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The End of Enlightenment – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Prologue

The Dead March

The light in the distance seemed to buckle and contract, a pale amethyst that deepened to a purple shade. The ground, grey and desolate, began to rise on a slight incline. As the army marched it left in its wake a great ribbon of dust that billowed out and rose up towards a blackened sky. Ahead, the steppes of Shyish rolled on only into a deepening shadow, the dead lands of the Equuis Main. There were no hills, no forests, no settlements, no life. There was only dust and desert, and a breeze that blew a cold melody across the flags and pennants of the marching host.

Tuareth Y’gethin reached again for the brooch on the tassel at her wrist, but of course it wasn’t there. Her brother Carreth had it, back in Ymetrica. She had wrought it herself, spending many a moon of craft and artistry to get it right. She had given it to him as a small token to heal the rift that had grown between them. He had taken it from her with a look in those proud grey eyes that was for a moment almost like regret, but then the stern and unyielding mask had come down once more and he had coldly bid her goodbye.

The scholar’s mask, Tuareth thought with sadness. But he had been a warrior once…

She turned her mind from these lost thoughts, looking out instead over the serried ranks of her Vanari wardens. One hundred and fifty strong, they marched in immaculate lockstep, their pikes levelled and their cloaks ruffling in the breeze. What light there was in this benighted realm dazzled on the tips of their sunmetal spears. The pale cream of their armour was unmarred by dirt or dust. They were the colours of the morning, after the brash announcement of the dawn had faded into something cleaner and purer.

The Luminous Host…

For a moment she almost pitied the foe they had been sent here to face. But pity was another emotion the aelves of the Lumineth Realm-lords had long been taught to master. Pity was a weakness, as were anger and rage. As Tuareth raised her sword and issued the command to close the gap with the regiments on either side, she knew with cold certainty that their enemies would show them no pity in return.

As she glanced beyond her own regiment, she saw the next in line marching in similar precision, and the next beyond that, and the next, and all the other Vanari regiments on either side, a sea of clear blue and white and gold. Behind the wardens marched the Vanari Auralan sentinels, their bows held lightly, their arrows nestled in their quivers. On either flank, a mile apart, rode the great surging tides of the Dawnrider cavalry, their stallions snorting and scuffing the ground in distaste at this slow, unseemly pace. Onwards the host marched, inviolable, thousands of troops in blocks of infantry, archers and horse. And yet as the army strode on, the sound of its progress was barely more than a mutter in the dead air of Shyish, a faint scuffle swallowed by the endless plains. Dead grass crunched underfoot. Old, wind-dried bones shattered under marching boots. The grey sand mingled with the dust to rise above them as a vast ensign announcing their presence – the Lumineth Realm-lords had come at last.

Tuareth raised her hand to touch her breastplate, where Senlui, the rune of swiftness, gleamed in gilded light. On either side, her warriors bore whichever runes they had dedicated themselves to, representing each branch of the Hysha-Mhensa. Senthoi, firm and yet welcoming; Ydriliqi, the force of the flowing river; intricate Ylvan, the sign of pride and honour, and the honesty of imperfection. Tuareth tried to calm her impatience as she touched the rune. War had come to Shyish, and if one thing was certain, it was that Nagash of all beings would not meekly submit. The necroquake, his great working, had been unleashed. Reality itself had been assaulted, and the thin places of the realms had to be sealed before his foul death magic destroyed them all. It was inevitable. Tuareth thought of her brother again, turning his face from her arguments.

Nothing is inevitable, Carreth had said. If you unleash war, you unleash emotions that cannot be contained… You make a choice, my sister. Ensure it is the right one.

It could not fail to be the right one, Tuareth thought with a grimace. For how can anyone live in peace with a sword hanging over their head? And Nagash holds the very realms at ransom.

