Mogrek rests, his eyes like anvils and storms for lungs. The sound of drums is all around him, as if winter itself had a pulse. Everything that can be dragged from shore has been heaped upon the ice and set alight, a brief respite against the howling cold.
The fog is thicker than walls, Mogrek wrapped in it like cloth on a gargant’s club. He sits upon a throne of stone, the two great rogue idols inert and lifeless, their tumbled bulk comprising his throne. Mogrek’s features are hard to discern, as if the bonfire’s very light is afraid of the orruk’s boundless fury.
The nights were long in the Delta, and the Longblades- as they began to call themselves- have come and gone, pledging fealty or great deeds. They seem small and fragile, but that was not for Mogrek to judge. The coming battles would determine their worth.
So much had changed since the Ironsage tricked him, but it didn’t matter. They told him how Sigmar had shiny warriors made of lightning, and how the Boss Trampla and the big frog had fought over a human city the size of a continent. He’d missed so much, but it didn’t matter. It hadn’t before, and it wouldn’t now.
In five hundred years the fighting had never stopped, and that made Mogrek grin.
***
Atressa had cast her scabbard into the fire before her allies, swearing never to sheath it again in anything but Mogrek’s hide. That was not strictly true, however, and her bold claim had become something of a nuisance. Behind her, a squire cradled the blade like a newborn babe, folded in a heavy fur that had previously served as a bedspread, now the only wrapping her masterwork blade wouldn’t immediately pierce.
The nights were long in the Delta, but she could feel this one coming to an end. The winds were picking up, unnaturally cold, frost biting her face like a thousand needle-thin teeth. She felt rage swell within her breast. Already, there had been skirmishes, small engagements, blood shed. They were out there, downriver, atop the ice. She wanted to run them down while they made camp, drive them back into their own unnatural storm. If this were the founding of the Ceraphate, if she had the Idrelec at her back, she would. Oh, how she would, too!
Yet those days were dead, and her old life with them. She was Warden of the Iscarneth now, and she would know only victory… no matter the cost.
***
The march had begun before most Longblades even realized it was happening. Night slipped away and the winds began to howl. The idols pulled themselves from the snow and ice, lumbering forward as their diminutive allies parted before them. Mogrek stepped down from his throne and rested the Longblade across his shoulder, the two idols that had given him respite rising to follow at either side.
Fog turned to steam as the Everwinter faltered before the Delta’s burning touch, and the idols began to stumble, tumbling through ice melting as fast as it could form, the volcanic muck sucking at their stone bodies like quicksand. Mogrek snarled, and the idols stopped, their blazing green-white eyes expressionless. The Longblades paused in their advance, as though collectively taking a deep breath.
“ATRESSA AELF-KIND!” Mogrek boomed, the storm’s gale speaking in his voice. “I WILL HAVE YOUR HEAD!”
As one, the Idols plunged their lumpen hands into the river’s frozen surface and began tearing it up.
***
Hurled with the force of a trebuchet, the Delta’s coastline shook with the sound of rolling thunder as great chunks of ice crashed from the sky. The Longblades advanced under cover of their makeshift artillery, wind, fog and steam serving to further safeguard their advance.
The Longblades discovered no resistance upon the beaches, nor when they made the heights. They found no Redhands lurking at the jungle’s edge Fuegorn Drift, nor even upon the vacant streets of Emberport. Soon, every Longblade began to spit a single accusation: cowards.
***
Serenity wasn’t surrender. Atressa wanted to scream at the words, to cut them to ribbons, to set them on fire and stomp on their ashes.
She took a deep breath, and then another. Dariel would have built walls and dug trenches, but no. That wasn’t the way to win, not here. Atressa played her own game.
Nearby, a dozen Wanderers spoke in hushed tones, looking through the eyes of their bonded animals. Twice that many Iscarneth adjutents hurried about, scribing their words and referencing them to hastily drawn charts and ancient maps. Everything was falling into place.
Mogrek’s challenge would not go unanswered. The brute’s lumbering stone gargants were as useless in the Delta as his Everwinter. With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, he’d fed his fledgling horde into the teeth of the Redhand's ambush.
She motioned to her squires. One brought her sword; the other, a gun. She regarded the strange firearm of Caradryas' design for a long moment. Its ammunition was a single crimson flare, bright enough to burn through any obfuscation. The Kharadron admiral from which she purchased it spoke of how it came at great expense from far out along the realm's edge. She had signed the debt in Dariel’s name without hesitation.
Taking up her sword, Atressa held the flare gun aloft, pulled the trigger, and began a war.