates and boon companions – they were her mentors, the three wisest and most competent Stormcasts among those she called friends. Their guidance and support were the cornerstones of whatever excellence Tivrain had achieved in her office as a Knight-Incantor and rector of the Elegium. In her most desperate hours, in moments of weakness or rage, Tivrain had turned to each of them, seeking solace or wisdom.
Now, here they were – unbidden, meaning they knew well that something terrible had its talons in her.
Ordys was the only one she had confided the truth to. Even Ansonnir, bearing witness to her collapse the night before, had been offered no better explanation than ‘I must be exhausted, forgive me’. Now, however, it was clear that they all knew something – or expected her to confess to them.
‘Most impressive,’ Ibon said drolly, his sonorous voice like two millstones grinding against one another. ‘Besting seasoned Paladins and Liberators, challenger after challenger.’
‘My Incantor’s staff and spellcraft serve me well,’ Tivrain said. ‘But I should never lose the ability to meet an enemy blade to blade, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Oh, aye,’ Ibon said with a shrug. ‘Should your spellcraft ever fail you, I’d take you on my Liberator line without hesitation.’
‘What do you say to a match with glaives instead of stormblades?’ Ordys asked, suggesting her own favoured weapon. ‘Could you hold your own then?’
Tivrain smiled in spite of the weight threatening to crush her heart.
‘Never, mother,’ she said. ‘I’m brave and hard-working, but I’m no fool.’
‘Brave and hard-working,’ Ansonnir said, ‘and certainly no fool… but I think isolated. Inside yourself.’
Tivrain felt her smile become a frown.
‘I’ve been sleeping poorly of late,’ she said evasively.
‘Clear enough,’ Ibon said without hesitation. ‘But why?’
‘The visions, is it not?’ Ordys asked.
Tivrain felt a twinge of betrayal at the thought that Ordys had shared her fears and misgivings with Ansonnir and Ibon. An instant later, she felt terrible guilt at her impulsive anger.
Why? Why should she find it so difficult to confide in these three, her most trusted mentors and allies?
Because if they knew that there were Stormcasts held prisoner, crying into the aether for deliverance, for release, and that Command actively discouraged any thought of liberating them…
‘You know it is,’ she said, and lowered her eyes.
‘The visions you saw in the Crypt of Remembrance last night?’ Ansonnir asked.
Tivrain nodded.
‘How long?’ Ibon asked.
Tivrain shrugged.
‘How long?’ the Liberator-Prime pressed.
‘Weeks,’ Tivrain spat. ‘Months.’
A pregnant pause answered her. Finally, Ansonnir spoke.
‘We’ve gathered your circle,’ he said. ‘They await in the crypt.’
Each tomb lodge kept their own rites, but in the Elegium Aeternum, every member of the lodge was also a member of a circle. That circle was a group of stalwart companions whose sole purpose was to bolster and aid one another, so that each lonely Stormcast regained some sense of themselves after the trial of Reforging. Ideally, the lodge as a whole performed those functions, offering succour, recording the recollections of its members, providing peers to anchor them and an identity by which to define themselves, but in practice, smaller, more personalised cohorts were required. Circles within the great circle, minor lodges within the parent lodge. The aim was not so much to insist that the Reforged Stormcast reclaim their old memories and play-act at being someone or something they no longer were, but to accept whomever and whatever they became over the course of their long, manifold lives. To know that however they evolved through the ages, they retained a cadre of core companions, always ready to accept, challenge and support them.
Ansonnir, Ibon and Ordys were the senior members of Tivrain’s inner circle – in her own mind, her father, her grizzled uncle and her fierce, protective mother – but they were only the fellowship’s core. Reaching the Crypt of Remembrance, Tivrain found that the remainder of her inner circle, her closest companions, were already waiting.
Though she knew their intent was benevolent, she nonetheless felt ambushed and outnumbered.
There was Rysain, a mercurial Knight-Azyros whose level gaze and half-smiling mouth perpetually suggested a delicious secret or mordant jest. He looked sleek and proud as always, an impressive figure with a smooth-shaven face and head, his shining sigmarite wings folded against his black-armoured shoulders.
