The Ravening

When the last of the free kingdoms in the eastern reaches fell silent, it was not to sword or spell but to teeth, in the creeping famine-war the chroniclers called The Ravening. From every barrow, ruin and forgotten hollow poured the deluded hosts, believing themselves noble knights riding to a glorious feast even as they fell upon the living like starving dogs.

The Flesh-eater Courts marched under kings who saw gilded halls where there were only bone-pits, and summoned to their banners a chivalry that existed nowhere but in their broken minds. They swept across the land in a tide of gnashing hunger, and where they passed the villages emptied, the dead were dragged from their graves half-eaten, and the survivors were carried back to the crypt-courts to be fattened for the abhorrent revels their captors imagined as feasts of honour.

Against the tide came grim allies of circumstance. The Soulblight Gravelords warred upon the ghouls for dominion over the dead, resenting these ragged pretenders who devoured the very corpses a vampire might have raised, while beleaguered Cities of Sigmar threw up walls of fire and faith to keep the gnawing hordes from their gates. Neither could halt the Ravening so much as blunt it, driving it from one starved land into the next.

The Ravening was less a campaign than a plague with a crown, a hunger that reasoned and marched and dreamed. By the time it was checked, whole kingdoms had been reduced to gnawed bone, and the survivors had learned that in the realms even madness could raise an army.