This is a story that I wrote as one of the NPCs in the recent City of Skulls campaign. I thought that i'd put it up here where those that weren't part of the campaign, but are interested in Warhammer related stories, can read it.

It's pretty long, but I think you'll get a chuckle or two. Oh, it's pretty dark too...

In Chains

A rat sniffed the stale air briefly before scampering pestiferously across the moist and mossy cobblestones to an alcove of apparent safety. The creature moved cautiously. Even more cautiously than expected of the innumerable, small, scurrying, potential boot-smears that swamped this world with their fragile and fleeting existences. An all encompassing unease gnawed at it, as though a saddle of writhing earthworms had been strapped upon its back and was clumsily ridden by joyriding jellyfish. It couldn't quite place the source of its fear, but its heart beat harder and stronger than it ever had before. The buzzing little organ beat a visible tattoo upon the rodents' chest and forced the blood into its brain with such alacrity that the membrane of the eardrums throbbed distractingly.

The rodent considered himself to be Morris, though such a name meant nothing to anyone else in any practical sense. The other rats didn't call him Morris or even Morrie or Moz. The large green creatures that tried to skewer him with iron implements had no recipe for Morris stew and the worms and beetles that he ate never begged for their freedom from Morris the Merciful, Morris the Magnificent. It did allow him, however, to tell self from else, and that made his thought processes much easier. He knew not to chew off his tail or foot because that was Morris. He knew that he could eat the squirming creatures that filled the dank where he lived because they weren't Morris. In fact, he had a laboratory in his brain that kept samples of over twenty two thousand smells that were all labelled meticulously with 'Not Morris.' Usefully though, most of them had sub-headings scrawled below messily in Comic Sans, like; [font="Comic Sans MS"]'Not Morris - eet' 'Not Morris - hide' 'Not Morris - sik' 'Not Morris - root'[/font] and [font="Comic Sans MS"]'Not Morris – aieee![/font] The whole of C and D Blocks were filled with 'Not Morris' samples with little nibble marks on the labels. He didn't know how to spell 'chew.'

The smell that he was creeping towards now was the most 'Not Morris' smell he had ever come across. Perhaps that was why he was heading towards the source of his discomfort instead of following any of a number of better alternatives that were available. Alternatives such as fleeing with limbs whirling like windmill blades in a danger fraught dash to anywhere else in the City of Skulls than the sub-sub-basement of the Artisans Halls. That would be the chosen course of action if Morris had possessed an ounce of sense. As it were though, Morris barely had a tenth of a gram of sense and was heading towards a world of pain of the kind usually reserved for big fat party animals at cheese rolling festivals.

As Morris crested the edge of a small defile in the floor he heard a sound. He turned his head cautiously as he paused there, perched half in and half out of a cold, septic soup. He had in fact settled in a makeshift sewer hastily ploughed into the rocky floor by the newest inhabitants in this wrecked and befouled region of the once mighty Dwarf stronghold. He didn’t notice the filth creeping up his brown pelt or the gunk oozing up through his toes. His attention was wholly and unconditionally focused upon the noises filtering his way. One element sounded like someone clicking their fingers together rhythmically, whilst someone else appeared to be re-killing the sheep that had donated its innards to the construction of a bagpipe. Somewhere nearby there appeared to be someone playing a glockenspiel. Playing was perhaps an exaggeration for they were “playing” it like a musician that was tripping with a head full of Zombie and fighting off imaginary Ostrich's at the same time, if one was to be brutally honest. Perhaps honestly brutal would also have sufficed, had the true nature of the situation been known to the rodent.

As soon as the music filtered through Morris's leathery ears he was off like a shot towards the cacophonous melee, all caution dissipating as he was caught up in a magical trance. He gambolled forward like a forest sprite in heat and pranced as best as four legs would allow him. The gaiety of his motion belied the thoughts in his mind though; his sense of trepidation and foreboding failing to assuage. His frantic imaginings shot to a summit of mind shattering horror at one point, overwhelming his synapses with stimuli, before switches in his brain sent out chemicals to dampen those regions, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Morris galloped gaily through the area used by the Nemhian Brigade as their torture chambers, or the 'Day Spa' as it was affectionately known to the Warbears (Spa being the Dwarf word for horrible and day being their word for day). The Warbears were a unit of mercenary Dwarfs that did much of the heavy lifting and fighting for the Necromancers and Lichepriests that formed the leadership group of the cretinous cabal currently quartered within. No one from that ghastly group of plunderers and psychopaths was there now. Everyone in the brigade was giving the sub-sub-basements a wide berth at the moment.

As Morris neared his final destination he was thankfully distracted by the music, otherwise he would have noticed that the majority of smells coming his way were most like those he kept locked safely away in a blast cupboard and were labelled [font="Comic Sans MS"]'Not Morris - WTF?'[/font]

As he entered the last room in the blood plastered catacombs, stepping lightly past the gristle and gore, he froze. Literally. His legs became solid ice and a cute little icicle formed on his snout as he breathed out for the last time. Simultaneously three people…ah, figures…well...entities, looked up with penetrating stares at the little intruder.