The Knight-Arcanum Tarros was a bearded, brooding wonder-worker and avowed scourge of death and darkness, the potency of his spellcraft matched only by his aloof, unflappable nature, whether in quiet solitude or in the din and clamour of battle.
Hunter-Prime Athelys Grimscar, a pensive, intense tracker and scout, spoke infrequently but offered profound insights when she chose to. Tivrain had never told anyone, not even Athelys herself, but she ascribed special weight to Athelys’ rarely bestowed pearls of wisdom, taking their scarcity as proof of their value. The Hunter-Prime’s fierce aetherwing, Myrmourn, perched calmly upon her shoulder pauldron, bending its head from time to time to silently insist upon a friendly stroke of its feathers.
Vornus Blackcrown, an olive-skinned young Judicator, struck most who met him as proud and overbearing, even arrogant, but Tivrain knew that the wolfish champion’s swagger hid an earnest heart forged for service and a soul desperately in need of genuine communion and connection. If Vornus projected self-importance, it was only because he strove to be worthy, to be of genuine use to those around him.
Most remote and intimidating was Heldymion Dawnslight, the oldest and most oft-Reforged member of their circle. Heldymion was a hammer-wielding Annihilator, his bulky thunderstrike armour usually stained in combat by the blood and ruined flesh of his enemies, but presently spotless and buffed to an ebon shine. His mastery of single combat and fearlessness in the face of Chaos were matched only by his ability to impart some measure of his fiery, dauntless spirit to all in his company. At rest, removed from his natural, martial habitat, his rich brown skin and thick black braids made him look like some brooding sabre-cat eyeing prey on a grassy plain. Tivrain knew that he was, forever and eternally, her ally, but his mood was prone to melancholy and his thoughts impossible to read.
Hulking together in a corner were the Retributor Barastus Battleborn and his ever-inseparable companion, the Decimator Saran Doomsmaul. The two of them were so tall, broad and muscular – even by Stormcast standards – that they vaguely reminded Tivrain of the over-muscled disciples of Khorne whose bodies were swollen and twisted by the violent energies they sowed and fed upon. An unshakeable bond existed between the two men – a bond that had existed for as long as anyone could remember – but their personalities were as opposed as day and night. Blue-eyed, long-haired Barastus was always quick with a droll quip or brash jest, even as he strode into the thick of battle, smashing Chaos minions with ardent blows from his enormous lightning hammer. By contrast, Saran never spoke, offering most of his communication through subtle facial expressions or short grunts barely audible because they rose from deep in his chest rather than the back of his throat. In the heat of combat, he was a terrifying harbinger of death, hewing down adversaries with great, sweeping arcs of his thunderaxe, slaying daemons and mortals with equal abandon, all without making a sound. Whether some aberration in his Reforging had rendered him mute or he was merely indisposed to waste breath on words, Tivrain did not know. Thankfully, his silences were more profound than some individuals’ eloquent pronouncements.
The newest member of their circle – adopted deliberately, due to her relative inexperience – was Pharena Ashforged, a wide-eyed, red-haired woman whose face bore the stamp of youth, plucked from her afterlife and added to the Anvils’ rosters only recently. Though she had proven her mettle in battle on several occasions, the young Liberator – a member of Ibon’s Redeemer conclave – was, by most Stormcast reckonings, rough and unseasoned. So far as Tivrain knew, Pharena had yet to be slain and Reforged since her advent among them. Thus, she retained most of her memories and impressions of the life – and afterlife – that she’d lived prior to her existence as a Stormcast Eternal. Though her experience was limited, her desire to prove herself and win her comrades’ respect was boundless.
Now, these excellent companions stood before Tivrain as Ansonnir, Ordys and Ibon led her into the crypt. Only a scant few of the hundreds of half-burned candles around them had been lit, making of their lodge sanctuary a gloomy and tenebrous tabernacle – a place fit for the utterance of secrets and the revelation of long-buried fears.
