RYE - Culmination

Ten years.

For ten years, the First City had stood like an immovable mountain of black stone, unperturbed by the storm that raged against it. For ten years, Mazdamundi had stood atop its utmost peak, channeling such extremes of power that all extraneous thought was banished from his mind lest an errant idea disrupt his task. For ten years, the beast before him had screamed and bellowed without remit, writhing against the bonds of the eldest slann’s spellcraft with just as much relentless ferocity as the rest of its millions of bodies displayed, throwing itself against the lizardmen again and again. For ten years, the entirety of the Uax psychic organism that had grown under the name and face of Gardakka Worldhamma did its utmost to smash the Children of the Old Ones to flinders, to bring down their walls and massacre their defenders and raze everything they had built to the ground. Ten years of unending focus, of animalistic drive and brutality and desperation, as a monster crafted by the hand of the Old Ones did all that it could to preserve its core purpose, bending all its unnatural strength to an objective of utmost simplicity - kill Mazdamundi. Stop the ritual.

For ten years, it had not been enough.

The lizardmen had watched their enemy for well over a century, and they had learned much from their study. From its hands they had taken the secret of gunfire, and from its clumsy movements they had intuited the proper ways in which to make war with such devices. The Saurus had taken these new lessons and applied them to old truths, adopting doctrines that combined both aspects of combat. They learned to shape their battlefields to their advantage in new ways, to gain distance when advantageous and to take it away from the foe when needed. They weathered the rain of fire the Uax sent upon them, and had grown from those deadly lessons.

When the Uax cast aside all pretensions and marched on the First City, the force that met them was not the lizardmen of a mere century before. The Children of the Old Ones had regained the greater part of their old strength, and now held the weapons of their enemy in hand, spitting death upon the Uax’s bodies from beyond the horizon. They had prepared for this assault, stacking the odds in their favor at every turn. Splitting the horde up in advance of the ritual, ensuring a fifth of the Uax died before ever seeing Itza. Preparing the ground with layers upon layers of fortification and traps so that a solid carpet of green corpses laid around the outskirts of the First City. Preemptively dousing the nuclear fires the Uax would have unleashed, and warding their cities against it besides. Restoring the Geomantic Web to its prime operational state, and in doing so, activating the artifacts that made it so that any who died in defense of Itza would merely be reborn. Each measure they took was another layer of insurance, another way to delay the onslaught of the Uax just a while longer.

For all that they and the Uax shared some strand of common heritage, their purposes were fundamentally different. The Uax was a creature of destruction, and it attained its goals by killing everything in its path, growing ever stronger the more it fought. The lizardmen, by contrast, were fundamentally architects - everything from their cities to their spellcraft reflected this. The Great Plan that was central to their lives was, at its core, a set of schematics passed down by the Old Ones, if far too vast and mysterious for ordinary minds to even comprehend. It was by this maxim that the lizardmen grasped victory. They did not need to kill all of the Uax in order to end their struggle against the green tide.

They merely needed to hold it off long enough to build something that would end it for them.

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The invisible agony in the air had built for ten years, and now it was at its peak. The scream of the Uax intensified yet further, and the creature’s bodies lost any semblance of sense they retained, scrambling towards the peak of Itza without regard for anything else. They ground themselves to paste against the black walls of the First City, flung themselves over with improvised catapults, climbed over the mounds of corpses with a feverish, unrelenting frenzy, paying no heed to the city’s defenders. The lizardmen reaped an indescribable toll, cutting down green-skinned bodies with such dispassionate, mechanical efficiency that it was as if they were working on a factory line. The Uax cared not, feeding corpse after corpse into the grinding jaws of the lizardmen war machine, directing every ounce of fire it had towards the looming peak of [i]Itzoatl[/i]. It fell short at every instance. Artillery shells soared towards the pyramid-temple, only to find themselves blown back by fell winds, deflected by shimmering shields, sent back upon the green tide by twisted coils of space. Fleets of rattling planes dove towards the city-temple in suicidal attack waves, and found the distance between them and their target growing faster than they could approach, until they crashed in spent heaps far from the city walls. The Uax struggled ever harder to reach the peak of Itza, and like a beast caught in a trap, only succeeded in tangling and restricting itself yet further. All while the armies of the lizardmen flanked and encircled and split the constituent bodies of the Uax apart, taking away the beast’s advantage of numbers.

All the while, the keening cry of the Waaagh!!! intensified still further, even as the merciless grip of the Web tightened with every iota of time that passed. Eventually, it held the accumulation of psychic fire that was the Uax’s mind and soul and self in an inescapably-bound sphere of emerald radiance, squeezing tighter and tighter until great fissures split apart the nuclear surface.

