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Force of Personality – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Force of Personality

David Guymer

The first forged of the Stormcast Eternals are in many ways more human than those who came after. We can laugh, enjoy mortal company, recall bits and pieces of our former lives. Perhaps this is something that the God-King would rather I not share, but I tell you here because, with that knowledge in mind, events in Nemisuvik might be taken as further evidence of my place in Azyr’s firmament of heroes. I was still human enough to know fear…

I stood bestride the algae-coated gabion wall of Nemisuvik, proud as you like, getting battered by the elements of the Ghurite Stormwilds as though I were the amethyst-and-gold figurehead of an implausibly massive sail ship. Saltwater steam and brimstone ash stuck my hair to my face and made my tattoos glisten. A cloak of bearskin clung to my shoulders like a man half drowned as I shook my halberd defiantly at the sky. A skull the size of a chariot dropped out of it, horned and baleful. It screamed with the passage of wind through its gaping eye sockets and mouth, and smacked into the ocean about twenty feet out, dousing its fiery cargo and spraying me with sulphurous brine.

‘How do you keep on missing?’ I bellowed across the steaming ocean as the missile sank. ‘What can I do to make it easier? Should I light a fire? Wave a flag?’

More skulls wailed overhead like comets, invisible but for the daemonic glow of eyes and grins that burned through the occluding mists of the pontoon city. Fire mushroomed in the wet haze.

‘You couldn’t hit Azyrheim from the top of the Celestial Stair!’

Let us just say that we don’t all deal with fear in the same way.

Artillery.

Does it invoke the same dread in you that it does in me? Even thinking back on it now I can feel my heart beat faster. No? Let me say it again.

Artillery.

It was not war as I had been raised to. I didn’t know my past as fully then as I do now, but any fool could intuit that I had been a simple man. I was a child of the Eternal Winterlands of Azyr. On its frozen battlefields, we hit one another with rocks. If we were feeling spectacularly creative we would throw the rocks. A man there rose and fell by his own stamina and courage. Luck played a part, I suppose, as it always must. But a warrior earned his luck as he did the favour of his gods, with recklessness in battle and wantonness off it. Heroes were not splattered by faceless engineers from a mile away.

Perhaps dread was too timid a word for what I felt as I watched hellish artillery rain down.

It was a tension that would not pass. It was the feeling of endlessly filling your mouth with ale, but never being able to swallow – my guts were knotted, my mind galloping wild, and my beard was wet. The instincts I had honed on those simpler battlefields against the axe-throw, the spear-thrust, the frost-sabre cat, were of no use here.

I drew a deep breath, steadying myself internally.

‘What are you, an acolyte of Tzeentch?’ I bawled. ‘No, say what you like about the followers of the Twisting Path but they can aim! Anchor a little nearer next time, and maybe you’ll have half a chance of hitting something.’

The siege of Nemisuvik was one of the first of its kind in the Realmgate Wars. The reason for that was simple – when Sigmar’s storm broke over the Age of Blood, those of us in the vanguard found precious little left worth defending. That’s what a few hundred years under the dominion of Khorne will do to a place. In later days, it came to be known as the Thousand Day Siege. Whether it really lasted as long as that I never did know. I hadn’t been there for the start. The city’s own siege engines and the wild beasts of the Stormwilds had been enough to hold the foe at bay. It was only when the enemy’s catapults had managed to start hitting the walls from beyond the Nemesians’ range that Sigmar had heard the city’s prayers and cast me down to shore up its defences. It hadn’t quite worked out the way either of us had expected. The enemy never showed any interest in taking the city by strength of arms, intent instead on demolishing it from afar.

Two months I spent, waiting for that invasion, and in that time I never once laid eyes on my opponent.

Blackjaw was his name, a bloodreaver of whom I knew surprisingly little. Normally, champions of the Blood God tended towards bombastic displays and strutting about as though they had personally invented war. But Blackjaw was different. He had instead raised himself a daemon fleet and obliterated places like Nemisuvik without ever showing his no-doubt-ugly face.

It is said that in the underworlds of Shyish there exists a hell for every culture in the Mortal Realms. This one, I was starting to feel, was mine.

‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater! Do you–’

Then something hit me from behind. It turned out to be the head of a small, lightly braised fish, but I had wound myself into such a state of tension that I spun around with a roar, my halberd raised.

Akbu grinned at me from behind a mask of rubbing fat, his dark face hemmed in by a leather helmet and a hugely thick leather coat. He was flicking fish scales from his hands, graciously nodding to his warrior band as they handed him coin.

‘What…?’ I forced my arm to relax enough to lower my halberd. Akbu’s expression did not alter in the least.

‘I bet that I could make you turn around.’

‘You do not bait the Bear-Eater, friend. You are likely to lose an arm.’

‘Then I would be the one out of pocket. And your face would be very red, I think.’

Now, I have fought alongside Stormcast Eternals of every Striking. I have fought with duardin, greenskins, even the undead, but I have never stood on a wall with warriors as cheerfully stoic as the maorai, the professional warrior class of Nemisuvik. Give them a duty that would force them to forsake a meal or cheat them at dice and they would scream and rage as though you had sold their firstborn to a Verminlord. But ask them to stand on a sea wall while the sky falls in, week after week, and no masque of Slaanesh could have ever looked happier. They were irreverent, turned up on the wall as it suited them, and fought in iconoclastic formations based on the skins they wore and the beasts whose horns and fangs made their weapons. They didn’t give these groupings names. They probably would have been bemused by the idea, and in truth they functioned more like fractious extended kin-groups than the Freeguild regiments we know and love today. To me, though, they were the Allopex Knife-Throwers, the Eviscerark Spears, the Razorclam Half-Swords. Their insouciance under pressure almost made me ashamed of my increasingly manic acts of bravado.

‘Moha bet five shells that you would fall in,’ said Akbu, conversationally, as another skull screamed over our heads, smashing into the built-up areas of the pontoons in a gout of flame. The maorai craned his neck to pick out a woman with a face like a salted chop and leaning on a pole arm of sharpened coral. ‘You are an imp squid, Moha, always squirting your coin into the ocean. The Castle Lord Hamilcar,’ I had long given up trying to make the Nemesians say Lord-Castellant, and here Akbu bent stiffly to slap his thigh, ‘he has legs like limpet stalks.’

I was assuming this was a higher compliment than it sounded.

I looked back over my shoulder to where the waves crashed against the gabion blocks. Rocks and shells had been stuffed into iron baskets, red with rust and seaweed, built into a perimeter wall on a colossal scale. Kelp fronds and accumulated driftwood bobbed with the waves. It was curiously inviting. I sighed, and for a moment the shrieks of the artillery ships, the crackle of the burning city, the endless jibes of the maorai were all sucked into the lap of the waves.

I could just hurl myself in and swim out to Blackjaw’s flagship, or die in the attempt. That, at least, would be an end that the Nemesians would speak about for a hundred years.

Had I been entirely myself then I probably would have done it, too. At the very least I would have loudly made the suggestion, and then laughed it off as the maorai talked me down, but my heart wasn’t in it. For all the soaring bellicosity of my highs, I was as prone to crushing lows from which even Korghos Khul with a ribbon around his neck would struggle to rouse me. These bouts were rare, thank Sigmar, and tended to pass swiftly.

I could feel one tightening around my skull as we spoke.

I jumped down from the battlements and onto the walkway. ‘I’m going to get some sleep.’

That a warrior, even a nominal commander such as myself, should just decide to leave his post for an hour or two struck no one as grounds for complaint. They were maorai. They took orders from no one and did as they pleased.

‘Good idea,’ said Akbu. ‘If anything will make Blackjaw properly attack the wall then it will be the sight of your back.’

I smiled, not entirely faking it. ‘I’d show him my arse if I thought it would help.’

Akbu and his warrior band burst with sudden laughter, for nothing tickles the outrageously well-wrapped Nemesians like an exposed body part.

With that, I left them to it. I tried not to feel too bad about it. I was just as capable of being blown to pieces by artillery fire from the pontoons as I was on the gabion-walls.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Gods & Mortals in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jake Murray.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-611-1

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