Tivrain turned to Ansonnir.
‘What is this?’ she asked. ‘Have I broken some by-law of the lodge? Some ordinance of our Stormhost?’
‘Only one,’ Ansonnir replied. ‘That you should speak true, and share your heart – especially among those who know you best.’
She looked to Ordys. ‘I swore you to secrecy.’
‘I told them only that you were besieged by visions and nightmares you did not understand,’ Ordys answered. ‘And that I was worried for you. It still remains for you to tell them what you’ve seen, and what you believe it means.’
‘I know what it means,’ Tivrain said, sighing. ‘Yet knowing offers no relief. I daresay it makes my predicament far worse. In the end, however, they are only waking dreams, ghosts–’
‘There is a vast gulf between memories and visions, Tivrain,’ Ibon said flatly, his deep voice carrying the vaguest note of disapproval. ‘As a Knight-Incantor, a guide to disembodied souls, you know this better than most.’
‘What’s the harm, eh?’ Barastus pressed, smirking. ‘We all love a gheist tale. We could use an evening’s entertainment.’
‘Gheist tales,’ Athelys Grimscar muttered, almost to herself. ‘We are walking gheist tales, Barastus. Each and every one of us.’
Tivrain leaned upon a nearby sarcophagus. Every fibre of her resisted the urge to share her burden. In her heart, she knew that to inform them was to possibly enlist them, to divide their loyalties between herself and Command.
She inhaled. Held her breath. Exhaled slowly.
She had no choice but to tell them the truth.
‘They began subtly at first,’ she said, ‘just dreams, such as plague us all.’
Her companions nodded. Every Stormcast knew what havoc the Reforging process wrought upon their psyches, their souls. The one constant in a Stormcast’s existence – aside from slaughter, death and the agony of Reforging – was a swirling maelstrom of ever more remote images and impressions haunting the shadowed chambers of their minds, assailing them when they slept, taunting them when awake, rattling them when lost in quiet meditation.
She began with Pyrath Redflame, the sense that he had somehow been vital to her past, and how that suspicion – never verified, never defined – must have somehow created a link between them.
‘An old comrade, perhaps?’ Athelys offered, feeding Myrmourn a small morsel of dried meat from her belt pouch. ‘Or a lover from your mortal life?’
‘Both and more had occurred to me,’ Tivrain admitted. ‘But Pyrath is but a prologue. In the past months, without warning, my dreams began to trouble me. I saw Stormcasts bound immobile in a great and terrible web. I could hear their silent lamentations, their deepest thoughts. Their awareness of their terrible fate assailed me as though it were my own. And even as I searched among those I saw in that web for the face of Pyrath Redflame, I began to suspect something far worse – I was seeing through his eyes, feeling his torment, and the torment of his closest companions.’
‘What torment is this?’ Vornus asked.
‘The persistence of the visions eventually revealed the truth to me,’ Tivrain said. ‘Pyrath and his unfortunate companions were prisoners. I was not seeing the past, or even a possible future – this was their present. Among the detritus of their fevered imaginations and dreaming minds, I saw each and every one of them captured and immobilised by spellcraft and venomous decoctions. They were paralysed, left in a state of vague awareness, yet bereft of the ability to move or act.’
Tivrain paused, swallowing the lump that had formed in her throat. Her companions all stared at her. She saw the trepidation, the mounting horror, on their faces. As Stormcasts, it was their purpose – their reason for existence – to serve Sigmar, to fight, and die, and be Reforged. The thought of being suspended between those states, denied wilful action as well as the release of death, was a Stormcast’s worst nightmare.
‘Where are they, then?’ Rysain said, his sigmarite wings bristling. ‘We need to tell Command–’
‘I told them,’ Tivrain said. ‘As I realised what I was seeing and deduced where it might be unfolding, as the visions grew stronger and began to interfere with my duties, I petitioned for a deeper reading by a Lord-Arcanum, even purification by a Lord-Exorcist or, perhaps, the recognition of my visions as the prelude to a Questorship. I had my audience with Command yesterday. They told me, in no uncertain terms, that my visions were true, my suppositions verifiable–’
‘Where are these Stormcasts, then?’ Tarros asked. ‘Who holds them?’
