Prelude
Ghrond. The fortress-city on the frontier of the Chaos Wastes. Endless gales shriek about its walls, but it is the winds of magic that truly blast its obsidian spires, and howl through the halls and chambers of its arcane depths. This is the home of the Dark Convent, the greatest seat of magical study anywhere in the world. This is where the maidens of the Convent plot and conspire under the stern eye of the eternally beautiful Morathi, mother of the King.
This is where the saga truly begins.
The Asurian prince is dying. His blood, tapped from his throat by a silver blade, has pooled in the silver tray that the hags and crones cluster about. His life and hopes and dreams flicker out as they conjure forth the forbidden rituals of scrying - with the death of an Asurian prince they seek to tear aside the veils of the future.
They are afraid, and well they might be. Morathi has declared that if her son’s invasion should fail, that the blood of the Maidens will run freely in Ghrond. So, they seek to discern a path to ultimate victory over the Ulthuanii south.
And then, suddenly, in the blood of prince they glimpse it. Skeins of fate, conditions and the tipping points of possible futures. But the future is a quick and difficult thing. Hard to pin down, and harder still to comprehend.
The hags chatter amongst themselves, they are the greatest of their kind. The most experienced that still live, and who know the art of distilling the future into the present through the lens of silver-shed blood.
They decide they understand what they have seen, and with fear they commit it to writing, to be borne to those who will decide what to do with their blasphemous knowledge.
“The Dreadlord must die, and the House must perish, else there shall be no victory”
This is where the saga truly begins.
