RYE - Armageddon Descending

Time ground onward. Mazdamundi’s ritual progressed inexorably towards its completion. The battle at Itza raged ever fiercer as the decade approached its close. Every second was strife, every minute a massacre. The all-encompassing onslaught of violence and destruction churned around the First City like water caught in a drain, feeding on the blood and life of lizardman and Uax alike and growing ever more apocalyptic with every passing moment. The noise was unavoidable, a calamitous cacophony of chaotic sound that shook the eardrums and rattled the bones. The distinction between life and war narrowed, then vanished. The conflict stretched on without an end, waves of ork bodies crashing into Itza’s walls on one side of the city as they retreated in other places. The city’s defenders were forced into an endless race to reinforce the barricades, relying on the divinatory portents of Azyr skinks to organize the flow of soldiers to the First City’s endless supply of towers, forts, and walls. The tromp of scaled feet marching in unison across paved stone and the clatter of equipment being fitted to lizardmen who had died on the battlefield and been reborn in the Emerald Pools filled the inner streets of Itza wasinterrupted intermittently by the deadly rain of Big Gunz artillery pieces that sent their payloads crashing down across random swathes of the lizardmen metropolis.

The only places insulated from the constant influx of war were the numerous Star Chambers of Itza, where the slann reclined in absolute, meditative silence, accompanied only by the noise of their own blood coursing through their veins. Oftentimes, the corpulent mage-lords would even remove this distraction by temporarily halting their metabolic processes, placing themselves into a stasis where their minds were disconnected from any sort of sensory input. Sealed away behind their Void Sanctum enchantments, the slann were able to attain a state of isolated concentration that could go unbroken for years at a time. It was here that they would perform the most vital work of the war.

At the start of the decade, observation of the Uax had noted that the rate at which the creatures had been able to annex new territory was vastly increasing, with short-term cogitative divination encompassing the next solar year indicating that the Uax would be on track to nearly triple their existing territory by the end of the decade. The slann dispatched to scout the greenskin horde in astral form quickly returned with an explanation - somewhere in the rush of mad experimentation the species constantly engaged in, an Uax engineer had figured out how to trigger the process of Ima’Gun’Di’s Untangling Helix and used it to create bombs.

This news rippled up and down the Communion, causing great consternation. The Untangling Helix was a peculiar feedback loop that could be induced by explosively combining certain strands of Chamon, Aqshy, and Hysh together in a specific ratio, causing the accumulated magical forces to both feed on and unravel each other’s fundamental structure. The result was a chain reaction that released an enormous amount of exothermic energy in the form of a mushroom-shaped explosion. It was not a favored spell by the slann for the simple reason that despite its relatively uncomplicated nature, the Helix had to be cast with a great degree of precision and skill to avoid any cast-off remnants of Chamon and Hysh surviving the detonation and curdling into a miasma of Dhar that would linger over the casting site for years afterwards. The Uax seemed to have found a way to replicate Ima’Gun’Di’s work with material science, and judging by the pallor of radioactive smoke hanging over the blasted reaches of Mochantian jungle, were not concerned by the prospect of dealing with the fallout.

”The Uax cannot be allowed to unleash their Helix devices upon Itza,” proclaimed the Third Generation slann Byqa-Buum, who was acknowledged by his peers as one of the foremost experts on explosion-derived magics the Communion had. ”Until we can finalize the design of the barrier shields to meet appropriate specifications, these explosives pose an unacceptable risk to the sanctity of the First City. We must prevent their deployment.” His statement was heeded as command by a great number of his understudies in the Fifth Generation, who promptly sealed themselves into their Star Chambers and set about the process of sabotaging, destroying, and dismantling as many of the Uax’s bombs as they could manage.

The Waaagh’s southward expansion stumbled and fell upon itself as misfortune after misfortune befell their Mushroom Bommz, as the Mekboyz had named them. Warehouses filled with supplies collapsed and exploded without cause, gantries crumbled as support beams were shorn away, and many of the already-existing explosives were disposed of by the most immediate of means. Almost as soon as they were assembled, every Mushroom Bomm assembled by the orks would spontaneously detonate, vaporizing dozens of teams of meks and slowing the creation of additional devices, the production of which was moved deeper into ork-held territory. When krumped for answers by their bosses, the Meks involved - ever superstitious, ‘explained’ that the pollen that swathed the area was somehow triggering the explosives.

Once the slann had been satisfied that the capability of the orks to produce Helix bombs was within their capacity to control, they relayed orders down through their attendants to the enclaves of chameleon skinks skulking outside their cities. They called for those operatives who had successfully infiltrated ork settlements on previous occasions, for the task the slann had in mind was as important as it was perilous. The news of such a mission fluttered on wings of gossip and whispers through the chameleon skink grapevine, and a collection of the camouflaged assassins assembled themselves, including certain operatives who had participated in the slaying of Wurkaz Slashytoof almost a century ago. They found themselves placed under the command of a skink priest far younger than even the most junior of their number. Pun’Chrunk was one of the most experienced Ulgu skink priests the lizardmen had, already a veteran of many high-risk infiltration operations over the course of his scant decade and change. His aggressive, explosive alpha-striking methodology had drawn the slann to choose him for this task, for the orks guarded what Helix bombs they had with a watchful eye, and both speed and violence would be required to successfully secure one.