The First of them, a tall and well built being, smiled and spoke.

“Ah, here is the lassst member of the choir. I have been expecting you Morrisss. Take your place quickly please.”

It was a figure of speech. Morris wasn’t going anywhere whether he was being chased by a gibbering Snotling armed with a meat cleaver or was enticed by a room full of [font="Comic Sans MS"]‘Not Morris – root’[/font] smells. It was a figure of speech in another way too. Those listening to the speaker could just barely make out the form of a suggestive snake dancing sexily before their eyes, if they were discerning and autistic enough.

The scene was as puzzling as it was terrifying. Maybe it was more terrifying actually, but it certainly made no sense. The dominant feature in the room was the ghastly entities known as The Three Hands of Nagash. Draped in tattered rags, mostly for dramatic effect they would admit if pressed, they were a picture of evil and despair. It was as if someone had said “I need three beings that look evil and despairing” and then created them and that was pretty much how they came into existence.

They looked like zombie skeleton ghost mummies and had all the stereotypical features that one would expect. They possessed glowing eyes, a deathly pallor and moved with a fluid, graceful motion that would make a dancing Wood Elf look like a stiff-legged old geezer trying to kick no-good kids off his lawn. The air around them was brisk to say the least and they stunk. They smelled like a hobo that has rubbed himself with a skunk that came out of another skunks arse. Usually the only thing missing was rattling chains and now, after recent events, even those were evident.

The beings themselves weren’t really ghosts or zombies or any sort of undead creature. They were, in fact, not only not alive now, but they never had lived. If asked nicely enough they would describe themselves as a primordial force, older than life itself, which is as vast and as cold as the universe and resides at the precipice beyond time and space where even death can’t reach and where the laws of nature bow to oblivion, turn around sheepishly and head back the other way. They always did have a penchant for dramatic and incongruous statements though.

At another time they once described themselves as the embodiment of a sentiment. If that sentiment could be accurately described (and I assure you that it couldn’t), it would be something like this;

“I’m gonna cut you! I’m gonna cut you good! I’m gonna cut you into all your tiniest constituent parts and spread you across the vastness of space and fast forward time by 20 billion years.” Something unpleasant like that anyway.

There was a glow and an opacity to the creatures, as one would expect, but they were certainly not insubstantial. In fact they were denser than a black hole, but in an anti-black hole sort of way. They were every non particle in the universe, currently compressed into a singular space that appeared to be about 3 x 5’8” tall. If the universe was a hologram, expanded from the singularity that existed before the big bang, then these were the exact opposite. The cold, empty spaces of the universe would be the hologram of them. If you were to hit them with something it would most likely break. (This is purely speculation however, as it is quite unimaginable that The Three Hands would allow themselves to be hit by anything without doing something defensive. Something irrational like explode into a thousand poisoned darts or turn the bearer into a statue of solid saffron or, as they once did to an unfortunate Jester from the Court of the Calicidandra of Meiking, teleport the offender ninety eight thousand light years away to a planet with six times greater gravity and an atmosphere of pure hydrogen, yell “Happy Birthday!” and introduce the heavenly body to its first and last encounter with naked flame.)

The creatures had taken on their current forms for expedience mostly. They found that their minions were more effective if they had a focus to talk to, and to fear unto the very core of their beings, instead of some vague notion that there was something they needed to do OR ELSE! At a time when they were much less substantial they had experimented with a system of communication with a sect that lived in a jungle region down in Lustria. They convinced the priests that sacrificing virgins and writing messages in their entrails was a good way to be contacted, but it was just ever so time consuming and the race dispersed or died out for some reason before they got through asking The Three Hands of Nagash whether they could please bring them some rain because the temple steps were becoming fairly pongy and quite sticky under foot. (They copped a lot of hate for the drought (of virgins) in those regions, but they justified the practice as at least ensuring that no innocent unborn children were killed by mistake. They often felt misunderstood, which was quite surprising even to them, considering that they had no feelings).

The Three Hands of Nagash were brought into their improbable existence by the most powerful necromancer to have graced that world; Nagash (I bet you already knew this - Of being the preposition expressing the relationship between a part and its whole and all). Indeed Nagash was known as the father of necromancy and even though he had been killed several times, over the space of a thousand years or so he usually managed to pull himself together again and create another epic kafuffle which would be remembered for the next epoch or two. During his time in oblivion Nagash came to know that the nature of entropy was irrepressible and in one of his greatest works he managed to anthropomorphise it. The outcome had been a little unexpected, but he found The Three Hands to be one of his most useful agents. They had no ambition or desires. They simply existed as an expression of chaos and the break down of all things in time. They were certainly patient. They had forever to see their plans come to fruition.

At first they were without shape and fairly ill-formed, but the longer the beings existed, the more they became fleshed out and unique individually. The three of them were quite unalike in many ways and they preferred it that way so that they could tell each other apart, however there were still some…identity issues…that plagued them.

