Then she took in the subtle shift in the Bad Moon’s ghastly visage and her blood froze in her veins. Its crater-eyes had constricted impossibly into narrow chasms. Its mountainous maw was twisted as though coughing, or retching.

‘Sigmar, no…’ she breathed, as the glittering lights swelled into roiling fireballs plummeting closer and closer. Her sharp aelven eyes picked out the shapes of jagged meteorites, mercilessly showing her the vast weight of loonstone hurtling down upon Draconium.

‘Fangs of the Bad Moon,’ croaked Borik. Across the square, fresh screams rose as soldiers pointed skywards and fleeting hopes of deliverance turned to panic.

The first rock struck far away across the city, ploughing through the distant towers of Rookswatch amidst eruptions of fire and shattered mortar. The structures had no time to topple, as the meteorite ­hammered into the ground and raised a roaring blast wave that snatched the towertops and blew them apart. Blazing lumps of stone and blackened bodies rained down for miles around.

Another rock struck closer, slamming into the slopes of Gallowhill and flattening a quarter-mile zone of buildings, streets and people in a heartbeat. Captain Morthan cried out as the proud silhouette of the distant watch blockhouse came apart amidst the devastation.

Another burning light consumed Aelyn’s focus, a blazing projectile that grew and grew above the square until the entire area was lit by an apocalyptic false dawn.

‘Get to cover!’ she yelled. She turned, grabbing Olt and Borik by their shoulders and urging them towards the sagging shopfront of a milliner’s on the edge of the square.

Fire blazed above them.

Their footsteps pounded the cobbles.

The cries of terrified city folk were drowned by the roar of the falling rock.

Then the impact. A blinding flash. A furious convulsion of air and ground, and Aelyn knew no more.

Across the city, near the southern edge of Docksflow, desperate eyes watched fires consume the skyline. Orlen Drell had scrambled from his barge before it was dragged below the waters and somehow, by the grace of Sigmar, he had made it through the bars of the river gate. He hadn’t wanted to attract the attention of the city watch, and so he had slunk from one shadowed doorway and draughty corner to the next, a half-drowned shadow indistinguishable from the other homeless vagrants who haunted the city’s poorest districts. His mind broken by the sights he had seen, Drell’s only thought had been to hide amidst his fellow humans, to seek what comfort he could beneath the city’s flickering lights. He had scavenged and stolen to survive, and for a few precious days he had believed he might be safe.