A boom of thunder reached out across the plains, rhythmic and precise. As the army drew closer, Tuareth saw high black shapes rising from the mist ahead. The peaks of distant mountains, she thought at first, but then as they crossed the empty steppe the mists drew apart like a sundered veil. Beneath their gauzy wrapping, still a mile distant, were revealed the spires of three great towers, harsh and disturbingly precise in every cut and facet. They gleamed like oiled obsidian, a morbid crackle of green lightning playing around them. Between each tower was a curved curtain wall, with here and there a gatehouse or a lower keep built into the sweep of the fortifications. Spaced regularly along the curtain walls were strange pyramidal braziers, which sputtered a green fume into the air, wreathing the fortress – if such it was – in a pallid shroud of smoke. The boom of thunder came again, clashing like a hammer blow in some almighty forge.

A ripple passed through the aelven army as the fortress came into sight. Not fear, Tuareth knew, not unease or disquiet, but something more like certainty.

‘The long march is at an end, high warden,’ Dae’annis said at her side. He gripped his pike tightly, his mouth a grim line. A lock of yellow hair had come untethered from his helmet and danced in the breeze around his face. He looked at her and offered a thin smile. ‘I confess – all of our months of training, and I’m still nervous.’

‘Training is one thing,’ Tuareth said. ‘But now the real work begins.’

Calls rang out further down the Lumineth line, although in truth the orders were redundant. The arts of war were studied with as much dedication and seriousness in Lumineth society as the arts of peace, and each regiment knew as if part of some intricately wrought mechanism when to halt. All across the front of the army, marching feet stopped with utter precision. With a clatter of arms, pikes were brought to bear and bows strung with the first nocked arrows. The wind whispered across the sand. The only other sound was the flapping of cloth from the Realm-lords’ ensigns.

Tuareth looked out across the span of empty ground towards the fortress, silent and mysterious, abhorrent in its dark majesty. The towers and the curtain walls, she realised, were not made of obsidian at all. Rather, they had been constructed from some kind of oiled black bone, moulded into new shapes and retaining in some places a hint of its previous form – skulls, femurs, ribcages, spines. As she looked down at her feet, and as the breeze erratically scraped a layer of dust away, Tuareth realised that the very ground they were marching across had given way to bone. The army was standing in the middle of a colossal avenue, which stretched on across the plains towards the fortress, and reached out behind them towards the limits of the Equuis Main. The avenue was covered with traceries and fissures like the plates of a skull.

More orders were given, the aelven voices ringing like the peal of a silver bell from unit to unit. As each order was given, so the soldiers of the Lumineth Realm-lords obeyed.

‘Triple line!’

‘Wardens to the front!’

‘Nock arrows!’

‘Form up!’ Tuareth shouted. ‘Triple line!’

She held up her sword, and around her the wardens, as fluid as a mountain stream, refashioned themselves into a block three deep and fifty wide. She saw another regiment sprinting to form up on their left flank, and then two more units to form the flank beyond them. To her right, the bulk of the army swung slightly in one unbroken line to match the frontage of the black fortress ahead of them, thousands of troops moving with perfect symmetry, not a step out of place. Reserve units dressed their ranks, and behind them the Vanari sentinels plunged spare arrows into the dead earth. The twang of tested bow strings quivered in the air like the notes of some strange instrument. Thrumming through the lines of the Lumineth host came the fierce, static charge of woven magic. Their weapons gleamed like the first bold blaze of sunrise.

Tuareth stilled her mind, felt her breath settle. She reached out and touched her thoughts against the sunmetal of her wardens’ pikes. She felt the elements inside the metal contract and expand, combine and fall away. She felt the essence of the dust around her, the structure of the air, the energies that flowed and surged between each element of life. Although a high warden’s magical skills were nowhere near the level of the Alarith Temples, it was the easiest thing in the world for her to take a strand of that energy and weave it into new shapes, and to charge those shapes with all the force of light itself. Right across the army, the Lumineth’s weapons glowed with a golden heat.

That you should miss this, Carreth, my brother. The light of Hysh has come down to the underworlds, down to the darkest places in the realms…

She looked at Dae’annis and smiled. And then the gates of the fortress opened.