The First was the leader character and he was more of an athletic and decisive figure than the other two. He had the strongest personality and took charge, usually announcing their decisions, giving orders and putting the fear of nothingness into their ‘friends.’ He had a penchant to lisp a little, but he was no fool and fairly matter of fact in most of his dealings.

The Second was more scholarly and often described the reasons for their actions and decisions. He would explain to their ‘friends’ why they were about to be obliterated in a cruel and unusual fashion and how it pained them to have to do so. He often spoke with a strong degree of alliteration, though I’m sure it gave him no pleasure. His diction and grammar were precise and he presented a picture of studious perfection, in a hunching, dishevelled, corpse-like fashion.

The Third made batshit crazy look like some sort of whimsical fad. He had become unhinged, left his tree, gone round the bend, off his trolley, out to lunch and come back nuttier than a fruitcake. He had crooked teeth and tended to drool a lot. He was also fairly obese, perhaps even corpulent. He lisped and stuttered and there was an air of ‘duh duh-ness’ to him. He had a flair for stating the obvious and added little but confusion to most conversations that the trio tried to make. Some people that found themselves in his presence thought that he was like a yokel crossed with a dullard, but that was too simple an equation. Those few evil-types that spent any amount of time around The Three Hands noticed that The Third was a daffy "I swear too much" with much in common with lottery ticket buyers, flat Old Worlders, Juggalos, Carnival folk, Liverpool supporters, those that say poofoo valve and the sort of people who believe that they have been left a thousand gold sovereigns by the son of the imprisoned Marquis of Menshenfresserhoffen in a random carrier pidgeon message and all they need do is send their first born daughter to collect the gratuity. He was certainly a cretin and an oaf, but you could be forgiven for describing him as a blundering boofhead.

A bureaucrat in Cathay once asked The Third, “Are you dense or something?” before he promptly exploded, along with about 15 hectares of moderately populated farmland and villages. It wasn’t that The Third was upset about the accusation contained in the question, he couldn’t be, but it was just the method he chose out of the many at his disposal to say “Not in the classical sense of the word…”

Their current predicament had been largely thrust upon them by another of Nagash’s agents in this area, a necromancer named Kestus Bloodgruel, or Claggy Bloodglue as The Three Hands liked to think of him. Bloodgruel was the self-appointed figurehead of the Nemhian Brigade, a ragtag assemblage of Necromancers, Hierophants, Liche Priests, Witch Elves, Mages, Conjurers, Daemons and the odd mercenary chasing a quick buck at the expense of their honour, sanity and perhaps any chance of writing that autobiography entitled The Heart of War, in their retirement. A necromancer of no small skill, Bloodgruel was far happier when causing chaos from the safety of his sanctuary in the Tower of Nemh or when alone at his studies into the black arts in the Grand Mortis Library. He mostly fell down in the power-hungry megalomaniac stakes in the crucial department of minion management.

Skill with people was something that Bloodgruel had little experience at, unless you wanted them dead and then not quite so dead or perhaps turned inside out or maybe had their skin turned into a book. He struggled at the day to day tasks of running an army of maniacal, self-absorbed go getters, concerned only with their own rise up the corpse-a-lot ladder.

Bloodgruel covered his shortcomings in the leadership role by buck passing, duck shoving, weasel wedging, salmon shouldering and generally failing to show up to anything but the most important of events. When once asked by one of his generals why he was never around, or why he had no valuable advice to give, he explained to the grizzled old soldier that he “Didn’t want to wrongside the demographic,” before promptly having the experienced campaigner wrongsided by a Bull Ogre.

When he did happen to grace the troops with his presence he often claimed that he had been busy "forward planning" and "nectworking" and even then his instructions were brief and vague, although always optimistic. His ebullient manner was totally at odds with what was expected of the commander of one of the blackest brigades of brigands and blood spillers ever assembled. The thought that his persona could be described as ‘buoyant’ made his sub-commanders dry retch.

It was somewhat of a puzzling occurrence for The Three Hands to watch Bloodgruel attempt to motivate the Nemhian troops. They wondered if it had occurred to him that most of them were mindless animations and whether the plethora of platitudes was entirely for his own benefit. When he first inspected the Brigade and said to the assembly, “Thanks for joining the Brigade! Very nice to see y'all here,” they had very nearly offed him then and there. The time that he told a zombie to, “Keep up the good work,” they just about spontaneously combusted with contempt. They still remembered the time too that they found Baeor Ironfist and the other Dwarfs of the Warbears packing and ready to leave the hold after Kestus had said to them “You can’t have your cake and eat it too, so you’ll have to step up to the plate and show them how you like those apples!” It took all the convincing they could do to assure the Dwarfs that there was plenty of cake for everyone and that Kestus was speaking metaphorically and that they’d run out of apples weeks ago anyway.

