#81 A Tale of Salas Nova

The following short story was written as my application to the Black Library 'Dawnbringers' open submissions window in October 2021. They rejected it, but I thought I'd share it here anyway...

The Girl with the Blood Red Rose

Rain spattered relentlessly on the casket as it slowly descended. A brown and amber cushion of dead leaves awaited it at the bottom of the grave. Marcas stared at the single red rose his mother had laid on his twin’s coffin. His eyes were watering, not so much with tears but because he was trying so hard not to close them. Because every time he did, he saw his sister die again.

It was so unfair. He had never wanted to come on this stupid crusade anyway, but no one ever asked him what he wanted. And now Kornelia was dead, slaughtered by a nightmare. The banner heraldor had barely been planted before he had lost his twin. And it was all his parents’ fault! From the moment the Dawnbringers had set out from Glymmsforge, they had been beset by ghouls, gheists and deadwalkers. What had they expected of the Realm of Death if not – death? Back in Azyr, Marcas had never really considered his own eventual demise, but here in Shyish he worried whether he would even see his thirteenth name day. And yet death wasn’t the real fear: undeath was. Would his twin sister be lucky enough to remain dead? And when their time came, would he and Father and Mother?

Deep down, he knew full well that his father had never had a choice about accepting the coin malleus and enlisting the family with the Dawners. The Crusade’s Grand Theogonist herself had expressly chosen Gaias and brought him all the way from glorious Azyr to miserable Glymmsforge to be her Chancellor. The unremitting terrors of Glymmsforge had been a nerve-shredding culture shock to the traumatised young Azyrite twins, but at least the free city had offered Marcas and Kornelia some sort of civilization and comfort, unlike this utterly dismal backwater. 

Salas Nova it had been named by the Crusaders, but it was an ancient place, its original name long forgotten. Now it was nothing but a forlorn pile of timeworn ruins overgrown with thorny vines of glossy, crimson roses. It lay just within the bounds of Barfunweltz Cemetery, an impossibly vast expanse of dank, labyrinthine graveyards, crumbling mausoleums and rain-lashed moors studded with prehistoric cairns. This miserable tomb-land stretched as far as the gates of Glymmsforge itself; it had taken the Crusade many dreary months to trudge across it. But here in Salas Nova (so the thaumaturges assured them) was a ‘unique pattern of geomantic nexus points and ley lines engendering an exceptionally efficacious convergence of arcane energies’. Marcas had absolutely no idea what that meant, except that Father had no choice about bringing them here. But that didn’t mean Marcas wasn’t going to resent it.

He sighed, and without thinking closed his eyes. Instantly the images surged back: the skeletal horse, the spectral rider, the sweeping scythe. Ephemeral, immaterial – and yet physical enough to slice though his sister’s neck in one stroke. Her brief scream. Her copious blood. Long blond hair stained red in an instant. 

Marcas snapped his eyes open again, but the image remained, imprinted on his psyche. He forced himself to recall what had happened immediately afterwards: the Dawners’ cheers as a surge of geomantic energy had finally flooded from the nexus siphon and powered up the guardian idols of Salas Nova’s outer defences. The ghostly procession was instantly banished from the fledgling Sigmarite stronghold. Protection had come, but it had come just a moment too late for Kornelia.

He shook his head to clear the images and returned to the present. To his twin’s rain-drummed casket being lowered solemnly into the freshly consecrated ground at the edge of the arable reclaim. 

Kornelia’s coffin had reached the dead leaves at the base of the grave, but as it touched them, they rippled and parted as if to welcome her into the earth. What new horror of Shyish was this? Then Marcas realised the hole was simply flooded (hardly a surprise given how much it rained here) and the carpet of dead leaves had been floating on water. Then the casket was suddenly submerged, and the dead leaves returned to cover it with a faint sloshing sound. It had vanished, like some sick conjuring trick. The coffin ropes were pulled back up and the water became still. Marcas found himself staring at leaf-litter in the bottom of an apparently empty grave. Shyish had taken his sister.

He sensed Mother and Father step away, turn and trudge back towards Salas Nova. But Marcas remained, staring at the layer of dead leaves as if willing them to give him his sister back. 