‘Close ranks! Close ranks!’ she screamed. ‘Form square!’ A haze of dust smothered her as the cavalry came on again. Blood gushed down her face from the cut in her scalp. Her helmet was a shattered ruin somewhere on the ground at her feet. She heard Dae’annis grunt as he swung his pike to her left, stabbing out with it and plucking one of the dead riders from its stinking steed. The skeletal figure came slipping down the shaft, gnashing its mismatched teeth, a mad glow in its green eyes. Tuareth snapped out with her sword and beheaded it, and Dae’annis flung the carcass away. Shadows and flame, the flash of blood. The dead riders charged in again, like a landslide sweeping all before them, hacking down with their scimitars, flinging bone-barbed spears deep into the Vanari lines. The horses – if they were horses – barged into the front rank, trampling aelves under their hooves, their riders stabbing in and out with their short swords.

In moments, the two armies had gone from wary appraisal into the hellish maelstrom of combat. The enemy had formed up in front of their fortress with all the calm precision of a parade: massive blocks of infantry, fifty deep at least; squadrons of skeletal horses; catapults that shimmered across the plain on creeping feet. Units of gigantic warriors with four arms and huge, gleaming falchions stood on their flanks. Their mages floated across the length of the field on waves of necromantic energy or picked their way between the ranks on bizarre walking platforms that scratched the ground with clawed feet. The two armies had stood there watching each other, appraising, judging, no more than five hundred yards apart. Then, as the Lumineth host readied itself to advance, the gates yawned wide once more and a great flood of cavalry came boiling out onto the plain, tearing off to the left, flocking like some dread murmuration into a lance of thundering armoured horse. It had crashed into the Lumineth flank like a thunderstorm, a billowing cloud of dust sweeping up in its wake, blinding the entire front as the enemy war machines began hurling their ammunition deep into the aelven host. Then all had been madness and death, the brutal press of hand-to-hand combat, the insane confusion of war.

The enemy horses now moved off, flowing around the aelves’ left flank and disappearing into the haze, just the terrible thunder of their hooves shaking the air around them. Tuareth risked a glance to her right and saw through the dust and sand that the Vanari square had collapsed. There were riders behind them and the enemy’s infantry were now crashing into their front.

‘Reform!’ she cried. ‘The line’s broken! Reverse wheel on the right flank!’

Leering skulls rose from the mist before her, grinning, hacking, pushing forward with their shields. She stabbed out with her sword, parried, cut, shearing off splinters of bone, hewing arms and skulls. They were being pushed back and her feet crunched dead bone underfoot, dead flesh from the aelves who had fallen in the first assault. She tripped, landed badly, her ankle twisting under her, raising her sword in a wild block as a spear point came stabbing down. She felt it plunge into her shoulder and screamed, her vision black – and then Dae’annis was there, sweeping his pike in a great arc over her, like bright lightning shattering the skeletons as they swamped over the front rank.

‘The whole regiment has fallen!’ he shouted as he pulled her to her feet.

‘Move back,’ she cried. ‘Link up with the regiments on our right. If we let ourselves get surrounded, we’re dead!’

How has it come to this? she thought. How have we misjudged them so badly?

Her left arm hung uselessly at her side, blood pouring from her shoulder. She pointed with her sword, screamed for the remaining soldiers to fall back and reform, but whether they heard her or not she couldn’t tell. She could barely see any survivors, just here and there the flash of sunmetal, the crackling blue stab of magic surging through the dust. For a moment it just seemed to be her and Dae’annis, huddled together in a sea of corpses – dead aelves, dismembered skeletons. Except, she realised, they weren’t skeletons, not really. She had seen the servants of Nagash before, the resurrected dead, but these warriors were different somehow. They were like weird constructs, things that from sheer habit may have taken the shape of men but were instead a grim assemblage of disparate bone-stuff. She had even heard them talking, their captains issuing orders in a harsh, clashing language just as the Lumineth officers issued their orders in turn.

‘What are these things?’ she muttered. ‘What have we done?’

