The Storm of Chaos

Every age of the Old World lives in the shadow of the last great invasion and the dread of the next. The Storm of Chaos was that next invasion made real: a Chaos incursion to rival the horror the Empire had survived under Magnus the Pious, launched in the world's later history by a champion whose ambition dwarfed even Asavar Kul's. His name was Archaon, and he came not merely to raid or to plunder but to end the world entirely. That he did not is a story of frozen Kislev bleeding to buy time, of an Empire that would not break, and of a single fortress-city upon which the fate of all men came to rest.

The Everchosen Returns[edit]

For an age the north had gnawed at the borders without unity, its tribes squabbling as often as they raided. Then a single warlord gathered the favour of all four Dark Gods and was raised to the ancient and terrible rank of Everchosen: the chosen champion charged with uniting every servant of ruin for the final war. The last man to hold that title had been broken at the gates of Kislev. This one meant to finish what his predecessor had begun. From the Chaos Wastes the tribes poured forth once more, and this time they marched behind a leader who would not be so easily thrown down.

Archaon, Lord of the End Times[edit]

Archaon was no simple barbarian. Once a templar of the Empire, he had turned his back on his god and sought out the fabled treasures of the damned, claiming one by one the dread artefacts that marked the true Everchosen. Armoured in the trappings of prophecy and mounted upon a monstrous steed, he styled himself the Lord of the End Times, and he believed with utter conviction that he was destined to unmake the world. Behind him assembled the mightiest host the Warriors of Chaos had raised in centuries (armoured champions, howling marauders, daemons, and monsters beyond counting), all bent southward toward the lands of men.

The Shield of Kislev[edit]

As ever, the frozen realm of Kislev took the first and cruellest blow. Its people had rebuilt Praag once already, in the ashes of the Great War; now they watched the storm gather to fall upon them a second time. Kislevite lancers and stubborn foot-soldiers fought a bitter delaying war across the snows, trading ground and lives for time, knowing full well that they stood as the shield behind which the Empire might yet muster. Kislev bled so that the south could arm, its cities put to the torch and its people driven into exile or death. It is a role that grim northern land has played more than once, standing as the Old World's frozen shield against the fury of the north, and never once without terrible cost.

The March on the Empire[edit]

The storm did not stop at Kislev's ruin. Archaon drove south into the northern provinces of the Empire of Man, and the war became a desperate scramble to hold the heartland together. The scale of the incursion strained every alliance the Empire could call upon; its armies were stretched across a hundred leagues of burning frontier, and its people fled before a foe that seemed unstoppable. This was no mere border raid to be repelled by a single Elector Count's levy. It was the whole apparatus of ruin bearing down at once, exactly as our account of the forces of Chaos warns it always eventually must.

The Siege of Middenheim[edit]

The war found its centre at Middenheim, the great City of the White Wolf, raised upon a sheer mountain of rock and sacred to the war-god Ulric. If Middenheim fell, the north of the Empire would be lost and the road to its heart thrown open. And so the decisive act of the Storm of Chaos became a siege: Archaon's colossal host battering at the walls of the fortress-city while its defenders held on through assault after assault. The greatest heroes of the Empire gathered upon those ramparts: the Emperor himself, the high priests of the war-cults, and the battle-wizards of the Colleges of Magic, throwing back wave upon wave of the damned in a defence that would decide everything. The fighting raged through the streets and across the flat mountain-top, into the tunnels beneath the great rock and along every wall and gatehouse, until it seemed that no defender could possibly still be standing, and still, somehow, the banners of the Empire flew above the smoke.

Valten, Chosen of Sigmar[edit]

In the darkest hour a champion arose to answer the Everchosen. Valten, a simple smith's apprentice, was proclaimed the chosen of Sigmar himself, bearing the god's holy hammer and blazing with a courage that rallied the failing armies of men. To the faithful he was Sigmar reborn in the hour of need, the mortal answer to Archaon's dark destiny, and where he fought the tide of Chaos was turned. The confrontation between the Chosen of Sigmar and the Lord of the End Times became the war's defining legend, the clash of the world's hope against its doom upon the blood-soaked slopes of the White Mountain.

The Storm Breaks[edit]

Against all reckoning, the walls of Middenheim held. The Chaos host, unable to take the city and bled dry by its own fury, was at last thrown back, and Archaon's grand design collapsed for want of the final victory it needed. The Everchosen withdrew into the north: beaten, but not destroyed, carrying his ambition back to the Wastes to nurse it anew. The Old World called it a triumph and mourned its dead, yet the wisest knew the truth that our account of the Great War Against Chaos teaches of every such victory: the north had merely been delayed. The Everchosen still lived, the Dark Gods were still patient, and the storm that had broken upon Middenheim was only a rehearsal. The true and final reckoning, when Archaon would return to make good his terrible title, is told in our account of the End Times.