Chapter 4: The Gathering Storm (Enhanced)
The skies above the Blacklow Plains churned with roiling clouds the colour of bruised flesh. Lightning flashed in silent streaks across the horizon, casting hellish light on a landscape scarred by war. Smoke rose from distant villages, their once-proud banners now torn and trampled. The earth, blackened and broken, stank of blood and sulphur.
This was no longer land fit for men.
At the heart of the valley stood the warcamp of the Broken Tooth Horde, a teeming chaos of crude tents, weapon forges, and bone totems. The ground squelched with the weight of a thousand booted feet and clawed paws. Orcs, goblins, ogres—and worse—massed for slaughter beneath the watchful gaze of demonfire.
Gorbrak Skull-Splitter, warlord of the horde, towered on a slab of basalt. His eyes burned like coals, and his fanged grin promised agony. His axe, Gravehowl, shimmered with a cruel red sheen, as if thirsty for a king's blood.
Around him, drums boomed like distant thunder, and the horde answered in unison—throats howling, steel clashing, teeth gnashing. This was not war. This was vengeance incarnate.
“The time of man is over!” Gorbrak roared.
The horde answered with a wave of fury.
“They poisoned our rivers! Burned our forests! They spit on the bones of our gods!”
Behind him, wolf-mounted goblin outriders yipped and screeched, jerking the reins of their slavering beasts. The wolves, lean and twice the size of hunting hounds, were born in deep caves and fed on corpses. Their yellow eyes glowed with shared malice. Riders leaned forward with curved blades and black arrows, laughing like crows over a battlefield.
“Tonight we feast on their fear. Tomorrow—on their flesh!” Gorbrak bellowed.
To his left, Snagga the Gutpiercer—wiry and mad-eyed, covered in dagger belts and warpaint—grinned atop a white-fanged wolf with a split ear. He had already dispatched saboteurs disguised as refugees into the lands of men. Let their villages scream.
To Gorbrak’s right lumbered Mulg the Gullet, the ogre war-chieftain, draped in looted armour and grinning like a child. His massive club, studded with bones and iron, dragged behind him, already slick with the blood of a dozen deer crushed for sport.
But it was what stood behind them that curdled the blood of even the hardiest goblin.
A rune-pit carved into the ground smoked with blue fire. Cultists—no longer quite Orc, nor man, nor beast—chanted in forked tongues. Their bodies convulsed as something ancient and wrong clawed its way into the world.
Out stepped the Chios demons.
They came in forms that defied nature—flesh twisted by dark sorcery. Some bore burning wings of smoke, others dragged barbed tails behind clawed limbs. Black iron grew from their spines like armour, and their eyes were bottomless voids. The largest of them, Kar’vul the Unspoken, carried a spear of living bone and breathed a mist that melted steel.
The air thickened. Even wolves whimpered and backed away. Only Gorbrak stood firm.
“Kar’vul,” he said, with a begrudging nod. “You came.”
“We were promised carnage,” Kar’vul hissed, voice like knives scraping granite. “We will drink deep.”
“Then do your part,” Gorbrak spat. “Split the skies. Unleash terror. When they see you, the hearts of men will fail.”
Kar’vul merely nodded and vanished into shadow.
War banners rose—skulls, black suns, and clawed symbols daubed in gore. The goblin outriders howled and spurred their wolves, who snapped and snarled in hunger. Ogres smashed drums with fists like anvils. Orcs beat their chests and kissed the talismans of their blood gods.
The last to rise was the Doomhorn of Chios, its call not heard by ears but by bone. The very sky bent around its tone.
The chant began—first whispered, then screamed:
“Blood for the Chios… skulls for the horde… death to the light… WAR! WAR! WAR!”
The world trembled. The Horde was ready.
And somewhere on the horizon, the horns of men were beginning to answer.
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