‘They’re prisoners of Morathi,’ Tivrain said, ‘in Anvilgard.’
A long, poisonous silence followed.
‘Anvilgard,’ Ibon breathed, as though the name itself were a curse.
‘Har Kuron,’ Barastus said mordantly.
‘Those Khainite harridans can call it what they like,’ Ibon countered. ‘So far as I am concerned, it is forever Anvilgard.’
Tivrain understood Ibon’s bitterness all too well. They all knew what had transpired in Anvilgard nearly twenty years prior – Morathi and her Khainite minions annexed the city, allegedly to quell a rash of violent rebellions and purge the Chaos-corrupted from Anvilgard’s administration. Peace had been restored, but the city remained in Morathi’s hands.
As did the many Stormcast Eternals garrisoned in the Black Nexus, held against their will for all of the nineteen years that Anvilgard had reposed in Morathi’s fell grip.
Every member of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer knew that their unlucky brethren, claimed with the city, were casualties of a tenuous alliance whose critical importance outweighed their own value as fighters and servants of the God-King.
And every single member of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer nursed a simmering rage and vague sense of betrayal, knowing that their Stormhost comrades remained there, prisoners without hope of release, while those among their number who were free in the world were helpless to deliver them.
For most – Tivrain included, until recently – living with that knowledge was simple enough. They had wars to fight – they braved death and obliteration and Reforging day after day after day. There were crises enough to distract them from the terrible knowledge of the betrayal and abandonment of those Stormcasts who had tried to defend Anvilgard.
‘What’s to be done, then?’ Vornus asked. ‘Will we finally, after all these years, be sent to deliver them from captivity?’
Tivrain shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘The Lord-Imperatant made that abundantly clear. Sigmar’s alliance with Morathi must endure, and so, our comrades languishing in Anvilgard must remain there, tortured and abandoned, indefinitely.’
‘How?’ Pharena asked. ‘How can we maintain an alliance with one so dishonourable? One so vile?’
Ibon answered her. ‘If the God-King has decided that maintaining his alliance with Morathi, or anyone else, matters more than the lives of innocents, or his own Stormcasts, who are we to challenge him? His calculus of what sacrifices warrant which compromises is beyond our ken.’
Tivrain knew that his pronouncement was not indicative of wilful obtuseness or self-deception, but a weary pragmatism. Ibon did not like the situation any more than she did, but he was a realist, as well as an obedient soldier.
As Tivrain’s eyes skated over all of them, suddenly lost in grim contemplation of the suffering of their comrades and the indifference of their commanders, she noted that Saran Doomsmaul was hunched over one of the many sarcophagi in the crypt. As he glared into the middle distance, seeming to contemplate something that was not there, his enormous, gauntleted hands gripped the outer edges of the slab that sealed the sarcophagus.
Tivrain noted that the ancient stone had already begun to crack under the weight of his frustration and fury.
Saran’s mute desperation mirrored Tivrain’s own.
‘Right,’ Vornus Blackcrown finally said, turning to Tivrain. ‘What are we to do, then?’
‘Do?’ Tivrain asked. ‘What can we do? I was expressly forbidden from doing anything, Vornus. I could be subject to terrible discipline simply for speaking to you all about this, but I cherish and value each of you too profoundly to lie to you.’
‘What would you do, then?’ Athelys Grimscar asked, voice level, gaze steady. ‘If there were nothing to stop you, no one to tell you that you could not?’
Tivrain knew the answer – she had known it for months, in her heart – but she waited long and considered hard before giving that answer voice.
‘I would go after them,’ she said, in barely a whisper.
‘Aye, that,’ Barastus said with a brusque nod of his shaggy head. ‘To abandon them is an affront to our honour.’
‘Not simply an affront to our honour,’ Tivrain said, ‘but an affront to theirs. Why do we gather here, brothers and sisters? In this crypt? In this temple to death and loss? We gather here to remember, to record the fragmentary remains of our minds, our identities, our humanity, and do our best to preserve them.’
