Conquest Unbound: Stories from the Mortal Realms (Warhammer Age of Sigmar) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2022-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Inevitable Siege

Rhuairidh James

Most deserts in the realms are filled with incredible, invisible life. Beneath the sands teem furred, well-adapted creatures, patient forms of plant life, dust mites and hermit wyrms that have harmonised with their environment. The complex, balanced dance of water, light and root networks are all things that belong to natural law.

Travel rimwards, though, and a desert becomes something else entirely. Towards the edge of a realm, where reason gives way to pure magic, a desert is anathema to life, a scorched testament to the wildest and most brutal aspects of the Mortal Realms. There are deserts in Ulgu where the dunes undulate just so to turn a traveller round and round in circles, and where an oasis always hangs just out of reach on the horizon. There are deserts in Hysh where the sun does not just scorch one’s skin and parch one’s throat, but reveals awful, inescapable truths to those who dare wander in such places.

Other deserts are more horrific still. The Mortal Realms are a place of countless unremembered calamities – forgotten apocalypses that have seen entire empires sink into the dust. The Kharan Expanse was rumoured to be one such place. It was said that when Khorne first walked the Mortal Realms, he salted the earth behind him, ensuring that only the most violent forms of life could thrive. Those who dwelled in his wake would have nothing to feast upon but flesh and nothing to drink but blood. Here, towering cacti with spines of hollowed bone wait amid dry basins to drain the living of their vital fluids. Vast clouds of sand, each grain imbued with the spiteful non-sentience of a daemon, flit in sweeping flocks, stripping skin from bone with ruthless ease, all for the brief entertainment of a flayed man’s screams. The sun, a burning orb of brass hung in the firmament by the Blood God himself, blindly reaches its searing rays to rake the shade and to scorch any cowards who hide there.

In this terrible waste, a sorcerer wandered. His name was Kanem Sharu.

He was thirsty.

He was thirsty, and his boots were filled with sand.

From a distance, Kanem cut a slight figure. Even in his greatest years, he had been a far cry from the towering, spiked overlords that Sigmar’s flock dreaded. He was a small, dark-eyed man, clad now in nothing finer than weather-beaten travelling robes, their sigils and embroidery offering tokenistic reverence to the Dark Gods. He had worn armour, once, largely as an affectation. Most of it now lay littered among the dunes, discarded in order to lighten the load on Kanem’s rapidly weakening frame. He had always preferred to lurk than to stand out – he had lived a very, very long time by being underestimated and unseen.

Here, though, in the Kharan Expanse, it was impossible to be invisible, even with the coarse red sands of the desert now thoroughly worn into his clothes and skin. He wondered how he looked to his pursuer –

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