When Romilla opened her eyes and found herself still alive, she wept with gratitude. Her silent tears became a flood when she found Eleanora lived too. Both of them were a mess, certainly, covered with cuts and bruises. Her robes were torn and fire-blackened, and her back was a raw mass of pain that she knew must be burns. Her ears rang, and she felt as though her wits had been blasted from her skull.

It didn’t matter. They lived.

A sudden shock of realisation caused Romilla to grab for the ragged hem of her cloak and try to throw it over Eleanora’s prone form: they were lying out in the open, patches of their skin exposed to the skies above! Yet as Romilla looked upwards and her eyes at last managed to focus, a sense of wonderment stole over her.

It was gone. The Bad Moon was gone, replaced by straggling clouds and the last amber glow of evening.

They lay upon a spongy and disgusting mass of fungus, tangled amidst a heap of wreckage, of twisted metal and shattered stones and a forest of sundered pipes, ruptured machinery and the black-burned husks of giant spiders. The ruins of the pipehouse loomed over them, thick smoke rising in a billowing plume from its shattered glass roof.

‘We’re… alive?’ asked Eleanora in a faltering voice, wide-eyed with bewilderment.

‘The grace of Sigmar, my girl! Oh, thank the God-King, we’re saved by the grace of Sigmar,’ Romilla replied.

‘We must have been ejected through the rent by the blast wave,’ said Eleanora, staggering to her feet and looking around at the wreckage surrounding them. ‘We were near the end of the stanchion… Yes, look at the damage to the building’s flank, we were caught in the blast cone and blown clear amidst a bow-wave of detritus. Romilla, the chances of our escape… if we had been a mere foot to either side, or a little further from the hole…We would have burned…’

‘You got it just right, as I knew you would,’ said Romilla with a weary smile.

Eleanora was still frowning furiously, counting on her fingers and looking from the building’s wall to the fungal pulp in which she stood. She shook her head, and Romilla knew that the engineer was reasoning out their fortunate escape, calculating every angle, trajectory and whatever other technical details helped her to rationalise what had occurred.

‘We must have landed atop one of the greenskins’ fungal outcroppings. That at least does not seem so unreasonable. I mean, they sprout everywhere the light of–’

Eleanora stopped. She looked up. She made a choking sound and put one hand to her mouth.

Romilla nodded. ‘It’s gone,’ she said simply.

‘We did it,’ said Eleanora.

Romilla shook her head, and wrapped her arms around Eleanora in a tight hug. They held each other and sobbed, all the terror and horror and pain flooding out of them in a tide.