He gasped as the water suddenly stirred. Slowly the floating leaves parted as something came to the surface. His sister – 

Marcas exhaled in relief. It was only the rose his mother had laid on her daughter’s coffin, bobbing back up to the surface to join the rotting leaves. Marcas reminded himself that the Grand Theogonist’s exorcists knew how to protect a grave from necromancy, and the tomb of her Chancellor’s daughter would certainly enjoy the most fastidious attention. He turned his back, hunched his shoulders, and followed his parents back towards the towering silhouettes of Salas Nova’s guardian idols.

He did not see the crimson stain exuding from the floating rose and spreading inexorably outwards.

* * *

Marcas glanced over his shoulder as they ran. Running from a battle seemed cowardly to the part of him that wanted to avenge his sister’s death. But fighting was not the vocation that Sigmar had granted to this family. Father was always going on about how ‘the quill is mightier that the mace’, but Marcas knew which he would rather have in his hand right now. 

The noise of fighting was becoming more distant. It didn’t sound like a normal battle to Marcas (whatever ‘normal’ meant here). The clash of metal against metal was mostly absent, for the flesh-eater court’s mordants mainly fought with tooth, claw, and scavenged bones. The ghouls were bizarre and emanated sheer, unrestrained madness. It was as if they believed themselves to be engaged in something completely divergent from the appalling reality. The appalling reality from which Marcas’s family was now fleeing. On reflection, maybe running was a good idea.

Once again, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer had come to the defence of Salas Nova. Precious little of the potential city had been completed yet, but what had been built could not have been achieved without the constant protection of those ancient Stormcast heroes. Marcas had no doubt they would soon drive the flesh-eaters off – as they had done numerous times before – but in the meantime, mere mortals such as his family needed to keep themselves well out of trouble.

Running through the rain, down a deserted, half-built street in the shadow of the transport metalith, they were aiming for the centre of the Sigmarite strongpoint, well away from the fighting. Yet somehow, a pack of ghouls still seemed to be chasing them.

“Quick, in here!” panted Gaias over the distant cries and shrieks of the battle. He was holding up a flap of oilskin, the corner of a large tarpaulin that had been thrown over a stack of building materials in an effort to protect it from the incessant rain.

Marcas followed his mother and swiftly ducked under the sheet. His father shoved him into the hole between the stone blocks, then checked up and down the half-built street before squeezing into hiding himself.

Sweating profusely and wheezing heavily, his father squinted at them in the sudden darkness. Marcas watched his mother stare back, eyes wide with terror and bloodshot with the exhaustion of grief. “Keep quiet!” whispered Gaias, “There’s one coming down the street, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t see us hide.”

“Pretty sure?!” groaned Marcas.

“Shush!”

The family crouched in silence, listening. Sure enough, barely audible over the rain pattering on the oilskin and the muffled screams of the fighters, there soon came the sound of footsteps slapping in the mud. 

Trying to quieten his breathing, Marcas peered anxiously through a gap in the tarpaulin. His perspective was reduced to a narrow vertical slice of the building across the street, an ancient structure which the Dawner craftsmen had been trying to refurbish. Without warning, the view was suddenly obscured by the filth-encrusted skin of a huge thigh. Thrusting a hand over his mouth, he stifled a gasp of terrified revulsion.

The creature outside was clearly stalking them: as it moved, Marcas saw it was crouched low and peering around. It gradually turned its head in the direction of the tarpaulin. He could see now that it was a huge ghoul monster, as tall as an ogor but wiry and sinuous. Its snub-nosed face was a thing of horror and it absolutely reeked of carrion and putrid offal. Almost choking on the stench, he whispered a prayer to Sigmar. Its gaze swept over their hiding place, and for the briefest of moments its glistening black eyes seemed to stare right at them… and then the crypt horror returned the way it had come, the slapping of its feet gradually fading away to be drowned out by the sounds of rain and battle.

“All clear,” whispered Father, “but we have to stay hidden.”

“Come this way!” hissed Mother from the back of their refuge, “I think we can get through – somewhere better to hide!”

Pushing their way through the darkness under the oilskin, past assorted tools and building materials, they awkwardly emerged one by one into a half-renovated stone house. Its ancient walls had been reconstructed up to the second storey, but it had no roof and the rain had turned the ground floor to sticky mud. Even though masons had clearly been working here recently, a tangled vine of blood-red roses had already grown halfway up one wall. It was secluded, an ideal hiding place, and certainly more comfortable that being cramped under the tarpaulin.

“Come on though – find somewhere sheltered to hide!” Mother gestured further into the building site and Marcas gingerly led the way.

Stepping through a doorway, he came to an abrupt halt. “Father…?” he called nervously. 

