Below is excerpts from the Turn 3 Unfolding Narrative of Animosity II included here with permission.
Dyrnawen Silverfish regarded the dead Dracoth with disgust, his burned palm trembling where he’d made the mistake of touching its mangled corpse. How many years had he just taken off his life? Decades? Centuries, even?
“Bad juju ’bout dat one,” Hogrog ug Weirdklaw commented, the excitable Wurrgog sounding unusually somber.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Dyrawen replied, bitterly. The Stardrake that had killed Han Shinzong’s mount lay nearby, broken where it fell, its mouth sawing open and shut silently as it struggled for each shallow breath. The beastmasters of aelf, orruk and ogor alike had begun working to save its life before Dyrnawen had ordered them away, lest they too be afflicted from such close contact with it. Besides, Sigmar’s golden lackeys would be here to reclaim it soon enough; let them risk their lives for the celestial beast’s sake.
“Den why don’t you try tellin’ me, ya thinky git?” Hogrog squared off against him, the old orruk still several times larger than the pale elf. “Tell uz why we’z here, Dern-a-wen. Wot our boyz got sicken’d an’ drownded an’ krumped fer. Tell us we’z ain’ jus’ da bludgeon, an da Grate Saga’s got a story fer us.”
Dyrnawen smiled mirthlessly. “What harm could come of it? Everyone will know what’s happened here. Sigmar’s dogs will discern what I have soon enough.”
“Out wivvit, den,” Hogrog growled, his usual patience for the aelf’s whimsy wearing thin. “Tell uz about da walkin’ sickness dat burns an’ poisuns us, an’ spoilz da fishies, an’ rots da souls.”
For perhaps the first time in his life, Hogrog listened without speaking as Dyrnawen shared words of a corruption deeper than the manifestations of the spikey Chaos boys, a searing wound of the physical and spiritual that split apart bodies and souls alike. Chaos reduced to the fundamental, to the primordial. This, Dyrnawen said, was the nemesis of all things, living and dead alike, a foe from which neither the blessings of Sigmar’s pantheon nor the gifts of the Dark Gods could offer protection.
Worse, it was spreading, its curse already burning its way through Dyrnawen’s body and the Stardrake alike simply for touching the corrupted Dracoth-thing. Soon, the Soulscryer warned, it could consume Lake Bykaal itself, and all within its waters.
Hogrog hardly found all this motivational; dying a slow, miserable death of a wasting sickness was no way for his boyz to earn their place in da Grate Saga yet to be sung… and that was when Dyrnawen revealed the secrets of the Aethersea, and of the binding of souls and the beasts of the deep.
Inspiration twinkling in his beady eyes, Hogrog ug Weirdklaw knew this would make for one hell of a story.
