The Realmgate Wars

For generations the Mortal Realms endured beneath the heel of the Dark Gods, and the ancient roads between worlds belonged to the enemy. Then the sky broke. On a scorched shelf of rock in the Realm of Fire, lightning fell in a storm without rain, and where each bolt struck the blackened ground a warrior in gleaming war-plate rose from the smoke. This was the opening blow of the Realmgate Wars, the sprawling reconquest by which Sigmar meant to reclaim a shattered creation, and it kindled the first true dawn of the age that now bears his name.

The Locked Doors of Creation[edit]

To understand why these wars were fought, you must first understand the realmgates. The eight Mortal Realms are not neighbours on a single map but separate planes woven from raw magic, and the swiftest passage between them runs through these arcane portals: arches of ancient stone, whirlpools of shadow, doorways of living flame. Whoever holds the realmgates holds the arteries of the cosmos. Through the long nightmare of the Age of Chaos, the servants of the Dark Gods seized nearly every gate they could reach, severing the realms from one another and strangling any hope of a united defence. When Sigmar sealed the great gates of Azyr and withdrew into the heavens, it was not to hide. It was to forge an army that could one day take those doors back.

The Storm Unleashed[edit]

The reconquest began in Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, and its first champion was Vandus Hammerhand, a reforged hero who led the charge onto the ash-choked Brimstone Peninsula. His warriors were Stormcast Eternals, and they came as a single living thunderbolt, crashing into the warhordes of the Blood God before the enemy grasped that the very sky had turned against them. Waiting for them was the warlord Korghos Khul and his Goretide, one of the mightiest hosts of the Blades of Khorne, who had spent the dark centuries raising mountains from the skulls of the slain. The clash that followed set the pattern for all that came after: sudden, savage, and always aimed at a gate. Each of Sigmar's Stormhosts struck like a hurled spear, seizing a portal, anchoring it, and prising open a road for the armies of Order to pour through behind them.

Among the God-King's earliest prizes was the recovery of his own weapon. Ghal Maraz, the god-forged warhammer lost in the death of the old world, had been hidden away within a drifting fortress in the metal realm, and reclaiming it was as much a symbol as a victory. The hammer returned to Sigmar's hand as his armies returned to the fight, and the free peoples took heart from a sign they could all understand.

War Across the Eight Realms[edit]

From that first strike the war fanned outward until it burned in every realm at once. In verdant Ghyran, the Stormcast fought their way toward the goddess Alarielle, whose life-magic was being throttled by the pestilence of the Maggotkin of Nurgle; the alliance they forged with her woodland children, the Sylvaneth, became one of the great turning points of the age. In metal-veined Chamon they hunted for the buried relics of ages past, while in the beast-haunted wilds of Ghur and the shadowed passes of Ulgu they carved out beachheads against impossible odds. Nor did the Stormcast fight alone. The star-born Seraphon sailed their floating temple-ships out of the deep heavens to lend their cold celestial sorcery wherever the light began to fail, and mortal warbands who had defied Chaos for generations rose at last to march beneath Sigmar's twin-tailed comet.

The Battle for the All-Gates[edit]

At the black heart of the conflict lay the Allpoints, a realm-between-realms where countless portals converged into a single strategic prize. It was ruled from a colossal Eldritch Fortress by Archaon the Everchosen, the dread warlord of the Slaves to Darkness and champion of all four Dark Gods. Whoever commanded the Allpoints could strike into any realm at will, and so it became the great objective of the war's later years. Sigmar hurled host after host against its walls in the campaign that would decide whether his reconquest could ever amount to more than a string of daring raids. The fighting there grew apocalyptic even by the standards of the age, a grinding siege waged at the very crossroads of creation.

The Tempering of the Storm[edit]

Victory, where it came, was never clean. Every Stormcast who fell in these campaigns was drawn back to Azyr on a lance of lightning and reforged for war, but each return scoured a little more of the mortal soul away, until some warriors could no longer recall the very lives they had died to protect. The longer the wars ground on, the stranger the storm's children became: some too fierce, some too cold, some subtly unmade by the process meant to preserve them. This was the tempering of the storm, the slow and painful discovery that Sigmar's perfect weapon carried a flaw at its heart, and that immortality bought in lightning came at a price no mortal could truly reckon.

From War to Walls[edit]

The Realmgate Wars did not end in a single blaze of total triumph. They ground gradually into stalemate as both sides bled themselves pale, and the front lines hardened around whichever gates each power had managed to hold. Yet the achievement was immense. For the first time in an age the roads between realms lay open to the free peoples, and behind the Stormhosts came engineers, farmers, and refugees to raise the first free cities of the new era. That fragile dawn could not last forever. The peace the storm had won was shattered from below when Nagash tore the veil and unleashed the Soul Wars and the Necroquake, and the age of reconquest gave way to a grimmer, stranger struggle for the fate of every soul. But the lesson of the Realmgate Wars endured long after the lightning faded: the realms could be fought for, and even the gods of ruin could be made to bleed.