The gaping jaws of Gardakka Worldhamma stretched wider and wider until muscle and tendon began to peel apart, bones cracking as something began to emerge from within the body of the ork. Its limbs jerked spasmodically, seizing with such force that joints ruptured and its green skin began to blister and tear. Something shone with terrible force from behind its eyes, growing brighter and brighter until wisps of steam began to arise, the viscous red substance of its sclera boiling away and igniting as green fire blazed from the sockets.

The body of the Warboss shriveled and fell to dust as its core essence, a pillar of viridian psychic might too bright to look upon, emerged. It was like a caged star, an animate nuclear explosion that carved itself into the world with an immutable expression of violence. Merely standing before it would have driven any mortal mind insane with frenzy, driving them to rip their own body asunder as the animalistic brutality of the thing overrode everything that they were.

Mazdamundi squinted, blinking layers of nictating membranes closed over his eyes until he could properly behold the thing. He nodded, then reached out and grasped it in a hand. The energies it gave off should have been enough to sublimate his flesh instantaneously, but the essence of the Waaagh!!! had been tamped down by geomancy, condensing its presence into something that could be held within a cage of spellcraft and will. Something that could be comprehended, even understood. Something that could be unmade.

Mazdamundi held the Waaagh!!! aloft, now compressed into a pearl no larger than his eye, and spoke a word in the language of the Old Ones. All the terrible energiesaccumulated over the past decade now flooded into the sphere. Every iota of strength the lizardmen had painstakingly built since arriving on Mochantia, every chain they had removed, every lesson they had learned, every resolution they had made all testing themselves against the absolute certainty of war that the Waaagh!!! held as its axiom.

And in the face of such power, the sphere cracked, a single shining flaw introducing itself into its infinitely compressed substrate. Then it burst asunder in Mazdamundi’s hands, and the great unravelling began.

All across the middle continent, the roar of the Uax grew to an unbearable peak, the voice that issued forth from every squig and gretchen and ork body climbing octave after octave until it was percievable not as a noise, but as a vibration that cracked glass and stone. Every extrusion of the Uax paused in place, their muscles seizing in identical fashion, and a fierce emerald radiance began to shine from within their heads, growing brighter until it eclipsed everything else on the battlefield.

Uax heads burst in eruptions of green flame, starting from those closest to the central pyramid of Itza and rippling outwards, spreading through crowds of viridian bodies like an exponentially multiplying contagion. The strings puppeting them were cut, and the essence that powered their forms was shattered and unmade. The keystone of the Waaagh!!! had been removed, and its component pieces tumbled after it like any building would.

The wave of headbursting spread across the continent with superluminal swiftness, and as the greater Uax organism was unmade, so too were all the fiendish contraptions it had made and sustained with its power. Shootas and Big Gunz stopped firing as the psychic component that had allowed their ammunition to load fell away. Buggiez and Trukks and Dakkajets fell to pieces or exploded as they came to their ultimate stop, the dispassionate arbiter that was physics allowed to render its unmerciful judgments upon the creations of the greenskins.

As its bodies died, so too did the hidden fungal network that comprised the majority of Uax biomass fall apart. Mycelial strands withered with unnatural speed, gestating fungal pods shriveling and crumbling to pieces. Forests of towering mushrooms caught fire with no discernible source, green-tinted blazes rushing ravenously through their crumbling stalks. The eternal footprint the Uax had left upon the world faded away, the merciless severing the ritual had enacted leaving no hidden reservoirs upon the central continent from which the greenskin threat could be reborn.

A sudden silence fell upon Itza as the last of the Uax bodies fell, and the terrible tension of geomancy in motion at last faded from the air. After ten years of unceasing war, at last there was quiet, and it was such a sharp contrast that a ringing still persisted in the ears of many lizardmen, who had only just realized what was happening before it was abruptly finished but an instant later.

”My siblings,” a voice boomed, coming from the distant peak of Itzoatl, magnified by the magics of that place so that it reached the ear of every lizardman, no matter where they were. After a decade of solitude, Mazdamundi spoke once more to the lizardmen. ”The storm is weathered. Our foe has been unmade. It is done! Uaxla-loqaz!”

For a moment, the lizardmen were still, as the reality of the slann’s proclamation sank in. Their foremost enemy on this world, the primary thing that had threatened their cities and restrained their growth, had been undone. It would not be coming back. They were one step closer to reaching the destiny set out for them by the Old Ones.

The cheer went up across the empire, work unilaterally pausing for one exultant moment. Scaled hands were raised high, banners depicting the gods and the Old Ones waved in triumph, and a trilling, thrumming cry went up, every lizardman from Itza to Huilcatlan joining in.

“Uaxla-loqaz!”

Their opponent had been cast into oblivion.

“Uaxla-loqaz!”

The specter of war had been banished from their doorstep.

UAXLA-LOQAZ!”

They had won.

VICTORY

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Glossary: Uaxla-loqaz: “Uax law is to die”, literally translated. More accurately means “the natural place the world has for the Uax is to die,” effectively an exultation that one’s victory over the Uax is so complete that it may as well be natural law.