‘Isn’t he here already?’ croaked Bartiman. Then Aelyn saw Romilla walking leadenly down the steps, and in that instant, she knew. She felt a bleak sorrow well up inside her, threatening to overwhelm her composure, her sense, everything.

‘He’s gone, isn’t he?’ asked Aelyn.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Romilla.

Perhaps they would have said more. Perhaps there would have been tears, denial, even recrimination. But at that moment another shockwave struck, and with it came a terrible groaning sound that seemed to radiate from the very air itself. Aelyn staggered, feeling pressure crushing her down to her knees then vanishing as suddenly as it had come. Her ears popped, and a sharp headache blossomed behind one eye. She raised a finger to her nostrils and was unsurprised when it came away wet with blood.

‘What is happening?’ she asked.

‘Damnation,’ replied Romilla.

Then came the leprous light, spilling across the square like a false dawn as something emerged slowly from behind the flanks of the volcanoes that loomed over Draconium. Aelyn’s instincts screamed out a warning, and she felt suddenly as though she had woken from a deep sleep to find something monstrous standing over her bed, staring into her eyes. She felt an awful foetid touch spread over her skin as the pallid light found her, and as she turned slowly to stare skywards she already knew what she would see.

Vast, horrible eyes staring down, seeming to see straight into her soul. Tattered clouds scattering as though fleeing in horror from the lunar abomination that settled low and gibbous in the skies above. The jagged suggestion of fangs the size of mountains, set in a leering, pockmarked face whose sanity-blasting immensity dwarfed the city as an armoured warrior dwarfs an insect.

Aelyn beheld the monstrous celestial body as it rose. As its crushing malevolence bore down upon her she tried to scream, but her chest could not force the sound out.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

EMERGENCE

Aelyn was driven to her knees by the monstrous spectacle above her. The lambent immensity dominated half the sky. It filled the gap between the two volcanic peaks, blotting out the stars of the heavens with its sickly light. Its glow glinted from cobbles and walls suddenly slick with cloying moisture. With a desperate effort, Aelyn dragged her eyes away from the grotesque spectacle to look at her comrades.

‘What in Sigmar’s name…’ Romilla managed to gasp. The priest’s eyes bulged with horror as she stared skywards, both hands wrapped around her hammer talisman so tightly that her knuckles were white.

‘The Moonshadow brings death,’ whispered Eleanora.