The new Sons of Behemat miniatures and battletome are available for pre-order tomorrow! Get ready for the latest stomp with a free piece of Warhammer Age of Sigmar fiction.
King Brodd does not often dream. When he does, he dreams of the lightning.
Which is not really a surprise. He has seen plenty of lightning, raging on the horizon or being hurled by some squawking little ’un. But only one instance – one irreversible moment – is the lightning. You don’t readily forget a display of such absolute power that it burns out your eye and murders a god.
Especially when that god is your father.
But Brodd, when he bothers to acknowledge his dreams at all, reminds himself to keep quiet. There are certain things a king doesn’t talk about. There are also certain things that a proper gargant doesn’t talk about.
So, when he tells the tales to audiences of rapt, gawping gargants, Brodd doesn’t mention the lightning that crackles through his sparse dreams, though he proclaims what he intends to do to the storm-godling of Azyr viscerally and often. He describes in punishing detail how he’ll twist the Sigmar the Hammer King’s limbs off and squash him between huge, wart-encrusted toes, but he never mentions the scar in his mind’s eye. He recounts seeing Behemat, the World Titan, topple into death as Sigmar’s treacherous bolts struck him, but he says nothing of the feeling that welled in his own chest as he did so.
Any gargant who tries to delve deeper with questions gets a scowl and a cuff round the head, at best. Brodd tells them the stories, but it is not his job to bare his soul to them. His task is vengeance – and vengeance alone.
Yet now there’s another breed of lightning, and this one does not haunt his sleep. It’s real. It crackles an evil green as it comes closer, dripping from the rusty iron fangs of the vermin-machine forcing him into the slop of the Scabrous Sprawl. Cold mud crawls up Brodd’s leg as he pushes back against that mechanised pressure.
‘Come on,’ the lightning seems to say, ‘sleep where Behemat slept. Die where your father died.’
In answer, Brodd roars. Spittle flies from gaps in his teeth onto the Parasite Engine he’s wrestling with – a huge, skittering, multi-limbed mechanical monster. Ratmen swarm over the machine’s hide of scrap, adding their shrill voices to the cacophony. Brodd grits his teeth and strains at the metal limbs, bunching every muscle. His eye feels like it’s going to pop. He tries to summon up the divine strength of his forefather, but he finds it won’t come. He grunts, demanding it, and still it won’t come.
The sounds of other gargants battling against the tide of gnashing, slashing rats has grown distant. He wonders what he looks like to them. Strong? Like a king, with his veins bulging and nostrils flaring? It doesn’t matter. The Engine’s mouth is getting closer, jaws grinding open and spitting electrical hate. He might die.
And it’ll be the lightning that kills him.
‘Did ye dream last eve, Brodd of the Behemati?’
It’s Maegran who says it. The Chooser of the Mighty waits until dark has fallen and the campfire, made of three trees stacked atop one another, has burned to cold embers. Her wind-crackle voice stirs Brodd just as he was beginning to nod off. The other gargants of the war party are already asleep, their snores rumbling like the echo of some cosmic birth.
‘What?’
‘Did ye dream?’ Maegran stands at the edge of the camp, leaning on her spear and smoking a pipe carved from some ancient, mouldy bone. For all her apparent age and creaking limbs, the wyrdy-witch of the bogs has yet to actually sit down in all the time Brodd has known her. Right now, that is only about two days, but it still strikes him as off. One of her moss-furred brutes snuffles around at her feet. Maegran grasps the torc clasped around its neck and gives it a yank that is possibly meant to be affectionate.
‘No,’ Brodd lies. Unconsciously, his hand finds his great obelisk-club, patting it.
‘Liar.’ Maegran chortles and blows a smoke-ring that shimmers off into the night. When she looks back at him, there’s a snaggle-tooth sneer about her.
‘All the kings what was dreamed. When we ruled these lands and the little ’uns knelt to us, our kings dreamed.’
‘Good fer them.’
‘That ain’t kingly, Brodd.’ She’s still smirking. It makes Brodd scowl.
‘What’d you know about that?’
‘Told you. I spoke to ’em. The old Behemati kings. Back before there was storm gods and spiky gods; when there was real gargants to be king of.’
