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The Resolute – Extract

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The Resolute

Josh Reynolds

The rotling roared out a challenge and Felyndael, Guardian of the Waning Light, turned to meet it. They always sought to challenge him. It was not bravery, he thought, so much as hunger. Hunger for challenge, hunger for conquest… hunger for death. They were like the roots of a blighted tree, still stretching for nourishment even though the trunk was dead. They belonged dead, but could not die. He gestured contemptuously, and the rotling lumbered towards him.

Around him, his fellow tree-revenants fought with other rotlings, leaping and slashing among the clumsy plague-lovers. Scarred Caradrael bisected a bloated warrior from crown to groin as lithe Yvael cut the sagging throats of three with a single blow. Daemonic ichor splashed across the wondrous curved structures of the reed-city of Gramin as the rotlings stumbled and died beneath the blades of his twenty-strong kin-band.

Felyndael felt a surge of satisfaction as his warriors fought with their customary flowing grace. They flickered in and out of sight, lunging and striking at their opponents from every direction at once. They were veterans of the withering years, and could easily dispatch three times their number in open combat.

He turned his attention back to his challenger as the brute, bulbous and clad in stinking furs and pitted metal, came at him in a clumsy rush, roaring out the name of its foul god. It seared the air with its murk. An axe swept down, and Moonsorrow rose to meet it. The ancient blade hummed with strength and struck with the force of an avalanche. The jagged blade of the axe shivered apart. The rotling reeled back, pustule-dotted jaw working in shock beneath the rim of its foetid helmet. Flabby paws waved in hapless defiance as Felyndael darted forwards, quick as the wind.

Moonsorrow screamed in joy as it pierced the noisome bulk. Flesh, muscle and bone parted like smoke before the bite of the sword. The rotling hunched forward with a shrill wheeze, clawing helplessly at Felyndael’s bark-clad arms. Wriggling worms spilled from its mouth and pattered to the ground as its stinking ichor gushed from the wound.

Ably done, noble one, Yvael thought, her compliment pulsing through Felyndael’s mind as he pulled Moonsorrow free of the rotling’s cancerous body. He let the creature sag to the ground and looked around.

I am not alone in that, my sister, Felyndael thought. Around him, his tree-revenants finished off the last of the dead thing’s companions, killing the bellowing brutes with graceful savagery. The rotlings had become separated from the flow of the horde now occupying the circular streets of Gramin, and thus were easy prey for him and his kin-band as they erupted from the spirit paths close to the heart of the city.

The reed-city was as much a thing of Ghyran as Felyndael and his warriors. Alarielle’s magics had constructed it in ages past. She had drawn up the reeds that grew thick and wild in the shallows of Verdant Bay and woven them together into a great metropolis of canals, bridges and high, sweeping arches, spreading outwards from the Basilica of Reeds at Gramin’s heart. All as a gift for the mortals who had sworn to care for that which she had entrusted to them in ages past – a clutch of slumbering soulpods.

It was a duty that the citizens of Gramin had upheld until the final days of the withering years, when the rotlings had come from the sea. Their plague ships had clustered like maggots along the shore, befouling the green waters of the lagoon, kept pure until then by the budding soulpods. The raiders swept through the city with fire and axe, killing or enslaving all who inhabited it.

Felyndael’s grip on his sword tightened at the thought. Though they had not been of his soil, the mortals had been caretakers, even as the sylvaneth were. They had not deserved such a fate, and he wished that he had been there. Perhaps– no. The season was done, and the cycle continued. Though his heartwood cried out for vengeance for the atrocities of the past, his task now was more important than simple slaughter.

The raiders had left the city itself – and that which even now slumbered beneath it – untouched, after scouring it of all mortal life. Perhaps they had deemed it unimportant, or indefensible. Regardless, they had retreated to the great sargasso, where they had raised foul citadels upon the floating weeds and left the reed-city and its hidden treasure to sit silent and undisturbed.

Until now. Until Alarielle had awoken, and her scream had set the skies to burning and the winds to roaring. As the echoes of that scream spread throughout Ghyran, the rotlings had returned in their scabrous galleys, stinking of ruin, and their return endangered the slumbering grove of hidden soulpods. Now the city shuddered in the grip of a malaise, and the waters beneath screamed without ceasing.

Moonsorrow trembled sympathetically in his grasp. He could feel the ghost of the mountain for which the sword was named stir within the blade. A sorrowful weight, a millennium of tragedy, condensed and compacted into the weapon he now held. A burden and an honour both. It sang to him sometimes, when the moonlight struck the blade just so, and the din of battle had faded.

But it was not singing now. Even if it had been, Felyndael could hear but one song – the war-song, the song of the reaping. Alarielle’s voice resounded through him, branch and root, summoning him, driving him to war. It had been centuries since he had last heard the Everqueen’s voice. It was like a gale wind, ripsawing through the realmroots. She sang and screamed and whispered all at once, crying out in wordless command.

It was a command he had no difficulty obeying. Indeed, he had never stopped fighting. Felyndael of the Fading Light had never set aside his sword, had never set down roots or shrunk into the dark and quiet like many of the others. He had fought without ceasing since the first rotling had set ragged claw on the good soil of Ghyran. And he would not stop until the last of them were mulch beneath his feet. He would not stop until they had been punished in full for their crimes against life itself.

The sword hummed in his grip, the voice of the mountain murmuring to him. Calming him, settling its weight upon the rage that rose up within him like a wildfire, snuffing it. But not for long, he suspected. It grew more difficult to ignore with every turn of the seasons. The harder he fought, the harder it became to do anything but fight.

He had become a hollow thing, burned black and made brittle by war. But he would serve until his roots shrank and his branches cracked. Calmer now, Felyndael examined the body at his feet. Why had the rotlings come back? The servants of Chaos always sought to destroy the soulpods, when they knew of them. But that was not the case here. He would have sensed it if the soulpods were in any direct danger. Something else was going on.

One of his warriors, Lathrael, stretched out her hand. The air is wrong here, she thought. Her words pulsed gravely through the connection that bound them.

It is sour, Caradrael the Scarred thought, with the mental equivalent of a shrug. Like everywhere the rotlings infest. And so? Caradrael’s bark had been kissed by fire long ago, and it had made him short-tempered. Let us kill them, and cleanse this place.

Their numbers are great, Yvael thought.

Then our vengeance will be all the greater. Caradrael’s thought was the hiss of a slashing branch.

No. Lathrael is right. It is different, Felyndael thought. Like the calm before a storm. It trembles, like a thing afraid. Wait – something is–

The air shuddered as unseen bells tolled. The sound of it was every axe-thud, every root-snap and crackle of flame. It was the sound of bark sloughing, curling, decaying and the scream of dry grass in the burgeoning. Felyndael nearly dropped Moonsorrow as he clutched at his head. The others were similarly afflicted by the droning reverberation.

As the tree-revenants recovered their wits, horns brayed in the distance, and drums thudded. The rotlings were agitated. But not, Felyndael thought, by his kin-band. Something else had come to Gramin. Come, brothers and sisters, he thought. Let us see what has our foes so excited.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in The Legends of the Age of Sigmar: Sylvaneth in Great Britain in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Antonio Luis.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-955-2

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