Pun’Chrunk and his team were teleported into the territory of the orks mere weeks before Mazdamundi was to begin his Waaagh!!!-shattering ritual, and nothing was heard or seen of them until hours before the ritual’s commencement, when a communique from Pun’Chrunk in the form of a miniature terradon made of shadow was received at Xlanhuapec by the fifth generation slann Zatill-Ayt. The assassins had encountered unexpected difficulties securing the bomb due to unexpected security increases, but had successfully lured a rival ork warband into the area and made off with the device in the midst of the fighting. It had taken Pun’Chrunk many days to successfully shake the trail of the orks and transport the kroxigor-sized ball of scrap metal to a spot in the jungle where they could conceal it long enough for him to send a message to the lizardmen cities.

The device and team were promptly teleported back to Xlanhuapec, and from there to Mekhinyx’kal, where the slann set to work analyzing the device’s capabilities. Via applying short-term cogitative divination to see the history of the materials that made up the bomb, the slann deduced the amount of explosive force it was likely to produce once detonated - a considerable amount, as expected, but not actually enough to irreparably ravage a temple-city with a geomantic web of anything above baseline. The reaction clearly possessed the capability to escalate itself further, but the caliber of the devices the Uax produced at present were simply not advanced enough to facilitate explosions of such magnitude. This data was refined several times with further studies as the rest of the slann continued to sabotage further Helix devices that the Uax pieced together out of scrap metal, and the calculations fed into the parameters of the Metropolis Preservation Barriers.

All of this culminated in the ninth year of the Uax’s frenzied assault on Itza. The fungoid entity had ramped up its production of Helix bombs over the course of the siege, spontaneously piecing them together out of scrap and rubble on the battlefield with ever-increasing frequency and continually decreasing regard for safety. The slann had been able to stymie any of the bombs from actually being deployed, but it was only a matter of time before one example or other slipped the proverbial net.

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A few kilometers out from Itza’s walls, a swarm of Uax bodies clambered over each other like ants, hammering and welding great sheets of metal together with brute strength and instinctual intellect. A dome-shaped engine took shape, coalescing from the frenzied effort of the many bodies that worked across it. Many of these efforts had been dashed aside by the angular, shining minds of the Web-thing, their croaking voices shouting denial as they unmade bomb after bomb.

This time, it was different. The frog-things had been spread thin, their attention diverted. The rocket came together, the device at its core glowing a brilliant, eye-searing green. Many of the Uax’s bodies began to flay themselves apart as they worked on it, radiation scouring its molecular structure to the point that even its formidable genetics could not hold it together. Flesh bubbled, twisted, and sloughed off, and the Uax kept working, piecing together its engine of destruction until its bodies collapsed for lack of ability to function.

The rocket’s engine started with glee, squig-fat fuel burning hot and fast, lifting it off the ground on a thick pillar of fire. It was a burning green sun, the radioactive metals inside the bomb itself shining with a poisonous radiance. The missile roared as it ascended, and the Uax bellowed along with it, singing twin songs of destruction.

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Tik’tokrok looked down as something buzzed and hummed within a pouch on his waist. The glossy dodecahedron nearly jumped into his hand as he reached down to retrieve it, and continued to hum with increasing force as he took it out. The glyphs on the thing were gleaming with pale white light, and it pulled insistently as he held it. Instinctively inclined to obey the workings of the slann, the kroxigor released his grip and the device snapped forward, coming to a halt in midair at the very precipice of the stairs that led down the slope of Itzoatl. The glow leached out of all its glyphs save for one, which pulsed slowly as it hovered in the air.

Tik’tokrok stepped forward, standing in the exact spot that Kroak’s long-dead Eternity Warden had millennia ago. A recollection came to him, then, of the words he’d heard the saurus say, and he understood what he was to do. He looked up at the ball of radioactive green flame falling from the sky, and spoke the phrase that had halted Khorne’s mightiest Exalted for minutes on end.

“Passage denied.”

The dodecahedron trembled, and the glow emanating from its single illuminated glyph brightened, quickly becoming painful to look upon. A ringing noise also arose from around it, as though an invisible bell had been tolled, a smooth, clear note that reverberated with increasing intensity. When the light and noise reached their peak, just at the precipice of causing pain, they halted for a single moment, allowing silence and shadow to return to their surroundings. Then, with a single sharp burst, a colorless beam of energy lanced out of the top of the dodecahedron, piercing into the sky above Itza. There it halted before spreading outwards, falling down over the city like the water from a fountain. The emerald star made contact with the nascent shield just as it reached the city’s outer walls, and Itza shook as a curling blast of nuclear flame swept over it. Hellish light gleamed with corrosive glee, and the force of the detonation roared with a voice fit to end the world. A hole was blasted in the everpresent storm, the clouds and rain swept aside by atomic wrath.

The light faded. The smoke cleared. Itza’s shield shone unwavering, the city beneath remaining an unmarred obelisk of black stone. A ray of sun shone down through the gap in the clouds, and the lizardmen roared savage victory, even as the Uax poured on with unrelenting urgency.