Doubt crept along the borders of her thought, hungering in the darkness. She turned her mind against it. She touched her breastplate, where Senlui still glowed, untarnished.

Be swift as the wind, swift as light. Let light splinter the darkness and cast it aside.

More joined them, other wardens leaping the corpses and taking up position next to her, the great blue crests of their helmets tattered or streaked with blood. A dozen more came staggering through the dust, and then another ten. They presented arms, pikes bristling like the spines of some vicious beast. Tuareth intoned her spells, weaving her magics, charging the sunmetal with all the blazing light of Hysh. She could hear aelven voices far off to her right, where the centre of the host had taken up position. Some of them were still alive, it seemed. There was a sound in the air, high above the clash of steel and the thunder of hoofbeats, that reminded her of breaking glass. It was bone, she realised. Bone shattering under forceful blows, rendered into pieces by the interlocking fields of charged magic. The Realm-lords were still fighting, somewhere in that sea of dust.

‘We are all that remains of the left flank,’ Tuareth called out to her troops, her voice breaking with pain. ‘We are the last light in the darkness, and we need to hold this position, come what may. Sell your lives as dearly as you can, in the name of Teclis himself. For if we fall now, the entire host will be rolled up and destroyed. Do I need to remind you of your duty?’

‘No!’ two dozen voices cried back.

‘Will you let the light of Hysh die in this benighted place!’

‘No!’

Despite everything, despite the blood pouring down her face, her arm now numb beyond all repair, Tuareth smiled. She heard the tramp of marching feet, the rumble of hooves clashing over the plains, and she gripped her sword tight.

‘Here they come!’ Dae’annis shouted. He bared his teeth, crouched to receive the charge, the bright metal of his flared shoulder guards catching what light remained to gleam with purity and grace. Tuareth peered into the dust and saw the Bonereapers’ cavalry careering onwards, dark shapes looming in the haze. At their head rode an ornately armoured figure on a tusked steed, his skull capped with a crested helmet of gleaming bone, a tattered cloak snapping out from his skeletal shoulders. He shrieked something incomprehensible in a voice like the dry crackle of flames and lowered his scimitar. He pointed directly at Tuareth, the troop of dead steeds leaping the bodies that littered the ground ahead of their position, the sound of their hooves drowning out the world.

‘Hold!’ Tuareth screamed. ‘Hold the line!’

She tried to snatch the moonfire flask from her belt, but with her ruined arm she could merely scrabble at the clasp – and then the dead were on them, and the wardens were swept aside in a furious tangle of spears and shields, blood and dust and buckled armour.

Tuareth leapt right, thrusting with her sword, a jolt up to her elbow snatching the blade from her grip. She crashed to the ground, spat, rolled over, slithered down a pile of dead. Her forehead struck rock, sparking a white light behind her eyes. She heard a surge of water and realised it was the blood rushing in her ears. She saw a pike on the ground, spun it around without looking and tangled it in the legs of one of the dead horses as it crashed past, riderless, the great heap of bone thundering to the ground and cleaving the skull from its neck. She saw Dae’annis drifting through the mist, two other wardens with him, shouting something that she couldn’t hear. She tried to stand, fell, looked down to see a shard of bone stabbing out of her broken thigh. She tried to scream but the breath had died in her lungs.

A shadow fell across her.

The leader of the cavalry, the Bonereapers’ general, jewels throbbing with unlight in his crested helm, armour oily with a sick green glow. As if seeing it all in a dream, Tuareth watched him rear back on his steed, scimitar raised. The jaws of his skull stretched wide – as if the dead could laugh and found in the living only the simple stuff of cruel amusement.

The blade came down. Tuareth took the moonfire flask from her belt with her good hand. She whispered a prayer and threw it to the ground in front of her, and before the flames claimed her she seemed to see the light of Hysh expanding over the dead lands, washing her with its healing balm, reaching out and sweeping the corpse-things away and leaving in their place only this good, clean light – the last blessed glimpse she would ever have of her home realm, now gone from her for good.

Carreth… she thought – and then she thought no more.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Alexander Mokhov.

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