Chapter Text
The Crownguard manor was, like every building throughout Ulthuan, constructed primarily for form over function. A sprawling mess of intricately gilded marblework and towering spires, its layout was so confusing that guests had been known to show up days or even weeks after they were supposed to have left, wandering the nigh-identical halls half-mad and near starving.
The only ones fully capable of navigating that labyrinth unaided were the most senior servants, and the Crownguards themselves, who seemed from birth to have an instinctive understanding of the place. Normally, a rendezvous location that would have taken several pages of direction to reach once inside the building would have been wildly impractical, but the two figures staring silently at each other in the shadow of a spiral staircase had arrived with ease.
“Luxanna” The taller of the two said to break the silence.
“Garen” The shorter replied.
The greeting was incredibly stiff, even to the most unaware observer. To those who knew the two in conversation, the interaction was positively frigid; there were few siblings as close as the infamous twins of Aenarion, and Luxanna and Garen Crownguard could usually be considered among that number.
Not that such relations could be distinguished from a casual glance. Beyond the fair hair and elegant features that unified the physiognomy of all Asur, there was little to indicate a kinship between the two, save perhaps for the startlingly similar sea-blue eyes.
To call Garen Crownguard broad for an elf would be something of an understatement. A head taller and at least twice as wide as any other warrior among the Asur, the only races that would call him skinny were the Ogres and the Dwarfs, and the latter only out of stubborn refusal to acknowledge that a “pathetic elgi” could match their standards of physical might. His stature was such that several scandalous rumours would fly around the court of his heritage not being entirely “pure”. Such claims ranged from the shocking possibility of human or even Dwarf blood in him, to the frankly absurd claims of Ogres, Saurus, or as one imminently deceased young noble of the court once alleged, Greenskin.
Of course, whenever such accusations would reach Garen’s ears, the party responsible would be quickly found, a challenge to a duel issued even faster, and faster still would come Garen bashing their faces into the dirt in a very bizarre form of landscaping.
Luxanna, on the other hand, was far more typical of an elf. Though certainly tall, her eyeline was barely level with her brother’s shoulder, and she struggled to wrap her arms around even the narrowest parts of his torso when their greetings were of their normal warmth. Though both studied at the White Tower, where Garen’s pursuits were martial, Luxanna excelled at magic, oft-cited as one of the finest manipulators of Hyish in several generations.
“Would you care to explain your sudden bout of insanity, sister?” Garen asked, arms folded as he fixed his sister with a stern glare. Luxanna met his gaze unflinchingly
“You were there, brother, and you read my report, you know exactly what happened.” She replied, a terse edge to her voice.
If there was one regret Luxanna could single out above all others, it’s that she was going to die in Bretonnia of all places. She could have met her end fighting tooth and nail to defend her home from a Druchii invasion, or in a glorious battle taking the fight to the forces of ruin, but no: she was going to die here, in a barren field of a land so backwards she swore she could feel herself getting more primitive with every breath she took.
And to think it had all started so simply. A routine excursion to the southern shores of Bretonnia, a small force led by her brother with Luxanna herself as magical support, ostensibly to aid an old ally against a sudden surge of Beastmen against a town while the local lord was campaigning in the north. In reality, the objective was the renewal of the wards on several waystones located on the mainland, and manipulating the witless Bretonnians into a sense of gratitude was simply an added benefit.
Luxanna was stationed with the loremasters, poring over maps of varying ages and even more varying quality, trying to ascertain the exact location of the waystones. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled as she fruitlessly tried to draw similarities between two hand drawn maps that ostensibly were of the same few dozen acres of farmland, but couldn’t look more different to her. She sighed to herself, and got up to pour herself another goblet of wine.
As the wine settled in the crystal goblet, the distant bell tolled again, and the surface of the red liquid began to ripple. Luxanna stared at it warily, as she slowly became aware of a low rumbling coming from what felt like the earth itself
BONG
The ring of the bell would be deafening to any creature with ears. For someone like her, every sense amplified past the point of reason, the clanging was pure agony, the sound reverberating from the stone that surrounded her and up through her very bones. But she worked still, the stolen warp-grinder jerking wildly in her grip, almost as though it was trying to escape as it bored through the rock, each second bringing her closer and closer to that long-awaited freedom.
She knew she could die at any moment. The tunnel could collapse, she could dig into a lake and drown, or worst of all, they could hear her and they could catch her. But this was her one chance, if she didn’t get out now, she’d never make it. So she kept digging, until she died or she saw the sun again.
