It had rampaged through ruined corridors and echoing chambers, and as it had come across knots of shocked townsfolk it had torn into them like a bladed hurricane. All the time its flesh ran like wax. All the time, that awful cursed crown upon its brow had pulsated with unclean light.

Hendrick and the others had pursued Varlen, or rather the thing that Varlen had become. They had gaped, appalled, at what their leader had done to the folk who had offered them sanctuary. They had chased it out onto the wide, grassy gathering space before the ruins that housed Stonehallow – but so had the townsfolk.

Filled with religious terror at the horror stalking their halls, the mob had flowed down upon Varlen. Hendrick’s group had tried to intervene, to slow their cursed leader’s rampage and subdue him before the mob could do so. Bartiman had cast an entropic curse upon Varlen that had made the monster stumble but had not slowed it. Romilla had compelled its taint to be gone in Sigmar’s name, but though white fire had leapt at the priest’s words, whatever power she could bring to bear could not overmatch that pouring from the cursed crown.

In desperation, Eleanora VanGhest had shot Varlen through the leg, hoping perhaps to slow or stop him. For her troubles she had been smashed aside by Varlen’s mutating nest of appendages and only just escaped a messy evisceration. Hendrick had even struck his brother, more than once, and that at last had slowed the monster, though it had felt to Hendrick as though he struck himself with every blow.

Though more than two dozen of them had died in the act, the Stonehallow mob had bludgeoned Varlen to his knees and collared him with the long catch-poles they used for wrangling their gheln-hounds.

The Swords of Sigmar had tried to intervene, to protest that it was not Varlen’s fault and explain that it was the cursed crown he had placed, all unknowing, upon his brow.

The folk of Stonehallow did not care.

Now Hendrick squinted against a sudden flare of light from ahead. Heat beat against his skin and a great whoomph filled the air.

A pyre, he realised, and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a desperate snarl.

‘The Moonshadow brings death!’ screamed his brother in a cacophony of ever-more-monstrous voices. ‘The Moonshadow brings death to Draconium.’