The Soul Wars

When the Necroquake tore across the realms, it woke a war that no living thing could sit out: The Soul Wars. Nagash, Great Necromancer and self-proclaimed god of the dead, had worked a ritual of such magnitude that death itself overflowed, spilling ghosts into every land at once and setting the living and the dead at one another's throats.

From the amethyst wastes of Shyish came the Nighthaunt, processions of shrieking spirits bound to Nagash's will and loosed upon the living as punishment for every soul that had ever cheated the grave. They drifted through walls, quenched hearth-fires, and dragged the terrified dead back into undeath. Gravesites that had lain quiet for centuries disgorged their tenants; mourners were slain at the very tombs of those they wept for, and whole cities were emptied in a single haunted night.

Against this tide Sigmar hurled a new generation of Stormcast Eternals, the Sacrosanct chambers, armed with cleansing magic to stand where mortal soldiers could not. For them it was a war of grim novelty: their lightning could scatter a daemon, but a slain ghost simply reformed, and victory meant banishing rather than killing a foe that felt neither fear nor fatigue. Their battles ranged from besieged free cities to the black shores of the underworlds themselves.

The Soul Wars proved that Nagash's ambition was no less total than that of Chaos: he sought not to rule the realms but to still them, folding all life into his silent kingdom of the dead. The living endured, but the realms were left haunted as never before, and in the deep underworlds of Shyish both sides knew the true reckoning with the Undying King was still to come.