The Ravaged Coast thrummed with sorcerous tension as the Changecast advanced, their armour shimmering like fractured rainbows across rusted cliffs. A storm of colour — blue, violet, and pink — churned over their heads like a wound in the sky. Lord Voltrix walked at their head, leaning upon his blue-skull staff, its crystalline core pulsing erratically with memories not his own. His eyes narrowed as he surveyed his battered force: Corrupted Vindictors standing in a jagged shield wall, their weapons flickering with unnatural azure fire, Annihilators with their heavy round shields, each emblazoned with the eye of change, their single-handed blades like slabs of shimmering moon-iron;
— And behind them, the two-handed glaive Annihilators, hulking silhouettes poised like executioners awaiting the signal.
He had not slept in days.
Or perhaps he had been dreaming the entire time.
The last battles swirled together like oil in water, refusing to sit still in his mind. Yet each memory glowed with a shard of truth — and a shard of the Lord’s whisper.
The Skaven Tide — Rats Without End
It began with a tide of fur and metal. He remembered the stench first. The reek of warp-oil, sweat, and ratfur.
Then the scratching rumble of countless paws.
The Skaven had poured across the fractured coastline, their Rat Ogors erupted from the earth like flesh golems stitched from nightmares, their Doom Flayers belching sparks as they shrieked toward the Changecast lines.
Voltrix’s staff glowed — and reality buckled.
A thunderclap tore the sky.
The glaive-Annihilators fell from the heavens like falling stars, crashing down behind the Skaven lines. Their massive blades cleaved through the general and his gun-crews in a single incandescent sweep, scattering limbs and scrap metal across the salt-stained rocks.
Clanrats surged in response, a flood of blades and teeth. The Vindictors held firm, their corrupted sigmarite twisting into warped spikes as they counterthrusted, each stab igniting a rat in pink-blue fire.
But then the Rat Ogors struck.
They erupted from behind a ridge, slamming into Voltrix’s rear guard. He remembered the sound — the wet crunch of armour and bone — as the glaive-Annihilators tried to intercept them. The Ogors knocked them aside, smashing their bodies into the slate cliffs. One Annihilator bisected a Rat Ogor with a desperate swing before being hurled into the rocks, his armour screaming as it cracked.
More rats spewed from the shadows, throwing themselves upon the blades of Tzeentch’s warriors again and again as if death were merely an inconvenience. Doom Flayers shrieked across the battlefield until a formation of shield-Annihilators planted their feet and reduced the machines to splinters with hammering blows of their great blades.
Then came the moment burned deepest into Voltrix’s fractured mind:
Six Rat Ogors, charging him directly. He swayed from their blows, the cunning of Tzeentch’s magic protecting him and cut down two of the mighty beasts without breaking sweat. Their crude cannons fired at point-blank range. Smoke swallowed him. When it cleared, the two Ogors lay dying on the blood-soaked ground — and he was gone, slipping through the folds of illusion.
The Changecast prevailed.
Emberstone was theirs.
The Lord’s laughter echoed from the deep places of the earth.
The Deadwood of the Broken Sylvaneth
The next memory bled green and black.
A forest of writhing shapes. Trees knotted with faces, branches dripping with ichor. The Sylvaneth had been twisted, perhaps by Tzeentch, perhaps simply by the Ravaged Coast itself. At their head strode a Spirit of Durthu whose bark-flesh rippled like molten tar.
Voltrix sent in the glaive-Annihilators first, their long blades spinning arcs of violet flame. They hammered into Durthu like falling guillotines — but the great spirit merely roared and cut three down with a sweeping blow that sent them crashing through entire trees.
Vindictors attempted to pin his legs. He kicked them aside like insects.
Then the carrion-bugs appeared — bat-like, skeletal, screeching with hunger. They fell upon the corrupted Vindictors, tearing armour and flesh alike. Shield-Annihilators crashed into the swarm, forming a shining bulwark of sigils and steel. Their round shields rang with each hit, and for a moment the line held — a circle of shimmering defiance within a storm of claws.
Then Durthu came again.
The Knight-Arcanum stepped forward, unleashing a spear of corrupted light. Durthu answered with a single, contemptuous blow — the wizard struck down with humiliating ease.
Voltrix engaged the Treelord Ancient alone, his staff clashing with the creature’s oaken cudgel. Sparks — blue, gold, and sickly green — sprayed across the roots. He remembered pain, the cracking of ribs, the bite of corrupted bark tearing into his armour. He staggered, bleeding pink-violet light, and barely escaped as his forces scattered.
He survived only by letting the forest swallow him.
A retreat, but not a defeat.
The Changecast withdrew, wounded but unbroken.
The Lord whispered soothingly into his thoughts: Pain is merely another form of transformation.
The Pleasure-Marked Ambush
The third memory shimmered like a fractured mirror.
Slaangors. Dozens. Hundreds? Fast as hunger, beautiful as broken glass.
They descended upon the Changecast like dancers in a slaughterhouse, led by a Lord Hubris whose arrogance was so potent it distorted the air around him. A Lord of Pain followed, smiling as though he had already won.
Once more, Voltrix hurled Annihilators at the heart of the enemy. They crashed down in a meteor-strike of crackling colours, slaying the Slaaneshi general in an instant. The ground split beneath the blow — and then the foe tore the Annihilators apart in retaliation.
Voltrix watched his corrupted Vindictors being torn apart by the flanking herds, their lightning-souls scattering into the wind. He remembered the Lord of Pain strutting through the melee, blades dripping with indulgent malice.
Annihilators fell.
Slaangors died.
The battle devolved into a trade of bodies, a brutal grind of bloody slaughter.
Slaangors swept in from both flanks, the Changecast reforming, collapsing, reforming again in fractal patterns.
One shield-Annihilator - Voltrix remembered this with strange fondness — stood against six Slaangors, his shield glowing like a dying star as he bought his brothers the time they needed to reposition. Every time he struck, a ripple of nine-fold colour washed across his armour. He decapitated the last of the demons and shouldered his cleaver-like blade in satisfaction of a job well done.
Voltrix teleported across the battlefield in fractal flashes, appearing atop an Emberstone cache with a snarl. There he faced the enemy champion — a blade duel of ecstatic fury against controlled madness. The exchange ended in a stalemate, both champions of the ruinous powers acknowledging each other’s prowess before returning to their respective forces.
A stalemate in a war of shifting fates.
But the Lord whispered: Even a draw can be a victory if it moves the pieces closer to the final gambit.
Now — Returning to the Coast
Voltrix blinked, pulling himself back into the present.
The Chasm of Emberstone awaited.
The cocoon was nearly complete.
The Lord of the Thousand Sons stirred hungrily beneath the earth.
The skies above the Ravaged Coast twisted further, as though the land itself remembered his battles and reshaped them into new futures.
“Soon,” Voltrix murmured, clutching his staff as its skull-gem burned with impossible hues. “Soon you will rise. And these victories, these failures… all were but steps on your path.”
The Changecast behind him halted, kneeling as one — not out of loyalty, but because the ground itself compelled them. Emberstone veins blazed like molten lightning.
From deep below, a voice whispered with laughter made of many futures:
“Bring the last emberstone, my chosen, just a little more.
The chrysalis opens.
My rebirth nears.”
Voltrix smiled — a cracked, kaleidoscopic grin.
The Ravaged Coast trembled.
Change had only just begun.