Well met, sons and daughters of chaos! Yer boy Cali hasn't forgotten about Relics of Their Forefathers, but I'd like to clear my head and take a detour with this here other Warhammer Fantasy story. While Relics is more of a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign, this one will function a bit more like a series of Fantasy Battle games. It's set roughly around "The End Times" (seriously, who wants Warhammer to end like that? Pfft.). Dear readers, hope you enjoy the mayhem and madness as chaos is at work!
CONTENT WARNING: This opening chapter gets a little morbid in just about every way.
Chapter 1: Daggers Under Morrslieb
Leuchtfeuer Hill Jade College
Five Leagues South of of Marienburg
The College watchman had just laid his flaming matchstick into the churchwarden pipe that hung from his lips – nigh near synchronized with the sun that had just set. Officially, it was against the rules to smoke on shifts, but even the menial activities of the Jade Wizards he protected were far more hardily enforced. Flicking the match onto a nearby anthill, he was ready to pace along the base of the wall for what was likely the fiftieth time that night. As long as he was able to inhale burnt tobacco, imported from the Moot, he'd be content in a den full of swamp trolls.
He chuffed another drag off of his pipe, before picking the spear he had propped up on the wall and resuming his patrol. The moon of Morrslieb's terrible emerald glow had begun to feast on the darkness around him. He always hated patrolling under such circumstances, as he was usually a day shifter. Since the man he replaced built up a good case of the runs, he was stuck on nightwatch. In fact, due to the string of hangovers and sicknesses after the feast of Galliger's Eve.
It's not like it mattered. In two hours, he'd be likely be passing down eleven shillings to share a bed with Rita in the brothel by the quarry. It had been a month and a fortnight since he visited that venue, and he had mostly been saving up his salary to refurnish his flat in the townhouse he resided in.
The importance of the do-to-list etched into the watchman's mind, visiting the grocer as well as having another argument with the college watch's quartermaster not being excluded – were put to an eternal halt shortly after he gazed to his right, the alley between the small taproom next to the dry goods store being inhabited by a bevy of six or so shadowy figures, with tall hoods and terrible glints from the blades they held.
The churchwarden pipe fell from his mouth. "What in the foul hell-" The watchman cursed, reaching for the whistle that hung from his breast pocket. From behind him, his face was brutishly seized by a pale hand, his head was lugged backward, and the blood that ran through his jugulars was now taking a detour outside of his body, thanks to the serrated stiletto that his attacker held in his dominant hand. The robed man who had arranged the watchman's fate ran towards the alley, joining the others as they crept through the terrible night. The sentry held mute witness as a neat trail of blood soaked from the white ruff around his collar, down to his knees, as he fell on his rear, gurgling and finally laying his back to die. Many of his fellows in the watch that night would share an identical fate.
Like dominos, the guards that ensured the Jade College's security in Leuchtfeuer, were ambushed, having their throats slit by daggers, or decapitated by billhooks as they slept against their halberds or paid a fundamental lack of attention.
The acting captain of the guard was buckling his belt as he was departing from one of the privies near the exterior of the small arboretum. A hatchet flew from the darkness near the shrine of manaan, the guard looking up and screaming briefly before the head of the axe pierced his green dyed studded leather jerkin and intruded into his chest cavity through his sternum, the weight of the weapon knocking him down, and he fell with a thud, eyes bulging like saucers. A cloaked man in purple robes dashed toward him from the darkness, before he yanked the hatchet from the meat of the captain and made sure he would stay down with a gruesome blow to the forehead.
"Ha!" The apprentice mage cackled with a handful of playing cards, laying down a seven high straight. The two other magi who sat at the dormitory table shaking their heads and massaging their faces in humiliation over the weak hands they were dealt. The aforementioned apprentice's hopes for victory had subsided when she noticed the fourth apprentice warping one of his cheeks with an impish smirk.
"I think I love this game as much as you do." He rested his hand on the table, two aces over three eights.
"Fuck you, Dodge." One of the apprentices cackled. "Well, looks like we're buying this arse-faced card shark extra rolls in the canteen."
"Well deserved." Dodge huffed. "We could go for round three."