The Three Hands had been rather disappointed themselves when they’d gone to visit Bloodgruel one day, after he’d said that ‘his door was always open,’ and they arrived to find it locked securely, with a scribbled sign outside stating:

[font="Comic Sans MS"]WE ARE NOT IN AT THE MOMENT BUT REST ASSURED THAT WE HAVE YOU ON OUR RADAR. WE ARE CURRENTLY ASSESSING AND MITIGATING THE IMMEDIATE IMPACTS OF CURRENT UNFORSEABLES. AFTER THE RECENT PARADIGM SHIFTS, A PROCESS TO INCENTIVISE THE OVERCOMING OF CHALLENGES SHALL ENSURE BETTER ACTIONING OF DESIRABLE OUTCOMES FOR ALL STAKEHOLDERS SO THAT WE HIT THE GROUND RUNNING GOING FORWARD.[/font]

They decided to take a few days off at that point to avoid obliterating anybody in the brigade (or perhaps everybody) and went and cleared their minds by terrorising a small fortification of settlers in the Border Princes region. Masquerading as giant subterranean worms, they destroyed the stockade and buildings from below the frightened hicks, whom they ate to gain a sense of completeness on the matter.

Upon their return they found that the brigade had been successful in many facets of their campaign to recover the sacred object that they were searching for, but that Bloodgruel blamed them for the failure of his troops to find a troubling meddler known as the Shadow Man. Bloodgruel had conjured a new trick then. A trick that they now realised he must have worked upon for many long weeks. He had imprisoned them…well, at least that is what he told his somewhat confused army, as he clapped The Three Hands in irons. In reality he had severed their link with Nagash and they were left completely without any direction. Suffering from this amotivational syndrome they simply stayed in the cells where they had been put and kept to their own devices.

(It should be stated here that The Three Hands felt no ill will towards Bloodgruel himself. They once stated diplomatically to an old chum of theirs, Laerian Eressea, that “It bothers us not whether he succeeds gloriously or falls into a very deep pit and his legs come away and he is trapped there alone with an annoying fungus spreading over his ever enduring bones until the world ends.”)

At this stage in their evolution they were taking part in one of the strangest scenes to ever grace their parent planet. Their ‘own devices’ seemed mostly to entail tea parties, games of charades and expanding upon their appreciation of good music. They were currently trying to emulate what they thought of as “good music” and they had used all the powers and resources at their disposal.

If poor Morris had still been in control of his own actions it would have taken him a very long time to take in the scene. The Three Hands all sported heavy looking iron wrist and leg bands that were chained together. Clinking and clanging stereotypically as they moved, the irons appeared to be the mechanism that kept them detained. The simple wrought and entirely unmagical devices didn’t actually impede them much though and at one stage when The Thirds leg irons broke and fell off, he absentmindedly picked them up and reattached them with a much greater strength using his own magical skills.

The First was on his feet and held heavily decaying human arms in each of his hands. He waved these about erratically in imitation of a conductor leading an orchestra. The Second was seated on a rotted wooden bench and grappled with the remains of a large cave Squig. The bulbous red-skinned creature was obviously inflated by some unnatural force and its formerly gaping mouth was closed tight, the lips having been sewn shut. It had a series of hollow brown bones of descending length protruding from its stomach. It should have been dead, but the frantic darting of its bloodshot eyes showed that it merely wished that that was the case. It had a glitter covered, pink and green party hat attached to its head with elastic, or Squig gut, or something stretchy anyway. In fact everyone in the room was wearing party hats except for a series of skulls arranged on the southern side of the room. The Three Hands were adorned with party hats, the pumpkin in the corner had a party hat, the groaning zombie pile in the corner had party hats, although most of them had fallen off, and even the unstable pile of hundreds of empty tea cups sitting guiltily against the back wall had little party hats holding the vessels firmly to their saucers.

The finger clicks that Morris had heard were coming from The Third. His chest cavity was exposed and he broke ribs in his chest to the beat of the music. By the time he got back to the other side of his chest the ribs had reconstituted themselves. He had two party blowers sticking out of his ears and these played impossible yet haunting harpsichord sounds as he ‘breathed.’ He tapped his foot rhythmically and enthusiastically. He would have been producing a dull stomp, if his foot didn't land repeatedly on the groin of half an elf, the semidetached legs rising animatedly and striking a garbage lid, causing a clamorous din.

One of the slightly stranger scenes amongst the very strange tableau was the glockenspiel players, piled precariously by the locked cage door. Several skulls were arranged haphazardly and animated skeletal arms, grasping several femur bones, were striking notes upon the hollow skulls. The melody was often interrupted however as there was a shortage of the valuable thigh bones compared to the number of arms attempting to play the music. At least four of the arms grappled and quarrelled over the limited supply of sticks as they attempted to maintain their timing with the rest of the orchestra.

