Soul Wars

Prologue As Sure as Death

The dead thing stumbled slowly across the eternal desert of Shyish. Its bones were baked the colour of a dull bruise by the amethyst sun overhead, and what few pathetic tatters of flesh it retained had become leathery and fragile. Yet the lack of muscle and sinew had proved to be of little impediment in all the slow, countless centuries of its task.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Across burning sands, to the very edge of the Realm of Death, and then back, ten thousand leagues or more. Slowly, but surely.

As sure as death. As certain as the stars.

There was a soul of sorts, in those brown bones. It was a small thing, akin to the last ember of a diminished fire. It had no hopes, no fears, no dreams, no desires. Only purpose. Not a purpose it recognised or understood, for such concepts were beyond such a diminished thing. The directive that provided motive force to its cracked bones had been applied externally, by a will and a mind such as the dead thing could not conceive – and yet recognised all the same.

The master commanded, and it obeyed. The master’s voice, like a great, black bell tolling endlessly in the deep, was the limit of its existence. The reverberation of that awful sound shook its bones to their dusty marrow and dragged them on. The master had sheared away all that the dead thing had been and made it into an engine of singular purpose.

The only purpose.

Cracked finger bones clutched tight about a single grain of pale, purple sand. The mote rested within a cage of bone and was incalculably heavy despite its size, weighed down with potential. Moments unlived, songs unsung. The dead thing knew none of this, and perhaps would not have cared even if it had.

Instead, it simply trudged on, over dunes and swells of windswept sands. It was not alone in this, for it was merely a single link in a great chain, stretching over distance and through time. A thousand similar husks trudged in its wake, and a thousand more stumbled ahead of it. Twice that number lurched past, going in the opposite direction. Their fleshless feet had worn runnels in the stone beneath the sand, and carved strange new formations in what was once a ­featureless waste. The silent migration had changed the course of rivers and worn down mountains.

Jackals hunted the chain, having grown used to the sport provided by the unresisting dead. They streaked out of the dunes, yipping and howling, to pluck away some morsel of dangling ligament. The dead thing paid them no mind. It could but dimly perceive them, as brief, bright sparks of soul fire, dancing across the dunes. By the time its sluggish attentions had fixed upon them, they were gone, and new fires beckoned elsewhere.

A carrion bird, one of many, circled overhead. Once, twice, and then it alighted on a sand-scoured clavicle. The bird twitched its narrow head, digging its beak into the hollows and crevices of the dead thing’s skull, as generations of its kind had done before it. For wherever the dead went, so too came the birds. Finding nothing of interest, it fluttered away with a skirl in a flurry of loose feathers, leaving the dead thing to its purpose.

On the horizon, a second sun – a black sun – shone. Its corona squirmed like a thing alive, alert to the attentions of the master. As that great voice tolled out, the sun blazed bright with a hazy, bruise-coloured light. When the voice fell silent, the sun shrank, as if receding into some vast distance. But always, its dark light was visible to the dead thing. And always the dead thing followed the light.

It could do nothing else.

All of this its master saw, through its empty eyes and the eyes of the carrion birds and the jackals, as well. All of this, its master knew, for he had willed it so, in dim eternities come and gone. And because he had willed it, it would be done.

For all that lived belonged ultimately to the Undying King.

In every realm, wherever the living met their end, some aspect of Nagash was there. Once, such a menial task would have been undertaken by other, lesser gods. Now, there was only one. Where once there had been many, now there was only Nagash. All were Nagash, and Nagash was all. As it should be, as it must be.

The dead were his. But there were those who sought to deny him his due. Sigmar, God-King of Azyr, was the worst offender. Sigmar the betrayer. Sigmar the deceiver. He had snatched souls on the cusp of death to provide fodder for his celestial armies, imbuing them with a measure of his might and reforging them into new, more powerful beings – the Stormcast Eternals.

Worse still, he had not been content with the nearly dead, and had scoured the pits of antiquity, gathering the spirits of the long forgotten to forge anew into warriors for his cause. Every soul lost in such a fashion was one less soul that might march in defence of Shyish.

Nagash saw the ploy for what it was, and a part of him admired the efficiency of its execution. Sigmar sought to beggar him and leave him broken and defenceless, easy prey for the howlers in the wastes. But it would not work. Could not work.

His servants had been despatched to the edge of Shyish, where the raw energies of the magics that formed the realm coalesced into granules of amethyst and black grave-sand, heaped in grain by grain. Over the course of aeons, he had gathered the necessary components for his design.

Even when the forces of the Ruinous Powers had invaded the Mortal Realms, he had continued. Even when he had been betrayed by one he called ally, and the armies of Azyr had assaulted his demesnes, he had persevered. Unrelenting. Untiring. Inevitable.

Such was the will of Nagash. As hard as iron, and as eternal as the sands.