The Realmgate Wars

When the storm broke at last over the Mortal Realms, it took a name that would echo down the age: The Realmgate Wars, the long, grinding campaign by which Sigmar sought to wrench his stolen worlds back from Chaos. For long ages the God-King had watched from Azyr as the other seven realms drowned in ruin, hoarding the souls of fallen heroes against the day of return. When he opened the gates of his heavenly city, it was to loose a new kind of warrior upon the foe.

Down through the lightning came the Stormcast Eternals, reforged demigods hurled like spears at the great realmgates that stitched the realms together. Their war was fought gate by gate and bastion by bastion, from the fire-wracked plains of Aqshy to the rotting groves of Ghyran, wherever a portal might be seized and held. Each victory reopened a wound in the body of Chaos; each defeat saw whole Stormhosts scattered back to the forge to be remade and hurled forth again.

Against them stood the massed hordes of the Slaves to Darkness and the daemon legions of the Dark Gods, entrenched behind ten generations of conquest and led by champions who had never known defeat. The fighting sprawled across the realms without pause, drawing in sylvaneth, duardin and the reawakened peoples of Order. Realmgates changed hands a dozen times over, and for every fortress liberated another fell to a Chaos counter-attack, until the map of the realms seemed to bleed and reknit with each passing season.

The Realmgate Wars did not free the realms (no single war could), but they shattered the myth of Chaos invincibility and planted the banners of Order once more in soil long thought lost. For the fuller account of that reconquest and the campaigns that flowed from it, see the Realmgate Wars.