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Monsters – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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MONSTERS

by Noah Van Nguyen

Yndrasta was coming in too fast.

Through gusts of wind and gouts of rain, the Shyishan hill swelled beneath her. She could make out a tor of dusk-grey stone, a baleful realmgate perched atop it. A midnight-black battle line of Stormcast Eternals held back the horrors pouring from the portal’s dismal spell-light. Watching them was like watching a dark fist grip wine from a spilt cask. The gibbering tide leaked through the battle line’s fingers, running over its hands.

Yndrasta grimaced. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer needed her. They needed her now.

She tucked her wings, tightened her approach, ignoring her speed. Wind buffeted her. Rain pelted her sigmarite warplate like barbarian arrows. Off her flank, the Knight-Venator and his flight of Prosecutors chased to keep up. They were Anvils of the Heldenhammer, too, dark-hearted and sombre. Stormcast like Yndrasta but only half-willing allies, pulled into her hunt by the force of her will, by the terrible gravity of her legend. They did not fear Yndrasta. For Stormcasts never feared.

But they were wary.

Before the realmgate, through slashes of rain, a Lord of Change leered. The capricious greater daemon had never been christened in mortal syllables. The shamans called it only the Anomia, the nameless one. Even the Anvils had been reluctant to face the soul-eater’s tricks.

To Yndrasta, it was only prey. She was the slayer.

She dived. Her allies soared behind her and their fusillade picked up. Thrice-blessed arrows and stormcall javelins cracked like lightning into the crag-crowded hilltop, hammering back the daemonic tide. Gabbling Pink Horrors split asunder. Each ruined half morphed into a more diminutive blue daemon, weeping and morose. Then those were obliterated, and then again the things which their deaths spawned.

Ungiving, the Anvils held the hill’s brow. They chanted Yndrasta’s name, awaiting her arrival. She wondered if they relished the kill as she did. She wondered if it made their hearts pulse and their blood race.

Shyish bulged closer. Behind the Anomia, the baleful realmgate’s components floated in eerie patterns. Soon it would activate. Unless Yndrasta killed the Anomia first, the creature would escape.

A bolt of sorcerous flame streamed just past her shoulder, scorching her pinions. An ice-white flash and the crack of thunder told her one of the Prosecutors had not made it. Yndrasta hardly noticed. The kill. There was only the kill.

The Anomia screeched. Its clawed arms began unfolding in concentric shapes. Its vulture-features hardened into scabrous corners, then swirled into a storm of kaleidoscopic light. Rain-soaked plumage and mottled flesh inflated into recursive bubbles. What emerged from the mutative storm was sickening and imponderable. Wings, upon wings. Eyes, upon eyes. Discs of bronze and purposeless flame. The sight was ineffable, profound…

And pathetic. The Anomia was afraid. To protect itself, the daemon had abandoned its physical form. Now it was harmless and invulnerable.

But invulnerability wouldn’t stop Yndrasta. She clenched her jaw, sheered left, barely controlling her descent. This gale reeked of malign magic, a cheap and clever defence. She wouldn’t get another pass. She wouldn’t make it–

She landed, hard. The maddening visage of the Anomia glared down at her from its place on the tor. Yndrasta didn’t stop to admire the abomination. Elegant, efficient, she hefted her holy spear, Thengavar, to her shoulder. She transferred the momentum from her reckless landing into a run up, recruiting every muscle in her body into the coming throw. Force passed up the axis of her, from her big toes through her spine to the tips of her fingers. Yndrasta heard the sound of her breath, felt the wind whip it from her lungs; she smelled the Shyishan petrichor in the rain, reeking of death, and relished its taste on her lips.

From the Stormcast battle line, orders were given to withdraw. The warriors pounded back, step by step, making way, but not for the daemons. They chanted Yndrasta’s many epithets, awaited her killing blow.

And Yndrasta’s throw was perfect. Thengavar, sister-in-steel to the God-King’s own Ghal Maraz, flew. The glistering weapon whistled through the storm, shrinking into the Anomia’s swirling mass, penetrating into…

Into its very…

Her eyes hollow, her shoulders heaving, Yndrasta scanned the Anomia’s spectral mass. Thengavar had disappeared. It did not return. She had… missed.

Or Thengavar had missed? The concept felt so unreal Yndrasta wasn’t even sure how to express it. She drew her runeblade. There would be a time to contemplate the impossibility of what had just happened.

First, the Anomia. She was the slayer.

Yndrasta roared and charged the maddening monstrosity upon the dais. But the ground folded beneath her, and she stumbled. Her wings flapped, but it was like flying through aether. The air was gone, sucked from the hilltop as if by bellows. A spell-trap, Yndrasta realised. Another cheap sorcerer’s trick. But it had its effect, and Yndrasta tumbled into the earthen maw which opened beneath her. She plummeted.

Somewhere far above her, a sick thing laughed.

