“Hello! Problem. Problem. Hello. Problem. Problemproblem! Problem.”
Ortus was accustomed to mountain spirits in Ymetrica. They tended to think in geologic time, and he appreciated their measured, thorough responses in conversation. River spirits like this one tried his patience with the constant bubbling of their thoughts, but they still commanded reverence. He knelt at the riverbank and spoke slowly, hoping his own external calm would be reflected somewhat in the river’s response.
“Yes, spirit, we ourselves had determined these lands were ill at ease shortly after we had stepped out of the portal from Hysh. What can you tell us of the trouble afflicting you?”
“Problem sour water. Plants more worse seed disease. Sourwater vomit rotfly spawn.”
“Thank you, spirit. We’ll scour your banks of this corrupt presence.” Ortus felt the spirit’s presence recede back in to the swiftly-flowing river before him. He rose, turned to the Alarith and Vanari under his command, and permitted his mask to slip. “It says some friggin’ chaos-worshippers are junking things up for the river and forest.”
A chorus of sighs arose from the aelves. Serein, the High Sentinel and second in command, cursed hard enough to startle her scry-hawk.
“How many and what color?”
“The spirit’s words were not that specific, though it did mention signs of the Plague God.”
There was muttering among Serein and her archers. “Dammit! These are the only clothes I brought. Yours can at least get wiped down when you’re statues.”
“That’s why we’re the front line, and you sit back with your arrows.” Thamuz, broadest and bluntest of the stoneguard, hefted his greathammer up over his shoulders with a scoff. He adopted a pose with it resting on one pauldron, wrist draped casually over the weapon’s hilt. “If the pukebringers can get through us then your clothes will be the least of your troubles.”
“I’m sure you’ll steer us to victory,” said Serein, with a slight grin.
“Indeed. The stoneguard shall lead!” Thamuz began sauntering along the bank in the direction of the river.
“You won’t be cowed before their might?”
Thamuz turned slowly and narrowed his eyes at the now-smirking archer whose left hand had slid back onto the pommel of her sword. For all his might, his wit was only on par with the more studious of duardin. “You’re trying to say something, eh?” There was a faint crackling sound as his surcoat shifted from deep teal to slate gray, willing it to petrifaction.
“Bury it, both of you,” Ortus snapped, “save your anger for the battlefield.” Journeys far from the abundance of Hyshian society always wore on him and any other Lumineth in his command. With no sources of aetherquartz beyond what little they could carry with them, their welling emotions still needed an outlet if they were to remain clear-headed enough to see their mission through. As long as it didn’t come to blows, Ortus reasoned, venting them on each other was nearly as good a solution. It certainly felt different; a palpable sense of relief, opposed to the unnatural vacancy typically left by aetherquartz.
He directed the group into formation with a sweep of his mallet. “Stay alert. We don’t know how far downriver Nurgle’s hordes may be, but we’ll smell them before we see them.”
The Lumineth made their way along the stony bank of the river, a stretch free of trees that could hide ambushers, or worse, listen. Five Alarith formed a solid line at the front with their hammers and picks, Thamuz’s petrified robes clacking against his greaves as they advanced. The dozen Vanari sentinels hung further back in two rows, arrows nocked on their first bowstrings. Ortus marched alongside their column and, after loosing her hawk to scout ahead, Serein slipped formation to walk beside him.
“Glad you stepped in before I had to raze the steaks,” she whispered.
Ortus raised his cloak to cover his own slight smile.
“Save your moonfire for Chaos-worshippers, or any of Alarielle’s spawn along the way who may step out of line.” His eyes skimmed across the looming forest. He didn’t sense any magical presence, but was still wary of observation. “The Everqueen does claim this realm as hers at the moment.”
Serein nodded. “I guess it is theirs for as long as the earth abides.”
“Yes, for however long we may.”
Soon they came to a bridge, its sides seeming to have been moulded or grown from one single expanse of tree reaching across the river — a still-living one, based on the leaves that sprouted in a vague swirling pattern along its length. The scry-hawk was perched on the near end, and squawked as Serein approached. She stopped, unsure of its meaning until the hawk gestured downward with its beak.
Ortus halted his party and caught up as Serein knelt by the end of the bridge. A snarl of rusty barbed wire, thicker than a man’s thumb and slick with some foul liquid, had been pulled across that bank’s entrance to the bridge about two feet above the floor. The wire stood out prominently, black and red against the bright tans of the living wood.