The First signalled a halt to the players’ practice and prepared to start the performance anew. The strange menagerie of instruments and musicians were not without an audience. It had been The First’s idea that they could provide distance education to some budding young musos and had opened the portal which reached out to a medium sized town school in Wissenland. The round, wavering window on the dungeon wall showed a room full of students ranging in age from about 6 or 7 up into the mid-teens. Most of them were well dressed and they appeared to come from moderately well off families. They were currently stuck fast in their seats, their eyes unblinking and their blank faces failing to portray the mind altering terror that each and every one of them were currently experiencing. Many had thrown up upon themselves and their aged, but functional, walnut desks.

The First addressed the assembly of transfixed and terrified audience members.

“I present to you The Three Hands of Nagash and the Singing Shamblesss. I came up with the name myssself…we…”

“We thought that it is only proper for us to have a suitable signature. It would be the height of rudeness to appear in this tutorial without a sanctioned sobriquet. We hope that you tell your friends about us…they…”

“They were going to call themselvesss The Beetlesss, after they saw a beetle, but they’re not. Beetlesss that is…”

Tired of the delay, The First flicked a wrist and Morris and several other rats inflated to many times greater than their original size. Despite the fact that he wasn’t breathing, Morris was able to feel every breaking bone and every screaming nerve. This was a perfect way to accentuate the soliloquy of screams echoing through his skull, his terror having returned tenfold since the music had stopped.

The First looked at him and smiled reassuringly. “You are the music, whilst the music lasts,” he stated with a disturbing accent of irony and finality to his voice.

Turning back towards the school room, as viewed through the portal, The First announced, “This is a song that I call Chainsss. I’ve worked very hard on thisss one for your listening pleasure…”

“You’ll notice the arrangement we have here,” chimed in The Second. “Percussion, woodwind, string and voice instrumentation”, he confirmed assuredly. He continued on seriously, stating, “Most of us go to the grave with our music still inside of us…These few are lucky enough to come back and let it loose,” before waving his arm in an arc at the assorted skulls, bones, decaying body parts and the Squig in the party hat that was straining perilously at the edges of its coelum.

He turned to The Third and nodded.

The Third savoured the moment briefly and then began the affair. “And a one and a four and a seven and a thweee…”

The cacophony started afresh. For the first moment or two it was earth shaking, glass shattering, ear splitting and noodle numbing all at once…and then it all made sense somehow. The discordant elements meshed perfectly and a sweet, soothing melody carried up through the sub-sub-basements into the cavernous city above. The sounds also pervaded the listeners’ ears at the school at Upper Frogton, in Wissenland, some six thousand miles away.

The percussion was led by The Third, snapping his ribs in 4:4 time. The glockenskullsTM had managed to find a system that worked with the femurs shared between the self-playing bones as needed. The Second, with his lips pursed upon the Squigs anus, produced a sound that was strangely much more like panpipes than bagpipes and The Third played a mellifluous tune from the trinkets in his ears. Morris and his cohort of hyper-inflated rodents produced a harmonious backing vocal, the air escaping steadily and measuredly past their stretched and straining vocal chords.

As the intro faded into forgotten history, The First began to sing. His dramatic baritone voice was heard vividly throughout the numerous rooms and passageways of Kazad Ghal, the City of Skulls. Every creature within the immense hold stopped and listened attentively with fearful fascination. His soulful voice gripped them like a vice:

Your arms are warm but they make me feel
As if they're made of cold, cold steel
A simple kiss like a turnin' key
A little click and the lock's on me
Can't move my arms, can't lift my hands
I won't admit to where I am
But I know baby, I'm in chains
I'm in chains…

Without missing a beat, The Second took up the soulful lament, his falsetto voice shattering vessels and causing many of the Gors and Ungors in the hold to rip the fur from their chests:

We pretend we can always leave
Free to go whenever we please
But then the sound of our desperate calls
Echo off these dungeon walls
We've crossed the line from mad to sane
A thousand times and back again
We love you baby, we're in chains
We’re in chains
We’re in chains
We’re in chains

The music played on and then the earth began to rumble disconcertingly. A deep, gravely, basso profundo voice took up the call and it shook the very foundations of the hold. Sounding like continental plates rubbing against each other luridly, the deep bass with a booming loud tessitura began to shake sections of the hold apart. The precarious overpass that lead to Sunlake Keep had several large chunks fall into the rushing waters of the ravine deep below and the air vents leading into the Copper Smelters collapsed completely. Several Dwarfs were nearly lost forever in the Hall of Reckonings as a cavalcade of books piled up on top of them and many Goblins bled to death after being dashed to pieces upon shattered bottles in the Tavern. The Third boomed and bellowed into the stale air of the hold, all the while two bamboo and paper party blowers creating an unseemly sound in the impossible exhalations from his ears:

Should have known passing through the gate
That once inside they could not escape
They never thought this could happen to them
Never thought this is where they'd be
But baby, baby…baby, look at em
Baby, baby, look at themsss, they in chains
Baby, baby, they’re in chainsss
They’re in chainsss
Baby, baby, they’re in chainsss
They never thought this is where they'd be
Never thought this could happen to them
Baby, baby, they’re in chainsss
Baby look at them.
They’re in chainsss….

