Looks like GW has dropped another lore snippet on the community site!
IN THE BAD MOON’S LIGHT
‘Ain’t seen nuffink but clouds in days,’ said Snarlboss Grikka, slashing at the lengths of golden vine with a rusty sword. The one-eared warlord was generally regarded as even more short-tempered than the slavering wolves his Gitmob warriors rode into battle. Today, he was in a particularly foul mood.
The grot warleaders had met under the cover of the forest, peering through mouldy leaves at the strongpoint of Sandwall – the fortress-town they had come here to burn, trample and shatter, but which still clung stubbornly to life, despite their best efforts. It had been months, and though Grikka’s warriors had known several bloody victories in that time, things had recently changed. Realising just how outnumbered they were, the humies had retreated behind their walls. There they hid, defended by a fearsome array of artillery, although everything within half a dozen leagues around Sandwall now belonged to the grots.
‘When’s it gonna happen then, ’shroom-head?’ Grikka went on, fixing Krungol with a nasty stare. The Cave-Shaman met that look with a cool one of his own, scratching idly at the great Deffcap mushroom that sprouted from his cranium.
‘Da Loonking ’imself said da Bad Moon’s coming,’ Krungol said. ‘And I’ve seen it in me dreams for days, what’s more. When it gets ’ere, we’ll be ready.’
‘We ain’t gonna get through them big walls easy,’ said Loonboss Boik, posing arrogantly on a shelf of rock that ensured he was a foot taller than any of the others. ‘Great big bang-stikks they got, and rock-chukkas and all sorts of gubbins.’
Krungol smiled, and his fungus-head gave a sinister pulse that expelled a cloud of dusty motes into the air. Even Boik grimaced at the sight.
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ the Cave-Shaman snickered. ‘Old Krungy’s got a plan. Follow me.’
They plunged deeper into the forest, feet squelching in the musty loam. Black-clad grots leapt out of Krungol’s way, all too aware of what happened to those who earned the Cave-Shaman’s ire. The Gitmobbers were less easily impressed. Snarlfangs and riders lounged around in packs, sullen because they had been told to keep out of sight of the walls and thus had not seen the sun on their backs for days. Some were currently cheering themselves up by feeding screaming snotlings to their hungry lupine mounts.
Finally, the party reached the crooked hollow that Krungol had made his lair. It was guarded by Krungol’s personal retinue of Stabbas and a troggoth they called Snot-chops, who was currently scratching his rocky backside with a splintered branch of ironoak. The bored-looking grots were standing watch over a gaggle of sickly human prisoners. Some were poking the bound and gagged captives with their daggers, cackling at the muffled cries their crude treatment elicited.
‘Told you not ta touch ’em!’ Krungol screeched. He grabbed the nearest grot guard and spat a mouthful of spores into the wretch’s face. The unlucky creature fell to the floor, twitching and vomiting; Krungol gave him a kick for good measure. The others swiftly ceased their antics, much to the snickering amusement of Loonboss Boik.
‘What’s your game?’ said Snarlboss Grikka, frowning. The idea of not subjecting his captives to creative torments was simply beyond his comprehension.
The Cave-Shaman did not answer; instead, he slammed the butt of his staff into the ground three times. His fellow grot leaders muttered and clutched their jagged blades as the forest stirred around them. They heard a dreadful chattering sound like thousands of sticks being rubbed together. In the shadows, something huge and many-legged shifted its chitinous bulk.
An enormous Arachnarok Spider heaved its way through the foliage, ramshackle howdah teetering atop its ridged thorax. It crouched before them, eyes flicking back and forth between Krungol and his captives. There were figures perched atop the beast – spider-grots with red tattoos and glowing eyes, seated beneath a great shrine of woven silk. Their leader wore a feathered headdress and a strange cloak from which several arachnid legs sprouted, enclosing his skinny body.
The humans struggled helplessly at this monstrous sight, and the grots present cackled maliciously despite their unease. The titan-spider loomed over the gathering, rubbing its forelimbs together eagerly. Toxic drool spilled from its gaping, fang-stuffed maw.
‘Oi!’ the Cave-Shaman cried, brandishing his stave and nearly dislodging the armoured segmapede wrapped around its tip. ‘Those ain’t for you, greedy-legs!’