‘What’re we, then?’
‘You’re the boss. You tell me.’
This cyclical, riddling sort of talk that Maegran so enjoys makes Brodd’s head hurt. There’s a gabbling hiss by his left ear. One of the red-fleshed imps that always cling to him apparently has an opinion. Brodd pushes the Creeper down with a finger; it flees just in time to avoid being squashed.
Brodd’s knees protest as he stands. He steps through the mass of sleeping gargants, reminding himself with some effort not to simply stomp on his own subjects. A few sleep close to where Maegran lurks: her followers, who think her magics can make them mighty if she chooses. To Brodd, it seems stupid at best, vaguely blasphemous at worst. In the future, it might be a problem. But for now – ‘now’ being the long and vengeful present that will persist until Sigmar is bloody paste, which is all that really matters to Brodd – she is an ally.
‘You didn’t talk to no kings of old, witch,’ Brodd says as he stomps to the edge of the clearing and stares over the marshy, misty flats below. ‘All just tales on your part.’
Far out in the night’s gloom, amongst the mists of the Scabrous Sprawl, light sparks a faint green. If what Maegran told him in her cave was true, then there are ratmen in the deep swamps. They seek to scavenge weapons that Brodd smashed up when they disturbed the World Titan’s slumber. Now they profane his very grave. But the Sprawl is gargant turf, hence the warband sleeping at Brodd’s back, ready to smash and bash when the light rises.
‘No?’ Maegran crows a cackle that sees several slumbering gargants grunt and turn over, landslides in miniature. ‘No wonder ye be a king! You know me better than I know myself. Even the World Titan might have rumbled approval at that.’
‘You didn’t know him, neither. I won’t hear that rot.’
‘Best hope that. Perhaps ye wouldn’t like to know what he’d have thought of all this. If he thought of you at all.’
‘What’s that, witch?’
‘Well, what’s the legend of Brodd, really? Smashing little after little in one long rage? And how often do ye think of all these oafs at yer side, battling and hanging on to your every word? What are your people in this grand stomp o’ vengeance?
It’s not the answer he expects. For a long few moments, Brodd – scowling, stomping, bellowing Brodd – doesn’t know what to say. He’s the Prophet, isn’t he? Empowered, haunted, by the scraps of their dead father’s spirit? He glances around at the sleeping mob: Odro with his perpetually drooling nose; the triplets Fog, Marog, and Babog, all slumped in a snoring heap and with the messy refuse of the humans they gobbled up smeared around their mouths; Begra, who grunts in approval at every word he says and stands beside him with arms folded like some enforcer, with that corposant scar on her gut she wears so proudly. Then he turns to Maegran, one good eye narrowed amongst his drake-skull helmet, distant lightning illuminating his face.
‘You’re a tester, Chooser of the Mighty.’
‘Is that not what I’m for, King of the Bigs? To keep all you lunks honest and worthy of yer blood?’ Maegran maintains that wry smile, but there is something off-putting in her gaze now. The many carven faces hung across her frame glare and speak not.
‘You’ve come back here, to where Behemat was shot down by those even stronger than he, to smash the rats with all that godly strength what clings to you, Brodd. And aye, that be right and proper. But bigness ain’t always just size. Sometimes, bigness be in spirit. There’ll be a moment where ye’ll have to reckon with that.’
He doesn’t like the sound of that.
‘Don’t like the sound of that.’
‘But ye’ll know it,’ Maegran says, and there’s a twinkle in her evil eye now. ‘And ye’d best be ready for it. Else ye’ll find yerself a king of naught but mud and weeds.’
For a while, Brodd forgets the conversation. It seems like meandering night-talk from the wyrdy-witch, which he’s already come to learn is par for the course. Besides, the start of next morning’s battle goes well. The mists of the Scabrous Sprawl pull in thick, as if intending to shield the gargants from view as they approach the sparks of green. Then they charge out of the murk with voices raised in hullabaloo, kicking through mobs of screaming ratmen and hurling rocks to send cannons exploding into brass scraps and splinters.