When the air finally returned, it was useless. Yndrasta barely slowed her descent with a well-timed pulse of her wings. She crashed hard into a pool. Metal clanged on stone. Water doused her. She felt ill, unable to breathe, and ripped the sigmarite bevor from her warplate. She let it dangle, gasped. The air was cool, crisp. She was alive. Alive…

And nowhere near her quarry.

Yndrasta shouted until she went hoarse. She punched the water’s surface, soaking herself again. She had been so close. Right there, on the verge!

Water dripping from her drenched features, Yndrasta huffed and quieted, finding some pale source of calmness within her. It was a wretched, futile thing. She felt humiliated. Like a hole had been bored through the core of her and she could not cover it up. She ran her mind over those sanity-curdling moments. The Anomia, that monstrosity of flame and wings and geometrically unsound shapes. The universe folding upon itself within the baleful realmgate. Thengavar disappearing, as if it had never even been thrown.

She shook her head. The recollections made her feel as if her soul had begun to run. Now she was compromised, half warped…

That feeling would fade. So would the humiliation. But Thengavar… Yndrasta batted at the water again. The shaman court had promised Thengavar could pierce the Anomia’s wards. Either they were lying or they had been fooled. The fault was not hers. Yndrasta was not perfect, not by any stretch, but she had thrown her spear true. Thengavar did not miss.

A black mirror of knee-deep water pooled around her. The mere rippled with Yndrasta’s silvered reflection. She glared at the misshapen image of herself, wondering about what she saw. A long blade of silver hair, shaved temples. Her face, snow-pale, high-cheeked. A pair of ugly scars crossing one eye from brow to jawline.

She had been broken. So many times.

So what? This was far from over. Failure changed nothing. Yndrasta had come to Shyish to slay the Anomia, and she would not leave until that was done. The kill vitalised her. It was all she lived for.

Her eyes wandered. She was in some kind of miraculous grotto beneath the ground, untouched by war despite the carnage above. The clamour of the battle on the hill echoed here, far below. She must return, lest the Anvils sell their lives for nothing. The Shyishan Stormhost made for a gloomy lot, and Yndrasta wouldn’t give them more reason to pine over their dark fates and Reforged souls, or to spread more rumours of her heartlessness among the Stormcast. She was cruel, yes. But not needlessly so.

Yndrasta flexed her wings, preparing to leave, but something stayed her. A feeling. She glanced around. A tree loomed over the water. An ancient willow, its fronds stroking the surface of the void-black pool. Dead light gleamed beyond its whips of foliage, illuminating strange pixies in the grotto’s air.

Yndrasta wrinkled her nose. This place smelled… unusual. Of death. And life everlasting, like the sterile corridors of Sigmaron’s Soul Mills. And roasted meat.

‘Sigmar?’ spoke a stranger, his voice gravelly from disuse.

Yndrasta turned, her armour creaking with her gentle movement. Beneath the wizened willow, a hulking man-thing hunkered over a guttering flame. He was a big boar of a mortal, like an ogor-son, all muscle and just enough fat to provide protection from a good blade. Beside him, a strutted-up pot straddled a small fire like a Khainite cauldron in miniature.

The mortal stepped from the darkness, glaring. A tuft of braided hair dangled from his pate to his chest, black as the day the realms would die. A thick moustache weighed down his mouth, each end hanging almost to his hips, like reins on a dracoth’s bit. And his skin: it was hardened and black like coal, like the charred flesh of the vermin he roasted on a bent spit beside his pot. The rocky char had worn away in some places. In the palms of his hands, the folds of his joints. Those crannies shone like burnished bronze. But what held Yndrasta’s attention were his eyes. Smouldering red gems, enchanted with formidable magic.

Yndrasta tensed. Something deep within her, something immutable and untouched by her Reforgings, detected a threat. This mortal was dangerous.

He leaned in. His cliff-wide brow smoothed. ‘You’re not Sigmar.’

‘I am Yndrasta.’ Her voice was husky, overused. ‘I am Sigmar’s huntress and slayer. Who are you?’

The mortal’s ruby-eyes lifted. He glanced to the fleshy trunk of the great willow. There, propped up against the tree, a double-headed battle-axe resplendent with power. Yndrasta could feel the pulse of its war-heart beating in her breast. She could taste its marvellous heat on the air. That was a weapon of Azyr if ever she had seen one.

The mortal’s eyes returned to her.

Yndrasta raised her finger. ‘Don’t.’

The man-thing tumbled towards the axe like an avalanche.

Yndrasta ripped her wings through the air. She lurched up, sailing through the willow fronds, and landed gracefully between the stranger and his weapon.

He staggered to a halt. Yndrasta’s drawn sword prodded into his neck, just beneath those dracoth reins. The blade’s tip rasped against his coal-black skin. Beside them, the battle-axe’s presence felt like a great weight. Lift it, and the world might keel over on its side, and they’d both slide off to the bottom of the universe.

‘Why would Sigmar come here?’ Yndrasta said.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited - Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Thomas Elliot.

Monsters © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Monsters, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-716-9

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