Multi-faceted orbs swivelled to fix upon him, and the Arachnarok raised one spear-like limb up high. That leg could impale the Cave-Shaman all the way from skull to belly as if he was a rotting mushroom. Despite his moonstruck fervour, Krungol almost fled for his life there and then. Not that he would have made it very far. He heard a nasty snicker and glanced aside to see Snarlboss Grikka muttering to one of his wolf-riders. The Gitmob ruler was clearly betting on whether Krungol – whom he openly despised – was about to come to a messy end.
But then the Bad Moon filled Krungol’s mind with visions of the Great Green, and his fear evaporated in a rush of intoxicating babbling. The Cave-Shaman glared up at the grot leader standing atop the arachnid beast’s back, who stared back at him through beady eyes.
‘Webspinner Worzik,’ Krungol said. ‘You sure you wanna start trouble? The Loonking ’imself sent me here, and if you kill me, you’ll end up one of his screaming ’shroom-totems.’
Invoking Skragrott’s name was risky, because Krungol had never even met the Loonking, much less received any special orders from him. But the mere mention caused even the brutal Webspinner Shaman to flinch. The titan-spider lowered its legs and hunched down. Worzik nodded towards the captives.
‘Them’s ours,’ the shaman hissed in his reedy little voice. ‘You promised us meat for the Spider God! That’s why we’re here, innit?’
‘These ain’t for eatin’, web-shaman,’ said Krungol. ‘We gots another use for ’em.’
The Arachnarok shifted threateningly.
Krungol ignored it and instead paced around the prisoners. He stopped before an old, grey-headed human with an eyepatch. His good eye glared at Krungol defiantly. The Cave-Shaman grinned, leaned down and tapped a bony finger on the man’s skull.
‘So what’s da plan?’ snapped Loonboss Boik. ‘How we gonna crack those walls?’
‘Simple,’ said Krungol. ‘We’s gonna hand these long-legs right back to their mates.’
‘Open the gates!’
The cry went up along Sandwall’s great palisade, and with a deep grinding of gears, the strongpoint’s northern portcullis began to rise. Sergeant Luccan and his men advanced cautiously out into the dusty bowl of grassland that spread out before Sandwall, nervous despite the cannons and rocket arrays trained on the open ground between the palisade and the forest’s edge.
‘Easy, lads,’ Luccan muttered. ‘Anything out here so much as moves and it’ll be pasted by our gunner-boys before you can blink.’
Stirring words, but that dank, mouldy-looking row of foliage was still far too close for comfort. Normally they’d have sent some axemen or alchemists armed with flame-pots to keep the relentless Ghyranite flora at bay, but ever since the coming of the green ones, such work had become a death sentence. Sigmar alone knew what was lurking in there. Grots, of course, but also an endless menagerie of slavering monsters, all of them just waiting for some hapless fool to stumble within claw’s reach. Luccan hated this whole damned place. He wished he was back in some dimly lit taverna in Greywater Fastness, drowning himself in cheap ale.
‘Let’s make this quick, anyway,’ he said, trying to keep his voice breezy.
They hurried towards the staggering figures that had emerged from the treeline – clearly men and women, not scuttling little fiends with fungus-addled eyes. The sight had taken the Freeguilders aback, for Sandwall had been fending off grot attacks for months, and never before had they known a single one of their prisoners to survive the experience.
As he neared the poor wretches, Luccan winced. The men were still clad in Guilder steel and leathers, though the armour hung awkwardly on their skinny, malnourished forms. Various scrapes and abrasions suggested they had been beaten, poked and sliced with daggers. Their hollow eyes stared right through Luccan and his soldiers.
‘Easy now,’ the sergeant said, taking the nearest by the shoulder. ‘You’re in good hands. We’ll get you a draught of Aqua Ghyranis and a good meal, and you’ll be good as new.’
The captive fixed him with dumb, bloodshot eyes. If Luccan didn’t know better, he’d have said the man had been drinking. Indeed, his breath was musty with a sour chemical reek, but it smelled like no spirit Luccan had ever sampled. The others were the same. Maybe they’d just lost their grip on reality after too long in the clutches of the enemy. It wasn’t uncommon. Grots were sadistic little devils.
‘Don’t,’ the man said, then frowned as if he didn’t quite know how to form the right words. ‘You… you shouldn’t… just leave us.’
He paused and clutched his stomach, groaning softly.
‘And we won’t,’ said Luccan. Then, to his men: ‘Quickly, get ’em back to the gatehouse. Carry ’em if you have to.’
Grabbing the dazed man by the shoulder, Luccan steered him towards sanctuary. He kept glancing back towards the forest. His skin was crawling, that oddly distinctive sensation a man got when he was being watched.