They were clearly not the first Dawner family to seek shelter in this half-built house. Before them in the mud lay the bodies of a man and a woman. Their throats had been ripped out, and the mud around them was stained deep red. A short distance away, sobbing silently, was a girl. Her long, pale hair had been splattered with gore and was turning pink as the rain diluted the blood. Marcas thought she looked about his age. If she had heard them, she did not respond. She simply sat hugging her knees and staring forlornly at her parents’ corpses.

Marcas glanced nervously around and tried to listen out for any lingering mordants. Maybe this was not such a good place to hide from the flesh-eaters after all?

“Oh, my poor thing!” cried Mother. She splashed down into the gory mud and gently raised up the trembling girl, who tried weakly to reach out to the two cadavers. Her gore-stained locks formed a sodden veil over her face as she slowly lifted her eyes.

“It’s alright my dear,” murmured Mother, “You’re safe now. I’m Orelia. What’s your name?” She gently parted the girl’s blood-pink hair to reveal a haggard young face: dead eyes, wan skin, and an expression of utter helplessness. Tears and mucous mingled with rain and dripped from her trembling lower lip.

“What’s your name, child?” prompted Gaias gently.

The girl looked up at her saviours, something like recognition dawning on her ashen face. They leaned closer to hear her timid whisper over the rain and the distant sounds of battle. 

“Anya,” she mumbled faintly.

* * *

As expected, the flesh-eater court had soon been driven off and the freehold returned to its nervous normality. Anya had come back with Marcas’s family to their domicile shell, where she had remained. Deeply traumatised, she never uttered more than a couple of words at a time and was unable to speak at all about her family or their fate. No one was inclined to force her to do so.

Father had tried to identify her parents, but their bodies had been too mutilated, and he had yet to find an entry in the tomes valoris which matched what little they knew about Anya’s family. Having found no kin to care for the girl, Mother and Father had of course taken her under their wing without hesitation. Marcas knew they considered it their religious duty to look after an orphan, but he also knew enough about human nature to perceive that his parents yearned for relief from the pain of losing their own daughter. But replacing Kornelia was impossible and unthinkable. And anyway, Marcas certainly did not regard Anya as anything like a sister.

Even now, as he stomped home from Salas Nova’s ration market, shoulders hunched against the inevitable rain, he found himself thinking about her. If he was honest, he had become obsessed. Obviously, he was attracted to Anya, but she also scared him. And mystified him. Apart from Kornelia, girls had always mystified Marcas, but this was on a whole other level. And it didn’t help that she hardly spoke, just gazed at him with those pale, pale eyes – 

A man pulling a handcart shouted at Marcas to get out of the way as he splashed through a puddle and wrenched him from his reverie. Marcas scowled and hefted his soggy sack of meagre rations. Back in Azyr – even in Glymmsforge – servants had run the family’s errands and cooked their food, but not in Salas Nova. And despite Father’s rank, their accommodation and provisions were essentially the same as the common Dawners from Glymmsforge. It was all so unfair. Father had been working long hours for the Grand Theogonist, supervising construction of her precious Sigmarite shrine. Mother had been busy too, both setting up their new home and helping tend to the constant stream of wounded – casualties of the incessant predations of the local undead. Much to his annoyance, this had meant more chores for Marcas, although he didn’t mind quite as much when silently sharing them with Anya. On more than one occasion, he had caught her watching him while they worked, an eager glow in her alabaster eyes.

As he rounded the corner to approach their domicile shell, he vaguely noticed that a new vine of roses had grown up the wall on one side of the door. He stepped inside, shedding his oilskin cloak, and leaving it in a puddle on the floor. Father and Mother’s cloaks were draped over chairs to drip dry; they were home early, and he could hear them talking in the next room. 

“…but I’m sure it’s her!” Mother was saying, “Look at how she’s fitted into family life – she acts so much like Kornelia, and she even looks like her too!”

“I hear what you’re saying my dear Orelia – and Sigmar knows, this is Shyish after all – but just listen to yourself: this is blasphemy!” Father sounded genuinely frightened. “If the Grand Theogonist found out, she’d – ”

Alarmed, Marcas lingered outside the door to listen.

“She won’t find out – you can see to that – and anyway, that’s hardly the point! If she’s our daughter, then she’s our daughter, blasphemy or no!”