“By Asuryan, what is that?” asked one of the loremasters, hand warily on his blade as he exited the tent. Luxanna followed as that bell tolled again, staff gripped in her off hand while the other shielded her eyes from the sudden change in lighting as the setting sun cast its last rays into her eyes. The tent had been set up in the grounds of the local lord’s estate, an expansive meadow of finely landscaped hedgerows and meticulously plated flowerbeds that served as a stark contrast to the ramshackle housing of the commonfolk under his rule.
The bell rang again, sounding much closer now, and the rumbling in the ground got worse, the tremors now bad enough to throw the balance of anyone attempting to walk at more than a trudge. The tent had been set up with the entrance facing the setting sun, the sky burning orange as Luxanna and the loremaster scoured their surroundings, trying to find anything that could be causing the quakes,
There was nothing. No signs of any beastmen, nothing. Luxanna turned on her heel and went back into the tent, a frown on her face as that bell tolled for the fifth time. She turned to one of the attendants,
“Could you hand me the reports from the Bretonnians about the attacks?” She asked him, He gave a curt nod, and procured all the relevant sheafs of parchment without so much as needing to search. She thanked the attendant, and retreated to her previous chair to study them
BONG
She could hear them now, through the walls. The sound of thousands of chittering voices, countless sets of claws scraping away in the much larger tunnels.
BONG
And of course, the bells, tolling as one, the rhythm getting faster and faster as they rapidly approached the time of attack.
She dug even faster now, paying no more heed to the noise she was generating, confident it would be drowned out by the cacophony that was so near. Her own tunnel was becoming far more earthy, and she knew she was so close to freedom.
“Livestock mutilated, multiple disappearances…” Luxanna murmured to herself, barely able to hear her own voice over the rumbling. There were papers scattered all over her desk, numerous panicked reports from terrified peasants, transcribed as best as the Bretonnian accents could be interpreted by the scribe compiling them. They were all the same, and all lined up with the signs of Beastmen, save for one crucial detail: nobody had actually seen any Beastmen. There had been no raids, no signs of any attempt at raising a herdstone, nothing more than tracks in the fields.
The one real discrepancy she could find in any of this, was the complete lack of hoofprints anywhere in the supposed Beastman tracks. Plenty of footprints, an abundance of the claw markings that indicated the presence of harpies, and furrows in the ground that pointed to the presence of chariots, but no hoofprints. Nothing that would point to the presence of cavalry, or any of the more bestial warriors who would actually have the standing to lead any sort of organised raid. It made no sense, and Luxanna was giving herself a headache as she wracked her memories of any prior knowledge that could explain this. The tolling of the bell, closer now than ever before, only served to make the throbbing between her temples worse.
BONG
She was digging through earth now, the rock and the main bulk of the army now behind her. The bell was screaming in her ears, the warp-grinder was screaming in her arms as it spun faster than it was meant to, and the muscles in her shoulders screamed at her to take a break, to put down either the ramshackle drill or any of the several contraptions strapped to her back. She ignored all of them, pushing the warp-grinder even further beyond its limits. Some errant worms flew past her face, and she grinned, heedless of the flecks of dirt flying into her mouth. She was so close
BONG
The toll of the bell punctuated Luxanna turning the page of the report, moving on from descriptions of the fields to the accounts of the farmers themselves. She mumbled the report to herself as she read, a habit the other loremasters often told her was highly distracting, but one she’d never been able to break. Between the rumbling and the bell, it was unlikely that they could even hear her now, at any rate.
She paused in her mumblings, a worried frown forming on her face as she re-read the last passage.
“Farmers whose livestock had been taken reported several strange marks scratched on the walls of their barns, the offending planks removed and burned for fear of chaos corruption.” She read aloud, a note of concern entering her voice. The second passage, however, gave even more cause for alarm. “Upon repeated requests for a description, and reassurances that scratching the marks into the ground would not damn their souls, the farmers described the marks as upside-down triangles, unevenly drawn, but with a strange uniformity to that unevenness.”
The worry set in properly now, her mind racing to a conclusion she desperately wanted to be false. She supressed that building panic a heartbeat later, closed her eyes, and muttered the most minor of invocations in Anoqeyån, and with the trails of light that now formed at her fingertips, traced the pattern described in the air. They symbol that hung there as that bell tolled again, the brightness of its light belying the ill omen that it truly was, confirmed all of Luxanna’s fears.