‘Find solace in remembrance,’ Heldymion Dawnslight said.
‘Precisely,’ Tivrain said. ‘We seek solace in remembrance. But there can be no solace if we abandon them, hoping against hope to forget. They, no less than we, are Sigmar’s loyal servants, loyal unto death, willing to forego afterlives, paradises, happy memories and the warmth of families and friends, to fight and die and have the exposed fragments of their humanity chipped away, Reforging after Reforging. We were not forged to love, or to create, or to sow, or to reap, or to leave behests to the world of poetry or wisdom or creations of the mind and hand. We were forged to fight and to die. That is our sole purpose. To abandon those brave Stormcasts to an eternity where that purpose is denied them, to hang, interminably, between meaningful lives or useful deaths, is an abomination. Inaction spits upon the sacrifices they’ve already made.’
‘Why do we still talk?’ Barastus asked. ‘The decision is made – we go after them.’
Saran Doomsmaul crossed his arms over his huge chest and nodded in agreement.
‘No,’ Tivrain said. ‘I did not share these things with you – with any of you – to spur you to action. I will not be responsible for any of you drawing the ire of Command on a foolish, forbidden errand.’ She shouldn’t have been surprised – Barastus was, among the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, unusually wilful and hot-blooded. Presented with an impossible task tied to the honour of their Stormhost, he could only choose action. Inaction was anathema to him. And where he went, Saran would follow.
Tivrain could not be held responsible for that.
‘What is the ire of Command beside the honour of our brothers and sisters?’ Barastus asked. ‘If it were us – any one of us – would we not want the same? For someone to deliver us?’
‘I am inclined to agree,’ winged Rysain said, offering Barastus a nod. ‘Knowing what we now know, we cannot fail to act.’
‘You are talking about mutiny,’ Ordys said.
‘And an unwinnable battle besides,’ Heldymion interjected. ‘A handful of Stormcasts – however brave, however resolute, however deadly – against a city full of Khaine’s hellspawn? Accessing a realmgate to Aqshy could, alone, take us months – that’s to say nothing of accounting for our expedition with the guardians of that gate when we find it.’
‘We have a realmgate to Aqshy near at hand,’ Knight-Arcanum Tarros countered. ‘The one just seized from those disciples of Tzeentch.’
Tivrain speared him with an accusatory glare.
Please, that look said, do not spur them on.
Tarros only raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Do not castigate me, I only speak the truth.
‘But the gate’s guarded,’ Pharena broke in. ‘And tainted by baleful Chaos magic. Wouldn’t utilising it be dangerous?’
‘There are ways through,’ Ansonnir said, so quietly that it seemed he spoke to himself. ‘There is always a way.’
‘No one’s going anywhere,’ Liberator-Prime Ibon snapped. ‘We gathered here, in this crypt, so that our lodge mate Tivrain could divest herself of the burden she carries – to share its weight and not be crushed by it. We did not come here to hatch mutinies or suicide plots.’
‘Then, clearly,’ Barastus snarled, ‘every bit of humanity and fire has been Reforged right out of you, Ibon. That you could stand here and counsel inaction when you know that fellow Anvils of the Heldenhammer suffer–’
‘Who among us does not suffer?’ Ibon snapped. ‘Who among us is not broken, shattered, a stranger in our own mind, cast adrift on the sea of our own fog-shrouded understanding? We are made to suffer, Barastus Battleborn. Beyond the sharpness of our blades or the fury of our magic or the defiance embodied in our shield walls, we have no other purpose. We suffer so that the weak and the innocent need not.’
‘Then I would gladly suffer!’ Barastus roared. ‘Suffer any censure, any punishment, any perdition pronounced by the God-King himself, if it would free my comrades from their own suffering, even if only for a brief moment in time!’
‘You suffer foolish delusions of passion, Retributor,’ Heldymion said. ‘There is no glory in sacrifice without purpose, nor in risk without some calculation.’