Yet no arrows came whipping out of the trees, and no shrill war cries met his ears. In a few dozen paces, they were back beneath the iron canopy of the gatehouse, and Luccan could breathe again.
‘Get the surgeons,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got wounded men here.’
They passed through to the inner courtyard, where several squads of exhausted-looking Fusiliers were stripping and oiling their weapons ready for their stint on the walls. To the right and left, there were curving staircases that led up to the parapets and to the cannons mounted on the walls in covered casemates. Ahead lay the strongpoint proper, a dusty little frontier town entirely designed around the realmwater spring at its centre. Sandwall was a decent enough place compared to some of the pits that Luccan had served in, growing in prominence since the battles of the Clot River and the relentless harrying of the local orruk tribes. Still, another season seemed a long time to be stuck out here on the borderlands, where it rained for two-thirds of the day and savaged you with biting flies the other.
‘Sir!’ came Shildern’s worried voice. She was inching away from one of the rescued men, her eyes wide with horror. Luccan felt his own heart skip a beat as he saw what had unnerved her.
The man was convulsing, spitting great lumps of what Luccan first thought was foam. When he looked closer, however, he saw that they were stringy, latticed sheets of a wispy substance, stained black and red. He knelt and poked at one with his sword, lifted a strand up on the blade’s tip. It fluttered in the breeze.
‘It’s like a web,’ said Shildern. ‘Like a dust-catcher or a—’
Her words were cut short as the twitching man began to scream and tear at his belly, doubling over and rolling in the dirt. One by one, the other prisoners fell, adding their own agonised wails to the chorus. More of them began to throw up the same trails of wisplike matter, and Sergeant Luccan felt a stark sensation of impending horror.
‘Get them out!’ he cried, even as the sawbones came running over. ‘Open the gate again! We need to get these people out of the city, right now!’
And such was the intensity in his words that the wall-guards rushed to obey, even though he had not the rank to issue such an order. Someone started cranking the portcullis. Steelhelms Carso and Bruiggan dashed forwards and grabbed the nearest of the wretches under the arms, dragging him upright.
He vomited on them. Or, at least, that was what Luccan thought at first. But then he heard the two soldiers screaming and saw the small black-and-yellow shapes crawling across their skin, biting and stabbing with needle-like forelimbs. The pair fell, faces already swelling grotesquely so that they looked like corpses dredged from the sea. The stricken former captive fell on top of them. As he did so, his belly burst open and a gushing tide of arachnids spilled forth. Freeguilders screamed and stumbled away in horror as the spiders scuttled up the walls towards the casements.
Primordial revulsion and terror overcame men and women who would have faced a gunline or a rampaging troggoth without blinking. They fired panicked shots at the spiders, and more than one soldier was cut down by a recklessly discharged fusil. Perhaps that first brood of horrors might have been contained. But then the rest of the rescued prisoners met the same fate as their companions. Bodies burst open, disgorging chitinous forms, and suddenly the floors and walls were alive with hideous motion.
Then shapes came swarming into the compound, forcing their way through the half-opened gate: spiders as big as hounds and snarling wolves carrying grot riders, the sheen of their armour painfully bright to look upon. These newcomers set upon the disorganised mass of Freeguilders with gusto, stabbing and slashing. Wolves ripped and tore at the fallen, staining their muzzles crimson.
Luccan knew then that Sandwall was lost. He tried to run, but something grabbed at his heel, and he looked down to see Bruiggan trying to scream something at him from a face that no longer resembled anything vaguely human.
He stumbled and fell, striking his head on the rocky ground. Images swimming before his eyes, he rolled onto his back. The skies above had begun to curdle, turning the sickly yellow-grey of spoiled milk. At first, he thought his vision was darkening because of his head wound, but no, this was real. Peering out from behind the clouds came a demented, grinning visage that seemed to be fixed on him alone. Despite his horror, he could not look away, even as he felt the sensation of hundreds of needle-thin limbs crawling across his flesh and scratching at his throat. He heard a great howling of wolves – some in the distance, some unnervingly close.
Something heavy stepped on his chest. He looked up into the crooked, pointed face of a grot, who grinned to reveal rows of sharp yellow teeth. The fiend’s skull ended at its scalp and then transformed into a swollen mass of fungal matter.
‘Where was you running to?’ it cackled at him, brandishing a blood-stained sickle in his face. ‘Fun’s just gettin’ started, humie.’
Then the creature’s mushroom crown convulsed and filled the air with drifting spores, and Adbert Luccan screamed as his mind dissolved in a flood of green fire.
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