Doubles Story - Written by Sean Smaker

The ruins were overgrown with the tendrils of the jungle.  Sounds of splitting rock and stone filled the halls of the small Lizardmen outpost.  The temple was empty, save for the mage priest motionless in meditation as he had been for the last century.  Suddenly, and quickly, the Slann’s eyes ripped open as if torn awake from a nightmare.  The sky turned black covered in unnaturally dark clouds.  Green glows appeared in the sky like torches in the mist.  Large cracks filled the air that shook the ground as each glow tore open giving birth to rocks falling from the sky.  These unworldly glowing green stones struck the ground with such force and resonance that it threatened the integrity of the small temple.  Immediately skinks filled the great mage priests chamber, rushing him out of the temple, just as hundreds of the warpstones meteors impacted the great pieces of stone turning them to dust.  Just as quickly as the sky had eaten the outpost, so did the storm subside, and a terrifying silence fell over the ruins.  The mist of the jungle was replaced with green ash from the incinerated comets.  The mage-priest and his followers were saturated with the power of the dark heavens.  Infused with the power of warpstone flowing through his body, the past, present, and future seemed so easy to see, in the mind of the mage-priest. The great plan of the old ones was clear.  The slann took his followers and left the decimated temple.  He would take his army across the lands as a wave of death killing all the leaders of the world, like cutting the head off a great serpent.

It had been nearly 300 years since the warp storm.  Loq-Kai, as his followers had called him, meaning ancient death, had killed hundreds of generals and wizards, and thousands of mortals and monsters.  The mage-priest and his army rested after a long battle against a vampire lord and his unnatural horrors.  Loq-Kai sat up in his palanquin made from the bones of his enemies and looked toward the East.  He felt something familiar as if remembering a dream.  The ground began to shake and a resonance filled the air.  Out of the forest burst swarms of Skaven riding mutated rat wolves and herding tortured hydras, charging across the opening toward the Slann.  Above the tree line flowed a wave of flying rat monstrosities, like water running over a stone.  Loq-Kai closed his eyes and reached into the minds of the enemy leaders, seeing their entire lives in an instant.  He began an incantation as he always had before every battle.  It was a dark spell that ripped the bones out of the body, like pulling a rock out of a shallow stream.  He stopped, seeing something in the mind of the enemies dark wizard, and opened his eyes as the vile skaven drew near.  The leader bore a scar across his face.  Two cuts originating from his left eye.  The twin tailed comet?  Loq-Kai had seen a second coming of the heavenly body.  Was this the familiar feeling pouring over him?  Just as the mage-priest stopped his dark chant, the thunder of the Eshin army stopped, as if the rat leader had given the order directly to the minds of his followers.  Curled faces of the skaven began sniffing the air drawn to something.  The essence of warpstone was still in the blood of Loq-Kai’s army, no less so then the day of the storm almost 300 years ago.  The leaders of both armies cautiously entered the small opening between the battle lines.  Loq-Kai fought his urge to tear the rats body into pieces, as he was there hundreds of years ago when the skaven tore the jungles of Lustria and the poisonous swamps turned the skaven into plague fouled creatures of horror.  But this rat had a different essence.  The leader had never been to lustria and has sworn off the council of the thirteen, bent on greed, and destruction of his brethren.  The two powerful sorcerers of death struck an unlikely alliance.  The rat, for reasons of power, and feeling the aura of warpstone from the mage-priest, and Loq-Kai seeing the scar on the face of the rat resembling the twin tailed comet, believing this rat to be the one to aid him in the destruction of the other races, cleansing the planet, and returning it to a sanctity for the old ones.  Whether or not the alliance would last would be something the slann would have to meditate on.  However, one thing would be for certain, tens of thousand more would fall to the tide of death brought about by the two dark leaders.