The performance ended with a rattle of bones falling lifelessly to the floor and a final explosive burst of air from the rodent choir. Men, Dwarfs, Goblins, Elves, Ogres and Trolls snapped out of their reverie and moved about awkwardly trying to return to a semblance of normal activity. Tools and weapons were taken up anew and thoughts returned to reaching the final objective, grabbing the sacred object and getting as far as possible away from the strange and twisted citadel, before having gouged ones eyes out with a custard spoon.

The reaction to the evenings’ performance varied throughout the different races present. The undead creatures of the hold didn’t think much of anything about what had just occurred, but they did appear to walk taller and less hunched over if that was at all possible. The Dwarfs acted as if nothing had happened - as a matter of course it just wasn’t mentioned. There was much twisting of moustaches and grave stares into half empty tankards that night though. The men of the Old World in the area were agitated and generally didn’t speak of the occurrence either. No one said a word when soldiers left their posts momentarily and came back wearing their other pair of pants. Many Goblins had their throats slit after exclaiming “Oi, last night, did yuse guys hear…,” whilst the ancient Beastmen, who found it uncomfortable enough already, residing hundreds of yards below the surface, mostly chose to drink their potent brews and perform their strange rituals and feats of strength into night. The Trolls in the area though generally sat around and talked for hours (or a handful of sentences) about the qualities of the songs’ structure and its clever use of space. The Trolls eventually broke into two waring factions – The Stone Trolls claiming that the song wasn’t brutal enough and the River Trolls claiming that it was trying too hard and needed to simplify to truly reflect any meaningful sentiment. The situation wasn’t resolved until some clever oaf managed to mash the two together and created a band he called Corpseklanni and spent the rest of the night teaching their first song, ‘Blood, Blood,’ to the rest of his race.

In the sub-sub-basement The Three Hands cast aside their instruments and The First waved aside the portal in the wall. At the last moment as the vision vanished he noticed that most of the students locked in place in their classroom seats had blood streaming from their orifices. He smiled. They’d touched them with their music. “There goes a future generation of dedicated musicians,” he ruminated to himself.

The First turned to his compatriots.

“Well, I thought we nailed that one on the firssst take. I was quite impresssed to tell the truth and to see the looksss on those kiddies faces was pricelesss…”

“We found that to be quite a lot of…fun…I guess you’d call it. Music is a beautiful opiate if you don’t take it too seriously…”

The Third took the party poppers from his ears and looked at The Second suspiciously. His face took on a look of consternation that announced that he was about to proclaim something either extremely profound or ridiculously insane.

“MUSIC IS AN OUTBURST OF THE SSSOUL,” he exploded with spittle.

The First had had enough for the moment and he looked around at the mess in their cells. He eyed Morris and the other rodents, their legs frozen in place, their thoughts racing like water down a drain.

“Without music life would be a mistake,” he stated unfeelingly.

He raised an eyebrow and ice crept its way cinematically up the creatures’ bodies until finally their faces solidified and they experienced their final curtain call. After a single breaths pause, the small mammals exploded in a shower of angular chunks of fur and flesh.

The First turned to his companions.

“That wasss fun, but I’m bored now…”

The Second got to his feet, dropping the shocked Squig, who rolled some distance away to the darkest corner of the cell.

“What should we do now?” he questioned.

“Howsss about, Murder in the Dark?” The Third replied wheezingly.

Epilogue –

9 years later. 6,000 miles away.

Fine silt filled the boots and worried at the ankles of Jorn Abramelin as he trudged disconsolately along an overgrown and unkempt dirt track. The air was still and quiet and he was sweating quite a lot despite his casual pace. The lute at his back left a big round sweat patch upon his faded green shirt and the bedroll and small pack of possessions resting on his lower back were reservoirs of damp. He appreciated the cooling effect as he pushed on with resolve in the afternoon sun, but he was sure it would prove to be rather uncomfortable if he didn’t find a town to bed down in overnight.

Lanky and unshaven, the late twenty-something man looked as unkempt as the track he strode upon. Sporting a blond, furry beard and sandy, straw-like hair he was a picture perfect example of ‘Don giva fug’ meets ‘Whaddah I care.’ His clothes were once fine but now rather tatty, a toe poked through the top of one of his boots and his sword appeared to be the only thing of quality amongst his aging haberdashery. Despite its impressive design, he carried the sword as a visual deterrent more than anything. He didn’t really enjoy the cut and thrust of cutting and thrusting, nor did he really know how to use the damn things. He also knew that he would be quite sorely pressed to ward off any assailants once they saw that the weapon was only an elaborate handle with no actual blade, once pulled from its sheath. Perhaps it would buy him precious moments of confusion in which to flee with a valuable head start.