And then, at the heart of the bog, some screeching rodent techno-warlock manages to spark enough lightning and pull enough levers to bring the Parasite Engine back to life. It rises from the mire, venting waves of poison gas. A spear of green lightning shoots out from some horn-like projector and burns through Begra’s throat. She topples backwards, a tidal wave of brackish water sploshing where she falls, and that’s it, dead, eyes dull with incomprehension as they stare skywards. Brodd is still thinking that that’s no way for a gargant to go as the Engine brings its terrible weight down towards him. He catches its clawing forelimbs just in time.
And then the lightning’s coming to kill him.
Just before the machine’s power can overwhelm him entirely, something sees it lurch with a great metallic screech. Slick, bloated vines have writhed their way out of the bog-water to wrap around one of its limbs, pulling hard enough that it loses balance. It grants reprieve, enough for Brodd to stagger back and get his footing. He hears Maegran muttering mystic chants over his shoulder, feels energy crackling off her levelled spear and off the snorting beasts at her side as she weaves her spell.
She’s saved him. It still might not matter. Those gargants who have followed him here are quivering, starting to break. Their king was almost overwhelmed. That, it seems, means something to them. The Parasite Engine regains its footing with a mechanical hiss, its armour panels flaking. Brodd can just about imagine the manic rat at its control, grinning in what it thinks is victory.
‘OI!’
Brodd roars the word like some artillery barrage. The battlefield falls still as that tectonic explosion of sound issues forth. Even the Parasite Engine seems to draw back, startled and wary. Brodd steps forward, beating his fist upon his scarred chest and snorting. Around him, the watching gargants begin to chant low and stomp their humungous feet. Normally, he finds it faintly annoying. Now, Brodd goes so far as to give a leering grin.
‘You come ’ere, rat, to gargant turf, and you think you can take what you want? Nah. Into the bogs with you lot. Down to rot and be forgotten, in the shadow of our father’s bones. As all pipsqueaks should.’
Every word is slow, and low, and clear, and mocking. It is, after a fashion, kingly. The Parasite Engine appears to take umbrage. Power crackles along its vanes and prongs once more as its mechanical rodent skull stares into Brodd’s unflinching gaze.
Except King Brodd is already moving, faster than anything as immense as he should move. Strength rises in him again, the might of Behemat, flowing as his followers chant his name and stomp that rhythmic beat of power. Maegran’s spell-beckoned tendrils yank down on the Engine once more, pulling it further into the marsh. Its focus is broken just long enough for Brodd to take his club in a two-handed grip and swing it like a meteor.
The obelisk-club crashes into the Parasite Engine’s iron flesh and keeps going. It buckles metals and whirring motors to set off a chain of furious detonations within, gouts of warpflame incinerating wailing Skaven crew. Brodd rips its weapon out in a burst of machine guts. He lets it slam down, throwing up a torrent of filth-water. He has enough time to spit into the open jaws of the Engine before it is torn apart from within by explosions.
It takes him a moment to realise that the roar he hears isn’t only the machine bursting into flames. His gargants are chanting his name. They’ve done so many times before, but this instance feels different to Brodd. Or maybe he’s just actually listening to it for the first time. It’s the sort of thing he could get used to, if he let himself.
‘Now, there be a sight,’ Maegran says as she wades to Brodd’s side, watching with a murmur as the wreck of the Parasite Engine begins to sink into the marsh. ‘Maybe Behemat’d have looked at a thing like that.’
‘Hmm,’ Brodd grunts. ‘Kingly, were it?’
‘Oh, aye. It’s a start.’ Something in the way she says it makes Brodd chuckle, a sound strange even to him. He shakes off the last prickles of the blast and lifts his good eye. The Skaven salvagers are panicking, splashing to and fro through the waters of the Sprawl in an attempt to escape, and eager gargants are already barrelling off after them with long, ungainly strides. But some of the ratman chieftains are trying to pull them back into a semblance of order, lashing them with their tails and jabbing towards the titans with cruel spears.
‘Well, yer bigness,’ Maegran says, ‘looks like the job ain’t done yet.’
‘Good,’ Brodd says, gripping his mace in both hands once more. ‘This place belongs to the Behemati. And I’m just gettin’ warmed up.’
Get ready for tomorrow’s pre-orders with some more free King Brodd fiction – he’s always looking for something to smash!