Tivrain looked to Ordys.
‘This is why I was loath to speak of this,’ Tivrain said. ‘This… this in-fighting. This helplessness. I never wanted to infect the rest of you with this.’
‘But we bade you,’ Athelys chimed in, her voice level, barely above a whisper. ‘And you did as we bade. We took these burdens on willingly, Tivrain Greymantle. You “infected” us with nothing.’
Athelys held Tivrain’s gaze, her dark, hooded eyes quietly challenging her.
‘What would you have me do?’ Tivrain asked.
‘Make a choice,’ the Hunter-Prime said, casually stroking her aetherwing’s bowed head. ‘Then let us each make our own.’
A rather diabolical trap, Tivrain thought grimly. If I choose to obey Command, some among my companions may set out on their own, even without me. If I choose to disobey Command and they follow, do I damn them as well as myself?
She heard Athelys’ voice in her mind, as clearly as if she were speaking to her via magically aided telepathy.
Make a choice… then let us each make our own.
If she respected them, she had to give them the opportunity to choose.
If she respected herself, she had to follow where her heart led.
‘Very well, then,’ Tivrain said. ‘We cannot mount a sanctioned rescue operation. We cannot barter for the prisoners or negotiate for their release. We cannot march our full Stormhost to the gates of Har Kuron and demand Morathi hand them over. But I – I alone – can try to reach them, and free as many or as few as fate allows.’
‘Do you have a plan?’ Heldymion asked. ‘Or merely an impulse.’
Tivrain nodded. ‘I have the rudiments of a plan.’
Silence followed her pronouncement. Clearly, they wanted to hear this plan of hers.
‘I’ve fought in Anvilgard, though it was decades ago. Beneath Dauntless Hall lie the Vaults–’
‘The old archives,’ Ordys interjected. ‘It is a veritable maze–’
‘But also a means of ingress,’ Tivrain said hastily. ‘The Vaults empty into a long, narrow tunnel that opens nearly a mile north-west of the city walls. It was built in Anvilgard’s antiquity, to allow the city’s Grand Conclave to evacuate if need be. The entrance to the passage beneath Dauntless Hall was well hidden by the duardin smiths who built it, and I wager there is a chance – slim, but a chance – that Morathi’s brood have not discovered it.’
‘I have heard tales of those archives,’ Barastus said. ‘A labyrinth, overflowing with centuries of long-accumulated records. Such a warren could be a good place to hide before daring a sortie up into Dauntless Hall itself.’
Tivrain nodded. ‘Precisely – a secret point of entry, coupled with a place to conceal myself if I make it inside.’
‘Alone?’ Ibon rumbled. ‘That’s a fool’s errand, lass.’
‘Then I am a fool,’ Tivrain said proudly, defiantly. ‘I am a Knight-Incantor, Ibon. When not calling the storm and smiting the foes of my God-King, my purpose among our brethren is to guide them home, to draw their spirits back to the Anvil of Apotheosis, where they can be remade anew, to fight and die again. That is not just what I do, but what I am. I am a beacon in the dark, a guide to the lost. If, by some means I cannot understand, these prisoners have found me in that darkness, if they have been drawn to my beacon, I cannot fail them. To fail them, even one of them, is to fail to fulfil my purpose. And to leave them there to rot is to fail to help them fulfil theirs.’
In truth, Tivrain had not begun that day with a burning desire to defy Command or the will of Sigmar, to brave censure or even obliteration, just to fulfil a duty, to prove a point. Honestly, such a course of action had never occurred to her as feasible or necessary until her friends challenged her.
But she had been forced to examine her heart and its most ardent desires. What she found there, locked inside that shattered, haunted labyrinth, was a righteous, white-hot indignation.
‘Does anyone wish to stop me?’ Tivrain said. ‘Or to report my ill-advised intentions to Command?’
‘You’re committed, then?’ Tarros asked. ‘You’re setting out alone?’
‘What other choice do I have, Tarros?’
‘She’s not alone,’ Barastus said. ‘Saran and I will be beside her every step of the way.’
