The Dawnbringer Crusades

As the realms reeled from the Necroquake and the Era of the Beast, Sigmar cast the dice of survival with The Dawnbringer Crusades, an act of desperate ambition. From the overcrowded metropolises he sent forth vast crusader-columns: farmers and masons, soldiers and priests, faith-anchors dragged on groaning wagons across a thousand leagues of hostile wilderness. Their charge was simple and merciless. March until you find open ground worth dying for, then build.

Most never arrived. The wilds between the great cities teemed with the orruk-warclans hungry for a fight, with predatory Chaos warbands, and with the restless dead. Escorting each crusade came warriors of the cities-of-sigmar, and above them the golden hosts of the stormcast-eternals, who spent their immortal lives without count to buy the settlers a single dawn.

Where a crusade endured, a strong-point rose from raw earth, a faith-anchor blazing at its heart to hold back the corrupting tides of the realms. Such victories were islands in an ocean of failure. For every settlement raised, a dozen columns were butchered on nameless plains, their wagons burned, their people scattered as carrion. Yet Sigmar's gamble bought something precious. Not safety, but hope, purchased in blood and paid forward into an uncertain age.