The travelling minstrel had spent the last eight years meandering through the quieter back roads and villages of the Empire, earning enough coin to keep him fed and out of trouble. Keeping out of trouble for Jorn usually entailed keeping just ahead of troubles bludgeoning stave or just below its razor edged swipe. With a somewhat charming nature and his lazy good looks, Jorn often found himself leaping pants-less out of bedroom windows and running down dark streets, clutching his few possessions awkwardly, whilst being chased by {insert Husband/Father/Brother/Matron/Abbess /All of the Above, here}. His gambling habits and loose observation of ownership laws only made matters worse.

Jorn was actually only now, in the last few hours, becoming confident that he’d shaken his latest pursuers. He was fleeing from a group of lunatic cultists who he’d upset at a membership drive in the town square in Serrig, two days earlier. He’d quickly skimmed over their scrolls and recognised the source of their promises and claims. His constant jests and laughs at their deranged ideas and bare-faced lies had upset them considerably. When he pointed out that their supposed cult leader, Elrond Cupboard, was actually a fictitious writer from the other side of the vast Empire and that they had somehow taken his children’s tales as gospel, well, they’d grown very displeased. When he stated to the dispersing crowd that the Priests of Sigmar described the Died and Et It cult as "the Old World's largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy," well, then they’d flown into a frenzy and several of them had been chasing him ever since.

He’d been following his map of Wissenland westwards into the foothills of the Grey Mountains, towards a quiet area of sparse and unimportant villages, when he’d finally managed to evade them. The map he was using was fairly old and he’d acquired it, in what he thought to be an equitable exchange, from a nobleman’s library in Pfieldorf. He had never expected to find such an exquisite map in his possession, but whilst the nobleman had been snoozing drunkenly after one of his heartfelt performances, he had decided to occupy himself with a spot of reading. He’d come across the expensive old map book and sat down to look at it with interest. He found that as he pulled the page on an angle against his thumb, the thing began to tear. Then as he continued to tear at the page, whilst making sure that he wasn’t interrupting his hosts sleep, it had incongruously torn away. He blamed shoddy workmanship on the cartographer’s part. When they found the nobleman the next morning unconscious or dead amongst a pile of wooden chair pieces (after having woken up when a shoddy lock on a jewellery box had broken when Jorn had absentmindedly smashed it against the fireplace as hard as he could) he hoped that they would blame shoddy workmanship for that as well.

About three hours before night was due to fall, Jorn had put the map away as he was nearing the small town that had always piqued his curiosity. It appeared that someone had spilled a drop of something on the map and in trying to repeatedly wipe it away with their thumb, managed to nearly obliterate the towns’ name. All that was decipherable was U………ton. He often let his imagination wander as he wondered what the town could possibly be called. Umpteenton was one of his favourite guesses, although he knew deep in his heart that it was very unlikely to be something as interesting as that. Ulricston would have been his best bet if a wager was at stake. As it was though, he was very close to finally finding out the towns name and its nature.

As Jorn walked past the wooden houses that marked the perimeter of the village, the first thing that stuck him was that cleaning and preventative maintenance were not very high on the townspeople’s list of priorities. The second thing that caught his attention was that gardening was just as far down on their list. As he got closer to the town centre his third observation was that filling the water troughs, picking up things that have fallen over, removing burnt out cart bodies from the street and, judging by the propensity for the ground to crunch under foot, feeding the pets and livestock, were on another list entirely. One that they ignored religiously.

Having reached what he judged to be the centre of town, he stopped, and then pirouetted slowly to take in the whole apocalyptic scene. With a growing sense of unease, as if he was being chased by rodents steered by Jellyfish riders on saddles of erratic earthworms, he listened for sounds, any sound. It was quiet and he imagined the town to be completely abandoned. The last thing he noticed before ‘events’ began to transpire, was that there was a crooked and faded sign near an official looking building that could possibly hold a clue to the towns name.

He had just decided to go and take a closer look, when a shape passed fleetingly between two buildings. He crouched down closer to the ground and observed the area. A large, mottled mutt, lean with patches of bare skin showing, sniffed its way along the next gap with its head down, ignoring the visitor. To his left a series of bells tinkled and he turned to find that a wind chime had suddenly leapt into action at the behest of a rare gust of wind. “What next,” he thought, “A creaking door will open slowly, but no one will be there?”

As Jorn looked on fearfully, a door in a shopfront across from him opened slowly and creakily. To his relief and dismay, a person appeared, ruining the tense atmosphere of suspense. Dressed in rags, hunching painfully and possibly suffering from rickets or maybe just ‘Billy thinks he’s a cowboy syndrome,’ a boy of about eighteen approached him with a smile. Unthreatened by the malnourished boy and keen for some sport, Jorn put on his most pompous voice. “Say, you there, boy. By what name does this town go by?”

The boy winked at him conspiratorially, put a finger to his lips to indicate the need for silence and pointed towards the town sundial. Jorn noticed that it was nearly three o’clock and continued on in an obnoxious prose. “What say you to my most reasonable question you blithering dolt?” The boy frowned and once again raised his finger to his lips.

