AoS28: Stormcast Eternal

“By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jeweled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…”

The Crystal World (1966), J.G. Ballard

AoS28: Freyvid Hafnar - The Eclipse

Is it like the hand of God hovering above?

Freyvid Hafnar, Chief investigator of the Barak-Nar Biologis Guild, had been commissioned, alongside an Overlord warfleet, to venture into the humid cloudbanks of Ghyran in search of a missing explorator fleet. The Kharadron had long forsaken the realm of life for the riches of their native Chamon, but greed and hubris garnered from their dominion over the skies eventually pushed them outward. Rumors circulated the airways of some daemonic taint that had begun to overtake some of the farther reaches of the realm, and the Admiral Counsel began to fear that their ships may have been lost to its vile clutches. In hopes of salvaging something from the lost venture, they commissioned a Grundcorps reconnaissance fleet to investigate, with Hafnar amongst their storied crew. Never ones for superstition, the Barak-Nar Admirals reasoned that a scientist would prove useful in case the lost fleet met their end via some unconventional means. Hafnar was also somewhat of an expert on Nurgle pox and maladies, if anyone could truly be called such, studying the Guild’s labyrinthine archives on the matter. Whatever the fate of the lost ships, the decaying hand of Nurgle or otherwise, they would be found and avenged…

AoS28: Exploring a crystal world

“There is an immense reward to be found in that frozen forest... the gift of immortality a direct consequence of the surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identities. However apostate we may be in this world, there perforce we become apostles of the prismatic sun."

The Crystal World (1966), J.G. Ballard

In some forgotten grottos and neglected glades of the Mortal Realms, a singular transformation is coming over all organic matter. Living or dead, all blossoming into vitreous spurs of crystal. An inexhaustible tide, physically and psychologically. White static on periphery of conscious thought, beckoning all to return to face absolution. A new horror to add to the many that plague the Mortal Realms. But perhaps the capacity for it has been present all along, since the World’s molten core was placed within the firmament, some antediluvian certainty finally coalescing into being?