Borik shook his head, struggling to understand the mangled words. His eyes darted around the room and he struggled to make them focus in the hope of spotting some means to escape his tormentors. He saw his armour, his bag and his guns strewn in an untidy heap a few yards away. They looked to have been thoroughly rifled, but still, if he could just reach them. In his addled state, Borik actually strained against his restraints before reality asserted itself.

Somewhere behind him he heard a door creak, then the thud of heavy footfalls getting closer. The grots backed away, their expressions filling with fearful caution. Borik’s eyes rolled as he tried to look around, tried to see what was coming.

A shadow fell over him. The metal chair groaned as something huge and heavy settled upon its headrest. Borik felt hot breath upon his scalp and smelled a rank stench of sweat and fungi and something deeper, colder and immeasurably older. He craned his head back and found himself staring up at a truly enormous troggoth. The brute was wearing a crude helm, its yellowed eyes peering at him from the shadows of its eye-pieces with dull hunger.

Borik grunted, and tried again to tug against his restraints. Again, he could barely move at all. He stared upwards, breathing fast and waiting for the thing to rip him from the metal seat and bite his head off in a single mouthful. Instead, the troggoth stepped ponderously aside to make way for a smaller figure who circled around to stand before Borik.

Only now did he realise that the grots hadn’t been backing away from the troggoth. They had been retreating in fear of this ghastly figure instead. It was grot, but like none Borik had ever seen. Tall and rangy, the greenskin stood wrapped in ragged black robes with crude Bad Moon glyphs worked into their material. It wore a crown of pale fungi that burrowed their roots into its skull, and held a staff atop which a huge moon-fungus glowed with nauseating light. In its other talon the grot held a shorter staff topped by a human skull, while the train of its robes was borne aloft by a pair of weird moon-faced squigs, who clutched the cloth in their fanged mouths.

Borik could stare only at the greenskin’s eyes, though. He saw cunning there – fierce, cruel intellect that studied him like a spiteful child studies a helpless insect. There was madness there too, Borik thought, sharp as a razor and every bit as deadly. This was surely the greenskins’ leader, nightmare royalty stepped from the pages of a children’s fae-tale to torment him.

The grot rapped its moon-staff against the ground, and its followers dropped to their knees. They bowed to their king and jabbered ‘Gloomspite! Da Gloomspite!’ over and over.