Camilla held the torch high so that it illuminated the strange throne. The flickering torch light woke disconcerting flashes in the purplish orbs, like heat lightning above the plains of Atranto in the summertime.  Instinctively she looked up to the collapsed ceiling to see if it might be possible to climb out. Terror froze her for a moment.

“Cydric..” she breathed. The mercenary turned to regard her as she lifted the torch towards the ceiling. Or the lack of one. The roof of the catacomb and the entire hillside was gone, replaced by a semitransucent ghost of its present form. Instead the sky winked with wan alien looking stars. A vast plain of ice spread out before them. Somehow Camilla knew she as looking at the entrance to the tomb as it had appared thousands of years ago. The throne still seemed real, it shone with a sharpness that was unpleasant to the mind.

In a moment of searing clarity Camilla saw the throne being forged. A great Chaos warrior lay on a beir of bones. A pair of what looked strangely like dwarves but twisted and wrong stood over him. They raised vast hammers and bought them down in blows that could have shattered stone.  The helmet split and something dark and nameless rushed from within. One of the dwarf things reached into the helmet with a ring studded hand and withdrew two bloody but otherwise human eyeball. Camilla’s stomach twisted and she would have vomited if her body hadn’t been frozen between one moment and the next. Desperately she willed her heart to beat or eyes to blink, anything at all to prove she was alive.

The dwarf thing began to chant in some foul language that sounded like rocks screaming. The darkness which had escaped the helmet rushed back into the bloody eyes, congealing around them like nacre around a sangrain in the formation of a pearl. A moment, a millenia, later the dwarf held two glowing purple orbs. Behind him his companions hammer rose and fell with the rhythm of the moons wheeling in the sky. The body of the chaos warrior was hammered blow by blow into the shape of the throne, black iron running like water against the hammer.

Reality snapped back into focus and Camilla felt her pulse thunder in her temple like a distant but immense drum.

“It is him…” Camilla breathed but before she could clarify to the confused men beside her a horrifyingly familiar skittering came from on of the side passage. Camilla snatched her rapier free a moment before a horde of grotesque rat creatures burst from the subterranean tunnel, preceded by the miasimic tide of musk and sweat. The stink of the skaven as unforgettable. There must have been fifty of them, dressed in tattered mockeries of clothing, clutching rusty kines and improvised spears. Chisel like fangs dripped foetid spit as leather and steel rasped over fur and flesh.

The skaven were not focused on them. From a tunnel opposite the skaven a massie figure in black and bronze arm strode into the room. The baroque steel giant was covered in twisting runes which seered the eyes and carried a sword of blue crystal which must have been as tall as Camilla herself. Wordlessly the giant hewed into the throng, sending a spray of dark blood gouting onto the wall behind the throne. The stink of the horde intensified as they hurled themselves onto the chaos champion stabbing and cutting and raising a shower of sparks from the demon forged armor. 

[@POOHEAD189]