The wind screamed across the Ravaged Coast, dragging curls of ash into spirals that dissolved before they touched the ground. Emberstone veins glimmered beneath the fractured cliffs — living ore pulsing with the mingled essence of lightning and flame, as though the land itself were trying to remember a time before corruption.
Lord Voltrix stood upon a jagged precipice, the cracked earth beneath him arranged in patterns that looked far too deliberate for nature. In his hand, his once-pure staff shuddered like a creature waking from an unwanted dream. Once the ordained mark of a Lord-Veritant — it now throbbed with the pulse of an alien heartbeat. The blue-skull crystal at its crown flickered erratically, threads of colour shifting through hues not meant for mortal eyes.
He rested its tip against a cluster of exposed emberstone. Immediately the ore reacted. Light surged up its veins in a violent flash, then contracted into spiraling sigils that crawled across the staff’s length.
The Changecast recoiled.
“My lord—” one began, but Voltrix silenced him with a raised hand.
The emberstone continued to glow, brighter and brighter, until its radiance cast warped shadows over the warband. The staff drank in the light greedily. Jagged arcs of energy licked up the shaft, fusing into the crystal skull.
Voltrix felt the first jolt strike his arm — cold and scalding in the same instant, like being thrust into a storm that remembered every life he had ever lived. His vision fractured into overlapping futures, each one whispering a different outcome.
Feed the conduit.
Let the ore rewrite you.
Voltrix leaned into the pain, pressing the staff harder into the emberstone. The ore cracked, not from force but from surrender. Molten lines of emberstone essence streamed upward, pulled into the crystal skull as though by a starving vortex.
The staff convulsed.
The crystal fractured. And from its fissures, something new emerged — a glow that moved like sentient fire, but colder, sharper, threaded with impossible geometry.
Warpfire.
It licked across Voltrix’s gauntlet, tracing the runes that had once been Sigmar’s blessing before twisting into the symbols of Tzeentch. His armour changed hue with each heartbeat — cobalt to lavender to a shade that resembled the inside of an eclipse.
The Changecast knelt, their helmets splitting with feathered mutations as they felt the shifting of fate around their lord.
“My lord,” one whispered, voice warping mid-sentence, “the emberstone… it has awakened something in you.”
“No,” Voltrix murmured, eyes blazing with spirals of colour. “It has revealed what was already there.”
He lifted the staff.
Warpfire erupted, swirling around him like a cyclone of sentient light. It poured from the crystal, hungry, seeking, devouring the last traces of emberstone in a radius of several paces. Rock melted into whorls of living rune-script. Air screamed.
Voltrix felt the fire settle into him — not as a gift, but as a pact. The emberstone had not simply empowered the staff. It had fused with it, rewritten its essence, stitching his soul and the artefact into a single conduit for Tzeentch’s will.
And on the Ravaged Coast, reality began to smolder and shift, rewriting itself around the sorcerer who had just claimed dominion over a new and terrible flame.