‘And my wings will cover the three of you,’ Rysain said.
Tivrain was tempted to tell them once more they were under no obligation to join her – but she reminded herself that their choices were no less personal, no less sovereign, than her own.
‘I accept you, my friends,’ Tivrain said. ‘But I must warn you, there is no telling what will become of us if we’re caught. I can’t imagine the punishment for insubordination is light.’
‘It is not,’ Ansonnir said, eyes downcast, an enigmatic half-smile on his face. Then he raised his eyes to Tivrain. ‘But the punishment for dereliction of duty, to my mind, is far worse. Our comrades called to you, Tivrain – to you. You cannot abandon them… and we cannot abandon you.’
‘Myrmourn and I are with you,’ Athelys said.
‘As am I,’ Vornus Blackcrown said.
‘My hammer is yours,’ Heldymion said with grim resignation.
‘As is my stormblade,’ Pharena Ashforged declared.
‘I am your Liberator-Prime, girl,’ Ibon broke in. ‘You are under my command.’
‘All due respect, Liberator-Prime,’ Pharena said, not giving an inch, ‘but in this circle – in this lodge – we are all peers, without rank. I choose, then, to join my brothers and sisters in their quest.’
‘We are courting our own destruction,’ Ibon said gravely. ‘Sigmar made each of us. He can unmake us just as readily. Or worse – cast us back into the hands of Nagash. Whatever else we may have forgotten about our lives – about who we were, why we lived and why we died – I trust we all remember well that Old Bones was once our tyrant gaoler, and that Sigmar alone delivered us from his foul clutches?’
Tivrain knew that he spoke the truth, but she noticed something else.
He had said ‘we’.
‘Sigmar wouldn’t,’ Pharena said, but it sounded like she was trying, and failing, to convince herself.
Ibon speared her with a cold, level gaze. ‘Oh, he would, child. And he’d be right to do so… but it is also right that we do this.’ He looked to Tivrain, his sad-looking eyes meeting her own with quiet strength and resolution. ‘Now that I see the path, no other can tempt me from it.’
Tivrain turned to Ordys. The Protector-Prime’s set mouth and level expression made it clear that she’d already declared to follow Tivrain without a single word uttered. Now, she addressed the others.
‘If we do this, there is no turning back. We risk destruction at the hands of our enemies – or, perhaps, destruction in answer to our betrayal of our lord and master. If anyone hasn’t the stomach for this, let them depart now, and we’ll think no less of them.’
None moved.
Tivrain felt the sting of bitter tears.
Had her friends redeemed her? Or had she damned each one of them?
Only time would answer that question.
‘Before we depart, there is a final bit of business,’ Tivrain said. Before anyone could ask, she moved to the tomb where the lodge’s many codices were stored and withdrew the present volume. She transferred the Mourning Codex to the lectern, opened it to an empty leaf and dipped a quill in ink.
When she met all their expectant gazes, she knew they understood.
‘The names of the fallen shall be recorded,’ Tivrain said solemnly.
Each in turn spoke their name. As they did so, Tivrain recorded them in the Mourning Codex.
‘Knight-Relictor Ansonnir.’
‘Protector-Prime Ordys Stormwall.’
‘Liberator-Prime Ibon.’
‘Knight-Azyros Rysain.’
‘Knight-Arcanum Tarros.’
‘Judicator Vornus Blackcrown.’
‘Hunter-Prime Athelys Grimscar.’
‘Annihilator Heldymion Dawnslight.’
‘Retributor Barastus Battleborn,’ Barastus said. After a long pause, he hastily added, ‘And Decimator Saran Doomsmaul.’
Saran grunted his approval.
‘Redeemer Liberator Pharena Ashforged.’
‘And Knight-Incantor Tivrain Greymantle,’ Tivrain said, inscribing her own name. She raised her eyes to study them. ‘Long may we remember. Long may we be whole.’
‘Find solace in remembrance,’ Ansonnir said, his voice catching in his throat, emerging raspy and hollow.
‘Find solace in remembrance,’ they said in unison.