Father groaned softly. “Oh, I do so want it to be true…”

“Listen to your heart Gaias – you know it’s true! This is Shyish: the dead do not stay dead. We lose Kornelia, and then a few days later she finds us again!” Marcas could hear his mother was speaking through tears of joy. “It’s a blessing! A gift from Sigmar!”

“Perhaps it is Orelia, but it’s a gift that could see us swinging from the executioner’s gallows before dawn…”

“So how are we going to prevent that? Now that we’re all back together, how are we going to keep our family safe?”

“Well… I suppose we have to talk to her first,” said Father. Marcas could hear his calm rationality returning to the fore. “See if she can confirm it is her. Then we’ll need to tell Marcas his sister has returned – that won’t be easy.”

Outside the door, Marcas felt like icy water had been poured down his back. He wanted to run but his legs were wet rope. Surely, they didn’t think –

He heard a door open and someone else join his parents. “Oh! Anya my dear, you made us jump!” Mother’s voice was quavering. “Please do sit down and join us, we’ve just been talking about you...”

It was too much. Without waiting to hear their conclusion, Marcas bolted for the door and ran back out into the pouring rain.

* * *

My parents think Anya is Kornelia back from the grave!? This is madness! This is nonsense! Kornelia was my twin; do they not think I’d know her! Anya…? No… definitely not… she just can’t be…!

Marcas ran through the rain. He had no idea where he was going, he just wanted to be as far from his parents’ madness as possible. Then he turned a corner and suddenly – there was the girl. Standing before him, soaked to the skin, not ten paces away. They stared at each other in silence. Marcas had never felt more frightened or more confused or more awkward.

He blurted it straight out: “Are you… are you Kornelia?

Anya gazed at him through a veil of wet hair and slowly shook her head. She shrugged and her red lips curled into a coy smile. Marcas exhaled and almost laughed at his parents’ paranoia: imaging the undead everywhere, even within the guardian idol barrier of the freehold! This sort of thing probably happened all the time when Azyrites tried to make sense of life in the Realm of Death.

Still smiling, Anya silently beckoned to him. Without a moment’s thought, he followed, instantly forgetting his parents and their foolish notions.

Marcas’s heart pounded as Anya led him by the hand, out of the rain and into the shelter of Salas Nova’s new Sigmarite shrine. He was breathless and confused and excited and terrified. She stopped, let go of his hand and reached down to his feet where a rose was growing, its thorny tendrils already clambering up stones freshly laid by the Dawner masons. She plucked a single, crimson bloom.

And then she spoke: “The blood roses of Barfunweltz are always bleeding.” It was the most Marcas had ever heard her say. Her voice was every bit as gentle and alluring as he had imagined. He was stunned into silence, overwhelmed by a barrage of conflicting emotions.

“The Sigmarites think they can make Barfunweltz their own,” she mused, “But look – the roses soon grow back. They will clamber silently over the walls of this so-called civilisation.” She turned the rose gently in her fingers, gazing at it. Marcas had never seen anything so captivating. “Gradually they will smother it and put it to their own use.”

Delicately, almost reverently, she crouched down and placed the rose in a puddle where it floated among the dead leaves. A crimson stain bloomed in the water and spread inexorably outwards. 

Anya looked up and smiled. “Dear Marcas. I’ve seen the way you look at me. Would you like me to kiss you? I do so want to.”

If Marcas had even considered resisting her, he would have found he could not: that white-gold hair, that ivory skin, those blood red lips, those alabaster eyes… Trembling, he closed his own eyes in anticipation. 

He could not feel her breath against his skin, but he could smell her and feel her hair brushing his shoulder. And then –

PAIN! Such agonising pain! Emanating from the side of his neck and instantly coursing through his whole body. His legs gave way, but she held him upright with unnatural strength as she continued to suck his lifeblood. His mind exploded with monstrous nightmares. And then darkness.

* * *

Anya Liedl of the Bloody Pilgrims giggled girlishly as she watched Chancellor Gaias, his wife and their son feeding on their first kills. It was a rather messy affair, but her own Soulblight ascension was recent enough that she could empathise with their ravenous blood thirst. This was her first solo mission for her mistress, and everything had gone precisely to plan: Procession, Court and Coven had worked together to fool the naïve Azyrites. To produce three new Bloody Pilgrims, three more roses of Barfunweltz, three vampires inserted into the very heart of the Sigmarites’ blasphemous Crusade, ready to do the will of the true lords – the Gravelords – of Shyish.

#82 THE HUBRIS OF THE GHEISTBUSTERS