Jorn was about to continue when other people started to come out of their homes. They concerned him. Most were dressed in rags or ill fitting garments or furs, many of which seemed to have been constructed by someone who didn’t realise that you were meant to cut the rest of the animal away before donning them. They all seemed to carry a bewildering array of kitchen, farm and military implements. Their purpose with them could hardly have been friendly. How was one meant to welcome a tourist to ones town sporting a scythe with rabbit skulls on strings dangling morbidly from the blade?

There were a few themes running through the gathered ghouls. There were no adults and no children. Everyone seemed to be in their late teens, perhaps up to their mid twenties at the latest. They all looked dishevelled, emaciated, lost and lacking in higher order cognitive function. Some rocked, some rolled, and others bounced, bounded or braced themselves bandy-legged against walls and railings.

It was when the group started shambling towards him menacingly that a switch in Jorns mind flipped from ‘I should leave, now!’ to ‘Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark!’ He started to move slowly at first and then upped his momentum to a jog. As he considered that a sprint might be in order, there was a whistle blown and then all hell broke loose, Broadway style. Yells and screams and chants and screeches were subtly accentuated with gongs and drums and rattles and smashing metal tools. Singing invaded the town and echoed off the buildings, if forty people screaming non-words at the top of their lungs could be called singing. Picking a relative gap in the throng, Jorn busted his way through and ran down the street. Other boys and girls leapt out of buildings at him, trying to forestall his progress.

Rounding a corner with his breath ragged, Jorn skidded to a halt in front of a tall and ornately decorated (for a pissant village of this kind) hall. The building was ominously dark in a darkly ominous way. There were no windows. There were no doors. The entire construction was a continuous rectangle of wooden boards, broken only by a four and a half foot tall hole that seemed to have been smashed through from the inside to out. Within it was dark. Dark like there was an absence of light. Although it was surely hazardous to his health, Jorn was compelled to enter. He craved to see what was inside and/or die trying. He was stopped though, as two boys of about twenty years of age ducked out of the doorway together. They were twins.

Jorn was rather surprised by just about everything he had seen in this village, but these two took the cake, fed it to the dog, and claimed that the cake had never existed. The other youngsters were obviously in awe of the two, for they kept their distance and seemed to avoid making eye contact. The music died down to a low and steady tattoo that seemed to just mark time and the singing died down to an ohminous hum. The two were dressed in cloaks made entirely of stuffed birds (Whether their little bodies had been filled with materials or not, you’ll have to trust me that they were definitely stuffed). The birds, whilst completely buggered, still seemed to comprehend their surroundings, with twisted and broken little necks swivelling as they scanned the circle slowly gravitating towards the paranormal pair. The cloaks covered the twos’ shoulders and backs well enough, but not their modesty. Most disconcertingly, they chuckled continuously and with genuine mirth.

With a couple of discrete motions, the two had Jorn twisted into a painful contortion and levitating in front of their faces. They looked over him lasciviously and then turned to their band of followers. Extending the range of their mystical abilities they spoke simultaneously into everyone’s mind with a lyrical prose and sinister smiles on their faces. “If music be the food of love, play on!” And the band played on.

(As a narrator, it is impossible here to describe the sounds created by the inconceivably cretinous posse. Bear with me if you will…Ok, how about this - Imagine an Oompah Band of wailing banshee players that have been set on fire and are stepping on cats. Imagine this was recorded and given to the Ark Music Factory and put through their auto tune machines and then ultimately transferred to a 33 and played through a record player put on the 45 setting, whilst being sung at by Rebecca Black, high on Speed and Helium, oh and you had a moth in your ear. That’s my best attempt anyway).

Jorn lapsed in and out of consciousness as the group marched around with him held aloft on a pole. Eventually the noise died down and he found himself laying face down in the dirt surrounded by torchlight. He was lifted roughly and his clothes stripped off. Some magical force held his body prone, but his head could move. He looked up through teary and drowsy eyes to a younger boy of about fifteen who approached the dais where Jorn had been lifted to. He carried in his hands a strange contraption. Possibly an iron chimney flue originally, it had a series of holes punched into its sides and a series of bags and levers attached haphazardly about its construction. The boy was rubbing some sort of grease or oil onto one end.

The Twins stepped forward into Jorns view and addressed the primitive players who had quieted in barely checked anticipation. They spoke in a staccato of sharply shot stanzas at the silent throng.

Sing with me, sing for the years
Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears
Sing with me, just for today
Maybe tomorrow, the good Lord will take you away…

They then signalled to the group of youths behind Jorn to begin their invasive interaction and one of them lowered his face down to Jorns ear. He spoke at a whisper in reassuring yet frightening tones. He spoke to Jorn alone. “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

Then Jorn was hit by a wave of pain and he began to lose consciousness. He looked outwards and upwards through drooping eyelids and noticed a faded and weathered old sign. Suddenly he comprehended. “Of course,” he thought. “It’s so obvious.” Then the last thing to pass through his mind, before it shutdown to prevent further damage, made its pointed observation. “Lower Frogton on the southern side of the river should have been a dead-set giveaway…”