"Nah." The lady apprentice shook her head. "I think I'd rather not see you get fatter than you actually are-"
The stain glass windows of the dormitory exploded in fire, each of the residents diving around or under the table. "What the hell?!"
"Is it those religious fanatics again?! The sigmarites?!"
"Look out!"
The windows sills and edges were caked with a ring of fire, making it look like some sort of terrible portal to hell. Another firebomb fashioned from a bottle of cheap wine hurled through it and landed inside, its flames catching two of the students and setting their robes alight, screaming ensuing.
The herd that was the watch had been more or less liquidated by the attackers, leaving the robed predators to their own sinister volitions as they burst through the college doors and residences, killing many in their beds. Fearless dogs were cut down defending their owners without hesitation, and two commoner women who inhabited the college town were seized and raped by the robed attackers.
The alderman of the village's working folk was just about finished eating a late dinner, the last bits of ham and beans on the lead plate lying dormant as he stood up from his table and looked upon the commotion outside. The window shattered as the bloodied corpse of his neighbor's ten year old son was thrown through it, landing and rolling at his feet. He yelled and leaped toward the coat rack near the front door, grabbing his pair of pistols hidden under a scarf. His wife ran down the steps, facing him. "Etan! What's happening?! Is it a raid?! Are the greenskins-" She looked down at the dead boy, and was so terrified and in utter shock that her tongue pressed like a vice into the roof of her mouth, preventing her from letting out a scream that would have shredded the trees in an entire forest.
"Get back upstairs! NOW!" He screamed at the top of his lungs before he had just barely dodged a cloaked man who dove through the window feet first in an attempt to drop-kick him, and he croaked as he landed on the wooden floor. The alderman pulled back the hammer of the pistol and shot the intruder through his hood before he could stand back up, the contents within his skull splattering onto the floor around his head.
He grabbed his wife by her shoulder with the intention of ascending the stairs and barricading within the master bedchamber; a hastily put together plan, but the only one he could think of. The house was now being pelted with firebombs, and the west wall of it was almost entirely drenched in flames, beams and boards already starting to creak. Before he could reach the steps, the window near it shattered as two figures in purple robes leaped through. The alderman's wife was screaming in an almost feral pitch and tone as they advanced and chased them a short distance through the study. The second pistol discharged in the alderman's hand as he pulled the trigger, one of the attackers nearly juking out of the way, the pistol ball lobbing off the ring and pinky finger of his hand.
The other intruder picked up a clay vase from a corner and tossed it toward them, and it impacted and burst over the alderman's cheek and knocked him back. One of the cultists sprinted and grabbed the screaming lady of the house by her hair, and she clawed at his face, one of her fingers poking him harsly in the eye, and he let out a sharp, pained grunt in response. He then violently pushed her on the ground and began hacking her with his billhook cruelly and relentlessly, the woman screaming as her blood dashed and painted the walls.
The alderman returned to his feet but was soon grabbed by the man whom he just shot in the hand, and pushed into the wall. The attacker had begun unfastening his robes, the alderman attempting to flee but kicked back into the corner he was in. The robed man threw his cloak aside, standing naked before him. His body had all matter of tattoos, mostly text from a language that was completely foreign to the alderman, but it sent chills through his spine to even look at. A symbol of a spiked wheel was etched into his thorax. His hair was cropped, and apart from his terrifying psychotic grin, nothing was out of the ordinary with his facial features; a woman would have swooned over it.
The now nude man, grabbed the alderman by his throat and kept him locked in the corner as he cut open the alderman's cotton doublet. "You know the saying, ser?"
"W-what?"
"Blood."
"Why-"
"Blood."
The alderman stammered, confused.
The man hissed. "Blood for the Blood God." The alderman's chest was pierced and carved with a wide Tilean cinquedea dagger, his chest cavity opened, as if surgically. The cords connected to his heart were sliced as the alderman screamed, the tattooed attacker grasping the wheezing heart within his chest, biting into it and consuming it savagely as the dying alderman witnessed it in unimaginable horror.
"First this village." The man whispered through teeth and lips, wet with the taste of the alderman's blood. "Then Marienburg. A long awaited end to a city that has outstayed its welcome upon this wretched world!"