“What do they take us for?” Serein said.
Ortus’ face flashed with heat. It was one thing to blight the lands in the name of fell powers, but to underestimate him? Using a trap so unsubtle that even Thamuz would have noticed?!
He raised and stomped a swiftly-petrified boot down onto the rancid wire, tearing it free of the living wood just as an enormous bloated form crested the treeline beyond the bridge, beating the air into an unsettling hum with its blurring wings.
“Fall into friggin’ formation,” Serein barked to her sentinels, who arrayed themselves before the bridge as a number of mottled green figures began shambling into view on the other side. They loosed a volley of arrows into the plague daemons a second before the stoneguard filed in, standing four abreast to block the entire width of the bridge.
The plaguebearers ran forward, straight into a synchronized fall of the stoneguard’s greathammers that blunted the first wave of their charge. Several more piled in over their fallen cohort, their glistening black blades seeking gaps in the shifting stone plates of the Alarith’s armor.
Ortus noticed a curious giggling from beneath the bridge and turned from the battle line in time to see a tide of smaller daemonic creatures well up from the riverbank, on their right flank. He shouted a warning to the sentinels, who’d refocused their attention on the massive rotfly hovering towards them. Ortus and Thamuz ducked below their loosed arrows as they charged into the encroaching wave of nurglings, Ortus cleaving through several rubbery bodies with one broad sweep of his glaive. Thamuz flattened one nurgling among the swarm with a blow from his hammer, but several others grabbed onto his weapon’s shaft, scrabbling along it and each other to reach him. He tore his weapon free, scattering an arc of squealing blobs out across the river, though several still clung to his armor.
An aelven scream caught Ortus’ attention and he turned to his line of sentinels. The rotfly had managed to descend, despite multiple arrows lodged in its swollen body. The archers had all scattered save one, which the rotfly’s snaking proboscis had engulfed down to the waist. The plaguebearer riding on the creature’s back hurled a cluster of… something… at a nearby group of archers who were readying another volley, the vile bouquet landing at their feet and erupting into a visible cloud of noxious vapours.
Ortus leapt forward, planting his feet before the creature to brace for a powerful upward swing of his blade, severing its hideous tubular mouth close to the skull. He recoiled from the horrendous stench and clotted ichor that flowed forth from the fresh wounds as the creature turned on him with its numerous clawed legs.
He staggered back several paces, using his glave entirely to fend off the creature’s slashing claws, unable to find room for a strike of his own. He could hear the twang of bowstrings from behind the beast, though it seemed entirely unfazed. Then, accompanied by a shouted insult from Serein, the plaguebearer atop the beast was wreathed in blue-white flames. It flailed its arm and tumbled sideways, the flames spreading onto the rotfly’s wings and bringing it to the ground with a sickening wet thump, and Ortus wasted no time in driving his glaive down through the creature’s three-eyed skull.
Ortus paused to observe the rest of the battlefield. Thamuz had dropped his hammer and was swatting at the small daemons attempting to scale him with both hands. With a defiant shout he leapt into the air, throwing his arms out to his sides as he rapidly petrified, then crushed a score of nurglings with his earthshaking descent.
The Alarith were walking among the fallen plaguebearers on the bridge, crushing the occasional head to make sure none would rise again. Ortus approached the charred form of the rotfly rider, which was trying to raise itself up with an arm that was just blackened bone. He drew the stratum hammer from his belt and brought it down on the back of the creature’s horned head.
“Unclever wretch,” he muttered to himself.
A short distance away Serein and her archers were gathered around the bodies of two who’d been overcome by the disease cloud, and the lower half of the fly’s victim. He bowed his head and, during a moment’s silence, realized they had neither the time nor means to assemble a proper Ymetrican dolmen.
“I’m afraid the best we can do is bury them to ward off scavengers,” he said.
“I don’t know that we can dig deep enough to keep the Skaven away,” Serein said.
“There were Skaven alongside the daemons?”
“One, watching from the other side of the bridge. He ran like hell for the trees once it was obvious we had the upper hand.”
Before Ortus could order her to send out her scry-hawk, there was a joyous whoop from behind him. “Now who’s going to help clean the slop of victory off of me?” bellowed Thamuz.
