The grot peered at its handiwork with amused fascination, before fishing a vial from its basket and emptying the contents over its stinger-staff. Aelyn itched to slay the monstrous poisoner, but Morthan wasn’t stopping for anything and the crowd swept the grot away.

Aelyn’s shoulder hurt, her injured arm ached, and her mind churned with the constant terror of the Bad Moon leering down. She felt as though, if she could not escape its monstrous gaze soon, she might go mad. Instead, she kept moving. She wove around the fiercest knots of fighting and drove her knives into anything greenskinned that came too close. An arrow whipped over her shoulder – friend’s or foe’s, she didn’t see – and Aelyn felt keenly the lack of her longbow. Her comrades were retrieving her backup weapon, she reminded herself. She would have a bow in hand soon.

‘Providing any of us survives this long enough,’ she muttered, grimacing as a troggoth smashed out through a shopfront in a shower of stone and broken glass to swing its club through a knot of watchmen. Broken bodies flew through the air, the one survivor screaming in terror as a spore-sickened nobleman pounced on him and vomited across his face.

‘The sickness is still spreading!’ shouted Aelyn, spotting several more gibbering infected tearing their way through the crowd.

‘I know,’ replied Morthan. ‘We’ll regroup with the muster then put them all down.’

Another earth tremor rocked the ground. Something huge and shadowy ploughed along a neighbouring street amidst a chorus of screams. Aelyn privately wondered whether matters were already too far gone, but she kept moving. At this point, a determined fight back from a secure position seemed the city’s best bet. She tried not to wonder how they might even begin to banish the lunar monstrosity that filled the skies above them.

One problem at a time, she thought.

‘Where the hells are the Heav’ner Stormcasts I heard so much about?’ shouted Olt as they pushed through a mass of panicking city folk. ‘Seems like the sort of thing they might take an interest in?’

‘All off fighting their damned wars of conquest, just like most of our city militia!’ replied Morthan angrily. ‘I told Selvador he’d left us too weak. I damned well warned that old fool.’