She stood up, scanning the tent for the chief loremaster. When she couldn’t locate him, she walked as briskly as the rumbling of the ground would allow to the nearest person she could see.
“Where is loremaster Aenur?” She asked, her question almost drowned out by the tolling of the bell “I must speak with him, it’s urgent.”
“He went further outside, to ascertain the source of this quaking.” The scribe replied “Is something the matter, my lady? Do you-“ Luxanna didn’t hear the rest of the scribe’s question. She had already taken off, heading towards the tent flap that led to the outside world.
BONG
She kept hitting vegetables. The first one had smacked her in the forehead as the warp-grinder dragged it loose, and the rest were falling around her like a rockfall. Potatoes, the name she dredged up from some half-forgotten memory. A memory from before. She grit her teeth, pushing the thoughts away, and kept going. She could see slices of light, the tiny slivers piercing through the crumbling soil, but more than enough to sting her darkness-accustomed eyes. Just a few more feet. She was almost free.
“Loremaster Aenur?” Luxanna called, breaking into a job as she saw the man staring intently at a point on the horizon. The sun had almost fully set, and the dark moon was already hanging low in the sky, a sight which only added to her worries.
Aenur turned to face her, his stern face betraying no emotion.
“What is it, Lady Crownguard?” he asked, his voice as equally taciturn as his expression.
“It’s not beastmen” Luxanna replied, a note of desperation finding its way through her enforced calm tone as she dispensed with formalities “Inform my brother, we need to prepare for an attack immediately, I-“
The rest of her report was cut off as the shaking of the ground reached such levels as to throw both elves off their feet, Aenur falling to a crouch while Luxanna was knocked down, landing on her back.
He said something Luxanna couldn’t hear, his words drowned out by another toll of the bell, this one seeming so loud Luxanna was sure they could hear it at home on Ulthuan. Aenur’s face remained as unflinching as ever, but his eyes now glinted with what Luxanna could only describe as fear.
“We’re too late” She said to herself as she staggered to her feet. She looked to Aenur, only to see his expression finally change as his mouth hung open in shock. Her elven reflexes allowed her just enough time to turn to see what caused such a drastic change.
She felt what happened next before she saw it, her aethyric senses practically ablaze as she felt a rush of magic hurtle towards the lord’s manor. For a split second after the aethryic rush, there was a moment of quiet. Then, the manor house, the building where her brother and the rest of the Asur command staff were located, erupted in a ball of magical green flame.
She was aware of herself calling out Garen’s name, but she couldn’t actually hear it, the blast overwhelming every other sound for miles. The shockwave of the explosion knocked her off her feet, tumbling backwards onto the grass, landing next to Aenur. She looked towards the now ruined manor, and even from this distance, she could see the tide of bodies pouring from the crater, all intent on bringing the entire town to its knees.
The Skaven had arrived.
She was finally free. She stood in a field of tilled earth at the base of a hill, the hole behind her rapidly filling as the loose soil tumbled into it. Her arms were outstretched letting the wind blow across her exposed arms and send her long blue braid flying about her face. After what felt like a lifetime in the under-empire, it felt almost… wrong to be out in the open. She stared into the sun, ignoring the way her eyes burned and watered as she did so. They’d heal, everything always did; but she was going to enjoy the first rays of sunshine she’d felt countless years.
She was brought out of her reverie by the deafening noise and resultant shockwave of a massive warpstone explosion, and her head snapped towards it to see the green fireball shoot into the sky from somewhere behind the hill and expand outwards like a gigantic cave mushroom. Her still face twitched for a moment, then morphed into a frown. She glanced briefly at the warp-grinder that lay discarded behind her. It sparked and smoked, the extended use too much for the ramshackle contraption, and she knew immediately she’d be getting no use from it as a weapon. She shrugged to herself, and reached behind her to unsling yet another stolen piece of warp-tech.
She could hear the sounds of the rats, over the hill from the direction of the explosion. She wasn’t free just yet. She hefted the ratling gun in her arms, the barrels slowly beginning to rotate as the weapon whirred to life. One hand went down to her waist to check her stolen weapon, and as her hands brushed past it the warp bombs next to them jangled from her belt. Her frown turned into a triumphant smile.
The Skaven might be here. But so was their curse, their nightmare.
Their Jinx.